DHS's Operation Metro Surge hurt Minnesota's leisure and hospitality industry in Jan-Mar 2026, destroying: - 4,600 jobs, - 3.8 million work hours, - $71 million in wages. New analysis by me & @aaronrosenthal.bsky.social @northstarpolicy.org northstarpolicy.org/leisure-and-...

I try not to make a habit of dunking on undergrads — they’re learning! Trying to find themselves — but it’s a kinda funny bit for your only two op-eds to be “Hey, let’s leave the billionaires alone! 🥺” and “Have you considered the Muslim students just have too much money? 🤪”

We get training on how to be good presenters, but not nearly enough on how to be good audience members. Imo, looking engaged and friendly is an important skill to develop!

Update: made it through the talk unscathed — I live to fight another day

If there’s a God, may they spare me from slipping up during a job talk, inadvertently letting years of watching The Boondocks kick in, and accidentally pronouncing W.E.B. Du Bois like this man (Y’all I swear I know!)

It’d be nice if more professors posted their syllabi/reading lists

Personally I like when the insufferable dweebs who I’ve long disliked for largely petty reasons get dunked on for more substantive critiques, but maybe some just ain’t got the heart of a hater like I do

Not to doom about automation and job destruction (I’m not even a doomer!), but leaving my apartment today and seeing the Latina custodial workers who usually clean the hallways have seemingly been replaced with a vacuum/deep cleaning robot *that speaks Spanish* feels… ominous

Just let the record show: when I mentioned missing the days of EconTwitter, I didn’t mean also the shitty takes Alas, many such cases

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Here is what I find so interesting. The excellent work of scholars like @lavaredmonds.bsky.social shows that HBCU trained teachers closed gaps, but we’d rather focus on narratives centered on Black cultural deficits such as “role model effects” and this: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Has anyone written about how our fragmented television consumption environment has affected (political) advertising (in the US)? Probably, right? I imagine things have had to change dramatically from even 10 years ago, but curious what that’s looked like behind the scenes

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the Economics Department at Stockholm University as an Assistant Professor, following a postdoc at Brown University’s Economics Department and Watson School!

I was gonna give macro some credit bc I recently had to dig back in my memory and use some of their tools I'd learned in my own work (it's useful stuff!), but then I just saw an embarrassing number of folks in their feelings about the "credibility revolution," so I'd say we broke even this week

Update: A Nobel laureate said I’m a really good presenter, so that’s on the CV now

Aah, I see the (unnecessarily) angriest on here are still the most illiterate. Good equilibrium, very healthy

Day 1 of my cross-country voyage for archival work Austin: food has been fantastic, but on a “Terrible layout for interstate driving” scale from 1 to New Jersey, it’s registering at about a 7 — not great!

I think @lavaredmonds.bsky.social is tongue in cheek here, but I honestly love this. Easiest way to screw up as a grad student or especially junior faculty is to not submit any papers.

Sure I’m biased, but, just as grad students send a + signal with published work on their CVs, I should be able to flaunt how many times I’ve had my papers rejected. Look at all this resilience I’m building! Pretend it’s 10 years ago and look at this ~grit~. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Today in “I think I might be part of the problem”: Look I’m not saying the sycophantic, weirdly casual voice of ChatGPT is good or not creepy, but sometimes the direct, sometimes stern tone of Claude Code makes me feel like I’m in trouble, and idk about that

There’s no reason for Led Zeppelin to have made music this meandering. At least real jam bands will find an interesting new riff sometime around the 6:00 mark

Econ historians of bluesky! Submit your paper to the SEA econ history sessions, sponsored by Clio and EHA, by March 22: forms.gle/YomRiP8iAUYK... Proposals due: March 22, 2026 Authors notified of acceptance of paper: March 28, 2026 Conf dates: Nov 21-23 #econconf 1/2

A band I liked in college just put out a good single, after nearly a decade of straight garbage. Hopium is back on the menu, boys

Working on campus today and, twice now, I've caught something seemingly darting quickly into the corner under the desk next to mine Maybe it was nothing, just my imagination! Conversely, the building has a mouse in it, and I will momentarily be burning this campus to the ground. Stay tuned

Another week, another cool data product release from LEHD and Census. This week, we released new PSEO data for schools from North Carolina and BYU-Idaho, bringing our total count of institutions to 952. Check out the data here: lehd.ces.census.gov/applications...

