If/when Dems regain control of Congress, the path is clear. No clerks. No building. No shadow docket. Nothing, until the Wizards In Robes stop ignoring the law, data, history, precedent, & the plain meaning of words in the Constitution. And there will be 25, with 9 chosen by lottery for any case.

It’s hard to convey the insanity of a thirty-something White House staffer getting an interim US Attorney appointment and marching into the grand jury room alone four days later to indict the former Deputy Attorney General and Director of the FBI

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

I turned this thread into a full post over at Fixing Bugs In Democracy. To read about torturing evidence until it confesses, check it out: samwang.substack.com/p/tylenol-ca...

Decades of research have found that acetaminophen is safe for children when administered as recommended. Misleading claims link the medicine to autism. These false claims send a dangerous message to parents and does a disservice to autistic individuals. www.aap.org/en/news-room...

This is bad for America. These fellowships train the innovators and educators and leaders we need. We should triple the size of the program. And as Grimace as my witness, we will.

Over the past 10 days, Trump has sued The New York Times, demanded investigations and firings of his political enemies, attempted (with temporary success) to bully a comedian off the air and threatened progressive groups. These are not signs of Trump’s power. They’re signs of his regime’s weakness.

This headline says it all about where we are on the rule of law. “Trump Fired a U.S. Attorney Who Insisted on Following a Court Order” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

Not only is this foreign aid stay an assault on the separation of powers and rule of law, it’s also an assault on Congress as an institution. If Congress can’t tell the executive to spend money, what can it *actually* do?

Do still we have a system of "checks and balances" if partisan allegiance to the Executive makes the Court unwilling to uphold clear division of power between Congress and the Executive, and the Congress isn't willing to protest?

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP www.science.org/content/arti...

How Pew Research Center now reports on generations www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

this most "this could have been an email" thing i've ever heard

Douthat went to Hamden Hall & Harvard. He's spent ~no time at the colleges that educate the vast majority of 🇺🇸 students. Mailman graduate from KU, where she got a great public education she well knows wasn't indoctrination. Don't. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspapers. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Review of materials for these two jobs begins on 10/1:

Literally the authoritarian playbook: 1. Call your opponents terrorists. 2. Deploy state power against them. There's nothing subtle or confusing or complex about what's happening. The *outcome* is uncertain but the authoritarianism is right out in the open.

I’m not a CEO but seems unlikely that any business leader is going to start the process of building a factory in then next 5 days…

In a personalist regime, your business (tariffs) or your life (Comey, ICE) can be upended at a moment's notice at the whim of the authoritarian leader

Student reporter: I would like to interview you for an article I’m doing on Hamilton and political culture Me:

The University of Utah Department of Political Science is hiring a department chair at the rank of Full Professor! This job is open to any subfield. Let me know if you have questions about the search, including (as you likely are wondering) why we are hiring an external chair.

Wondering how attitudes about autism and its causes will be shaped by partisanship going forward. Strikes me that it's ripe for polarization which will make getting science backed information out more challenging.

I don’t know who’s had a weirder 48 hours — me or the CEO of Tylenol.” — Jimmy Kimmel

A case of an actual pivotal voter (or 2)!

There's a lot going on here but I feel like we could use more jomahs at services. This really makes a statement. www.chabad.org/library/arti...

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Does anyone else feel like grades in graduate classes are like points in Whose Line is it Anyway? Everything is made up and points don't matter?

It’s Fat Bear week! I saw someone comment that they should release the Berenstein Files which is an amazing crossover.

Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor, is 1 of only 100 Americans out of over 250 million adult citizens given the consequential responsibility to advise and consent on exec branch nominees. He used that to approve an antivax, anti-science conspiracy theorist as the nation's top public health official.

*Women (not all parents, the plan is for women to stay home)

When your claims of executive authority to harm people are too broad for John Yoo: "a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade ... would violate American law and the Constitution"

As the brother of an autistic American, as a person who worked on US scientific integrity policy at the White House, and as human being, I'm boiling at the RFK idiocy. And though I have little to offer beyond surpassing rage and national shame, I did smile at this statement from NYU's Arthur Caplan:

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

ACOG reaffirms that acetaminophen is safe for managing pain and fever during pregnancy. No reputable studies support suggestions like those in HHS’s recent announcement linking acetaminophen use in pregnancy to autism; in fact, high-quality studies show no such risk. https://bit.ly/47Wxc59

this is really serious. if it continues, we’ll start to see states make do their own drug labels in some manner, possibly through collabs with other states, similar to what we are seeing with ACIP recs

Don’t put your baby in a catapult!

Jews are in fact allowed to push back on the claim that Jews killed Jesus? like, that's an antisemitic conspiracy theory. saying "it's biblical" doesn't change the fact that it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory. it's kind of doubling down on the antisemitic conspiracy theory, in fact. 1

Really important to note how historically unpopular Donald Trump and his Administration are -- they are underwater on virtually every issue, at least in terms of the presidencies of the last 25 years or so - thanks @gelliottmorris.com

Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued. Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially. Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.

What if we just had laws passed by Congress, without the personalist authoritarian grift & arbitrary policy cycling?

If you are celebrating tonight, wishing you a sweet, peaceful and healthy New Year.

had a ton of fun working on this poll with @today.yougov.com about the songs that everybody knows the lyrics to, the generational anthems are super neat www.numlock.com/p/numlock-su...

Making women endure pain from a variety of ailments while pregnant will cause increased stress on the mother and studies suggest that prenatal stress increases the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes.

"I’m free today because of this advocacy,” Soliman said. “Don’t underestimate your voice."

An open endorsement of hate - precisely what you do not want the President to do after an assassination when messages from leaders disavowing violence are especially important www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/u...

They abandoned the whole free speech thing as soon as people started saying things that genuinely offended them. It wasn’t that they were so tolerant that they accepted nazi talk as a necessary evil to protect speech writ large, they just liked saying and hearing slurs bsky.app/profile/jame...

If you haven't seen this paper before by Jeff Harden and Erin Rossiter, you should! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Add this to the “latent identities that can be made salient and drivers of behavior”. Disney Adult is not a political identity per se but if you link that to an ideological position you can use this identity to motivate participation.

We are hundreds of miles on the interstate past Watergate & the Goldwater-Rhodes visit to the White House. Maybe even a single journalist wants to ask Johnson & Thune why they are violating their oaths of office & not doing their damn jobs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of a key annual report that is central to future inflation data. I’m sure it’s because the numbers are really, really good.