Reagan-appointed federal judge: "justice is supposed to be administered...equally for everyone, without fear or favor. This is the opposite of what is happening now....Day after day, I observed in silence as President Trump, his aides, & his allies dismantled so much of what I dedicated my life to."

“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.

I can't be the only person hearing "terminate the filibuster" in an Austrian accent.

NO FOOD FOR YOU

Online platforms shape what we know, how we connect & who gets heard. In partnership with Knight Georgetown Institute, we are launching a new series, Seeing the Digital Sphere: The Case for Public Platform Data. The series starts today, with an essay from KGI’s Leticia Bode and Peter Chapman.

I've seen this go by a few times on TikTok now and I have to say, I love this idea. We need a way to convince people to keep running even if they don't win, maybe building the loss into it as a troll move is the secret.

Very few Americans support actual political violence. Many more support intimidation. Almost no one thinks it’s appropriate to kill your political opponents, but many more would dox them. Read the latest: goodauthority.org/news/very-fe...

Huh, must have missed it when

People are commenting “welcome to turkmenistan” all over Kyrgyz social media —and I have to say that the measure is indeed more extreme than anything we’ve seen in Kazakhstan or even Uzbekistan in recent years

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Saw a few more people in Teddy Roosevelt & on the Maah Daah Hey trail than I saw in the Boundary Waters two weeks ago, but not many. Did see Bison (only a couple, most are in winter pasture), feral horses, and prairie dogs. Heard coyote and elk.

This is exactly how the Turkey's Erdoğan dictatorship succeeded in remaking all mainstream media into regime media. Not mainly by overt censorship. Mostly by making it clear that media firms clearly communicating the truth about regime actions would be targeted by selective/perverted 'regulation'.

New editorial from me and @keithschnak.bsky.social. “Why Washington University must not sign Trump's 'compact'”

Don’t look away.

Check out the data paper (open access) and the publicly available data: We hope that many people will use it in their research and for other purposes.

NDSU has, apparently, hired a professional recruiter to help deal with the whole no demand problem.

Hi all. A little clarification: the Purdue student journalists did OFFER to do this but "Unfortunately and understandably, the IDS declined the offer, fearing expulsion of its student leaders and more firings of its professional staff." They printed and delivered a statement of solidarity instead

There have been 12 players to hit 3+ HR in a Postseason game. There have been 16 pitchers to have a Postseason game with 6+ IP, 2 hits or fewer, 10+ K, and 0 runs allowed. Only one did both on the same night.

Those of you at universities might share our recent report on public opinion with their leadership. There are takeaways that are highly relevant to their choices in the current moment. In particular, there is broad, bipartisan, but latent, support for higher education. edbarometer.org

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner: Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries Harmonized roles/policy areas Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940 Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p ⬇️

One casualty in the Trump administration’s war on higher education is federal funding for area studies. This harms students, scholars, and U.S. national security. It also comes at a time in which political science and area studies are more compatible than ever before. Read on for new research! 1/

2025 isn't over yet but it's unlikely that Twitter will see a resurgence of research discussions.

I just learned, Thomas Alter, tenured professor, has been terminated effective immediately. Shame on Texas State! We mst build support for Tom. spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-tex...

NPR's veteran defense reporter Tom Bowman: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon Pass www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g...

The BWCAW is a good place to spend three October days not seeing a single other human (only some beaver, many grouse, assorted other birds, and a pine marten). flic.kr/s/aHBqjCxdgE

New Working Paper 🚨 I am introducing the new dataset on Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes (PEAR). It includes information on the composition of parliaments in 819 legislative terms in 130 autocracies from 1945 - based on over 200k individual-level observations. tinyurl.com/48h68hmh

I repost this every time she posts it. Also, I have consulted for the World Bank. Not to say I wouldn't again, just I'll be thinking about this post while setting up my 2 factor auth and doing the onboarding training modules.

What Americans Die from? And what the media reports on... Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

I don’t know if I’m late but this @tressiemcphd.bsky.social analysis is so good. Here’s a gift link

People think they’re taking down a rich intellectual sinecure but they’re mostly terrorizing committed public servants who make $58,000 a year after 15 years of experience at a school that has to budget creatively so students can access textbooks.

Flashbacks to a V-dem dinner during the last shutdown where I ended up sitting next to the Swedish (deputy?) foreign minister, who wanted the only American in scolding distance to explain how this could be a thing. I may have panicked and shown him a picture of my fiscal cliff Halloween costume.

In reporting this piece on the new trial for a Huntington's treatment, I was struck by one thing in particular: The joy. One of my sources wept for joy. He has spent his entire career studying this disease, he said it was the happiest day. www.sciencenews.org/article/hunt...

Sara Roy has written a deeply poignant and painful piece in @journalgenocide.bsky.social and I hope you will read it: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Two years ago, @nber.org asked me to talk about my research on political violence during Reconstruction. Political violence is not just about intimidation, it is also related to thwarting and violently penalizing political success. Seems appropriate to revisit that today. youtu.be/Wrdj4oLq4wk

I think what is important is that it *is* an LLM problem *too*. This seems obvious to people who work in this domain, but we're at the point in the hype cycle where this is valuable to a broad readership.

📊 New dataset and paper alert! We’re proud to launch the Opposition Movements and Groups (OMG) Dataset, 1789–2019: a global dataset covering 1,452 mass mobilization movements. It was just published in Comparative Political Studies. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Below follows a 🧵

Excited to introduce a new working paper with @danpemstein.com, @chknutsen.bsky.social and other colleagues not on Bluesky! We use experimental and observational data to investigate the degree to which general biases affect expert perceptions of specific cases. 🧵 1/17 v-dem.net/media/public...

Sidenote: Elsewhere colleagues (incl @acrowinghen.bsky.social , @medzihorsky.bsky.social, @danpemstein.com, @chknutsen.bsky.social, @silindberg.bsky.social) and I find little evidence that bad-vibes among V-Dem’s country experts drive the recent global democratic decline. doi.org/10.1017/S104...

It amuses me that the topic becomes economics by dint of an economist doing it ("Be economics-related, as evidenced by the inclusion of the CV of at least one practicing PhD economist in the original NSF funding application").

Garnet Lake on the JMT

I got an exciting box in the mail today! Looks like The Effect: Second Edition is live! I've updated the website as well, so you can check out the changes and the new Partial Identification chapter (+ a new mini-chapter on finding material in the book) at theeffectbook.net

Return to society or walk back into the high Sierra to find the guy who hot-boxed the Muir Hut maybe an hour before I got there at 9am Saturday?

📢 The APSR is opening a new Research Notes track! Authors may now submit directly as Notes—or, with editor agreement, have papers reclassified during review. Notes should be ≤7,000 words (excl. refs/appendices).

Version 2.0 of the National Elections Database is online! nationalelectionsdatabase.com We cover presidential and parliamentary elections 1789–2023, extending the post-1945 data of Electoral Turnovers @reveconstudies.bsky.social (academic.oup.com/restud/advan...) w/ Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet