True story: I gave my first draft of my dissertation to my advisor (in 2011ish) and she wrote on every single page. Probably the most common thing was fixing this. So, I went through 200+ pages and made sure the punctuation was inside the quotation marks. And I will never forget it.

Weird thing to throw out here on a Saturday, but Discord servers for your department? I don’t want to police a proto-social network, but I also want to give students (prospective and current) info in a place they want it. Yay or nay?

This is giving me some flashbacks of doing tax foreclosure research in Milwaukee. Also, drinking Natty Boh in a bathtub as a stand in for champagne? Doesn’t get more Bmore than that.

The saddest thing I’ve done today is hit “cancel” on my public sector jobs day to-do.

Republicans have been warning about socialism for years, but it turns out the call was coming from inside the house.

The one downside of caring more than a little about audio quality is that I have to wait for the heat to turn off before I can record anything. Trying to get rid of random HVAC noise is super annoying.

Preaching to the choir here, but this shot up to the top of my podcast queue for this morning. I always appreciate @reckless.bsky.social's interviews on the subject.

Alt phrasing: I don't think the ordering of the Articles is indicative of their importance. 🤦‍♂️

Trying to take the Ron Swanson advice of "whole-ass one thing" to heart today. One thing at a time.

What is up with weird tech billionaires and wanting to build super secretive schools?

I appreciate that Ken has a brand. And that brand is attempting to meddle in places where he does not live and has no stake. Feel free to ignore entirely—we in Chicago learned this long ago.

It's incredibly difficult to see how we move past this without some people serving significant jail time.

Maybe socializing an entire generation about how to use money in an environment of zero interest rates was a bad thing. TVM is a thing, non-zero interest rates are a thing, and borrowing can get unexpectedly expensive.

dawg not the steakhouse wedding font

When I teach budgeting, I have an assignment where one of the various options is using budget reserves to "solve" a short-term problem. Students often ask me what they should do, and I almost always respond with "Is it raining?" It's raining, y'all. It's in the name.

One of the many reasons I held off on upgrading to macOS 26 was reports of weird audio issues. Since I spend a lot of time doing audio related stuff (videoconferencing but also lecture recording), I held off upgrading. Rogue Amoeba seems to think all is fixed, so I might dip my toes in.

Oh no, I might have finally found the thing that kills off Things3 for me—robust task integration with Obsidian.

In IL, "General assistance" covers a lot of things, and helping people who are losing SNAP benefits is squarely in that wheelhouse—many townships, particularly the urban ones (but not exclusively), have extensive food pantries that operate outside the general assistance program.

Well, at least the .1 Apple updates were released such that I can probably hear John Siracusa tell me whether I can update to macOS 26.1 without much issue.

You know what the Wayback Machine is amazing for? Looking up old academic department websites. Basically, everyone from the early 2000s in my department is long gone, so this is like a time machine to what we were doing.

I love occasionally forgetting and remembering that Alfred Molina is the guide with Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It brings me joy.

I love what Criterion or Arrow do for movies. However, we need a non-horror, cult classic distributor/restorer. I just want Zardoz on 4k! (Yes, I’m a sucker for weird Sean Connery side projects. I just bought Outland on 4k.)

When I lived in DC, I flew to ATL about every 3 weeks. Always the same schedule—6 pm flight on Friday, back on the last flight on Sunday. I often flew with elected officials, mostly Sen. Johnny Isakson. Other than the Congressional pin, you'd never know who they were. Social media has warped people.

Ugh, I've been having an issue where my MacBook won't charge (or charges very little) when plugged into my dock. Turns out I had the Thunderbolt cable plugged into the wrong port, only feeding the computer 15 watts instead of the 87 watts it wants. 🤦‍♂️

Ah, it’s that time of year where a hot shower is insufficient to get warmer back up. I like biking in the cold, but what your body does when it isn’t pumping blood at >130bpm is less than enjoyable. (All the shivers, if you’re interested)

It seems I missed fall entirely. Straight from bibs/jersey to tights/thermal jersey. Boo. #cycling

Me, trying to organize my thoughts on why only the research community cares about my research, why that's ok, and how to work with local govts. I'm very happy to be the local govt generalist. It's a way to have a massive impact outside academia.

Observations around doing engaged work. 🧵 1. Engaged work looks like a lot of things. Working directly with govts/NPOs on peer-reviewed research, all the way to public/community engagement. 2. You're either a specialist or a generalist. Your work is directly related or entirely irrelevant.

Alt response: We'll tear gas kids in Halloween costumes, and you'll like it. The Dems should be running ads about this 24/7.

It's wild when you've accumulated enough familiarity with a foreign language to be able to read it without context. And, at least for me, it just happened—a flip of a switch, and I'm reading full paragraphs.

Private enforcement of state preemptions (after all, this isn't the State of Texas suing).

Phil is absolutely correct here. 99.9% of the time, I'm trying to do what I'm supposed to on a bike, and it's the motorist who is doing the completely unpredictable thing.

Always fun when Azure gets slightly borked and everything I'm required to use suddenly goes, "Sorry, we cannot authenticate you, no soup for you."

Also, not an insignificant number of special districts.

Dear #rstats, Please find attached the alpha version of my book "An Introduction to R for Policy Analysis": policyanalysislab.com/shared/r-for... Unfortunately, the draft has been released too late to be considered for a Nobel prize, but I look forward to being nominated in 2026. ...

Evidence the social order is broken: people try to bum rush the exit while deplaning. Row order is irrelevant for like 20% of people.

I’d like to meet whoever designed TPA and ask them what kind of drugs they were on when they designed this place.

We did some things better in 1975. This program cover is a banger.

"Don't accept calendar invites in not-your-home time zone" advice is in full effect.

One of my former students, who won a big fellowship and is doing great things, was sorta weird about giving me her business card—like I wouldn’t be impressed with it. I wish I could figure out a way to say that card is worth more than a gold bar to most profs.

It's not a real place, so sure, this makes total sense.

Say I have two groups and an intervention that’s supposed to correct or prevent discrimination. That is, the treatment should eliminate differences. How do parallel trends work for this in a diff-in-diff framework? I can’t find anything on this, or the lit is moving so fast I missed it.

I used to ride in this bike lane or walk down 5th to the ACME all the time. This is nuts.

Say I have two groups and an intervention that’s supposed to correct or prevent discrimination. That is, the treatment should eliminate differences. How do parallel trends work for this in a diff-in-diff framework? I can’t find anything on this, or the lit is moving so fast I missed it.

“It’s all on quicksand — the very quicksand that has us really up against it financially… when there is no help coming from Springfield. There is no help coming from Washington obviously,” Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson told the Sun-Times. trib.al/x66Dwra

The 1.4 release of @duckdb.org supports using a DuckDB database to serve vector tiles! Of course, I had to try this out in R. Check it out: all 242,000 US Census block groups dynamically served as vector tiles from a DuckDB database, displayed on a MapLibre map from R in Positron.

It is not lost on me that this guy is basically Sean Penn's character from One Battle After Another.

Uh...I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but downtown Atlanta feels about a million times worse than the Loop in Chicago. And then compare that to the popular view of both cities.

Tired: planning your to-dos a week out Wired: planning your to-dos a year+ out. I guess this what happens when you take an admin position.