Want to talk to the past? Here' an LLM "trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 & 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library" Quite different from an LLM roleplaying a Victorian. huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

Lots of replies and quotes asking how this is working out for CBS. But we don’t need to look far for a reminder that it often makes business sense for the wealthy to take over communication platforms and use them for more profitable political aims, even at a financial loss to that platform.

Does the NYT have a reporter with a specialized beat in social movements? I'm guessing not, and I'm furthermore guessing that this is part of the problem. Certain kinds of politics do not compute in standard journalism unless you have someone whose particular job is to understand and explain them.

📣 New historical data visualization! "How Fast Was the Mail?" is an interactive map showing how long information took to travel across the US between 1882-1908: cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ +

They will have the troops wear slippers before the admit there are boots on the ground

I have said it before and I'll say it again. Academia is NOT a good place to build self-esteem. Poorly described work targets, amorphous deadlines, inadequate credit for the teaching that pays the bills, lots of anonymous evaluation of your work. All of that feels like an evaluation of your

One of my favorite, underutilized network datasets.

New data drop from IRS useful for studying labor markets & migration www.irs.gov/statistics/s...

Wow.

Fire sale on my book Building Resilience which argues that #socialcapital - the ties that bind us - are critical for surviving and thriving during shocks www.amazon.com/Building-Res...

I have been thinking for the last few years about ideologies and how they emerge in text. This paper, with @davidlazer.bsky.social and Kim Williams, reflects some of those thoughts, and how I think we can improve and expand on how we operationalize ideology in discourse. arxiv.org/abs/2603.18945

I'm organizing a Research with AI Agents Workshop Series, inviting colleagues and friends who have been actively exploring the application of AI agents to share how they're using them in their work and research. The first talk will feature Dr. Yanbo Zhang. See abstract and bio below. 1/2

You can't smell a flower, you can't eat a Swedish fish, you can't clip your toenails without an ID

I wrote about why @knightfoundation.org invested in @bsky.app: philanthropy can act when mission & opportunity align. We believe in @jay.bsky.team's vision for a better social web—& in ideas (like @masnick.com's) that grow out of the research ecosystem Knight has long supported. kf.org/kfbluesky

A new report from the Atlantic Council shows brokers and resellers facilitate global spyware deals that would be blocked under regional export rules, reports Tech Policy Press fellow Vas Panagiotopoulos. www.techpolicy.press/policymakers...

As my mentors have always said, every talk is a job talk

🚀🚀 WE ARE HIRING!!! - Postdoc Position on Inequalities in Epidemic Processes 🚀🚀 Join as a postdoc the Network Epidemics Group at the HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics (Budapest) to work on behavior driven epidemics. www.renyi.hu/node/4925

"You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right." Goddamn, Melville could really cook.

I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments. 📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026 Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)

📢 We are hiring: Combined Postdoc position at V-Dem Institute and GLD! Applications are open for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Cross-National Survey Methodology in Political Science. Application: web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/103... 🧵1(4) #Polisky #PoliSciSky #PoliticalScienceJobs #PostDoc

Polnet is in Europe this year, super excited!!!

Recommended read from @courtneyr.bsky.social on the Coalition for Independent Technology Research lawsuit against the Trump administration for chilling speech and retaliating against researchers working in the public interest to study phenomena on tech platforms. (I am a member of the Coalition.)

Deepfake financial fraud is a massive, growing problem. Justin Hendrix spoke with Alice Marwick (Data & Society) & Anya Schiffrin (Columbia SIPA) about their new report on the issue and the regulatory reforms taking shape around the world that could turn the tide.

Two TT jobs in technology and democracy at Northeastern’s Dublin Innovation Institute with the great @davidlazer.bsky.social urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

This compares each market to the average post 2016 year:

Our article with Timothy Fraser et al: Uneven paths: Soft Policy's benefits to recovery in Louisiana Parishes after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita TL;DR: Top-down, state-led recovery policies are not significantly linked to recovery while bottom up ones are www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I’m pleased to share that the academic paper that goes with the story linked here has just been accepted at Social Science Quarterly. 🥳 This is the first academic publication associated with @scharschool.bsky.social Learning Communities. It was a real team effort. schar.gmu.edu/news/2025-12...

