New article with @lfalvarezleon.bsky.social on the different geographies created by digital capitalism, urbanization, and global production networks

‪The latest ‪@njpolicylab.bsky.social‬ report written by professors @ericseymour.bsky.social & @willbpayne.bsky.social looks at corporate ownership of 1–4-unit residential properties in #NJ. Between 2012 and 2022 ownership more than doubled. policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/...

Between 2012 and 2022, corporate ownership of 1–4-unit residential properties more than doubled in #NJ, according to this latest report from NJSPL and authored by #Rutgers researchers @ericseymour.bsky.social & @willbpayne.bsky.social: policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/...

Similar to its precursor (smart cities), the real money in these speculative projects lies not in any eventual product but in the ecosystem of summits, workshops, and gatherings that circulate the idea and monetize the fiction itself under the pretense of design or planning.

OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.

Out in spring from @bentarnoff.com & I www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

AAG 2026 Call for Papers/Panelists: "Urban Politics from Bidenomics to MAGA Urbanism" organized by myself and @alanwiig.bsky.social. Please send abstracts and/or expressions of panel interest to us by October 24, and share widely!

It’s your lucky day! We have identified your profile as a winner, but time is running out to claim your reward. Just send us 250 words within the next three days so we can process your claim. Act now! #AAG2026

Along with Will Payne and Jovan Lewis, I'm organizing an AAG session on the economic geography of scams for the 2026 conference in San Francisco. Please share widely! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

In which surveillance study scholars, computer scientists, digital geographers, and a random economic geographer (me) collaborate to unpack the black box of how/why cell phone companies model your location in cities. There's more ambiguity than you'd think! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Call for Papers: Locating Power & Resistance in Global AI Production Networks AAG 2026 Annual Meeting AI is not just “in the cloud.” It relies on global supply chains, with power concentrated in a few countries and corporations. fair.work/en/fw/blog/c... #AAG2026

Yuppies has a cover! And a release date! Out May 12 with @harvardpress.bsky.social.

José Ramírez-Garofalo, an ecologist at Freshkills, “will soon defend his Ph.D. dissertation at Rutgers…. He sees the park as a hopeful story at an otherwise ‘grim’ time for conservation efforts. ‘We’re seeing all these species come back… And they’re all here on Staten Island.’”

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) payment technologies are targeting young women and reconfiguring the spaces, practices & relations of digital money and finance. Very happy to have been interviewed for this story based on my research on BNPL and the geographies of consumer fintech w/ @dcockayne.bsky.social

Sea-level rise & flooding are ongoing due to climate change. How should coastal communities & decision makers respond? In a New Jersey study Geronimo et al. found cultural & institutional factors create barriers to transformative adaptation strategies @willbpayne.bsky.social‬ doi.org/10.1111/risa...

New article by Laura Geronimo, Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social, Clinton J. Andrews, Elisabeth A. Gilmore, Robert E. Kopp: Cultural and Institutional Factors Driving Severe Repetitive Flood Losses: Insights From the Jersey Shore. #research onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper by former @bloustein.rutgers.edu PhD student and MACH postdoc Laura Geronimo examines how differences in values and worldviews shape attitudes toward coastal adaptation strategies

Dr. Will Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social and colleagues published a new article in JPER titled "Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change." journals.sagepub.com/eprint/RDXWS...

iNaturalist Animals and Plants xkcd.com/3118/

Higher #corporate ownership rates of small, 1- to 4-unit properties appear in a range of #NJ municipalities, including Trenton, New Brunswick, Atlantic City, Asbury Park, and Newark:

OnlineFirst - "Mapping elite tastes along New York City’s gourmet gentrification frontier, 1990–2015" by Will B. Payne: #localreviews #commercialgentrification #NewYorkCity #geographicinformationscience #foodculture journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways? aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

Geology Murder xkcd.com/3112/

"Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas." Joshua Rothman on reading in the age of AI www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

Approximately 19% of Trenton's one- to four-unit #housing properties transitioned to corporate ownership between 2012 & 2022, totaling just over 4,000 properties in the Garden State capital, according to new research from @ericseymour.bsky.social w/ @bloustein.rutgers.edu: #Rutgers #NJ #NewJersey

Senator Padilla’s office sends me this video of his take-down and detention at Sec. Noem’s press conference in L.A.

I am in downtown Los Angeles right now and it is completely surreal to hear that Trump is sending Marines here. We are listening to mariachi music. People have dogs. There are teenagers here. It is utterly and completely peaceful. Please tell your friends.

Professor @willbpayne.bsky.social has examined how user-generated review platforms can impact restaurants' reputations, and as the landscape of restaurant discovery evolves, he notes it is more crucial for restaurants to navigate online reviews carefully.

Musk should be asked about this in every interview he does now and forever. To ignore it is a dereliction of duty. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

New article out in Urban Studies! I examine Google’s urban-tech power from Fiber to Sidewalk Labs and argue that the company is less a cohesive strategist and more a shapeshifter, driven by the speculative ethos of Silicon Valley journals.sagepub.com/eprint/JIJUW...

SCOOP from me: the mass exodus of employees from NOAA is decimating a tiny office that literally keeps our measurements of latitude and longitude accurate — and, former employees tell me, endangers the science of how the US understands global measurements:

Looks great Gavin!

SHAME. This is an example of the feds on an out of control rampage. Arresting the mayor of Newark for demanding to inspect a site in Newark is absurd. #ReleaseBaraka pix11.com/news/local-n...

I am outraged by the unjust arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka earlier this afternoon outside of Delaney Hall in Newark. I am calling for his immediate release by federal law enforcement.

Between his attacks on NIH, NSF, and higher ed generally, Trump has very nearly placed a moratorium on public scientific research in this country, yet legacy media seems determined to frame it exclusively as a snit over Harvard.

The great @andreapitzer.bsky.social is in @nymag.com, calling CECOT what it is: a bona fide concentration camp

BCNM student Lee Crandall is recognized for their groundbreaking work in the field of geography at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers! bcnm.berkeley.edu/news-researc...

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

@aresluna.org I present to you… a Horton Gorton (spotted in Vancouver, the land of Tim Horton’s, unrelatedly)

Read @moiraweigel.bsky.social on why the Trump tariffs are likely to strengthen Chinese economic power by accelerating its globalizing push, especially in Asia www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/o...

This is such a bad article about sprawl in the Times. For instance, this statement is insanely misleading -- there is absolutely no radius out from Los Angeles where it's denser than NYC. The LA 'metro area' is more dense just because of how we define metro areas… www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/m...

Pleased to announce that my article with Steve Holloway, "Underestimating Racism? Decoupling Race and Redlining," in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers has received the IPUMS Spatial Research Award. 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Piscataway, NJ has a message for the current administration on this gloomy spring day ✊

Excited to share new work with Lemir Teron at Howard on highway removal/reconfiguration politics in NY. We examine the variegated role of state government in both hindering and facilitating such projects, increasingly crucial to understand as USDOT abandons the more progressive elements of IIJA/IRA.

Among the many idiotic things about DOGE is trying to reduce the federal budget by eliminating things like NEH or IMLS. That’s like me trying to free up my hard drive by deleting 5kb text files instead of the dozens of 4K movies I torrented or the 16gb language models I stupidly downloaded.

Very fun tool Mercator Extreme that lets you change where the North Pole (and greatest distortion) is on a Mercator-style map projection: mrgris.com/projects/mer... (via @kottke.org)