This Egyptian goalie is really ... the king of denial

Much of Africa is terribly under-governed. That needs to change: open.substack.com/pub/kenopalo...

We are leaving the Old Code Age, the Paleocodic, the artisinal code era, where if you needed a novel program, you would commission a local codesmith or code guild to hand-craft a work of code for you, bespoke.

The US Administration's radical, extreme cuts to science funding, student visas, and academic freedom are making foreign scientists prepare to depart. We are losing breakthroughs, cures, natsec technology. Conservative and Liberal Americans will suffer, permanently. www.nber.org/papers/w35330

Sadly, we're probably going to see declines in the UK too. 30% decline in international students overall since 2024.

The US government has succeeded in in its stated goal of cutting inflows of international students. Inflows are down 1/3 or more. This slashes a key source of productivity-enhancing high-skill STEM workers for the US economy. In a new Brief at @piie.com, my co-authors and I quantify the impact—>

The poorest economies in the world are not achieving economic growth. The consequence is that progress against the very worst poverty is coming to a halt. This is one of the worst problems in the world today, but hardly gets any attention.

Nice quote of @economeager.bsky.social here about no serious reckoning yet in microfinance www.wsj.com/finance/bank...

"The hardening evidence of microfinance’s failure to alleviate poverty should have led to a rethinking of its use as a development tool, said Rafe Meager, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who has studied the academic research on microfinance."

US tariffs are taxes on Americans. They are not "external revenue", they are not taxes "on other countries". They are taxes on every American who buys anything with any ingredient made overseas—that is, all of us. Every dollar of wine tariffs is paid by US consumers—> www.nber.org/202603/diges...

Which American benefited from this pointless cruelty? None. No Conservative, no Liberal. But it does degrade us, collectively.

I was thinking this morning about how AI is pretty good at starting research projects, but not very good (at least for now) at finishing them. As a result, it’s become much easier for scholars to accumulate an unmanageable backlog of half-baked, AI-assisted projects... 1/n

Migration does not have to be what it is now Innovation can change what migration *is*—more orderly, skilled, integrated, & tangibly beneficial to everyone affected In 2012 I proposed one way: Global Skill Partnerships The World Bank just released a major GSP roadmap—> hdl.handle.net/10986/42780

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Would anybody like to read one of my long threads about a 2.5bn year old rock, bacteria that could produce oxygen but not consume it, and tank production in wwii

There’s something sad about how many blogposts are simply copy-pasted ChatGPT output now. It’s not writing, it’s content — not voices, but outputs. When the only button you press is for an LLM, blogposts don’t earn applause, they earn scrutiny.

I've built a new tool! You can upload your pre-analysis plan or registered report, pre-submission to a registry or journal, and it will screen it for completeness, clarity, and consistency. 1/ 🧵

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

New #UofGSpotlight episode on 'Work, Ageing and the Employment Rights Act'💡 @kezdugdale.bsky.social speaks with Kat Riach about ageing and work then @melaniesimms.bsky.social about employment rights and recent legislation. Listen and subscribe: uofgspotlight.com 🎧

I'm not an audiophile, but making the choice to switch back to wired headphones has massively improved my music experience

“We measure the impact of increased immigration on mortality among elderly Americans, who rely on the immigrant-intensive [health care] sectors… [we find] striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide.”

So now we can see the official report of what happened to PEPFAR coverage in 2025 compared to 2024. 14.5m fewer people received testing and counselling (leading to a 400k drop in positive tests) 100,000 fewer on ARVs 1.6m drop in ART patients with documented viral load

I have used @raulpachecovega.bsky.social's to teach reading and literature reviews to easily 500+ students (mostly undergrads), and I regularly get feedback that they're among the most valuable lessons in my science and teaching writing classes. Cannot recommend enough.

"Our desperate times have created concerned reactions, so here's a firearm factsheet to consider if you're pondering gun ownership:" armedwithreason.substack.com/p/what-to-kn...

US Development Finance Corporation did $3.5bn in business last year. For comparison, China's Belt and Road investments last year were about $85bn. www.cgdev.org/blog/looking... greenfdc.org/china-belt-a...

Took advice from @parismarx.com a couple weeks ago and it's been great. Most all changes I've made have zero impact on my day-to-day, but mean I'm supporting a wide diversity of non-US platforms. A couple are even a genuine improvement. Combat both US tech capitulation and Enshittification at once.

Studies of mobilization against Bolsonaro and the effective unity of South Korean political elites against an authoritarian power grab by the last president are still underway. So there are several models politicians in the U.S. have.

Interested in learning more about policy and public engagement and develop the skills to engage in media interviews and public-facing writing? Apply for our workshop this summer - www.bridgingthegapproject.org/ipsi Applications close this Sunday

If you’re aged 18–30 and have a good business idea, Scotland will back you. Today I have launched The First Minister’s Start-Up Challenge and applications will open soon. £500 to test your business, and up to £5,000 to launch it.

Blog: The US Halt on Immigrant Visa Processing. On Wednesday the US announced it was suspending processing for immigrant visa applications in 75 countries home to 2.5 billion people with a combined GNI of $9.9 trillion....

“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”

Important considerations if you're collecting data on online platforms such as Prolific. www.science.org/content/arti...

Post-doc positions: "Academic freedom is under pressure today. This requires rescue havens of free research. ... [we] invite early career researchers, whose work is restricted due to political pressure in the USA..." uni-freiburg.de/frias/call-f...

The Govt of India is dismantling the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and that's a real shame.

“Randomizing newborns to no hepatitis B vaccine at birth in order to evaluate “overall health effects” of an intervention whose primary benefit is already known is indefensible. When benefit is established, withholding an intervention is no longer neutral experimentation; [it is] premeditated harm”

What the Democrats can learn from the UK Labour Party's complete implosion after moving right on immigration www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-cost-o...

@justsand.bsky.social and I have updated our estimates of lives lost based on cuts to US foreign assistance spending through the end of the fiscal year. They look similar or worse than they did back in June: in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 people. www.cgdev.org/blog/update-...

When I was at NC state, I had lunch with a visiting scholar from Sweden who was visiting US universities for the first time. He described his experience as touring “hedge funds with football teams.”

🚨 New working paper! How well do people predict the results of studies? @sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

The destruction of US science will be felt worldwide for decades. Take it from @msier.bsky.social, who was the lead program director for the Biological Oceanography program at the US National Science Foundation.

"Migrants are also likely to be net fiscal contributors. Far from draining our welfare system, migrants are supporting the British state’s solvency." While @lgilbert.co also argues that a collapse in immigration will harm the UK’s economic prospects ukandeu.ac.uk/lower-migrat...

New from me. What I Tell Policy Students About Doing Research with Practitioners 1. Meet practitioners where they are. 2. Do not start by asking for what you need. 3. Make your partners' lives easier. substack.com/@jaeyeonkim/...

I recently discovered Conventional Comments (conventionalcomments.org) for providing a pseudo-standard set of labels for feedback and just tried it for an article review and it was really helpful to specify issues vs. thoughts vs. suggestions, etc. Hopefully it's helpful for the authors too!

Too cloudy? Too sleepy? Too lazy to go outside? I have a solution for you. Aurora webcams.

Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions. We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards. 6/n

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

this is a depressingly good point (about how the EU / Aus / China / Asia-Pac etc did not step up nearly enough to fill the gap left by USAID)

Good news for China, India and Canada: "firms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment... particularly in China, India, and Canada. The most impacted jobs were R&D- intensive."