“use AI” is just “underpants gnomes”

I’d argue governors being denied access to federal law enforcement facilities in their state is part of what I call slow civil war.

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

I say without hyperbole that this is the most brazenly corrupt action in US Presidential history. That it does not immediately lead to impeachment is a dangerous sign of how far the rule of law has declined.

🚨 Do you or your students use @statacorp.bsky.social? Want to learn some tricks for better graphs? If so, I'm hosting a seminar w/ @instats.bsky.social on June 8 and 9! Lots of tips, tricks & guidance for clearer, prettier data viz for descriptive & inferential analyses. Pls spread the word! 🙏

I'm working on a piece I'm slightly behind on for @liberalcurrents.com on reconstruction. And I'm always struck by the fact that we only needed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Fair Housing Act because the state and federal governments just ignored the Reconstruction Amendments.

incredibly depressing that the reimposition of jim crow districts across the entire south is getting nothing more than generic horse race coverage

NEW: We've spent 10 months tracking the outcomes in tens of thousands of lawsuits brought by ICE detainees amid an unprecedented detention push. It's not a cose call: judges have ruled more than 10,000 times against ICE, a 9-1 ratio. See the database: www.politico.com/news/2026/05...

This seems like a good time to announce two pieces of news: 1) I’ll be presenting my work on silicon sampling for conjoints tomorrow @experimentsapsa.bsky.social 2) I’ll be joining @lilymasonphd.bsky.social @snfagora.bsky.social for a postdoc starting this fall. Thanks to everyone for the support!

📢 Calling all students still on the market for this fall. 🚨 Post-doc opportunity working on how to adapt interventions to different cultures, with Catherine Thomas at the University of Michigan. Due June 15: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2... @iaccp.bsky.social @umich.edu @spspnews.bsky.social

ABC News: Elon Musk’s DOGE “blatantly used” race, gender and other protected characteristics to execute the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. abcnews.com/Politics/jud...

🚨New PolCom Postdoc Vacancy🚨@kathleenbeckers.bsky.social & I are hiring on project "Media, Inequality, and Democratic Support" as part of the Horizon Europe project EDGE ⬇️ Start: 1 Oct 2026, length: 30 months, location: @ascor.bsky.social 🤩, DL: 7 June 2026! More info & apply: tinyurl.com/23zdmjhe

Retractions never get proportional attention. This one should.

relentless poll chasing + contempt for your political base + a total absence of principle or vision = political disaster www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/o...

Listen, this is tit for tat until a national gerrymandering ban, and R legislatures in FL and OH already did this exact tit to get around their courts so the optimal next step appears to be tat

UK politics shouldn't be perpetually interpreted in terms of US anxieties but this bit is relevant. If deliverism regularly mistakes policy for politics, popularism regularly mistakes politics for policy.

happy 9th anniversary to the day we watched Zendaya fall madly in love with Tom Holland in real-time

Postdoc alert! Fellow in Public Policy at the LSE School of Public Policy. Up to 3 years, a great job in a tight market. Needs to be able to support teaching on our MPP program, but political scientists could definitely do this (make your case!) www.jobs.lse.ac.uk

YES - the papers I've received in the last two years appear to never have been read by a grad advisor. The reviewer is expected to do the work of guiding, instructing, editing, etc.

We’re hiring two LSE Fellows in Public Policy A two year career development role for early career scholars to teach on the MPP and contribute to LSE’s research community 📅 Deadline: 21 May Apply: https://www.jobs.lse.ac.uk #LSEPublicPolicy

The actual problem is 1) Democrats have popular policies but the country never hears about them due to right-wing propaganda; 2) Democrats constantly blame themselves and their base for this —a message right-wing media amplifies, making the problem even worse.

“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

Still no clear motive, as the social media accounts of the bears do not reveal whether they were Democrats or Republicans.

One of the most obvious ways to see that our media environment is failing us in the US is that our violent crime rate has plummeted since 1993, but year after year an increasing % of Americans think the violent crime rate is higher than it used to be. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Your end of semester reminder that there are some students who would never even think to ask you to round up or give extra credit (or hell, even fix a grading error you made!), and those students differ in significant ways than those who will ask.

