Congrats to Fairbanks for having their coldest Dec-Mar on record. 🥳 @alaskawx.bsky.social

From sea to shining sea.

#Anchorage #Alaska

No Kings in Utqiaġvik (Barrow) Alaska!

Your protest may have been larger and warmer, but Fairbanks' featured Santa Claus and a stocking drive. Yes, "Santa Claus" is this gentleman's legal name. He was once mayor of North Pole (naturally) and ran for Alaska's House seat on a pro-child platform.

Excited to be a Visiting Scholar at Cornell and study economy and society. Thanks Cristobal Young and the Sociology Dept. for hosting me! @cornelluniversity.bsky.social

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

After enough zeros, more zeros lose their meaning to the lay public and, evidently, the media. @deanbaker13.bsky.social puts costs of Trump's additional ask for Iran into perspective. Doesn't count the $1B/day, or nearly 1 yr of NSF/week, he's already spent. cepr.net/publications...

Big men scared of sociology, but it’s illegal to research why. www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

I'm crushed that we won't get multiple spinoffs of The Chair, which despite Sandra Oh's talent was cancelled after just one season. Think of the possibilities: The Chair: Ithaca .... The Chair: Murfreesboro Office Space Wars Reviewer Two Data Colada: Fraud Trackers The RA Survivor: The Committee

we have a new paper in the April issue of Political Psychology. in this (admittedly quite lovely) new paper, @stephenvaisey.com, @pablobellode.bsky.social and I make a simple point: using panel data to understand belief change is very hard. we highlight an empirical intractability in the process:

Adventures in giving a pill to a cat: Attempts #1 - 5: Cats are not as stupid as they look. Attempt 6: Who knew a pill coated in cat spit can stick to a wall? Attempt 7: Butter-wrapped Benadryl FTW. Day 1 score: Boo Radley 6, Kim 1 One more dose tomorrow, if she doesn't murder me in my sleep.

Wow. Child penalty graphs (eg. Kleven et al 2019) are so often misinterpreted that % of Swedish respondents who erroneously believe gender earnings gap is 0-5% jumps from 18% before seeing graph to 47% after. Ironically PhDs may be more susceptible. I suspect in US you'd also find PARTYID effects.

Timeline cleanse: road hazards outside Oatman, Arizona. These "wild" burros can smell a sucker with a banana in their car from 1/2 mile away. (Pic from a non bluesky friend)

It's so cute that the Dean of Faculty office sent out a reminder that Spring Break starts this week, as if we didn't know that there are only 6,059 minutes to go.

Timeline cleanse.

Taughannock Falls, Ulysses, N.Y. #fingerlakes #waterfalls timeline cleanse

Waterfalls! One of the joys of living in the Finger Lakes. 💦 Aunt Sarah's Falls #FingerLakes #FLX #I❤️NY

Demographers are weird, "parity" edition. Normal people: equivalence of rank, status, or pay Physicists: symmetry under mirror imaging Sports pundits: even match of teams or players Economists: equal or harmonized (as in purchasing power parity) Demography (and medicine): number of live births

The authors report more findings in this fascinating study: sociologicalscience.com/articles-v11...

Today marks 5 years since I began my "minimum 10,000 steps a day" personal challenge. This year I fell short on two days, once because of sickness and once because of grief. Yeah, step-counting is kind of silly, but it works for me. Onward to year 6.

The high in Fairbanks, AK, was 107F colder than the high in Phoenix, AZ, was today (-5F vs 102F). @alaskawx.bsky.social

Some quick hitters at the blog today: asocial.substack.com/p/inequality... Including one heck of a devastating graph showing the consequences of the Great Recession for the bottom half of the American labor market

At my first job, before direct deposit, Payroll confused me with another female prof with a similar name. They sent my paychecks to her local address. USPS forwarded them to her field site. Her field site was in Yemen. Yes, my paychecks traveled 15K+ miles to go 3 blocks. They were ... delayed.

