Just dug up this banger of a @mattblackwell.bsky.social post to use in my instrumental variables slides. Pumped to be teaching the next generation about choosing estimands based on identification assumptions. 😂🙏

Many of us are numb to it, but almost every day he publicly confesses that he is at war with our laws and Constitution.

Okay, follow-up on the students' first grades of the semester. On the one hand: *So many* Calendly sign-ups. On the other hand: it feels like a huge teaching win that one of my students told me this morning that they were disappointed in their grade, but also understood it based on my comments.

I was skeptical of Vancouver APSA. But I just posted my first grades of the semester from JFK and maybe another country is the right place to be headed after giving some folks what could be their first-ever sub-A grades.

There is, unfortunately, a precedent of sorts. Trump sent in the National Guard to D.C. after Edward "Big Balls" Coristine was assaulted by some teenagers

Very, very bad stuff coming from leading right-wingers

I have yet to find a way to incorporate the bear-skinning episode into my observational causal inference course, but I have until Monday.

For my political behavior writing seminar, I assigned a "pastiche op-ed," where the students have to use current events as the hook for an opinion column... I'm making them all use the bear. I look forward to reading a lot of op-eds about hunting regulation written in the voice of Maureen Down.

John Oliver: "While get the appeal of thinking just one more concession, one more payoff might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone."

I am a HUGE pre-registration booster. But IMO this is the biggest problem with pre-reg (especially pre-reg without analysis plans): It's hackable if people pre-reg anything and everything. Like I've heard people *brag* about having the foresight to pre-register a lot of hypotheses. Don't do that!

The bartender at the JAWS happy hour last MPSA tried to convince me to order Malort. And I kind of wimped out. But now I'm curious!

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

An art historian friend is a member of the grad union at Cornell. He recently told me I'm management now. I will never recover from this. Anyhow Happy Labor Day!

Here’s the link to comment on the rule. Please do comment. They can make a difference in litigation. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

My father has emailed me to ask whether my sister told me that Taylor Swift is engaged. Huge day in the life of our family.

I have a friend in Dutch politics. He keeps saying stuff like "Can't you just build a coalition from the center to resist?" or "What about lawsuits?" I respect the panic in Europe about Putin & the Baltic states. But @aphclarkson.bsky.social seems right: folks are missing the scale of the crisis.

🚨 Updated working paper! Ekin Dursun and I ask what instruments best manipulate emotions on surveys (osf.io/56h4g). We find that vignettes really work! They have large effects on emotions of interest & smaller effects on emotions *not* of interest. But as always, it's complicated.👇 (1/17)

I have received a cold-email from an undergrad wanting to apply to be my PhD student. How trippy! So much hidden curriculum stuff here about poli sci not doing the lab model and new APs not taking students... But it feels wild that I was in the potential applicant position just 6 years ago!

An academic I know once said - about a debate over political violence - that it was so obvious which side was right, no one could think otherwise. I never figured out which side he meant! Anyhow, half my feed is "Obviously Obergefell is gone" and the other half is "Obviously Obergefell is safe."

AI companies have to be complicit in these misconceptions about chatbots, right? Like the Container Store wardrobe I assembled last night came with more prominently displayed directions for use.

knowing yourself is half the battle in this world. if you are currently an academic, no, you would not have a quirky job. academia is the quirkiest job most academics can handle.

The Great Khan of the Northern Steppes stepping up to protect the right of elected officials to enact parliamentary procedures.

Every single class of elite societal institutions has done this. The corporations. The law firms. The universities. The banks. The television networks. The Papers of Record. The professional sports leagues. On and on. It's been a full-scale national shanda of epic proportions.

Dear Ithaca NY, I thought I was an okay runner. But I did not know your game. Just some cute path and then BOOM 15% GRADE. I have been suitably chastened. Respectfully, Amanda

Well when you put it like that... Crazy that more academics aren't going into politics!

New metaphor for the relationship between nonparametric and parametric statistics just dropped @lauretig.bsky.social

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God. Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well. forward.com/opinion/7575...

Lastly, is @amandaweiss.bsky.social‬’s "How Much Should We Trust Modern Difference-in-Differences Estimates?" examines DID designs where treatment is applied in US states (n =50). She shows that all DID methods are underpowered in this important context. osf.io/preprints/os...

Polmeth @ Emory this past week was so great (research thread to follow) - but the real highlight of the trip may have been the horse parked on the sidewalk in downtown Atlanta.

Okay there are exceptions: Nick "I throw away perfectly good chocolate candies" Adams claims to do some of the labors of hotness for himself. But maybe that's why his career ceiling is an ambassadorship.

I definitely agree re: unique class dimension to Trumpian aesthetics. But fascist regimes have long outsourced the labor of being hot to women. Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring were no untermenschen. Eva Braun, Magda Goebbels, and Emmy Göring were the ones keeping up Aryan beauty standards.

I'm sorry, not the point - but what are female M&Ms?

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)

Texas is so very vulnerable to climate disasters - including in the Hill Country, which has dry-as-hell soil that doesn't absorb floodwaters. GoFundMe/peer-to-peer shouldn't be the safety net, but it is. Worth donating.

The Revenge of Ansolabehere et al. (2003): People (and PACs) only *think* they're getting an investment good.

I grew up mostly in Bloomington (flagship IU campus) and my parents now live in Indy (home of IUPUI). It's hard to overstate how completely local communities depend on IU jobs and infrastructure. Shuttering programs and shrinking public ed harm more than just(!) scholarship and students.

What will you do when authoritarianism comes to America? Because it's here. Right now.

this is like drake and kendrick lamar but they're both drake

I first read this as being about *that* kind of DID and started trying to figure out what on earth PLC stood for. Partially Linear Combination? Penalized Logistic Computations? In unrelated news, I am jetlagged.

I'm not on Instagram - but I guess I made an appearance!

'Leo' is the 12th most popular baby boy name is Illinois and 18th most popular nationally, as of the most recent SSA data. So the new pope is right on-trend.

Just fielded a survey with some standard affective polarization questions. One of the anonymous respondents sent me a DM on Prolific to say "just because I'm a Republican doesn't mean I have to hate Democrats." I'm kind of fascinated by this reaction.

Students are emailing me to pre-enroll in my Analysis of Natural Experiments course!

Democratic Party going from Minnesota nice to... Illinois feisty? Springfield scrappy? Chicago you-wanna-go?

This is SUCH a trivial concern in the scheme of things, but: NPS maintains the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch/birthplace/burial grounds and - by extension - Hereford cows descended from the president's very own herd. It feels like those cows are in big danger. I'm scared for the cows.

My current, 100% serious theory: hair extensions. $3,000 in cash is right on target for super-long high-quality human hair extensions - which are usually imported and would be subject to tariffs. Related possibility: the money is for an unlicensed cosmetic procedure.

Really begs the question of whether the goal is keeping women out of public life as much as it is raising the birthrate.

I am glad that Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, but the extent to which people view immigrants, whether here legally or not, as not worthy of the basic consideration, dignity and respect due to all people I find extremely depressing.