This year's hunting regs had an interesting addition. #AlaskaLife

Who's going to tell him that a doctor is a person who has earned a doctorate?

There's more evidence (albeit indirect) that taking aspirin during pregnancy reduces children's risk of autism than there is that taking acetaminophen increases it. But, the wellness industry & trad-mom movement don't benefit from aspirin sales, so here we are. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

hi, medical toxicologist that knows a lot about Tylenol here👋 Claiming that tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism is fearmongering here's what you need to know 🧵

🚨 Job alert: Postdoc at NYU Abu Dhabi. You’ll uncover how group boundaries form online using virtual experiments + digital trace data and work with a fantastic trio: Mario Molina, Minsu Park & Blaine Robbins. Apply by 1 Nov 2025. 👇🏼 apply.interfolio.com/173544

If you think your family gatherings are awkward, consider Thanksgiving with the Begich family. Two Dem ex-senators, one US and one state (also a current gubernatorial candidate), & their MAGA nephew. Yes, more nepo-politics from the state that's been represented by a Murkowski for the past 44 yrs.

Good morning, Chicago.

Bad news for my hometown university. And before anyone says "FAFO" or "leopards and faces," the students who are most directly harmed by these cuts are disproportionately Indigenous students from the rural villages. They/their parents tend to vote Dem.

If you thought Manuscript Central was bad, you haven't reviewed for a Wiley journal in a while.

The Free Speech President has now pulled two of the three major late night hosts off the air through threats and intimidation because of their jokes. Obviously I’m behind Jimmy Kimmel 100% in the face of this fascist garbage. Speech against this admin isn’t just being chilled, they’re freezing it.

2025 me is regretting 2000 me's decision to create a folder called "Kim_Work." I created it to hold all the stuff that wasn't directly related to my own research, courses, or students. 2000 me, fresh out of grad school, was hopelessly naive about how much of my job would fall into this category.

Glad SecDef is focused on the really important stuff that will Make America Great Again, such as reducing the number of approved colors of nail polish for women in the military from 60 to 3 (including clear).

As we watch an administration that wishes to use state power to silence opposition and criticism, we need a vocabulary that can describe their project. Not in negative terms, as what they wish to destroy, but in positive terms, of what they want to build. Here is my attempt at that vocabulary:

Ketchikan, Alaska, the rainiest city in the U.S. (over 150" per year), had their 4th wettest calendar day on record yesterday. This Summer/Fall, they also had their 10th and then 5th longest dry spells on record. It's been feast or famine. @alaskawx.bsky.social

Central Yukon’s latest resource management plan was finalized after more than a decade of extensive public engagement. It concluded that over 3 million acres should be protected. The process cost the federal government $6.7M, but Congress may now rescind it, unravelling decades of land policy.

On the Trump administration's cruel disbanding of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium: my op-ed @statnews.com My 12-year-old son died from brain cancer. This research would have helped children like him www.statnews.com/2025/09/15/p...

People are getting radicalized by university studies! direct.mit.edu/rest/article...

As teaching and assessment tools, take-home essays and research papers are already on life support. Soon in-class written exams aren't going to discourage cheating, either, at least by wealthy students who can afford wearable AI. (Instructors can't ban eyeglasses in class, for obvious reasons.)

Went for a 6 mile walk to get away from it all. Ran into this American toad. Looks like he's as disgusted by American politics as I am. Or maybe that's just Resting American Toad face.

"Too big to fail" doesn't just mean that taxpayers end up bailing out poorly run or harmful co.s that dominate a market. It also means "too big to boycott." Want to boycott RayBan for privacy-destroying AI glasses? Parent ElissorLuxottica controls 48% of sunglasses market, much of eyecare market.

What kind of numpty alphabetizes a list of names on a website according to *first* name or, worse, by title and first name? Douglas Smith Douglas Taylor Dr. John Doe Dr. Lawrence Abbott Elizabeth Brown Elizabeth C White Elizabeth Johnson (Fake names. Real list.)

This point hasn’t been given nearly enough attention. If you applied actually existing research principles to genAI, it would never be allowed anywhere near a university, research project or classroom.

Shot put in Italian is "il getto del peso," or, in literal translation to English, "the jet of weight." It may be years before I have a conversation about track and field events, but if/when I do, I'll definitely use "jet of weight." Makes so much more sense.

Ideological violence in America mostly comes from the right. You can check multiple sources, but I am going to use the libertarian Cato Institute here to avoid being accused of cherrypicking, So, how can universities, a supposed hotbed of leftist indoctrination, driving political violence?

Trump's policies are a war on breakfast, and breakfast isn't just for breakfast anymore. Source: Fedwatch via @carlquintanilla.bsky.social . First column is year-over-year (Aug) price change. Second column is weight in CPI. Third column is tariff exposure.

