So, presumably she got a promotion and a nice vacation home in Qatar? A "delicate dance", indeed ... 🧐 www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

By far the best speech on what the present moment means for middle powers and what it means to stop “living within a lie”. An inspiration for what Europeans should do.

Weltpolitikschmerz /ˈvɛltˌpɒlɪˌtiːkˌʃmɛːts/ German, from Weltpolitik ‘world politics’ +Schmerz ‘pain’: a feeling of melancholy and political world-weariness caused by witnessing unprecedented geopolitical stupidity and thinking about the unnecessary harm inflicted upon the world.

Everybody in the comments making the same joke 🚬

Die Bundespolizei geht offenbar konsequenter gegen die russische Schattenflotte vor. Nach Informationen von NDR, WDR und SZ haben Bundespolizisten unlängst mehreren russischen Schiffen die Fahrt durchs deutsche Küstenmeer verwehrt. @bstrunz.bsky.social, @florianflade.bsky.social u.a. ⬇️

Something is happening on @bsky.app. For the first time *ever*, we're seeing durable, modest, realistic growth, and it couldn't be happening at a better time. Are we about to hit escape velocity?

🚨 Big news from Brussels: EU countries move to approve the EU-Mercosur trade deal, @euronews.com confirms. Against: 🇫🇷🇵🇱🇦🇹🇭🇺🇮🇪 Abstention: 🇧🇪 All other member states voted in favour. Written procedure will conclude at 5 pm.

Everyone longing for more innocent, apolitical fun on this platform -- this one's for you! 🚢

BREAKING: UK and France sign formal declaration of intent to put boots on ground in Ukraine in event of peace deal with Russia. They would "operate on Ukrainian soil, securing Ukraine’s skies and seas and building an armed forces fit for the future".

Oof. Day 3 of 2026 *almost* makes me miss 2025 already.

There is something very revealing about the civilizational imaginary of being "besieged" by what amounts to the world. And to be clear, this is just a more obnoxious formulation of Borrell's "Europe is a garden. ... Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden."

The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

Hope I won't regret this ... 🫣

#Geldwäsche ist ein massives Problem – das ist seit vielen Jahren bekannt. Warum ist es so schwer, dagegen anzukommen? Wo liegen die strukturellen Hebel? Darüber haben wir mit Anne Brorhilker @finanzwende.de und dem Wissenschaftler Kilian Wegner gesprochen.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Area Studies Centers at UNC shuttered due to insufficient "return on investment," unclear "metrics of success," and non-alignment with the chancellor's "priorities." One day (soon), we will look back on the miracle of the public research university and will scarcely believe that it ever existed.

Ugh. Potential fixes (via this thread or my colleagues): Force students to add .. - DOI or a direct link to each source - screenshot of every first page as appendix - screenshot of cited part of text as appendix Or maybe I should ask everyone for an essay on the negative externalities of LLMs!?

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

We have a final deal on our 2040 climate target ✅ We now have a legally binding 90% GHG reduction target: 85% domestic cuts + up to 5% international credits. This is an ambitious and pragmatic agreement that brings predictability and flexibility for everyone.

Out now — die Ergebnisse des Justiz-Projekts.💥 Ein Jahr Arbeit, rund 70 Gespräche mit Expertinnen und Experten, in denen wir der Frage nachgegangen sind: Wie verwundbar ist die deutsche Justiz? Ab sofort Open Access verfügbar: verfassungsblog.de/book/das-jus... 🔗 Antizipation beginnt jetzt.

Now here’s the kind of news you drop going into a long holiday weekend. Maybe no one will notice. 🤡 @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Man weiß ja, wie schlecht es um die Bundeswehr und die Verteidigungsfähigkeit bestellt ist - aber das so konzentriert zu lesen, ist dennoch beklemmend. Ein paar Snippets (mit Geschenklink zum Artikel):

An unexpected moment in the spotlight for EU researchers' favorite bit of jargon! 🇪🇺🙂

Für alle, die sich mit Korruption bzw. deren internationaler Bekämpfung beschäftigen, z. B. auch in der Lehre: Unser (@maxlesch.bsky.social & @mathislohaus.de) Beitrag "Das internationale Antikorruptionsregime" im Handbuch Korruptionsforschung ist online! link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/...

