FTR I accept you're coming from a position where you want _some_ people to be heard, and I commend that. But from an accedemic perspective, _all reasoned arguments have a right to be heard. Balance in all things.

Seems to be a lot of people who are angry about this. The attack line: this is a charter for purveyors of bigotry, racism...insert bad thing of your choice. I have one question: who gets to decide what is and is not bigotry etc? Is it just you & your mates or do we all get a say?

According to @hepi-news.bsky.social polling: www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/u...) while 70% of students agree that 'universities should never limit free speech', 50% want at least one political party banned from campus. 🤷

I'd suggest there's something wrong with a vetting process whereby even if you fail, the people appointing you to a role can't be told.

The Quiet Revival report was retracted after YouGov acknowledged problems with bogus survey respondents. In this NYT story, I comment on why the initial report got so much attention. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/europe/britain-christian-revival-survey.html?searchResultPosition=1

Don't say hurty things and give us what we want or we will hit you with a hammer. As all classical "non violent" movements have said.

The idea that subsidising energy bills for everyone can be done without anyone except billionaires/profiteering companies paying, and without any impact on fossil fuel consumption, is fantasy. A serious politician/political party would explain that, not pander to it.. (4/n)

It seems to me there are basically just two coherent positions: 1) Do not organise sport by sex at all & acknowledge that males will win more or les everything apart from tiddliwinks & show jumping; 2) Organise sport where there is clear male advantage by sex. Then set rules for who qualifies for

New #OA at ESR 🌟 What is the income penalty of dropping out of #VET in Germany? With an IV strategy, @kostermann.bsky.social, @patzinaalex.bsky.social & @katymorris.bsky.social show that the causal effect is substantial and especially pronounced for lower SES individuals doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

Just wow! To stop these flag-debasing "patriots", this woman gets under their van like it’s just another day at the garage. Hugely impressed by, and very grateful for, her bravery

New paper by Dr Mathis Ebbinghaus in @qualsoc.bsky.social ✍️ Based on interviews with Black Lives Matter activists, it traces a 3-step process through which riots are legitimised - and argues that this legitimation work shapes what tactics become “available” ⬇️ link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Much as I deplore such a ban I think it is true that a fair amount of actually existing sociology is, in fact, advocacy research of one sort or another. This is true in the UK & I've no reason to believe it is less true in the US. You reap what you sow, so not surprising if you give

I'm delighted to forward this to my undergrads in quant soc methods, because I used this example a couple of weeks ago to badmouth web panels. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwjxx5eyn1o

Regional variation of GDP per head within China, 1080–1850: Implications for the great divergence debate doi.org/10.1016/j.ee... Paper in Explorations in Economic History by @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social Fellow Stephen Broadberry and Hanhui Guan

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

My hypothesis is, you only need to look at this platform to find some of the answers.

The Netherlands wants to stop with salary bonus restrictions for the financial sector, that were in place since the crisis taught us that banks are always covered by the tax payer. @volkskrant.nl cites interesting research by SEO that the bonus restrictions have not led to flight of bankers.

I wrote this thing on my substack: open.substack.com/pub/colinmil...

Let me guess. Could it by any chance be people that favour freedom of speech? Just a thought.

Far-right leaders surprisingly often mean what they say. The rest of us, instead of believing them, surprisingly often look for “what they really mean” or call it theater. But it’s usually wiser to take them at their word. If Trump says he wants Greenland, he’ll probably try to get Greenland.

A Birmingham silversmith

Depends entirely on what you are denoting as "anti-Zionist". Unless you spell that out clearly, without equivocation, it is impossible to give an honest answer. Maybe that was the point.

JOB: Research Scientist at Wikimedia "We’re hiring a Research Scientist strongly committed to the principles of free knowledge, open source, privacy, and collaboration to join the Research team. As a Research Scientist, you will conduct applied research on the integrity of Wikipedia knowledge […]

Since the first International Workshop on Analytical Sociology in 2008, INAS is returning to Oxford. The 18th Annual INAS Conference will take place from 1 to 3 July 2026 at the University of Oxford, hosted by Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology. Submission deadline: 1 Feb 2026

Fact check. She did not say that trans people are subhuman. Truth matters.

Fact check. LGBA does not, as far as I know, oppose LGBT+ rights.

My new book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, is now shipping! A brief summary of the argument to follow…

Great interview with my former colleague Tom Snijders

Congrats to Michael Biggs on his full professorship! 👏🎉 www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/article/mich...

Some cool PhD studentships open at Stockholm Sociology: AI/future of work (quant) su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Organized labor and care leave (quant/mixed) su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Violence and sexual health in Mexico (quant/qual) su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

📢 Call for Papers – Hong Kong Sociological Association Annual Conference 6th December 2025. Abstract submissions are open until 19 September. I’m honoured to be giving a keynote at the conference and look forward to engaging with fellow scholars.

Note, too, the logical inconsistency: the Trump administration wants Brown to collect information (on skin color) that it wasn't collecting before, based on gvt's evidence-free claim that Brown has been discriminating against students on the basis of skin color information that it didn't have. 9/9

Also, neither the Common App nor internal university systems are set up to collect information on skin color. Requiring universities to report data by skin color is effectively a massive, unfunded mandate to collect what will end up being low-quality data on a difficult-to-measure construct. 8/9

Do I think professional organisations should expel or boycott constituent associations from states whose governments do or advocate bad things? No, not unless the association is state controlled or acts as an arm of the state. I said that in 1989 about the SASA & say it today about the ISS.

Excellent debunking of Matt Goodwin and GB News pretence that a British Army veteran was forced out of army housing because of the Afghan info cock-up

Paid research assistant opportunity with the British Election Study for UK-based graduate students. Help us validate turnout in our surveys against Electoral Commission records

It's nice to be cited. Less so when the citation gets what you wrote back to front. Like the guys fussing about the interpretation of a logit model who tell us they are interested in an unobserved continuous outcome, which turns out to be,...whether or not an infant is alive or dead.

I'm in two minds...

The real power of administrative register data: Each person-year has an anonymized address ID, which lets me measure how much siblings actually lived together growing up. Just did that—and linked it to survey data on 15,000 siblings! #sociology @erc.europa.eu

MIT philosopher Alex Byrne responds with restraint and reason to colleagues' hamfisted condemnation: "Encouraging individuals on social media to join a public condemnation of a colleague is inimical to the mission of the university." web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/D...

The Telegraph obit for Lord Lipsey is excellent and contains this corker www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Thank you, Herman. It was fun to put it together and I find the contributions impressive. The last few will be coming online shortly and then the full special issue will be out soon. Complete line-up below, quick summaries here: doi.org/10.1177/0049...

My colleague Cristobal Young and co-author Erin Cumberworth just released their book on multiverse analysis, a set of tools that help resolve the "garden of forking paths" and "file-drawer" problems and, in the process, improve quantitative social & behavioral science. Highly recommend.

Jolyon Maugham KC has blocked me, but posted that the guardian article about Melanie Field shows UKSC in FWS v Scottish ministers is constitutionally wrong. For a KC to suggest something so legally illiterate in statutory interpretation is bizarre. My explanation why medium.com/@scott-wortl...

I must admit to finding the first line of the second paragraph an odd criticism. The UK SC is an apex appellate Court. It does not hear evidence, it hears legal argument. If Amnesty or the Scottish government chose not to instruct a trans barrister, is that not on them, rather than the UKSC?

Hard facts. I want to spend a night on George Street with @charlieangus104.bsky.social 😬😆🍻

This is very good.