Among other things this illustrates how fully useless “social listening” and other social media sentiment analysis has become

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

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.

This kind of poll has been debunked over and over. It's clickbait that harms society by convincing people that their fellow citizens are stupider than they really are. academic.oup.com/poq/article-...

Samsung has rolled out a software update to its smart fridges that will display ads, despite saying they had "no plans" to do so. We're headed for a future where you will have to pay extra for appliances without ads.

Dr. @ashishkjha.bsky.social, who led Biden’s coronavirus response, on what the Trump administration’s MAHA report leaves out. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/12/o...

Miller: The power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power and if you have broken the law, take away your freedom

Looking for something to do at APSA today at 8am local time? Come to our panel on Experiments on Violence and Political Behavior!

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

One thing I didn’t really think about when I first read Trump v. US was how it makes subordinates who carry out an official-but-criminal act dependent on the president for a pardon

The main pro-MAHA/Kennedy group is urging his supporters to flood congressional phone lines after his combative hearing last week. (I reported here on how the group has been deploying a media strategy to promote him, icymi: bostonglobe.com/2025/09/01/n... )

Trump's massive raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia is huge news all around the world. But in the US it's barely even reported, much less discussed and explained. Something fundamentally wrong with US media.

There is, as of right now, no coverage of this protest on the WaPo website or in their @washingtonpost.com feed. So, if you (you reading this) want people to SEE this protest, you must share it.

From a time when childhood vaccines were just a figment of imagination. Row after row of baby headstones.

It’s almost as if Trump and Hegseth haven’t the faintest fucking clue how to defend a nation. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Excited to announce my paper, Measuring Strategic Positioning in Congressional Elections, is officially accepted and online @thejop.bsky.social here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... Quick thread on the paper below:

Imagine asking people two questions -- whether each of these is a good or bad way to run a govt: 1) having a democratic political system 2) having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections What percent says *both* are good? 44%!

Until the TCJA, the top 400 US individuals by wealth and the full US population both had effective tax rates of ~30%. The TCJA reduced the Top 400 individuals’ total effective tax rates to 23.8% in 2018 – 2020, well below those of the full population (still ~30%). www.nber.org/system/files...

"Analysis has found drivers in the tallest cars could not see children as old as nine when they were directly in front of the vehicle."

MAHA www.nbcnews.com/health/rcna2...

Free important article idea: misperceptions about which party says these phrases the most dcinboxinsights.substack.com/p/was-it-som...

The full write up is here: Was It Something The Democrats Said? A Response to Third Way’s Political Language Memo open.substack.com/pub/dcinboxi...

Hugely important. Thanks to our broken discourse over immigration stats people falsely imagined that all of Obama's removals ("deportations") were long-term residents, when that was actually a small %. What's happening now is so much more different than the # of removals ("deportations") suggests.

If Bolton was asked to return documents and didn’t and then they were subpoenaed by a grand jury and his lawyer attested that everything was returned but it wasn’t and then the FBI moved in? OK. Fair comparison.

The creators of the idiotic slogan "democracy dies in darkness" once again show they haven't done the reading

holy shit this is a helluva ad from the Democrat running against Joni Ernst in Iowa. worth every second

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

No, Native-Born Employment Has Not Soared www.briefingbook.info/cp/171234316

Here is the chart showing the growth of reported protest over time, 2025 vs. 2017, referenced in the piece below.

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Conservative affirmative action is wild. They just let anyone do any job no matter their qualifications, so long as they’re loyal.

So painful to read Federalist 76, which is about the president's appointment power, in 2025. Hamilton's like, no president would be so degenerate as to appoint only those "personally allied to him," esp since Senate confirmation would 'silently operate' as an "excellent check" on such attempts

Stony Brook is hiring in political psychology (assistant professor). Please Share! Feel free to reach out if you have question. For more information: apply.interfolio.com/170193

Hey! Here’s what to do when you have two or more surveys on the same population! (Combining survey data obtained using different modes of sampling) statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/12/h...

Libertarianism for me (and things that benefit me). Not for thee. Don’t make me tap the sign.

I'm quoted in this New York Times piece on the challenges facing the Trump administration in collecting and publishing quality data on college admissions by race after the relevant Department of Education staff were laid off.

True: @zohranmamdani lives in 1 unit of rent-stabilized housing. Also true: Andrew Cuomo oversaw the loss of 96,064 units of rent-stabilized housing. And killed NYC’s program helping people move out of shelter. Leaders must show moral clarity. Andrew, time to move out. 🧵 x.com/andrewcuomo/...

I realize broad science-literacy problems cannot generally be solved just by shoving more facts at people but I really wish more people understood that the entire purpose and mechanism of a vaccine is to educate your OWN immune system, making it about the most "natural" medical intervention possible

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

who could have seen this coming www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/b...

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

It seems fairly clear that Donald Trump thinks gravity makes water flow "down" from the Pacific Northwest to California, because there is absolutely no system that connects the water in Oregon and Washington to Southern California.

To balance out the extremism of the GOP, the media and Republicans need an equally extremist figure on the left. As they rarely get that from Dems, they’ll often content themselves with people vaguely “leftist,” even if they aren’t part of the formal Dem Party, much less wield any influence over it

Trump: "Whatever Todd Blanche asked Ghislaine Maxwell would be totally appropriate, and it's not an uncommon thing to do that. I think he probably wants to make sure that people that should not be involved or aren't involved are not hurt by something that would be ver, very unfortunate, very unfair"

Is it efficient to fire hundreds of people in critical positions and then frantically try to hire them back once you figured out how important their work is? www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/w...

"Plastic production is on course to triple by 2060, less than 10% of it is recycled, and around 8,000 megatons now pollute the planet" - report from The Lancet just before the next UN plastics treaty talks begin in Geneva www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

But also if you are exporting your survey data as #s rather than as text, you are probably making important errors that you'll never detect

The most corrupt White House in history. Here is an account of what people are paying, directly to a PAC called MAGA Inc, in order to meet the president, get pardons, change policy www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...