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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. Deadline: 11:59 p.m. ET In a dramatic series of court rulings and reactions Friday and into the weekend, the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia leapfrogged the Alien Enemies Act deportations as the case…
By JACK BEZANTS Published: 12:54 EDT, 7 April 2025 | Updated: 13:23 EDT, 7 April 2025 Of all the controversial men Joe Rogan has encountered over the years, one appears to have had a darker impact than most. ‘My dad would have turned me into a f***ing psychopath,’ the 57-year-old podcaster once said of his…
In a turn of events that would make Monty Hall smile, the European Union is reportedly indicating that they are ready to meet with the Trump administration to make a deal on tariffs. Advertisement This was, very likely, the president’s goal all along, and if that’s true, it appears to be working. Europe is “ready…
A new poll released today by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reveals widespread, bipartisan support for small businesses in America, along with overwhelming backing for making the 20% Small Business Tax Deduction permanent. This deduction, introduced under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), is set to expire at the end of the year, and Americans are urging Congress to act to prevent a significant tax hike for small businesses.
What’s the proposal?
The deduction has been crucial in leveling the playing field between small businesses and large corporations by reducing tax burdens for small business owners. If left to expire, the impact would be severe, as nearly 9 out of 10 small businesses would face a substantial tax hike, potentially crippling their ability to expand and raise wages.
The NFIB, which advocates for small businesses, conducted the poll, showing strong support from all political affiliations, with over 8 in 10 Americans believing it is important for the federal government to support small businesses. The survey found that 83% of Republicans, 86% of Democrats, and 79% of Independents agree that it’s important for the government to support small businesses.
Image Source | NFIB Insight “The 20% Small Business Tax Deduction: Quantitive Findings March 2025
NFIB President Brad Close emphasized the stakes, stating, “Americans recognize the immense value of the 20% Small Business Tax Deduction and are concerned about the devastating consequences should Congress fail to act.”
The results
According to the NFIB poll, the results uncovered:
83% of Americans feel it’s important for the federal government to support small businesses, with 45% considering it extremely important.
62% of respondents believe the Small Business Tax Deduction should be kept in the tax code, while only 20% support letting it expire.
77% of respondents agree that the deduction helps level the playing field between small businesses and larger corporations.
91% of Americans agree that small businesses rely on the deduction, and 79% say it has a positive impact on the economy.
Why does this matter?
As the expiration of the Small Business Tax Deduction looms, Americans are expressing clear concern about the economic consequences. Moreover, the poll shows that 51% are extremely concerned about its impact on the economy, and 75% believe the deduction has a positive effect on local economies.
NFIB urges Congress to act quickly to make the deduction permanent, ensuring small businesses have the certainty needed to grow and contribute to their communities.
Greece’s leading contemporary director has had a request to shoot footage for his new film at the Acropolis in Athens denied by his country’s culture ministry.Yorgos Lanthimos had filed a request to film scenes for sci-fi comedy Bugonia at the fifth-century BC site in April. But in a statement on Thursday, the culture ministry said permission had been refused because “the proposed scenes are incompatible with the symbolism … and the values the Acropolis represents”.Bugonia is Lanthimos’s latest collaboration with Emma Stone, who won the best actress Oscar for her role in his 2023 comedy Poor Things. In their new film, whose scheduled November release date suggests a major awards push, Stone stars as the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company kidnapped by a conspiracist bee-keeper, played by her Kinds of Kindness co-star Jesse Plemons.The scenes in question depicted 70 dead bodies placed between two of the Greek citadel’s key sites: the Propylaea, its complex of Doric entrance buildings, and the Parthenon, the temple dedicated to the goddess Athena.View image in fullscreenLanthimos’s request appears to have initially been welcomed by the ministry of culture, who agreed to waive the standard filming fee for the Acropolis – around €1,984 (£1,700) per day – in recognition of the director’s international standing.However, this offer was subject to the approval of the Central Archaeological Council, which oversees the Acropolis. They rejected Lanthimos’s proposal, citing symbolic inappropriateness and insufficient reverence, and suggested nearby alternatives where he could film.The ministry of culture is said to have delayed its final ruling until producers from the film indicated whether they would pursue another location. On Wednesday, culture minister Lina Mendoni received a letter from Lanthimos’s team, reiterating their previously rejected request, but reportedly not providing sufficient grounds for her to ask the Central Archeological Council to reconsider.Despite being widely regarded as one of the planet’s most important cultural artefacts, the Acropolis in Athens has often been used as a filming location. It featured extensively in Sophia Loren’s 1957 breakthrough, Boy on a Dolphin, as well as in more recent films such as Patricia Highsmith adaptation The Two Faces of January (2014) and Before Midnight (2013).Comparable sites, such as Stonehenge or the Vatican, are usually rebuilt as replicas.Born in Athens, Lanthimos, 51, was among the creative team behind the TV visuals for the 2004 Olympics held in the city. He made his breakthrough film with 2009’s Dogtooth, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and was nominated for the best international Oscar.View image in fullscreenAlps (2011), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) cemented his reputation for challenging absurdist comedies, before he found mainstream acclaim with Queen Anne comedy-drama The Favourite (2018), which was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning best actress for Olivia Colman.Lanthimos’s first photography monograph, titled Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken, featured photos shot behind the scenes on Poor Things. A second book, I Shall Sing These Songs Beautifully, collected shots from the production of Kinds of Kindness.An exhibition of some of these photographs – Lanthimos’s first bricks-and-mortar show – has just opened at a gallery in Los Angeles.
