Jazz did a lot of heavy lifting for my sanity in 2025, and for whatever reason (coincidence? not?) it was a really good year for new jazz releases. I wanted to do a little thread about my favorite albums, and give a top five.

The extent to which everyone refuses to learn whether it's "Sliwa" or "Silwa" is very funny to me

The occupied city winning because its diverse prosperous team came through thanks to guys who don’t usually get the glory is what we’re going for here, I think.

Love this piece by Laura McGrath, who finds an important question for the book industry—“What if we’ve been over-estimating the role that genre plays in the life of a reader?"—in a recent paper I wrote with James English.

As a metaphor maybe

I think a lot of people feel an almost familial pride in and love for their cities, and among other things these marches highlight each city, its particular faces, slang, colors, streets, communities. It's ineffable but I think it’s profound.

Hell yeah www.thedp.com/article/2025...

Roughly 40% of political journalism is “Right Wing Guy Dislikes Left Wing Thing”

It’s so clear he didn’t write this: the fanfic cadence, coherent narrative, diverse (for him) vocab, topical focus, quotations, a sense of other people’s experience, the notion that he spoke to Melania. These Potemkin ramblings show that even his old delights (griping online) are beyond him now.

If eating road kill were just a little more dangerous, I wouldn't have COVID right now.

Really excited to see this piece come out! Studying eclectic readers has been a fascinating and extremely rewarding challenge. We wound up operationalizing both genre and eclecticism in ways that (classic DH stuff here) point to the limits of both concepts. culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...

These were the best donuts in the world, and really good kolaches, too. Now we're a year from them being as bad as Krispy Kreme, <5 years until they're gone entirely.

Out of the cradle, endlessly boppin

I will pretty much always participate in a ranking exercise—a habit that has been weirdly vital to my career. The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.

This is an incredible dataset, and it's a lot of fun to play around with it on the Post45 site!

Here's a graph of the Sufficient Bucket in every NBA playoff game so far this season. The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).

This is a great dataset, very excited to see it go live! Already looking forward to sharing this with my students next time I teach.

One of my favorite papers to work on! Writing with Nat and Jumbly had a huge impact on my thinking about meaning, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of LLMs.

Erik and I have been blown away by the excellent work these students have done. It was really thrilling to see them featured at this showcase!

Inspired by a few people over the holidays mentioning Trump's "blowout win", here are a few tables (via Wikipedia) showing how narrow it was. - Worse than every Dem win of this century - 5th worst in the last 100 years - All time, 49th place (out of 59) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

“Difficult” is the top word missing from Moby Dick. Feels like Melville doing a little malicious compliance with his editor’s demands

What's in an anthology? @jdporter.bsky.social, Price Lab DH Specialist, & @fredner.org (with assistance from David McClure & the @stanfordlitlab.bsky.social) built a relational database of all 464 authors & 3,374 works published across the ten editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

I went to a very interesting AI/pedagogy summit yesterday, and one of my big takeaways is that we really need an institution-level push to normalize this kind of thing. It's a really straightforward way to make sure we preserve the essay form and writing skills (in code or prose).

I can really relate to this

Tried to do a ballot curing phone bank, but by the time they trained the new folks like me they had already finished the entire list. A case where it feels great to be unnecessary

The most evergreen post about MAGA politics I’ve seen

No way a repugnant, entitled New Yorker could commit an overt violent crime on TV for all to see and just get off scot-free

Experiencing all the emotional/physical effects of knowing my life and the lives of everyone I love will either be pretty good or completely destroyed based on an upcoming event I can't control and wondering how people get into sports gambling.

🤌

“In the 1960’s, 90% of Cleveland fans agreed that the Browns were the greatest team in football history; today, that number is far lower.”

Jonquel, you love to see it

Also have to mention that the Houston Comets retain the tie for most titles ever, they live forever in every Houstonian’s heart

Breanna Stewart is the best NY athlete of the last 50 years

What a finals. Peak of the art form

The thing about Trump “working” (standing near) the fry cooker “at McDonalds” (a closed sound stage basically) is that his campaign has correctly understood that people will be really impressed if he didn’t burn himself to death

This cutout has real “Coming this fall to CBS” energy

One of the best basketball games I’ve seen, Stewart on D is mesmerizing

These are imprecise, because nationality is complicated, but I've always wanted a graph that shows the hilariously outsized presence of Sweden in the Nobel committee's conception of world literature.

As soon as I saw this asshole on TV I knew we were screwed. Teams that haven't gone all the way through to the evil side just can't survive karmic hits like that.

Imagine if the meme team getting hot in October tips PA to the GOP Personally I wouldn't root for that, but I guess Mets fans have made their choice www.reuters.com/article/busi...

“Vice President Harris, please say one of the following two sound bites: A: Donald Trump is not racist B: Millions of Americans are racist” Even *this* show is too scary for Trump to risk appearing on TV again

A couple fun graphs about Shohei's historic 50/50+ season. First, here's a scatterplot of the 500ish best power/speed seasons in MLB history, scraped from baseball-reference.com. You can see how Shohei is off on his own, with both the best season ever and one of the most balanced.

Having my spies send a million dollars to the weirdest guy on earth so I’lll be slightly more likely to die in a fire.

Proud to be muttering into such a rapidly growing void

This Hemingway word cloud really runs out of steam after “WAR” and “Bullfighting”. No other writer comes to mind when we see iconic terms like “Yogi Johnson”, “ROOSEVELT” and “captives”. Neither does *this* writer, but I bet he technically wrote each of those things.

Amazing work by the transcript team here, the space in "strong man" 100% accurately capturing Trump's profound misunderstanding of what people are saying when they describe Orbán to him.

Gotta wonder if this guy being the most omnipresent person in our culture has made generative AI easier to sell

I’d be fascinated to know which Presidents Trump can name. No way it’s more than 20 of them. Never would’ve guessed McKinley would be on that list but you just know he’s got to have two or three truly weird guys in there. Probably loves like Pierce and Harding too.

There‘s something profoundly moving to me about seeing Kamala recite all the ways Walz was a good teacher—moral, professional, caring, like so many good teachers out there—and thousands of people cheering like he’s an NBA star.

Pointing at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio every time they show my hometown Spring, TX under Biles’s name