Just published in the Du Bois Review: From white supremacy to a multracial mainstream: How the color line can change, by me, John Torpey, and Juan Dolores Cerna. We challenge the common social-science view that only whites can assimilate.

Marco Rubio, who publicly justifies the sending of young Latino men with tattoos into a prison that is one of the planet's hellholes, comes from an immigrant family that benefited from leniency about illegal entry. His beloved grandfather entered the U.S. without a visa but avoided deportation.

German word of the season: Gleichschaltung, used specifically to refer to the processes by which Hitler and his supporters forced all societal institutions to follow his lead during the early years of the Third Reich. Now relevant again for the Trump regime.

Naked redistribution upwards: The House Republican budget is going to shred Medicaid, on which 70 million Americans depend, for the sake of giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. This is the nation we are becoming. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/u...

For those concerned about AI, I strongly recommend Melanie Mitchell's 2020 book. Michell is an AI researcher and a student of Douglas Hofstadter; her sober assessment of AI's abilities in major domains like visual recognition is that AI falls far short of what humans can do.

Dismayed by the sanctimony of the commentators condemning Biden for the pardon. They are refusing to acknowledge his humanity. Glimpsing the toxic desire for vengeance issuing from Trump, Biden, as a father, chose to save his son while he could. He did the right thing, in my view.

Richard Alba here. I am glad to find a burgeoning sociological community on Bluesky. I abandoned Twitter some time ago, when Elon Musk took over and it became clear that he would use it to advance ends I reject.