Lee Ladett

incredible news: we’re having the same arguments over and over for the rest of time

Someone should check in on the rational actor assumption. Seems like it has had a hell of a week/month/year/decade.

"The night before, Ebeling and other Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that launching in cold weather could be disastrous." www.npr.org/2026/01/25/g...

Felix Klein lectured “On Hilbert’s first note on the foundations of physics" at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. He included excerpts from letters in which he and Hilbert give priority to Emmy Noether’s results on conservation of energy in general relativity. (1/n) 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬

And despite it all, this is Tehran 🇮🇷

🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]

Impossible how good reading is. You mean I just point my face at the paper for a bit and it does a whole update on my brain?

Watch /listen to Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu live her dream.. Playing with Yo Yo Ma.. 🥰

Attempt number seven at uploading this video of intermediate filaments in an enormous COS7 cell. I have a feeling the BlueSky compression will not do it any favors.

The evil that men do lives after them

What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

Killing MIT seems dumb to me

A plague a’ both houses!

"The magnitude of [the stakes of new technology], taken together with the insufficiency of our predictive knowledge, leads to the pragmatic rule to give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss." Hans Jonas

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

Heinrich Heine says good morning.

watching other anglosphere nations elect uninspiring technocrats

The road to fascism is paved with bitches telling you “it’s not that serious”

elder millennial here. just checking in for my annual “unprecedented times”

Americans are in denial about the implications here because they wish it wasn't happening. But this is the behavior of a dictator. It's the sort of thing that warrants secession or revolution. The Republic is over the second federal funding is withheld pending a governor's personal apology.

The Tower of Babel, rising ever higher above the city, 1580. Giant Nimrod at right criticizing architect: it needs to be taller! Taller! By Hendrick van Cleve, whose day is today.

US Supreme Court rules 6-3 that poisoning your rival is an official act.

@juliusgoat.bsky.social

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

I'm glad that America is doing real classic end of empire stuff. A king who is visibly losing his mind declaring a war based on a dream he had. Greedy courtiers feuding over access to the treasury. Some looks are timeless.

This language describes a coup. You have to be a government employee, subject to the rules & procedures that bind gov employees, to do this kind of work. This is a blatant abuse of the public trust by the Trump administration, a true 5-alarm fire. www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

Spiegel reports that Musk now also has access to sensitive data of competitors with regard to their financial dealings with the government.

A new analysis from the Tax Policy Center estimates that imposing a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico would reduce after-tax incomes by nearly 1% in 2026, costing the average household the equivalent of $930 in lost income. taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/25-pe...

This is as good a time as any to post a paper I've been working on with @LindseyGailmard: The Persistence and Fragility of Bureaucratic Capacity. We ask: what makes bureaucratic capacity persist, and what makes *threats* to bureaucratic capacity hard to reverse?

Sometimes you use a pen that turns out to write way better than you thought it would and oh man that’s the good stuff

me when any program's AI assistant asks me if I want help writing:

Whatever you’re imagining, it’s going to be 4x dumber that that.

It’s cool that humans have been eating bread so long that when we touch a loaf for a moment we can sense ah this is going to be awful bread. Like badgers sensing vibrations underground through their claws.

Fascinating paper by Claudia Goldin on drivers of low fertility in advanced economies. Countries where economic progress outstrips social progress (in particular, gender equality in household division of labour) see the most rapid falls in fertility.. www.nber.org/papers/w33311

Once any space becomes less than 40% male, (straight) men tend to cede it entirely while shouting about how it “went woke”. Fascinating read:

In a new wp "The Political Economy of Bread and Circuses", we examine the tradeoff in early states between productivity-enhancing infrastructure (like irrigation systems) and non-productive architecture (stelae, altars, etc) by studying the Classic Maya (250-950 CE). 1/5 dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Lucille Clifton, always.

Growing up in the Caribbean, C.L.R. James told Stuart Hall in 1976, “you get a certain comprehensive view...a microcosm of society on the whole. We—not me alone—Fanon had it, Césaire had it, Padmore had it.”

Since 1983, we’ve developed new vaccines for more diseases. Since then, we also developed: Antiretroviral therapy Statins First cancer immunotherapy Laparoscopic surgery tools Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) & more. 1/