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Everyone in academia reading this "joke"

Protip: review the paper, not the authors. A paper is not a grant proposal and you don't need to critique the PI, just the work. It's actually easy to not mention the authors at all. Instead of "the authors should...", just say "the work should address..." or "the paper would be improved by..."

Correction: Biden is technically silent generation, not a boomer. Point still stands

It's likely that in the 2028 election, after 36(!) straight years of Boomer presidents, we will elect a Millennial, skipping Gen X entirely. Which is sad but also the most Gen X outcome imaginable

Clear-eyed analysis from @blekhman.bsky.social on the future value and current limitations of AI in science. TLDR: we need to change systems to realize AI's promise blekhman.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...

This is the key. Thinking up new ideas is never the bottleneck - it's all the institutional slow downs: Grants take years, purchasing approvals, sponsored projects office need so many docs & let's not forget how long it takes our animals to breed. AI doesn't solve the most important bottlenecks

Everyone says AI will accelerate science. I don't think it will -- at least not in biology, and at least not soon. New post where I explain why, and how the productivity paradox can be resolved: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...

To help Europeans understand the American halftime show, think of it as a mini Eurovision. The over-the-top tackiness is the point

A great example of Betteridge's law en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...

The Human Microbiome Conservancy is doing something incredibly important: creating a “seed bank” of human microbiomes from around the world, preserving diversity before it vanishes. Enjoyed discussing it with the NYT for this wonderful story: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/m...

Good night from Chicago

Successfully appealing an unappealable red card! We can finally say that the US is a true soccer country, taking part in FIFA corruption like the big boys 😅

Look at that dinosaur reading and reviewing claims himself rather than asking Claude how good it is, as we all know now proper independent review should be done /s

“I have posted many preprints to bioRxiv, but had not really considered that this implies consenting to commercial AI scoring and ranking. There is no opt-out mechanism...Honestly, this makes me a bit less enthusiastic about posting preprints.”

I looked at this but left it out of the post, because the gender inference tool could only classify 44% of first authors and 31% of last authors. But given this caveat, this is the distribution: First authors: 71% male, 29% female Last authors: 83% male, 17% female

1. I don't think this ranking is done well (from what I can tell - the methods are a black box, and they perpetuate known biases) 2. I don't think this ranking should be done at all (ranking all biology preprints on a single unified axis simply doesn't make sense)

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

My first reaction to QED 1% is that it's an interesting idea - there are so many preprints that any additional data point could be helpful for filtering. Might be the beginning of something useful My reaction after seeing my preprint is not in the 1%: what a terrible idea. A joke really

They say the US lost its global influence, but somehow it convinced everyone in the world that it's normal to play soccer in 4 quarters??

Our new friendly neighborhood monolith. Maybe an unpopular opinion but I love it