After a decade of running interference for the Biden Crime Family, the New York Times finally feels it is sufficiently safe to do real journalism. Friday, the New York Times reported on a recently released letter from Hunter Biden to the US ambassador in Italy requesting “support and guidance” on how to help the Ukainian…
Scientists, professors, engineers, teachers and doctors are routinely ranked among the most trustworthy people in society. This is because these professions rely heavily on research, and good research is viewed as the most reliable source of knowledge.
But how trustworthy is research? Recent news from the US suggests that the Trump administration wants to fund more “reproducibility studies”.
These are studies that check to see if previous results can be repeated and are reliable. The administration’s focus seems to be specifically on studies that revisit the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism.
This is a worrying waste of effort, given the extensive evidence showing that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and the harm that suggesting this link can cause. However, the broader idea of funding studies that attempt to repeat earlier research is a good one.
Take research on Alzheimer’s disease as an example. In June 2024, Nature retracted a highly cited paper reporting an important theory relating to the mechanism of the disease. Unfortunately, it took 18 years to spot the errors and retract the paper.
If influential studies like this were regularly repeated by others, it wouldn’t have taken so long to spot the errors in the original research.
Alzheimer’s is proving a particularly tricky problem to solve despite the large amounts of money spent researching the disease. Being unable to reproduce key results contributes to this problem because new research relies on the trustworthiness of earlier research.
More broadly, it has been known for almost ten years that 70% of researchers have problems reproducing experiments conducted by other scientists. The problem is particularly acute in cancer research and psychology.
The Trump administration wants to fund more ‘reproducibility studies’.
Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock
Research is difficult to get right
Research is complicated and there may be legitimate reasons research findings cannot be reproduced. Mistakes or dishonesty are not necessarily the cause.
In psychology or the social sciences, failure to reproduce results – despite using identical methods – could be due to using different populations, for instance, across different countries or cultures. In physical or medical sciences problems reproducing results could be down to using different equipment, chemicals or measurement techniques.
A lot of research may also not be reproducible simply because the researchers do not fully understand all the complexities of what they are studying. If all the relevant variables (such as genetics and environmental factors) are not understood or even identified, it is unsurprising that very similar experiments can yield different results.
In these cases, sometimes as much can be learned from a negative result as from a positive one, as this helps inform the design of future work.
Here, it is helpful to distinguish between reproducing another researcher’s exact results and being given enough information by the original researchers to replicate their experiments.
Science advances by comparing notes and discussing differences, so researchers must always give enough information in their reports to allow someone else to repeat (replicate) the experiment. This ensures the results can be trusted even if they may not be reproduced exactly.
Transparency is therefore central to research integrity, both in terms of trusting the research and trusting the people doing the research.
Unfortunately, the incentive structure within research doesn’t always encourage such transparency. The “publish or perish” culture and aggressive practices by journals often lead to excessive competition rather than collaboration and open research practices.
One solution, as new priorities from the US have suggested, is to directly fund researchers to replicate each other’s studies.
This is a promising development because most other funding, alongside opportunities to publish in the top journals, is instead linked to novelty. Unfortunately, this encourages researchers to act quickly to produce something unique rather than take their time to conduct thorough and transparent experiments.
We need to move to a system that rewards reliable research rather than just novel research. And part of this comes through rewarding people who focus on replication studies.
Industry also plays a part. Companies conducting research and development can sometimes be guilty of throwing a lot of money at a project and then pulling the plug quickly if a product (such as a new medicine) seems not to work. The reason for such failures is often unclear, but the reliability of earlier research is a contributing factor.
To avoid this problem, companies should be encouraged to replicate some of the original findings (perhaps significant experiments conducted by academics) before proceeding with development. In the long run, this strategy may turn out to be quicker and more efficient than the rapid chopping and changing that occurs now.
The scale of the reproducibility, or replicability, problem in research comes as a surprise to the public who have been told to “trust the science”. But over recent years there has been increasing recognition that the culture of research is as important as the experiments themselves.
If we want to be able to “trust the science”, science must be transparent and robustly conducted.
This is exactly what has happened with research looking at the link between vaccines and autism. The topic was so important that in this case the replication studies were done and found that there is, in fact, no link between vaccines and autism.
