Lincoln friends: Still time to book tickets for two talks tonight by my colleagues. @drnickcowen.bsky.social on How to End Drunk Driving & Dr Sue Bond-Taylor on Carefree Children, Careless Youth: Why young people in the UK need a radical politics of care. pintofscience.co.uk/event/how-we...

"Why doesn't the US have national health insurance?" Fascinating new paper from Alsan and Neberai out in QJE @qjeharvard.bsky.social finds: rise of private health insurance in the US was enabled by 'strategic, interest group-financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy' #EconSky

Lincoln friends: you are invited to hear my Social & Political Sciences Uni of Lincoln colleague @drnickcowen.bsky.social discuss How to End Drunk Driving (& Other Crimes) on 19 May. This is part of Lincoln’s fabulous Pint of Science festival - details below pintofscience.co.uk/events/linco...

Looking forward to talking about how to end drunk driving (and other 'normal' crimes) next week at Pint of Science alongside my colleague Dr Sarah Sauve from psychology: pintofscience.co.uk/event/crime-... join us at Dough Loco on Tuesday 19th May at 7PM!

@drnickcowen.bsky.social for our future novel externalities work. Actually for all my policy salient work. From the ufo files [ht: @hetanshah.bsky.social]

Against the Generality Principle and Pro Politics; Or why I am a Machiavellian and not a Classical Liberal Shout outs to @mattzwolinski.bsky.social @drnickcowen.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/digressi...

Who should we fear more, tyrannical majorities or rent-seeking insiders? Aris tells Alex Aragona neither - more fundamental than these players are patrons and their clients. Without clientelism, political mobilisation is impossible. Politicians are not merely competing for votes.

The median voter

good essay from @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com that i think gets at what i mean when i say that the competition with china is a) real and b) not a military competition, not fundamentally it is a competition of systems, as during cold war 1 www.liberalcurrents.com/the-next-dem...

🚨NEW BLOGPOST 🚨 The Hormuz crisis has a real chance of causing energy shortages in the UK. The government is insisting it's business as usual, and opposition parties are arguing for fiscal measures that will stoke shortages. Neither is serious. open.substack.com/pub/joxleywr...

What share of income goes to the richest 1% in your country? How about the richest 10% or 0.1%? How has that changed over time? The World Inequality Database (WID) is the leading source for answering questions about incomes and wealth at the very top of the distribution.

“In the meantime, the coming months will likely see expanded American hybrid economic warfare, with little sense of where it might be headed”. V good piece on US economic warfare. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Video appears to show the moment ambulances belonging to a Jewish Ambulance Service in Golders Green were set alight in a suspected arson attack. It is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime. Police are appealing for information - nobody has yet been arrested.

In 1966, abortion was suddenly restricted for most women in Romania. In the decades that followed, maternal mortality increased, and by the 1980s, more than 80% of maternal deaths happened as a result of abortion complications.

My book (and many others!) are available at a stunning 50% discount from now until March 27th! A truly 'just' price. Use code ISAC26 at the checkout. www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/neo...

This week, it was a great honour to host Dr Mike Harris, former director of Rampton Hospital, to discuss the ethics, practice and governance of compulsory detention on mental health grounds for our applied criminology module: law enforcement and human rights.

Someone went to the trouble of creating 5 fake OSF accounts today, linking to 5 fake ORCID accounts, and generating 5 fake papers to submit to SocArXiv, with fake author and emails. Dude, if you are reading this, I hope you get the help you need (or a better job).

One of the things that surprised me when I was involved In university administration is that while faculty were almost exclusively focused on teaching students were often concerned about things outside the classroom: places to study, meet friends, eat, play sports. Having a university experience.

I talk a lot about how Article I of the Constitution (Congress) is not in effect, but Articles III and VI as well as their explicit powers from Marbury v Madison (Judiciary) are also not in effect.

For those who are now Claude-Code-curious: this is the best single set of slides and one hour talk you can check out to start using agentic AI in your research: outstanding-panther-851.convex.cloud/api/storage/...

The number of ‌legal abortions in Poland doubled in 2024, while complaints to Polish authorities over conscience clause refusals in the country have apparently ceased. The government had told hospitals they are obliged to provide abortion on the legal grounds of a woman's ​mental health.

