We don't yet know much about what was going on with Claudio Neves Valente, the Brown and MIT gunman, and we may well never. But this tragic case reminds me how the pressures of academic life, often starting in grad school, can sometimes push people past a breaking point. We don't always do a great job of taking care of our colleagues, or of recognizing when they need our help and understanding.
The $1776 "warrior dividend" that Trump announced yesterday is actually just a renaming of an existing, already authorized military housing allowance. Shocked. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/18/trump-warrior-dividend-troops-congress-00697375
The thing to remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene says the occasional sensible or decent thing these days is that she's demonstrating that she's been capable of being sensible and decent all along, but was deliberately choosing not to be.
Oof. Providence police have released the person arrested Sunday morning for the Brown shooting, saying he is no longer considered of interest. So the shooter is still at large.
Just to be clear: should I have the terrible misfortune to be killed in a mass shooting, please feel free to politicize the hell out of it. And go ahead and do so immediately. No time will be β€œtoo soon”.
What fresh hell is this. Went to bed with news of the Brown mass shooting still breaking, and woke up to news of the horror at Bondi Beach.
Utterly wild story about a nuclear generator lost atop a Himalayan mountain by the CIA 60 years ago.
How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?
A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a covert mission that the U.S. will not talk about.
 [Gift Link]
The Onion
Study Finds 80% Of Americans Lack Social Connections To Pull Off Heist
NEW HAVEN, CTβ€”Shedding new light on a previously undocumented effect of loneliness, a team of psychologists at Yale University found that at leas...
@npub1ucvq...5a8g you no doubt saw this story (or other reporting on it) about the hiker rescued via a satellite device after being trapped in quicksand(!).
Stuck in Quicksand, a Hiker in Utah Has His SOS Answered
Austin Dirks used a Garmin satellite device to reach emergency responders, who rescued him in a remote canyon in Arches National Park.
I'm happy Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been released from custody and will be getting his day in court, but that still leaves hundreds of other people we deported to extra-judicial incarceration in El Salvador for whom there is no clear path to either a trial or release. The plan seems to be that they eventually just die in prison.