Good algorithm

"Even after accounting for the upfront costs and delayed benefits, enrolling marginal applicants to public universities generates substantial net returns for society, the marginal students themselves, and the government budget." Public Universities FTW!

Smoking is gross and unhealthy not just to oneself but for everyone around you. There. No discourse needed. Go read studies if you don't believe it's unhealthy. Secondhand smoke is terrible and more than enough reason to strive for a world where no one smokes.

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

a lot of people don't realize that Christmas carols and traditions are actually folk memories of suppressed pre-Christian events, namely the end of the Third Age and the Fall of Sauron.

Find something that excites you the way I felt excited seeing a history of the German Peasants' War for sale at Barnes & Noble, something I never expected to see in a retail store

Merrick Garland should be investigated for ties to Trump and the insurrectionists in the next Democratic administration. We've known he's Republican-friendly for many years, it seems very plausible given his conduct.

The greatest scientific institution of the 20th century has its publishing arm doing Covid denialism and promoting anti-science conspiracies. Disgraceful.

alright! so! let's go district by district. secure.actblue.com/donate/bring...

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump never has a polling average below a certain point... but not because of actual retained support. But rather because there's enough GOP pollsters willing to conjure numbers for him compared to the polling of the 2000s.

yeah...this is a really common confusion, but fascists (and evil people generally) are often extremely incompetent. bigotry is a massive moral error which leads to cognitive errors. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/white-supr...

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

Your regular reminder that Neil Gorsuch illegitimately occupies a stolen SCOTUS seat & is as deeply & fundamentally authoritarian as Alito & Thomas, even if less corrupt & generally more polite, else he would not have accepted a nomination for said stolen SCOTUS seat.

I do find it a little weird if people get mad at the comic book superhero movies for reusing characters and having lots of deus ex machina I don't think those films are claiming to be high cinema or to be the best scripts you've ever seen! It's also okay to not like them just like any other movie!

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

This is a really great interview with Virginia LG-elect Ghazala Hashmi. I highly recommend everyone read it but especially if you are interested in education or writing. I hope to see her as Governor in four years. www.shenandoahliterary.org/volume-75-nu...

A plea: It is 2025. The term "mail-in ballots" is hopelessly stuck in previous decades. There is absolutely no need for the addition of "-in." We all know the ballots are mailed "in." Please just call them "mail ballots." That is what they are. Ballots returned through the mail. MAIL BALLOTS!

gop lite is consistently the dumbest thing the democratic party does. consistently. on foreign policy, on spending, on immigration. its never the right way. but the party is addicted to it.

Epstein letter: hello fellow child abuser, President Donald J. Trump also abuses children. Merrick Garland for 4 years:

The omens are good today: Barnes & Noble had significantly fewer pro-AI books in the Science category compared to my past visits and even had a handful of anti-AI books there. And in a very packed store I saw zero evidence that anyone was looking at them.

there is one and only one political strategy, and that is: “hang trump like an anchor around the neck of every single elected republican and the party itself.” no ‘friends across the aisle.’ no ‘the fever will break.’ anyone not on board with that has to go. no exceptions

Important reminder that NIMBYism is a conservative, reactionary political ideology that serves primarily older and more wealthy people over a greater number of people who are suffering in our current rent crisis in this country. Trump was a criminal real estate guy, his brain is functioning here.

I would do "buy a ticket and offer $3,000 for someone to move TO the US" I'd probably offer even more, the stimulus would probably work better, but you get the idea. Almost Most forms of immigration and UBI are good!

In case you're unclear on what JD Vance is trying to do here maybe it will help to recall Italian writer Ignazio Silone's 1938 description of what fascism is: “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.”

Just apropos of several things going on on this site, I don’t want to be see mean or judgy (this isn’t a value judgement, to be clear), but I really feel like a lot of people are functionally illiterate. This goes beyond reading comprehension issues.

Hard to express how much I love this. Twitter is the Nazi site for Nazis. Delete it, ESPECIALLY if you're a famous person or political leader. Abughazaleh does a great job explaining that it's also TRASH and doesn't even let you reach your audience. Get the hell off.

I asked our university's official AI assistant to draw a map of Poland in 1941. Great stuff. Glad we are steering our students toward this helpful resource.

My guess is that Bari Weiss is going to do more to drive Democrats away from the relentless Republican propaganda spewed on cable TV than the efforts of virtually any of us who have been all too aware that cable news is a cesspool for years. It's just a bit too obvious and folks will know, I think

It is fortunate that the enemies of democracy and human rights have a very poor understanding of the Streisand effect and how much popular support it actually takes to do a lot of authoritarian actions *successfully*

The person you’re sneering at is an actual historian who knows the job a million times better than you. You don’t have the slightest goddamn clue what you’re talking about, which makes sense given how impressed you are by AI.

If you are good at reading and can critically analyze what is relevant and what is not, not only will you outperform the awful results of LLM summaries, you will also be competent and qualified as a researcher! That's all you have to do. Simply be literate and TRY. I will never use LLMs for writing

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

People purposely scream/vocalize while sneezing????

My only real trouble online these days is when two people I like/respect argue with each other and I'm forced to consider if my estimation of one or both of them was flawed. Generally the folks I listen to agree with each other on all the biggest things, so seeing a major argument is disconcerting.

The standard story was that 1950s religious revivals were about contrasting America with the godless commies of the USSR, but I found material that hinted at an older well funded campaign that reframed the revival as a corporate pushback against the New Deal. So I followed that unexpected thread!

Not a fan of this from my Senator!

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

Notably, no one is stopping Democrats in "red" districts or states, especially RETIRING ones, from "voting their conscience / the party line" politicians are not video game playable characters with set stats. You can choose to not be awful and corrupt, actually! That is a choice we all have!

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

It's a shame Marie Newman lost but at least we got an active Bluesky poster willing to dunk on Yglesias

A discharge petition to advance a policy ending congressional stock trading was finally moving forward when Hakeem Jeffries sucked the air out of it. By proposing his own bill that no Republican would sign, Jeffries effectively made consensus impossible. From @ddayen.bsky.social:

Al Franken Andrew Cuomo Bill Clinton Dennis Hastert Donald Trump Jeffrey Epstein Larry Summers Madison Cawthorn Matt Gaetz Noam Chomsky Steve Bannon Tom Reed etc. Creeps who deserve every bit of blame for their lechery. No playing favorites. And the number of crimes per person is irrelevant.

If Bill Clinton is your political hero, you need to do some serious internal work.

Imagine having to fake photos of Bill Clinton being a creep, like you had such a quota to fill in hiding Trump's crimes that you have to make things up about one of the other most famous predators of modern history.

From a focus group of Gen Z Republicans. (www.city-journal.org/article/manh...) Tell me again about how Zohran Mamdani is the big threat to Jewish thriving in the US today.

This seems really early for an endorsement. Rather telling, I think. Somebody REALLY likes him, and no one in this country likes him as a person, so she... yeah. There's an affair.

Reminding everyone for no particular reason that Section 230 is one of the last things standing between free speech online and Trump having control over everything you see and say on the internet