A month ago, Brad Lander put a great video calling for the expansion of the Supreme Court. I (impertinently) responded “This but 29.”
Today at 1:00, I’m hoping on Lander’s substack live to talk about court expansion, 13, 29, and all the reforms in between. Should be fun.
You know what all teams in the men's Final Four (and both women's teams in so far) have in common?
HERBARIA.
UConn is threatening to cut the staff of our nat history collections (plus many other awful budget cuts). If only we cared as much about biodiversity as we do about buzzer beaters!
These are the things that have historically led to revolutions. Not sustainable.
TAPPER: You know that if you vote against an additional $50 billion of funding for operations in Iran, that vote will be cast as you voting against the troops.
CHRIS MURPHY: Come on. The American people do not want this war. If you support the troops, you should be voting against this war.
There have been some very bad developments today.
SHOULD THE U.S BLOT OUT THE SUN AND USHER IN AN AGE OF ETERNAL DARKNESS? - Gallup 2/20/26-3/5/26
NO - 41%
YES - 38%
UNSURE - 21%
10 years ago, Bernie Sanders warned America of the unintended consequences that could emerge from a regime change war with Iran. Watch.
Silver car on city street surrounded by low pile of snow.
black car on city street surrounded by low pile of snow.
Any car that hasn't moved in the period between the last storm ending and the next storm beginning should immediately be towed, stripped of hazardous materials, and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to become artificial reefs like they do with old subway cars.
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
I’m happy to share the main result of my PhD, which you can find on bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... If you are interested in learning about a new way to perform DNA-PAINT multiplexing, which we call Combi-PAINT, or if you are interested in the study of mRNA conformation, keep reading! 1/10
I’m excited to witness the west coast flex this week with the #JPM2026 Biotech and Healthcare conference
"This is the look your well-respected math teacher gives you during a brutal discussion after they’ve tried their best to help you succeed and now they’ve caught you cheating on an exam and they’re beyond disappointed with your conduct."
“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”
Philadelphia Fall from the BioEngineering Skirkanich Hall.
dawg they’re live laugh loving the white house. president homegoods
This NYT map of election results is gorgeous, reader-friendly, and in the case of this 🎁 link, free.
If you've ever lived in NYC, visited it, or watched an episode of Seinfeld or Friends, you'll want to spend time clicking around
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker.
And yet, for too long, we have been told to ask for less than that, and endure hatred and bigotry in the shadows.
No more.
The White House is asking people not to share pictures of the East Wing because it’s even worse today.
No Kings NYC October 18th 2025
Bring as many American flags to No Kings as you can.
mitochondria from bipolar patients are closer to the nucleus in these images; control patients' are spread out further
15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell - have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery… 🧵
Squad Company 1 Park Slope brooklyn. #fdny #nyc #neverforget
A herbarium is a magical place if you’ve never been. it’s a library of our botanical past. Like most libraries it doesn’t incur much cost for the wealth of knowledge it preserves.
Four million people feel the same way. Every day.
ICE is now changing tactics and arresting people who have been granted asylum hearings.
This is both a violation of US & international law that demands immediate attention from all New York elected officials & underscores the urgent need for legal service providers to be at all of these cases.
People immediately pivoting to slot Lander into a progressive primary challenge are missing the implicit deal in the cross-endorsement: he's going to be deputy mayor, essentially COO of New York City. He's going to use his experience with the inner workings of government to help Mamdani deliver.
The editorial board took numerous shots at you and your tenure as mayor. What’s your response? It felt like the New York Times didn’t understand New York City. It was this strangely conservative law-and-order, traditionalist view that totally missed the reality of the city today. My view is people are hurting and affordability is the issue and the Times just does not understand what everyday people are going through. They’ve disconnected from New York City more and more with every passing year. Obviously, they decided they didn’t care enough about New York City to make an editorial endorsement and then they show up with this wimpy, disingenuous editorial basically justifying why people should vote for someone corrupt in Andrew Cuomo, and not even recognizing that other new leaders had worthy ideas. I mean, the whole thing was like, “Let’s invalidate new young leaders,” right? It was unbelievably ageist and out of touch. I was immediately transported back to 2013 when they said in their editorial when I was running for mayor that my ideas, like Pre-K for All, were impossible. They were absolutely dismissive, and their whole attitude was, Big bold ideas can’t happen, so why vote for someone who wants to change things? And I feel what they have become is sort of a parody of the status quo. They, in their own curmudgeonly way, just tell people to swallow hard and accept the unacceptable. If you talk to everyday New Yorkers, as I do all the time, you know that people really, really can’t stand the status quo in the city. But it’s not because they want to go back to some good old days of strongman leaders. It’s that they think their leaders don’t care about them, aren’t helping address the extraordinary pain they’re going through and the challenge of making ends meet.
Jesus Christ, Bill de Blasio is cooking here.
nymag.com/intelligence...
Current Mood
New Orleans, the start of the Caribbean.
Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, sent Harvard a letter.
They graded it.
Bwahahaha.
