What the hell is going on here?

I’ll keep pushing this line of analysis because I’m increasingly convinced the clearest path out of this mess is for Dems to adopt a relentless anti-corruption, anti-inequality, anti-oligarchy, pro-democracy platform. The Dem leadership hasn’t realized it yet, but they’re now a reform party.

Direct File is survived by its code, lovingly preserved on GitHub for potential revival whenever the leaders of the executive branch are no longer bent on looting the country.

no pods, no casters.

The many monarchs of Europe, the slaver's Confederacy, the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Italian fascists, Imperial Japan and many more all assumed that because liberals value peace and human life, that they were weak and feckless and easily beaten. Go look for them now.

You’ve heard that the Economist accidentally published misinformation about the prevalence of Holocaust denial, but did you know the underlying methodological problem is super common and decades-old? Learn more on Nov. 13: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-rare-t... Free for students & AAPOR, $5 for others

The American moral economy is so bizarre, especially on the pop-left, where you have this rhetorical and aesthetic framework lifted from 19th century proletarian socialism deployed in favor of a sort of anti-free markets consumerism that is totally individualized.

“The Flight 93 Election”

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What if we did a single run and declared victory

Keep an eye on this space. I have an essay coming out next week that tackles this topic. One thing this story doesn't explicitly acknowledge is that with Trump "lobbying" is now on an individual firm basis, instead of industry wide. That seems significant, too. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

So Instagram has decided all the money is in Reels so they'll slowly deprioritize the photos. Another data point for "algorithmic short form video is the end stage of trying to occupy your eyeballs" @chrislhayes.bsky.social

Interesting paper, but identifying on Genshin Impact seems a bit weird for generalizing to “social media”-type apps. Like, you could probably get the same effects from World of Warcraft during the MMO boom.

Spike Jonze: In my movie I invented the parasocial relationship with an AI as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Parasocial Relationship AI from the classic sci-fi movie Don't Create The Parasocial Relationship AI

Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality. This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀 diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

... really? This is what we're up against? People who ignore fucking survey weights? Like, obviously people very much do bad research of this kind, and they will continue to do so, but the fact that the Yglesias' and the Kleins of this world don't do the right thing and reject this out of hand...

Oh so it runs Eve Online?

I think there’s a comfort in blaming our current politics on social media. When I think a boring but more accurate story is that plutocratic tech elites and right-wingers *made a lot of choices*. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/o...

Prepping a lecture on dynamic Bayesian models and wanted to give the students some real world applications - Hats off to fiftyplusone.news for having such a good and clear methodology page! fiftyplusone.news/methodology

since there's reports on social media of money hitting accounts worth reiterating that this is illegal and unconstitutional as shit, it's not a close question, and while I don't expect anyone on H/SASC or H/SAC will do anything, anyone performing this 'reprogramming' should face criminal penalties

Everybody’s got their own definition of fun. This is mine.

should I start a bsky book club? one book a month, say, and then we do a big megathread to discuss it.

If he gets a Nobel then I’m going to start pointing out that the Econ prize is not a real Nobel.

YOURE FUCKING KIDDING ME

Why most polls overstate support for political violence www.gelliottmorris.com/p/most-polls...

i wrote a custom llm sampler for llama-3.1-8b so it could only say words that are in the bible

The Ig Nobel is incredible , one year an Indian guy won it for calculating the average surface area of an elephant and during his acceptance they had an elephant hold up a sign with the surface area of the scientist on it, they do showbiz better than the Oscars

I've written an essay reflecting on how I use the word slop and some theory of what distinguishes slop from spam and kitsch. minihf.com/posts/2025-1...

It will be an annual bailout, because the buyers are not going back to unreliable sellers, and other countries now have windfall revenues they can use to ramp up even more production for the next cycle.

The language is stunning, but it's also one of the most clear-eyed and comprehensive statements I've seen from ANYBODY involved in government thus far as to the nature of the constitutional revolution that we are currently undergoing.

I continue to think that one of the reasons this country is falling apart is the wholesale abandonment of public virtue as a broadly shared aspiration. Or even something people should be embarrassed about if they don’t have it.

This is true, & backed by the best peer-reviewed research. @kevinshih.bsky.social of @ucrchass.bsky.social uses large shocks to international student supply in the past to test the hypothesis that they crowd out natives. They crowd *in* natives, via tuition revenue—> doi.org/10.1016/j.jp...

Ai 2002 rtvrn video and its just an excel sheet for the box offices of every medium sized film from 1995-2004

Hades 2 is like *instantly* better than Hades 1. Right out of the gate it's better. How is it possible. They did it. Those crazy bastards actually did it.

This is a corollary of why I dislike the battery of “robustness checks” approach in a lot of papers - just do it right the first time!

Gemeinschaft is not a fun place to live. And it's the exact opposite of liberation, it's basically as far from liberation as you can get. This is why I think communitarianism is always intrinsically reactionary as a political project, no matter how radical the rhetoric and theory.

It was a true honor to talk to legendary political scientist Adam Przeworski about how he understands the present crisis, what he learned from Chile and Poland, and how to move forward from here www.dissentmagazine.org/article/how-...

casual remarks like this i think are a data point for capitalism having died of natural causes sometime in the last ~30 years

Instead of joining Chinese apps as an alternative to TikTok, Gen Z users should simply stop dancing and having fun and become mildly depressed 37 year old Bluesky users talking about Star Trek Deep Space 9

I think education is an underrated political issue right now we're at a moment where a) clearly American kids are not getting as good an education as they should, but also b) this doesn't have obvious partisan valence yet, neither party has a theory of the the case www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/u...

Come hear what Larry Katz, Xavier D'Haultfoeuille, Kei Hirano, Francesca Molinari, and Andres Santos think about publishing econometrics in general interest journals! Tomorrow's Chamberlain Seminar: 12pm ET

OUR BATHROOM MIRRORS ARE VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY

dudes rock

I wrote about the importance of optimism in politics, particularly when it comes to younger Americans.

chotiner is primo at what he does to be sure but the real thruline in all of this is that our best and brightest have never been either of those things and that the only thing exceeding the impunity they enjoy for their actions is their self-regard and deference in pontification

YouTube is truly the broadcast TV of the Internet. Extremely important and extremely invisible in discourse because elites find it boring and cringe.

voting is a fucking sacred duty and the fact that people don't treat it with the respect that it deserves is telling. you are not "selecting" an electoral product on the market - you are engaging in a form of mobilization and deciding what your values are

I feel like a bailout’s not going to fly under the radar this time www.npr.org/sections/the...