Sam Ezersky is the thief of joy.

Back in Iowa, y’all.

It must be lonesome being Sam Ezersky.

I have a 25 hours in a car solo followed by 50 hours on a bike. Taking recommendations for audiobooks or podcasts to pass the time, or projects I can do with Claude Dispatch.

Interesting read for sociologists given how sociologists vary in whether anthropology is to be seen as a role model or cautionary tale.

I don’t know what your game is, Alice, but no.

I have not followed this Mitch McConnell story at all, but I know it’s serious. Unfortunately now that Smiths song is in my head, only with his surname in the chorus instead of “Girlfriend.”

Denmark should announce that they are gifting Greenland to Belgium just for lulz.

(No relation.)

If I could bring back cancel culture for just one person, it would be Sam Ezersky.

At a sports bar watching Australia-Egypt. Not looking good for me getting another use out of this Raygun costume.

Did you know? The “Lost Colony” was founded on Rianoke Island in 1587. When a ship arrived in 1590, the colony appeared abandoned, with the only clue being the word “CROATIAN” carved onto a palisade.

I’ve been given the service task of our department newslettter, and I’ve decided that what should set us apart from other newsletters is hard-hitting investigative reporting. If you know of any scandals that would rock Stanford Sociology to its core, my DMs are open.

Alienating more science-minded members over and over for years and then sending the radical flank into a spiraling tizzy by telling them no once? chronicleofhighereducation.substack.com/p/what-are-s...

The new CHE article on sociology brings together a lot of voices to paint a picture of a discipline that is long on drama and (seemingly?) short on fresh ideas. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

At Australia’s World Cup game dressed as one of that country’s greatest Olympians.

Detour on the drive from Wales to Heathrow for a sports fan must-see: the hill outside Gloucester where they do the cheese rolling race. The picture makes the prospect of running down this hill look a lot less terrifying than it is.

ISR is honored to receive the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences, alongside NORC at the University of Chicago. We are grateful to the researchers, staff, collaborators, funders, & survey participants whose contributions make social science in service of society possible.

Requiring GRE when other places were refusing to look at scores was like having a cheat code while it lasted.

Go figure: Dublin had a bunch of Joyce stuff; Sligo had a bunch of Yeats stuff; but Limerick just has the one mural for O’Riordan.

Derry may be the most conspicuously Catholic place I’ve ever visited. It’s either there or the Vatican.

Unsure if one of the menu footnotes from this restaurant in Donegal is a holdover from The Troubles.

In Belfast. Teen server at pub enthusiastically tells wife and I “your accents are class!” (And she was able to correctly identify both!)

Celebrating the start of Stanford summer by crossing an item off my bucket list: Bloomsday in Dublin!

Do people still say tool? Like in the sense of “Alexi Lalas is such a tool”?

the last ~10 years or so in sociology.

This is a correct argument, but in sociology it is abused by ASA Council to prevent its journals from having policies for quantitative research.

Feels like in the last couple months I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the use of the adjective “load-bearing.” Is it just me?

In Vegas for the first time in a while and only dimly familiar with the word that seems to be everywhere: Vanderpump.

Sam Ezersky should be in prison.

Spouse and I played through Mixtape the past couple nights and really enjoyed it. It’s more like movie than a game—a drama about adolescence, memory, and music. $20, about 3-4 hours, catnip in particular for anyone who knows what “shoegaze” is. annapurnainteractive.com/games/mixtap...

Patriotic cheese celebrating USA independence on sale at Safeway. Imported from the UK.

Back from #PAA2026 in time for World Donkey Day at our local park.

Huh. PAA is having its own “Fireside Chat” with Jay Bhattacharya next week with questions to be asked by another economist. www.populationassociation.org/paa2026/rela...

my thoughts on that fireside chat between Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/04/that... #NASEM #NIH #CDC #replication #innovation #COVID

Imagine how much more powerful AI would be if it was billions of linear probability models in a trench coat.

This workshop has been going great, btw. Recordings are going to be posted afterward.

Next: Fireside Chat with John Ioannidis / Facilitator Pamela Davis-Kean. JI: We need to learn from others and always do better. People have criticized that using the term 'reproducibility crisis' can be weaponized and destroy the ecosystem. There is improvement of preregistration, sharing. #NASEM

samuel beckett was born on this day 120 years ago. astonishing to think that if he had survived, and could run 100m in 9.57 seconds, he would be not only the oldest but also the fastest man in the world - together with his nobel prize for literature, an astonishing trifecta

The new FY27 budget plans for NSF to dismantle the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate in FY 2027. Attend this webinar tomorrow (Tuesday, 4/14, 1pm ET) to see how you can help stop and protect the SBE.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD HE BE ALLOWED TO DRIVE THE BUS

I am one of the co-organizers of this event, and there has been some upset about it elsewhere on Bluesky. I cannot speak from anybody's perspective other than my own about this, but will express my own position briefly here. 1/X

April 23-24: Two-day online National Academies workshop on enhancing scientific integrity in the social and behavioral sciences. The program is here (bit.ly/NASprog), including links to (free) registration.

The studies are mostly fabricated by his students. Guéguen then steals a selection of them and claims to have run the study himself, even though nobody did. See steamtraen.blogspot.com/2019/05/an-u...

Who knows? It’s been like having a succession of guys in Grim Reaper costumes show up at your door. Is it really him this time?

This may be the stupidest thing I have ever posted but I believe that if enshittification had been proposed by Max Weber instead of Cory Doctorow we would be teaching it in every sociological theory class as if it had been inspired by God.

7/ The policy impact is striking: reproducibility rises from 29.6% before Data Access and Research Transpareny (DA-RT) to 79.8% after.