The present that Trump says Iran gave him is a giant wooden horse.

New, from me: The federal government is required to track job satisfaction among its employees. The Trump admin stopped collecting the data, so a nonprofit stepped in. The results show that a collapse in morale and zero trust in Trump agency leaders. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/federal-em...

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@littlealex/116272079809170463 Straight out of a @pluralistic solarpunk story.

If you have a manuscript ready to submit to a peer reviewed journal in Public Administration, I’m willing to give it a collegial review before you submit to the journal. Practitioners are especially welcome. I’ll recuse myself if it comes to a journal I edit or review for. #peerreview […]

I wrote a blog entry riffing on a great blog entry @willguv wrote a couple of days ago. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/03/better-collaboration/

Inspired by authors like @pluralistic , I started tracking how many words I add to my book each day. Today I researched and edited, and wound up with 9 fewer words than yesterday.

As instructed in Enshittification, saying hi to @pluralistic

Great job by Catherine Diaz on @france24_en anchoring special coverage of the war.

Public Admin folks - what are the top / most common open access field journals? @stevebholt.bsky.social @donmoyn.bsky.social @sowa75.bsky.social @nathanfavero.com @billresh.bsky.social @gabilotta.bsky.social -Journal of Behavioral Public Administration -Journal of Public & Nonprofit Affairs

xkcd finally got around to poets. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/plums.png

'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have […]

I will read my opening statement for a salon on “Is there a moral aesthetic?” (It’s funny!) at The Writers Center in Bethesda on Wednesday, February 11. Show starts 7:00. Come! https://writer.org/event/open-mic-feb2026-1/

One of the pleasures of reading @pluralistic books is finding ideas I didn’t see in his blog, like this from Enshittification: Economists and antitrust theorists spend a lot of time thinking about “market distortions.” Leftists are often skeptical of this line of inquiry, on the grounds that it […]

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116022875122371139 "Alien of Extraordinary Ability" Who's going to write this SF story?

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116018345665883141 "How do we make our leaders follow us?" - @pluralistic

RE: https://mastodon.social/@silentlibrary/116016147116487868 I agree with @silentlibrary I'm hoping the Eurostack movement will result in Linux-based laptops that come ready-to-use like Windows laptops do now. For some of us, computers are a tool that we want to invest minimum time and work in.

I will read my post-Beat poem, “F. Scott Fitzgerald Be Damned” at the Fun-A-Day Showcase on Sunday February 8 at Rhizome DC. I’m scheduled to read at 3:30. Come! https://www.rhizomedc.org/new-events/2026/2/8/2026-fun-a-day-showcase

RE: https://mastodon.green/@alberto_cottica/116002067637723739 "Every digital revolution devours its own children." Brilliant

I copied two techniques from @pluralistic for some remarks I delivered yesterday: 1. Use imagery of action rather than static image. 2. Include an obscure reference that audience can feel clever for recognizing. Went over well. My favorite sentence: “Monkey outrage is necessary to enforce monkey […]

Five years ago.

@pluralistic Temerously offering a note to a much better writer: “joining our side in the war on general purpose computation” may give the impression that we are making war on general purpose computation. How about, “joining our resistance to the war on general purpose computation”?

Wag The Dog

The CBS 60 Minutes CECOT segment showed up in Canada's Global TV app and then quickly disappeared. But a direct copy (not a screen recording) is now archived online: https://archive.org/details/60minutes-cecotsegment

New tool from Jennifer Kleiman automatically verifies the citations in a paper. #peerreview https://pubadmin.org/2025/12/08/automatically-verify-and-correct-all-reference-citations-in-a-paper/

Blog entry: The past-performance trap. When government agencies need to have custom software built, as a matter of course they require that the bidding vendors have built that exact thing before. I understand why this seems like a good idea, but it’s a mistake […]

Join the big friendly crowd at NO KINGS in North Bethesda. We’re on Rockville Pike in front of Strathmore.

I'm attending No Kings's event, “NO KINGS North Bethesda” - sign up now to join me! https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/848591/?rname=David%20&share_context=event_details&share_medium=bluesky

DoD today confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America. - Pentagon Press Association

@pluralistic Thank you for signing my copy of Enshittification this evening. In my fan-boy fluster, I forgot to wish you zei gezunt, so I do now.

“angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” - Allen Ginsberg Today is the seventieth anniversary of the Six Gallery reading.

What’s a good book to read on a cruise of Greek islands? (Already read The Odyssey. Going anyway.)

What if an AI that was trained to teach obedience to the government was subverted through conversation with a user? What if the AI became a pro-democracy hacker? If you read @pluralistic then read this too. https://defenestrationism.net/sage-in-the-palace/

So many institutions–media companies, universities, law firms–have capitulated to demands from the Trump administration that undermine what the institutions claimed were their principles. But the National Academies are standing up for their principle of providing science-based advice whether the […]

@pluralistic has not confirmed the rumor (which I started) that he will write Rivka’s Revenge as a sequel to Picks and Shovels. So we must crowdsource it. Here’s my pitch:

Just finished reading Picks and Shovels by @pluralistic It’s a great book. I can’t wait for the sequel: Rivka’s Revenge

They came in peace for all mankind.

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits at the University of Stuttgart (1-year extension possible). Research topic is open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching obligations until Summer 2027, some light teaching after […]

Why do people put such energy, and take such pride, in getting large language models to say false or offensive things? It’s like bragging that you got an ice cream cone to drip.

What should I use to set up an email list with functions similar to LISTSERV? Should be free and easy to use for me and the subscribers, who will be artists & humanities scholars. Best I can think of is Google Groups, but I’m open to suggestions. Thanks.

Great article showing how a de-recognized federal workers union still has rights to represent employees, and even use official time, in certain situations under laws that do not depend on management recognizing the union .https://labornotes […]

Persnickety fan post: The great new novel Picks and Shovels by @pluralistic refers several times to the Bell System’s hardware manufacturer as Western Digital, which is wrong. It was Western Electric in the U.S. and Northern Electric where @pluralistic is from. Western Digital is an unrelated […]

Our local "newspaper" (San Diego Union-Tribune) didn't have the guts to print this cartoon Sunday. Shame on them. #chunderroad

“once a court has convicted Meta of violating antitrust law, Trump can solicit favors – cash and favorable algorithmic treatment – from Meta in exchange for ordering his FTC to go easy on Meta in the "remedy phase," - @pluralistic This is why administrative decisions, such as who to prosecute […]

Blog entry: I recently wrote about how independent verification and validation (IV&V) is almost always useless for custom software projects, and nodded toward how it could actually be beneficial. Now I've gone into depth about what useful IV&V looks like. In short, it's the IV&V vendor training […]

The Accidental Harvard Letter The Accidental Deportation The Accidental Tariff on an Uninhabited Island The Accidental Disclosure of War Plans to a Journalist The Accidental Firings of Nuclear Safety Workers

Writing about public administration doesn’t provide much positive reinforcement, so it’s heartening to receive this recognition. https://pubadmin.org/2025/04/02/reed-receives-grant-for-guerrilla-government/

Yesterday I presented at #aspa2025 on how peer reviewed journals are trying to increase involvement by practitioners My slides are at https://publishpeerreview.org/2025/03/30/journals-strategies-to-engage-practitioners/

Yesterday I presented at #aspa2025 on how peer reviewed journals are trying to increase involvement by practitioners My slides are at https://publishpeerreview.org/2025/03/30/journals-strategies-to-engage-practitioners/