Subscriptions streaming in, hell yeah lfg
Journalist, looking for next thing. Bylines all over the place. Author: NOT A SCIENTIST: How politicians mistake, misrepresent, and utterly mangle science (WW Norton). Signal: @davelevitan.26 Sign up: www.gravityisgone.com www.davelevitan.com
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Subscriptions streaming in, hell yeah lfg
I think 182 year old research articles should be free I want to read about the man
In all seriousness I cannot imagine what it feels like to be someone who could *easily* destroy 99.999999% of people on the planet at the game you play for a living and basically have ZERO chance against the guy across the net.
Janik Sinner trying to raise the NYC murder rate
My pre-labor day reward was to get laid off, do me a favor and sign up to get my now-independent reporting and writing
The salad enjoyer
I will write/report about science-adjacent agencies like NOAA, NIH, EPA, DOE, and others, as well as about climate change and public health more generally. I will also continue to innovate in the "descriptions for RFK Jr space," that's the Gravity Is Gone promise. www.gravityisgone.com
![But almost inevitably, it is when the conch is passed to Health and Human Services Secretary and [highlight] wheezing sack of malarial miasmas [/highlight] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that things seem most grim.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:u45hqzk7counfbwyg5edhmvi/bafkreidamfxv34v3r5kl7lunlqgtpsf242qbxtttyfybm7i2uxmsfpxt4u@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Just going to keep saying it, it is remarkable (you can still be shocked without being surprised!) that the rest of the Republican party has decided that blatant corruption and enrichment off the office of the presidency is legal for this one guy
Nate Silver should have his own social network. Like, just him. No one else around. Seems positive for everyone.
This is the way
My pre-labor day reward was to get laid off, do me a favor and sign up to get my now-independent reporting and writing
lol the Atlantic rules
Happy Labor Day, the Trump administration hates unions more than basically anything www.gravityisgone.com/a-lot-of-fol...
Quantum of Solace is pretty good, actually
Imagining the Vance version of the LBJ Air Force 1 photo and just giggling
Subscribe to this for the most muted, staid, reasonable commentary and reporting when the thing you’re waiting for happens
The pardoned Jan 6 rioters want to be PAID FOR THEIR PROSECUTIONS www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/u...
This from @davidjroth.bsky.social is very good but for some reason it is "at some point, Roy grew a moderately distressing goatee" that I keep giggling at [🎁]
It is remarkable how many versions one could come up with as to what really happened here, a true gift to creativity
I'm sure everything about this will turn out to be extremely normal
It's true just look at Portland and Minneapolis, both burned entirely to the ground in recent years, not a building or person remains
[nodding]
Ok some great candidates but the Exorcist III shot is the one I’m willing to entertain
Now I’m curious, what’s the competition? Single shots, recognizable from a still.
what cursed sorcery is this
First look at this neat image of Walter Cronkite visiting a NASA low-gravity simulator in the 60s and then sign up for the newsletter it adorns, thank you
That's fair and I'm just kinda spitballing but I might argue that the Clinton stuff was essentially a response to the right's campaign, they assumed they needed to get on board because it had such resonance
Gonna sound obvious but in retrospect the right's half-century-long campaign to convince the public that the government doesn't actually do a ton of useful stuff was among the most successful PR campaigns ever
An all-timer of the genre where I wonder how not one person involved with arresting these firefighters, at any level of leadership or not, didn't stop and just ask "wait this one's probably not a great idea, right?" [🎁]
lol typo in the alt text, you get the idea
Did the Simpsons movie do the best-ever explanation of the Streisand Effect
"83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written"
So, NOT like those other trains? Yes?
Signal is davelevitan.26 for no reason at all
who wants to leak info, any info, no info in particular, to the cool new thing
folks,,
WaPo confirmed this a bit afterward, I’ve heard about a few firings, all of people who signed the dissent
Anyway, the Energy Emergency continues apace, I guess
Or another, $48 million withdrawn from Arthur Kill Terminal -- a State Island project supported by both parties. Almost 64% of Staten Island voted for Trump in 2024; killing the project would kill at least 750 jobs.
Just absurd own goals involved in this crusade. Here's one of the projects they're withdrawing funding for, with improvements to a Rhode Island port that improves it generally but "includes offshore wind components." That port is among the top 10 auto importers in the country.
NEW: The EPA employees who signed a declaration of dissent and got put on administrative leave? Well, at least some of them have received yet another extension letter of that leave, through next week. A few termination notices have also gone out though they could still be to probationary employees.
He drove past some homeless people and sent in the troops to get rid of them. I'm convinced he more or less lacks object permanence but this is sort of his own weird cousin to it, where a thing in front of his face becomes the *only* version of that thing that is important. Forever.
Trump had to look at a wind turbine while playing golf and now he is destroying the entire industry here.
Streak is holding though the Dril news has shaken me.
I know I'm naive but I still find it at least a little strange that Congressional Republicans seem so content to give up their power
The president and his lackeys are objectively pro-childhood cancer [🎁]
Still think the clearest and simplest way to explain Trump's whole deal is that he thinks holding an office means you own all the stuff involved. The president, as the highest office, owns, well, everything.
Don’t care that it’s not just one, nominating “self-inflicted wound” as Word of the Year
“RFK Jr. is perhaps the most confidently wrong person in public life today”
what a fucking stupid time to be a person who cares about other people
The problem with figures like RFK Jr. isn’t just that they spread bad information. It’s that they sustain disordered counterpublics, spaces where falsehoods are reinforced through imitation of legitimate democratic processes.
COOL "O’Neill, who served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior health official before becoming a close ally of investor Peter Thiel..."
I am not a popcorn guy myself but this does seem disqualifying defector.com/i-submit-to-...