I wrote about @hermwerf.bsky.social 's excellent ASR article last year on education expansion and intergenerational mobility. Hope you find it useful! asocial.substack.com/p/inequality...

Treating syllabi as legal contracts harms student learning. To be a good prof, you have to be able to deviate from syllabus. Students may be especially interested in a topic & want more time on it, or struggling & need more time on it. A new, course-relevant discovery or event may break. Etc.

Curious how hiring freezes and "right-sizing" rarely extends to athletics.

My parents' hobby orchard of organic, heritage variety fruit will produce 15,000 pounds of apples this year. Problem is, all local growers have a bumper crop so September's apples are like July's zucchini: you can't give them away, even to the food bank. Latest plan: convert apples to venison.

How do respondents interpret the classic ISSP ladder question that is usually deemed to measure subjective social status? In a whole heap of different ways, according to Lewis Anderson @dspi-oxford.bsky.social

As the trans-Alaska gas pipeline inches closer, AK's congressional reps are trying to sneak thru massive, and massively unpopular, sale of the public lands through which the new & old pipelines travel. Would reduce even the minimal public safety & enviro watchdog patrols of pipeline that occur now.

We're hiring in wonderful Copenhagen 🇩🇰 Two or more open rank sociology professorships (tt assistant, associate with tenure, or full prof with tenure). You'll join a leading sociology department in Europe with many core fields represented! #sociology More 👇 jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

Example 489,760 of why diversity in science generates better science. If the GOP really cared about infertility, they'd support a massive increase in funding for research on endometriosis, which affects >10% of women & causes infertility in ≈1/3 of those. Instead, funding is tiny and declining.

Citing DEI concerns, the Trump administration has halted funding for programs that support students with combined hearing and vision loss in eight states. Their funding had previously been approved through Sept. 2028. “How low can you go?” one advocate asked. “How can you do this to children?”

I mean, how can you be a middle-aged person in America and NOT know that Frog and Toad are gay?

A&M's code prohibits students from disruptive behavior in classrooms, meaning behavior that prevents the instructor from teaching or other students from benefiting from instruction. It also prohibits unauthorized recordings. No religious or political identity exemptions listed, but in practice ...

If I were to post this on X, the predictable response would be "ah, you lefties tolerated cancel culture so don't complain that now it is coming after you." But there is simply no symmetry here in nature and scope of cancelations, media support and consequences for the faculty involved.

Sociology instructors, take note: classic sociological theory makes an appearance on the menswear guy's account! (Actually, many of his posts have sociological content.)

Rising gold prices means a placer mining boom in Yukon Territory and other Gold Rush regions. Here's what placer mining does to the environment. But it's OK because YT gvt got 36,000 CDN (26K US$) in royalties. Whee. And a few jobs, tho mining is heavily mechanized. HT @shanahstone.bsky.social

For folks following the Trump Administration's proposal to eliminate the Roadless Rule, which has restricted logging and development in national forests, a status report filed this week in relation to a Roadless Rule lawsuit outlines the projected timeline. #Akleg

I can’t think of two better people to debate this than @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social & @mattglassman312.bsky.social. No one knows U.S. politics better than these two and they are the most strategic thinkers around (laudatory). However, the argument against a shutdown is an argument for surrender.

Shorter SCOTUS:

Excellent article on difficulty of getting food to Alaskans. The Al-Can highway isn't the biggest pressure point, though Canada getting angry enough at US to close it off would hurt. It's the reliance on unglamorous, taxpayer funded infrastructure: ports, roads, airports, weather stations, etc.

RFK Jr needs to go NOT ONLY b/c he's pushing junk science and lying about the (non-existent) link b/n vaccines and autism, but b/c he's effectively saying it'd be better if a lot of people die than a few have autism. Autism is NOT a fate worse than death. Only a eugenicist would imply that it is.

Outside my office, a man is photographing my 6' x 4' window banner that says, "any person, any study, from any country." It's a uni pres's riff on Cornell's motto, from speech during 45's Muslim ban. I wonder if this is going to be a Thing. It sucks that I have to wonder if it might be a Thing.

Sometimes you see a vanity license plate and think, “that’s clever, I bet that person would be fun to meet”. This is not one of those times.

Disneyworld's going to have to change its ubiquitous theme song to, "it's a smallpox world after all"

No professional association or scholarly society should hold a conference in FL if this idiocy passes. You can't claim to support new parents in your discipline AND hold meetings in a state willing to put infants (and others who can't vaccinate) at such risk. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Just to be clear, the lesson 47 learned from Harvard is NOT "don't pull grant funding (or renege on contracts to reimburse for work performed) based on flimsy, unconstitutional pretext." It's "when you pull grant funding and renege on contracts to reimburse for work, don't tell the university why."