Sorry corrected link here!!! dynamicdemocracy.us

the harbin railroad audit office (哈尔滨铁路稽核室) is a crucial window into the Maoist history of public management. itself a product of the joint Sino-Soviet governance of the rails developed under imperial Russian and then Japanese and Republican Chinese management, it was a model studied across China

what I should be doing this week: updating my syllabus and course materials what I am doing this week: (re)starting several projects

What you need today is this DJ Marie Kimishima vinyl set (I don't make the rules). Mostly underrated jazz funk instrumentals www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoKS...

great days

decades of “national security” people treating those concerned about US imperialism as wacko commies while intoning gravely about a supposed liberal/rules-based order under threat by a rotating cast of someone else.

I enjoyed this exchange quite a bit. I'd love more like it in our field.

Coda 2: I was fortunate to have a mentor who asked me "how do you know that" Once I said, "I cited so-and-so historian, is that ok?" He said, "Well, it may not be true. But it's scholarly."

Ok historiansky 🗃️ — you could start with Brand’s “American Colossus” but that starts and ends early. Any ideas?

if you are 35 years old and have not burned through at least three or four completely different ways of looking at the world what are you even doing ?

Only because it’s 厦门 counterfeit swill when we all know the best 高粱酒 comes from six km away in 金門

Chinasky, since it's the time of the year to make reading lists (for myself & for teaching): what's some writing on science and technology in China from the last few years that really stuck with you, changed how think, or that you immediately thought "this should go in any China S&T syllabus"?

what a day

me, all semester: I'm a citation maximalist. If a citation might be appropriate, it needs to be there. I'm making you rewrite papers if you're missing citations. students: *submit 2k-word final projects with like four citations total*

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

I wrote a piece on LLMs, citation metrics, and the institution of science. It's been up for a couple of days, but it is officially "out" now.

we have graduated to the four (4) blanket zone

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

you could write a paper about the intellectual networks in the 1980s based entirely on from whom intellectual magazines got calligraphic endorsements e.g.:《人事》‘s first issue ('85) has calligraphy from both 姬鹏飞 (first amb. from PRC to GDR) and 柴泽民 (first amb to US). 5th anniversary ('90) ? 习仲勋！

what‘s the long German word for the sort of bittersweet pleasure of shoveling snow off your neighbor‘s sidewalk even though you’re really tired from shoveling yours?

🚨 Applications are open for the 2026–27 Good Authority Fellowship! 🚨 Political scientists passionate about public engagement will receive a $2,500 stipend and mentorship in writing for broad audiences. Apply by Jan 9, 2026, 5pm PT. Apply at the link👇 goodauthority.org/news/announc...

“preempt my parents (lab scientists) from reading and loving sapiens by giving them other books” challenge (difficulty: impossible)

too real

In today's JMP blog, @jiaweilyu.bsky.social studies impact of affirmative action for men in China's civil service. Women outperform men in the entry exam, so quotas were introduced to balance gender. Fewer women were hired, quality declined, & tax collected fell. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

simply spending this morning that there was a way to look at a publication title from 20th century china and instantly know if 交通 meant traffic or communications

never gets old

when did worldcat get really ... bad?

One of my favorite columns — Translated Chinese Literature — need to check out Diablo's Boys. Hunter was a personal favorite! chinabooksreview.com/2025/12/09/t...

『吾有一數。曰三。名之曰「甲」。 為是「甲」遍。 　吾有一言。曰「「問天地好在。」」。書之。 云云。』 運行之。乃得 『問天地好在。問天地好在。問天地好在』

prof. mcmillan cottom does not miss

Throwback Thursday -- 1988 www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

Rstudio wrapped bsky.app/profile/sal....

Very excited to have a software paper with @yh-huang.bsky.social in the CHR journal on the Digital Collections Explorer, our open-source multimodal viewer for digital collections!

Don't pronounce a eulogy on paleographers yet. We'll want them around to understand the data we do have, build more open data, work on languages big companies don't care about, and evaluate when systems go wrong. bsky.app/profile/giul...

there was a time when doing whatever seemed hardest (e.g. learn Chinese, which is not even close to the hardest language to learn, let alone thing to do in college) was a big part of my self concept because I was afraid of being boring. to see how that worked out, I now study the bureaucracy.

drove 25m to get Neil’s donuts in Middletown and they are good. but I also should not need to spend an hour in a car to get decent donuts when there are nominally 11 “donut” shops within 5m

Dunkin’s main crime is not actually its coffee but the fact that it has either eliminated or prevented the flourishing of any actually good donuts in my area

20/For those that appreciated this thread, here is a podcast conversation companion. It lays out the core ideas of a neo-royalist world order, how it makes sense of Trump Administration actions, and how one might prevent such an order from consolidating www.podbean.com/ep/pb-npzcs-...

Somebody who reads all my ramblings and tells me "girl don't nobody need to hear about this random aside" is a gift from the writing gods

in some really dark hours of pandemic grad school, i digitized thousands of pages of archival materials in my basement for mostly no reason. i've now donated the originals to an academic library, but being able to just ... share the scans ... with curious grad students has been a huge joy.

The US government is considering punishing American scientists who worked with Chinese researchers *years ago, retroactively*.

They analyzed 2k NOT 47k conversations, no idea how they sampled the data or determined topics. This is at least the fifth article I’ve seen like this, where journalists try to do data analysis on chats, badly replicating what has already been published by researchers.

this is the future we were promised (derogatory)

again, understanding the government as the information collector of last resort brings a lot of other political economy issues into sharp relief

I personally think this is a "harder problem" than we care to admit. So, are you a (social) scientist struggling with this situation? A break between what you _want_ to study (a causal process) and what you feel you _can_ credibly study (a correlation)? Here are some readings that might help. 👇