Gravity Relaunched
The media industry: great fun forever.
Last week, I was laid off from my role as deputy editor of Splinter, where I spent about a year and a half covering — among other things — climate change, science, public health, and their intersection with politics and policy. Over the seven months of the second Trump administration, that project obviously took on a different flavor, involving fairly extensive sourced reporting from inside federal agencies including the EPA, NOAA, NIH, and more.
The goal here, post-layoff, is to continue that project, to some extent. I will certainly reduce its frequency, likely publishing once or twice a week, but I will still be paying attention to the administration's efforts to more or less kill off the scientific enterprise in this country, send our energy systems hurtling backward toward the 19th century, induce Katrina-like catastrophes, and reverse a half-century of environmental progress. I am extremely grateful to the various people inside those agencies who have been willing to talk with me, and I remain in touch with many of them as the assaults continue.
To give some idea of the sorts of things I have been doing, and hope to continue, a few selected examples:
- Commentary on the use of "emergencies" to do everything from enriching oil companies to invading cities, on zombie coal power plants, and on the cynical destruction of offshore wind power and simultaneous boosting of offshore oil
- Dives into what RFK Jr. is doing to the nation's public health infrastructure and biomedical research edifice, including his attempts to influence, uh, Denmark's scientific funding, his dismantling of nigh-on-miraculous mRNA vaccine research, and his assault on the entire concept of scientific advice — including breaking a story on the dissolution of the National Cancer Institute's Board of Scientific Advisors — and the public health benefits it helps provide. (Among other things; he really is infuriating.)
- Reporting from inside and out of Howard Lutnick's attempts to zero out NOAA's scientific capabilities, kill its funding and reputation, and punish anyone on the wrong end of a sharpie
- EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's up-is-down reshaping of his agency into an unholy bizarro world version, proud of leadership's ignorance as it attempts to undermine all climate action in the country, retaliation against dissenters on his staff, and abandonment of science as a guiding principle
- The pushback from within a variety of agencies including NASA, EPA, NIH, and others against what the employees themselves see as dramatically harmful policy decisions
- Occasional half-baked theories on pressing matters
I will also keep reporting on climate change writ large, as it is probably the load-bearing foundation of my entire career. For the moment at least, I am considering this a relaunch of a newsletter rather than a launch — not that I would recommend it, but you can feel free to scroll back through a few dozen posts dating back mostly to 2019-2021 that I have imported here from its previous, very problematic home, when Gravity Is Gone was less reporting and more ranting. Since I have that back catalog, such as it is, and the domain name, I figured just starting that one back up made sense — to the small cadre of subscribers from back then, thank you, and hello again.
I stopped posting here when I started various staff jobs — first for Grid, a job I actually wanted to do and enjoyed. That startup was bought back in 2023 by The Messenger, leading to a job I did not want to do and hated. All 300 or so of us there were of course unceremoniously laid off in January of 2024 after the obviously ill-advised project burned through $50 million in eight months, soon after which I started the role at Splinter. Again: the media is a joyous whirlwind of professional indignity.
For the moment, I am not going to ask for paid subscriptions — this will likely change soon, but until I actually produce some content that strikes me as a tad premature. I hope that my work at Splinter, and perhaps the couple of decades of writing before that, might for the moment offer a reason to sign up; I'll try to provide more such reasons moving forward.
