💥🔥🧨 I am beyond excited to announce that I will be writing AN ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION, a book for @mitpress, about the schools debacle in America during the pandemic. The book, in essence, will be a case study of how and why bad decisions are made THREAD 1/12

The funny thing about being a journalist is that some portion of people will always be mad at you because you’re not writing about what they want. Matt can exclusively report on the plumbing supply business for the rest of his life if he feels like it.

25 years later, New York, 7:58am. Rowers on the Harlem River, as seen from the MetroNorth Hudson River Line.

It’s clear that academics in social sciences intellectualize themselves into supporting fads that the average person can see are idiotic. Architecture is similarly vulnerable. At best, a few of these buildings are “interesting.” Most are objectionable. None are uplifting.

New initiative at Rutgers to discuss and debate ethics in science and how scientists behave, including gain of function research, climate research and more. Congratulations to @Bryce_Nickels on this important program!

The AI trying to close caption Michael Stipe’s lyrics is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. Humanity prevails. The machine can never fully understand man. The last chorus AI gives up, simply repeating “bring it” for “radio free Europe”

Why didn't schools open? A core answer is that The New Yorker, along with much of MSM, did ~zero investigative reporting during the pandemic that dug into the literature and evidence behind NPIs. The institutional inability, even today, to recognize this failure is troubling.

Analysis by @ProfEmilyOster on what appears to be a major mistake by NY state on ELA test scores. Huge gains in 2025 appear to be false, the result of a data error, with a massive reversion in 2026. open.substack.com/pub/statet…

Every. Single. Time. They leave Gen X out. It’s like a trope at this point.

To be clear: Fauci is lying through his teeth here. His advocacy spurred 50M healthy American children to be barred from school. Yet when questioned he refuses to say the BLM protests should be limited and pretends that he’s agnostic about which types of crowds should be limited. The government chose winners and losers. In parts of the country liquor stores and malls were open while people were prevented from going to church. Adults could have a glass of wine and eat lunch together while down the street a playground was chained shut. The hypocrisy was obvious at the time yet almost no one in the legacy media nor the public health/medical establishment made a peep about this while it was happening. Only “bad” Republicans and a few others called this out, largely yelling into the void.

22 countries in Europe reopened schools in spring 2020. In May, and again in June, EU ministers said they observed no negative consequences of the reopening. This evidence was ignored (and later dismissed) by Fauci, the US public health establishment, and legacy media.

Too many people were looking for a savior and abdicated all personal agency and critical thinking to this guy. I think that’s partly why many religious people were less susceptible. They already have a savior.

Fauci: “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did.” (2023, NYT) Also Fauci:

Worth considering: the PSAT & SAT were redesigned, enabling girls to perform better, closing the gap with boys, who had higher scores on average, but grading systems nor pedagogy methods have been changed to accommodate boys even though girls have higher GPAs.

The New Yorker ostensibly has the best fact-checking dept in all of journalism. Is it technically correct that Platner is an oyster farmer? Sure, OK. But to describe him as such when the business makes $5k and its primary customer is his mom is obviously incredibly misleading. When the media is in the tank for someone or some issue all scruples and professionalism go out the window.

This is a video still of a DSA-backed celebration rally on October 8, the day after more than 1200 Israelis were slaughtered and kidnapped, before Israel even retaliated. The “it’s all Bibi’s fault” explanation for the DSA election wins from this TV pundit is deeply ignorant.