"With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself."
I did a deep dive on tetanus when I was in grad school, and holy hell, get vaccinated. Tetanus is terrifying. The thought of kids going through that agony is truly nightmarish.
Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.
At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.
Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”
wapo.st/4euUt1c
I’m from Shreveport. I wrote about the tragic murders of these kiddos.
www.thecut.com/_pages/cmo7c...
"where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster" is a solid definition for rfk jr.'s health policy strategy
"authors concluded this was evidence of keas’ high problem-solving abilities & possibly an example of deliberate tool use. It’s also why Bruce’s caretakers...have never fitted him with prosthetics, believing it would only cause him stress and force him to re-adapt his behavior all over again"
In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke about AI becoming as divisive as DEI, the prevalence of scholarly slop, and how Bluesky poisons academic discourse. Evan Goldstein: You’ve described the Substack series as “intentionally provocative.” What — or who — were you trying to provoke? Alexander Kustov: I started using Claude Code and other agentic tools, and I was impressed with the possibilities and functionalities. Yet I still hear a lot of negativity about AI from colleagues who haven’t used those tools. The vast majority of folks in academia still think AI is that chatbot interface from a couple of years ago that hallucinates and cannot really do anything. But that’s not what I saw on my computer. I’d written short items about AI, so I thought to try to see whether Claude could assemble that and create a coherent, substantive post. It did a pretty good job. I just posted it. Then I realized it was a big thing.
Kustov: If we look at the best agentic models right now, they can do most quantitative social-science research tasks better than most professors globally. All of the kind of caveats here are important. What made a lot of people upset about this statement is that they interpret it in a very America-centric way. People were thinking about their colleagues at Oxford and R1 research universities. But I was born in Soviet Russia and went to undergrad in Europe. I have seen a lot of human slop. It should not be a controversial statement to say that agentic tools can do better. The value of qualitative research is going up because that’s something that AI cannot do well — ethnography and actually interviewing people in person, especially in hard-to-reach places. If you are gathering new data that is not yet publicly available, that’s the highest value that you can have as a professor and as a researcher. But I just came from an International Studies Association conference. I saw so much poor research that, if anything, I’m more convinced that my original point is correct. Too many people with Ph.D.s, with tenure, are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle has decided to interview Dr Kustov, who repeats his claim that AI agents do "qualitative social science research better than most professors globally"
Imagine having tenure and stability, and choosing to shit on his colleagues in a time of great instability for academia.
My second #ESCMIDGlobal2026 session today is the keynote session given by Eddie Holmes: On virus origin, evolution, and the next pandemic threat
Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19):
NYT: 5 of 58
WashPost: 1 of 43
WSJ: 0 of 40
AP: 0 of 26
CNN Wire: 0 of 18
NY Post: 0 of 17
Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4
LA Times: 0 of 4
Boston Globe: 0 of 2
If this is their idea of “support,” one wonders what their idea of “gutting the future of American science for kicks” might look like.
I've been in training full time for the past 12 years.
I need one of these grants to start my academic career.
The current administration could support my research for the next millennium with a small fraction of what they have stolen from the American people.
Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...
"The average taxpayer in 2025 paid: $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans."
do not forget that we the people have the power to chart a different path than this
do not forget that the american public overwhelmingly supports vaccines + requiring them for school.
The thing I think about whenever Palentir comes up is that I once played Werewolf sitting next to a guy that worked at Palentir and he spent the entire time trying to convince me that the company wasn’t evil while simultaneously picking off every villager in the game.
It isn’t as attention-grabbing as a porn site, but it would be great if news outlets could focus more on sexual assault of disabled people! This is a 2018 *yearlong* investigation on the incredibly high rate of sexual assault ppl w/intellectual disabilities experience.
i think that’s supposed to be tucker carlson on the right, too
Not even 10% of humans are cruel
And the federal funding lines for *paid* grad degree tracks are quite volatile & often shrinking. It’s a bad time to be a young person in the US.
how is this literally happening in real life
Three panel comic. Panel 1: at a house party, a guy is standing next to his buddy, a human-size horseshoe crab. They’re both holding red solo cups. The guy is looking to the other side of the room and excitedly says to the crab, “hey, there’s another horseshoe crab here!” The crab replies, “ugh.” Panel 2: the guy says, “what’s wrong?” The crab says, “he’s one of those guys who flaunts it too much.” Panel 3: we see the other horseshoe crab in question, engaged in conversation with a group of smiling people standing around him. This second horseshoe crab is wearing a cap with a horseshoe on it, and a novelty t-shirt that reads: I SURVIVED 5 MASS EXTINCTIONS. IS IT FRIDAY YET?
Three panel comic. Panel 1: scene from the movie Aliens; Ripley is in a mech suit and delivers her iconic line: “get away from her, you bitch!” Panel 2: the xenomorph queen lunges at Ripley in the robotic suit and they engage in a fight. Panel 3: later, the xenomorph queen is standing in the shower, mid wash. She says, “‘it takes one to know one, honey.’ That’s what I should have said.”
Washington Post article on STEM cuts at federal agencies. NSF tops it at -42%!
“Between January 2025 and February 2026, STEM and health employees at science-focused agencies saw nearly 15,000 jobs cut. The rate outpaced cuts among other federal workers.”
OPM data - Figure from Wash Post article 19 April. (Where US science has been hit hardest.)
NSF at -42%!
an era of radical celebration of human linguistic quirks as protest against robotic uniformity
I am forever saying that if refusal isn't a live option in any decision making process about "AI", then no ethical practice is possible. You've got to be able to stop if the thing is unacceptable.
Happy Golgi Day
This is what’s left of the historic town of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon after Israel passed through it
wait till they figure out how much faster the airplane, a machine invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903, can traverse the same distance
