We're gonna need a bigger tarp.

Oh, Wikipedia.

Calling this a war on diversity is right wing framing. Pete Hegseth is blocking the promotions of qualified Black people and women because he’s a bigot. These aren’t diversity hires who are being promoted to fit some quota. This is racism and sexism at the highest office in the U.S. military.

"So far this year, Mr. Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least 40 senior officers to general and admiral ranks. About half of those are women or members of minority groups." This is an unprecedented effort to whitewash military leadership. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/u...

Sociologist/demographer friends! Wisconsin is hiring an assistant professor in population studies and health: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

The US-Iran "memorandum of understanding" is public. It amounts to US surrender. US WAR AIMS: Unmentioned or punted to further talks. IRAN GETS: Immediate concessions, including economic benefits. No wonder the White House hesitated to make it public. I went through the deal point-by-point, here:

"Only about 12 percent of trustees at American colleges and universities have professional experience in higher education." www.americanprogress.org/article/how-...

As fertility decline becomes a growing topic of debate, we must distinguish between changing preferences vs fertility barriers. Claims about fertility shortfalls, including who is most affected, depend heavily on how we define and measure them. Read the paper here: austriaca.at/0xc1aa5572_0...

It pays to have no morals.

When you set a deadline, don't chastise people for failing to accomplish the task well in advance of the deadline. If you want it done earlier, move the deadline earlier.

There are currently nearly 30,000 people watching scaffolding on YouTube.

Musk's gutting of USAID killed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. He has used his net worth to stoke hatred against people he dislikes and to fuel white supremacy. So no, I don't think he is uplifting humanity.

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

CNN's resident fact-checker Daniel Dale hasn't conducted an on-air fact check of Trump in more than three months, a stretch that coincidentally began around the same time Paramount announced its merger with WBD www.status.news/p/daniel-dal...

When the Artemis program was first announced, the claim, all over the website, was that the landing mission (which has since been shifted from III to IV) would include "the first woman and the first person of color" to walk on the Moon. Last year, that language was deleted from the NASA site.

wheee... tylervigen.com/spurious-cor...

* in the US

“NSF silently blocking awards for meritorious proposals coming from certain institutions shows that the agency is no longer aligned with NSF’s founding principle that meritorious research, identified by expert review panels & expert NSF program officers, should be funded w/o political interference”

"I have no experience in X, so let me tell those with expertise in X why they're wrong about how to do X." is the most blueskyiest of bluesky tropes.

Fun day of cycling to watch, if nothing else.

Female Navy officers say they fear a career cap after Pete Hegseth cut women from a promotions list. Several female officers say they see the unusual intervention as a sign that their careers now have a ceiling and worry for the future generation of female military leaders.

Nope, nope, nope. “...curriculum and courses are institutional matters subject to … final approval through the authority of the Board [of Trustees] or through such administrative delegation as the Board may authorize.”"

Today in "If FIFA had any semblance of a backbone" (they would have relocated the WC this year).

FCC To Investigate TV Shows Where The Mom Has Job https://theonion.com/fcc-to-investigate-tv-shows-where-the-mom-has-job/

This study of four cohorts of French schoolchildren shows that the gender gap in math (girls falling behind) begins essentially immediately as soon as kids start school. They use the natural variation in kids' ages at school start to show that it's school entry, not age, that triggers the change.

Screwworm confirmed in Texas in the midst of having the worst imaginable people in charge. I guess we’re gonna have to keep getting hammered by infectious disease until we realize public health has a point.

Weiss/Bilton don't seem to understand who it is that's breaking that trust.

⏳ Only two weeks left to apply! 📣 Call for Proposals | PATCHWORK Final Conference & Data Workshop Deadline: June 15, 2026 Barcelona, Feb 24–26, 2027 Use cross-national network data (N=6,000) + get funding & early access patchwork-erc.eu/en/16/call-f... #SocialNetworks #SNA #Sociology #SocNet

Russ Vought is trying to steal spending power again. The Trump Admin is making up a new "rule" so they can revoke federal grants whenever they want for whatever reason. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/u...

"Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities." I'm also pondering whether there's a similar shift from social/community engagement to "attention economy" within academic publishing...and it's ramifications for the nature of science.

I'll say it again; their operating principle is that the government should be out of science, not that it should do it better.

Reviewers in two groups were given identical resumes for Emily Clarke and James Clarke and told they had used AI. Emily's was 2x as likely to raise doubts about competence. "She can't even write a CV herself." But James "just needed a bit of help." fortune.com/2026/05/10/i...

This has long been anticipated as a generational opportunity for the usmnt at the World Cup, and I genuinely don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to watch a single game.

Tim Swarens thought Colbert's persona on Comedy Central was real, and was disappointed when that bubble burst.

I once said that any academic paper that uses a yes/no question as its title should have a one word abstract.* Then the lone time I had such a title, didn't have the gumption to attempt to pull it off (our answer was no, fwiw). * If "it depends" then the phrasing of the title should change.

A quick reminder that every time Bhattacharya's NIH asks you to remove words like "gender," "diverse," or "social determinants of health," they are undermining the institution's foundational statue. Gender: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/... SDOH/diverse: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

Simply, they (befuddlingly) don't believe science should happen outside the confines of companies developing products (which by some definitions isn't even science).

👋 Meet the Sociological Science Accelerator (SSA), a network for collaborative experimental sociology. Members propose research ideas 💡, the community votes 🗳️to select projects, and winning studies run across multiple labs/online using shared protocols. experimentalsociology.github.io

So, we're back to the only thing worth watching on CBS is an occasional sporting event?

And yet if anyone tries to actually do anything about it, he can't wait to vote against them.

The deepest challenge to student learning is the transactional system of education they've been steeped in. Harvard's actions have just turbocharged this problem by making the desired outcome of the transaction scarcer. More stress, more dishonesty, more AI use, less collaboration. Good luck, fools!

"in danger of"? You mean, the calling card of his presidency?

quite a headline (and it’s right)

As a parting 🖕 to his constituents, McMaster overrode standard procedure in the state (which was supported by a handful of state Republicans!) to ensure this fuckery could happen.

It's always been fundamentally about the grift for him.

“.. What we are talking about is nothing short of the sitting president of the United States looting from the Treasury for his own gain,” she said. @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/5733...

Story out today on my new research in the @nytimes.com We find ICE activity in Trump 2.0 hurt the labor market and hurt US-born workers. Article: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/r... Paper: www.nber.org/papers/w3512...