What El-Sayed has actually said about his views on Israel/Palestine (vs. what others claim he believes) is quite good, so here it is:

Democrats strongly favored to take the House, Senate tilts Democratic in our new election forecast (crosspost) open.substack.com/pub/gelliott...

Democrats strongly favored to take the House, Senate tilts Democratic in our new election forecast (crosspost)

Our brand-new election forecast for the 2026 congressional midterms puts Democrats at above even odds to take control of both chambers

open.substack.com

His opponent has publicly expressed support for El-Sayed in the general. But sure, the party is "fractured" because it had multiple candidates in the primary.

Politico@politico.com · 6h ago

🚨 Abdul El-Sayed is the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee. Now he’ll have to unify a fractured party to hold the seat for the party. 🔗 politi.co/4xrMXut

Welp time to have a big cup of coffee and avoid reading all the news

This is just rank Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, based on the bigoted idea that there is something inherently scary about a president with the last name "El-Sayed." It is incumbent on all of us to call it out.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 6h ago

JD Vance: "We don't want the next administration, whoever -- god forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years ... "

tough shit for them

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · 18h ago

New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does.” — Matthew Cobb, Manchester University Right on, Dr Cobb, right on. (This article is terrific btw)

Neuroskeptic@neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 6h ago

"AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK" www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin... Hmm... it's a great article, maybe not a great headline.

On this day. August 5, 1966, the Yardbirds played at Dayton’s in downtown Minneapolis. It was Jimmy Page’s first ever performance in the United States. Jimmy’s FB post from three years ago:

Wordle in two, hell yeah! Wordle 1,873 2/6 ⬜🟩⬜🟨🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

"Trump is stuck. He cannot win militarily at this level  and he cannot resolve this diplomatically without paying a political cost at home" @valinasr.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/87b0...

Donald Trump trapped between escalation and an Iran deal on Tehran’s terms

US president faces few good options to exit a war he once said would end swiftly with the Islamic republic’s surrender

ft.com

The latest El Niño forecast by the ECM is suggesting a record shattering +4°C event. Impacts; - Record breaking global warmth (1.7-1.8°C) - Catastrophic marine heatwaves Potential to be one of the most disruptive climate anomalies we’ve ever observed.

I deeply identify with this. I never loved marking but in the last 1.5 years I have gone from 'net positive love of teaching with some serious caveats' to ... some new normal that is barely tolerable.

AI causing ‘moral injury’ to lecturers trying to police its use, Trent University research shows

Some in writing faculty are overwhelmed by task of spotting AI in students’ work, paper says

theglobeandmail.com

Brown University has a widget that tracks the cost of the Iran war to American consumers (as contrasted to whatever the Pentagon is spending). Per-household cost now exceeds $600. iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu

It’s really important to understand that the criminal legal system in the U.S. already produced the infrastructure to make ICE possible. If we ever rid ourselves of ICE the way to make it harder to revive it will be destroying and defunding the institutions it has borrowed so much from

The Marshall Project@themarshallproject.org · 7h ago

Adapting to public pushback, the Trump administration is pivoting to expand immigration detention bedspace nationwide.

Important read. I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of humans do NOT choose to burn up & starve on an unlovable fiery planet. Why are we letting these profit-obsessed death cult freaks decide the future for all of us?

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 13h ago

My column on how capital becomes a death cult. Faced with a choice between profit and human life, the radical right chooses profit. Then it tries to persuade us that mass death is what we want. It's the new phase of climate denial: accept your fate, earthlings. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"As [AI] becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care."

Matthew J Kuiper@matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · 16h ago

Many of us have been saying… Refusing to write with/by AI is absolutely a necessary “act of resistance against an ever-dumber world” (not to mention against the tech companies and powers that want to make us pliable, unthinking slaves)

Excited to be at #CCN2026 in New York to present brand-new work with @kathadobs.bsky.social 🥳 By testing hundreds of categories, we found striking differences in functional specialization between visual cortex and DNNs 🧠 Come find me at poster F81 on Thursday 1:45-3:30 p.m. Happy to chat!

This article for example. From the senate race to congressional race to state politics, this is patently untrue: bsky.app/profile/poli...

Politico@politico.com · 12h ago

Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted

El Niño could push 50m people into acute hunger before end of next year

El Niño could push 50m people into acute hunger before end of next year

UN forecasters warn of worsening conditions in 45 countries currently experiencing severe food insecurity About 50 million people are likely to be pushed into acute hunger before the end of next year by the rapidly developing El Niño weather system, according to forecasting. This is in addition to the hundreds of millions of people already facing dangerous levels of hunger, owing to years of drought in parts of Africa and pressure on food prices from the war in Iran. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

Do animals use names? Some opinions: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this w...

cell.com

New Yorker cartoon feels about right

Seconded. It’s wrong on principle, it’s unamerican—we rejected religious tests for office and dual loyalty smears with JFK, Jewish Americans, more—and every minority (especially but not exclusively religious) should recognize it as yet another assertion that only white Christians are real Americans.

ae@aelkus.bsky.social · 14h ago

i really have no patience whatsoever for people who are scared of muslims having elected office

Doc with Nile Rodgers, Marshall Jefferson, Honey Dijon, and more about how Disco's death, social unrest, and Chicago's underground gay clubs led to a global dance movement. It shows how young black musician-entrepreneurs created a house music empire that took off. 🎶 #BlackSky youtu.be/9Rah1F1zq1k

A minute of Kikagaku Moyo at the Majestic Theater in Madison, Wisconsin in May 2022

i would say this is the core of the problem. We don't take anti-Black and anti-Native violence seriously, when the literal Nazis did. They took Andrew Jackson's notes so seriously that Hitler wrote about admiring the Trail of Tears and reservation systems- reducing the KKK to being "silly"

Coriolus Nimrod@coriolusn.bsky.social · yesterday

Yeah, but the KKK have long been viewed as marginal, clownish peckerwood halfwits by most everyone. They don’t scan as radical racists who hold broad national institutional power. I don’t know who the archetype for that in the U.S. is. Woodrow Wilson?

Not a single Israel defender has ever been able to defend this. They just pretend it doesn't exist, even though it defies any of their supposed 'arguments'.

The New Arab@thenewarab.bsky.social · 10h ago

Israeli forces used small aircraft to cross the border and spray high concentrations of the herbicide glyphosate over farmland in southern Syria and Lebanon, a new report has revealed. According to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the spraying halted the growth of several crops

"I work in physics research and the AI situation makes me feel insane." www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/c...

From the TrueAnon community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the TrueAnon community

reddit.com

Cortical territories compete in developmental space race doi.org/10.53053/HIF...

Cortical territories compete in developmental space race

Sensory and association regions are established through a reciprocal process, according to a new model of cortical development.

doi.org

“The tragic implication of Plümper and Neumayer’s analysis is not that individual scientists are unusually dishonest, but that a system designed to incentivise truth-seeking has been incrementally transformed into one that often rewards its distortion” blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofb...

Is publication, not truth, now the driving pursuit of science? - LSE Review of Books

The Credibility Crisis in Science by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer explores how researcher incentives and publication bias distort scientific knowledge

blogs.lse.ac.uk

i just can't w these people www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/u...

Arizona’s Democratic Governor Set to Pick a Republican Running Mate

Gov. Katie Hobbs, locked in a competitive re-election battle, plans to tap a moderate former mayor of Mesa, Ariz., John Giles, to serve as her lieutenant governor if she wins in November.

nytimes.com