This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

🚨 Please share widely! 🚨 I'm hiring a postdoc (from Aug 1) to help build a new research program on politically sustainable immigration policies at Notre Dame. Looking for a social scientist with strong quant skills, familiarity with new computational tools, and interest in public-facing research.

Good Authority's Erik Voeten used country-level UN vote data to create ideal points, similar to how political ideology is measured. It shows the massive shift in U.S. foreign policy in 2025, relative to the rest of the world. goodauthority.org/news/the-wor...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How it works.

ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings. www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...

Very excited to see this out at @bjpols.bsky.social! In this article, I show that contemporary political news coverage makes it challenging for readers to learn information that is helpful for democratic accountability, even for very politically engaged audiences. A brief summary:

Sowing fear of "ICE at the polls!" could do more to suppress votes than any actual ICE at the polls. Here's an explanation of the right's strategy on this, along with my recommendations for what to do instead of playing along. katestarbird.substack.com/p/effective-...

Warrantless searches sparked the American Revolution. In the 1760s, Britain made complaints similar to this about policing American merchants & resorted to issuing blanket "writs of assistance" to customs officers to enter ships, businesses, and homes without a specific warrant or even any evidence.

Everyone who says they don’t have enough goons to do this everywhere is totally missing the point that they absolutely have enough goons to do it in enough swing state city neighborhoods to tip the Senate or the Electoral College: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see. His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory. www.cell.com/one-earth/pd...

Did you think the debate over the effect of shark attacks on the 1916 presidential election was over? Think again! Out today: @borisheersink.bsky.social and I with a replication and extension of prior work that incorporates information about the conditional effects of tourism industry density.

Louisville resident here! Our local government recently made it so Churchill Downs (a billion dollar business) will never have to pay taxes for 30 years. This is while Jefferson County Public Schools is making hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts www.wave3.com/2025/12/05/c...

I spent the day grading an assignment. Several students found and used this article. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

dplyr 1.2.0 was released last week and since I use {dplyr} a lot in my work, I wanted to take some time to try some of the new functions. This post provides some supplemental examples of the new functions, beyond what is provided in the new Posit materials. #rstats cghlewis.com/blog/dplyr_u...

We tracked public TikToks containing keywords like "ICE," "Alex Pretti," "Renee Good," "Trump," and "Epstein" over time. There was a big drop - but it hit everything, political and non-political alike. "Recipe" and "Oscar" posts fell off too.

6/ The Post has lost over 375,000 subscribers in just over a year. If 10% of those readers subscribed to The 51st instead, we could hire 10 reporters and five editors, dramatically scaling our coverage of the city at this critical time. 51st.news/signup

Really important research out of Anthropic: In a RCT study, they found AI coding assistance resulted in a 𝟏𝟕% 𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐩 in mastery for users. While tasks were slightly faster, offloading thinking to AI stunted skill growth. Using AI to explain code, rather than just write it did help with retention.

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence: "Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

🚨 If populist rhetoric isn't persuasive, why do populists keep winning? 🚨 Our new paper (and first published registered report) shows populism's real electoral power may be mobilization, not persuasion—though policy positions still matter far more for voting. alexanderkustov.org/files/Kustov...

My new analysis: The administration misleads and ignores courts most often in immigration cases. In fact, a majority of the instances identified in a compilation by @justsecurity.org were about immigration. When deportations are on the line, expect them to lie to courts. www.cato.org/blog/admin-m...

After years in academia, I’m exploring data science and research roles in industry. I'm a quant. social scientist (PhD Yale ’24, NYU) focused on causal inference, experiments, and large-scale data. Feel free to get in touch or share; all leads appreciated. [email protected]

BREAKING: Whistleblower disclosures reveal a formal ICE policy to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.  Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home. 1/

At a time of unprecedented daily scandals, this this whistleblower complaint, and the memo it reveals for the first time, breaks through for me as beyond the pale. It's the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment. Read it here: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

i think this MLK day the thing to focus on is the strategic focus and tactical brilliance of the civil rights movement and the way it was laser focused on a set of achievable goals

Trump lets another drug trafficker out of prison because his father happens to be a Republican member of Congress.

"Their 6-month-old infant stopped breathing and lost consciousness."

Non-protesting dad just trying to hustle his kids, as young as 6mo, out of the neighborhood. ICE threw a flash-bang INTO HIS car, all 6 kids in the hospital now. If anyone wondered how things turn against occupying armies there's a case study playing out in front of you.

brutal bag of charts by @ashendruk.com www.not-ship.com/america-isnt...

To mark 10 years of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics we are pleased to offer access to all issues from 2025 - https://cup.org/3Ld06Fl Where not #OpenAccess the articles in these issues are free to read until the end of January 2026. cc @journalrep.bsky.social#OpenAccess

In the clip he goes on like this for a solid 25s

DOKOUPIL: When I travel the country, they tell me they don't feel it because grocery prices are up-- TRUMP: They're going to now. I've only been here for 11 months. I inherited a mess. If she got in, you wouldn't have this job right now.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

Academics - if you are expert in the history of the fourth amendment, today is a day you could pitch your favorite news outlet with a piece about it. If you're interested, do a little writing, then email me lollardfish at gmail and I'll give you some free op-ed coaching.

Breaking News: The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses.

It’s beyond insane that our overarching internal security agency has spent months tweeting barely-coded messages of support for neo-Nazi groups and the entire media apparatus looks at it and says “That’s odd but certainly not part a major story that is relevant to current events, I’m sure”

1. The DOJ has not released 99% of the Epstein Files, in direct violation of the law They claim the delay is necessary to review the files But here is the thing: The DOJ previously claimed THE REVIEW WAS COMPLETE IN JULY

This is the kind of thing that the Founders explicitly designed our constitution to prevent; a president who has seized wealth for his own benefit without any intervention from Congress, which in our system is supposed to be the holder of the power of the purse.

“No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law" Article I, Section 9.

New at Tusk: I’m pulling my post-January 6th Mischiefs of Faction piece out of the archives to commemorate this fifth anniversary

A tiny trial in New York has shown that personalized mRNA vaccines can provoke massive, lasting immune responses against pancreatic cancer, even as sweeping federal cuts now threaten the fragile labs required to produce them. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-breakthr...

Copy Editing Matters, from HHS's release on the new childhood vaccine schedule: All the diseases will still be available to anyone who wants them

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

I guess StackOverflow is done.

If I may quote Bari Weiss's memo from last week: "the standards for fairness we are holding ourselves to, particularly on contentious subjects, will surely feel controversial to those used to doing things one way"