a thing that irks me about the hampshire college thing is, the people worst affected by its closure are the staff and faculty—especially the latter. yet 95% of what i see people saying about it are entirely about students, whether current or imagined future students.
ugg do we have to write a response now?!
and people DO loose sleep about the fact that construction is majority men and nursing is majority women....like, do a google
I will add that the fact that biology is now 60% women is A NEW THING IN THE LAST FEW DECADES and maybe because of changes that were made to pedagogy, mentoring, and an increasing # of women in senior positions in bio...
Another professor wrote a campus paper piece arguing that the economics gender gap is mostly biology. This... did not survive close reading. So because I am this way, I made an interactive annotated edition cataloging the factual, logical, and rhetorical errors. Wheee... Enjoy! #EconSky #AcademicSky
#ArtemisII has been sustaining me in many ways, and despite nationalist tone to some of its framing, I'm grateful this journey was made in a context where openly-emotional experience is shared by crew & team, alongside science. Wouldn't have happened with Apollo, or some other space agencies today.
Oh no. NSF Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program shuttered.
This one leaves me winded. A good story from 2025 by @seattletimes-rss.bsky.social offers insight into what we are losing: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
I'm very excited to share that I'll be following the likes of @jamellebouie.net by speaking at Williams College on April 22 as part of their 2026 Public Affairs Forum!
In conversation with @sarahjacobson.bsky.social, we'll discuss the (not-so) hidden truth about work and #TheDoubleTax. 😭🥹
Hah! More like why are THEY wearing suits 😉
excited for this!
Poster with information on the spring public affair forum at Williams College. TUESDAY, MARCH 16 | 7:30 PM | ’62 CENTER MAINSTAGE A Conversation with Oren Cass ’05, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 7:00 PM, GRIFFIN 3 A Conversation Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Sarah Jacobson, THURSDAY, APRIL 30 | 4:15 PM | GRIFFIN 3 Labor Roundtable with Mijin Cha, Ryan Hancock and Alex Jacquez, moderated by Ben Snyder
Lineup for the Public Affairs Forum at Williams College! I had a hand in the remaining two events with @itsafronomics.blacksky.app on April 22nd and @jmijin.bsky.social @alexsjacquez.bsky.social and Ryan Hancock on April 30th - join us for some great conversations about work & labor
missing pages!
Definitely super cool and signficant! But doesn't re-write the origins of complex life - just fills in some gaps that we know existed in the fossil record - we know that major clades of animals diverged long before the Cambrian boundary, this fills in some of that missing fossil record.
So excited to host @itsafronomics.blacksky.app at Williams in a few weeks!
Chad is my work bestie. How lucky am I? So excited to read this book - just a little over a month till it comes out! Still time to pre-order and be first in line to read it and have your mind blown (in a wow things are @#$#ed up but also wow data is cool sort of way)!! bookshop.org/p/books/unlo...
Authors Chad M. Topaz, Anvi Kurongonayini, Bennett Ptak, Arden Fluehr, Ariana Mendible, Rachel Roca, Nancy Rodríguez, Lu Xian, Régan Schwartz, Jude Higdon Abstract Five countries account for over 80% of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries. Because high-prestige recognition redirects resources and talent, such concentration can be self-reinforcing, yet whether it originates in institutional design or individual evaluator behavior is unknown. We decomposed Nobel selection into a five-layer network spanning 8,134 individuals, 514,111 edges, and five prize categories (1901–1975). The Swedish and Norwegian bodies that oversee Nobel selection assembled a geographically diverse nominator pool, yet within it, nominators select same-country nominees 4.85 times as often as expected (p < 0.001), from 8.58 times in Literature to 3.01 times in Physics. This concentration persisted as the nominee pool diversified over seven decades. Geographic sorting enters at the discretionary nomination decision, not the institutional pipeline—a specific, targetable point in the selection process.
🚨 80% of Nobel Prizes go to folx in 5 countries. Why?
We analyzed 75 years of prize committees, nominators, nominees, and laureates... a network of 500k edges. Turns out nominators choose compatriots at 5x the expected rate — amplifying geographic bias.
Read: osf.io/preprints/so...
#AcademicSky
A scale illustration of the Earth and the Moon, with the Earth on the far left, lots of black, and then the Moon on the far right, about 30 Earth diameters away.
In honor of (hopefully) today's launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon in more than 50 years, here is a to-scale graphic of exactly how far away the Moon actually is. (Click image to expand.) You could fit about 30 Earths between the Earth and the Moon!
I know that there are a lot of different ways to be in the world, but I actually cannot comprehend how anyone who uses GenAI to do some of their research and/or writing thinks of themselves as a thinker and writer.
The thing that makes me a writer is that I do my writing. I also do my prep for it.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I think people too glibly hand-wave away physical/geological concerns about things like continuously declining ore grade, which probably isn't going to get much better given we have to mine more copper in next 30 years than previous 6,000 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Whooo out there has some undergrad accessible slides and/or activities on marine carbonate chemistry? You know Bjerrum plots, alkalinity, etc? I'm finding lots that dives right into the chemistry, but I need something for undergrads who haven't seen much chem since high school...
March 18- SXSW March 21- Spelman's Black Beauty STEMINIST Summit April 7- 2026 Mullin Welch Lecture with Cortney Sanders April 18 - Women in Power conference with Dr. Iris Bohnet April 22 - 2026 Public Affairs Forum at Williams College April 24 - Just Book-ish with The City of Boston
It's official! This Spring, #TheDoubleTax is back on the road and may be coming to a city near you. See you soon: Austin, Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, Williamstown, and Boston!
All tickets can be found at: annagifty.com/thedoubletax
#womenshistorymonth #blacksky #booksky
Congrats to @gwynchil.bsky.social on her first first-author publication in @paleosoc.bsky.social Paleobiology! www.cambridge.org/core/journal... - based on her undergrad thesis w/ me at Williams, Gwyn finds that tiny worm teeth(scolecodonts) get smaller across the Late Devonian extinction event
This is Nathan Cavanaugh, another DOGE staffer explaining how he flagged grants at NEH for "DEI" which would be reviewed for termination. 404 Media has reviewed hours of this footage and we'll have more soon.
Part of a lawsuit by @acls1919.bsky.social, @modernlanguage.bsky.social + @historians.org
Let me know if you figure it out - since we don't have good consensus on what causes the banding, it's really really hard to know! Could be seasonal/annual, but then there's the usual issues w/ assuming constant sed rates, etc.
A very amateur recording of a very fun and interesting night with me, @peterbrannen.bsky.social and @sidneyrothstein.bsky.social discussing carbon dioxide, capitalism, and copper mines.
I tell people that if the government is covering up the existence of aliens, NASA is absolutely not involved, because astrobiologists can't keep a secret to save their lives
Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).
A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)
The public and commentators need to stop thinking about "wars for oil" as about securing oil for the U.S., it's been decades since that was a motivator. "Wars for oil" are instead about securing oil for oil companies, securing a fossil fueled global economy, and denying oil's wealth to "enemies."
Jayme Lawson from Sinners hit the nail on the head and said how I felt with the whole BAFTAs situation.
My hope is to post many of these on the SERC website once the semester is over - so far I've got a STELLA model for the long term carbon-oxygen cycle, and I'll have at least two R-based @macrostrat.org labs by the end of the semester as well.
