I’ve been dreading opening analysis files for part of my thesis that does geocoding in Docker and fits a model in Stan. I hand-coded (funny to have to say that now) it years ago, but before I was trained in reproducible coding. Claude helped me get it tight and reproducible in a few hours 🥲

I saw five 22 Clark buses in a convoy last night. My friend had a theory this route is cursed. She said it always comes in twos. I don’t know what five means but it cannot be a good sign.

I've been helping my wife fight her insurance company for 2 years and it's been the most demoralizing but also radicalizing thing that could have happened while training as an anthropologist & epidemiologist.

PAA loves first timer attendees! Yay @elijahjwatson.bsky.social - we are having a special mixer for early career PAA folk from 4:30-6pm on Weds May 6 before the traditional Welcome Mixer at 6pm and we'd love to have you join us @popassocamerica.bsky.social

Excited for my first PAA! I'm looking forward to sharing my dissertation work on how the timing of prenatal exposure to the 1983 political–economic crisis in the Philippines—following the assassination of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino—shaped outcomes from birth to epigenetic aging in midlife.

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

This is an Average Treatment Effect on the Treated appreciation post. I love ATTs. Go ATTs.

New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem! In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference. www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...

A week in the life: Monday: postdoc interview, rejected same day (at least they were fast 🙂) Tuesday: food poisoning, no sleep Wednesday: slept all day Thursday: reviewed a manuscript draft for co-author submission, wrote a dissertation paragraph, ate a lot of soup and applesauce

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday. It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. War, Medicine, and the Military 2. Field Geology of Eastern California (included a week of field research!) 3. Medicine, Literature, and Culture 4. History of South Africa 5. Global Health Policy

The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) IS LIVE! openvisualizationacademy.org Thread follows #dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization

If you see this, don't participate. It's a rigged study by Lisa Littman and unethical researcher J. Michael Bailey meant to undermine access to care. Spread the word.

If you missed my talk on Tuesday, you can now watch the video!👇🏼

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

Downfall Bovino Edition. You're welcome.

ICE AGENT: “I love my job. I can’t believe they pay me to do this. I’d do it for free. I only went to high school and I make $200,000.”

Statement from the American Nurses Association about the death of Alex Pretti in Minnesota. www.nursingworld.org/news/news-re...

If you're living somewhere outside the USA, one thing you can do is pressure your leaders to boycott World Cup and Olympic events here.

It's time to abolish Trump’s ICE.

they're executing moms and nurses in the street. they're using preschoolers as bait. they're stealing people's dads and grandmas and children. they're tear gassing babies. they're staking out schools. there is no remedy but abolition. any proposal that doesn't start there is an act of violence.

What we are watching is a paramilitary force learning that they can kill with impunity, that the regime will smear the victim and defend them. Unless politicians and the legal system exerts accountability, it will not stop. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/past-the-b...

”modeling difficult conversations“ “diverse viewpoints”— just throw all the neolib + RW talking points into a blender — to what end? who is this for? if only we all knew how to have difficult conversations, we would have a robust public health system that is accountable to all publics?

They are never, ever going to win in Minnesota.

every beard frosted over from exhalation and eyelash beaded with snow on this cold cold day as people keep moving makes me want to cry. <3

ICE detained a 5-year-old child in Minnesota to use as “bait.” An innocent child. America, let this sink in. This is what the government is doing right in front of our eyes.

Everyone on this app right now.

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

There’s nothing wrong with common sense until you dig a little and learn that common sense is wrong. Thanks @profgalloway.com for providing a great example of common sense that I’ve gotten a kick out of doubting. Thanks @prosocialworld.bsky.social for hosting. www.prosocial.world/posts/whats-...

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Noise pollution from electric passenger rail harms babies' health. "I estimate that the annual cost of noise pollution due to harms to health at birth is $9.8 billion." Black, Hispanic, and the poorest Americans disproportionately bear these costs. This is such a cool paper!

Hi everyone! I'm co-organizing this retreat/workshop June 15-19 for those looking to get started in mathematical/computational modeling of biological processes. Location is a beautiful farm in NC. Please share with students and others who want to build modeling skills. Interdisciplinarity welcome!

Depressing late Friday holiday news dump: Northwestern agrees to pay $75 million to the federal government. The faculty vote against doing this, @heidikitrosser.bsky.social points out, was 595-4. That's the kind of margin where going the other way reflects a major failure of university governance.

All NSF SBE DDRIG solicitations have been archived and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Grants currently submitted will be processed, but as always, chances of funding remain very low. This means anyone aiming for the upcoming deadline will not be able to submit. 1/3

The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Somehow I spoke to more anthropologists for my silly little podcast than Yuval Harari did for his bestselling book

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

Now this is how you detect whether an election was stolen. Humans choose rounder numbers. by @TheEconomist

In between things I've been checking in on the emails that mention "university" and uhh did we all know about this connection?

Look I’m willing to say it: maybe James Watson got two things right

A little cloudy, but was so worth the 20 minute walk to the lake to see the northern lights over Chicago

Billions of regressions ≠ robustness. My new PNAS Letter shows how unjustified models can drown out justified ones — and why thoughtful model selection matters👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...