Unprecedented corruption. Literally asking for billions of dollars.

Extremely useful!

Not all news clicks teach us something. In POQ, Cardenal et al., using digital trace data, find that only article-level exposure to Ukraine stories—not general news browsing—predicted who learned about the Russian invasion. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

New paper @jhppl.bsky.social (w/ Michael Shepherd & Alee Lockman) where we find Americans who grew up (socialized) in rural areas are more likely to own guns, support the NRA, & hold more conservative firearm policy attitudes over the lifespan, even after moving away. 1/ doi.org/10.1215/0361...

Check out CHIP50's most recent report, looking at immigration attitudes! Key takeaways: People lean towards strong disapproval, 49% to 37%, with enormous partisan divides. Independents disapprove about 2:1. www.chip50.org/reports/amer...

I am gonna double down on this a little: the reaction of many senior academics to fairly banal LLM takes like ‘they’re useful tools’ is extremely unbecoming, & would, if I was your graduate student or junior colleague, actively make me feel like I had to either lie to you or de facto hobble myself

This is exactly it. And I would emphasize one other thing: we, society, *will* figure out a better way to incorporate these tools into workflows. It's absolutely chaotic right now, with a ton of misuse. We're in a transition phase and we will figure it out. Right now is the most chaotic it will be.

We posted lots of great research about Buddhists today at @pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org/religion/202... www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/... www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent. State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes. www.wired.com/story/gramma...

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability www.propublica.org/article/trum...

A few people have asked for the syllabus from my grad seminar on Generative AI for social science -- just posted it here: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/10/n...

This is the way a lot of us would like to think we would respond to hostile questions in a Congressional hearing, but its rare to see a witness just turn the tables on a Senator like this.

I am excited about this new paper, Negativity & Misinformation, just out with @cbwlezien.bsky.social in @polcommjournal.bsky.social: "durable biases in information processing, by media organizations and humans more generally, can produce misinformation and misperceptions..." doi.org/10.1080/1058...

Interesting paper. When science is cheap, multiverse analysis becomes the key abstraction for authors & journals to strategize for. These results suggest its the new unit of evidence authoring & review should accommodate. Related to some of my comments here: substack.com/@jessicahull...

In this systematic review and meta-analysis of up to 153 longitudinal studies: Social media use was associated with higher depression, behavioral problems, self-injury, and substance use, and lower self-perception and academic achievement tinyurl.com/47z3anym

APSA Centennial Center Research Grant applications are due Sunday! The #CCRG Spring cycle provides support for APSA #members who are contingent or #communitycollege faculty, #faculty in non-PhD departments, and #gradstudents. The new application deadline is March 15th! buff.ly/A3Bxsbm

I'm giving the upcoming Online Causal Inference Seminar, this Tuesday 11:30am Eastern. I'll be talking about different dose–response functions you might want to estimate when treatment effects may spill over from one unit to another. Tune in & ask questions! sites.google.com/view/ocis/home

🧵 Some personal news: My new book, ON COURAGE – with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist @juliaangwin.com – is available for pre-order NOW (out June 30). It’s a deeply reported manual with sixteen lessons for how each of us can defy authoritarianism. Pre-order: www.harpercollins.com/products/on-...

ICYMI, @thecoalition.bsky.social @knightcolumbia.org & @protectdemocracy.org filed a new First Amendment lawsuit earlier today challenging the Trump admin's denial of visas to tech researchers, tech workers, fact-checkers. Here's a post explaining why we're suing. mailchi.mp/knightcolumb...

Join us next week Friday, March 20, for a presentation by @leticiabode.bsky.social and @pfchap.bsky.social on "Better Access: A Framework for Accessing High-Influence Public Platform Data". Registration required via events.gwdg.de/event/1260/

Even if the destruction somehow stopped today, it will take years to rebuild.

A Berlin court has ordered X to grant researchers API access under the Digital Services Act. Daniela Alvarado Rincón, Simone Ruf and Jürgen Bering explain how they won the case, and why it’s a major step for researcher data access.