It seems we learned nothing from the horror and stupidity of the "Torture Memos," except a lust for extrajudicial violence Instead of waterboarding supposed 9/11 masterminds, we are deep-siding men in boats that we haven't identified, know nothing about, & send home if they live despite our agency

Just a wild guess. What’s in The Epstein Files are threats by the FBI against Trump that they’ll pursue charges of statutory rape of a 15 year old and money laundering unless he cooperates in taking Epstein down. Epstein already hated him for taking that property from underneath him. And then this.

My guess is that there are plenty of college-bound kids who though they won’t focus on the study of race, gender or sexuality still don’t want to be at a place where the intuitions and common sense of donors and priests determine what can be said without risk of penalty.

This is…outstanding. If I may, I urge us to read it carefully, and appreciate the details, the shape, the picture it paints.

Have you written about Mokyr's Prize yet? Do you see the connection between science and industry qualitatively changing in the late 19th century, and our possibly reading back into early modern Europe the importance science had for capitalist development that it only later had? @delong.social

is this bad

In the US there’s no talk even of techno fixes like sequestering carbon or blocking the sun because that‘d be an admission that fossil fuels are creating problems. We can’t even move past climate denialism. In fact to turn attention on an existential climate crisis is said to divert from the border

Make sure he isn’t watching or listening to “War of the Worlds“ on Halloween.

“I’m a climate scientist. Trump’s U.N. address is a fire hose of misinformation” | My new op-ed in the @sfchronicle.com: www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open... #ScienceUnderSiege

‪[email protected]: What do Europeans do with these extra hours of leisure that Americans do not enjoy? Maybe FOMA could inspire Americans to change the nature of work? conversableeconomist.com/2025/09/01/w...

More than 85 scientists say that a recent U.S. Department of Energy report is full of errors and misrepresents climate science.

It's more like American voters gaslit themselves during the election.

Such an important argument. Bergstrom reminds me of the similarly important arguments in Naomi Oreskes's Why Trust Science and Philip Kitcher's Science in a Democratic Society (he critiques the poles of denial of expertise and dictatorship by experts). Great class to assign all 3 & probe differences

1/2 The dust hasn't settled, and perhaps it will constantly be kicked up for three years. But it seems like we don't have an idea of how radically American science has been reoriented. One suspects that research into diseases that afflict the poor and the aged will suffer as well...

The anti-Marxists of the 70s & 80s claimed to support liberty, free trade & the rule of law & oppose tyranny & the use of murder as a political tool. Which shows how much the right has changed in my lifetime.

Finishing up the syllabus😜 I. Plato & bell hooks Must Philosopher Kings be intersectional? 2. Aristotle & Judith Butler Is trans identity necessary for eudamonia? 3. Newton, Foucault & Said Were even the laws of physics a knowledge/power nexus for Western imperial control?

Trump suffers most loss with Asian-Americans and without those without a college degree. So he has his sharpest losses with a population that probably has the highest % with a college degree and with those without the degree.

This isn’t what I voted for only because I actively ignored Trump promising that this is what he would do.

About to get my private tutorial on this.

I've been with my Mom at the hospital as they treat her for signs of congestive heart failure and advancing dementia. Two floors below, our two kids who embody her values were born. The site of indescribable joy is also one of anguish I can't describe.

Guess: Musk built the cybertruck monstrosity because he knew Chinese producers had him beat on EV technology and would catch up on self-driving. China invited Tesla in and outcompeted him. Musk needed US government contracts to survive. www.npr.org/2025/02/24/n...

I read Marx's Capital after many years and made a critical reading guide to help students get through it. Comments welcome. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The accessible American mid-level state school with a 60%+ admissions rate that still is able to go round for round with everything but the absolute best universities that the rest of world has to offer is a world-historic triumph that these fucking clowns are burning down due to their ivy neuroses

If you haven't watched this, you need to. As the bodies are tragically piling up in Texas, we need to remember who is responsible for the climate crisis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag8r...

