Notable because though a Philadelphia collar county, Bucks is purple and Trump won in 2024.

Went to class on the day it was discussed, fell asleep when it was debunked.

Somebody has been reading Sam Huntington and it shows.

Rip Hope this isn't an omen for the season. #phanatic

"According to the experts, these acts could amount to sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearance, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and femicide." www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

Academic friends, UMass PoliSci is recruiting teaching faculty in International Relations as well as other fields of political science. Please share widely!

Philadelphia, America's Greatest City.

(5/11) Walmart, Whole Foods, and Kohls are switching to electronic shelf labels that can display dynamic prices. Kroger deployed them with Microsoft AI—a setup a 2024 Senate inquiry warned could enable “surge pricing” via facial recognition. (Kroger claims it will only lower prices.)

If you’re not seeing this warning, it doesn’t mean you’re not being targeted by algorithmic pricing. It just means you’ve elected reps who can’t be bothered to require that you get the warning.

New: Military officers could soon find dozens of top colleges and universities across the US (list in replies) abruptly off limits for tuition assistance as part of Hegseth’s campaign against schools he describes as being biased against the US military www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/p...

🚀🇫🇷 Elle est partie ! ➡️ L'astronaute française Sophie Adenot a décollé ce vendredi en direction de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS). Elle est la deuxième Française de l'Histoire à effectuer un vol dans l'espace #Espace #France #ISS #SophieAdenot #Adenot #Astronaute

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.” ― Octavia Butler

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has shared a big data update, covering all recorded US protests through Jan 2026. Some key takeaways 🧵:

Taken together, an overall look at protest patterns in 2026 reinforces the sense of a growing, durable, and disciplined pro-democracy movement increasingly mobilized at the grassroots.

The movement is extraordinarily disciplined, despite escalatory rhetoric, threats, & violence against the movement, immigrants, and observers. Over 99% of reported protests featured no arrests, 99.8% had no participant injuries or property damage, and 99.9% reported no injuries to law enforcement.

Participation is likewise robust. For counts for just 41% of our events, we tallied well over 10.3M participants across explicitly anti-Trump protests, < 111k across pro-Trump protests, and over 387k across other protests.

Overall, we have tallied 4x more protests through Jan 31, 2026 than we had through Jan 31, 2018

Protest volume is escalating. Jan 2026 recorded the highest monthly total of protests during Trump’s second term so far (nearly 5900)—and the 3rd highest total of protests per month since 2017, behind only June 2020 (BLM) & March 2018 (Enough Walkouts + March for Our Lives).

The two No Kings protests (6/14 & 10/18) were among the largest single day protests in history, but we are tallying protests all over the country every day in locally coordinated protests, too, particularly in opposition to ICE - an increasingly large share of the total #.

The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.

In this episode, humanitarians and experts in mental health or wellbeing talk about what’s driving high rates of burnout, how people can identify it and take action, and what organisations must do better to help their staff. ⬇️ buff.ly/5BwIR3U

If you're in New Haven and interested in U.S. policy in the Middle East, you should attend today's discussion of @abuaardvark.bsky.social's new book, "America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region." At Yale, with Rob Malley. @imes-gw.bsky.social macmillan.yale.edu/middleeast/e...

Some good news abcnews.com/Business/wir...

Now Open! APSA Spring 2026 Centennial Center Research Grant Program | Deadline: March 15, 2026

This is Millie. She has accurately predicted the winner of the Super Bowl three years running. Also knew Bad Bunny was going to bring out Lady Gaga, but no one bothered to ask her about that. 14/10 (TT: jo_jo177)

Their top story ice melt > snowflakes

"The Epstein class" is a global rot In Europe, ties to Jeffrey Epstein are ending careers, sparking spy probes, and possibly toppling governments In America, not so much. How the lack of elite accountability became the tipping point for democracy. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/jeff...

"In July 2016, 32-year-old Philando Castile, a Black man, was shot and killed... by a police officer... Castile was pulled over and told the officer that he had a gun – for which he had a permit – in the car. Seconds after the disclosure, the officer shot Castile five times, killing him."

We found that Jeff Bezos paid *zero* taxes in 2007 and 2011. In fact, he reported making so little in 2011 that he even claimed and received a $4,000 tax credit for his children. This is how he did it (published 2021):

Great interview with my friend Dr Carrie Walling about conflict and accountability for #humanRights violations in #Minnesota. #law #MNStrong

Haïti : les violences sexuelles systématiques "sèment la terreur" à Port-au-Prince, dénonce MSF

Philly style snow plow. Volume up! youtube.com/shorts/A0eCt...

Gladys West, Unsung Figure in Development of GPS, Dies at 95 As a Navy mathematician in the 1950s and beyond, she played an unheralded but foundational role in making possible the global satellite-based mapping system. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/s...

American Roots asked if a few faith leaders could come each day to help provide comfort. "I'm like, 'Oh no, you don't understand," Field said. "We have a God squad we can call, you know, like, I'll just put the bat thing up in the sky.' And lo and behold, like 20 clergy were there that afternoon."

The Sudanese civil war is bringing the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into stark relief, writes Alex de Waal. “Sudan has become a prototype of a new kind of international war.”

L’interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux moins de 15 ans approuvée par les députés

“He was lawfully carrying a firearm, and that is not any license to kill someone... We have a Constitution that provides a Second Amendment individual right, and it is unlawful to kill a man for exercising his constitutional rights.”

Philly during a snowstorm > anywhere else 🙃 (But please, don't try this as home!) 🔗 www.inquirer.com/weather/live...

🎯

L'ONU alerte face au "risque de violences massives contre les civils" au Soudan du Sud

it's equal parts great and bizarre to see someone in office who seems genuinely proud to be a public servant

They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, ... they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples. -Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955)

It was never about tyranny.

@mariajstephan.bsky.social on why nonviolent resistance works against authoritarian impulses. youtu.be/N7MgLMzsnmE?...

Major donor nations dealt a devastating blow by cutting support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Only $11.85 billion has so far been pledged for 2026-2028 of an urgently needed $18 billion.

"People tend to be in solidarity not with an abstract idea of humanity but with the people who are close to them." Interesting thought piece. I often wonder if the universalist principles of humanitarianism are a constraint to garnering public support. For decades it was the opposite.

Already some excellent submissions in for #PEADS2026 from May 22-23 at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. Don't have yours in yet? Don't worry there's still time - deadline January 30th! Please "re-sky" to spread the word!

So I guess we now have the G-77 + 1