today in: sentences I wasn’t prepared to read

Reworking my "AI is awesome and you should unquestionably embrace it" graduation speech after some feedback

So many emails Arrived in my inbox now Forgive my delay #AcademicHaikus

Geopolitical prediction markets "incentivize treason and fraud, create constituencies that benefit from escalation, and give structural advantages to unconstrained actors."

Platform rules against insider trading & proposed legislation like the PREDICT Act are both scoped narrowly: elected officials, appointees, direct employees. But privileged information flows through networks (e.g. friends). The circle of potential insiders is wider than these frameworks acknowledge.

Some polling organizations are now using “silicon sampling” – that is, asking AI what the public thinks instead of asking people themselves. In this Q&A, Courtney Kennedy, our vice president of methods and innovation, explains why Pew Research Center does not use this approach. 🧵

The coercive federalism of it all. ICE is paying local police salaries, bonuses, vehicles, and equipment to join the 287(g) program. The ACLU calls it “unprecedented.” But the fiscal relationship between the feds and local jails on immigration isn’t new /1🧵

👀 "In order to prevent the improper sharing of voter lists, Election Alberta “seeds” voter lists w/fake names, & the body was able to confirm that the Centurion Project list had originally been provided legally to the Republican party of Alberta, a fringe rightwing party, & then improperly shared."

Hm, ok. So, Russia and the Trump administration are pulling in the same direction. Different motives, overlapping effects. 🧵 /1

Alberto was recruited in Mexico. He now works more than 10 hours a day for about $300 a week.  Sofia came from Honduras to work as a live-in caregiver.  She works 19-hour days for just $540 a month. Marcus was recruited from Mexico for a cleaning company. More than half his wages went unpaid.

“According to a Nature survey of about 5,000 researchers […] scientists are split on the ethics of AI use in academia. More than 90% of respondents felt it was acceptable to use AI for editing or translating their own text, but fewer were open to the idea of using it to generate text directly.”

Americans voice broad bipartisan support for age caps in Congress — NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll. (@elenamoore.bsky.social) More, via Opinion Today: opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260507-top...

*emerging from grading fog* so, what did I miss?! oh…

A WSJ analysis found 67% of Polymarket profits goes to just 0.1% of accounts, while most traders are in the red. Most Kalshi users also lose money.

oh. um. no. futurism.com/future-socie...

omg jumpscare (me before a hair cut)! I'm late to seeing this but thank you for engaging with my piece. Since that piece was published, courts have given us a clearer answer on who governs the prediction markets: the feds! www.reuters.com/world/new-je...

So, this happened on Friday. The entire National Science Board was removed. Through mechanisms like staggered six-year terms, the NSB was designed to be insulated from any single administration. Terminating all 22 members is what circumventing that design looks like. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The CFTC's plan for overseeing the recent prediction market boom: let traditional finance, crypto, Polymarket, and Kalshi advise on innovation. Also, lay off 24% of its own staff (cuts that began last year). Regulated today, regulator tomorrow. No lobbying needed... www.cnn.com/2026/04/26/p...

Even more prediction market news. This time in the form of criminal charges. A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier has been indicted by the Justice Department for allegedly making $400,000 on military secrets. www.npr.org/2026/04/26/n...

No, seriously, you have no idea what's going on at the DC Hilton, and neither do I. Neither do many of the people that are there. And unless you're part of the law enforcement effort, you don't really need to figure this out in the next ten minutes.

Question for academics/professional ppl outside Canada: Do you use a "two finger" to signal you have a direct response to someone? As in, you raise two fingers and someone will literally say aloud "so-and-so has a two-finger." Or is this just a Canadian thing? This is absolutely a real question.

something something institutional mechanisms that override gridlock and usher in policy with minimal negotiation… hm…

Beyond disagreeing with results, it’s about how evidence gets filtered before it informs public health policy. It’s an evidence pipeline problem: when research isn’t published, it distorts the inputs shaping policy design, evaluation, and implementation.

IF YOU’RE IN LINE TO GET CONTROL OF THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ, STAY IN LINE

A reminder that the state can reduce administrative burdens when it wants to 🫤 apnews.com/article/hegs...

“Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability.” That part! Everything from documentation to compliance mechanisms to whistleblowing is a threat.

It seems the “wisdom of crowds” angle is doing a lot of PR for prediction market platforms. These are really economic redistribution machines. A small group of traders capture most of the gains, while everyone else supplies the cash and the idea that this is just collective intelligence. Hm.

Oooh! More news on prediction markets! “The top 1 per cent of users capture about 84 per cent of all gains, while the top 0.1 per cent capture nearly 60 per cent. In effect, most participants lose money to a small group of sophisticated traders…” www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/pe...

1/7. We Americans have a hard time seeing ourselves in the world, and so even when we want to criticize our fascist oligarchs we fail to see the international networks of which they are nodes.

Small byelections, big consequences! #cdnpoli

I've been offline for 4 days. What did I miss?! Oh.

I think I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/on-the-mat...

How often does the Supreme Court overturn its own decisions?

Who has jurisdiction? Not the states! We have some answers to a few of the questions posed in my piece: "U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform." www.reuters.com/world/new-je...

So glad that congress isn’t alive to see this.

Yesterday, four astronauts swung around the far side of the moon, traveling farther from the Earth than any humans had ever gone before, taking some spectacular photographs along the way. theatln.tc/19ze00pK 📸: NASA; Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty

As @dandrezner.bsky.social concludes, the war is a strategic defeat for the United States. We are worse off than before the war, and already there have been military and civilian costs. As many experts have said, hard to see opening Hormuz militarily. 5/ danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-strate...

You don’t get “America First” by undermining alliances. You just get “America Alone.”

Polymarket criticized over ‘disgusting’ bets on fate of pilots on US jet shot by Iran

the saga continues…

If you are wondering who regulates the death markets, the short answer is the Trump admin is claiming to do so, but mostly to stop anyone else from engaging in meaningful regulation. Oh, and Don Jr is advising both Polymarket and Kalshi.

The 2027 budget proposal ​calls for cuts to nondefense spending, including funding for education and the EPA. on.wsj.com/4cpgJYV

🤦🏽‍♀️

Folks, I give you the New York Times

“Like free Black people before the Civil War who carried the burden of proof to demonstrate that they were not enslaved people […], the burden of proof today has been borne disproportionately by US citizens and immigrants who are people of color…” Fascinating piece re evolution of mobility rights!

TIL there's an "End Prediction Market Corruption Act" bill that would ban (a subset) of government officials from trading on non-public information, sponsored by Merkley and co-sponsored by four fellow Senate Dems, and IMHO more lawmakers should get on board. www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

My newest for @donmoyn.bsky.social 's blog! I wrote about prediction markets, and why governing them is, at its core, a federalism problem.
 Polymarket and Kalshi are caught between a federal regulator claiming exclusive jurisdiction and states insisting it's theirs to police. /1 🧵

‘Canadians don’t want to come here any more’: anger over Trump squeezes US border businesses

Over the last 25 years, six people who contracted measles in the U.S. died from it. A model built by Stanford researchers predicts that if Americans could no longer get the vaccine, measles could kill about 290,000 people in the next 25 years.