Time is a flat circle, episode 134: Warren Zevon ad-libbed Bibi Netanyahu's name into a live performance of Mohammed’s Radio shortly after he was first elected PM ... 30 years ago. archive.org/details/wz19...

From November 2025 - Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records - https://cup.org/4qy0az4 - Paolo Bertolotti, @aidanmilliff.com, Fotini Christia & Ali Jadbabaie #OpenAccess

Exciting new paper on analysis of interviews at scale! As I've argued elsewhere (APSR, 2024), I think it's important to put humans back in the loop as an additional step *after* the LLM, but this method could easily be extended to do that. academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

I wonder if it’s related to the McKinley/expanding territory fandom www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

Submit your papers *by 1/7* for SoWEPS-10 at FSU. www.soweps.org/call-for-pap... SoWEPS is a great chance for advanced grad students and junior faculty to get feedback on developed projects. We'd love to see you in Tallahassee this March!

“America’s openness to the world’s most ambitious people — and its unique ability to absorb and make use of human talent — has perhaps been its most potent form of soft power. Why try to defeat the world’s richest country when you might have the chance to join it and reap its ample rewards?”

I went to Texas to write about the sudden end of one of America's most successful experiments: the six decades of welcoming India's most educated and ambitious citizens. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...

Not planning to do an overall year wrap up but do want to share some work on US strikes in Somalia over the year. By our tracking (not yet updated for holiday strikes), it is the peak of the campaign and may surpass the peak of strikes in Pakistan. 1/7 www.newamerica.org/future-secur...

“NCAR has played a greater role in advancing weather prediction & atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world,” says @weatherwest.bsky.social Dismantling NCAR would be “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” KH

Friends: University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment is hiring...and definitely looking for social scientists. Apply!

Just received a rejection on a paper that was under review for 8 months. The rejection part is totally fair. Waiting 11% of the tenure clock for a first decision on a paper, on the other hand....

Last class of the semester so grad students get to take it easy with questions like: - What does ethical research (not) look like? - What is professional responsibility? - What is the nature of goodness?

🚨 New in @bjpols.bsky.social : “Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records.” By Bertolotti, Milliff, Christia & Jadbabaie. We use 12 billion call records from Yemen to measure the civilian consequences of drone warfare. 1/6

NEW - Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records - https://cup.org/4qy0az4 - Paolo Bertolotti, @aidanmilliff.com, Fotini Christia & Ali Jadbabaie #OpenAccess

The recording industry in Kenya is legit fascinating. There was a period of time in maybe the 70s when labels were popping up at the *county* level, recording folk songs on 45s for hyper-local distribution.

Southside Weekly holding strong as Chicago's best reported local paper (with the Guardian in ironic second place).

Despite the grim topic, this is a very good paper: monuments that signal white supremacy can substitute performative violence and thus reduce it. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very short summary of this paper:

Very excited that my paper with @katakeith.bsky.social is now out in @polanalysis.bsky.social. We investigate whether LLMs actually follow the instructions/definitions provided in codebooks, propose some diagnostics, and release a new evaluation dataset. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It's important to remember the 🐺 Wolf Number 🐺 In 2021 @today.yougov.com found that 12% of Americans said they'd beat a wolf in an unarmed fight ⁉️ When you see a survey response split 85/15, remember: 12% of people will say literally anything on a survey. today.yougov.com/society/arti...

Modest #APSA2025 proposal: Move all panels, receptions, meetings, etc. to Stanley Park. Just describe the tree you are meeting under, and count on everyone to find you.

🤔 (I really don't think India is interested in the opportunity to be a treaty ally with the US if they have to drop historic partners who aren't currently imposing tariffs on their exports to do so)

So far during the second Trump administration, this puts the US military at: —1,000+ air strikes in Yemen (in March-April) —65+ air strikes in Somalia —5 air strikes and 2 JSOC ground raids in Syria —1 night of B-2 strikes on 3 sites in Iran —1 air strike in Iraq —1 air strike in the Caribbean

Syllabus plug! Here's what I assign on how to give feedback (of which peer reviews are a special type, imo)

A veteran US Navy SEAL reflects on Gaza dbarkhuff.substack.com/p/i-should-b...

🚨 Just accepted at @bjpols.bsky.social! Paolo Bertolotti, Fotini Christia, Ali Jadbabaie, and I use 12 billion Yemeni cellphone records to study the effects of U.S. drone strikes on civilian mobility and displacement. We Find: 🧵: 1/3

How amazing is ChatGPT! I just tried turning publishers' citation manual PDFs into .bst files. It's a super efficient way to make all your LaTeX citations show up like this: The future is amazing.

A bit buried in the text here, but: UChicago is apparently pausing/ending graduate training in one of the best South Asian Studies departments in the country.

📢🗣️...Are you a graduate students about to go on the market? Or perhaps you're just interested in research presentations. If so, check out my free two-day workshop: The Research Presentation as Storytelling

Very excited that FSU is hiring this year. I am not on any of the committees, but I'm happy to talk to anyone about what it's like to work at FSU. Drop me a note, or find me at APSA next month!

Florida State University’s polisci dept just posted 3 jobs: a junior job in American political behavior and open rank jobs in American public policy and American public law/judicial politics. The Polisci dept here is a great place to work. Come join us! Happy to answer questions if you have them.

I agree Chat GPT is "like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket" in that I usually spell traveling as travelling (with three Ls)

I'm looking forward to presenting on this panel, which I'm sure will not be as ominous as our title makes it sound!

What am I missing? It seems like this graphic shows that Mamdani also got ~7pp more of the first-choice vote than Cuomo. Doesn't that mean Mamdani would have won without ranked choice...even assuming that *zero* Lander voters made a strategic adjustment?

Here's the letter that NSF sent UCLA last week about cutting its research funding NSF says UCLA is doing affirmative action by asking applicants' their zip codes, family income and what HS they went to, and that they can discuss race in personal statements storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I've been at Georgetown for ~23 years. I've been on the PhD admission committee for the Government Department for well more than half of that time. AMA.

My RA sent this interview with RADM Huan Nguyen because his testimony about un-predictability, lack of agency, and becoming a refugee from Vietnam is really compelling. I waited too long to click the link and ... the Navy deleted the page. I wonder why? www.linkedin.com/posts/us-nav...

GMU is, to put it mildly, *far* from a bastion of progressive thought (the Antonin Scalia law school; an econ program that trumpets its Ludwig von Mises/Austrian Economics curriculum). Every college or university president needs to understand if they come for Mason, they will come after you too.

the president does not actually have the power to fire a university president or a museum director, but if elites simply roll over under pressure, then effectively he does

Another day testing the limits of resilience. The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels. Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels. The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

Great, important scoop by @stevenbeynon.bsky.social www.military.com/daily-news/2...

academic folks: Harvard international students may need to begin immediately transferring out in order to avoid having to leave the country If it sounds insane, that's because it is what will your institutions do to help?

At this point I'm pretty sure that Trump is simply trying to destroy Harvard as an institution as a way of demonstrating his power and make everyone else submit.

Here's the letter Noem sent Harvard, as posted on X. Nothing alleges ANY specific violation of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Nothing. She cites no law violated, no regulation broken, no policy ignored. I don't care what you think of Harvard; this is clear weaponization of government.

This is not a game, this is affecting people's lives... I can only imagine what it's like to be a student at Harvard right now -- not to mention that this hangs as a threat over every single international student in the US.

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

If you're wondering about how bad things can get between India and Pakistan, listen to my discussion here (taped late last week) with Sameer Lalwani. This episode is outside the paywall. warontherocks.com/episode/thin...