💅

I met John Hawks a while back. Nice guy. Why not just ring him up? He’d have the scoop! I told him I wasn’t as sure about the cultural story but they’re cooking up interesting things (last I was told it’s in revision).

Virginia Ex-Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax Kills Wife and Self, Police Say

Welcome to another morning of men. Waiting on that online Bear Academy.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/u...

Unclear. Sperm whales don’t have menopause (so far as we know) and collaborative / protective birthing culture is also super rare, but there’s so much more to learn!

Trump Administration Begins Investigations Into Three Medical Schools

Because the idea of a Black woman who's authoritatively and deservedly a doctor is *impossible* for them to accept: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/u...

Person online: Normalize self-care.

Statistician: Ok, the average amount of self-care is now zero.

Also true: yesterday an older dude said, surprised, “oh this is like a serious book!” And not knowing what to say to a moment like that, so nakedly what it was, I said, “well there are a lot of jokes… but also a lot of citations”

Pretty sure I put the loss / lack of human sperm plugs in the last chapter of Eve 😂 and very much enjoyed saying researchers collect them from chimps off the forest floor like glittering jewels!

An Open Letter to the College President Who Maintained Close Ties with Epstein If you agree with my general sentiments here, please comment below—just “signed” or “seconded” is sufficient.

Please share and sign if you agree with my open letter calling for Botstein’s immediate resignation katemanne.substack.com/p/an-open-le...

Photo of an African-American woman wearing gold hoop earrings, a gold necklace, and a red blazer. She has short brown hair light greenish eyes. She is beautiful.

Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston is a living legend. She has spent her career advocating for affordable healthcare for all, and was the first Black woman director of a public health service bureau.

If that weren’t enough, her advocacy has led to advances in treatment for sickle cell disease.

Goals.

Eh every thought is edited on its way out, still counts. But! I know--deeply--what it's like to get to "full doc" with a massive book so sending the getting-to-full-doc vibes, instead.

Sending good-revisions vibes!

Pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no. — Harvard Gazette Geneticist explains recent analyses made possible by tech advances show human history to be one of mixing, movement, displacement.

Can see some coverage of Reich's work elsewhere here (with a nicely anti-eugenecist headline): news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Lasting Lower Rhine–Meuse forager ancestry shaped Bell Beaker expansion - Nature A distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted 3,000 years later than in most European regions, contributing to later Lower Rhine–Meuse Bell Beaker users.

Yup! Maybe 'cause farming *sucked* for a long, long time? And kudos for this angle from Spain, Leiden, & the Reich lab on female knowledge-transfer across communities! @lemoustier.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Survival of the foolest: population dynamics, income policies, and IQ trends - The Journal of Economic Inequality This paper examines how different income distribution policies may influence the future distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) in a population. Using a multi-period individual-based simulation mod...

More evidence, as if more were needed, that academia is not in fact wholly controlled by the ideological left. An apparently respectable economics journal just published a paper which is pretty overtly promoting eugenic ideology (first two citations are to Francis Galton and Richard Lynn!)

The effects of a second pregnancy on women’s brain structure and function - Nature Communications Extending their previous findings of brain changes in a first pregnancy, the authors show that a second pregnancy uniquely alters women’s brains, involving both a further fine-tuning of first-pregnanc...

Cool new research on pregnancy-related brain changes from the Hoekzema lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Documents Reveal a Controversial Vaccine Study's Unusual Path to CDC Approval A new investigation has found irregularities in the ethics review of a grant to study effects of a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau.

This a great piece of investigative journalism. @rollingstone.com
This should be required reading for scientists and ethicists.
Ethics matter, especially in science.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I'd meant "elusive." But... both work.

Note that the gap starts waaay before any pubertal behavioral effect in the HG group... that's gotta be immunity & repair, folks.

It's... not "antics." It's everything, everywhere, all at once.

They are important. The consequences remain illusive. And those of us who had been little girls--who are mothers to yet more--honestly, we're pretty broken right now. It's one thing to suspect, even to have been victim... quite another to see it all called "Caligula antics" in the Paper of Record.

Have only met a couple. But all believe the era of "no jobs" is coming much faster than you'd think (reality of that unclear). So there's a blur between "want" and "assume" in that frame: if you assume all such jobs are like blacksmiths during the Industrial Revolution, then what is stewardship?

A different world is unimaginable when you think your path to virtue is made of the power already given to you. The nihilists find it oppressive and party. Others drug themselves numb. Some make (to us) very strange choices that clearly harm others while they think they, alone, know the path.

Which is to say: these numbers aren't shocking to the very wealthy. They simply don't believe the data mean what everyone else thinks they mean. It's akin to asking what royalty felt about their power in Europe 500 years ago.

Most likewise think of only a fraction of their money as self-serving and the rest as what it nakedly is: power. So they see it as stewardship, and which ones feel more or less invested in the moral qualities of that stewardship depends on pre-existing personality and childhood experiences.

Agreed. Having met a few bill's, here's an interesting twist: many in this world think of their political contributions and certain strategic investments (which are also wealth-serving) as "giving" so their understanding of their own money-management doesn't align with these numbers.

The lack of Irish-descended self-awareness in that group is continually amazing.

Total coincidence. Nothing to see here. 🙄

When the hands are the scariest things

It’s my birthday! Anybody wanna make today a little less… Jean Genet? How about the sequel to Little Girl Blue being an actual astonishing victory? Anybody?