Tom Vondriska

What to think about open.substack.com/pub/thomasvond…

@BillAckman someone succumbing to cardiac arrest could do so in the middle of a perfectly coherent sentence (this is a comment on your appraisal of Graham's fitness, not on the coherence of his speech)

The Atlantic’s new cover story by @rosehorowitch is absolutely definitive on the end of the age of reading in America—and the emergence of a new post-literate age in modern life Some core facts and anecdotes: 1. Reading is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure declined by 43 percent between 2004 and 2023. While Americans might see more words than ever—between all those texts, posts, emails, and captions—less than half of Americans read books, anymore. The average sentence in NYT bestsellers are one-third shorter than a century ago. 2. Americans can swallow words and sentences, but they’re losing the ability to think deeply about writing that’s longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent. 3. It’s worse for the young. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. 4. “Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read”: Most high-schoolers consider reading for pleasure an alien practice. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, says some students view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, it's as if “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.” theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

Universities are showing their true priorities. When federal funding tightens, the first thing they cut is student admissions for PhD programs. That tells you graduate training was never the sacred mission they claimed it was. It was a labor model. These arguments always assume more funding is better, no matter how the money is spent. No one asks what universities protect when the spigot slows.

They’re calling it The Summer of George, Jerry

On 10 years with JD Vance open.substack.com/pub/thomasvond…

A Great University Undermines Its Mission nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opi…

How much does a scientific claim actually change between the preprint and the final published paper? We used a large language model to track it across all available 72,644 bioRxiv -> journal pairs from 2018 - 2025 in this new work with @HaoYin. 🧵

Great fun chatting with Ahmed Ibrahim about science and many other topics on his podcast @SatMorningLab, check it out

The Center for Cardiovascular Research at UChicago is looking for a mid-career or established PI pursuing research in heart rhythm disorders, heart failure, or cardiomyopathy. Contact Dr Arora (rishi.arora@bsd.uchocago.edu) or myself (Jonathan.kirk@bsd.uchicago.edu) if interested

Our second annual @UCLAAnes Gratitude & Good Outcomes Grand Rounds! Love this event. #GG celebrates stories of excellence across the department from past academic year. Much goes w/out fanfare; it’s so nice to pause & recognize some of these stories and what enabled them.

Edward Norton talking to himself at the USA-Türkiye game 😅

Imagine thinking the best use of AI is to reconstruct Nature from first principles.

On this week's episode, I chat with the brilliant and thoughtful @DrHelenECollin1, Assistant Professor of Cardiology at @uofl. We talk about discovering her passion for research, the struggle to find a postdoc position at the height of the recession, moving to the US and establishing her research program exploring mechanisms that underlie female cardiovascular health and resilience. podbean.com/eas/pb-d743b-1…

On this week's episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor @jenheemstra. Jen is the chair of the chemistry department at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the highly acclaimed #book “Lab Work to Leadership”. She discusses her early years, mentors who inspired her towards research, and the struggles of tenure. We touch on themes of imposter syndrome, gratitude, leading and building leaders. Jen is not only an inspiring leader but she does some really exciting translational chemistry! podbean.com/eas/pb-6why5-1…

On this week's episode, I interview Mariana G. Weber, a kind and charismatic Medical Science Liaison. We talk about her journey from a small town in Brazil to a PhD in microbiology, surviving layoffs and setbacks to land her first Medical Science Liaison role. Her secret? Resilience, mentorship, and taking ownership of her career. #MSL #LifeSciences #Biotech #CareerDevelopment podbean.com/eas/pb-rft85-1…

Action shots of Pratiti and Sean presenting at the Dept of Physiology retreat today @UCLA

For the last 46 years, it has been my privilege to work alongside countless talented artists and crews to create these characters, stories, and films for you all. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the movies! DIGGER. Only in theaters this October.

What if you could watch chromatin states change inside living neurons.....IN REAL TIME? Repost or share if you or someone you know dreams of this! The Solecki Lab is building an imaging-based biosensor platform to make chromatin biology visible, measurable, and experimentally testable as neurons mature and wire into brain circuits (see enhancer nucleosomes fluttering below). We’re looking for an Associate Scientist who wants to do more than run experiments. Someone who wants to help build the framework for seeing how the neuronal genome changes as the brain is built.

Reading a paper that came out a month ago thinking how it's just completely indecipherable for anyone except maybe 5 people