The sudden passing of John Leahy reminds us of life’s fragility and of the importance of distinguishing what truly matters from what does not.

John Leahy, the chair of Michigan’s economics department, has suddenly passed away. I deeply mourn his loss. He was exceptionally smart and humorous, but most importantly, he had deep empathy. It is so difficult to process what happened. May he rest in peace.

On Saturday, protests in the US will demand "no kings." The Rose asks in its new release, "O," that "Until the day the king resigns//let kingdoms fall for dreams to rise." www.youtube.com/watch?v=Busw...

Werner Von Braun would like a word. Also, do the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann, Fermi, Szilard, Wigner - and Einstein, whose letter got the ball rolling. To name just a few. Or American mathematics: Courant, Kac, Lax, Wald...

Pope Leo joined X today, but I can't see him on Bluesky. He needs to be encouraged to use alternatives to X.

Educating international students is a massive export of services. They pay us money earned in a foreign nation for a product the US has, until now, had an absolute advantage in. We cannot effectively sell these services if these students can be deported, detained, and even kidnapped at random.

I am profoundly saddened and alarmed by Columbia University and Paul Weiss law firm’s capitulation to the increasingly dictatorial Trump administration.

Jörg Oechssler and Georg Weizsäcker have created a new opportunity for us to donate for Ukraine: yourcontributionsquared.eu/en/

I have signed this wide-ranging open letter that protests against recent developments at US universities: sites.google.com/view/we-who-...

I wonder how much anxiety among foreign students and faculty in the US has been caused by Trump's executive order regarding visa policies. It sounds dangerously vague. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

The new US administration seems set o join the group of authoritarian regimes that don't respect the law, internationally and internally. This Episcopalian bishop's sermon yesterday was a beautiful expression of the worry that many people have. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

I read Emmanuel Carrère's "V 13" over the holidays. It is a remarkable re-telling of the trial of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. It prompted me to look back at some aspects of the history of first quarter of the 21st century:

Few things are as moving as this.

Paper worth reading: "The Optimality of Majority Rule" by Nina Bobkova. It offers a new perspective on why simple majority-rule may be best: it not only aggregates information but it also motivates voters to learn about what really matters. Link: drive.google.com/file/d/1pVVE... #polecon

I wrote an intro to the literature on simple mechanisms. Out now in the JEP. It’s a short (14-page) plain-language summary, designed to get students to the research frontier. 📈📉 pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Suppose you didn't know who won the election. Two options: (i) I tell you whether it was Trump, or it was Harris, (ii) I don't tell you the winner, but I tell you who won Michigan. According to the rational inattention literature, (ii) has better chances of catching your attention than (i).

I wonder whether it is relative or absolute disadvantage that determines which job in the Trump government one gets. In any case, I qualify in both respects for many government jobs!

Which role should Google Scholar citation counts play in tenure reviews? What are people's experiences, and opinions?

The provision of spaces for online interaction seems a public good. Some providers offer such spaces as a byproduct with the main intention being something else, such as political influence. Maybe some public policy intervention would be jusfied?

The newly published collection of hundreds of letters by Oliver Sacks includes three letters to his cousin Robert Aumann. Sacks brings up religion, evolution, consciousness, rationality ... Sacks even, politely, acknowledges game theory. Only letters from Sacks, no letters to Sacks are published.