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

An existential threat to online surveys: LLMs could “transform survey fraud from a labor-intensive/low-margin cottage industry into a potentially lucrative and scalable black market for fraudulent data.” Worse: LLMs let bad actors systematically bias results by coordinating synthetic responses.

Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

lmao what’s next a defense intelligence company called Palantir?

RFK Jr's response to someone collapsing nearby him was to haul ass out of the room as quickly as possible

“theorists of late modernity were preoccupied with how … social actors became ‘paralyzed by increasingly uncertain futures.’ Quite to the contrary, we find that people actively develop cultural tools to adapt to ‘new species of trouble.’ We refer to these tools as repertoires of repair.” /1

Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back! Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary. Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest! #MundaneHalloween

How do people react when they face a crisis that breaks their trust in the world around them? In a new paper, I and Denise Milstein analyze the ‘repertoires of repair’ people used during the first months of the COVID pandemic to cope with pervasive uncertainty and isolation. (Gift link)

"...the idea that plants should be considered part of society is not a new one; it’s just new to some people," writes @sarahelton.bsky.social. 🌿 Free to read, download, and share ➡️ journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....

“What we need to elaborate is … a distinct project of probing how life and death, growth and destruction, prosperity and peril, are made routine or exceptional.” The fine folks at Sociologica have reissued my & Rebecca Elliott’s 2021 essay collection on critical disaster studies as an e-book…

A major front of the current information war: getting your facts, frames, propaganda, disinformation, etc. into the AI systems that create so much of the content we see and are rapidly becoming the de facto “ground truth” of the internet.

I kept thinking during House of Dynamite that I hadn’t been so stressed out by a movie since Uncut Gems. Then realized that what we need but will never get is a Safdie Brothers adaptation of The 2020 Commission Report.

Graduate seminar did a deep dive on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yesterday. At the line, “in America the law is king,” they (14 students from 6 countries) burst out laughing. I've been doing this for 35 years and this is the first time that was a laugh line.

Wow

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

I mean it was definitely unheard until they found it.

Very good thread here

September 30. October 1.

(Reuters) - More than 150,000 federal employees will leave the U.S. government payroll this week after accepting buyouts - the largest single-year exodus of civil servants in nearly 80 years .. @reuters.com www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Study links greater inequality to structural changes in children’s brains

Anthropic experimented with letting an AI run a little shop. It lost money, then went insane. I wrote about how the case illustrates the need for research on how the social world will be transformed by the massive increase of interactions between people and LLMs, and, crucially, between AI agents.