🚨🚨 Texas A&M Board of Regents is meeting next week and set to approve a new policy requiring pre-approval of courses on race and gender. This is a blatant violation of academic freedom.

New data on the #EconJobMarket as of Nov 2. Based on total # of job listings on JOE, this year continues to be even weaker (by 11%) than during COVID (2020). 1/many #EconSky

The SG’s attempt to follow Trump’s lead in telling fairly well-informed Supreme Court justices that tariffs aren’t taxes, don’t raise revenue, and aren’t paid by American firms isn’t working out well:

Possible effects of Cuomo on the NYC race: 1 Without Cuomo, Mamdani might not have won the nomination. 2 But if Mamdani had won the nomination, he might have won the general election by a larger margin.

The magnitude of the Democrats’ win yesterday shows the rhythms of US democracy are still very much alive. The race against authoritarianism is clearly not lost yet.

If I was a GOP strategist, I’d be pretty worried about diluting my safe +15 districts into a bunch of +5 gerrymandered districts after tonight.

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes Republican behavior around the shutdown.

Trump posts his worst-ever net approval rating in a CNN poll this morning, 37% to 63% (-26) s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

A bad feature of our politics that things that should disqualify candidates have the capacity to strengthen them.

If you or any of your students are interested in pursuing an MSc in data social or research methods, please join us online for our annual virtual open day sessions. These are brief but very informative sessions that prospective students tend to greatly enjoy. See you there.

Last week, the Trump admin purged senior leadership at ICE ERO, which leads internal immigration enforcement. Gregory Bovino and the Border Patrol are now increasingly in charge. As former ICE Chief of Staff Jason Houser writes, what we're getting now is theater, not serious law enforcement.

I thought this was a good statement from the other site.

🚨Next time you hire, don’t take it easy! In a new working paper, @elliottash.bsky.social, Jason Sockin, and I show the difficulty of the interview signals to workers whether the job is a good fit. 🚨 Paper link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Donald Trump's approval rating in our tracker has fallen to -18, the lowest it has ever been (lower than any point in his first term) www.economist.com/interactive/...

An embarrassingly obvious point, but... This. Is. Illegal. If anything like the rule of law were in force, Trump couldn't arbitrarily increase a tariff because he is annoyed. In important and increasing ways, the rule of law in the US no longer exists. www.cnn.com/2025/10/25/b...

My first, primary overarching observation about this deal is: UVA agreed to pay $0 in penalties in its "deal." After that, there is simply no way the UC Regents can with a straight face agree that California must pay the feds $1.17 billion. This is simply extortion and the only response is "no."

The UC Regents finally released the “settlement agreement” the Trump administration proposed in August. It’s a doozy. UC alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents, donors—and all citizens of California: Now is the time to let the UC Regents know you do not want them to sign this bad deal.

A man was arrested for playing Darth Vader's theme music, "The Imperial March," behind National Guard troops walking through Logan Circle. Now the ACLU is suing on his behalf. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

One thing that concerns me about Platner if he survives this (besides losing to Collins) is that it would suggest that Democratic voters are also dropping their standards for candidates. Democrats shouldn’t follow Republicans, their direction is bad, and it’s not the way out of this.

In my view, the primary determinant of whether something should be cited is whether it is relevant and true, not who authored it. Plus, how can authors know what the attributes of other authors are, anyway? The below policy does not, in my view, enhance the credibility of the scientific enterprise.

I just received an email informing us about safety measures to take when traveling. Five years ago, I would not have imagined seeing these countries named together: "Countries classified as high risk in terms of knowledge security are: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the United States."

I don’t think this conclusion is warranted on the basis of the decision this year of one university.

Look things aren’t super great but tbth this type of doomerism doesn’t help.

How is this real life? www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/u...

I don’t spam y’all much anymore about my book but a photographer at a department event snapped this handsome pic so send tweet

This is so mind-bogglingly corrupt, it is difficult to comprehend. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/u...

The thing about Platner is that it’s not about whether he deserves to be forgiven for what he did in the past personally. It’s that it’s not worth it for the team to be saddled with that kind of baggage.

You might want to shield a candidate from competition to prevent damage, but the competitive test can be good. Applies more generally to stress testing things

Seems like it’s time for Platner to drop out

UPDATE: COLOMBIA’s President says 🇺🇸 government (Trump) “committed murder” and bombed a fisherman with no ties to drugs “The boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure”

Watergate every day

"a memorandum expanding his administration’s authority" The phrasing you're looking for is that he's suspending parts of the Constitution by decree.

Five alarm fire that's illegal and impeachable. Newsrooms and electeds should be yelling this.

I am more optimistic about AI chatbots than some people in this site. Grok on the other hand …

JUST IN: Judge Cobb has blocked the Trump administration’s effort to extend rapid-fire deportation procedures to immigrants who have been in the U.S. more than two years — warning that it is a flagrant deprivation of due process that could ensnare anyone. ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

Again, it is a full-blown federal felony crime for anyone in the White House or Executive Office of the President to order tax investigations into anyone. And it's not just a crime to DO it, it's even a federal crime for an employee not to REPORT such an order to the Treasury Inspector General.

Trump's mechanism to pay the troops during the shutdown is by far the most illegal budgetary action he's taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything. It's also needless because Congress would easily pass a troop pay bill if Johnson were willing to gavel in. Long thread.

BREAKING via WSJ The Trump administration is planning sweeping changes in criminal division at the IRS. Full Story: on.wsj.com/3LbVFtK

I sometimes argue with people about whether only outcomes matter or whether procedural concerns are important too. Well, we’re getting a glimpse of what it looks like when procedural constraints go out the window and it’s not good.

Hope the university compact goes a similar way

My new paper on "How Speech-Based Immigration Restrictions Threaten Academic Freedom" (forthcoming in Lee Bollinger & Geoffrey Stone, eds., Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump, Oxford Univ. Press): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

"Humans aren’t very efficient movers—until you put us on a bicycle, when we become some of the most energy-efficient land travelers in the animal kingdom." www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...

Unless and until some kind of compelling legal and moral argument is presented as to why this is a legitimate use of deadly force, this is just…mass murder.

Just rounding people up. A US citizen who says he had his birth certificate with him (!) was still thrown in the back of a truck and detained.

Someday this could be you or someone you love

What if the unidentified masked men with guns don't accept the validity of your papers?

Do you want to live in a "papers, please" country?

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to economists Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.

Sometimes you hear the argument that pursuing truth amounts to ruling out possibilities which is inconsistent with viewpoint diversity Hard to take seriously No one is calling for hiring astrologists but we haven’t gotten anywhere near the point where we wouldn’t benefit from diverse perspectives