It was a town hall by electeds, but the AGs seemed just as angry about the state of the country as, say, the average Bluesky poster.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt that what I’m doing professionally is completely meaningless in the face of what’s going on in the world, but it’s definitely more acute in academia. The world is on fire around me and I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation??

Taking a short break from Discworld (finished Jingo, started Hogfather) to read All Systems Red, which was described as “competent people being competent” and is delivering so far on page 110/150. 9/10 read, solid brief escapism from both my dissertation and politics

Hey, I want to offer some helpful tips for coping with the cold for ICE folks who might have come from warmer places. 1. Wear cotton socks! Cotton is nice and soft next to your skin and will absorb your sweat so your feet stay warm. Cotton everything but ESPECIALLY socks!

don't underestimate the impact of kind emails... I just got one from a faculty member that completely turned my grumpy evening (2.5 hours on a crowded and hot bus) around

I think my 45 minute commute might take close to 3 hours today… Snow!

politics are dismal and infuriating and writing a dissertation is stressful, but there's still a certain joy in geeking out about old books squarely in your niche. I'm excited to read this

A running theme on my reactions to news events these days is "Oh god, they are replacing something messy and fraught with something much worse." Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) (like the Social Cost of Carbon) is a complicated and ethically fraught metric. Setting it to zero doesn't help, tho...

when they let him go they said "you're white, you won't be any fun anyway"

The problem with ICE is not insufficient training or even training content. It’s creating an agency where you give people guns and tell them to terrorize Brown people and then recruit people excited to do that.

"On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns." oof

In a video Heller took and shared with HuffPost, another bystander requests permission to check Good’s pulse. “No! Back up! Now!” an unidentified voice responds. “I’m a physician,” the man says. “I don’t care,” the voice responds. www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-sh...

It’s a defense mechanism, especially since white folks rarely have to truly consider the state trying to murder them. Welp things change and they should have taken those Black teenagers seriously because now it’s very clear that state has extended its oppression.

They shot an undocumented man here on a busy street in the middle of the day. They put “5 shots, 7 holes” (agents bragging words) in a Latina woman. Lied about the reasons. Charged her with attacking them then dropped it all. There wasn’t enough outrage.

This is the ninth shooting by ICE since September (I did not know that). All of them were into vehicles.

as someone who was never a real software engineer but did interact with complex, sprawling, *systems* of code with dozens of dependancies, I found this insightful and painfully resonant

I made and gifted this over the summer but maybe I’ll make another one as a coping mechanism

Happening now: a protest is underway in downtown Chicago against the overnight U.S. attacks on Venezuela, which included the kidnapping of its President Nicolás Maduro. Protestors are filing into the city's Federal Plaza despite the dark and below-freezing temperatures.

to put it very, very mildly, this is a disaster. (and what a time to be studying public health and political science)

obvious but it is *extremely* unethical to withhold vaccines that are already known to be lifesaving. Especially when 20% of the population is infected with the disease you're withholding the vaccines for. The remnants of the CDC, 2025 www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

as if having to click every link in student bibliographies to check for hallucinations isn't bad enough...

I haven't lit a menorah for years but kind of want to today...

pretty sure this is one of the 3 seats that Athens was gerrymandered into, in which case, thank you Athens voters! The district I grew up in is still stuck with Republican Houston Gaines, now 2 house dems 🎉 (I'm sure Oconee went red)

Listening to the AFT candidate forum for Michigan regents, and you’d think that the current Democratic regents are raging leftist union supporters… (… they are not)

"ACIP is no longer a legitimate scientific body" is existentially scary

I am not shocked by this because of ~ waves hands ~ but I also want to point out that it's objectively crazy

Okay so I’m mostly finding Jingo a bit of a… heavy-handed… Discworld book but having soldiers of two waring armies working together to surrender to the leaders of both armies is so wonderfully absurd

bleak, but at least darkly funny?

the academic problem of trying to cut a fellowship application describing your dissertation from 2000 to 1500 words, but it's 2025, so you're also wondering if grading a bad paper appropriately could get you fired

Happy thanksgiving! Hot pot and apple pie, our American-Chinese tradition. (Sweet potato pie in the oven and not pictured)

hot pot is the best holiday meal. minimal prep, minimal clean up, absolutely delicious. my family always has hot pot for thanksgiving

why is writing a 200 word abstract so much harder than an 8000 word paper?

My friend/colleague on our shared phd stress: “I have been watching some Indian movies this week … And I think the better plan would have been to marry a billionaire”

"Well, it’s been fun, but I should probably get back to work, checking in on the updates to my most active pages (Transnational Kleptocracy and Vaccine Denial in the United States, Part 16, April 2025–Present)."

Not a particular fan of either of my Senators but they are both a “no” to reopen so yay I guess

Driving from college town (Urbana-Champaign) to college town (Ann Arbor) after a lovely friend visit during the first snow of the season, and finally listening to Sold A Story, about reading education and science and politics. Snow driving and leaving a friend, 0/10, podcast 10/10

I can't believe ~40% of New Yorkers voted for Cuomo... like is 2020 that far in the rearview?

Thinking a lot about gen AI while grading student work, and one of the slightly less consequential but very annoying effects of it is crafting. More and more crochet & cross stitch patterns are AI, eroding quality... new crafters are getting scammed esp since some are not that obvious!

"nazi punks fuck off" "shame"

donate to your local food bank usually money is more cost effective than food Ann Arbor friends: www.foodgatherers.org/get-involved... (i am sad and livid about this entire horrific, preventable situation)

uchicago, with all of its many many flaws, continues to shape the kind of research questions I ask and the kind of scholar I am, so this is pretty bleak www.chronicle.com/article/rese...

Again, I can't stress this enough: Democratic elected officials are not constantly talking about climate change and trans rights. They are constantly talking about "kitchen table issues." Centrist pundits: Do a single fucking content analysis of their campaign speeches and materials, I beg you!

The entire mini season is brilliant, but this podcast episode about Hardin is one of the best I’ve listened to. I learned so much (Yes, the tragedy of the commons author an environmentalist of the ecofascist variety who supported abortion for eugenics reasons) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

reminder to self- the week an assignment is due when you double your office hours, also build in a 15 minute break so you *don't* have twelve 15 minute meetings back to back. (I am TIRED, and grateful for the meeting that took 10 mins so I can catch my breath)

the cruel thing about academia is the lack of geographical stability (your friends move away and then you move away) but I am visiting @sarahelazab.bsky.social (with her fancy new TT job) soon and I can't wait

i hate it here www.reddit.com/r/publicheal...

I've been thinking about this article for *days* and still can't quite put my finger on what's bugging me about it ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

that moment when a British newspaper has front page coverage of the biggest day of protest* since the Earth Day protests of 1970 but the biggest US Newspaper does not *let's not fight about counting methodology; the fact that towns in the middle of nowhere had protests is politically important

I didn't catch a picture of it, but I think my favorite sign of the day was "the wrong ICE is melting and the wrong Amazon is burning"

Counting Like A State, The Politics of Failed Policies, and Hacking the Electorate are all in my office, but I’m writing the first pass of my diss intro and what other social science books about data should I own? (I realize this is a niche question…)