People seem to think Mamdani is young & gullible but this was very smart politics. Meanwhile cuomo

this was one of the more thought-provoking pieces i've read recently data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-democr...

Student visas dropped to a four year low. Trump also cuts spending on research by hundreds of billions on college campuses. This is how you end American exceptionalism. I gifted this article so you can read it www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I should start a blog called Slow Causal

Remember supply/demand is a static, relatively simple model. In general equilibrium, wages can do much more interesting things over time.

find me another Dem that wouldn't be too afraid to do this. seriously.

Not to dump on this paper (the research design is a great idea), but just using differences-in-differences does *not* mean the effect is causal. DiD is a linear panel model that focuses on trends over time between cases. That's *all* it is. See my blog post: www.robertkubinec.com/post/did_dnd/

The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel has been swift, and severe. The whole episode underscores something I've been blogging about for a while: A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is www.gelliottmorris.com/p/a-lot-of-p...

It’s heartening to hear many principled voices argue that those in office should wield political power in a way that they would be happy to have it wielded when they’re not in power. But it’s worth saying this clearly: the current administration is not acting as if it intends to be out of power.

if this holds, it effectively ends hiring non-american citizens for faculty jobs. it also means nobody on a visa can ever switch to a different institution. news universities will have to seriously contend with ahead of upcoming polisci job market season.

Good morning. Immigration is good. Trade is good. There are nuances but they are narrow enough that free and open movement of people and goods should be the default.

new white house FAQ, which implies the $100k fee applies to cap-exempt orgs. what this means for universities: 1) if you hire a non-US citizen for a TT job, you have to pay the fee 2) if someone with an H1B visa on a TT job tries to change jobs, they also pay www.whitehouse.gov/articles/202...

Alaa has been pardoned! Wonderful, wonderful news. Yet, it also brings to mind the tens of thousands of political prisoners who remain behind bars in Egypt under terrible conditions. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/w...

Ok here's one I don't follow -- SC AG is threatening universities if they ask speakers from places like TP USA for security fees in the future. I get how that could be used to suppress speech, but c'mon, one of their people was just *assassinated.* 😬 scdailygazette.com/2025/09/19/a...

Very true, and in fact I can observe this sort of thing when I run social media ads for online surveys -- it takes about 2-3 days before survey hackers target a survey.

Wow this struck a nerve. Also clear to me that people have a very outmoded view of international migration patterns for high skilled workers. The US H1-B program admits 100k workers a year for 2 year terms. Dubai alone issued more high-skilled *permanent residency* visas in 2023 and 2024.

The weird spike in ordbetareg package downloads continues. I have no idea what is going on -- similar spike d/n exist for other CRAN packages. Presumably it's some kind of mechanical process... but what exactly? #rstats

The "talent" will go to the countries that want immigrants--and frankly, that's not most of Europe. It is China, the UAE, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, etc. It will take the US and the EU a long time to learn this, but the world is no longer just the US and the EU.

*Now* you all know what it's like to live in an authoritarian country 🫣

New from me: There's a lot of misinformation around the reasons I was fired from WaPo. Here's the official termination letter I got sent by Washington Post. Read and judge for yourself. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

This H1B thing is a DISASTER for the USA. Phone your representative and senator NOW and demand action to protect America. This is an attack on the American economy and American technological and scientific advancement. Not to mention a truly awful thing to do to half a million people.

What do you do if you're a Harvard LGBTQ grad who runs a plumbing company? Checkmate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of a key annual report that is central to future inflation data. I’m sure it’s because the numbers are really, really good.

What will Europe do to absorb the talent that's pushed out of the U.S.?

Keep in mind that this is taken from a Disney production, one that just this week won an Emmy. It may sound vaguely apropos. youtu.be/KYnE2Mxayco?...