I had a similar thought recently, but feared I was approaching “Old man yells at cloud” territory. Glad I’m not alone (Tbf you can usually tell the stuff with non-Black etymology bc it sounds so deeply uncool)

I came across an article with an insipid, annoyingly clickbait-y title, and immediately gave it the biggest eye roll. Then I checked the author, and saw it was written by, by far, the most annoying student I’ve encountered here (they’ve since graduated) Sorry, world: We’re not sending our best!

Did You Know: More than 90% of hotels in the United States refused to take reservations from Black guests? The Green Book Project tells the story Black travel during Jim Crow. Share your story and contribute to the Community Map: greenbookproject.osu.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

I can't be here right now because my words are not safe for the public. Leaving this here, going to go donate and check on my friends. www.standwithminnesota.com

Interesting the varying responses I’ve seen over the weekend: My Bluesky feed: eloquent thinkpieces, resource guides, inspirational rallying cries, up to the minute news updates, etc. My Twitter feed: “On a pike, up by their heels, idc idc”

My group chats are full of Minnesotans reacting to today’s murder by figuring out ways they can help. We need people outside of the state to do the same thing. Whatever you wish everyone else was doing right now? Do it today. Let’s make a list of things that could help.

Another question I came here with was: how effective are the whistles and honking? Does it stop abductions? And the answer is, surprisingly to my cynical self, yes, and often. I have talked to so many people who have successfully interrupted kidnappings.

I am not being snarky. I need my colleagues who wrote on covid school lockdowns to engage with this. To be as loud as they have been about prior "learning loss." Hell, you can cite Tom & Mark's AERJ paper so you feel better that there's some econ somewhere in your argument.

I know some have been a little unnerved at the aggressive following and noisemaking tactics of the observers. What they don’t realize is that it’s necessitated by what ICE is doing. You have seconds and you need as many eyes on them as possible, and as many people trying to get key info as possible.

If you see one, the most important thing to say is “WHAT’S YOUR NAME” because otherwise the person is gone for good, maybe. I witnessed one in an alley as the sole pursuit car, I was the only witness, I froze for a second and didn’t shout it in time, and the guy is just… gone now. I’ll never know.

You know the REAL worst part of ChatGPT? Its over-reliance on em dashes in write-ups has made some people think seeing them in writing is indicative of LLM usage No no no: I’ve been over-relying on/misusing em dashes for *decades* — my culture is not a costume

I am weak and blackout curtains are Strong: Lessons from waking up at 2 PM for two weeks

[Opening my email for the first time in two weeks, seeing beginning of quarter listserv invites] You’re telling me this weekly newsletter is bi?? (Actually yea, I could see that)

Happy New Year! Shoddy craftsmanship in an ostensibly newly renovated apartment almost locked us in here forever. Gonna not read too much into this as a sign of things to come

In the past hour at the gym, I’ve heard D4L, Lil Flip, JIBBS, Purple Ribbon All-Stars? Whoever is running the music tonight: show yourself. I just know we rode the bus to school together in ~2007

Unironically writing “the true champs of safe drunk driving” is crazy work. I really hope Woke 2.0 brings back shame

I hope whoever wrote that riff in “This Christmas” became very wealthy for generations, bc damn it’s still so good

There’s something so unsettling about streaming/reaction vids popular w kids today, reminiscent of dehumanized dystopian futures I saw on tv + film as a kid; I find the potential effects on children who’ve just been marinating in it for years to be genuinely frightening Anyway, Merry Christmas Eve!

Just saw girl twerking and hitting the splits on the roof of a car in 40 degrees at midnight in the parking lot of a Waffle House — I’m home ❤️

there's absolutely nothing wrong with 'I don't think it would be worth it for me to learn how to use this tool well in terms of time and other costs', but that's different from 'there's no way that this could be useful'

Astonishing how load-bearing this tweet continues to be I’m convinced now a frightening share of the anger on this site boils down to the fact that many posters can’t read, and, worse, they don’t know they can’t read

I don’t mind much that not everyone likes what I like — congestion effects, fun opportunities for discovery, etc. Conversely, at my core, bubbling under the surface of nearly every interaction is a seething annoyance that not everyone hates what I hate, and I’ll never let it go

Hey #econsky! I'm organizing a workshop at Brown this Spring in partnership with Eric Nielsen and Viviana Rodriguez. The topic is educational measurement. Please submit a paper/extended abstract! We'd love to consider your work. And please help us spread the word to folks who aren't on bluesky!

Hello! My name is Natalie. I am an applied microeconomist and a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and am on the 2025-2026 academic #econjobmarket studying how human capital policies and public subsidies impact the labor market outcomes of workers and firms. #EconSky