"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

On 26 December 1965, Franca Viola, then aged 16, is kidnapped from her home in Alcamo. She is raped by her ex-fiancé, who then puts pressure on her and her family to accept a "rehabilitating marriage". Franca becomes the first woman in Italy to publicly refuse this practice [Thread] >> 1

The success of the future Democratic administration (provided there is going to be one) is to be measured in years. Cumulative jailtime years for members and associates of the current administration. Anything less than a four-figure number is a Merrick Garland-sized failure.

Merry Christmas. 🎄 youtube.com/shorts/HcYwE...

The UAE is an accomplice of crimes against humanity, possibly amounting to genocide, in Sudan. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/o...

Trump is destroying democracy abroad too. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/w...

The Starmer government rejects the false choices and cynicism of zero-sum politics. They have discovered negative-sum politics. Make some people permanently mad as hell for no ultimate gain for anyone else.

You may get the EU to stand up to Putin. You may even get the EU to stand up to Trump. But you will never get the EU to stand up to farmers.

NEW: Labour just announced the biggest change in planning policy in 80 years. My breakdown of the key measures and whether they will succeed. www.samdumitriu.com/p/labour-are...

Virtually every other email on academic mailing lists these days: How do you integrate the endless possibilities of AI in your research workflow? Me:

In practice, US institutions work more like pre-modern republics with multi-tier indirect elections than modern democracies. Effectively, the ruling body is a Council of Nine selected from members of a professional guild by a Grand Doge elected by state-level magistrate slates chosen by voters.

An early Christmas gift from @demresjournal.bsky.social: new publication with @cantonwiner.bsky.social and Milan Kovačič on sexuality using dating app data. A great example of how social scientists and industry can collaborate to produce global, inclusive research.

Italy's entire foreign policy is geared towards making ketchup on pasta an actual crime against humanity. www.ansa.it/english/news...

Use of mental health medications in the population of Swedish PhD students is 40% higher than a matched sample by the fifth PhD year. Be kind to PhD students. Don't take up PhD students you can't invest in. Alert prospective students of the reality of a PhD. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Going through my data cleaning replication files is an emotional journey.

Rachel Reeves energy

Man, the Bluesky Wrapped 2025 is pretty brutal

When I was at an Oxford college whose library for some reason has a copy of Reeves’ BA thesis, I was separately approached by two different people asking for help to get hold of it. The obsession with taking down her intellectual credentials is revealing - and absolutely mental.

I had the same conversation with a colleague yesterday. It seems to me that students who started university well post-covid have adjusted to significantly better standards of attendance, participation, engagement than 2-3 years ago. AI is a problem but not as much as covid disruption was.

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna! ⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025 wratil.eu/files/MULTIR... 1/4 🧵

Arguably, the last deliverable* manifesto from a major party was Theresa May's in 2017, and was monstered by the media for it. *Ok, it still had the "tens of thousands" pledge on migration, but immigration promises have long been divorced from reality.

POV: you're teaching political science but the internet has turned your brain to mush.

Do policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ in European democracies? My new article in @ejprjournal.bsky.social finds: Yes, sometimes, but this is not the norm. Let's break it down. 🧵 1/10

(1/10) 🚨Preprint alert!🚨 In this article, I challenge claims of a generational rise of conservative men. In the media and recent academic publications, the so-called ‘youth gender gap’ has been interpreted as a generational phenomenon. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I'm sorry to burst the bubble but the idea that Republican elites and/or base are a couple of pieces of evidence from the Epstein files away from the tipping point is a fantasy. We've been through this for 10 years now. It's not going to happen. It's not who they are.

It’s very revealing how the techno-futurist crowd assumes that the rest of us also treat other people as props and gadgets in our lives, as opposed to valuing the fact that there’s a thinking, feeling person there.

A modern tragedy.

Hate crimed by the homework.

The Anglo consensus of the first half of 2010s was that where continental Europeans were endemically subject to crises and demagoguery, "we" were distinctly were more enlightened. Cameron's Britain. Obama's America. Ponderous essays about Magna Carta and the "golden thread". How wrong it all was.

ugh in two weeks I will have to teach NHST I feel so dirty

(This was obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes $50bn ago. Autocracies - no matter how much oil they can drill, how many foreign advisors they can hire, and how slick their PR - remain highly inefficient at allocating resources in the long run.)

German doesn’t care about ¬(p ∧ ¬p)

It’s fascinating comparing the front page coverage of the Huntingdon train attack (below) with how the British press treated another case 30 years ago. I’m referring to the 1995 Netto supermarket attack in Birmingham in which a man stabbed 10 people, killing one of them.

Anyway, we need some joy, so here's the Egyptian foreign minister being given a Lego Pyramid by the Danish foreign minister.

Interesting how often “going on about migration, free speech and Islam” correlates with “moving to Dubai”.

Things universities can make national news for: - people on the internet are a bit upset about the speaker selection of an obscure student group, - a member of faculty copy-pasted a sentence of boilerplate methods language in her PhD thesis 30 years ago. Things no one cares about: - Bombs.

Mandatory centrist dad post

I appreciate how purely Conor Lamb hates Fetterman

(The logic of most anti-tourism or anti-gentrification arguments is virtually indistinguishable from that of anti-immigration politics.)

X is not only completely out of control, it is also increasingly dangerous.

Multiverse studies seem doomed to perpetuate a cycle of "look it varies!" "but not that much" "does too!". Here's another exchange that I had missed. "Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions" doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Happy 100th birthday *checks notes* Margaret Thatcher

Migrant Electoral Rights Dataset (1960-2020) 📊 Link to dataset: hdl.handle.net/1814/93661 📕 Link to codebook: cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/c... 💼 Link to 400 page documentation: cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/c...

Rock ‘n’ roll is not what it used to be.

(I've written the narrowest, nerdiest paper and I *can't wait* for it to be out.)

Ageing societies are simultaneously safer and more scared societies.

Abundance update