Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

To The Contrary | Olympic Ban on Trans Women: Fair Play or Flawed Science? | Season 35 Olympic trans ban debated: fairness, science, and the future of women’s sports.

So I did this debate on To the Contrary, an NPR debate show about the new International Olympic Committee rule banning trans women from competing in women's sports. I want to give a trigger warning: my opponent says offensive and hideous things about transwomen.
www.pbs.org/video/olympi...

Gray whales, once rare in San Francisco Bay, dying there at alarming rates Researchers find increase in whale deaths in the Bay, largely because of collisions with vessels on busy shipping route

Gray whales, once rare in San Francisco Bay, dying there at alarming rates

Who Gets Guggenheims? - Public Books Unfortunately, 100 years of data show that those whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—that is, those not at elite institutions—are least likely t...

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.

Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities

www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

Just Gal Pals! The Differential Treatment of Sexual Behavior Among Nonhuman Great Apes Are bonobos just gal pals? We outline historical interpretations of same-sex sexual behavior in bonobos and propose ways of queering this research that expand the study of both same-sex and mixed-sex....

So excited by paper on Bonobo Gal Pals with Kirsty Graham is now out in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology!

🧪 #primatology

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A written email provides notification of a PhD research grant acceptance

A person stands up and poses for a photo with elephants during a safari.

I am honored to have won a 2026 dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation @wennergrenorg.bsky.social!! Having an unwavering spirit of curiosity pays off!

Project: "Navigating Malaysia's Fragmented Frontiers: Primates, Privatized Property, and the Post-Plantation Landscape"

U.S. federal support for human origins research may be over The field is generating more new discoveries than ever, but significant setbacks for students and many researchers.

The National Science Foundation has proposed eliminating the directorate that includes most of the federal funding for fieldwork and research in human origins. It's a sudden acceleration of a decades-long trend. I comment on what this means.

www.johnhawks.net/p/us-federal...

Woo-Hoo! First comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers! A biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction! Jennifer C. French, Somaye Khaksar, me & @marckissel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

Read this. this is what the administration wants to happen. this is how they destroy science... www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/b...

poster for "the future of (data) work." top right corner contains event info: April 10, 9:30-4:30pm, Aaron Burr Hall 219." Under the title is the conference description: "The rapid expansion and commercialization of artificial intelligence systems has been enabled by the upscaling of data work, defined by Miceli and Posada as 'the labor involved in the collection, curation, classification, labeling, and verification of data.' Amidst debates about how 'intelligence machines' will impact the global workforce, this conference brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars and organizers to examine the histories, topographies, and lived realities of data work around the world, centering the people behind the platforms that dominate our present to imagine alternative futures." Underneath this text is the list of panelists and their affiliations: Beth Semel, Organizer, (Assistant Professor, Dept of Anthro, Richard Stockton Picentennial Preceptor) Hunter Akridge Research Assistant (Grad Student, Dept of Anthro), Alex Hanna (DAIR), Seyi Olojo (UC Berkeley), Cindy Kaiying Lin (Georgia Institute of Tech), Julian Posada (Yale), Shivani Kapania (CMU), Samantha Dalal (Princeton CITP) Lilly Irani (UCSD), Sarah Fox (CMU). The background image, from Hanna Barakat/Archival Images of AI/AIxDesign, is a picture of hands yanking invisible strings through a rare earth mineral with a microchip superimposed over it set against. On the bottom of the poster are the sponsors (Princeton AI Lab, Princeton Dept of Anthro), and a QR code for the program).

interested in questions of tech, labor, and worker futures? on April 10 in Princeton i'm hosting an outstanding lineup of panelists at "the future of (data) work," where speakers will discuss the ethnographic, archival, and participatory action research they've conducted with data + tech workers

"...centering the nuance that anthropologists require in evolutionary approaches and encouraging recognition by evolutionary scholars that the cultural resources they are modeling can be more complex yet tractable in an anthropological sense." www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

#2026AAAs #multispecies #CfP

2026 AAAs CfP: "Edge Ecologies: Surplus, Scarcity, and Environmental Governance in East Asia", abstract deadline is April 20th! If metabolic drift, scales of loss and proliferation, socio-ecological histories, and developmental authoritarian regimes speak to you, please consider submitting!

The cover of the book Pregnancy Interrupted: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End by Kate Clancy. Features a zoomed in ultrasound image of an empty gestational sac as the background, with the book title in a grayish pink color in the foreground. This book will make you sad and angry and happy so I think you should read it.

Well if it isn't a late Friday cover reveal!!!

My book PREGNANCY INTERRUPTED: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End, out August 25th. 🧪

AAA Selects 2026 OpEd Project Participants! - American Anthropological Association Thanks to a generous grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and our donors, the AAA is once again pleased to offer a huge congratulations to the 20 members selected for this […]

In these important and urgent times, I'm honored to be part of @wennergrenorg.bsky.social and @americananthro.bsky.social's 2026 OpEd Project cohort. Looking forward to writing more on community-centered environmental justice, especially in the Global South! americananthro.org/news/aaa-sel...

"Sapiens": One page at a time I've been co-teaching a course for several years in which we read Sapiens . I think I've read it eight times, now. That explains the gumband...

I love this! The brilliant Holly Dunsworth is reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time, separating myth from fact… Let’s dive in!

ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...

AAA Selects 2026 OpEd Project Participants! - American Anthropological Association Thanks to a generous grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and our donors, the AAA is once again pleased to offer a huge congratulations to the 20 members selected for this […]

The AAA is once again pleased to offer a huge congratulations to the 20 members selected for this year’s “Write to Change the World” OpEd Project! americananthro.org/news/aaa-sel...

