Author | Lightnews

Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Aug 9

"Several years" is beyond optimistic. Have you seen what's happened to the MSTP pathway (the only realistic MD/PhD pipeline in 99% cases)? We're cooked for the next half century at minimum. Entire cohorts of researchers have already been lost where training time is measured in decades.

Joé McKen @joemcken.net · Aug 8

Science is effectively dead in the US for at least the next 3½ years, and will then take another several years to even get started again. Canceled research doesn’t just uncancel itself, and scientists who find opportunity elsewhere won’t just come flocking back.

The damage is generational.

Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · Aug 8

All scientific grant funding must now be approved by a political appointee and "demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities."

I wonder where innovation will happen in the future? It won't be in the US

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

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Michael Ann, sociotechnical femme @michaelann.bsky.social · Aug 8

This is effectively a ban on trans scientists getting federal funding, straight up. It’s also effectively a ban on all scientific work that includes trans people.

jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · Aug 7

“Discretionary awards shall not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate … denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic”

TL;dr grants to be denied to entities who acknowledge the existence of trans people

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

www.whitehouse.gov

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Aug 8

I made ~110k during my final year of medical residency in NYC - a position that is effectively DEFINED by getting paid less than you need to survive because programs can. Andrew fucking Cuomo of all people trying to shame someone making 142k in NYC as "rich" is beyond parody.

Susan Rinkunas @susanrinkunas.com · Aug 8

Grandma-killer says what? (This is deeply deranged and Mamdani got the apartment when he was making $47K)

Twitter screenshot:
Andrew Cuomo @andrewcuomo
Somewhere last night in New York City, a single mother and her children slept at a homeless shelter because you, assemblyman @ZohranKMamdani are occupying her rent controlled apartment.
You grew up rich and married an even wealthier woman. You’ve had weddings on 3 continents. You own property in LGTBQIA+ murderous Uganda. You make $142,000 a year plus stipends, and your wife works too, meaning you together likely make well over $200,000. No matter which way you cut it: Zohran Mamdani is a rich person. You are actually very rich.
Yet you and your wife pay $2,300 a month, as you have bragged, for a nice apartment in Astoria. That should be housing for someone who needs it.
We are in the middle of a historic affordability crisis. Millions of low income New Yorkers need this apartment and an apartment like it. Yet your apartment remains rented to rich people who don’t need it.
Today, I am calling on you to move out immediately and give your affordable housing back to an unhoused family who need it. Leaders must show moral clarity. Time to move out.
posted: 3:15 PM · Aug 8, 2025

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Aug 8

even before the song, the names of the 4 members were explicitly introduced as: Yoshiki...chi, Toshi...ro, Hide...ji, and Pata...rson lol

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Aug 7

having spent 10 years of my life there, you know why. the school has no spine.

Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Aug 6

I've found AI to be huge in accessibility/disability contexts (for live transcription/translation/recognition, as assistive tech for speech disb from illness etc.). Issues are legitimate, but its actually jarring how I've seen it treated/used professionally vs. the vitriol for it in spaces like bsky

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Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · Jul 24

Trump's new executive order about AI states that companies' models must not incorporate the idea that trans people exist as a concept. Seems bad.

The WHITE HOUSE
One of the most pervasive and destructive of these ideologies is so-called "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). In the Al context, DEl includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
DEl displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable Al.

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AAUP @aaup.org · Jul 24

You can never bend the knee enough to appease an authoritarian bully.

This is a devastating blow to academic freedom & freedom of speech at Columbia.

Never in the history of this nation has there been an administration so intent on the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump

www.nytimes.com

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Jul 22

lost the slipcase at some point but dragged the book from kickstarter with me through medschool, residency, and fellowship across three states❤️

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Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social · Jul 21

Once again I am begging everyone to understand that climate change and trans rights are not separate issues

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Jul 14

i'm going to refrain from sharing my own thoughts on this topic, but really have to say: you are wildly overestimating how "novel" e-scooter injuries are seen, while immensely underselling what the actual impact is of treating someone who has been "flattened by a car."

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Jess K., MD @jss00.bsky.social · Jul 5

He checked “Asian” AND “African American” together AND wrote directly that what he meant by this was that he is Ugandan to make sure there wasn’t any confusion. He took every step possible to make sure he wouldn’t be misconstrued and it still wasn’t good enough for the NYT to try to make it a story.

