This is a useful post to understand how scrolling is akin to gambling, with immeasurable loss, compared with some gain that makes the cost-benefit equation lopsided... I'll take a break from here and follow a few of you on your stacks, blogs, etc.

My partner is at an epic vegan lunch in Beijing, where a robot is bringing some of the dishes...

No Kings-Chicago, IL

Today in Development Impact..

If I were the social planner, the next Nobel Prize in Economics would be awarded to Samuel Bowles, Glenn Loury, and John Roemer. Their work is foundational to the modern study of inequality, addressing normative and positive dimensions of inequality with profound insight.

This is a good paragraph by Marie Harf:

Today in Development Impact...

And yet Google Maps is allowed to keep telling me that police are ahead

One day you're minding your own business as the director of a library and museum no one has heard of, the next one you're out of a job because the crybaby dictator didn't get what he wanted from your museum... The most random job firing ever. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/a...

Young’s opinion, which rules that the Trump admin illegally targeted pro-Palestinian students for deportation, is absolutely scathing. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police…ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”

"This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by Öztürk’s captors for masking-up and has heard the same reasons advanced by ... ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence."

At event in DC, Sen. Chris Van Hollen keeps it going with Hakeem Jeffries over not endorsing @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social: if you can’t back the kind of campaign he ran, “don’t ask those young people to show up for other Democrats across the country — that’s the message that will be sent.”

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

This rules - @raskin.house.gov straight up called out Roberts to his face. democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center...

I have never in my life felt as ashamed of the settler state of New Zealand as I am today. #FreePalestineNow

Nice to have birthdays like this🥰

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Ezra Klein can often be wrong, he's certainly off-base here. The central point here about shame & cultural pressure also feels right to me, w/ the caveats made in the article. But, I don't think that even Dr. Táíwò thinks that Klein does not "understand what liberal and egalitarian values are."

countless generations of talent and culture

This is so cool...

Really tough choice between blue, purple, and brown...

soothing to simply read a clear description of what this last couple days were, honestly

"Je suis Charlie and I edit something called free press but if you speak ill of Charlie, you don't get a visa to enter this country..."

I almost can’t believe bari blamed universities for the Kirk shooting. She is truly committed to being the dumbest motherfucker alive. Just head empty no thoughts 24/7

I often think about this study that shows ducklings swimming in a single-file formation behind their parent conserve energy through wave-riding, where trailing ducklings gain forward push, and wave-passing, where energy transfers efficiently along the line. Get your ducks in a row.

He's right, and it's not just Brazil. Around the world, at least 31 democratic leaders who committed similar crimes have been jailed or banned from office since 2010. The failure to hold Trump accountable in the US was a unique and systemic failure of our institutions and political culture.

Here’s a story that’s becoming all too common: federal immigration agents using racial and ethnic profiling as a rationale for stopping, questioning and detaining U.S. citizens who they suspect are undocumented.

With the approval of the highest court in the nation, this is what the US has become: an explicitly racist and xenophobic regime with an unhinged president and his spineless lackeys...

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Astonishingly, astonishingly bad. I think of all the folks I know who fit these criteria, the families of my kids’ friends who were already worried about crackdowns, the hardworking residents all around my city & county—all now subject to explicit ethnic profiling & forced LEO encounters. Sickening.

It's only a matter of time before some countries start detaining US citizens for deportation in retaliation...

It’s hard to overstate how unfit this person is to be Vice President

Many interventions “work” in small trials but fail at scale Also, EdTech often promises much, but delivers little In a new paper (bit.ly/3JKLgVn) @karthik-econ.bsky.social & I show how personalized adaptive learning (PAL) software can sharply improve learning outcomes at scale🧵1/16

Kids playing on the strand. Younger one falls, hits his head, starts crying. Older kid, unfazed, asking me about my 🐶. I ask him if the younger one is okay and he goes,"he's a sookie baba." Hadn't heard that b4. They dashed off happily, so he could have called me whatever kids use for worrywart...

in anything even remotely approaching meritocracy nobody would have any idea who this person is.

Today in Development Impact...

'... Something gets lost, though, in tepid consensus. As Sanneh writes, “The only way to separate good product from bad product is to listen closely—and, perhaps, to argue about it.”'

Without data, it's just words... Are PB venues turning over at a higher rate than non-PB ones? If so, what types? What are the roles of size, management practices, ownership structures, etc.? Are PB consumers more likely to prefer eating in (hard Q for causal inference)? Who's writing this paper?

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):

I often acknowledge people I'm passing by on the St (a nod, smile, hi, etc), sometimes I don't. They often return the greeting, sometimes not. No one gets huffy over the lack of either. (Expecting) Apologies for balls hitting top of the net & falling on other side fall into the same category...

Let's move UN HQ somewhere else...

💠 Final 3,000m Race Photo Finish...

Seems important - on the 'to read' list...

"Honey, I don't have much time. I've been arrested by ICE and they are sending me to a detainment center. I love you and the kids, I will be OK, please call our attorney" -- John Shin, DACA resident, speaking to his wife last week. She hasn't heard from him since www.fox13now.com/news/local-n...

Watching a Turkish tennis player (Sönmez) live (on TV) at a major tournament (US Open) for the first time. She reached the third round in Wimbledon earlier this year, but did not see any of those games. She did take the first set...

I think that some idiot at Netflix HQ thinks that NZ is part of Australia and that we can watch ABC (Oz) over here, as Fisk Season 3 is available on Netflix everywhere globally, except Australia, where it is on ABC - and, except NZ, presumably because we're not rest of the world!

A couple of climate wonks who I generally quite respect were arguing for NEPA reform on Ezra Klein’s podcast last month. Their basic argument is that wind and solar are now SO cheap that if you do permitting reform, it’ll benefit renewables way more than fossil fuels. And, well…

@dylanmatt.bsky.social posted a reflective piece on cash transfers... www.vox.com/future-perfe...