I have to think that the attraction of courts is that there can be some systematic presentation and evaluation of relevant evidence, under oath. Moreover, the parties would be required to have evaluated the evidence and be able to justify their conclusions.

MAGA doesn't have a clue about what it is trying to destroy. This is my daughter's quartet; she concentrates in Chemistry and Physics. www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxNB4...

This ad may be most effective in discouraging campaign contributions to Eric Adam’s

Surveillance enables companies to no longer pay efficiency wages, i.e. wage premia that workers were paid because it was difficult to discover whether they were shirking: the potenial loss of the wage premia was meant to motivate full effort. New surveillance makes shirking easy & cheap to discover

If anyone wants to hear any music of the Italian resistance, Bella Ciao, here's my older daughter's chorus. She's at our far left. www.instagram.com/reel/DKkeNHp...

SCOTUS just stripped judges' power to stop unconstitutional orders nationwide in a move KBJ calls "an existential threat to the rule of law" The Court has chosen a side, and it isn't the rule of law. Lower courts can't protect the Constitution because the Supreme Court won't let them.

Thanks to @markfabian.bsky.social for interviewing me. It was really fun to talk about my research. In the interview, I expand on what happened to MOOCs, how they became domesticated in that the wild hopes associated with them (access, big data!) abated but some concrete gains remained.

Emerson put it better? Things are in the saddle and ride Mankind? I have a discussion of commodity fetishism in these reading notes docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Does Harvard just let Stephen Pinker teach a course on race science or let Carole Hooven teach a course on gender/sex that they may have always wanted to teach (or Pinker's friend Epstein wanted taught)? What happens when few students take the brand-new gen eds? Will the wrestling lady be upset?

Is there any chance that Damsky's paper could be read as a reductio ad absurdum of originalism and thus serve as an unintended critique of it?

Granovetter has a ‘riot’ threshold model. At certain #’s many more people come in from the sidelines to join the resistance. 2% is probably such a threshold. Friends last night guessed that 3.5% would lead to a big increase in participants and change the political climate decisively against MAGA.

If the feds’ objective is to “liberate” Los Angeles and California from its democratically elected leadership, then this not a peacekeeping mission but a program of invasion.

He's an entertainer. He's a hyper-corrupt politician using the state for enrichment. He's a populist, a voice of the people left behind by neoliberalism. He's another Citizen Kane, a labyrinth without a center: a nullity. No, he is a fascist.

Ms. Rampell is correct to note the underlying hatred and disgust of the global racial untermenschen in the MAGA base. Both the feelings and the sanctioned ignorance that sustains them are deplorable. Not to say that is cowardly and deplorable.

The soldiers already believe that the enemy is within and that elected officials are abetting the criminal takeover of the country. These bozos will give no resistance to the order for indiscriminate lethal violence against whoever Trump labels an enemy within. America seems to be over, people.

Will Pres Trump order SEAL Team 6 to deal with the outspoken Governor of CA Gavin Newsom if Trump thinks that Newsom is interfering with his executive actions to handle a national security emergency? Is calling Trump's actions 'deranged' enough to give an assassination order?

Musk, the boy who cried pedo.

For @newyorker.com, Joshua Rothman spoke with @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social, authors of AI Snake Oil and a recently published paper “AI as Normal Technology”, which argues that practical obstacles will slow AI’s uses and potential: www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

"Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct" This should terrify every single scientist in America.

The replication stuff is hilarious because Trump is attacking the biological sciences exactly where it has consensus or near consensus: safety of mRNA vaccines, causes and consequences of global climate change, race as a poor prism through which to explore genetic diversity.

It's all so farcical. Nobody could seriously believe that there's some plan here which goes step 1: cancel all foreign student visas at Harvard, step 2: ?????, step 3: increase replication rates in biology. The lie is so transparent as to be insulting.