A Jay Holmgren

Yesterday: the economists were wrong, tariffs are clearly working

Today: Ok, we need to fire the economists because the jobs data doesn't look good

It was a real emotional roller coaster last night as the NIH froze and unfroze all extramural funds.

Now I'm back to the baseline level of worry about NIH funds (will my university get their funds frozen without explanation, will my institute disappear, etc.)

It has been a wild day to get an NIH grant.

thank you, confusing day.

uhh well maybe lol

NLM R01 Notice of Award

Obviously a strange time, but thrilled to receive my first R01 from NLM. Excited to combine some of my favorite things (instrumental variables and EHR metadata) to develop context-specific causal estimates of the value of viewing outside data delivered via HIE w/ MPI @natea.bsky.social

From what I've heard the NIH has asked some (but not all) institutes to forward-fund 50% of grants this year, and its unclear if that will go to 100% next year but that seems to be the trajectory. Yes it will even out eventually, and yes it will devastate early career folks right now.

Excited to get this grant submitted and some papers revised so I can spend this weekend enjoying my true passion: cooking up a weird little instrumental variables paper.

standing in respect for MY national anthem

YouTube video by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Stephen Colbert Joins The Mountain Goats To Perform 'This Year'

My favorite Colbert moment:

This performance aired right before the pandemic and I watched it nearly every night from 2020 to 2022

youtu.be/T_qkVPZ8DJI?...

I got a guy who has been taking ivermectin monthly and has had a great experience, he's ready to guest lecture, headshot below

If he had a good reason I'd probably be okay with my dog eating me now.

sure, i'm not a billionaire, but at least i got the experience of being hot and fun to be around organically rather than needing to build myself an AI manic pixie dream waifu.

"my people" maybe he means idiots.

Skill issue cause I’m a white dude with no connections (first gen college!) and I went to Michigan and Harvard just fine.

No joke this is the environment you get in academia if you hire a project manager for yourself. Obviously the buck still stops with you but at the start of my project meetings someone is there to recap progress, outline next steps, assign tasks and deadlines, and troubleshoot errors. It rules.

only logged in to eRA commons to see if my grant moved from "pending administrative review" yet 6 times today, not bad.

They also probably do not live anywhere near those farms and almost definitionally being on Medicaid don't have a lot of resources to move / uproot families / leave the folks they're caregiving with paid caregivers / etc.

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Conflicts of Interest - June 12, 2025 - USC Schaeffer Not all financial conflicts are equal. A wholesale purge of CDC's vaccine advisory panel may remove some members with industry ties, but it also may come at the expense of expertise and delay access f...

"If Kennedy really wants to limit industry influence in health policy and the health care system, the most impactful thing he could do is to roll back the funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health."
schaeffer.usc.edu/research/wha...

This isn't a real complaint I'm just tired and worked a lot the last few days.

I think this is a soft vs hard money situation though, hard money faculty without summer teaching loads should travel more. Early career soft money folks like myself... better be writing grants.

Big mistake I made was not travelling cheaply more when I was in graduate school. I have a lot more money as faculty but honestly no time to travel, or even plan vacations.

"you aren't really gaming if you haven't crimped Cat5 cables after running a spool up your parents basement stairs" - me in 2005, probably.

its kind of crazy how much discourse this generated when it turned out to be a data error on the part of NYT.

I'd still vastly prefer him to Cuomo, I don't think he harbors secret anti-semitic hatred, but I do think it shows the younger, leftier voices in the Democratic party that bent over to listen to minoritized voices the last 5 years saying "not Jews, though."

If Trump constantly said "Grab 'em by the pussy"-style misogynist shit but governed like Mitt Romney, no one would wonder why many women found that to be very concerning. It would signal a lack of empathy or concern for women in the same way defending "globalize the intifada" does for many Jews

I'm not scared (I don't live in NYC and I'm not visibly Jewish by name/looks/apparel), but I do think it just sucks to be represented by someone who went to bat for "globalize the intifada."

When you reach true health economist stardom the purple background yellow text slides call to you like the Green Goblin mask apparently.

Two years of publishing: onward and upward Only 2 years ago, we launched the inaugural issue of Health Affairs Scholar: Emerging and Global Health Policy (HAS)—the first new journal in Health Affair

#HAScholar @Health_Affairs celebrates 2nd anniversary! Now in leading indices & w/ a preliminary impact factor, we provide rapid and high quality review & publication. > 250,000 full text downloads in 2024! Two years of publishing: onward and upward. academic.oup.com/healthaffair...

they tested him with the globalize the intifada thing and he passed and thats all they really care about.