I'm excited to let you all know that Middlebury is hiring a comparativist who works on African Politics! I am the search committee chair, so hit me up with any questions you may have. Deadline is 9/1. apply.interfolio.com/188248

I'm excited to let you all know that Middlebury is hiring a comparativist who works on African Politics! I am the search committee chair, so hit me up with any questions you may have. Deadline is 9/1. apply.interfolio.com/188248

I’m in @foreignpolicy.com taking a big swing (but not a hot take): Trump’s defeat in Iran is a bigger US defeat in strategic terms than the US loss in Vietnam foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/16/i...

Just hearing about this. Devastating.

Really happy to announce that my article "A New Survey Measure of Hindu Religiosity" will be coming out in Sociology of Religion! I will share it when it's available.

Me to my daughters every single morning at around 6:15 AM:

"citation count & journal impact factor reveals quantitative studies on secularization tend to be published in higher ranked journals & get more citations. Topics related to philosophy, Catholicism & law get fewer citations. The topic of science & religion is often found in lower ranked journals."

"As the founding generation of Republicans understood, the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to regulate the court. By contrast, the document says nothing about the court’s claimed authority to regulate Congress."

Really excited to read this, and love that it's open access: www.cambridge.org/core/books/w...

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism

With 150GW solar, India achieved its target of having 50% of its total installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources in June 2025, reaching this milestone 5 years ahead of its original 2030 deadline set under the Paris Agreement www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/10/i...

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

Conditional accept for my survey paper on Hinduism! You have no idea how hard it has been to get this published (data is from 2018) -- not just because it's hard to get anything published, but also many religion journals don't seem to care about Hinduism. More soon.

My piece in Comparative Politics on the metamorphosis in qualitative methods is now officially out! Send me a message if you want a PDF. doi.org/10.5129/001041525X17607275497485

Oscar-winner Ryan Coogler recalling how a college writing professor pushed him to become a screenwriter & the possibility of #Sinners being taught in film curriculums someday: “I have so much respect for professors…for dedicating their life to future generations & making sure their minds are solid.”

Inadvertently makes a case here for why we need to keep the humanities in school

My piece in Comparative Politics on the metamorphosis in qualitative methods is now officially out! Send me a message if you want a PDF. doi.org/10.5129/001041525X17607275497485

Really enjoyed this book, which I would recommend to academics. Some very good tips. And in true "slow" fashion, I had to renew it six times from the library because I took my time reading it... www.amazon.com/Slow-Product...

Constant feeling about living in Vermont

This statement by Ariely to The New York Times literally made me lol.

It's been a very cold winter in Vermont. My thoughts:

Had a run of success at journals recently, but got absolutely creamed on my last submission:

"The Big Bang has been confirmed by observational evidence but not experimental evidence therefore it is NOT causal" - poli sci reviewers

It is important to understand that these are all lies. Deans don't tell applicants why they don't get a job that they applied for. The job market doesn't react to PhD defenses with phone calls for interviews. This is all false. These people are liars, and they are lying to you to start a race panic.

Now that I'm off ElonTwitterX, I realized that I had so many good jokes on there lost to the ether. In short: I'm sorry, my political science comedy albums are going to really delayed.

When I first heard the term "LLM" I was terrified it was yet another regression model that I needed to pretend to know about, whew thank god it was not that.

I am the face of Middlebury faculty research! Oh no.

"About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024" due mostly to DOGE's illegal dismantling of USAID

A picture is worth a 1000 words. The birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines in the USA eliminated perinatally acquired hepatitis B infection from over 20,000 cases a year before the vaccine was introduced to <20 cases a year. The gaslighting by the current members ACIP is obscene, unethical and cruel.

New idea to measure academic impact: how many books of yours were illegally downloaded and used to train LLMs by Anthropic.

Just want to mention two articles of mine since we are talking about the hilariously-named "Credibility Revolution." 1. "Randomized Controlled History?" It explores design-based inference approaches to history and finds them mostly problematic. (www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...)

This is an interesting paper. I continue to sense that we as a field have concluded, either you have an identification strategy as defined here, or you don’t have a valid causal claim. And that is really not true.

Just want to mention two articles of mine since we are talking about the hilariously-named "Credibility Revolution." 1. "Randomized Controlled History?" It explores design-based inference approaches to history and finds them mostly problematic. (www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...)

Amazing letter in The Times (also an unbelievable play fwiw)

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/b... Corporations: wait a minute, if everyone is poor, who is going to buy pizza?

Public man-made death: The dismantling of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” That’s 1000+ excess dead children every day. Every day. hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

This is the type of hater energy that will fuel us in the years ahead.

I have been thinking about writing this paper for over a decade: my definition and conceptualization of "religion." No idea if any of this makes sense. Feedback welcome. Enjoy! t.co/ykdwhEAEsK

this is a metaphor for waking up and logging on

I think the main problem with existing definitions of religion is that they also work for other items like "magic" or "astrology" or "Alcoholics Anonymous." Read my paper that tries to differentiate religion from other "supernaturalisms." papers.ssrn.com/abstract=577...

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

I have been thinking about writing this paper for over a decade: my definition and conceptualization of "religion." No idea if any of this makes sense. Feedback welcome. Enjoy! t.co/ykdwhEAEsK

Ouch! Feeling kind of old as one of that “earlier generation” that engaged in “shopworn” debates :) Great review of important recent work on qualitative methods! I would add Fairfield and Charman on formal Bayesian process tracing as one of the key recent contributions.

Check out my review of some exciting new books in qualitative methods!

Today's conundrum: "The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts." - Abraham Kaplan, Conduct of Inquiry.

Are you interested in the study of religion but tired of reading about Christianity? Boy do I have the article for you! Now under review. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I hope one day the Wilson Center, where I worked last summer, will be back but I fear it will not. thehill.com/opinion/inte...