Dolly's Generous Legacy: Do Rich Women Give More Than Rich Men?
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Dolly Parton gave away about as much money as she kept. Her death sent me to the data: do the world's richest women give more than the richest men?
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Journal Safari: Ask Eleven Models, Keep the Worst Answer
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Journal Safari #4. Eleven ESM protein language models were supposed to be near-interchangeable. They have different blind spots that do not overlap, and training each one on the others' best guesses puts sequence-only at the top of the ClinVar board. The gain comes off about 200 proteins, which is the part I keep chewing on.
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Single-Cell Is About to Have Its Placenta Microbiome Moment
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Microbial ecology spent twenty years learning that in low-biomass samples, the thing you measure is partly your reagents. Single-cell has the same exposure, most of the same tooling gaps, and none of the same scar tissue — and the field is moving into exactly the regime where it starts to matter.
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Journal Safari: Seven Million Parameters and a MacBook Air
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Journal Safari #3. Pan-human Azimuth puts 27 million cells from 23 tissues on one annotation tree, then classifies them with a model 70× smaller than the foundation model I read in July — and wins. The contribution is not the model. It is the labels.
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School Gets Out at 12:05 on Thursdays
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California just gave my daughter free transitional kindergarten, and I'm thrilled. Then I saw the bell schedule. A data-driven look at how American school days and American work days stopped speaking to each other.
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Journal Safari: What Do You Buy by Sequencing Half a Million Whole Genomes?
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Journal Safari #2. The UK Biobank just finished whole-genome sequencing all 490,640 participants. I read the resource paper to answer one question: what does WGS actually buy you over the array and exomes we already had — and who pays the storage bill afterward?
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A Bot Deleted My Account. Google's Fix: Delete My Family.
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Weeks after YouTube erased me, I finally reached a human at Google. Their official solution to getting my music back involves deleting my family group and hand-migrating 16 years of Google Drive. Here's why that's worse than it sounds.
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Journal Safari: Can You Compress a Cell Into a Word?
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Kicking off Journal Safari, my biweekly close-read of one recent paper. First up: CellVQ, a 500-million-parameter single-cell foundation model that squashes every cell into a discrete code — and the peer reviews that quietly agreed with my doubts.
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I Spent 16 Years on YouTube. A Bot Deleted Me in a Day.
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One June morning, Google erased my 16-year-old account without warning and rejected my appeal in minutes. Here is the timeline, and why I think an algorithm decided I was a problem.
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When Email Becomes Your API: Archiving Claude Code to Evernote
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Evernote suspended their developer-token API in January 2026. I needed to back up every Claude Code conversation anyway. So I turned email-to-note into a sync engine.
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The New King George: 250 Grievances for the Semiquincentennial
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Two hundred fifty years ago we fired a king for putting himself above the law and the treasury above the people. Here is a ranked, fully-cited catalog of 250 ways the new one brought the monarchy back.
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Data, Dirt, and Agentic AI: Why I Coded a Gardening App
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Battling grocery monopolies, testing AI coding agents, and planting a mutant sweet potato with my three-year-old.
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If 3.5% of Us Protest, We Win
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We need 11.9 million people to show up to the No Kings protests this weekend. Here is the data on why nonviolent resistance actually works.
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The Elephant and the Rider: What My Conservative Friend Back Home Taught Me About the ICE Protests
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Today and tomorrow, thousands of Americans are protesting ICE. My conservative friend back home thinks they're crazy. I think he's missing something important—and a book about moral psychology might explain why we're both a little bit right.
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Zohran's Math: Can Taxing the 1% Really Pay for Free Buses, Childcare, and Rent Freezes?
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NYC's mayor-elect wants to tax millionaires 2% more and raise corporate taxes. I crunched the numbers – and dreamed bigger.
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Teaching AI Agents to YOLO Responsibly
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I built a security wrapper so AI coding agents can run wild in Docker containers without accidentally joining a botnet or deleting your life's work.
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Science is Cool... But Have You Tried Deporting People?
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A nation's budget reveals its priorities. Ours says we'd rather build a deportation machine than cure diseases or invent the future.
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Save Mr. Stephen!
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Sport a mustache for a month. Let's save Colbert from CBS's cowardly cancellation.
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Voulez Vous Coucher Avec, Une Convicted Felon, Ce Soir?
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Thoughts on Cory Booker's disappointing vote to confirm Charles Kushner as French Ambassador.
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My Own 'Can't Let It Go': Trump, the Press, and Golden Lapel Pins
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A perspective on John Oliver's recent segment on the White House Press Pool and golden lapel pins.
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