Angela Chen
@chengela.bsky.social
Science journalist, editor, author of Ace. chengela.substack.com
SCOOP: Top researchers at Columbia, Stanford, and others thought they were elected to elite scientific societies alongside Nobel laureates. The catch? The organizations are a sham. I spent the last month diving deep into a massive academic scam spanning continents, for @nature.com
Exclusive: Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers
A Nature investigation reveals a network of organizations that have been building their ranks through deceptive practices.
nature.com
So many good details in this profile of Robert Montgomery, a pioneering heart surgeon with a heart condition. He learned to decrease his stress response so his device wouldn't shock him, got a heart transplant from his own program, is now working on pig kidneys. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/w...
He Changed the World of Organ Transplants. Would He Die Waiting for His Own?
A New York transplant surgeon’s experience waiting for a heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had spent decades trying to fix.
nytimes.com
I read a scathing ethnography about education at St. Paul's, an elite NH boarding school, & was half-convinced, half-skeptical. Then I talked to my friend who went to another elite NH boarding school & he goes "well everyone knows St. Paul's isn't rigorous." chengela.substack.com/p/what-they-...
What they taught at boarding school
And what the students learned.
chengela.substack.com
Confinement, week 4 of 6: Watched two "Kirsten Dunst gets married" movies back-to-back: Mona Lisa Smile and Melancholia. Works surprisingly well to think of Melancholia as a sequel.
Really moving piece, esp for anyone who remembers Nikole Hannah-Jones' original essay. Ten years later, her daughter tells her: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
nytimes.com
Everyone is wondering, so: yes, Bernard Derrida, awarded this year’s Dirac Medal for his work on statistical mechanics, is the cousin of Jacques Derrida, famous problematizer of binary oppositions. www.ictp.it/news/2026/8/...
ICTP Announces 2026 Dirac Medal Recipients | ICTP
ICTP has awarded its 2026 Dirac Medal to four physicists who have made important contributions to statistical mechanics, a framework used by physicists to describe the collective behaviour of systems ...
ictp.it
For years now there's been buzz that a particular genetic variant is protective against dementia — now people are suggesting there's been fraud. Investigation from @jennieerinsmith.bsky.social @charlespiller.bsky.social in @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...
Affirmations: My body is not a soft animal. My skin is chitinous. My juicy meat is protected. I will molt safely again and again.
"In 1957, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named John Hack discovered the most important law of river networks: Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6." www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-rive...
Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? | Quanta Magazine
A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further.
quantamagazine.org
I’m on an ethnography kick & loving them so much I have been inspired to blog! This one is about living in the Canadian Arctic among people never allowed to lose their temper, but starts with the anthropologist's disappointment over the reach of missionaries. chengela.substack.com/p/one-weird-...
Spoon River Anthology is taught in a lot of US high schools, but they should teach the annotated version because it's full of gossip. “Julia Miller” is based on Masters’ early sweetheart—in life, happily married to an older man, but he turns her into a miserable pregnant woman who commits suicide.
In a demonstration of how personality can subtly shape choices, yesterday my (cheerful, positive) friend and I discovered that we'd both recently read biographies of Alma Mahler. He chose one called Passionate Spirit. I chose one titled Malevolent Muse.
A few things I've learnt from writing >4,000 word pieces: - They tend to be more popular than my short pieces! - They're more definitive - like reference material, not a hot take. - Not everyone will reach the end, and that's okay. - Write so that the people who do find it incredibly satisfying.
The Word@the-word.news · 8mo agoAttention: most people won’t finish your 3,000 word article the-word.news/2026/0305/at...
my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels
"Anthropologist Haneul Jang, who has worked with the BaYaka for over a decade, describes how marriages happen: an enamored adolescent couple will simply walk off into the forest and a few days later, they return and build a hut": worksinprogress.co/issue/marria...
The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
worksinprogress.co
Since moving, J and I have been having escalating fights over his inability to plan, culminating in him sending me a google doc of plans that includes this:
For @thecut.com, I wrote about the time I spent two weeks in the hospital waiting for my second kid to be born, and what happened to my mind while I was there
Quit Romanticizing Boredom
Everyone says “logging off” will solve our problems. After actually living it, I’m not so sure.
thecut.com
Going through vacation photos, found this from the Franz Kafka Museum. Welcome, Franz.
I've had this on my "to-read" since @ruthgraham.bsky.social raved about it years and years ago (her review here: slate.com/culture/2017...). It's extraordinary, perfect mix of psychologically insightful plus dramatic plus existential.
If you want to understand open adoption, it makes sense to start with birth parents—yet studies of them are few. 2+ yrs ago, I began talking w/ birth mothers to try to understand what living in an open adoption is like for them, and what rights or options they might have if challenges were to arise.
When Adoption Promises Are Broken
Many birth mothers hope to maintain contact with their child. But their agreements with adoptive parents can be fragile.
theatlantic.com
I have an essay in the latest @kenyonreview.bsky.social. It circles questions I've been asking for almost ten years now: how should a medical diagnosis shape the past? When does biology require reconciliation? And what does it mean to be emotionally fair? kenyonreview.org/piece/disease-disposition/
IVF automation in Mexico City: "Over the past three years, babies have been conceived — and at least 20 of them have been born — through clinical trials that involve automation with little to no human intervention." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born.
One in six people of reproductive age suffer from infertility. Start-ups are using AI-powered robots to increase IVF success rates and lower costs.
washingtonpost.com
Seeing ice cream cones during their spawning runs really takes your breath away. They’ll only do this once in their entire lives.
MachinePix@machinepix.bsky.social · last yr.Ice cream cone manufacturing line.
At an Italian restaurant in Westchester and the waiter says to me: “Has anyone told you you look like…” I brace myself. “…Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices?”
"Merging two of America’s most iconic snacks, was a deeply complex undertaking, requiring cloak-and-dagger tactics reminiscent of the Manhattan Project." www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
Oreos Combined With Reese’s? Inside the Manhattan Project of Snacks.
The combination of two of America’s favorite treats sounded simple. It wasn’t.
wsj.com
Perhaps everything is easier said than done, but I do believe that if I were the most notorious traitor in CIA history, I would have tried harder to cover my tracks. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...
Years ago, my dad gave me a hard drive and said, somewhat morbidly, "in case I die, I want you to have these family photos." I finally opened it and it's 80% photos of him at ping pong tournaments.
