A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss

This story is heartbreaking.

A child shouldn't have to bury a parent lost to a domestic violence homicide. A parent shouldn't have to bury a child shot and killed by the other parent. I think we should all be able to agree on that. But today is another day in the United States, a country with more guns than people and not enough will to meaningfully address domestic violence. Or gun violence. And so today, on another day in the United States, eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana are dead — shot and killed by a man who was supposed to care for them and keep them safe. For at least some of those children, that man was their father.

safe. Treating domestic violence as random and unique to a particular family decreases urgency and absolves us of responsibility for addressing a larger societal issue. We live in a country where an average of 70 women are shot and killed by a current or former partner every single month, but people will still say there is no threat to the general public? I have a question. Since when are women not a part of the general public?

It's the guns. It's the domestic violence. It's an abusive president who has no interest in stopping the violence. And it's a culture that refuses to see lethal domestic violence as the crisis that it is.

From my latest piece on domestic violence, guns, and eight children who will never get to be adults. The mom who will never see her kids grow up. And a society that refuses to take domestic violence seriously enough to stop the killings from happening.

We can stop this. 1/

What is the "Mamdani Act"? GOP bill would ban socialists, Marxists from US Chip Roy's "Mamdani Act" would make socialists, Marxists and Islamists deportable and inadmissible to the United States.

www.newsweek.com/what-is-the-...

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

a man in a suit and tie is sitting at a desk and saying `` stay tuned ! '' ALT: a man in a suit and tie is sitting at a desk and saying `` stay tuned ! ''

FYI, Wu, @nickdemark.bsky.social, and Hill have an updated, extended version of this paper coming out soon (in Demography, I think) with projections showing that completed fertility for the cohorts most affected by the Great Recession will still be around 2.

Two graphs

Several people (Maibritt Henkel, Paul Novosad) on other platforms have complained about Claire Cain Miller's most recent NYT article, especially the figure (top) showing percent change, instead of (bottom) raw change in US births by mothers' age. This is misplaced.
/1

Opinion | You Can’t Defend a Nation When Soldiers Don’t Have Child Care

"Child care is not what you sacrifice to keep the country safe. It’s what keeps the country running."

There's a mic drop for you.

Red States Thought They Could Stop Abortions. They Ended Up Stopping Only the Lifesaving Ones. Abortion bans are failing.

I have a new op-ed in @slate.com today w Yvette Lindgren! We argue that abortion bans are only chilling medically necessary abortions w/o effecting traditional abortion seekers, who have found other ways to access care. Bans do not work. Check it out! slate.com/news-and-pol...

Headline reading "at least 89% of mass shootings were perpetrated by men."

A reminder, on the day following another mass shooting: it's a gun problem, and it's a masculinity problem.

Framing instances of gun violence largely as a domestic issue or a mental health issue ignores these glaring truths. wapo.st/3QQEH6Y

A mom and widow who had benefits cut because of a mistake on a form. A home health aid making $13/hour who said food pantries are so overwhelmed, they couldn't help. A student who said SNAP access supported eating disorder recovery.

My reporting for @slate.com & @economichardship.bsky.social:

Wonderful news, because many institutions rushed the roll-out of this "rule" and didn't provide the requisite support for faculty whose teaching materials needed to be made compliant (not the same thing as accessible...)

"North Carolina currently ranks fiftieth in the nation for school funding in total dollars per pupil and spending as a percentage of economic activity."

Improving Fertility Forecasts: New Research Highlights the Importance of Birth Order Dynamics Demographic projections are central to understanding how populations evolve and to planning for the future. Governments, international organisations, and researchers rely on forecasts of fertility, mo...

New research from new LCDS member Jakub Bijak (among others) shows that better fertility forecasts depend on looking beyond total birth rates 👶📊

By accounting for birth order dynamics, predictions become more accurate and informative for policy & planning.

🔗 www.demography.ox.ac.uk/news/improvi...

The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump's presidency The BBC has found a pattern of spikes in trades ahead of public announcements by the US president.

"You can have massive trades on a financial instrument that clearly show that someone was privy to what Donald Trump was about to declare," says Oudin.

"Yet there is a strong chance that no-one will be prosecuted," he adds.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

None of these efforts speak to the need to create the conditions in which people can have the children they want and raise them in a safe, supportive environment.

It’s about controlling women. 4/4

Expanding College Sexual and Reproductive Health Programs to Include Family Building The age of first pregnancy in the US is increasing, especially for individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Consequently, older college students, graduate students, and alumni from instituti...

And here: discussions on shifting sex ed and contraceptive counseling to emphasize “family building” and the risks of delayed childbearing. 3/

MAGA wants teen births. It won't work Teen birth rates are at historic lows — and young women want to keep it that way

And here: suggestions about how to reverse declines in teen and unintended birth rates 2/

Opinion | Does the Trump Administration Really Want More Teen Pregnancies?

Creating a moral panic over low birth rates is how we get here: attacks on contraceptive methods and on public funding of family planning. 1/

I think before you build an Arc de Triomphe you should be able to identify at least un (1) triomphe

Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health.

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...

I'm just so sad and angry.

"It happened even as Cerina Fairfax supported the entire family on her salary as a part-time dentist, allowing her husband to assume the role of political leader."

News: Leading atmospheric science summer undergraduate research program canceled due to NSF funding loss Quieter weather on tap for a few days for most of the country

News: a leading NSF supported University of Oklahoma atmospheric science summer undergraduate research program that has mentored hundreds of top atmospheric scientists over two decades has been canceled for 2026 due to funding loss. (repost w/correct link) More: tinyurl.com/3zjzf7vu

Our Boomer parents were right about MTV!

None of us knew!!!

a man in a space suit is holding a mtv flag on the moon . ALT: a man in a space suit is holding a mtv flag on the moon .

If MTV had stuck to playing music videos, we would not have a reality TV star president.

It also gave us the current Dept of Transportation Sec’y, who is the least problematic of this cabinet, but that’s not saying a lot.

It introduced reality TV (people who became famous for nothing), which was the precursor for influencers (people who are important for no reason), and here we are.

a woman is smiling and saying `` who woulda thought ? '' ALT: a woman is smiling and saying `` who woulda thought ? ''

Do you ever think about how MTV’s first season of The Real World was the end of
civilization, and we didn’t even know it?

"A few years ago Mike got fed up with dating in America. 'So many women there have been brainwashed to think it’s OK to treat men like crap'... He is now engaged to a Thai woman... In one viral clip...(she)
kneels on the floor clipping Mike’s nails."