Btw, Kennedy-adjacent, per a source the NIH canceled an event today where a Harvard prof was going to talk about adapting to extreme weather events. Not sure why. Anyway, please subscribe to this, thanks.
I'm not saying it would be easy/doable but I'm not sure there should be a bigger priority for Dems than to try and put RFK Jr out of a job.
"There is no measles outbreak big enough to prove him wrong."
Cassidy voted to confirm RFK after supposedly buying the lie that as HHS secretary he wouldn’t touch the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It took him like three months to fire the whole committee.
I know it's been said but I keep getting re-infuriated about RFK Jr doing his thing, like we had this vaccines thing *settled*, they rule and they were working and all we had to do was NOT put the worst possible person in charge of the country's public health apparatus.
[lamenting] why is it never Chekhov’s fun
Ah, well,,
I’m genuinely curious if there’s a fly-too-close-to-the-sun version of RFK’s tenure where Trump gets sick of the blowback or if the big guy simply does not care enough about vaccines and science and Medicare for it to penetrate the blast shields
Not a ton of Borat-Caligari crossover here, ok
[1920s German expressionist voice] My wife
Anyone at CDC I’m very curious to hear from you fyi
Horrors abound but a guy who will say “overburdened with mitochondrial challenges” and somehow be in charge of the nation’s public health infrastructure is TOUGH TO BEAT
Some info on what I've been covering/will cover here, if it's useful
Wrote this in June before like 20 more anti-vax moves
"Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the entire scientific edifice claims and also this long list of sick and vulnerable people can still have one" is a hell of an argument
Re-upping: if you work at EPA, NOAA, FEMA, NIH, CDC, USDA or other agencies that involve really any sort of science in their work, and you have something you want the public to know, I would always love to hear from you. Signal is davelevitan.26 and you can remain anonymous.
Sure if it's just a precedent they don't like/are scared of, but the phrasing suggested that the "financial ruin" would come from THIS class award. Maybe just a confused turn of phrase, idk.
Maybe I'm missing the point/stupid I dunno
I filled out the form because my book was in there but also I'm a little confused by the argument here, don't class action awards set a total amount and then distribute it among class members, rather than ballooning in size if more and more people prove they are part of the class?
Absurd. murky orders to stop construction at one wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island would hit different if the country had more than one (1) utility-scale offshore wind projects currently operating. The UK is currently, right now, getting more than 28% of its electricity from offshore turbines.
The Trump assault on the offshore wind industry—halting lease sales, outright stopping construction on mostly-built farms, etc—is obviously bad on its face but it also just makes me annoyed all over again at the two decades of heel-dragging this country did on it while Europe and China went nuts.
This is about as clean a summer NWS map of advisories and warnings as you'll see these days. Green is flash flood watches, pink is red flag warning (fire weather).
"Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now, these kids were literally praying." Two dead, as well as the gunman, 20 injured, "death toll likely to rise." Jfc. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
(please subscribe. thank you.)
Hey is it good that FEMA is suspending employees that warned publicly that the agency isn't ready to manage disasters with the peak of hurricane season two weeks away
[sneers] they’re wearing camo, prove they’re even there, hot shot
Tbh I kinda like it
is that what i think it is
Okay I added a banner image. It's Walter Cronkite visiting a reduced gravity simulator in 1968, somewhat altered. www.gravityisgone.com
Hey won't mention it again until I have other posts to promote (tomorrow? probably?) and maybe a banner image or somesuch but if you enjoyed any of my last 1.5 years/600 or so posts of writing at Splinter I'd really appreciate a signup to this newsletter.
Election day 2026 is going to be deliriously fascist
I don't want to do it myself because I couldn't stand to stew in that filth but I am curious to read an account of the people they found to post the vile shit they post. I know horrors abound but I am genuinely curious whether such soulless fucks are found or made or what.
This story is the "being a billionaire must be liked getting kicked in the head by a horse every day" tweet given corporeal form
Look I appreciate the thoroughness but I'm not sure it required emailing *350* scientists to determine that the DOE's and EPA's climate reports are full of shit
Every month or so Trump gathers his entire Cabinet to engage in a heartening televised round of Debasement Theatre
Cult of personality-ass government. Current HHS homepage vs what sorts of stuff used to go on there:
Again: they found absolute monsters to run gov social media accounts. People who at some point lost or never had the idea that the things you say online might have real world connections. Literal psychopaths.
The prolonged public torturing of a single man because the state cannot admit to its errors is not something that occurs in a free country
While seeing a great writer get fired for no reason is infuriating, it also makes me a little bit happy to see one start writing their own stuff on their own terms. I look forward to reading Dave's newsletter.
Somehow forgot to add: Signal is @davelevitan.26
Damn right I will.
Also: if you work at agencies like NOAA, EPA, NIH, DOI, and so on, including the people I have been in touch with the last 6 months, I very much would love to hear from you still. I can keep you anonymous and I appreciate any information, updates, or anything you think the public should know about.
I will, more or less, keep doing what I was doing. For now (emphasis on now), I am not asking for anyone to pay for a subscription — I will soon, most likely, but let's get this shit off the ground first, huh. I'll improve the branding etc soon, lol
HELLO: As I mentioned on Friday, I got laid off from my role at Splinter. I have now migrated my long-dormant newsletter, Gravity Is Gone, to a better home (Ghost), and will start writing and reporting over there. I would *love* it if you would sign up. www.gravityisgone.com/gravity-rela...
Judge Xinis: Your clients are *absolutely forbidden* from removing Mr. Abrego from the continental United States. You understand this? DOJ: Yes.
I’m not saying he deserved what happened but Martin Sheen’s character in The Departed was terrible at his job