Small town airports can be frustrating, but there’s also something quite charming about an honor system snack bar. Of course, it could be the psych students running experiments again. (And, yes, people do leave money in the cup.)

Mat-Su School District (very MAGA) wants to teachers to carry concealed handguns. They estimate cost at $700,000. With the inevitable lawsuits after a student (or teacher) gets access to a gun and shoots self/others, true cost is more likely to be $7,000,000 & lost lives. Idiotic, and *so* Mat-Su.

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

You may be interested in this, @rbreich.bsky.social.

I'd really like to see Cornell raise the funds for a fitting memorial to a young man (and rural sociology major) who was murdered by white supremacists for trying to protect Black Americans' right to vote. Fundraising priorities reflect university priorities. www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...

This is my first Mother's Day since my mom passed. It's hard. She was an amazing woman: artist, biologist, gardener, naturalist, teacher, apple pie-maker extraordinaire, feminist, builder, fixer, mender of scraped knees, source of unconditional love. A recent interview: youtu.be/tnpbVxTT9JE?...

Very nice of United to send a voucher for a hotel in Bozeman, Montana to compensate for the “change in my travel plans”. I’m trying to get from Chicago to Ithaca via Washington DC. That better be a quality Quality Inn if I’m going to travel 2000 miles out of my way for it.

Wrapping up my PAA with a nice catch-up lunch with my PhD advisor @weedenkim.bsky.social. Thanks for the treat, Kim! This is the end of my social takeover 😊 feel free to follow me @zhenghaowen.bsky.social

Timeline cleanse: morning fog in rural NY.

Mad respect to the woman traveling solo with three kids under the age of 5. Saw her in the Ithaca airport at 5:30 am challenging the two oldest kids to a jumping jack and lunge competition. Just saw her at SYR, 4 hours later, challenging the two oldest kids to a jumping jack and lunge competition.

The important thing about Trump’s boondoggle ballroom is less the “political fight” that it might engender than that it symbolizes his fundamental dishonesty, personalism, corruption, and authoritarianism, which are all inimical to a democracy but supported by nearly the entire Republican Party.

It's 8:30 am and the quietest morning-of-Slope-Day that I've experienced in 25 years. I like I should set some speakers outside and blast crappy music just to wake up the students in the neighboring fraternities and sororities. Turnabout being fair play, and all.

I am unreasonably excited about being upgraded to first class on a short, morning flight where sitting in first class just means that I'll get my water in a glass instead of in a plastic cup. Oh, and first shot at the Chocolate Quinoa Crisps, which are really the main reason to prefer United.

💯 Distinction b/n fashion & art is embedded in org structures. E.g., Cornell's fashion program isn't in college of art & architecture; it's in one initially founded to keep female-coded & female-practiced subfields (home econ, child dev, nutrition, family soc) out of elite, male-dominated colleges.

Ice went out on the Tanana River at Nenana Monday evening, extending one of Alaska's very best climate relate time series to 110 years. Although break-up was later than normal by 21st century standards, this would have been a bit early for the ice to go out prior to 1960. #akwx #Climate #Spring2026

As far as I can tell, AI video is used to create hit pieces on public figures by (literally) putting words in their mouths, sexualize girls and women, avoid paying human actors, and fake adorable animal-animal or animal-human interactions for clicks. So glad we're damaging the environment for this.

May the 4th be with you!

Kelly Hunt, 19, disappeared in ANC b/n her village in Western AK and her college. Her remains were recently found. She is 4th young person from Shaktoolik, an Inupiaq village of ≈210, to die in past few years. AK Native women are more likely to be raped or murdered than White women. 1 is too many.

"So we noticed that most professors are NOT voting for the party that's defunding higher education, canceling grants for political grievances, banning books, attacking entire fields, placing professors on 'watch lists,' and pushing pseudoscience." "Well, clearly that is the fault of universities."

NEW: Peter K. Enns, "How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

A big study that was cited as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted: www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-wi... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is excellent. Why did farmers support Trump II? They thought they'd get - more handouts than what's in BBB - tax breaks for millionaires, which many farmers are - no pesky environmental regulations - rollback of the minimal protections for H-2A workers But Trump doesn't need them anymore.

One thing that galls me about AI slop is the total reign of disingenuousness. A person "wrote" a detailed, impassioned appeal of their terrible AI slop paper's rejection. I explained why it was rejected. /1

Welcome to the last half of the US federal fiscal year. Here is where we're at with National Science Foundation--the agency that funds basically everything other than biomedical research at American universities--grant numbers. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Where DC politicians see only dollar signs, I see my home. A home where we used to have abundance, but now we have scarcity. We need systemic change if we're going to lower costs, save our fisheries, and fill our homes with abundance again.

