There are reasons they persist … www.nber.org/papers/w35079

Another way to put this is that the numerator (instances of close-minded, uncritical, herd thinking, etc.) is pretty easy to find if you're looking for it, but the denominator (reflective, critical, open to diverse voices) is much bigger, and vastly greater than any other domain of human experience.

If there is a single thing that the many outside critics of universities need to see that almost all do not, it's that the universities are the most internally disputatious and self-critical places on earth. We disagree, we criticize, we try to convince one another. It is literally what we do.

(6/2) By all means, criticize bad academic work! That is, in fact, what academics spend much of our time doing. In doing that, you’re joining our enterprise. Embrace that.

So, is cherry picking a single study by a visiting fellow at a center attached to a university and using it to bash "the rigor bar at universities" the sort of rigorous inquiry that we should emulate?

Remarkably, much of political science doesn’t consider this to be “money in politics”

This @michellegoldberg.bsky.social column is excellent. I think it's time to reluctantly conclude that when it comes to the rise & mainstreaming of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories, as bad as the Trump years have been, the post-Trump years are likely to be even worse.

If you’re a law professor thinking about reposting the claim that the Unite the Right rally was staged or faked, I’d encourage you to read the transcripts from Sines v Kessler. I know they run several thousand pages of testimony from the organizers, but they’re easily accessible and linked below.

"Unlawful use of confidential information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, and wire fraud." Statutes of limitations for all of these extend well past January 2029. And in the event of crony pardons, note that many of these are also state crimes...

When we look back on this era with a little more perspective, all these cancellations of speakers with politically disfavored viewpoints will seem pretty wild. It'll be up to historians to try to explain to confused students, "no, that was the side that said they were AGAINST 'cancel culture.'"

Most of the people who most need to read this story, won't. But some will. So please take this story, read it, and repost it somewhere that more people might see it, especially people who aren't as politics-obsessed as you are.

Uhhh… welcome? There’s, uhh, pie and punch in the back.

It’s obviously a huge challenge for the news business that each incremental story in the ongoing destruction of American scientific and medical progress is now a dog bites man story. But it’s really a “government lets rabid dog loose to bite us all” story. Don’t let yourself become inured to it.

SCOOP: Two weeks ago, the head of the CDC delayed publication of a report showing covid vaccine cut likelihood of ER visits and hospitalizations by half. Now that report is no longer allowed to be published in CDC’s flagship scientific journal. My latest. 1/2 www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

EXCLUSIVE: The SPLC indictment, the Klan history behind it, and the ignominy of Todd Blanche. Another dark day for DOJ. Tonight, at Law Dork:

This remains the greatest piece of persuasive advertising ever made about electrification. It's insane to me that Nissan dropped it & it's insane that no one on the green left has picked it up to make it a national PSA.

Constitutional antihardball. @fishkin.bsky.social David Pozen columbialawreview.org/content/asym...

everyone with real American manliness and a basic knowledge of military history knows that serious war efforts have never been derailed by such trifling matters as "communicable diseases"

It's a sociopolitical DDOS attack.

Absolutely. "These people are stealing your tax money, robbing you of services you paid for to enrich themselves. I will stop that." That's a pretty simple and effective message.

it is, among other things, incredibly striking to see that roberts was so solicitous of the burden the clean power plan might put on fossil fuel executives, when, a decade later, he is indifferent to the way trump’s moves have thrown hundreds of thousands of lives into turmoil.

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

It’s an important story that really illustrates well how the effects of the information bubble in which Roberts (and other justices) live are greatly exacerbated by the decision to do big things on the shadow docket—and by highly flexible tools of judicial activism like the Major Questions Doctrine.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court (Gift link) This is one of the more impressive pieces of reporting to come out of the NYT’s larger and stronger Supreme Court reporting team. Joan Biskupic may have the best inside source, but this team somehow has the paper trail.

Great thread More of the report's recommendations apply directly to my very different public university context than I would've expected. I'm especially eager to discuss recommendations 7-14 & 17-19 w/ my colleagues when I'm back home from my year away, but I invite a free-for-all conversation here

Got asked an ideology question during my talk at Chicago and shared that my first question is always "Which viewpoints are y'all looking for? Folks who say I'm not human because I'm Black?" Say it with your whole chest. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

The Yale report on trust in higher education has some good recommendations for reforms in many areas that I hope Yale and other schools implement. But its diagnosis is oddly silent about what I suspect is the most important force driving the decline in trust in higher education: political attack.

