It is surreal to be in an email back-and-forth about how a university website needs to be revised to comply with new university branding requirements when the US, and the world, seem to be in a pre-apocalyptic state.

Cool map. bluebookmke.substack.com/p/where-amer...

👶 Low fertility in the UK?! Our @drjenndowd.bsky.social joined BBC Radio 4’s More or Less to unpack the data and offer a demographer’s perspective — beyond the panic & myths. 🎧 Listen here: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... ✍️ Subscribe to her amazing Substack as well: jenndowd.substack.com

This is truly a tragic story.

Something I always wondered is how it would be covered if America became a dictatorship This is it

"Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power." www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-...

Study finds women use gen AI less than men not due to gaps in access or skill, but because they view it as harmful to mental health, employment, privacy & the environment. This is not misplaced: AI has significant energy demands and risks of bias and misinformation. www.unite.ai/research-fin...

🧵 1/8 Too much news noise. But don’t forget: we’re about to launch the next Tuskegee Experiment. This time, on babies. Dr. Offit breaks down this wildly unethical study in his detailed substack. Highly recommend reading. I break down some of his main points in thread below

The idea that low fertility is a "real problem" is a convenient lie. It easily justifies the ongoing erosion of women's control over our own reproductive lives, as is amply demonstrated here. 1/3

Fiscal Year 2026 NIH Funding Update The committed funding for fiscal year 2026 is lagging behind all fiscal years from 2015-2025. More details to follow. 1/6

2025 brought unprecedented disruption to federal research—from lost data and grants to agency shakeups and a historic shutdown. Through strong advocacy, PAA & APC helped restore resources, protect population science, and secure key funding—and we'll continue into 2026.

My latest @npr.org story: The United States could be headed toward the largest-ever decline in representation by Black members of Congress if the Supreme Court weakens Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination in redistricting n.pr/49tevoK

I really like teaching Intro Soc. It’s my favorite class to teach.

Heritage's plan for "saving American by saving the family" represents a view of government interference in private life that would be unthinkable to prior generations of conservatives. It also narrowly defines families - and narrows pathways to parenthood.

He has allocated the “income” generated by tariffs for about a dozen different purposes at this points. (I can’t believe I’m quoting Cato about something.)

💔 *Renee Nicole Good* was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis today. 💔 *Silverio Villegas Gonzalez* was murdered by ICE in Franklin Park, IL near Chicago in September. And, over the months, ICE agents have shot at others: see this article with the count from @thetrace.org, posted last month ⤵️

I explained the dangers of the recent politicization of grant reviews at NIH for The Hill, and also that while diversity otherwise remains a bad word, geographic diversity is somehow laudable. thehill.com/opinion/tech...

Read the whole thing. It's good, I promise.

“clicktatorship”

There is a full-fledged attack on women's reproductive - and thus their overall LIFE - autonomy. It's dressed up as "promoting health" and in the guise of "expanding options," but the intent is clear given Heritage's "Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family."

It’s the first day of the spring semester! LEGO Karen is (sniff) thrilled (sniff, sniff) and totally ready (waaahhh)!

January 2026 Newsletter Happy new year! Below is the January newsletter. We are currently in the process of solidifying the Spring 2026 term card of FemQuant events, but we have started adding sign-up links for the events we do have on the books! Keep your eyes peeled for more seminars and further…

This is quite in line with the US’s history of concern over its “population stock” & various efforts to encourage “selective breeding.” @emilymerchant.bsky.social’s book Building the Population Bomb is an excellent history about the role of positive & negative eugenics in US population policy.

Being so, so, so angry - feeling the tension bodily, thrumming in my veins and muscles - for almost a year now…it’s just exhausting.

NEW from me: The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since early COVID or the Great Recession—the country has lost 65k jobs over the last year as manufacturing, transport, & mining employment decline, while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out www.apricitas.io/p/america-is...