My weekend: Wrote letters: T&P, donor, and LoR Evaluated 13 student grant proposals Modified R code to extract netIDs from Forms Made template so students can estimate final grades Wrote exam study guide Answered emails Went to gym (x2) Cleaned kitchen Laundry (x2) Weeded (2 hrs) Is it Monday yet?

I just put my money where my mouth is & donated to @davidcostello.bsky.social. We all have a responsibility to defeat antisemitism & other bigotries & ensure they find no place in the Democratic Party. If you're able to, please join me in donating to his campaign for the U.S. Senate from Maine!

At a time like this we need leaders with the courage to name what we all can see happening. The social sciences give us a language to bear witness and light with which to see more clearly. We will not be extinguished so easily. >>

Powerful, honest and brave 🔥 Read this 🧵 and watch this video from IAS Member and friend @mjcrockett.bsky.social, who uses the occasion of her distinguished @nationalacademies.org award to challenge the uncritical automation of science and the erosion of federal funding for social science research

Seems like it's just a matter of time before the Trump administration threatens and bullies Gas Buddy into suppressing its gas price data.

Wrote a piece for @slate.com on how our theories of partisan polarization gave the SCOTUS majority more intellectual cover to kill the VRA slate.com/news-and-pol...

I'm no PR expert, but I'm pretty sure sending an all-campus email that says "When I backed out of my parking space I was careful not to hit any protestors" is going to raise more questions than it answers. Here's one: were a Nobel-winning economist & a Sociological Methodology editor also involved?

Excited for my talk today at Cornell University on reproducibility in the soc & behavior sciences, results from SCORE w/ a focus on sociology. In case you can't make it, I made a pre-recorded video youtu.be/kMwOwZaYYtE @briannosek.bsky.social @weedenkim.bsky.social #openscience #reproducibility

I've always put "8675309/Jenny" in the same category as the other rapey/stalkery 80s hits: every breath you take, hello, private eyes, hungry like the wolf, hey nineteen ... I could go on. It gets even darker under MAGA's bonkers redefinition of 86. Watch out, Jenny: he's got your number.

I'm curious what share of the political elite -- Trump's cabinet and advisors, members of Congress, directors or deputies of named agencies, lead lawyers at the DOJ, etc -- have ever worked in a restaurant or bar. AOC, famously, but her past as a bartender is well known precisely b/c it's so rare.

Mini-rant: "Feels like" temps are BS. How do they know? What does it mean to say 57 feels like 54? For 99% of Fahrenheit fans, it's a meaningless distinction. Celsius fans are dead at both. On C vs. F: F still used b/c US-ians stubborn & like big numbers. "But this one goes to 11" for temps. 1/2

I'm less upset about $350M tax dollars gong to a ballroom than about the orders of magnitude more taxpayer funds going to Trump's vanity war, no-bid contracts for his family & donors, IRS payouts to Trump, buyouts of wind farms, ICE/CBP harassment & detention, lawfare against political opponents...

New paper out in Annual Review of Sociology with @arnoutvanderijt.bsky.social #W.Foley and @l-sage.bsky.social "Luck and Predictability in the Life Course" We take stock of what we know about luck and its role in shaping life-courses and inequality www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Take action to protect sociology! The administration's FY27 budget will dismantle the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate, a crucial resource for social science research. Contact your elected official here: bit.ly/ASAaction.

At what point does a university lose the right to call itself a university?

This is a good article, about how western Alaska depends on diesel from Asia which flows through the Strait of Hormuz, with a limited time to actually get the fuel, while there’s no ice. It’s looking like a hard winter.

Protect the SBE Directorate www.congressweb.com/americansoci...

Recently, the accrediting body for U.S. medical schools quietly published updated standards that no longer explicitly require med schools to teach about health equity. In my piece, I argue that this rollback harms us all & that medical schools have an obligation to keep teaching this content.

Under a corrupt authoritarian regime, "public-private partnerships" meant that private companies give money to public officials in exchange for private property rights over public funds, public lands, and public goods. Otherwise known as "bribery", but potato, potahto.

For those of us in the US, this figure hits hard. Institutional autonomy is closely related to academic freedom, arguably a necessary condition for it. Autonomy took a nosedive from 2022-2025. That nosedive has only accelerated in past 6 months. See Fig 6 in report linked in @mclem.org's post.

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

No ballroom for trump, give him some thoughts and prayers and a bulletproof backpack. That's what schoolchildren get.

Odd how picture puzzles -- which are inexpensive, made from paper, and come in nearly infinite variety -- fell out of favor, yet people anxiously await the next cross-branded Lego kit that costs 10 x more per hr used, involves equally little creativity, and hurts far more when you step on a piece.

Slowly unfolding disasters in rural Alaskan communities: climate change is bringing more intense storms and rising sea levels, while Republicans are bringing fuel shortages, health care facility closures, and cuts -- or de facto cuts thru administrative burdens -- to SNAP and other safety nets.

Organic chemistry wasn't offered in the time slot I wanted.