It’s pretty interesting to compare Easter messages from political leaders and then consider which ones the media treats as being out of the mainstream or dangerous

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

R.I.P.

NeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?

OpenAI's former Head of Policy Research Miles Brundage announces AVERI, a nonprofit aimed at advocating the idea of external audits for frontier AI models (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

New tariff just dropped. Americans set to pay an additional 10% tax on all goods from Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. It starts in two weeks, rising to 25% by June. (Aside: A trade war with one EU country is a trade war with the entire EU).

Explaining the (relatively muted) market impact of Trump threatening to jail Fed Chair Powell: Trump talk, talk, talks, and only rarely acts. His talk is alarming, but he TACO's so often that markets have learned not to respond. And so he's broken that feedback loop from politics to markets.

Turns out Independents like independent central banks

🚨Job alert! 🚨 I'm advertising a PhD position (66%) in Comparative Politics at HU Berlin. Ideal candidates combine a research interest in autocratic politics, conflict, and/or political violence with strong quantitative methods skills. ⏳ 4 (+2) years | 🗓 DL 16.01; Start March/April 26 More info:

This polling data is really important, not least because it is a sober reminder that the government in power in DC does not make policy by public opinion poll. The other party that might want to hold power ought to think hard about what this means.

Denmark, you up?

One of the Europeans who has been barred by Rubio’s State Department from entering the US for his work in combating online hate speech happens to be a permanent US resident with an American wife and child. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

NORAD Santa tracker is Woke

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

fair question from a friend: is there anything relevant going on in quant political science besides finetuning standard errors, causal identification and AI algos?

Community. Note.

Days after FIFA awarded Trump a fake peace prize, DOJ moves to drop charges in FIFA corruption case www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/n...

Wow. This says *everything* about the German defence debate, really. For YEARS experts have fretted over public opinion on defence spending and how it would be impossible to justify spending over 1 or 2%. Turns out 35% (!!!!) of Germans think we’re already spending OVER 5 % of GDP. WTH.

Die @ec.europa.eu lädt 150 zufällig geloste Bürgerinnen und Bürger aus allen 27 EU-Mitgliedstaaten zu einem Bürgerforum zum Thema Krisenvorsorge ein. www.buergerrat.de/aktuelles/mi... #bürgerrat

How did the @nytimes.com editors let this sentence appear? "Critics have likened Mr. Trump’s approach to extortion, while others have chalked it up as a cost of doing business with this administration." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI www.nature.com/articles/d41...

So glad the implication is to develop better tests rather than to desk reject all work based on online surveys 🙏

NARRATOR: Roth quite clearly did not name call & we need our leaders to stop granting <every bad faith premise> of the far right authoritarians' lawless assault on higher education before we push back.

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I hired and worked with Jamal for a year. www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

#30DayMapChallenge Day 18 - Tour De France 1975 The 1975 Tour de France was the 62nd edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It took place between 26 June and 20 July, with 22 stages covering a distance of 4,000 km (2,485 mi).

I want Arnold Schwarzenegger to know that the notion of "out-cheating" each other in electoral districting is farcical when working in an area where using PEDs is increasingly becoming the norm (bodybuilding) to "outcompete" each other

THE YAED APPLE

Sliwa receives almost exactly the number of votes Cuomo would have needed to close up to Mamdani

📢 Call for Papers for EPSS 2026 conference in Belfast is out: epssnet.org/belfast-2026... This we’’ll feature the last two sections today: 🔝 This week: Comparative Politics of Development & Political Representation 🧵

If I count Sam Altman as an elder millennial, it is actually quite noteworthy what he achieved: he made boomers and gen x listen

honestly tired of autocrats playing strongmen on the world stage just because their power doesn't depend on the will of the people in their countries

It's bad when your German friends say this all seems so familiar

We believe there’s room for multiple poli sci conferences in Europe, just like in the US & other regions. 🔝 But if you’re looking to support a Europe-based not-for-profit member-led organization, submit your work to 1️⃣ EPSS conference: 📍 Belfast 📅 18–20 June 2026 📝 epssnet.org/belfast-2026/ 4/

Europeans: Kafkaesque Americans: McCarthyesque

Here's 90 minutes with @adamprz.bsky.social, Sue Stokes, Steven Levitsky, and @dziblatt.bsky.social on the state of American democracy right now. It was a great honor for me to be able to convene this set of people to speak together at this moment. Please share! open.spotify.com/episode/0F8W...

It wasn't even remotely Jimmy's most biting monologue that night

Emboldened by the Trump 2.0 administration, Orban-funded "researchers" are laying the ground for questioning some of the key tenets of European integration.

Very bad news for any political scientist wanting to replace human annotators with AI -- as expected, you can basically generate *any* statistical result you want.

A little warning about the CUP "coffee break" in Exhibit Hall A: they only had organic decaf when I went there #apsa2025 #apsa25

PSA: All APSA panels will be distributed along the various beaches of Vancouver

This campaign has produced the best ads/content of any Democratic campaign I’ve covered since Obama ‘08 and it’s not really close.

The latest polling from East Germany's #SachsenAnhalt should come as no surprise to anyone studying the far right, paralleling trends from similar regions in the UK and France.

how many university presidents preemptively caving to the Trump administration are more interested in keeping their multimillion-dollar jobs than preserving their university's research funding and why is it all of them

That’s two reported ChatGPT suicides in one week, plus the grandpa who died trying to meet Meta’s chatbot which had arranged an in-person meeting All going really well

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said direct talks between Russia's Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy wouldn't happen, even as the Trump administration continues to push for a peace deal.