These are like Nightmare before Christmas stories!

You will be visited by three spirits

The best thing about Joe Biden was that we almost never had to hear about what he was doing or saying or thinking. It was so refreshing. Somehow the media turned that into a liability for him.

Was about to share one of my favorite Christmas stories, but then I stumbled upon this one, and well, it chose itself. An absolutely lovely story for this year.

Watching Princess Bride with the kids. Highly recommend as a family movie night. As you wish!

Professor's pro-tip for anyone with college-age kids: Tell your kids go to class. It's really that simple. If you show up, you'll do okay. You don't have to be smart, you just have to be there. Maybe stay off your phones for 50 minutes. Just listen. You'll absorb something. I have data to prove it.

Merry Christmas to all celebrating starting tonight. (Everyone else, meet you at the movies and Chinese food)

This marinara really wants you to tell them their bangs look good.

Today is a big win for Illinois and American democracy. I am glad the Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump did not have the authority to deploy the federalized guard in Illinois.

Imagine interviewing a victim of torture and independently confirming the details of his torture and then being told you can’t broadcast it because the people who ordered the torture wouldn’t give their side of the story.

Reading graduate papers and for the most part they are interested and well written. But pretty much all of them skip the step of just giving me descriptive statistics for their data and jump right into fancy modeling. Show me descriptives! I want to see the means and distributions!

Adam Seth Levine spent three years writing a book and you just...skeeted it out. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

If you like stand up, highly recommend Kumail Nanjiani’s new special Night Thoughts. I was cry laughing.

I have never, once in my career, heard of a news org responding to a decline-to-comment with, “Well, we’ll hold it until you do.” The reason is obvious — it gives the subject of your story a pocket veto.

Pew's big mode effect study a while back had the same finding -- for all that people like to talk about social desirability findings when it comes to more political topics, where it really seems most evident is questions like this:

UPDATE: in point of fact there is not an innocent explanation for this.

Hmmm

Happy last night of Hannukah.

Job Call – Two Research Fellow Positions (ERC Project POPCLIMA) We invite applications for two Research Fellow positions within the ERC-funded project POPCLIMA led by PI Raya Muttarak and hosted at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Bologna. Details: lnkd.in/evwPHKgr

“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”

This whole video is adorbs but when he starts doing David Melech Kia Soul, it sent me. Those hand motions are straight from JCC summer camp. www.instagram.com/reel/DSaTIo4...

These are the people who are willing to go on the record. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/u...

NEW: President Trump is expanding the previous 19-country travel ban to a whopping 39 countries (plus the Palestinian Authority), and appears to expand a block on legal immigration to now include spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens, who were previously exempted.

Syracuse just unveiled the names of new snowplows. My favorite is “You’re killing me, squalls!”

Gotta say it's mindblowing to me that the Brown shooter is still at large and they don't even seem to have identified who they're looking for.

There is no difference - zero, nada - between this and just making data up out of whole cloth by punching numbers into a spreadsheet. I'm looking at you, Mike LaCour.

If this will get me dining reservations and an efficient way around the parks, I may consider giving it a try.

It's bad.

Pretty wild thing to say a week after you went to SCOTUS to argue against independent agencies on the grounds that al federal employees must respond in a knee-jerk way to the president's personal preferences, and no one else's.

Annual reminder that if you see a menorah in someone’s window, that’s an act of defiance against bigotry and hate. It’s also pride and bravery. It’s says “a Jew lives here” and that’s both painting a target but also reminding everyone that we still exist and we always will.

I love when teachers have a sense of humor. Middle kiddo’s chorus performed a choral version of Spice Girls “Wannabe”. They seems to be in on the joke.

Taking kids to a Hannukah celebration, lighting candles publicly, trying to be publicly Jewish feels fraught but also necessary. Try to bring some light into a dark world.

Really important not to condemn a mass shooting of Jews outside Israel unless you in the same breath switch gears and remind why they surely had it coming by association.

Care about gun control? Climate change? Gun control? Abortion rights? Gun control? Universal health care? Gun control? Higher education funding? Gun control? Abolishing ICE? Gun control? Ending murder on the high seas? Gun control? Etc. Your platform is <institutional reform>

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

The scourge of gun violence must end. We will be forever trapped in this devastating cycle until we start addressing the gun violence epidemic in this country.

Thinking of all our colleagues and friends at Brown.

My middle kiddo told me today that I have no filter and say whatever I’m thinking. Little does he know how little I actually say out loud!

I think Apple Watch should have a setting for “my teenager is driving” that would capture my increase in heart rate!

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These Indiana Republicans are civic heroes. Shocking and inspiring to see after the collapse of resistance to illiberalism among so many of their counterparts over the last decade.

shoutout to the crowd that insisted it was a political loser to stand up for abrego garcia’s rights

I think it’s also true that loneliness among women has historically been treated as an individual problem, while loneliness among men is treated as a societal problem. That, in turn, comes from an assumption that women are supposed to earn the company of others while men are entitled to it.

"This is a part of the manosphere story — part of it is struggling young men reaching out, but part of it is just assholes calling out to assholes." @davidfrenchjag.bsky.social and @timmiller.bsky.social discuss Barron Trump's reported fondness of Andrew Tate.

One of the most blatantly authoritarian threats in a Trump term full of them