It’s not that this is illegal, unethical, immoral, corrupt, etc that gets me, though it’s all those things. It’s the brazenness. It’s that he’s not even making any attempts to hide his corruption or his disdain for America, its laws, and its people.

I put my own manuscript into Microsoft Copilot to revise it to meet a journal's formatting requirements, which Copilot specifically pointed out were things like headings, italics, spacing. So I downloaded the revised version, & I'm here to report that none of those changes were made.

I was on @wunc.org's Due South today to discuss - what else? - what's going on with childbearing and families and how the discussion has changed during 2025. (I appear around the 24:30 mark). www.wunc.org/show/due-sou...

Pew Research Center just posted a brand new opening for a Data Archivist! This is a 2-year, grant-funded position housed within the methods team (the best team obv). Check out the link below for a full description and to apply! #openscience

I'll never forget that day. Christian nationalism on display. @profsamperry.bsky.social & I were asked to submit written testimony to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol. Read & download it for free from @socarxiv.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/so...

Fraud was the excuse: this is the real goal, revealed - reduce safety net funding, but only in blue states.

On this day in 1959, Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted of interracial marriage in Virginia, given a one-year suspended sentence, and banished from the state.

This chart documents one of humanity’s greatest achievements, in my view. We just lived through the fastest population growth in human history. It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace — but on every continent, they grew even faster than the population.

If the US public health system were a functioning one, federal health agency leaders—RFK Jr & Drs Bhattacharya, Makary, Oz, Høeg, Kulldorff, & Prasad—would be out there doing everything possible to promote flu vaccination Instead, they’ve taken steps to roll it back abcnews.go.com/Health/flu-a...

If the GOP believes that a private corporation can deny medical benefits like contraception despite being mandated by law to do so bc it violates the corporation’s leadership’s beliefs, surely it should be okay with a different private corporation exercising its beliefs for a different reason.

In all seriousness, isn’t this the kind of thing AI should be used for? I mean, if AI can’t be used for reviewing large volumes of data, it seems like it’s not really helpful in a “save time for humans” kind of way.

Big, big deal!

The Onion can just copy and paste this HHS language

Dear mothers, Here is more for you to do - or not do - so your children don’t suffer a fate worse than death. Signed, A father of 5 who has claimed to have never changed a diaper

That this needs to be said - that there is no law against pointing out what the law says - is proof that we live in the dumbest timeline. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Farewell and thank you for nearly six decades of quality programming that enriched the lives of so many.

This is a lot like "defund Planned Parenthood." There we saw that when a provider closes there isn't someone else waiting in the wings to swoop up and provide the care. And "refunding" doesn't bring orgs back to life - staff have moved on, leases are lost, etc.

While conservatives are debating work requirements, waste, abuse, and fraud for social safety net programs The Pentagon has failed 8 consecutive audits www.reuters.com/world/us/pen...

I have a new paper w Andrea Prat & Jake Spitz. We show that Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices vote in favor of the richer party by over 70% today, as compared to D’s at 30%. In the 1950s and both were at 50%. This strong trend may contribute to rising inequality. www.nber.org/papers/w34643

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), run by Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., will no longer require physicians to report vaccination rates. Instead, they plan to start having doctors report if they’ve discussed “alternative” vaccine schedules.

I feel like if you’re advocating for invading a country and forcing all its women to be breeding machines for making white babies you should not be giving your opinions on anything. Like you should be forcibly prevented from talking in public until you fix yourself.

Republicans ban books for fear a fifteen-year-old might read The Bluest Eye. Meanwhile, the GOP's biggest donor has built an international salad shooter of child porn and Nazi propaganda, and Republicans are silent.

"Along with birth control and abortion — whose providers are also smeared constantly with right-wing lies — day care is loathed on the right for allowing women to work instead of being financially dependent on a husband." www.salon.com/2026/01/05/m...

Colin and Sophie Hortman, the children of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, are asking Trump to remove the false posts about their parents' killing:

Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.