new work photo 😎✨

I'm working on a project on cross-national young gender gap that shows dif patterns. The below w ESS & CSES data show 1. Dif in ideology (id=standardized by country) btwn young men & women, where x is year & y is standard deviations 2. Young men & women ideology relative to other age-gender groups

Our Open Lectures Series 2026 opens tomorrow with John Levi Martin (University of Chicago): "Taking a Position in the Political Field: Voting, Speeches and Interactions in the Weimar Reichstag, 1920–1932". Hosted by our ICT Dept @steffenmau.bsky.social & Institute of Sociology @uni-goettingen.de

Burnham gets his wish after 2 hours of skeptical questions from MP Josh Simons and wife Leah... this really is a Harvard Gov department coup!! (N.B. Leah is a brilliant political theorist – unfortunately slandered as an "economist" in this article...) www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Another blockbuster from @pewresearch.org, on whether silicon samples can accurately simulate human survey respondent answers. They can’t.

Today's parties are hollow fundraising machines. But they don't have to be. A new report from @newamerica.org examines the Working Families Party as a model for rebuilding party organization from the ground up. www.newamerica.org/insights/ass...

NEW - Partisan (In)Tolerance and Affective Polarization - https://cup.org/4ud30Lm - James Tilley, @tmbejan.bsky.social & @sarahobolt.bsky.social #OpenAccess

Thanks to freshly gerrymandered House maps across the country, the number of competitive districts will fall to a new low of 33 (or less) this year, and only 15 are true toss-ups.

This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in U.S. history. I know we’re numb to all of this but this is a seven-alarm fire. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/b...

Let's meet in Paris to talk about the role of social groups for political representation! 🥖🍷🇨🇵

The black mirror episode with Rashida Jones about subscription model start-ups is my working mental model for what it’s going to be like to use chatbots within the next two or three years. #enshittification

I'm not an expert on state legislatures but I am an expert on Congress and there are not words in the English language capable of describing how outside the norm and antidemocratic this is.

“Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on," Rep. Pearson said. Fascist reprisals for protesting.

The Tennessee Speaker of the House will remove all Democratic Caucus members from standing committees and subcommittees as punishment for their redistricting protests. Democracy dies in Nashville.

For anyone who supported the endowment tax because they were sincerely worried that universities were hoarding cash rather than just trying to destroy any civil society that wasn't subservient to Trump, this should be seen as a great outcome. Mission accomplished!

101 courses are good, actually, & they are the only way to deliver intro-level material at quality scale to students, unless you want to fund 10-20x more faculty to teach the same amount of students in 15-person seminars. What’s that I’m hearing <taps earpiece>, we don’t want to do that? 🤔🧐

One of the things I'm most curious to analyze in these data are a subset of cases where the candidate included a short appeal from his wife to women electors. Excited to announce that after years of reading and digitizing these speeches, I have at last found ONE (1) wife guy.

once again, just spitballing, what if we just provided for everyone's basic material needs

one likely way to reduce the sheer volume of scholarly publication would be more widely distributed security of employment and recognition for smaller, better, units of work done.

We are hiring at the Dept of Sociology @uniluzern.bsky.social ! Applications for Assistant Professor of Sociology with a focus on “Communication and Sociological Theory" (100%, tenure track) are due May 29, 2026 www.unilu.ch/en/universit...

Data entry for my interwar British campaign speeches continues. This project continues to be exhausting but I’m soooo exited about the data coverage and quality for 1929.

real ‘covfefe’ energy on bluesky the last 48 hours

this is also one of my hobbyhorses. you want a better caliber of lawmaker? you want to reduce the odds of corruption? pay them more. a lot more.

They’re gonna close down the predatory learning management system unless we put on the best dang talent show this town has ever seen!!!

My kid is a college senior and wrote this email to his prof today (Gen Z can’t catch a break from once in a lifetime things happening annually to them…)

Just had Canvas stop working as I was typing comments on a student paper. I now can’t access anyone’s work or grades. Strangely, this never happened back when I used a grade book and had students email me their papers, a system no shareholders extracted money from.

Photo by @nicolehester.bsky.social for The Tennesseean www.tennessean.com/picture-gall...

Canvas, the Strait of Hormuz for American education

Good morning. What do we know so far about patterns of voting in the local elections in England?

this is so funny, i'm losing it

Ahead of the state election in September this year, new polls from Sachsen-Anhalt show the AfD at 41%. According to these polls, only four parties would make it into the state parliament, meaning that 41% might just give the AfD an absolute majority.

Check in with the law professors in your life, they may have seen this

Here 8 of the 10 “turnkey” facilities ICE is looking to purchase outright from private prison firms according to multiple sources. These would be much harder to fight than the warehouses, and would be “immune” from state or county level legislation as federal enclaves.

lol

How non-Germans perceive me when I tell them I moved to Bremen

New paper in @ajpseditor.bsky.social. Is descriptive representation good for substantive representation? Why do voters stay loyal to corrupt and poorly governing ethnic parties? I argue that we ought to focus less on patronage and more on dignity concerns. Defiant pride can come at a price. 1/🧵

back on my candidate speech digitization grind, so excited to be approaching the finish line of this seven-year-OCR-saga 💃🏻

Another new paper for the reading pile: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... They find that the partisan shift in support for higher ed “began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands…“

One week left to apply:

Is that Karl Marx

🎶 one of these things is not like the others 🎶

Germany has surpassed the rest of us on the politics of gender bathroom signs. Operating on a level the North American mind (mine) cannot comprehend

Great analysis by @eborbath.bsky.social

NEW: A new pre-print study offers the first causal evidence that outsourcing reasoning tasks to AI can rapidly erode users' independent performance AND their will to persist despite difficulty. "People’s persistence drops... they’re also not willing to try without AI.” futurism.com/artificial-i...

"If oil prices remain at current levels for the next 12 months, the Canadian oil industry is on track to make $90B in profits...$60B more than it would have earned without the war. ...Applying [a] 15% rate on the excess profits of the oil industry could generate $9B over the next 12 months."

NEW Economist/YouGov Apr 10-13: Gas prices % who say gas prices where they live are going up a lot U.S. adult citizens 55% Stance on Iran war Strongly support 31% Strongly oppose 75% Party Democrats 68% Independents 56% Among Republicans Overall 43% MAGA 36% Non-MAGA 54% yougov.com/en-us/articl...