Since the omerta on criticizing LLM infra investment appears to be breaking can we go back and maybe, acknowledge that there were some indicators that these guys have long been pretty cavalier about throwing money into the void? Money that could have been better spent on actual infrastructure?

so assuming 1. the floodgates break on tariff passthroughs 2. a future administration repeals most or all of them, has there been any modelling on which prices are likely to be stickier than others? my intuition is that some industries will probably try to hold the line on higher prices for a bit

Came upon some predictions from a southern studies edited volume from 1985 and man, what a swing and a miss there

I thought they were getting milder over time but jesus no, I wish I had budgeted a full day for recovery. You should still get yours though, especially if you teach on a college campus!

Going through the archives you run into plenty of articles about apartheid that sound eerily familiar (and, unlike today, have no compunction about analogizing I-P to South African apartheid). Here's some selections from October 1977.

I guess I should be grateful that there was *any* corporate archive at all for the main case in my dissertation but aaaah, it's a bit galling that the only correspondence was for two random years from a handful of random executives. What I would give to have been able to pick two different years...

I have half a draft about this, I don't think this is a new dynamic at all (constitutional sheriffs/Claremont-y sheriffs have been around for a while), in a post 2020/2024 world priority #1 for Dem execs should be making sure the police are *actually* under civilian control esp in crisis situations

Cornell University Library is hiring two Processing Archivists! Come work with us! jobs.hr.cornell.edu/us/en/job/WD...

oh man this looks fascinating!

You know what couldn't have been made today? Andor.

Here are Hasan Piker's avg concurrent viewership figures, for comparison. There have been some stories on him recently, but I still think journalists are underrating the influence of him+his fellow politics streamers. "Online isn't real" doesn't cut it anymore, the center of gravity is shifting.

"Twitter isn't real life" has become less of an observation and more of an excuse for journalists avoiding fluency in online culture.

the thing to understand is that for many people the violence of order maintenance is simply not seen as violence in the first place

For anyone who needs respite from the news, I highly recommend Taskmaster, an extremely silly long-running UK show in which five comedians compete at absurd tasks. Low-stress, high-pleasure, lots of laughs, utterly disconnected from reality. As your doctor, I hereby prescribe one episode minimum.

Hey! If you know someone (undergrad/grad) in either Charlotte or the Raleigh-Durham area who would do a couple hours of archival work (paid ofc), please send me a DM! I need someone to go thru a few boxes for me, for my dissertation. #histsky #skystorians #historians

Man I feel like in most archives searching the digital catalogs is usually less helpful than just leafing through a finding aid. The interfaces are so clunky, it feels like it takes ages to sort out what's interesting in a collection.

Notably, this issue is also the basis of the failed prosecution of Clay Davis in The Wire (and gives him space to transform himself from corrupt insider to persecuted civil rights leader)

My response to Eric Levitz. www.unpopularfront.news/p/against-vu...

oh boy www.law360.com/articles/237...

How many times does the UK govt need to be told that a backdoor is a backdoor is a backdoor? Insane that Vance is the voice of reason here www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

State legislators can't have it both ways: if you're cutting Math and English departments to the bone, don't expect to keep tailgating. The health of college sports should be tied directly to education funding- when academics go down, athletics should go down too.

The attack on core departments, tenured, and tenure track faculty is now accelerating in blue states, building upon the assault on NTT colleagues. Far from resisting Trump’s assault on higher ed, University admins in Democratic run states are spraying fuel on the fire to make it burn faster.

How valuable are family connections? New working paper finds that working for a parent’s employer increases initial earnings by 24%, primarily by providing access to higher-paying firms. matthewstaiger.github.io/matthewstaig...

This is an incredibly noxious and foolish position on the merits, and it's hard to believe the author is naive enough to think that succumbing to divide and conquer would make the university more defensible. This is a recipe for a total unraveling of American HE, not a retreat to STEM.

Statistics are always ideological, in the sense that they call attention to certain features of the world and not others, present some facts as neutral and others as political choices. But there's still a consistent procedure. If the content is just made up, they stop being statistics at all.

The Center for the sociology of innovation learned with great sadness that Michel Callon has passed away. A graduate of the École des Mines, Michel joined the center in the late 1960s and was its director from 1982 to 1994.

Coming March 2026

a sudden stop was put to further discoveries

I had (wrongly) assumed that once I got out of reports produced on typewriters into modern documents that OCR would have an easier time but alas...

I think most Civil War analogies are bad but one works here: American institutions are replete with McClellans, leaders with enormous self-regard and sympathy for their opponents, while lacking both the skill and desire to fight against them.

Historically, paying Danegeld always made the Danes go away and leave you alone in perpetuity. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

"In other words, almost a third of the prices going into the CPI at the moment are guesses based on other data collections in the CPI." - Apollo/Slok www.apolloacademy.com/the-quality-...

"downwardly mobile intellectuals love socialism" yes hello welcome to 1890, please collect your clerking job and SI membership at the door

This article is phenomenal samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-th...

I decided to make a long blog post combining general sociological things I am aware of with personal observations of cultural and lifestyle differences between the UK and USA. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/07/comp...

I think this is the most time I've spent cleaning up OCR since coming back to grad school and man I wish we didn't have several numerals that look similar with smudged ink (8=6,4=9,1=7)

Ladies and gentlemen, the commander in chief. www.wsj.com/politics/tru...

My university has announced a fund to essentially poach doctoral students from US institutions. DM me if you do work on the history/social impacts of AI and are interested in being poached 😂

In the evergreen words of Lester Freamon: "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. You start to follow the money and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you." (The Wire S1E9)

“The project’s main goal is to make Mayan an available writing system on every computer. This requires… encoding the Mayan writing system into Unicode, + developing a font + keyboard… We’re not trying to dictate how people use it, but instead provide a free, open source tool.”

The beauty of historical political economy: someone at UMich didn't press a book down properly on the scanner a decade-ish ago, so now I get to fix OCR'd spreadsheets all week.

well well well, round two of testing whether inflation benefits or dooms incumbent parties is coming soon!

CfP for a Special Issue of Emancipations on Economic Planning!!!

Our paper is now officially out in the September issue of Social Forces, and it is available open access! doi.org/10.1093/sf/s... "A processual framework for understanding the rise of the populist right: the case of Brazil (2013-2018)" By Benjamin H. Bradlow and @tomasgold.bsky.social

Who is gonna be at SASE? It'll be my first time, I'm very excited! Would love to meet up with some folks, please drop me a line