there is a fantastic visualization strategy coming from cultural evolution circles. I thought it'd be a perfect way to describe public opinion data, so I adapted it for aggregate survey data, created an R package, and wrote a post introducing it here: tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/publicopin

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

On top of the slowdown in grantmaking I wrote about last week - this is another deeply worrisome trend for scientists, physicians, patients, families, and basically anyone who wants new treatments and new tools to promote health. 🆘🧪🥼 open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"This is not efficiency... This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical research funder. And most people have no idea it is happening." Destroying the research that will power future discoveries and violating the Constitution

Someone went to the trouble of creating 5 fake OSF accounts today, linking to 5 fake ORCID accounts, and generating 5 fake papers to submit to SocArXiv, with fake author and emails. Dude, if you are reading this, I hope you get the help you need (or a better job).

the actual link for reference Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It. | Cato Institute www.cato.org/commentary/t...

Coldest first two weeks of March since the early 1970s at: King Salmon (26ºF below normal) Iliamna (24ºF below normal) Fairbanks (22ºF below normal) Tok (19ºF below normal) Anchorage (16ºF below normal) Talkeetna (14ºF below normal) Some areas early March 2007 was colder. #akwx #Climate

120 yrs of ASA membership (ht @hebagowayed.bsky.social) @philipncohen.com, didn't you once map this against new PhDs awarded? Raw counts are so affected by the fiscal health of universities generally (e.g., boom times in 50s/60s, budget cuts after 2008) that it's hard to get much from this.

We need return-to-home laws for detained or incarcerated people. Law and immigration enforcement should NOT be allowed to dump people wherever it's convenient & cheap for the agency. Police stranded this wrongfully incarcerated TN woman in Fargo in winter. www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

The elephant in the room: if you have access to the full population of transactions, why would you draw a sample?

Two days ago, students were in shorts and t-shirts.

Beautiful aurora tonight over Fairbanks--check out this giant auroral spiral! Great show earlier with the arrival of the coronal hole.

The obituary that Andreas Wimmer and I wrote for our colleague and friend Matthias Koenig is now online and can gladly be shared and read. rdcu.be/e7Zmg

Over at the blog I wrote about a few interesting findings. * (Lack of) compliance with minimum wage laws * NAFTA kills * (Poor) working conditions reduce partisanship open.substack.com/pub/asocial/... Hope you find this interesting!

People are making fun of the shoe thing, and for good reason, but it's also terrifying: If Trump's cabinet and advisors are too afraid to tell him he didn't guess their shoe size correctly, they are certainly too afraid to tell him the truth about the war.

I remember when it was big news that Alaska's prison budget became bigger than the budget for the University of Alaska. Now, the prison budget is over $500 million per year, a record high: alaskabeacon.com/2026/03/10/a... #akleg #Alaska

Google's genAI summary of transport options between Anchorage and a small town in Alaska recommends flying into an airport that is closed on a carrier that went bankrupt. Good luck, tourists!

There are many reasons to detest the anti-democratic SAVE Act, but one that's rarely discussed: it's a massive tax on every voter's time, and a regressive one at that. Switching from address-based sign-in to document verification would increase poll wait times for everyone, probably by factor of 3.

We often treat education as the primary engine of social mobility, but conventional models may be overestimating its impact. Not correcting for selection into schooling will artificially inflate any indirect effect through schooling... 1/3 #socialmobility #sociology

🔍 How does economic inequality impact beliefs in meritocracy? Using comprehensive survey data from 39 advanced capitalist democracies over more than three decades, Markus Gangl & I examine how rising economic inequality has been shaping citizens' belief in meritocracy. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwag016

Since 2022, AZ taxpayers funded $7.25M in Legos that individual families kept for themselves. Every AZ K12 teacher could have spent ~$125 on purchases *for their whole class, present & future* w those "take my toys & go home" Lego sets. [And yes, my code for this analysis was straight bananas.]

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Love the optimism!

NEW: Haowen Zheng, Robert Andersen, Anders Holm, Kristian Bernt Karlson, "Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...