Dani Beck, PhD

Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.

It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

God-awful fucking amoral, flat-out racist decision. Appalling.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will take over as interim CEO as Bluesky’s board of directors hunts for a permanent replacement.

Exclusive: Jay Graber is stepping down as head of Bluesky. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will be the interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.

it scares me to think that big tech/big AI's primary target demographic is kids

Just a reminder that Muslims have been on this continent since the first arrival of non-Indigenous people. They were among the first generation of Americans, and have been here ever since.

...large-scale irrigation/water engineering in dry land
early law code - Hammurabi
optics and experimental science
glassmaking & decorative arts
coffee
and so much more.

In case your history books and schooling did not tell you.

In case all you know from this region is the war your leaders create.

BTW, "Middle East" is a colonial term.

It's just West Asia.

Middle East relative to whom you ask? The British Empire.

And that particular region of West Asia - including Mesopotamian, Levantine, Arabian, Persian, etc - gave the World it's first civilisations, writing, the wheel, algebra, ...

Attacks leave dead vs killed

On this International Women’s Day, I cannot stop thinking about all the girls in Iran, in Sudan, in Gaza, and so may places — girls whose lives were snuffed out in conflicts they played no part in, before they could ever become women.

And I am thinking about their mothers.

Yup.

- Mossadegh wanted to nationalise Iranian oil and the U.S and U.K led a coup to overthrow him and backed the Shah.

- Iran's revolution overthrew the Shah and the U.S once again got involved by supporting Saddam this time in the Iraq-Iran war.

Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.

I wrote about how the US and Israel carried out an attack on an Iranian girls school on par with the OKC bombing and US media relegated it to a back page story. No stand alone evening news segments, no front page stories, it made A11 in the NYT then everyone moved on.

Over 160 schoolgirls are dead. Anthropic and Palantir executives must immediately testify and tell the public whether their AI is responsible.

Heart warmed.

3 young teenage girls were selling brownies outside the grocery store raising money for Palestine; completely at their own initiative.

Exclusive: Iranian girls killed by ‘double-tap’ strikes on Minab school Eyewitnesses describe second blast which killed survivors as they sheltered in prayer hall

The girls’ school in Iran, where 165 people were killed by an apparent US-Israeli attack, was hit with two strikes, with the second missile killing sheltering survivors, two first responders and the parent of a slain child have told Middle East Eye.

Iran, a graveyard Graves being prepared for the children and teachers killed in the bombing of a school in Minab, Iran on Saturday. Picture credit: Middle East Observer

telescoper.blog/2026/03/04/i...

Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.

“No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.” www.columnblog.com/p/corporate-...

okay, Ill bite.
What do you think the point of reading for and writing a literature review is? The process of reading and writing is crucial for THINKING. Your ideas are shaped by all of this, offloading it to gAI, no matter how "good" you think gAI is at it defeats the purpose entirely.

Not true. I really don't want you to know what I have found! Seriously, do not go to my google scholar, read my work, or cite me!

Really excited to be guest editing this special issue with Dani! Abstracts are due April 15th, reach out with any questions!

Excited to share a new preprint that examines how adversity exposure across development is associated with subcortical-cortical structure-function coupling and youth mental health! 🧠
Thread below: 🧵⬇

If you know someone doing work in this space, please tag them and/or share widely. 🙏

If you’re working on:

- longitudinal designs (developmental timing + tempo)
- neuroimaging
- mechanisms of adaptation (resilience, recalibration, mismatch, stress acceleration)
- within-person dynamics, heterogeneity, person-specific change

...this could be a great home for your next paper!

We’re looking for work that moves beyond “adversity → outcome” snapshots and interrogates time: timing, chronicity, sequencing, sensitive periods, recovery, and adaptation/resilience processes – and how these dynamics shape neurodevelopmental trajectories.

‼️Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Brain and Environment‼️

🧠 Temporal Dynamics Linking Adversity, Adaptation, and Neurodevelopment

🗓️Abstract deadline: 15 April 2026
🗓️Submission deadline: 16 October 2026

Guest Editors @abrieant.bsky.social & Myself!

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

The fictional horrors I grew up on are now dreams I long for.

Like please Judgement day come soon, bring your terminators and destroy humanity.

Day after tomorrow? Bring it on.

AI, Aliens, even a zombie-fucking-apocalypse, come ruin us please.

Can the USA and Israel please stop destroying the world.

None of us can focus on our jobs and private lives.

We just want to live in peace and silence ffs.

As long as the elite own media, they can control the opinions of just enough of the population to keep them in power, and keep the majority fighting among themselves about issues they construct to blind us from the real problems.

I learned this when I watched the movie Antz as an 8 year old.

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover

The richest man owns X.

The second and third richest men control Google.

The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.

And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.

See the problem here?

Listen to you pretty much every day in the car on the way to-from work. Love the content! Thanks for all the work you do, the balanced opinions, and the rational thoughts during a nervy season! from Norway

A part of Akinola Davies Jr's speech the BBC decided not to air