Greetings check this out: Amplifying voices is a new Cambridge grant to help under-represented scholars publish. Apply!!! www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

The constant rejection that we deal with in academia can be very psychologically damaging. Sometimes I direct that hurt inward and blame myself for the jobs I don't get; often I focus on the things I can't control: funding, idiosyncratic tastes, internal dynamics, luck...

Planning a two week trip to Japan, mostly based out of Tokyo and Osaka. First time in the country. Please share food & drink recs, travel tips, other suggestions! We eat everything & will do some history/sightseeing, but prioritizing wandering and experiencing local cultures.

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

the unitarian notion of accountability is, in general, very strange as it holds that a single election — the president’s reelect — is more democratically accountable than the rolling process of democratic assent produced by legislative elections and congressional oversight.

New, from me: by embracing unitary executive theory, the Supreme Court is moving towards making all public employees fireable at the will of the President. This will not just hurt government competence, it will aid democratic backsliding. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-will-wh...

Trying to come up with pseudonyms for my research participants and I really wish we still had phone books.

Lane Kiffin's LSU contract will pay him the equivalent of my Louisiana public university annual salary every two days

Planning a two week trip to Japan, mostly based out of Tokyo and Osaka. First time in the country. Please share food & drink recs, travel tips, other suggestions! We eat everything & will do some history/sightseeing, but prioritizing wandering and experiencing local cultures.

New: A grad student at Johns Hopkins has been stranded in Canada for months after his visa was canceled at the border. He’s been incurring thousands in expenses without being paid by the university, which says it won’t petition officials for six months: www.thebanner.com/education/hi...

Cowboys Eagles is coming down to who kicks themselves in the groin last

I also know a thing or two about the American elite, ahem, and they are very good at ignoring, compartmentalizing, and overlooking the bad behavior of others to advance their own careers

Reporter: Are you affirming that you think the president is a fascist? Mamdani: I've spoken about -- Trump: Just say yes, it's easier than explaining.

Will be interested to see the bill text, but worry this may focus too narrowly on rulemaking. The most insidious forms of influence often come from informal lobbying outside of rulemaking, while less resourced groups rely on rulemaking for info, access, etc. As one of my respondents stated:

Will be interested to see the bill text, but worry this may focus too narrowly on rulemaking. The most insidious forms of influence often come from informal lobbying outside of rulemaking, while less resourced groups rely on rulemaking for info, access, etc. As one of my respondents stated:

I spoke with the Boston Globe about the Summers situation TLDR: other professors like myself can no longer trust Summers to perform a key duty of a university professor, which is to advise & mentor students www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/18/m...

People are holding administrative burden parties to collectively take on tasks www.wsj.com/lifestyle/re...

“All misdeeds are not the same, and there is a real difference between the unseemly revolving door between business and government […] and a new status quo in which business leaders and heads of state give the president actual tribute in order to put themselves in the good graces of the White House”

Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? When Republicans control the presidency and/or the Senate, yes. White voters are more likely to see legislation they support become law than are Black, Latino, or Asian American voters.

"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."

I literally thought this was an excerpt from a romantasy novel at first

To negotiate a trade deal with the President of the United States, the Swiss government arrived with a "special Rolex desktop clock" and "a 1-kilogram personalized gold bar" www.axios.com/2025/11/14/t...

Yes. This is another reason why public funding is what we want - why the government should support science with democratic mechanisms of oversight. Public support means not having to beg toxic billionaires for money.

“The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.”

The new rules require presidential approval for courses that "advocate" race or gender ideology and ban material outside approved syllabi. Students can use a hotline to report course content. bit.ly/3XxszrC

I think the banal answer is: he’s very rich and powerful and good at networking and this how people act around very rich and powerful people.

If the shutdown disrupted your life, everything that happened this year was likely also incredibly turbulent and unsettling for you, and it unfortunately, probably will continue to be. Thinking that things could go back to "normal" (whatever that means) is an exercise in denial and delusion.

Quick — someone tell the New York Times that the situation in early October, when the shutdown began, was not “normal.”

Looking for reading recs on the sociology/political economy of college football. (Went to the Alabama/LSU game this weekend; marveling at how much the university feels like a professional football team with academics attached. The stadium & tailgate setup is bigger/better than a lot of NFL teams)

my hometown 🥲

“It has been complete cowardice on the part of industry,” [Vecchione] said. “What about an alternate world where all the importers — all the Amazons, all the Walmarts, all the Targets — what if they had all said, ‘No, we’re not going to take this.’”

Previously I was hesitant to describe what I study (corporate lobbying) as corruption because I saw influence & capture happening through imperfect but valid processes of democratic engagement & expert consultation. Now it is very clear we are talking about corruption. apnews.com/article/whit...

Job market candidates right now

Went back to interviews from 6-7 years ago and it's really nice to notice how my interviewing skills have improved- knowing when to let people ramble, when to chime in, what to probe, when to let silence sit. It's making me want finish writing up this project and get back into the field...

This will be an interdisciplinary event: we're interested not just in Smith and his works, but the broader context of his time (abolition struggles! revolutions from Haiti to France!) and the state of his themes (labor, trade, finance, etc.) in the world today. If you work on *any* of these, apply!

We now have multiple visualizations of this phenomenon from various news organizations. Which one is the best?

Looking forward to digging into this report. In particular, glad that Chapter 2 speaks directly to the need to think more carefully about diversifying the policy workforce - with people from different class & education backgrounds, career paths, professional communities, etc.

Finding myself unexpectedly upset about this, not because of any attachment to the east wing but because this is such a clear encapsulation of so much that is wrong right now… an unaccountable president, destruction of federal government resources, pay-to-play corruption…

Call this what it is: rank corruption. Major corporations funding a president's vanity project is a textbook model for pay-to-play. Why else would tech giants, crypto firms, and defense contractors care about a 90,000 sq ft ballroom?

Here are some data to drive this point home in sociology. Over the last 10 years we saw a decline from 333 to 200 asst prof jobs posted to the ASA job board - and that's until 2024, which was widely seen as a better market year than 2025

"The new dynamic has transformed the business of Washington influence... With Congress and agencies often sidelined, outside lobbying firms and in-house specialists — many with decades of policy experience and cross-party relationships — are declining in importance. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Yes, quid pro quos have always happened, some more explicitly than others. But there was also a general agreement that you couldn't do it openly, and because politicals weren't going to get involved in every issue, you had to also win over the bureaucrats & policy community to back your interests up

Seeing this issue more broadly across elite politics, as rule of law declines: why go through the trouble of building expertise, credentials, skills, social capital, etc. to make yourself more legitimate, when you can just bribe the government?

The deadline to submit abstracts for our mini-conference has been extended to October 31!! And don't forget to save the date for our symposium on March 5 at the JHU DC center, with an all-star lineup!

“The question of who gets to live as long as they should isn’t moral but systemic. We often say that death is the great unifier as it’s the one thing that we all have in common. But sometimes, I look around and wonder if even the after-life is segregated.”

NEW: From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russ Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like “he is the commander in chief.” @andykroll.bsky.social w/ @newyorker.com

Cannot overstate how great this postdoc is - not only for the time and resources you get to do your own work, but also the amazing colleagues and support. Apply!!

D’Angelo, the neo-soul trailblazer and modern visionary whose three albums were all heralded as classic works of art, has died at age 51. Access the free article here: www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...