Missed this from Chapple and Song when it came out, but it's very interesting, and offers a new dimension to consider, the "hotness of a housing market", in conditioning economic and social outcomes. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

MAGA is a world historical disaster, and the international community of decency must coordinate to destroy it and prevent it from rising again.

The NYT Opinion section continues to misread this moment. Safe district representatives' non-responsiveness to public pressures is an issue, but a LOT of the frustration rightly directed toward the Democratic Party isn't about ideology, but rather its fecklessness in the face of authoritarianism.

It honestly wouldn't be too crazy to get people in on the government side here. And it's a political boon. We just need to move the political resource base to move out of those who fear prosecution the most... www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

You want me to write a dissertation on political economy? In this political economy?!

Promising and timely! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/in-congress-we-trust/B88B1160AC86EE6A68A02E6826129C88?utm_date=20260226&utm_id=1772138781&%23fndtn-information=%7B%7D&utm_campaign=Books,LAWX,New+Title,POLI,Social+Sciences&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_content=

This raises a great point. When the regime took power, I wasn't convinced that committing acts of evil would be totally frictionless and free of political gravity just because the regime ignores usual politics/bureaucracy. Rather, the internal logic that dictates what happens is social media-driven.

Experts now warn prolonged war in the middle east could lead to: * A global food crisis (fertilizer) * Supply shocks for everything from plastics and pharmaceuticals to microchips * Spiraling stagflation www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Political scientists aren't good for many things, but one thing could do is tell you when you are making a catastrophically stupid assumption about a country.

How Palantir, not Anthropic, led US bombs to kill 175 civilians, mostly 7-12yo girls, in a school in Minab, Iran on Feb 28. How embedding automation - not LLMs in this case, just image processing and sensor fusion - in military workflows mutes human judgment, causes errors, & diverts accountability.

You want me to write a dissertation on political economy? In this political economy?!

As someone neck deep in empirical quantitative social science work at the moment, there's a lot to chew on here www.ft.com/content/9183...

Really weird to write something as if a reader could start reading it from any given section

Crisply identified causal treatment effects are hard to come by in the social world. But I feel we've ample enough intuitive evidence that media exposure substantially constructs the frames through which people understand their own material conditions and that of others. Feels crazy to ignore that.

New piece for The Nation on the ubiquity of "performative" and "virtue signalling" as terms of derision. "Citizenship ... is inherently performative and that abandoning the performance of democratic life means courting democratic collapse." www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The destruction of journalism was an inside job

Refrain from the Greek chorus of our era: "It ain't great but we'll miss it when it's gone"

The best news I've seen in a while. Just look at this little guy! gizmodo.com/fiat-will-se...

A reminder this is because the regime sent paramilitary forces into American cities to commit random racialized violence for social media views www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I wonder what recruitment and retention of quality talent looks like these days at my old employer newrepublic.com/post/207693/...

its only been like a week and this is already one of the stupidest things anyone's ever posted

So funny to see anyone bragging about their writing being good. The point of writing is to hate yourself during literally every moment of it

Love when LLMs cite my own work back to me

Refrain from the Greek chorus of our era: "It ain't great but we'll miss it when it's gone"

The destruction of journalism was an inside job

This is a great essay. In it, I hear echoes of the struggle of Marxist humanism against structuralism waged from the 1970s onward, and am reminded that we on the left must hold our collective ability to choose what world we live in as core to our beliefs. www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...

FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely! philjobs.org/job/show/30997

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

I hope we can all figure out what it is that we humans can do better than any thing else, and that we have the courage and resolve to build a social system that encourages that.

It's not good that lawsuits, especially ones weak on the merits, require the city to retain money to pay potential damages. It means powerful entities can hold the city and its budget hostage with lawsuits that have yet to succumb to a motion to dismiss or settlement. sfstandard.com/2026/03/05/a...

Can't imagine this plays well here in San Francisco sfstandard.com/2026/03/05/k...

A fantastic essay that captures many of my own thoughts and fears. But it's very cold comfort to those of us early career scholars who have already devoted many years to "running across the crumbling bridge" to the academy davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

As an early career academic, I've already noticed how my own writing style has narrowed just purely out of spending so much time appealing to those with little attention span and constrained tastes. No wonder the damn thing seems so imminent in replacing us. hegemon.substack.com/p/the-easy-p...

I can't believe how effective sill.social is at satisfying my primary social media use case

With the use of LLMs replacing some of the previous functions of research assistants or just plain manual research, I wonder how essential human contact with the data has been to social science knowledge generation. My hope is that we figure out where the human touch is necessary and focus there.

Now that I've played around with it a bit, it's hard not to see the introduction of Claude into the academic research environment as anything but a nuclear explosion-level event. It completely changes what constitutes the "sweat aesthetic" in the quantitative social sciences.

Good on the Standard for evaluating this person's claims through reporting. I suspect many now get their news of what's happening, even on their own block, from sensationalist social media more than their own eyes and ears. sfstandard.com/2026/02/26/s...

A good use of Tom Steyer's money! www.sfexaminer.com/news/state/s...

I would love to know how federal civil servants approach judicial injunctions regarding orders issued by the regime. Do they immediately take heed, regardless of what the political higher-ups say? Or do they wait for the political appointees to abide and continue on with their orders?

I must admit that learning about George Mitchell has hurt the most for me personally. He was a hero of mine as a young man, a role model of someone who came from a poor, child of working class immigrant background such as myself, who went on to great things. What a damn shame.

it is darkly amusing that costco being singularly focused on interested in a) selling a good product b) satisfying the customer and c) making money renders it a unicorn among major consumer-facing firms

This is an excellent post from @mmautner.bsky.social that applies very broadly to street design conversations—and applies well, yet again, to our decade-long debates about Hopkins Street in Berkeley. maxmautner.com/2026/02/22/p...

Yup. I wish I could make it clearer that San Francisco, the city, ought not be identified with tech so freely

"A man free of patriarchy is a man who has found not only every woman's humanity, but one who has at last discovered his own. The actual path to liberation for lonely men is feminism—because pursuing an identity based on dominating others is self-isolating." www.the-reframe.com/fix-your-hea...

The wealthy dominate political donations. Our co-authored research found the top 0.1% contribute at rates 10-15x higher than bottom 90%. They’re not just more likely to donate, they give exponentially more per capita. The wealth gradient in politics is real. cup.org/4cfm0Az

The federal judiciary today asked Congress to give it the power to manage its own courthouses and shift authority away from the GSA, saying decades of inadequate oversight exacerbated by recent actions by Trump's administration had left them in "crisis." www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

New unified transit design guides are a first for the Bay Area. These guides are intended to make it easier for riders to identify information and use transit by delivering information that is clear, predictable and consistent across service areas and county lines.

Sleep with dogs, wake up as AI homunculus

Breaking MS NOW: Agents with the FBI's elite evidence response team were delayed in reaching the scene of a mass shooting at Brown U. in December because there was no FBI plane available. Kash Patel was in south Florida at the time with one of the FBI's two available jets.