Former Republican governor of NJ posted this warning and article about the DOJ doing voter registration purges in the states stateline.org/2025/12/18/t...

The Senator from Henrico nails it. The rule of law is still alive and well in Virginia, and our new Gov will be well within her rights to remove the Board.

This is the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation of university president selections. (You can tell they know this will be well-received, popular, and accepted as legitimate by the late-Friday-afternoon-before-Christmas email announcement.)

Wahoos4UVA right on the nose

Here’s the thing: Any internal candidate who wanted to serve well would have asked to delay. Why burden yourself with that baggage? Darden students — put revealed preference to work: what did you just learn about this leader?

I think about this the way that punt coverage works in football: you don't actually want everyone making a directly line to the ball, you actually want different players occupying different lanes because *the punt returner is going to move!* and you want to have broad coverage of the field.

Brutal numbers for food in the latest inflation report: - bananas rose 6.7 percent in the past year -beef and veal rose by 15.8 percent -coffee, which rose 18.8 percent in the last year. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth

This is incredible news. Today, Virginia officials will unveil a statue of Barbara Johns at the Capitol to replace one of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had stood for more than a century. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

See if you can spot Liberation Day. @usapolling.bsky.social

Kimchi is killer on mac & cheese, too.

Yall you gotta order your Christmas gifts by the end of the weekend.

Another reason that we need Albemarle County to be more affordable! 60% of school employees live out of the county. 🫠

a fun fact about Tom Perriello is that he is the only member of congress who reviewed and made edits to the original Indivisible Guide before we launched it

20th Century housing reformers largely banned single room rentals to make their externalities go away. But did so without fully accounting for the unintended consequences. As a result, it’s now harder to move to a new city and easier to go homeless. www.richmondfed.org/publications...

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

It's largely lost today because we've allowed constitutional law to become the exclusive preserve of lawyers, but the original idea of written constitutionalism was partly one of public education, publicity, & (proto-)democracy—people should be able to read & come to know the law which binds them

If you want to tell me the plain language of the Constitution means something entirely different, you ought to have a heavy burden. But because we've allowed the public practices of folk constitutionalism to atrophy into lawyerly monopoly (see below), there's a brute appeal to authority available.

The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

Tomorrow, Oregon is poised to approve the nation's first statewide model zoning code + become the first state to make it mandatory in cities that underperform their peers on housing production www.sightline.org/2025/12/03/n...

Climate change is killing workers. The fix is simple. Water. Shade. Rest Breaks. Our new Health Affairs study: California's heat standard was associated with a 33% drop in heat-related deaths among outdoor workers. Now it's time for OSHA to adopt a federal heat standard. tinyurl.com/4wejjhkd

Article title: The NYT wrote more about Harvard last year than all community colleges combined I posted three main figure from the article below www.vox.com/2014/7/23/59...

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts www.nber.org/papers/w34524 via @florianederer.bsky.social

Wow. "It gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News. This is an act of a war crime .... There’s absolutely no legal basis for it.” - Newsmax's Judge Napolitano

I miss having economists like Josh working at the White House. This is what the job oughta be.

Home Alone could've had a very different ending if it was made more recently.

Senator Kelly is correct. Plus a Public Service Announcement: KEY section of Department of Defense's Law of War Manual is 18.3.2.1. The VERY rule on the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders gives as its paradigmatic example of what is "clearly illegal: "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

One of the things about trust is that it is efficient. It saves you having to invest a lot of time and effort in verification, and if placed in the right places, saves you a lot of pain. "The diseases will do the education" is what we get when we don't trust.

If they want some merch revenue, I’d frame the poster for my office in a heart beat.

Christmas gift loading…

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

I am so sympathetic to arguments lamenting the impact of AI on higher ed… … and so tired of hearing this warped stat about employment rates for art history majors. A quality liberal arts education includes quantitative literacy!

Telling people “prices are going down” while they’re in the checkout line is like telling someone on a treadmill they’re sitting on a couch. Their legs know you’re lying.

The lesson: mandatory inclusionary zoning really has to be funded for it to work.

Sign at the US Military Academy at West Point:

When I talk to students about public speaking or teaching, I always bring this up: Just tell people when you don't know something! It's remarkably powerful b/c it signals to your audience that you know the boundaries of your expertise and they can trust what you DO talk about.

We spent a year investigating billionaires for @washingtonpost.com. We found: the wealthiest 100 Americans gave $1.1 billion to influence the 2024 elections — 140x more than they did in 2000. And almost all of that giving boosted Republicans. washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

So great to see BLS back to work measuring and informing us about our large and dynamic economy. It’s a great institution full of dedicated civil servants deeply committed their mission. They have had a tough year, and everyone is covering for someone who left. I thank them all for their service.

Earlier this morning, President Trump threatened me and a group of service and veteran Members of Congress with arrest, trial, and death by hanging. Here’s my response:

What is a hate symbol then??

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

TIL: boundary work en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundar...

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

TIL the youth say "selling" to describe someone/thing that's doing poorly and on the decline and "sold" to mean it's totally dead. "Sold!" used to mean "Great idea! Count me in." ... which makes sense if their default view of markets is speculative, not value-generating. We are so cooked.

How confident are US importers in the holiday shopping season and beyond? Let’s just say inbound container units are expected to be DOWN 14.4% this month — and 17.9% next month. @bloomberg.com $XLY www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

As the ~discourse~ seems to bend interminably towards Republicans trying to figure out how they can (further) HDHP-ify ACA coverage, it's worth revisiting what is probably our best (most rigorous) study on the effect of deductibles in health insurance. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

Virginians deserve the right to marry who they love — full stop. I’m relieved that the Supreme Court decided to maintain this landmark precedent. Virginia, come January, know that you will have a Governor who will always protect your right to marry.