Liberals take concentration of power seriously, and liberalism offers solutions to the dangers of concentrated power. @mattzwolinski.bsky.social talks about how in a new essay at @liberalism.org. www.liberalism.org/p/the-enemy-is…

Do it www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Lincolnshire-born John Bowers KC, principal at Brasenose College, Oxford, will give the 2026 Brian Winston Memorial lecture at the University of Lincoln 6PM Friday 8th May - all welcome with registration!👇

Under a regime that banned them from school, work & public life — a small but fearless group of Afghan women walked into the streets of Kabul today. No protection. No guarantees. Just courage. 🤍 This is what IWD looks like under the world’s only gender apartheid regime. Share this. 🌍​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Hi there and hello! Welcome to the US Politics Thread for w/e 6th March 2026, or, The Of Course We Can’t Explain Why We’ve Gone to War Or How Long It Might Last Edition… (1/64)

How Hyman Rickover built the first American nuclear plant

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

crookedtimber.org/2026/03/02/i... With shout outs to @ryanmuldoon.bsky.social @kathleencreel.bsky.social @drnickcowen.bsky.social @neillevy.bsky.social

UN warns use of force in global disputes being 'normalized' www.courthousenews.com/un-warns-use...

Roko’s basilica

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

A one-man tour-de-force of corruption, using his money and connections everywhere he went to build networks which would prevent anyone from holding him accountable.

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself theconversation.com/the-greatest...

We already have the technology to rescue higher education from AI misuse. The fundamental problem is institutional. In a new working paper, I describe the value of occasional stressful ordeals in education (exams and classroom performances) that academic rigour brings to people participating in it.

Great pleasure welcoming to our campus Laurie Elks, one of the original commissioners on the Criminal Cases Review Commission, to speak about the CCRC’s work on righting miscarriages of justice. He is our first guest speaker on our core module Law Enforcement and Human Rights.

My tentative book talk schedule for 2026 is up. Reach out if you want to join any of these events or organize one at your org.

Japan’s snap election underscores the limits of economic coercion against resilient democracies. That lesson matters not only for Beijing, but for Washington as well. @geopolitics.csis.org www.csis.org/analysis/tak...

solid career advice: privately text everything you think you'll need to say to get promoted, but can't say out loud while the post is still occupied, to your most problematic friend so that you can then release them when that person is investigated to "clear the air"

On Hume's account of the origin of democratic despotism open.substack.com/pub/digressi...

Wowsers look at what happened to posts on Twitter/X about London crime after monetisation of posts was introduced… economist.com/britain/2026...

Holocaust Remembrance Day. When we say #NeverAgain, it was a vow made over ashes. For Jews then. For Palestinians, Iranians, and Ukrainians now. For refugees caged and criminalised in America today. Grief doesn't check passports. Neither should our solidarity.

ICE murdered Renée Good in broad daylight. Less than 3 weeks later, they killed Alex Pretti, shooting him 10 times. Every day, we watch as people are ripped from their cars, their homes, their lives. We can't allow ourselves to look away from this cruelty. Abolish ICE.

Great summary of what awaits peer review in the near future—I hope journal editors are waking up! I agree that discouraging AI use is a losing, if not destructive, gamble, while submission fees and mandatory computational reproducibility are a must. kevinmunger.substack.com/p/peer-revie...

Minnesota National Guard members have arrived at a federal building and were directed to distribute donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to anti-ICE protesters. Guard members were issued reflective vests so they would not be mistaken for federal agents.

This administration is cooked. Literally no one is scared of them.

“Totalitarianism begins when the law is replaced by the rule of violence.” - Hannah Arendt “Fascism takes power by legitimizing violence carried out by unofficial or semi-official forces.” - Robert Paxton “When power loses legitimacy, it relies increasingly on force.” - Vaclav Havel

🚨"This is nuts! What the f*ck is going on, this is insane! ICE is just trying to scare people; they tell you it's only immigrants—it's f*cking anybody!" -furious Minneapolis resident tells our @zdroberts.bsky.social after ICE shot a man in the leg tonight. LIVE NOW ⬇️