Scientists, professors, engineers, teachers and doctors are routinely ranked among the most trustworthy people in society. This is because these professions rely heavily on research, and good research is viewed as the most reliable source of knowledge.
But how trustworthy is research? Recent news from the US suggests that the Trump administration wants to fund more “reproducibility studies”.
These are studies that check to see if previous results can be repeated and are reliable. The administration’s focus seems to be specifically on studies that revisit the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism.
This is a worrying waste of effort, given the extensive evidence showing that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and the harm that suggesting this link can cause. However, the broader idea of funding studies that attempt to repeat earlier research is a good one.
Take research on Alzheimer’s disease as an example. In June 2024, Nature retracted a highly cited paper reporting an important theory relating to the mechanism of the disease. Unfortunately, it took 18 years to spot the errors and retract the paper.
If influential studies like this were regularly repeated by others, it wouldn’t have taken so long to spot the errors in the original research.
Alzheimer’s is proving a particularly tricky problem to solve despite the large amounts of money spent researching the disease. Being unable to reproduce key results contributes to this problem because new research relies on the trustworthiness of earlier research.
More broadly, it has been known for almost ten years that 70% of researchers have problems reproducing experiments conducted by other scientists. The problem is particularly acute in cancer research and psychology.
The Trump administration wants to fund more ‘reproducibility studies’.
Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock
Research is difficult to get right
Research is complicated and there may be legitimate reasons research findings cannot be reproduced. Mistakes or dishonesty are not necessarily the cause.
In psychology or the social sciences, failure to reproduce results – despite using identical methods – could be due to using different populations, for instance, across different countries or cultures. In physical or medical sciences problems reproducing results could be down to using different equipment, chemicals or measurement techniques.
A lot of research may also not be reproducible simply because the researchers do not fully understand all the complexities of what they are studying. If all the relevant variables (such as genetics and environmental factors) are not understood or even identified, it is unsurprising that very similar experiments can yield different results.
In these cases, sometimes as much can be learned from a negative result as from a positive one, as this helps inform the design of future work.
Here, it is helpful to distinguish between reproducing another researcher’s exact results and being given enough information by the original researchers to replicate their experiments.
Science advances by comparing notes and discussing differences, so researchers must always give enough information in their reports to allow someone else to repeat (replicate) the experiment. This ensures the results can be trusted even if they may not be reproduced exactly.
Transparency is therefore central to research integrity, both in terms of trusting the research and trusting the people doing the research.
Unfortunately, the incentive structure within research doesn’t always encourage such transparency. The “publish or perish” culture and aggressive practices by journals often lead to excessive competition rather than collaboration and open research practices.
One solution, as new priorities from the US have suggested, is to directly fund researchers to replicate each other’s studies.
This is a promising development because most other funding, alongside opportunities to publish in the top journals, is instead linked to novelty. Unfortunately, this encourages researchers to act quickly to produce something unique rather than take their time to conduct thorough and transparent experiments.
We need to move to a system that rewards reliable research rather than just novel research. And part of this comes through rewarding people who focus on replication studies.
Industry also plays a part. Companies conducting research and development can sometimes be guilty of throwing a lot of money at a project and then pulling the plug quickly if a product (such as a new medicine) seems not to work. The reason for such failures is often unclear, but the reliability of earlier research is a contributing factor.
To avoid this problem, companies should be encouraged to replicate some of the original findings (perhaps significant experiments conducted by academics) before proceeding with development. In the long run, this strategy may turn out to be quicker and more efficient than the rapid chopping and changing that occurs now.
The scale of the reproducibility, or replicability, problem in research comes as a surprise to the public who have been told to “trust the science”. But over recent years there has been increasing recognition that the culture of research is as important as the experiments themselves.
If we want to be able to “trust the science”, science must be transparent and robustly conducted.
This is exactly what has happened with research looking at the link between vaccines and autism. The topic was so important that in this case the replication studies were done and found that there is, in fact, no link between vaccines and autism.
This weekend in the National Hockey League, we saw a true generational accomplishment. Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals set the new standard for goal scoring by passing Wayne Gretzky for most goals in a career. On a level of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run mark, Emmitt Smith passing Walter Payton in NFL…
As a writer and business professional constantly balancing deadlines, strategy sessions, and content creation, I’m always looking for tools that can boost productivity without compromising quality. That’s what initially led me to ChatGPT.
At first, I only used it for the basics: brainstorming blog post ideas, generating article outlines, and fine-tuning first drafts. It was a handy writing assistant, but I didn’t see it as much more than that.
Then, I started hearing stories from other entrepreneurs using ChatGPT in ways I hadn’t even considered — refining marketing strategies, optimizing business workflows, and automating customer service. That’s when it hit me: I had barely scratched the surface.
Could ChatGPT help streamline my business operations? Could it take my marketing game to the next level? I had to find out.
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