Hello friends,
I’m back after trading my office for a world of salt and sun and stories, creating the thing we call Storymakers. This is where my theory and practice collide. I learn about blueschist, biogeochemistry, and more, in a place where I can no longer tell when I’m working and when I’m playing.

In those hours, and in that world, we’re not just scribbling, swearing, and citing our sources: we are singing like pirates and dancing like fools. Wild ideas appear like the island fox drifting along the edge of our firelight. It’s the purest magic I know, and I’m still basking in it.

This was Year 2, Week 31. To build a better future, we must first imagine it. Abracadabra.

What’s happened in science & higher ed

• A change to immigration rules for F-1 student visas and J-1 exchange visitors has been finalized. Effective September 15th, duration of stay will be capped at 4 years, rather than “for the duration of study.” The average PhD takes more than 5 and a half years in this country. Graduate students will be able to apply for an annual extension, but continuation will be at the discretion of their immigration officers, as will be switching study areas, transferring schools, or pursuing another professional degree. And despite being stalled out in court on trying to collect the $100,000 H1B visa fee, the administration is now seeking to attach a new $100,000 fee to the optional practical training (OPT) student visa extension.
• ICE has arrested Dr. Fatima Ameaka, a Johns Hopkins researcher and Fulbright scholar, as she boarded a domestic flight from Baltimore. Dr. Ameaka is from Cameroon, was previously granted Temporary Protected Status, and has an active asylum case pending. Thanks to changes to our systems, asylum-seekers can now be detained and deported at almost every stage of the process, and that is evidently now a priority. There are more than 1.4 million asylum cases in the backlog and average processing time is up to about 7 years. Only 2% of requests have been approved in 2026, the lowest rate in more than twenty years. And there is a surge in ICE detentions happening at airports right now, because of a new data sharing agreement between ICE and the TSA. Between this and the first bullet point, I just want to say… we need to take care of our trainees, collaborators, and ourselves. We need each other more than ever.
• Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci was subpoenaed by the Senate Homeland Security Committee and faced hours of questioning on Wednesday. After decades of public service, and more than 250 appearances in front of Congress, he invoked the Fifth Amendment for the very first time. And then he invoked it again and again, more than 100 times in total, which feels terrible from a science communication standpoint but utterly necessary as a legal response to this sham of a show trial.
• The NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies have finally admitted that they did not individually assess awards before sending form letters revoking funding. Instead, they used keyword searches to flag billions of dollars worth of grants for mass termination. Grants with words like structural racism, health equity, climate action, or sexual orientation in their titles and abstracts were cancelled. NIH Director Bhattacharya repeatedly denied that a list of banned words existed; the NIH’s spreadsheet was 370 pages long. This was a major breakthrough in the suit brought by University of California faculty. The next step is a hearing on October 20, where federal judge Rita F. Lin will determine if a trial is necessary or whether she can issue a summary judgement of constitutional violations.
• Elsewhere in grant termination news, we have a new absurdist term of art: something like 150 research programs expecting grant funds from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) instead received a “notice of non-award.” So far this year, the ARHQ has disbursed less than $15 million to existing grantees and hasn't made a new award in over a year, despite receiving an allocation of $350 million from Congress in the current budget.
• Two big reports have come out recently that you’ll probably want to maintain some awareness of:
  • “Science: A New Golden Age” is the latest from the White House. Chief Science Advisor Michael Kratsios, styling himself the new Vannevar Bush, charts a bold new era where private companies use our public funding for research and everything is AI. This reminds me to mention that the AlphaFold team has been disbanded as Google revamps their scientific strategy.
  • Vanderbilt has a new report too, also referencing The Endless Frontier. The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles was adopted by Vanderbilt trustees last month. Upsides: emphasis on scholarly merit, the freedom to teach challenging perspectives in the classroom, and the necessity of academic freedom for pathbreaking research. Downsides: well, what really catches my eye is the length and specificity of the passage about how leadership will correct the “dysfunctionalities” of faculty they deem to be out of line. Explicitly naming scholarly associations as potential problems speaks volumes.
  • Yesterday, Google rolled out a brand-new feature that allowed users to generate entirely fake satellite imagery. Today 404 Media broke the story with screen recordings showing how they prompted the Nano Banana model to produce images of vast crowds of protesters at Google HQ and a bomb blast on residential street. Today, GoogleEarth says they’re rolling it back to improve the guardrails, but the damage is done.

And what’s next

This year’s cohort of Storymakers was extraordinary. Each time we run the program it does feel a bit like creating our own pocket universe for a while. But that’s because of what we come together to work towards, not because of anything we’re trying to run away from.

Sometimes the work we need to do is generative, and sometimes it is necessarily destructive. Effectively dismantling broken systems is just as important as restoring stability–perhaps even more so in moments like we find ourselves in. This weekend, if you’re in the mood for some reading, I invite you to join me in a deeper dive into what rebuilding democracy and trust in institutions will require of us.

I’ll be starting with this essay on rebalancing power, on the merit of passages like, “every policy fight is also a fight over the future distribution of power, whether we acknowledge it or not. …A future pro-democracy government that responds by restoring the status quo, putting back the old programs and restoring the old approaches, will simply be setting the table for the next, more competent authoritarian.” I’m keen to get into the linked white papers, especially Dr. Michener’s contribution, Breaking Power to Build Democracy.

I hope you take care of yourself, and that you find a moment to feel wild and free, so that you might find your way to help the world that is struggling to be born.
Liz