Politics, Not Biology, Is Driving Legal Efforts to Classify Sex Sex is not one single, simple, uniform biological reality, so biology cannot be invoked as a basis for “immutable” legal classifications

given the IOC of late...reposting a few bits... www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Choctaw Nation Buys Former Big Lots Warehouse, Closing Off Oklahoma ICE Detention Site The sale is the second time in months that a large Oklahoma warehouse pursued by ICE for detention use has instead gone to another buyer.

👏🏼The Choctaw Nation has purchased a warehouse in Oklahoma that ICE was trying to buy and use as a detention center. www.projectsaltbox.com/p/choctaw-na...

Looking into a Neanderthal gallery at La Roche-Cotard An enigmatic “mask” comes from outside a cave filled with Neanderthal markings.

La Roche-Cotard is a remarkable cave site used by Neanderthals before 51,000 years ago and then closed. Inside are enigmatic parallel lines, geometric patterns, and ochre dots. Outside, a strange stone resembling a human face was unearthed.

www.johnhawks.net/p/looking-in...

'Sinners' Musical Performance | 98th Oscars (2026) YouTube video by Oscars

Didn’t see the Oscars. Raving comments made me look on YouTube because I needed to see this for myself. What magnificence! Someday there’ll be sensible merit based decisions in these awards. Meanwhile, kudos to Misty Copeland, Michael B Jordan, Brian Coogler & their team.
youtu.be/j3ae7BvTuC4?...

Group photo of Workshop delegates

Thank you to organisers Anand Krishnan, Sanjay Sane and Anusha Shankar and everyone who joined us in India for our Workshop on 'Integrative Ecology in the Global South'
biologists.com/workshops/
#BiologistsWorkshops

Graphic with the Contrasts logo, saying that pitches for issue 2 about fortunes are due February 23. Background image shows a rainbow light in the clouds.

Graphic reading: For Issue 2, we invite submissions that explore the vast and (un)predictable realms of fortunes. Whether they're tucked into cookies, ranked by the dollar on lists of 500, or tempted by the great unknown, fortunes are slippery, contentious things that shape how we choose, desire, imagine, and forge connections with worlds seen and unseen...

CALL FOR PITCHES / ContraSTS issue 02 / "fortunes"

Fortunes are slippery, contentious things that shape how we choose, desire, imagine, and forge connections with worlds seen and unseen...

Send us your thoughts on fortunes, sci/tech ( #STS ), & society!

More info & submit: contrastsmag.net

Abolishing ICE isn’t enough – it’s time to center people’s humanity | Heba Gowayed and Victor Ray It’s far from radical to reject a system predicated on violence – despite what thinktanks might claim

Abolish ICE is not enough.

It's not about training -- Ross who killed Renee Good was a TRAINER. It's not about body cams -- we saw Alex Pretti killed with our own eyes.

We have to abolish the idea that violence ever made us safer, before it's too late.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Notes from the Field | Kymberley Chu, Diasporic Drifting: Experiencing Cultural Outsider/Ethnographic Insider Dynamics in Malaysia — Critical Asian Studies “I don’t like this kind of weather; it looks ominous with the dark clouds, and it feels stuffy with no chance of a gentle breeze. I was going to say yi loh-hor [it’s raining] tapi [but] it’s not exact...

For @criticasianstds.bsky.social, I wrote an essay on the contemporary frictions of dwelling, diaspora, and development politics. Unpacking a political dichotomy, I pay attention to how linguistic identities contend with different projects of modernity in Malaysia.
doi.org/10.52698/BBJ...

Notes from the Field | Kymberley Chu, Diasporic Drifting: Experiencing Cultural Outsider/Ethnographic Insider Dynamics in Malaysia — Critical Asian Studies “I don’t like this kind of weather; it looks ominous with the dark clouds, and it feels stuffy with no chance of a gentle breeze. I was going to say yi loh-hor [it’s raining] tapi [but] it’s not exact...

Notes from the Field | Kymberley Chu @dialecticprimates.bsky.social reflects on the "multiple, overlapping political terrains that shape the complex kinds of interlocutor access and social relationships" Asian/American anthropologists encounter in the field. criticalasianstudies.org/commentary/2...

Distraught woman says ICE killed her wife in video after deadly Minneapolis shooting "They killed my wife," the distraught woman says, adding, "They shot her in the head." An ICE agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman who was driving an SUV in Minneapolis on Wednesday. / Screenshot/@Breaking911

"They killed my wife. I don't know what to do," the woman says through sobs in the footage, with a damaged SUV visible in the distance behind her. "We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head," the woman cries. "We have a six-year-old at school," she says, almost unable to breathe, as a chaotic scene in which federal officers prevented at least one doctor who was on the scene from assisting the shot victim unfolds. "We're new here," the distraught woman says in despair.

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today.

This could be you.

As dangerous eugenic ideas spread, NIH falls silent Federal research agencies are pulling back from fostering public discussions about science after the hollowing out of government communications offices.

Highly recommended read about the politicisation of science in the US and how this will help the resurgence of eugenic ideology and scientific racism.

“For the first time, there is a political appointee in the NIH communications operations”

www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/t...

🧵 NSF is reducing external review requirements and eliminating routine expert panels, citing staff shortages that this administration implemented. This change expands program officer authority. But the solution to flawed accountability isn't less public accountability.

Niche Construction: How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution How niche construction theory extends evolutionary theory beyond natural selection to a more general theory about the coevolution of organisms with their e

Gentle reminder that John Odling-Smee, who is now in his 90s (!) published his big update on #NicheConstruction last year.

It's open access and can be downloaded here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

( #pleasecite )