I love the difference in translation for this product. Says much about the difference between the two cultures.

All you ever wanted to know about bread production, prices, markets, and political economy in early modern Spain, now on Early View! "The Bread of Toledo", Joint with David González Agudo at @uv.es. Open access: doi.org/10.1111/ehr....

New working paper with Amol Singh Raswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps." A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

Here is Elon Mush bragging about how he "accidentally" canceled all Ebola prevention efforts.

Love this one www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zva...

I don't mean to brag, but my 10 year old is obviously an artistic genius...

“they called us bottlers… NOW WE’RE HOLDIN THE BOTTLE”

Glad to share this open-access article, based on the Tawney Lecture that I had the honour to deliver in 2025 Economic inequality and social mobility in preindustrial societies: What we know, what we don't (but should) know - The Economic History Review onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

22 years in the waiting, 6 years in the making: the title is Arsenal’s again. The squad gathered at Colney to watch tonight’s game, as they became champions. Here’s how #AFC won the #EPL - a title not simply won, but engineered. @theathleticfc.bsky.social 🔴⚪️🏆 www.nytimes.com/athletic/729...

Never in doubt ❤️ ❤️

Glad to share my online review of Patrick Boucheron's new book on the Black Death. @laviedesidees.bsky.social The lesson of the Pandemic booksandideas.net/The-lesson-o...

The University of Oxford is advertising a Professorship of Economic History, which will be held in the Department of Economics in association with Nuffield College. Closing date 25 May 2026, interviews 26 June. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru....

Georgia O'Keeffe, Light Coming on the Plains No. I www.cartermuseum.org/collection/l...

🔭 Comet R3 PanSTARRS Behind Satellite Trails Image Credit & Copyright: Uli Fehr ap260427

We need a new word in English for "That feeling you get watching Claude Code address referee comments in your paper that makes you think you're being productive but actually you've been sitting in front of the computer now for 15 minutes and haven't done anything".

The Republican turn to postmodernism is really a thing.

Ok guys. I’ve been investing a lot of time this semester learning about Claude code, agents, skills, etc…. I’m officially scared and feel old as fuck.

NGC 2903 and messier 37. Caught from my front yard.

Friday afternoon naps hit hard.

The dept of Economic History in Lund is hiring a new Senior Lecturer! Ad is here, deadline 17 May: lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

lunatic

Starting to think that if the founding fathers were any good at founding fathering, they would have given the power to declare war to Congress rather than one man in the White House.

Looking to use Claude Code as an applied economist? This excellent series by @paulgp.com covers how to set it up, data analysis and web scraping. Amazing work! Looking forward to the next episodes

Bilingual joke? French Wikipedia says the Poisson distribution is "not to be confused with Fisher's distribution" (the F-distribution) fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_de_...

looking for an economic historian of the Soviet Union and successor states at the University of Toronto!

We are hiring! Applications are now open for a Lecturer in Economics and Public Policy! We are looking for someone doing policy-relevant microeconomics. Come to beautiful Scotland and help us build the UK's quantitatively-focused MPP! Apply here: www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Just so you understand, this is as if you prepared for argument in front of a panel that included Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster asked you a question about cookies, and you had not thought about cookies in advance.

While social media shows you extreme content, AI is more likely to show people more moderate content This means the technology, on average, could have very different effects on polarization. www.ft.com/content/3880...

I’m pleased to report that, apparently, in the eyes of my 10 year old my most outstanding characteristics are being a Brazilian jiu jitsu blue belt and having a very hyper-extended right elbow. The two are likely related.

Is there a word for a scientific model that works absurdly well, nobody really knows why, everyone is a little embarrassed about that, and we use it all the time anyway? #LLMs #QuantumMechanics #LoggingTheDependantVariable

my favorite application of zipf… premodeconhist.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/d...

Zipf’s law drives anyone who thinks too much about it into gibbering madness

This is incorrect.

One thing I haven’t been able to get Claude to do is clip a figure or table from a paper to include in a beamer slide deck. Is this impossible or is it just me?

It’s almost like they’re incapable of thinking about the consequences of their actions before they act.

In the future when we look back, it will be clear that Musk and Trump were the two people most responsible for transition to EVs

Environmentalists that are anti-density and pro-parking are like public health advocates that are pro nuclear waste bathing.

Phew. Glad the disruption will last long enough for wise American voters to punish a future Democratic administration for it

not wrong…

This is wild: Over a third of genetics papers published in top journals in 2014-20 (including Nature, Cell, and PNAS) have errors whereby genes with names like SEPT8, DEC1, or MARCH3, were turned into dates by Excel automatically! The issue was first noted in 2004.

pull quote

Interested in opinions on this… I’m scheduled to teach phd gis/spatial techniques in the fall. I usually split it half coding and half discussing causal methods in papers. Should I tear it down, teach how to use Claude agents, and expand the scope of the class to cover research Methods in general?

Dog is asking some very pointed questions right now about why it was 80 degrees yesterday but snowing today.

Actually, this is not false.

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

🔭 The Cranium Nebula from the Webb Telescope Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI) ap260309

Spurs are SO bad they're making me feel bad for a Spurs player

Cool opportunity to work at the intersections of climate/environmental history and history of medicine! History and Medicine – Associate Professor or Professor with Tenure – McMaster University Apply by March 31st niche-canada.org/2026/03/05/h... #envhist #histmed #climhist #cdnhist