"...the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior." latest for @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

everyone [wishes they were] twelve

none of these words are in the Bible

🚨NEW PAPER Going Local? Localized Rhetoric in Congressional Communications Is congressional comms really nationalized? Analyzing 9M+ social media posts from Members of Congress, I show that local messaging is still common & strategic. New ML + domain sharing data www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

that viral Reddit post about the evil unnamed delivery app’s worker exploitation schemes was made up (likely model-generated), and the evidence the “whistleblower” provided to the reporter trying to confirm it was also made up (almost definitely model-generated) www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/11

Thinking about how the Taliban hates running Afghanistan because they have to actually show up to work every day instead of shooting guns with their friends.

🧵Day 3 and we have a new meaning for "running Venezuela," courtesy of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat, who is in charge of Venezuela as well as the National Archives. We're going to insist they do what's in the US national interest. Time for some principal-agent theory. 1/

“Trump is anti-war” was always shorthand for “Trump is a break from the foreign policy establishment/consensus, which is bad” and there’s no contradiction there if Trump does acts of war that seem different from what a more establishment-y president would do

there is of course a lot of competition but if things go really south during Trump II the fact that he keeps bragging about nailing these basic cognitive function tests is going to be one of those small details that everyone knows about him 500 years from now

Fascinating paper by Hood, McKee & Pittman demonstrating that election deniers were less likely to vote in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. If fewer GA Republicans believed the big lie, both GA Senate seats might still be in Republican control. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

we’ve spent ten years researching the direction of the causal arrow between misinformation and political attitudes and he just…tweeted it out

This was a pretty good one

I think ~everyone understands that Marjorie Taylor Greene's movement along the "Donald Trump: Good or Bad?" dimension of politics doesn't necessarily imply movement along other dimensions of politics, and also understands that different people put different amounts of weight on that dimension.

I feel like "attention hacking" is most of politics now. The Minnesota aid fraud story is becoming a perfect example. Recap: In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who'd fleeced a state food aid program. (1/x)

HEY VIRGINIA NICE POOCH PUNT

that may be the best pooch punt we will see in our lifetimes

the President owning an online betting market where you can bet on what the President will do seems both deeply unethical, and stupid for bettors Casino: "Hey you can bet on when the buffet is out of prime rib! 10pm" Chef: <checks bets> joe, pull the prime rib at 9pm "dang, lost again"

The Wisconsin component of the analysis here is revealing. Evidence is consistent with DOGE strategically delaying contract terminations in WI until after the 2025 state Supreme Court elections to mitigate electoral risk.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

I haven’t seen Alabama come out flat like this since THE LAST GAME THEY PLAYED WHICH FOR SOME REASON THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF COMMITTEE PRETENDED DID NOT HAPPEN

A writer publishing under the byline “Earnest Graham” fabricated a restaurant to ask food influencers about how much they charge for posts they purport to be honest reviews. Twenty-four influencers took the bait. thehunger.substack.com/p/eat-pay-love

we are watching a Christmas movie with the *audacity* to have a full 90 minute runtime. everyone knows this is an 80 minute genre.

this paper has a very thorough discussion of (and contributes to) the mixed empirical evidence concerning the causal effect of child gender on political attitudes/identities www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

With thanks to amengel.bsky.social, the decline is far more modest when I take proper account for the administrative codes in the feeling thermometers

not exactly a criticism but it's interesting, to me, that instead of the party issuing a 2024 autopsy a la the 2012 RNC one the Democrats have gotten a collection of 2024 autopsies from a couple of different, um, groups.

in addition to the antisemitic TD celebration, “NFL refs make bad calls on purpose to impress their group chats” is up there for dumbest conspiracy theories I have ever heard

Musgrave: "We are about to speedrun the rediscovery of why states stopped acting like this" musgrave.substack.com/p/literal-co...

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

A holiday classic defector.com/the-2025-hat...

I know it doesn't feel like it from our POV but academia/science is not where Qualtrics makes its money.

For your collective delectation this holiday season: Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever written (and definitely the most ridiculous graph I've ever made!) loreandordure.com/2025/12/16/j...

“How do you make long distance work?” is a wild question to ask someone when the answer is “abusing government resources.” It was a kind of big story a couple of weeks ago!

any movie that you watch *because it is Christmas* is a Christmas movie

“Regardless of her chances, [Republicans are] probably correct in that she’ll be useful for their own fundraising as well. That’s the attention economy when it comes to politics: it rewards the fight, not the outcome.” newsletter.tysonbrody.com/p/jasmine-cr...

Okay this is going to be long so mute it if you don't want a granular explanation but first: SHAME on @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social for misrepresenting what Chair Powell said in order to pat himself on the back. Shame on you. Let's talk about measuring the 171mm people of the US labor force.

one of the easiest things to look up when ~doing your own research~ into our health system is that we have literally never in the course of human history been better at keeping infants alive and healthy

hey if you study Congress and you could use estimates of status quo AND proposal location for over a thousand bills including many which never made it to the floor, we've got 'em! www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com: 1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science. 2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

in current discourse parlance, Perriello was (and I expect still is) an *extremely* Above Replacement candidate

Death By Lightning is great for a lot of reasons but one of them is that they basically told Bradley Whitford that even though he was officially cast as a senator he could just do Josh Lyman for a bit again.

Tarantino's issue with Paul Dano's performance in There Will Be Blood seems to be that Dano...nailed the character he was supposed to be portraying?

"it's a republic, not a democracy" right up until people expect you to actually care about how the scheme of representation will actually work. then it's "anything that doesn't cost you a presidential election goes"

New research from the #NetSI team + colleagues shows: groups with historically lower trust—women, Black people, rural and lower-income residents—trust scientists more when they share their identity. Greater representation across communities can boost trust in science. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

when final grades are posted >>>

The real task isn’t “teaching people to spot misinformation.” It’s rebuilding conditions where verification, deliberation and accountability are possible. Critical thinking only works when the world around it gives those skills a place to take root.