What happens at #COP30 in #Belém? So far, #COP30 has been far more interesting than many expected (including myself) — and also more encouraging, given the otherwise very bleak global outlook on climate and almost everything else. Here are my takeaways from the first week: 🧵

🚨🚨Breaking and bad #EU news: Lawmakers in @europarl.europa.eu agreed today to exempt more companies from green reporting rules after the center-right, right-wing and far-right groups allied to pass the EU’s first omnibus simplification package. #omnibus 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/epp-...

NEW: Global fossil fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless 'stated policies' are abandoned Contra some terrible news coverage, IEA World Energy Outlook shows coal near peak, oil peaking by 2030 & gas by 2035 (see chart) What's going on? 🧵 + cool charts www.carbonbrief.org/iea-fossil-f...

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

"[This] experiment, like other academic studies published...on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...

@ckreudersonnen.bsky.social and I are happy to announce two open research positions in our joint DFG-funded project VARICRIS (👉 bit.ly/varicris). We are recruiting a #PostDoc and a #PhD candidate 🧵: #PoliSky #PoliSkyJobs #polsci 🌐

New kinds of questions to ponder for a large political science (!) conference with (typically) ~50% participants from outside of North America. It used to be that "only" people with the "wrong" passports suffered visa issues; now it's about the risk of politically motivated sanctions.

Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it. 
CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures. 
But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do. 👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette... 🧵

Next Wednesday (October 15, 17:00 Berlin time), we're kicking off next term's Speaker Series with a talk and package demo by Francisco Tomas-Valiente on "Uncertain Performance: How to Quantify Uncertainty and Draw Test Sets When Evaluating Classifiers". Paper and information on how to join ⬇️

Kleiner Gruß von der BVG an die @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social: Pünktlich zum Beginn der Vorlesungszeit ist drei Tage "Ersatzverkehr" auf der (einzigen) U-Bahn-Linie, die zur Uni fährt. Liebe Erstsemester, willkommen in Berlin! 🤡

The amount of time it takes to grade things once they show an inkling of maybe-LLM-hallucinations is such a waste—gotta stop reading and spend half an hour to track down sources to see if they actually exist and say the things they claim to say

Evin Dalkilic @evinale.bsky.social: Hochschulen und Bibliotheken "dürfen Diamond-Open-Access-Publikationen" wie den Verfassungsblog @verfassungsblog.de finanzieren. Das Wirtschaftlichkeitsgebot steht nicht entgegen: "Um es kurz zu machen: Es handelt sich um ein Scheinproblem." 1/4

It’s really worrying that it takes a political scientist to point out all these irregularities in a paper that is picked up to such an extent by the press — reviewers, science editors, anyone listening? Anyone bothered to ask for the underlying data & code?

🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.

We are going to be digging out from all this for years and years and years.

Together with the great colleagues @i4replication.bsky.social, we are organizing the first Münster replication games (28/11/25)! Highly recommended to junior & senior scholars. Joint project together with #MueCOS & #CDSC @uni-muenster.de. More info/registration: indico.uni-muenster.de/event/3526/

Very excited to share this new tool for teaching the politics of climate change. What are the different *theories of change* that underlie decarbonization efforts and policies? Help your students learn about them. Please share widely. 🌎🔌💡🛢️

What a graph

methods section said “we follow standard practice” because we did not understand what we were doing but assumed someone once had

📣 Postdoc (75 %, 3 yrs) at @unigreifswald.bsky.social — start autumn 2025 on perhaps Germany’s most beautiful campus. Know someone with a PhD (or nearly done) in Political Science? ⬇️ #PolSci #Postdoc

The face-eating leopards are coming for ... Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok!?

This is simply huge. Hell freezing is next on my bingo card, after the French now agreed to coordinate on nuclear responses with the UK ! Anything is possible !

1/ Der erste 🇪🇺 #EUCO für 🇩🇪 Bundeskanzler #Merz ist vorbei – und offenbar war’s ganz nach seinem Geschmack. Doch was kam dabei heraus? Was hat Europa davon? Am 01.07. #EBDanalyse online mit Kanzleramt. 🧵 Vorab die Schlussfolgerungen: www.consilium.europa.eu/de/meetings/... bsky.app/profile/cons...

It's time for the EU to embrace Eurobonds and topple the US dollar. on.ft.com/4kgLYq5