Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) observed that Trump “has more plans for the ballroom he’s trying to build at the East Wing than anything he’s gonna do next in the Middle East.”

I should add that the NYT story is the kind of story that few news outlets could devote the time and effort to do right, involving combing through federal, state, and local campaign finance reports, FOIA requests and other data. Their scale matters for something like this. /End (for real this time)

Don’t let Fox get away with it this time. Spread the word. Fox & Friends Weekend replaced footage of Trump attending yesterday’s dignified transfer with a clip from 2025. They clearly didn’t want their audience to see him disrespecting fallen soldiers wearing a baseball cap. H/T: @BadFoxGraphics

State of Florida's new mandate for public college Intro Sociology curriculum: "The following should not be included in any course content... "Discussions arguing a causal association between institutional sexism and unequal outcomes between men and women" Indoctrination, not education nor science

G. Elliott Morris: Republicans could stop this at any time they wanted to. “All it would take ….is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dem[ocrat]s to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump—3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.”

This is a very interesting article! www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

Seemingly! What is wrong w US news… here’s one illustration of the problem.

Yes, but it should give you pause that the approval rating in his first and second term are similar and he was *re-elected*. The implication that ppl wish to draw is that similar policies and approaches by a MAGA candidate will not be supported in the next election. Wrong! So misguided…

imagine thinking people liked car insurance companies and wanted them to involved in a much bigger aspect of their lives

An official directive to change from Calibri back to Times New Roman is a move to undo initiatives to make information more accessible for low vision people. It’s just gross.

Really?! Wow, I was definitely not gonna guess this. Here I was thinking they would ...nah!

Satirical newspaper “The Onion” or “New York Times” article? Can you guess?

This was a very good and powerful read. Highly recommend it. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/o...

This is the funniest headline I’ve read in a while! It could be an onion article headline!

Was there ever any question!!? 🤣

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that while the stock market has done well this year, a better economy is going to “start flowing through to working Americans next year.”..Oh! My bad! I thought they said “on day one” or something like that. I must have misunderstood.

This is a great example of taking something we thought we understood, and looking closer! I always thought education could buffer more...but it does not appear so.

Good to document and congrats on the pub! I agree - every woman knows this. But I’m also sure you had a hell of a time getting it past the referees.

I’m checking to see if Trump has already made his AI post of him dropping shit all over Toronto….

While there are many differences across each higher ed institution, I think it’s fair to say that many would characterize their past year w similar “unprecedented” challenges and their futures as extremely challenging and necessitating significant reprioritizing of spend. I wish it weren’t so.

Is this really something he posted?

The simulation is glitching

Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdue’s student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...

This stretched two full miles, ending at the Big House, game traffic honking support the entire time. Ann Arbor upon Ann Arbor. It was awesome.

Their project depends on making us all feel alone, isolated and powerless. Taking part in a protest destroys all of those feelings in an instant. Go.

Goodall’s passing hit me hard. A mighty force of her own, pushing humanity to be better. Public goods provision must feel hopeless to the individual - Goodall urges us to keep on. But Yeats captures the moment for me. I am hanging on to Goodall for direction and energy while the beast slouches on.

Well said!!

Instead of blubbering and mumbling about some GOP members and Mike Johnson, why is this Democrat not announcing, full-throated, that the GOP controls the House, the Senate, the Oval Office and the Judiciary- and the shutdown is their fault. End of soundbite. Democrats gotta mumble.

Congrats for Austria! My home away from home ❤️

They all have one thing in common though, don't they?

So if I’ve got this right, then it’s women’s fault for taking aspirin? Anything else we messed up?

Trump and DHS will de facto auction off H1-B visas: if you pay them in some currency— flattery, side deals,— they will make the visa free

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

One of the most profound books pub’d during my college yrs was “Hitler's Willing Executioners”. What stayed w me is the documentation of how ordinary ppl through ordinary actions furthered terrible ends. But the opposite is also true: Ordinary ppl can play a small part adding up to lg scale good.

I am so excited to announce the publication of our paper: Experimental methods: Eliciting and measuring social norms (Charness, Dimant, Krupka, and Dimant) JEBO website: doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

open.substack.com/pub/heatherc... A beautiful remembrance and reflection on 9/11 and what could be.

Wow. This is a powerful image

"The mural is being seen as a possible reaction to the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators at the weekend supporting banned group Palestine Action." Defend Our Juries spokesperson: "When the law is used as a tool to crush civil liberties, it does not extinguish dissent, it strengthens it."

Re job numbers, Trump answered: "Well, we're going to have to see what the numbers, I don't know, they come out tomorrow. But the real numbers that I'm talking about are going to be whatever it is. But, uh, will be in a year from now … I think you’ll see job numbers that are absolutely incredible.”

I wonder whom we should fire for these numbers?

This is a cool paper that suggests that AI agents can indeed be used for social science experiments, but that just using a chatbot isn't good enough, instead prompts developed based on social & game theory makes AI agent actions predictive of real human outcomes. benjaminmanning.io/files/optimi...

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue

How well can LLMs mimic human behavior in playing games? What is revealed by the prompts needed to generate different behaviors? They reveal quite a lot: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... just published open access with Yutong Xie, Qiaozhu Mei, Walter Yuan

Tour de force review on “Economics of Attention” by Loewenstein just published in J Econ Lit @aeajournals.bsky.social #behavioraleconomics

NYT can’t/won’t report whom they voted for in the presidential election. Whole article is about how important public broadcasting is to these communities. It took a quote from Mark Amode ALL the way at the bottom (after detailing Murkowski’s “brave” efforts to carve out funding). Just gross.

I’m heartened to see that Publics appear less susceptible to legacy. However the pipeline after under grad perpetuates initial disparities. Would love to see more risk taking in the Ivy’s & more options in the public’s for ppl with fewer means to get xtra curriculars that enrich & prepare students.

I love the NY Times’ use of the words “may” and “could”.

I often wonder how today’s ultra processed health foods - think protein bars or powder supplements for example - will fare in this type of analysis. So many people I know, who avoid UPF, add all this stuff to their diet. I can’t help but think it’s similar.…

Krugman's interview of Posen (7/19) was helpful to break down recession and inflation pressures. This Posen quote stuck: ..sure as shooting, there are real income shocks and a real supply shock to labor markets coming and potentially shortages of key inputs...that has to show up somewhere.

To BC's point, it's a good read about the U.S economy. But I would quibble with notions that price discrimination (alluded to just before that highlighted quote) is a problem. Perhaps, though I am no expert on airport-stuff, the issue is that the options over which to discriminate are too few?