📢 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

Harold Hamm is having a good day, at least

The constituency of Americans who see DEI as detrimental to the country is vanishingly small, the sort of constituency that can easily be ignored if politicians want to ignore it.

Most of my grant panel service has been for NSF (where they likely did exactly the same thing) but I spent a good chunk of my '24 Thanksgiving break on NEH panel work. Between grantees, reviewers, panelists, so many thousands of hours of careful thought discarded. Which is the point, of course.

This shitty culture destroyed a generation of centrist intellectuals and weakened our defenses against fascism.

Random Q: does anyone know who Merle Fainsod's PhD advisor was? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_F...

Today I had a meeting about funding I received for a November 2025 (!) presentation. Part of the agreement requires me to present the talk at a university-wide event in March 2026. I was told today I could either censor/change my talk’s title and receive the funding, or withdraw. I withdrew.

Random Q: does anyone know who Merle Fainsod's PhD advisor was? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_F...

As good excuse as any to listen to this Empire pod episode on Diego Garcia youtu.be/w8AQe1TZNLc?...

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Any time I participate in a live training like this I alternate rapidly between intense irritation and feeling super bad for the poor normal person who has to give a semi-voluntary class to a bunch of professors.

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has shared a big data update, covering all recorded US protests through Jan 2026. Some key takeaways 🧵:

New study at The Lancet estimates that the illegal dismantling of USAID will result in up to 9.4 million deaths by 2030 alone Some 2.5 million will be children under the age of 5 No hell too hot, no prison too brutal, for the DOGE boys who did this

Tbf, it has been hovering around freezing or even above, the last few days, so all you need is a bathrobe, really.

So, I just have to note that there is a middle-aged woman at the Fargo Y pool, who, every workout, after clocking something like 2000 yards of smartly paced freestyle, spends about 40 minutes swimming fly, CONTINUOUSLY. Must cover at least 1500 yards, suspect she might do 2000.

Did…Mike Tyson just call me fat because RFK Jr paid him to? WTF

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

Normal people are out there doing extraordinary things. My mom's health aide emailed me: ICE took 2 of her neighbors; when she told them they weren't welcome, she was met w/a rifle. Now she's driving a neighbor to work hidden in the back of her car & escorting the neighbor's kids to the bus stop.

This is Jerry Lawson. He invented the video game cartridge for the Fairchild Channel F system. Because of his invention, many consoles had cartridges and CD formats and would become the norm. The Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, and many consoles wouldn't exist without him. Happy Black History Month.

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

January 2026 wtf

Don't mess with the Sons of Norway

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

NDSU polisci grads do tend to be scrappy

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

I wrote this yesterday about the hero city of Minneapolis www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKOW...

A start, but no retirement. Fire him. Also Noem and Miller's heads too. Prosecutions for murderers. In short,

Taliban's got nothing on the PTA

Wife and I in tears reading this…

A little thread of some courageous people bsky.app/profile/nkal...

I do really love the way upper midwesterners pronounce the word boots. Also, weirdly, does not rhyme with the UM pronunciation of roots.

I went down the football fan subreddits rabbit hole this morning, and I am utterly gobsmacked. 90+% of the content in the top threads are unabashed FUCK ICE posts, memes mocking the regime, and dudes saying how important it is to come together over something this significant.

Fargo public schools still holding out...-42 wind chill at the bus stop tomorrow should be interesting.

Greenland is covered with ice and Iceland is very nice. youtu.be/ePA1e9dtKAU?...

The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up. Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵

Huh, pretty sure this policy is why I exist today. Or, at least, my grandfather and great-grandparents took a Vienna-Paris-London-DC route, with a pretty long stop in London.

Snow could be better but bluebird days at White Pass provide some great views of Ranier.

A buddy in MN shared a drawing a classmate of his kid made. They've been making thank you notes for parents who have volunteered to carpool them to school so their own parents don't have to risk waiting out by the bus stop.

Weird to see your senator on TV endorsing blatant corruption. Either this is legitimate law enforcement and dropping the case in return for resignation would be corrupt quid pro quo, or it is illegitimate law enforcement and corrupt in and of itself.

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...

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

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...

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...

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

gotta be the time I enjoyed cheese