“The success of the shot has been so remarkable that it nearly eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding altogether. The science was settled decades ago.” Scientists don’t “know everything,” but they do know THEIR thing, and anti-science propaganda reverses amazing human progress.

“They hope everybody folds because the process is the punishment, and that paves the way for them to do it to more people and exert power, especially over the media.” www.mediamatters.org/ms-now-msnbc...

I wonder if somebody told Harry Enten to start describing polling numbers as if he's talking to 3rd graders, or if he just decided to do that on his own.

We've cleaned up (or attempted to) and released 1,460 ICE use-of-force incident narratives, dates, and participants, including regional divisions, facilities, and law enforcement agencies. There are more stories to be told with this data. github.com/wpinvestigat...

The experts — @nathankalmoe.bsky.social, @lilymasonphd.bsky.social, @rachelkleinfeld.bsky.social, @jacobware.bsky.social, and Garen Wintemute — all described political violence in America as emerging primarily from the intersection of two emotions: fear and hopelessness.

To be clear as day, this is, of course, absolutely intentional. It has happened with every Republican president of my lifetime (with the notable exception of HW Bush). It's what the GOP does. www.wsj.com/economy/u-s-...

Male supremacy IS the red thread linking not just all fascist movements but vast swathes of men across political parties, race, class, religion & sexuality. Male supremacy is rubbed in our faces daily, but istg most Americans just cannot see it: they may see racism & class war, but misogyny? Nope.

the u.s. is shooting itself in the foot with a tactical nuke american universities are *so* good and it's a virtuous cycle: smart and ambitious people attend, elevating the whole enterprise. if we alienate the world, it becomes a vicious cycle headed in the opposite direction

I say it again and again: Because we don’t learn the real history of this country, we do not understand what this country is capable of. After 1870, 22 Black men served in Congress. By 1901, because of racist SCOTUS rulings, electoral coups and election cheating and violence, there were none.

The Stand Up for Science Foundation (a nonpartisan 501c3) is launching a new Institute to craft and implement policy that will address the damage to federal agencies and institutions, recenter evidence-based decision making, and reestablish the United States as a global leader in science. 2/7

Review of postdoc applications begins 4/30, please share the opportunity with anyone who might be interested. #SciComm #philsci 🧪

There are things that are very hard for me to understand. He could simply pay the tax and he would be left with about $260 Billion in wealth. More than any single human could every possibly spend across any number of lifespans. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/u...

Emailing someone at 4am to request a 9am interview is extremely unlikely to ever work.

This was, in all seriousness, the point of the Harper’s Letter

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Appreciate this detail from CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs. It's an important part of the story that seems to be missing from a lot of comments & coverage.

Highlights from the MPSA "Town Hall" on US democratic collapse, featuring leading scholars in political science. 🧵 (1) Moderator, @nazita.bsky.social , starts off with a plain description of democratic decline in the US with an impressive list of illiberal activity and rapid decline. 1/

A good overview of what Dems were able to accomplish w/r/t forcing Kilmar Abrego Garcia's abduction onto the national agenda, beating back ICE in places like Minneapolis, and driving Trump's approval on his "best" issue into the toilet. Recall that some pundits advised Dems *not* to do any of this.

My hope is that someday, hundreds of years from now, the cautionary tale taken from the fall of the American empire is that you shouldn’t put the stupidest people on earth in charge.

I NEED HELP! Please take this quick, meaningless 19 question survey so I can get data for my students to learn stats! I did a similar version a few months ago but missed an important question type. Even if you did the old one, please do it again! Please circulate widely!

5/7. But one of our problems or syndromes is our provincialism: we just can’t see the possibility that other counties matter inside our political system. bsky.app/profile/gtco...

And, it is cowardly and hypocritical to claim you support intellectual freedom while attempting to shield speakers from scrunity because they lack the courage of their convictions.

Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.