My PhD's advisor's dissertation was on central bank independence, and that's supposed to be comically boring, not weirdly relevant.

My mother grew up in Birmingham, AL. Upon seeing this at her local Target, she said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Not even Bull Connor did this kind of foolishness.”

I want to draw your attention to the woman in the pink coat, with the walker. Also, as a former citizen, often visitor, I want to say the new Minnesota flag is great.

I have to start teaching again Tuesday. Also was trying to stop stress eating so much. Space this shit out a little.

Seeing people do "here's the savvy take on how and why the US should acquire Greenland" and just feeling so *embarrassed* for them. Have some dignity. You don't need to be an apologist for the world's dumbest autocrat, you're not somehow sophisticated for seeing The Smart Play on imperial vainglory.

Love this quote from the article: “I characterize science as a bunch of 5-year-olds playing soccer,” says another researcher [Sam Goldman]. “They all go where the ball is, running around the field in a herd.” www.wired.com/story/scient...

Feels like a tap-the-sign kind of news day

Powerful piece in STAT this morning from some NIH staff members who have resigned www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n... 1/3

Thank you to everyone who contributed to support Renee's wife and family. The organizer of the GoFundMe has announced it is closed, and the funds will go in a trust for the family. If you need a little hit of humanity, I encourage you to scroll through the many, many comments.

I like this kind of commentary from my soccer announcers.

"An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good" - by Danez Smith "Neighbor, you should have made it home to your child, to the bright warmth of his laughter, but our country is at war with its people, and your goodness makes you an enemy, a citizen insurgent." www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/feat...

What strikes me is how not alarmed she is. Because a reasonable human being in this country didnt used to expect an agent of the state pulling a gun over this level of interaction.

They don't. It's just part of the terror campaign.

Someone points out that the killer is taping the incident. It looks like he tilts the phone away when he shoots but the seconds immediately leading up to it were recorded. The footage of him after the killing and touching his phone is probably evidence deletion. bsky.app/profile/just...

This point is important. All state violence is political violence, technically. But this is *brazen political violence*: Send a paramilitary org to terrorize a community. Murder someone for disagreeing with you. Call their disagreement terrorism. Claim the right to murder your political opponents.

Not a lot of profit in tagging toxic speech at the moment.

Contrast this statement with video of the incident: bsky.app/profile/dani...

Some reflections from me on January 6 in comparative and historical perspective (first time on substack) open.substack.com/pub/ziblatt4...

This, but also not just politicians. So many of the election workers and officials I’ve talked with have harassment and threats of violence as one of their top concerns as they try to do their jobs. And yet it is very hard to design policy solutions that can target that 0.1%.

Yep. LLMs can be productivity-enhancing in various domains, but so far, if the goal is to produce well educated humans, they ironically undermine our ability to be as productive as we were as educators. You need more faculty to produce the same outcomes. Now, if your goal is generating diplomas...

Oil companies aren’t going to sink tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures that will take decades to pay off in order to revive Venezuela’s oil sector when they don’t know what the security situation will look like in 6 days, 6 months, or 6 years from now. They are not charities.

Man, if I ever plot a coup against my boss, but need to keep my hands relatively clean, I hope there's a chump in the White House to send Delta Force to do it for me.

But...the old regime is still in power, just different members of it. Reality TV Regime Change.

Ok, so Rodriguez (or someone less visible) decided she'd like the lion's share of the rents, gave Trump some solid content to sell for a few days, and nothing of substance is changing in Venezuela. Do I have that right?

Good morning to my American friends! You will never guess what Trump has done while you were asleep.

Child exploitation content on X/Twitter sharply increased under Musk, who not only abruptly disbanded the group of volunteer experts advising the platform on child safety, image exploitation, and other abuses in 2022, but tried to blame them for the company's CSAM problem www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1...

Must admit I didn't realize that we'd speedrun LLM anthropomorphism to the "scapegoat the tech I designed for the behavior I engineered" stage so soon.

North-Eastern vs Western Minnesota (wind chill of -18 in the second photo).

gotta be the time I enjoyed cheese

Not much natural snow at Lutsen this year, but the Lake Superior views aren't half bad.

Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.

Going to add my own two cents to the academic convo on AI... I do think there is an AI bubble + it will burst. That doesn't mean AI will go away, but it does mean it will be less ubiquitous than many of the tech leaders say it will. Also, i think a lot of us are frustrated. As an academic... 1/7

Doesn't include the rye black and white cookie, which was, frankly, a shock, but here it is: share.google/pzRzg6sM2bKt...

You probably never had a chance to eat at Bernbaum's, which is a shame. But now there's a cookbook! (although yours will likely not be signed and unexpectedly hand-delivered by the author) www.dottirpress.com/bernbaums

In a world of Sundown Towns where Black people weren’t allowed after nightfall, Green Book businesses were tiny spots of light. Traveling while Black was about survival. The Green Book Project documents that history: greenbookproject.org.ohio-state.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

NSF panels were a form of service that always felt truly worthwhile. All systems are flawed but this one seemed to work pretty well.

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

I'm going to sound like a broken record by the way I keep mentioning how 95% of Somalis in the Twin Cities metro area are US citizens, but very few mainstream outlets are pointing this out. This should be very basic stuff for any news organization.

This fetid landmark, this historical stain on humanity is primarily due to the stunningly reckless obliteration of America's foreign assistance agency earlier this year. Led by the richest man on earth. In secret, on a weekend. With zero analysis or discussion of its catastrophic impacts.

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

Completely missed this over the weekend; Fox was a giant. I use {car} virtually every time I boot up R. #RIP

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

Just published a deep look at where open social networks stand in 2025: Mastodon’s leadership change, Bluesky’s trajectory, AT Protocol, ActivityPub, cross-network tools, and more. For newsrooms and public service orgs, this moment really matters. werd.io/the-state-of...

WE JUST KEEP WINNING. (UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program RESTORED!!!!)

During Jim Crow, everything from restaraunts to stores to hotels to pharmacies to gas stations required making safe choices. They shaped every trip a Black person made. We document that history, and you can add your story to it here #CommunityMap: greenbookproject.osu.edu #GreenBookProject #EconSky

In chart form (with a slightly different basket of comparison agencies) bsky.app/profile/empt...

“With concepts like harmlessness or reasoning, people oftentimes just throw the word around to pick something that falls near that category that they can measure and say, ‘Great, now I’ve measured it,’” Bean added. Also my social science pet peeve. Measuring human/social concepts is hard.