The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

😮 Awesome views from Day 2 of #Artemis II this morning. @exploration.esa.int @esaearth.esa.int

This is the bleakest post imaginable. You look at an engraving of a guy whipping a horse that’s pulling a wagon of coal. Your options for existing are “am I the horse or the coal.”

A bright thread running through Malcolm Harris’ history of Palo Alto is how race science was woven into Silicon Valley’s culture and structure from the very beginning.

Randomly reading Walter Benjamin’s lumber-room of notes for his never-finished “Arcades” project and,

What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you, shipmate?

Disturbing anecdotal reports of "AI psychosis" and negative psychological effects have been emerging in the news. But what actually happens during these lengthy delusional "spirals"? In our preprint, we analyze chat logs from 19 users who experienced severe psychological harm🧵👇

A great write-up on brand-new research I was involved in. We used a really different approach from the ones that we & many others have used previously to estimate how many Covid deaths there *really* were--almost 20% more than known. Our results broadly accord w others but add new demographic detail

“The danger is … that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze.” Michael Power at LSE has been writing about this problem since before 2008.

A big city emergency management agency procedural is the best untried idea in television. For years I have been saying this

“Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.”

Wrote about the cumulative effects of generalized uncertainty: “People do not passively endure an unstable world. They stagger, pivot, or dig in. They reach out to others for support and test out new avenues of thought and action. This too adds up to a real effect. Call it the invisible heel.”

My book on Marcel Déat, “neo-socialism”, fascism, and political conversion is finally out with @universitypress.cambridge.org! Many thanks to everybody who helped me bring this book to print.

Happy Theda Skocpol Saving A Mail Carrier From A Turkey Day to all who celebrate

NEW: Disasters are a matter of "when," not "if." Are you an emergency manager or researcher? Help us build a national picture of the country’s preparedness, from funding to alert systems. Tell us what we should be covering.

One reason this piece is so good: it glimpses a future where AI coding creates abundance by freeing people from having to deal with crappy software. That’s a possible future! But tech execs only talk about wanting to use AI to create scarcity and soak up all value by automating all labor.

Coming this May. A documentary about WEB Du Bois - www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kMs...

Don't give anything an Emmy until it's as good as this.

thank you bad bunny for highlighting the importance of critical power distribution infrastructure bsky.app/profile/cost...

Today I'm releasing probably the most important scholarly thing I've ever worked on - a report based on talking with 144 people about why they don't vote or only vote regularly, and on what needs to be done to build a democracy that can include everyone. www.swarthmore.edu/u... please share!

Prove that you're human song

Rereading Moby Dick and thinking about Starbuck, a professional who will take part in a great wrong because he’s uncomfortable with the small wrong of challenging authority, and yeah it checks out that we have a whole chain of coffee shops celebrating that.

Fascinating as usual from my colleague @jamesbreckwoldt.bsky.social. Come for the Simpsons memes, stay for the lesson in US political realignment.

I just thought everyone should see this

"On the Frontlines of Crisis: Intensive Care and the Challenge of COVID-19" by Jason Rodriquez www.rutgersuniversit... #HealthPolicy #Nursing #COVID19 #Healthcare #MentalHealth #EssentialWorkers #PublicHealth #Medicine #Nursing

Covid wrought havoc on health care workers, and warped public perception of them, in ways that continue to shape the country. Here I review Jason Rodriquez's excellent @rutgersupress.bsky.social study of how ICU workers handled the depths of the pandemic.

Janet Yellen tells @nytimes.com that the investigation against Powell is the most significant attack ever on Fed independence. "If you can bring charges for no reason whatsoever against your enemies, we're no longer living in a society governed by the rule of law." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/b...

The best magazine profile ever written is actually Chapter 41 of Moby Dick, which works as a stand-alone if you don’t have the patience or time for the full novel. 🐋

R.I.P. Bulkington, Melville killed you off early and never bothered to actually write your demise #JusticeForBulkington 🐋

With everything going on, we could use a recording of @robertpicardo.bsky.social reading Father Mapple’s sermon for Moby Dick January tomorrow 🐋

It’s generally assumed that “Moby-Dick” has a canonical start date in December 1841, so there’s a good chance that Ishmael has entered the AME Zion church (then on South Second St, three blocks from the water) and the preacher he sees is Frederick Douglass. 🐋

Kicking off the Month of Dick with this incredible animation set to a semi-lost recording of Orson Welles reading excerpts of the book, one of my favorite internet artifacts. 🐋

The psychologists keep rediscovering sociology

some good climate/energy news: * 96% of new US power capacity was carbon-free in 2024 (56 gigawatts!) * 2025 included the first month ever when 51% of power on the U.S. grid was carbon-free * The golbal trend is overwhelming: The world is now investing more $ in clean energy than fossil fuels

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, is master of Europe, only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.

“We’ve long used digital technology to make forgeries of artwork; generative AI simply forges the work of making art.” I wrote an end-of-year appreciation of human sociality in creative labor.

Here’s an article that I wrote five years ago in which I call MYSELF Cassandra. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This video of WSJ reporters ruthlessly hazing a Claudius vending machine is no exaggeration the funniest 10-minute short I have seen all year.

Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families. But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes. With @theassemblync.bsky.social

There's a pretense that despair/defeatism/doomerism is some kind of solidarity, when it's actually quitting while others face the horrors and resist succumbing to them. Wrote about that here.

But this reign could subsist only in empty pageantry; and it was soon discovered that the will of the most absolute monarch is seldom obeyed, when his subjects have no longer anything to hope from his favor, or to dread from his resentment.

SCOOP — Gregg Phillips, a conspiracy theorist with no emergency management experience who helped produce the election-denying documentary ‘2000 Mules’ with Dinesh D’Souza and has faced numerous legal inquiries, has been named head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. My story:

Consumer AI is primarily tool to make dilettantes feel like they have finally accomplished something.

Pretty infuriating: King Gizzard quit Spotify over ethical concerns -- and now Spotify is letting AI knockoffs of its music (with all the lyrics copied verbatim) proliferate on its platform futurism.com/future-socie...

Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, killing millions of chickens and spiking egg prices, the federal government didn’t investigate if the virus was airborne. So ProPublica did. Absolutely terrifying reporting from @natlash.bsky.social: www.propublica.org/article/bird...

I have refined The uranium That was in The centrifuge And which You were probably Saving For power generation Forgive me It was so powerful I am Become death