I would like some of the folks who signed the Harper’s letter or spent years yammering about the threat to free speech posed by Oberlin undergrads protesting eugenicists to bring an ounce of that energy to the state censoring entire disciplines.

they don't want to critique power, they just want to critique powerless people critiquing power endlessly.

New Bright Line Watch report! -Expert ratings of U.S. democracy largely stable at lowest levels measured (since 2017) -Record partisan divide in public ratings of democracy driven by Republicans whose evaluations are highest since 2017 -Experts near-unanimous on many threats to democracy 🧵 below

New post on Robert Talisse's Overdoing Democracy. I think he's right that we're overdoing something, but what we're overdoing isn't democracy. Talking about politics has become a substitute for political action--talking about politics less won't fix that. open.substack.com/pub/rbnmcken...

📊 How does moral diversity shape a community's response to norm violations? New research provides a lens for understanding why communities and individuals differ in their tolerance of rule-breaking behavior. Read more in #SPPS: https://ow.ly/1CZP50Yy4M4

What is Emmanuel Grégoire, the new Paris mayor, planning for the city over his new term in office? —60,000 new social housing units —15 express bus routes —Completion of city's full bike network —Transformation of ring highway into a boulevard —1000 new pedestrian streets —300 new hectares of parks

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

11,000 Japanese citizens stormed their parliament demanding their PM stop following Trump into war. 82% of Japan opposes this. Protesters surrounded Japan's National Diet building today chanting: "Japan's FUTURE is not in Washington. Stop bootlicking Trump."

Shame can be good sometimes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The munition is briefly visible here:

Joshua Haymes & Brooks Potteiger (Pete Hegseth's pastor) pray imprecatory psalms against James Talarico: "I pray that God kills him. Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ ... If it would not be within God's will to do so, stop him by any means necessary."

love to see One Battle After Another winning things, not least bc I think Lockjaw shows us what the psychology of authoritarianism is really all about--treating state power as a means to an end i wrote about authoritarianism, OBAA, & The Lives of Others for PSYOP: open.substack.com/pub/anagantm...

The new V-Dem report was released today. There are dramatic declines in democracy in the US. Much worse than during Trump I.

"The US Department of Health and Human Services is now run by conspiracy theorists who believe that the American public health system is hiding key data on vaccine safety and who spend their days spreading health misinformation." Not how I ever thought I'd open an article but just stating facts

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Oscar-winner Ryan Coogler recalling how a college writing professor pushed him to become a screenwriter & the possibility of #Sinners being taught in film curriculums someday: “I have so much respect for professors…for dedicating their life to future generations & making sure their minds are solid.”

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

I wrote about Kat.

Adam Lovett suggests political ethics is fundamentally transformed when politics becomes asymmetric. You do not need to justify policy to those who break the rules of civic friendship & they have forfeited their right not to be politically subordinated by trying to subordinate others:

New short paper w @jkalla.bsky.social ! Candidates gain from moderation, but less than many theories expect. Many conclude voters must not care about issues. This is wrong. Small *average* effects mask large effects on specific issues & are consistent with widespread issue-based voting 🧵

In an attention economy it is important to grab the moment to say what you want to say and not just hope that people will see the film. Wish for otherwise, sure. But that is where we live.

It's wild to me that higher ed leaders can tell themselves that institutional neutrality will get the job done and then you've got Hungarian ambassadors and Russian dissidents saying this is the way you aid authoritarianism

Actually, Americans are just like you. ~20-30% of them genuinely support fascism, as in ~every 🇪🇺 country. You are just more fortunate to have political institutions & a multiparty system that prevent that 20-30% from fully capturing the center-right party, becoming 51%, & controlling the government.

Thanks to @gregdepow.bsky.social & Leif Anderson for organizing a great session yesterday on receiving empathy! Along with @anatperry.bsky.social, they are excellent colleagues to chat with and then consider true meanings of the constructs "empathy" and "brunch" @affectscience.bsky.social #SAS2026

That's about half of what it cost for USAID for a whole year www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

LLMs overemphasize moral concerns common in Western societies and underestimate values more prominent elsewhere. These distortions likely stem from cultural biases in training data and carry societal implications and risks www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

virtue signaling is good. practicing virtue is better, but both signaling AND practicing virtue is best.

"Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it." -- Hannah Arendt www.jstor.org/stable/23025...

“…polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.” This and other hopeful takes—> www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/m...

My views on activism and politics in science haven't changed much. You can get a pretty good sense of them in the spsp 2024 plenary I gave in San Diego (59:00 min there is this slide): youtu.be/pybPQBLvQeo?...

1. New in-press paper on religion's functions, co-authored with amazing lab manager James Nesbit! Full text here, more info in thread below: columbiasamclab.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/.... #AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #CogPsyc @socphilpsych.bsky.social 🧪

One of the lessons of the Iran war is that it was a huge mistake not to even try to put any of the Iraq war architects in prison. We shouldn’t make it again.

These people need to be understood as Brown Shirts because that is Trump’s intent

They had names. They had beautiful faces. And they had the same dreams as your kids - crushed when American "precision" bombs slammed into their Minab elementary school, killing 175 Don't blame AI for this. Blame the sick humans who see war as a game My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/iran...

This week, I focus on the recent research on repression and civil disobedience and how it helps us understand collective action and what we should expect to see as repression grows and activists mobilize to push back to draw attention to the growing polycrisis. danarfisher.com/2026/03/07/u...

Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act. We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy. New from me at @brennancenter.org:

Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.

My senior year of college, my roommate‘s best friend killed herself. I had seen her in the dining hall the day before, beautiful as always, and apparently vibrant. You never know what’s going on with people — remember that when you go out of your way to be cruel.

I'm back on this hobbyhorse and have cleaned up the resentment models. But look at this: while resentment cleanly predicts timing in uptake of the Big Lie, ideology / PID / education / income don't. At all.

“No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.” www.columnblog.com/p/corporate-...

This was about 7 hours of speakers saying we need to be nicer to billionaires

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

The "rally-around-the-flag" effect is not some law of physics that works automatically. It largely seems to happen because 1) the opposition party stops criticizing the president or the military operation, 2) partially as a consequence, the mass media is flooded with pro-government messages. /1

Arman just disarmed 99.9% of econ seminar participants with one single post

Federal judge: I've been at this for 44 years. I have never encountered the hostility toward the judiciary that has existed in this country in the last year.

You cannot talk like this about any other minority in America. And if it was any other president’s adviser who said something like this about any other minority, it’d be the instant end of their presidency.

Pape is out in media noting that aerial bombing campaigns have never (not once) produced regime change in favor of the side doing the bombing