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Yuuuuuup. As a dude with an Italian last name, I am well aware how recently Italians were given "white" status here in the US, and how much of a scandal it was when my first-generation Italian grandfather married my Yankee grandmother whose forebears helped found New Amsterdam.

The GOP scapegoating attacks on Dr. Fauci, a spectacle designed to affirm the conspiracy theories of a brain-wormed base, are chilling. What scientist or public servant, in their right minds, will choose to put themselves on the line during the next pandemic or crisis? www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/p...

🚨New Science Advances🚨 Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... -Exposure very low but highly concentrated -Reducing exposure by ~70% for months had no measurable effects *even among frequent consumers*

👇🎯 Again, this is what both political parties & societal institutions like the media need to to do in a functioning democratic polity, & we’re not going to get anywhere by continuing to allow the far right authoritarian party to set new terms of what is acceptable behavior in politics & society.

A decade ago, Facebook was so worried about rising misinformation that it paid various news outlets to hire writers specifically tasked with publishing Snopes-like fact-checks. Today, the company is leaping into bed with a purveyor of misinformation to toy with a tool known for getting facts wrong.

When people seek guidance from science, they expect it to work more than once. I have TWO new articles on commercial forces & proprietary models that make science less reliable, with pointers to communities and ideas that might help. This post offers a summary: citizensandtech.org/2026/07/comm...

$229 billion = annual amount spent in USA on alcohol $166 billion = annual sports gambling handle in USA (excluding pred markets) $300 billion = annual total gambling handle in the USA (casinos + sports) $600 million = NIAAA annual budget $0 = annual federal research funding for gambling

by way of idle wishful thinking - would be great if NYT hired a science writer/thinker for the op-ed page to tell us what’s happening and what’s at stake in the sciences, at a time when they are under attack in a way Galileo would recognize, while newspaper science journalism is facing extinction

Rufo was "supplying policy blueprints and social-media firepower for an ambitious conservative overhaul. In return, FL became Rufo’s proving ground, elevating the up-and-coming activist into one of the movement’s most influential cheerleaders." www.chronicle.com/article/flor...

Finally picked up my library card today and I should have done it much sooner! Look at what one of the card options was!! Libraries are the BEST

Grow native plants this summer or Tinsel *will* beat you up. She will haunt your dreams on behalf of the bees. Plant something native today.

The whole point of living in a country and paying stupid amounts of money in taxes is being able to assume that if you can buy a thing it is relatively safe. That isn't true - especially for supplements. And we should all be angrier that it isn't.

Surveys like this always alarm people Fortunately, recent research from cognitive psychology shows that the reason people are so wildly wrong when estimating the size of minority groups is largely NOT because of prejudice — but rather how humans think about unknown proportions of any kind

As the first female president of my high school’s NAACP chapter AND oratorical club, IME people get really hinky when girls use boy skills to beat boys at being Boy.

Ok Hollywood, these are our terms. You will deliver one hundred billion dollars to a designated location in unmarked bills or our professor keeps reviewing your films

We have gone from the “narcotizing dysfunction” (where people, overwhelmed by info, confuse learning about the world with taking action) to “enshittified dysfunction” where people conflate looking things up with acquiring accurate actionable info.

"When Harvard chose to fight back against the Trump administration, it did so at a time when we had few examples of successful resistance...Today, Trump is weaker politically, and we have mounting evidence that civic resistance works." www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/o...

When you set an Out of Office e-mail message there should be an option to set an additional message that goes out for two or three days afterward reminding people to be gentle with you while you try to claw your way out of the mountain of suddenly urgent tasks that descends on you upon your return 😓

if I had a million dollars I would launch a competitor for Etsy where AI and mass produced junk were banned and that did not punish tiny shops with huge fees