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Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Jul 4

the parent of a trans kid in missouri begged the new york times not to use an audio clip in The Protocol podcast of a verbal confrontation with professional transphobe Jamie Reed out of fear of safety for her kid and NYT management refused her request.

jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · Jul 3

Always curious to see who gets to be an anonymous source!

While Mr. Mamdani was not a target of the hack, the information about him was included in a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action. The Times agreed to withhold his real name.

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Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social · Jul 4

She had a verbal agreement with the writer that, though on the record for a print story, she wouldn't be part of the podcast. It meant nothing to NYT.

Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Jul 4

the parent of a trans kid in missouri begged the new york times not to use an audio clip in The Protocol podcast of a verbal confrontation with professional transphobe Jamie Reed out of fear of safety for her kid and NYT management refused her request.

jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · Jul 3

Always curious to see who gets to be an anonymous source!

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · Jun 30

The White House has ordered the US Dept. of Justice to prioritize denaturalization: voiding the citizenship of US citizens.

Who will it denaturalize? "Any" case that it "determines to be sufficiently important".

Point 10 leaves the criteria opaque and arbitrary.

substack.com/redirect/169...

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Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Jun 29

the problem with proving that trans kids end up committing suicide is that dead trans kids aren't around to fill out the surveys you would typically use to measure such data.

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · Jun 29

The "misinformation" in question here is that gender-affirming care reduces suicides among youth. It merely reduces depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal ideation.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine
How the left ended up disbelieving the science

By Helen Lewis

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

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🎃 Dr. Jessie Christianstein 🎃 @aussiastronomer.bsky.social · Jun 29

NASA is being told to cancel 19 *active* missions to save $6B, which looks to be less than the ICE *hiring/retention* budget going forward.

I need people to let that sentence sink into their bones for a minute.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · Jun 28

If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029:

- $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion
- $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million
- $8 billion for hiring/retention
- Billions more.

Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social · Jun 28

‼️‼️

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davidrlurie @davidrlurie.bsky.social · Jun 29

Trump believes in American Non-Exceptionalism.
His claim that America is as amoral as authoritarian regimes has long been false. But he longs to make it true.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Jun 29

BARTIROMO: China hacked into our telecom system, they've been stealing intellectual property, fentanyl, covid, all of this stuff. How do you negotiate w/ an obvious bad actor?

TRUMP: You don't think we do that to them? We do. We do a lot of things. That's the way the world works. It's a nasty world

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David A. Graham @dgraham.bsky.social · Jun 27

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · Jun 24

Congratulations Pamela

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Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof @evanbernick.bsky.social · Jun 21

Words fail me.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/u...

A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.

www.nytimes.com

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · May 14

ICE pretended to arrest a 21 yo in order to force her to call her undocumented mother to come leave the house (where she was safe from ICE arrest) to care for her baby. When the mother came, she was abducted and the daughter was suddenly of no interest to ICE.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Ferreira de Oliveira, who is 40 years old, was still at their nearby home when she received a phone call from one of her daughters, who said ICE had pulled them over and were threatening to arrest Clara.

Ferreira de Oliveira’s frightened daughter told her mother that she needed to leave the home now and come meet them on the street, because ICE was telling them that if they arrested Clara, they weren’t allowed to leave the baby in the hands of a minor. So, the feds insisted, grandma needed to rush over to take custody of the baby.

Shortly after Ferreira de Oliveira arrived on the scene, ICE took her into custody. The agents suddenly no longer seemed interested in the 21-year-old daughter. ICE did not arrest her or her 17-year-old sibling.

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · Jun 10

“This is an unmitigated public health disaster,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Story by @apoorvanyt.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/4mV37YK

RFK Jr. Removes All CDC Vaccine Panel Experts (Gift Article)

The U.S. health secretary chose to “retire” members of a committee that makes significant decisions about who receives immunizations, including the vaccines for children.

nyti.ms

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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · Jun 5

The New York Times is back at it again (derogatory).

An upcoming New York Times podcast on trans youth healthcare used audio from the mother of a trans girl against her will, after producers caught a vulnerable moment on tape.

‘Who Can I Talk to That Has a Human Heart?’: New York Times doubles down on harming trans people — Assigned

The mom of a trans girl pleaded with a New York Times producer not to use audio captured in a vulnerable moment. Against her will, the company is slated to use the clip for its new podcast.

www.assignedmedia.org

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · Jun 4

NYT, Page One:

“Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to ‘any city, any university I want,’ he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.”

@nytimes.com

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