rebecca solnit today rebecca solnit tomorrow rebecca solnit forever

The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman is posting stuff, like “Taste is a new core skill.” If people had taste, your company wouldn’t exist, Greg. But if everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that? Well, I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself. Culture right now is determined not by human teams of editors and producers picking and choosing what youth culture gets the spotlight, but, instead, by the unthinking algorithms that power YouTube and TikTok. Which means the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool by young people will, slowly, but surely, be whatever is unacceptable on those platforms.

A post so smart I'm almost afraid to share it.

www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-t...

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

Excited to share our latest work in @ajhgnews.bsky.social 🧬📄

We mapped the regulatory landscape of human liver at single-nucleus resolution using snMultiome, connecting genetic variants to the cell-type mechanisms underlying cardiometabolic disease.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Violence is too often sloppy; it spills over. Misogynists kill a lot of men, racists kill white people, ICE in its attacks on immigrants and anyone who looks like them just killed a white US citizen. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you're a gun everyone is a target.

This is an important and information rich article. I wondered about the effects by Institute. The table below (which is snipped here but is in the article) has that info. Broken down by # of grants and $ amounts.

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial-Jim Watson

I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions.

What follows is my personal perspective.

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GitHub - MichelNivard/awesome-complex-trait-genetics: A list of awesome tools for complex trait genetics. A list of awesome tools for complex trait genetics. - MichelNivard/awesome-complex-trait-genetics

🚨 This will become a curated list of awesome tools for complex trait genetics, **add yours**! it may become a review in which case those who contribute are invited as co-authors.

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

Just pre-ordered it! Looking forward to reading it!

Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

The maddening thing is that this would have been PAINFULLY OBVIOUS if they had ANY EXPERIENCE AT ALL working with the government! In any way! Or if they had asked a single question!! 😖

Tidy Population Genetics We provide a tidy grammar of population genetics, facilitating the manipulation and analysis of data on biallelic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). `tidypopgen` scales to very large genetic data...

We are excited to announce that tidypopgen – a new package for rapid population genetic workflows in R – is now available at evolecolgroup.github.io/tidypopgen/ 🧬💻 Read more in the preprint describing its features here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #popgen #Rpackage #genetics 1/2

People always stop me in the street to ask: "Yoav, where are the disease-associated eQLTs? We found a lot in GTEx but we can't find anymore. Do you know where they are?"

(For the record, no one has ever asked me this, but it is a really good question!)

I think we know where they are.

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."

Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

I wrote about my decision in TIME.

time.com/7285045/resi...

Postdocs: Human Genetics at Utah will be hosting our annual Rising Stars in Genetics and Genomics Symposium in Sept. Apply here: shorturl.at/wBMg2
There will be sessions on developmental, evolutionary and disease genetics. A chance be invited to SLC to network here and with peers! Please share.

the word alert is in a purple circle ALT: the word alert is in a purple circle

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM

Implementation of Schedule F

This is what a lot of us have been worried about.

This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs.

BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD...

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Hi, I’m autistic and I’m the mayor of my city.

bedbaser A client for BEDbase. bedbaser provides access to the API at api.bedbase.org. It also includes convenience functions to import BED files into GRanges objects and BEDsets into GRangesLists.

My list of interesting, new packages in Bioconductor 3.21:

bedbaser - A client for BEDbase. bedbaser provides access to the API. It also includes convenience functions to import BED files into GRanges objects and BEDsets into GRangesLists.

bioconductor.org/packages/bed...

BEDbase url:
bedbase.org

So You Want to Be a Dissident? A practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear.

Courage is contagious. But how do we catch it?

For months, @amifieldsmeyer.bsky.social and I have been asking dissidents and activists from around the world how we can topple authoritarianism.

We assembled their lessons into a field guide to courage.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-wee...

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

One of many moments in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” that will stop you in your tracks.

33% increase in Texas maternal mortality.

Holy shit.

NIH funding delivers exponential economic returns — Harvard Gazette Report finds all 50 states reap gains in patient health, job creation, research resources, business development.

Actuarial studies aren’t going to convince anyone who wants to defund the #NIH but in terms of ROI that seems like a pretty solid multiple, not to mention the benefits to life and health! 🧪

🥁We are just 3 days away from our next #FragileNucleosome seminar! We are delighted to host, 2 amazing ECR researchers @rachelhoffman.bsky.social & @jonmarkert.bsky.social this Wed!
PS1: Don't forget that US has switched to PDT
PS2: The recurring registration link:
us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Protestors holding signs. One reads "don't be a hata look at the data" and another reads "science will save your life"

Protestor holding a hand made sign of Trump's face stylized to look like a red apple with yellow worms coming out of his mouth and ears.

Protestors listening to a speech. One holds a sign reading "America hates kings"

#StandUpForScience Raleigh!

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org