Just to add that I love how this guy is wearing a hard hat... in case a ham falls on him and breaks his skull. Maybe you think that's very unlikely... but the more time you spend in a cave full of hung hams, the more that probability approaches absolute certainty.

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

Die Hard twist: it’s an Econ department

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Brilliant little online tool: Spin the globe and see what your life would have been like had you gotten a different draw in the place-of-birth lottery h/t @leightjessica.bsky.social on LinkedIn

I can't tell if NBER is reading the room or not @guygrossman.bsky.social ...

Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to

This whole thing is just unbelievably wholesome. youtu.be/R9XN1iOungs

my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

This is so very very ding dang sweet. I may/may not have cried. Love - you know? It's a whole thing!

In happier news, started a Star Wars reunion movie with the kid last night @daveevansphd.bsky.social

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Handwaving away your party’s embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories by saying “at least we’re not controlled by George Soros” is the most ridiculously quiet-part-loud thing I’ve ever seen.

This is very very bad and I appreciate @yasharali.bsky.social for reporting it in detail

Once when we wanted to show the ineffectual dithering of The Good Place Committee, we had one of them say, "There are rules, procedures. This is The Good Place -- we can't just *do stuff.*" We almost didn't include it, because we thought it was a little on the nose.

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

Really? It seems like the only time I ever hear him even give commentary it’s while running from reporters

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

The Green Book Project is best understood as memorializing the small number of businesses that respected Black customers. What was the usual way Black customers were treated? Listen to my uncle describe an ice cream parlor to see 1/3 greenbookproject.osu.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

Pro tip from distinguished computer scientist Susan Eggers, who got her PhD in the 1980s. Economists might need to tap into a fire hydrant or something.

"AS THEY ATE"

"Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed...Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing...They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving"

NEW: Humanitarian officials staged a last-minute plea to Trump officials at their fancy hotel to re-start food aid $ for a huge refugee camp in Kenya. The Trumpers blew it off and babies starved. @annamaria.bsky.social & Brett Murphy www.propublica.org/article/keny...

Trump's dementia has grown so extreme that a select group of advisors are now running the country without his input. To find who those advisors are and what their plans are, buy my new book, which will appear in March 2029.

Call for Pitches: In Development Issue 1 (2000 USD per piece). I know Lauren well, and she's excellent. www.indevelopmentmag.com?utm_source=n...

Come to the burbs @socio-steve.bsky.social

What a year this weekend has been.

Again, even though the Japanese government leading up to 1945 committed terrible atrocities, none of us think that Japanese internment was caused by the Japanese government. It was caused by American racism.

I promise if you’re not Jewish and don’t know any Jews quite well you really do not understand the level of justified paranoia baked into most public Jewish gatherings: Security at swimming lessons at the JCC, off duty police outside a bar mitzvah as a favour, etc. It shocked me.

Our local JCC has multiple layers of security including a 10 foot fence around the property, a manned gatehouse, a long indirect approach, bollards, keycard entry, and multiple armed guards on duty whenever the facility is open.

Fiddler on the roof, but with ICE agents playing the part of Cossacks. I know people think of Fiddler as a heartwarming story about a funny man doing Ya-ba-dibba-dibbas, but it's literally about pogroms like this

2 weeks ago, 4 blocks from my synagogue local police had a shootout with a man holed up in his house with an AK47. It took multiple armored vehicles to breach the house and I could hear the shooting and concussion grenades. The man had a nazi flag and other material in his house.

The chabad rabbi killed at Bondi Beach

Three days ago. No more words.

Special note to economists: It can’t start with “Your methods were so bad it inspired me to never…”

In Development's first call for pitches is up! . Tell us a compelling story about how something works — or fails to work — in the developing world. 2k-4k words, rolling review through Jan. 12 indevelopmentmag.substack.com/p/call-for-p...

"Unless you are living in 19th century Japan, you are probably used to reading text horizontally. Therefore, when possible, you should keep text horizontal – it’s the way people are used to reading" Amen. This goes double for graphs in presentations.

Registered for this by zoom & putting in my prop bet at draft kings on @donmoyn.bsky.social ending on an optimistic take (that’s the site where you can bet on us all being drafted to serve a unitary executive)

Gmail truncated the message display b/c it couldn’t handle this much data viz

Tomorrow at 8am (DC time) I'll be presenting on "Keeping Every Child Safe at School: What We’ve Learned from Impact Evaluations and What the Next Generation of Evidence Should Tell Us." It's streaming: come check it out! wfp-org-conference.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

I believe eigen fly. I believe eigen touch the sky.

Friend is listening to a neurology lecture online, patient is a physician who got up to give a lecture, and got through it all in 10 minutes. Getting through a lecture too fast was the first clue to his colleagues that he had a neurological disorder apparently.