The man is absolutely pitch perfect. "As Mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city. And some, just a little more than others." This is the way. We don't need to apologize for the idea that (1) everyone should pay taxes *AND* (2) wealthy people should pay more

Headline out of Cambridge, MA: Top administrators at Harvard propose world's most expensive affirmative action / DEI program

Obviously this betrays some ignorance on my part but this is definitely not who I what expecting to see name-checked when the Times noted who was the most prominent Augustinian prior to Pope Leo:

Is there a name for the form of succession planning where the CEO systematically undermines every potential successor, especially the most prominent/obvious ones, because the CEO's actual plan is "I run this place until I die—and then I don't care if it collapses"? Asking for a global superpower

I don’t read any Hungarian but I can see *from the graph itself* that “vegzettseg” has to mean educational attainment. Vertiginously steep age and education skews are the demographic key to this story…

Similar to Poland in 2023, young voters in Hungary seem to have turned out to vote in larger numbers than in earlier elections and - importantly so, as this poll suggests - have massively voted AGAINST the illiberal incumbent party.

Something to remember is that it took more than a year for Ronan Farrow to write the Harvey Weinstein story, and it’s not because he was lazy.

The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the "AI-powered" telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a "$1.8 billion company" supposedly run by just two brothers —…

Obviously not a substitute for Congress doing its job, but now would be a good time for Clinton, W, Obama, and Biden to say something jointly.

One of the many ways American media has failed to cover this president for a decade is by deeming the vulgarities too vulgar to print. Today's example is especially literal.

Really elegant example of the rhetorical and narrative potential of the single-post microblogging form. Clarity, concision, that one well-deployed element of repetition, a full (sad, true) political story in one largely punctuation-free post. Poetry.

This is powerful, if true. More of this. Refuse. Stand on principle.

“you know how you always wanted to be the guy who saves the day when the astronauts call houston with a problem?” “yeah?” “and you know how you hate being the guy everyone comes to when outlook is malfunctioning?” “… yeah?” “I got some good news and some bad news”

This is not a weed I was deep enough in to even catch at the time but yes, @evanbernick.bsky.social has the goods on this one. New academic goal unlocked: write a law review article important enough that the Solicitor General will see fit to misrepresent it at length *more than 100 years later*. 🙃

I always find it amusing the way many Supreme Court justices & advocates performatively declare that they don't do "policy" arguments (i.e. consequentialist reasoning) in con law, while doing exactly that. Some of that this AM, as Sauer insists his citations of European law are "only for rebuttal"

Adam means that she is the daughter of immigrants, but it is worth emphasizing that *every* U.S. citizen who has not been naturalized is a birthright citizen, either by the 14th Amendment or by statute.

Sauer just had to say that slaves had an "intent to remain" in the US. Motherfucker WHAT??

I’m not the first to share this and won’t be the last, but this NYT opinion piece by Yonatan Touval explaining how our leaders (in Washington and Jerusalem) so spectacularly failed to predict how things would go in Iran is excellent. Gift link—

Ok, a question about Chiles v. Salazar. Can Colorado write a law that says: anyone can say whatever they want about any topic, but we find that conversion therapy is presumptively medical malpractice, and anyone harmed by this can sue a provider who held themselves out as a licensed therapist?

The Supreme Court's decision in Chiles v. Salazar is yet another victory for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing activist organization that specializes in producing slick YouTube videos about noble Christians who are being unfairly smeared as bigots and persecuted for their beliefs

This is important. Journalists (ahem, @nytimes.com) need to avoid whitewashing the far-right term "J-pilled" and pretending it's simply about Israel. (If people on the left were using this term, the ADL would be all over it!) Let's not allow this term to break containment & become mainstream. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

This aspect of far-right Israeli politics is so familiar-yet-unfamiliar to me from U.S. politics. Very familiar: barbaric workarounds to impose the death penalty—in a highly uneven manner—when doctors refuse to participate. Less familiar: proudly embracing the noose as a symbol on your lapel.