Mildly annoyed that this paper needed, maybe 4 days of work to be submitted somewhere… but those 4 days of work have taken 11 months

I had an 8 hour drive recently and made it 3/4 the way through the audiobook for The Wee Free Men. 10/10 I have no idea how to rank it with the rest of the Discworld and I want to read the text also but wow is Tiffany fun. I wish I had discovered it as a kid

not content to let Trump’s foreign policy debacle get all the attention, ICE has decided to return to the headlines by assaulting a sitting United States Senator

Today’s non academic reading: The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Well-written, *rampant* casual sexism

It’s probably some combo of stress/teeth grinding/fillings reaching the end of their lifetime, but it does feel like some kind of portent that a DAY after getting a permanent crown because a filling fell out, another filling in the next tooth also fell out

Bleak

mildly annoyed by how quickly Ann Arbor went from "far too cold to comfortably write outside" to "slightly too hot to work comfortably outside"

writing (and futzing with stargazer and ggplot) on a paper that I'm so ready to be done with, but at least I'm on a patio

I was genuinely surprised (not in a good way) to have this book summon all the emotions of early 2025 on a spring night a year later. But it’s a really good book, and it does the important work of bearing witness to evil. Recommend, but as with most such books, not late at night.n

Fellow night owl @scottlgreer.bsky.social told me not to start Into the Woodchipper, Nicholas Enrich’s book about what the Trump admin did to USAID at night. Excellent advice as usual, but did I listen? (No, I did not)

god bless archivists. I've just been told to contact another office for the third time about the status of materials that used to be hosted in the Social Security Archives (which the Trump admin appears to have sunsetted), but each email is more and more helpful!

the first half of this is not a bad summary of my 4 years of doctoral education; the second half is what I strive for

*finally* warm enough in Ann Arbor to have a patio writing day!

I learned about this guy's brewery in 2020 and it was a small bright spot. I *might* be personally offended that he couldn't let me vaguely enjoy the memory of leftist small business during a global pandemic and instead is running a narcissistic and unhinged campaign for governor

"No longer. We solemnly vow to dismantle systemic barriers to inclusion—such as shared governance, apolitical job searches, and the discriminatory practice of vetting ideas—and to ensure that all viewpoints, however dubious, enjoy equal footing in the academy."

I just rewrote the "in the paper I argue" paragraph of this paper for the... 4th-ish time? the annoying part is that I think it is actually better. The process is just annoying when you want to be done

Cleaning my apartment and listening to the latest If Books Could Kill episode. flashbacks to the first domain I was radicalized in (education policy). I hadn’t thought about Angela Duckworth in more than a decade and I am not looking forward to being mad at her again (& Paul Tough…)

i've been bracing myself for this through a different mechanism (Trump's FDA, Comstock Act), but, well, fuck

Does anyone else have trouble eating when they’re anxious? Tips on how to trick yourself out of it? (I’ve managed half a bagel all day and that’s definitely not *helping*anything…)

hypothesis: group work (can?) disincentivize AI use in a prosocial way evidence: very little, since I can't prove or disprove anything

you ever tie yourself up in metaphorical knots about things that are, on their face, very silly? (don't worry I also tie myself up in metaphorical knots about hard things too.)

in a bit of a grading hellscape.... (20 short answer quality improvement case studies down, 130 to go!) (for the record: students could do these throughout the semester, and largely, uh, didn't. I graded most of the ones that came in as we went!)

i'm trying to close tabs and reading a bunch, so: today I can be again thrilled that Robin Vos is retiring. good riddance "Wisconsin politics are broken, and if you were to write a list of the reasons why, Robin Vos’ name is at the very top." www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/repost-the...

With @scottlgreer.bsky.social, @hjarman.bsky.social, & @mirandayaver.bsky.social, my fourth (and counting) paper about how awful the Trump administration has been for public health. This time including what unions and union members can do about it www.aft.org/hc/spring202...

Dozens of US military veterans were arrested at the Capitol today during a protest against the Iran War. Photos via @frankthorp.bsky.social

For a more poli-sci forward view of this work, see this science of politics episode with @mshepruralpolitics.bsky.social I’m lucky enough to have Michael as a mentor & talk to him about rural health politics all the time and still learned a lot! 10/10 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

As someone who has had the chance to organize alongside Ms. Edith for 2 years, I can say with certainty that she shows up for everyone. She uses her car for multiple grocery runs a week so she can feed her neighbors! Please donate anything you can to help Ms. Edith and, by extension, Healy towers! 🫶🏽

Well between my phone’s very loud tornado warning notification and the very unnerving tornado sirens I’m not sure I’ll be sleeping for a while…

there's a lot of horror here to go around but I'm also consistently struck by the Gender of it all

having coauthored several articles about the horrors and death that has already been wrought by the wholesale dismantling of US global health, and the long term effects that it's sure to have... this is somehow even more cartoonishly evil than I thought

graded student short answer quizzes, read a chapter of a book about how in the world one writes a dissertation, grocery shopped, cooked, and managed to do two of those things outside in the sun the world is terrible but my day was pretty ok otherwise

“Voters have a hard time assigning credit or blame to those responsible for [health outcomes like rural hospital closures]” I constantly hope in vain that @mshepruralpolitics.bsky.social will find something sunnier about normative democracy but I fear he won’t…

my planner this week features both "get my life together" and "collapse in a heap"

i think about this a lot also. the effect it's having on writing is really negative, it amplifies the human tendency to banality.

Propublica reporting (and reporters) are great, which is why you shouldn’t cross the picket line!

lost in the other insane news of the day but Wisconsin just voted in a liberal supreme court judge, which not only means the court's split is 5/2 in favor of the liberals, but also that voters have guaranteed a liberal majority until at least 2030

Glad to see the World Medical & Health Policy journal’s publication of my analysis with @hjarman.bsky.social on the tariffs’ harmful effects on health, examining tariffs’ intersection with SNAP, WIC, and beyond. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

www.chronicle.com/article/unma... bleak

I never have any proof that a student used an LLM and it generally doesn't feel worth it to pursue, but it's pretty soul crushing to be grading and giving feedback to papers that reads like chat gpt

about to submit a nomination for a mentorship award, the 4th (?) I have submitted for one of my advisors. my advisors are all supportive and kind, and they make me a better scholar. I'm immensely grateful

dissertations could be written about this breastfeeding t-shirt

every once in a while I find something so immediately relevant to my dissertation (around the politics of government data and data quality) that I metaphorically sprint to bookmark it that discovery has been via bluesky a non-zero number of times

... wow I haven't read Project Hail Mary and I think it just dropped off my TBR

i lived in Chicago when Rahm was mayor and his good press baffles me

today in try-hard acronyms (tell me, are academics, health systems, or legislators better at this?) I-PASS: Illness severity, Patient information, Action list, Situational awareness and contingency plans, and Synthesis by receiver

More gas. A young woman with a camera got shot in the eye and carried away Too chaotic to post

it's good to see enormous protests in big cities, and large ones in liberal places like the Ann Arbor No Kings I went to, but I continue to be more struck by small(er) ones in unlikely places I did rounds of protest in 2016/17 and 2020/21 & this seems like a big difference in this movement

I counted nearly 1700 protesters in Franklin, TN. Which is, uh, not exactly a hotbed of left-wing progressivism. #NoKings

FLORIDA… the Villages shows up again… #NoKings

St. Paul, MN @reuters.com #NoKings