A lot of people are talking about tech, but this is also another big tax on universities who hire many faculty from overseas--and they absolutely do not have $100k to spend on a fee. Universities will drop H1-B employees and end hiring them *starting immediately.*

This is a really cool paper, but the problem is that NIMBYism isn't really an issue with tenants, it's an issue with landowners. Building restrictions often happen out of the public eye, in obscure zoning meetings. They are anti-democratic in nature.

i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation. i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.

I know it's been a tough week, but see this GoFundMe to support Joshua Bregy, a Clemson professor who was fired this week for not being Fox News appropriate. His fundraiser is past its initial goal and one of his undergraduate advisees gave $300 ☺️ It's not all bad, not yet... gofund.me/b52118b1b

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Really important perspective here (whether you like Cruz or not). Cruz is still anticipating a continuation of democracy--that Democrats could win the White House. Those expectations are crucial for democracy to continue.

This looks like a really effective form of civil protest because ICE is deploying an absurd number of personnel to clear a bunch of people with poster boards. I guess it makes the secret police feel macho, but it's a very expensive way to operate & fewer officers for actual immigration raids.

The plot below shows pages from Facebook Ad Library that are connected by ad similarity (at least 5 ads with high similarity scores). We see a dense network of pages with high greenwashing/climate misinformation. Some with known funders (API) and others with fronts (Partnership for Energy).

Authoritarians often employ violence against women. Egypt's military regime employed forced "virginity exams" against female activists they captured before and after their coup. Authoritarian regimes project strength but it's really just beating up the vulnerable.

moments ago, ice agents again came out of the broadview detention/“professing” facility to escort a silver suv out of the lot. one of the agents picked up and threw congressional candidate kat abughazaleh to the ground.

It’s also widely known that @aoc.bsky.social uses #rstats #ggplot2 📈 📦 {ggaoc} by @jrosell.bsky.social 🔗 jrosell.github.io/ggaoc/

Very excited that my paper with @katakeith.bsky.social is now out in @polanalysis.bsky.social. We investigate whether LLMs actually follow the instructions/definitions provided in codebooks, propose some diagnostics, and release a new evaluation dataset. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Assistant/Associate Professor in Strategy/Entrepreneurship & AI, Management @ Stony Brook University (posting for a friend) apply.interfolio.com/173991

A decade of polarization, groupthink, and identity politics has made today’s Republican Party into a rubber stamp for Trumpism. They’ll now support him doing anything he wants, Constitution be damned. That’s the definition of an autocrat www.gelliottmorris.com/p/how-trump-...

it's also widely known that Kimmel preferred using #rstats over Python. the white house otoh relies on Matlab.

A plea to academic publishers: please stop publishing articles formatted in columns. It’s a pain for people using screen readers and is generally more difficult to read on a screen, which is likely how the majority of articles are read these days.

She is funny tho

I'd like to think that an US administration would not wantonly engage in killing US citizens. But let's be honest, we have no idea what the Trump admin will actually stop at.

Sorry to go Full Doomer, but: -Antifa is now a “terrorist organization.” And. -antifa is in the eye of the beholder. Antifa is whoever the administration says it is. And. -the administration engages in extrajudicial killings of “terrorists.”

Just now, 11 state and city lawmakers were arrested by DHS police on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza after a hour of demanding access to the ICE lock up on the same floor. @thecity.nyc

Gofundme: www.gofundme.com/f/defend-aca... and www.gofundme.com/f/support-dr...

A lot of the conversation about Jimmy Kimmel's firing is about elite capitulation. But we really don't know if elites are capitulating to anything. It could well be that upper management/boards wanted him gone *because* they like Trump. Capitulation means that you didn't want the outcome.

The media landscape shaping up leading into the midterms is disturbing. Two key platforms (TikTok and X) controlled by regime-friendly oligarchs — not even counting Meta. Many of the most powerful figures voicing opposition will be off the air, by regime demand. CBS, WaPo, LA Times, you name it…

Seems an apt time to re-up this...