Born to be Brave

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

This rule does not just affect scientists or universities. It affects the programs that millions of Americans depend on every day, including Medicaid, Head Start, school lunches, housing assistance, food banks, and community health centers. In FY2024, the federal government sent $1.1 trillion in grants to states and communities. Every dollar of it would be subject to these new rules.

The proposed rule would:

• Allow political appointees to cancel active grants at any time, with no meaningful appeal

• Require grant programs to align with the President’s policy priorities, not scientific merit or community need

• Embed prohibitions on DEI activities as material breach conditions in all federal awards

• Ban research into health and economic disparities

• Allow denial of grants based on an organization’s affiliations or views deemed ‘un-American’

• Restrict science communication and public health outreach as ‘issue advocacy’

Public comments close July 13, 2026.

It's also definitely not a stretch at all to say he'd probably met people who self-medicated with cocaine to deal with what we'd now call ADHD. Like, the second ever Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson protesting Holmes' overuse of cocaine, and Holmes replying that he needs it to deal with his overactive brain -- it's entirely plausible that ACD had had that exact conversation with someone or multiple someones.

At a time when cocaine was regularly administered by other doctors, Doyle wrote Watson to have a clear aversion and dislike of the drug and understood that it was bad for you. It’s written as a clear indication that Sherlock, despite all his brilliance and genius, is still a human being who can make very bad decisions for himself.

Not only that, but Watson does ultimately win and gets Sherlock off of his addition to cocaine in the end. It takes him a while, but Sherlock is weened off the drug and this is seen as a good thing for everyone involved. In fact in a later story Watson comes home and sees a needle and fears that Sherlock might’ve had a relapse (he didn’t, the needle was just being used for something else involving a case).

He had a clear disdain for social convention while understanding deeply how to conform to it in order to survive; a lot of Holmes' deductions actually depend on assumptions about typical human behavior in a given situation rather than physical evidence alone. It's the kind of encyclopedic conscious knowledge of unwritten social rules you might develop in order to mask successfully.

something i struggle with these days, as a millenial who has lived through greenwashing and carbon credits- is hope an op? are we getting peddled idealism and hope to cover for us being well and truly screwed?

i love this blog so much and i want to have optimism but i’m also so, so scared that this is a dupe, another shell (not u but like in general)

how do you combat that? how do you push past that?

Hi Anon,

This is a great question and definitely a not-uncommon feeling. I do sometimes get the not-so-nice version of this sentiment expressed at me in angry asks accusing me of lying or being paid to say the things I say.

I think that a confluence of factors, including the manufactured climate denial that got us where we are now, has understandably made a lot of people suspicious of hope in general. That if someone disagrees that everything is irredeemably broken beyond the point of trying to fix it, that if they say good things can happen sometimes, they are complicit in letting everything that is problematic and awful and unfair in our world off the hook.

Comic by Tom Gauld

While there is certainly old-fashioned climate denialism still out there, many entities with a vested interest in stalling climate action have switched their narrative to “it’s too late to be worth doing anything”. They’ve changed from blind, passive optimism to blind, passive pessimism, but it has the same impact of suppressing action. Dr. Simon Clark has a great in-depth video about this.

One quick test for possible manipulation is to think about what tangible action a message is likely to encourage and who that would benefit. Hope, or at least the kind of hope I try to promote on this blog, is not “things will get better no matter what we do”—that is blind optimism. Hope is “we can make things better through our actions”.

I’ve gotten many asks from folks telling me this blog inspired them to start environmental careers or volunteering that they previously felt too hopeless to pursue—and from people who felt the good news helped them pull out of a mental health spiral and get back to their lives. Dr. Hannah Ritchie, a climate change sustainability researcher at Oxford and Our World in Data, nearly did not go into the environmental field because she felt so overwhelmed by doomerism. I do not think hope prompts the kind of actions that the people who would dupe us and stall climate action are going for.

That being said, I do very much understand that knee-jerk, wary feeling. A dear family member recently got me the book How to Fall in Love With the Future by climate activist Rob Hopkins, which imagines various hopeful futures that could exist when we take positive environmental action and discusses how doing so can help us commit to fighting for those futures. Some of these radically hopeful futures made me so uncomfortable that I had to take a break from reading. Something about imagining things going really well felt unsafe or irresponsible, like it was too painful to open myself up to hoping for something so good.

Engaging with hope and the imperfect, complicated work of trying to make things better comes with uncertainty and uncertainty is scary. Sometimes certainty feels safer and more in-control even if it’s a negative certainty. I don't have any easy tips for getting over that hump, but I do think it helps to acknowledge that the hump is there and that it comes from a place of understandable fear and pain. Give yourself space and patience in letting those emotions run their course. It's a process for me as well.

Something I can say with complete certainty is that the future will be better than it otherwise would have been if we believe we have the power to make it better.

I hope this helps you trust the hope at least a little more, Anon. <3