Every time someone makes this (no offense) blindingly obvious observation we all know is true but mostly ignore, an angel gets its wings.

in case you were doubting the ability of the high fashion industry to foretell the future for the rest of us, this was in the NYT style magazine 12 years ago today.

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

It's possible Ezra Klein doesn't exactly know how algorithms work.

Oh geez. This is extremely not a new theory.

I recognize the problem of too much arguing about new ideas. There is lack of coordination to advance post-publication evaluation mechanisms in systematic well-organized way. I hope the Publish-Review-Curate Alliance that is currently being set up will help to change this: publish-review-curate.org

This from @pardoguerra.bsky.social is right: Not every useful unit of research needs the same amount of peer review resources. We need an incentive structure to support alternatives. Not said: there is no way to get there. /1

If we play our cards right, soon we’ll be able to send handguns through the postal service but not birth control or ballots

Happy Mother's Day!

Turku mother and child monument, 1914; mother and child in Turku, 2026. (Welfare state imagined, welfare state achieved?)

Ruissalo

Click bait headlines can really ruin an essay. I read the whole thing hunting for something "we have overlooked," and, never finding it, was just disappointed (surprise! It's uncertainty, which "we" talk about constantly).

Click bait headlines can really ruin an essay. I read the whole thing hunting for something "we have overlooked," and, never finding it, was just disappointed (surprise! It's uncertainty, which "we" talk about constantly).

The closest thing MAGA has to a pronatalist policy is an intended side effect of denying entrance into the professions for women (and students of color).

The closest thing MAGA has to a pronatalist policy is an intended side effect of denying entrance into the professions for women (and students of color).

This statement is meant to be left-punching, but notice that the most popular left-wing candidates (Bernie, Mamdani, AOC) are superb at plain-spokenness, and it is the moderate wing that usually offers language that has been optimized and focus-grouped to death

New research shows that, in the mid-20th century, China was able to achieve remarkably rapid declines in child mortality in the absence of economic growth, by investing in healthcare. bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/4/2/...

“Nearly half (48.6%) of investigators with equity-related terminations were BIPOC and 60.0% of investigators with gender-related terminations were SGM… 20.5% of investigators with institutional terminations (for purported antisemitism) were Jewish.” www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Thanks for this! Joana Pepin @joannapepin.bsky.social has done a lot of work on this... she she I did one little piece on marriage aspirations specifically: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

earlier today I saw a friend on facebook repost this graph from Institute for Family Studies, coauthored by Brad Wilcox. immediately it felt fishy to me not only because of the source but because something just smelled off about the graph. what would be the mechanism for that kind of plunge?

"A citizenry that increasingly outsources thinking to algorithms becomes vulnerable to manipulation and demagoguery. When sustained attention atrophies, so does the ability to track complex arguments or interrogate political claims." www.aaup.org/issue/spring...

If only we had evidence on the effects of abortion bans of migration for policymakers to consider… Oh wait, we do! www.nber.org/papers/w33328

Also only leaders where Super Mario lapel buttons

If you're okay with everything in this speech except for the line about Gaza, as U-M's president seems to be, you're not advocating for "neutrality"--you're exploiting the rhetoric of neutrality to suppress ideas you don't like.

This is good! We would add: Often the preprint is the only unpaywalled version available, so it's not just discoverable and citable, it's also readable - that helps, too! 😀

If someone says they believe in the Antichrist, there is no reason to discuss evidence. He also says Trump literally puts people under a spell. This requires a different kind of journalism.

What the hell www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

Advisory: If I think your email was written by a robot, I will delete it without responding. I just can't risk wasting my time on it. Of course, my human brain device is somewhat error-prone, and might be wrong, so I apologize in advance. But it does so many cool things I'm going to keep using it!

One thing that galls me about AI slop is the total reign of disingenuousness. A person "wrote" a detailed, impassioned appeal of their terrible AI slop paper's rejection. I explained why it was rejected. /1

I just repeated the analysis for grants in fiscal year 2026. I found 98 grants with title changes upon administrative (non-competitive) renewal. Here is the removed word cloud for fiscal year 2026. 4/5

In sabbatical news, my one-photo-per-species album has reached 200 birds, with the discovery of a grainy old photo of a Light-vented Bulbul from Hangzhou in 2017. That's almost 2% of all bird species! 🪶

The research question is genuinely very interesting, but this particular paper is doing an incredible amount of interpretive work in constructing concepts like "testability" and "prestige" + making them commensurable across disciplines from the specific vantage point of economics

In this essay, business professor Brayden King explains that Claude has replaced the human social dynamic he used to enjoy through his blog, for kicking around ideas, and why this makes him happy for some reason

The daily insults in the news are reinforced by the drone of military helicopters overhead, the leaf blowing of unemployed federal workers, and the restless pacing of National Guard troops from Arkansas and Nebraska

Lol come on

Good review by @jhollar.bsky.social (who should spend more time on here):

Don't remember where I got it, but now I often say: A paper is not the research, it's a description of the research.

For reading K. Paige Harden's new book, Original Sin, I re-read the review of her Genetic Lottery by @gcbias.bsky.social and @mollyprz.bsky.social (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...), w/ her reply (academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...) and their reply to her reply pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

More stories about his idiotic grandiose plans should mention that he promised to build "new Freedom Cities" on federal land to give "countless Americans a new shot at home ownership" -- not this.

He is 85. Raising the question, for me: have I been worrying too much about young people and not enough about old people being captured like this?

"It's Claude illusions I recall, I really don't know Claude's at all"? (Joni Mitchell - Both Sides)

Personally committing violence against peaceful students is a bad look for a university president. We'll see if blaming the autopilot is exculpatory enough.

If you require declaration of LLM use, a researcher who generates LLM slop faces two choices: 1. Declare over-reliance on LLMs. Result: 100% work is rejected. 2. Claim not to have over-relied on LLMs. Result: <100% change of rejection (no additional penalty for the deception). This is a problem.

In sabbatical news, my one-photo-per-species album has reached 200 birds, with the discovery of a grainy old photo of a Light-vented Bulbul from Hangzhou in 2017. That's almost 2% of all bird species! 🪶

Or is it polisci's view of themselves, econ's view of soc, and soc's view of econ

This is such a great and clear thread (and also, we *always* are making choices about what dynamics we are attempting to show when we chart things, and there usually isn’t one right answer - which is why it’s great when we can show the same data in a bunch of different ways).

Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3

This thread is excellent 10/10 recommend

Texas Tech's war on teaching about race & racism and sex & gender is both horrifying and also revealing. Their list of banned ideas is a mirror or projection of how racists and sexists think about race and sex rather than what’s taught in, say, history or sociology classes.

To wit, most public outreach and engagement is coded as “service”. Please, pray tell, when’s the last time someone got promoted on “service”? 20 mediocre publications hold more weight than 10 years of outstanding public work.