Never Ending Story theme song on the organ. Well done, organist!

I hope that Sonoda-San is wearing his shobu pantsu! Yamamoto wasn’t supposed to pitch! 😅 www.latimes.com/sports/dodge...

Helen Norton is so smart, and if you ever get a chance to have a meal with her, you should do it.

@austincollege.bsky.social I saw retired sociology professor Janet Lowry in this NYT article. AC isn’t mentioned, so I figured you might have missed it! www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/b...

University of Arizona also rejects the Trump administration's "Compact" 💪 president.arizona.edu/news/update-...

Moreover, I have recently been awarded an ERC starting grant towards the project GETGOV to work further on this, so expect more data on cabinet members in the future. I am currently hiring two PhDs and two postdocs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

This whole thread describes an ambitious and interesting data source, but this post caught my eye. We’ve known that our deregulated campaign finance system correlates to having fewer working class MCs, but seeing it up against a country with a different system is pretty stark.

Good morning! Our database is now LIVE. Please flag us any social media posts, news reports, or official reports of crowd counts. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

😆

Ellis also says she's modifying the restraining order: "All agents who are operating in operation midway blitz are to wear body worn cameras and they are to be on."

What regard do you owe another who has no regard for you?

oh goodie more locker room talk

In other words, nice university you've got there, it would be a real shame if anything happened to it. But the federal government cannot fight all universities at once. It's trying for snowballing agreement. But it risks snowballing defiance. That is why MIT's move today was so inspiring—

Among many other things, what Dr. Kornbluth has done with her strong statement is make it a bit more difficult for _other_ schools to say "yes" to this. Do you not care about academic freedom the way MIT does? Do you—unlike MIT—want a leg up in research funds instead of competing on the merits?

MIT President Kornbluth announced on Friday the university “cannot support” Trump’s compact, saying the university disagreed with a number of the principles laid out in the document, including policies that would limit freedom of expression and institutional independence.

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner: Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries Harmonized roles/policy areas Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940 Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p ⬇️

Possible link to use of state force and money in politics here. These data are likely gettable — foreclosure notices and ICE raid locations from a combo of public records requests, court records, news stories. Money in politics data from OpenSecrets. Have at it, grad students/postdocs.

These postdoctoral positions are made possible by an incredible $55 million gift from Francis & Kathleen Rooney to support Notre Dame’s new institute focused on democracy research and education 🔗 al.nd.edu/news/latest-...

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

For public policy scholars: JPIPE published our article that uses machine learning to code the universe of congressional and state legislative data since 2009 by the Comparative Agenda Project policy codes. That's 1.68 million bills. OPEN-ACCESS here: www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

Right. The fractured regulatory space and the fact that they’d need dozens of agency adjudications per university — with all the appeals! — to accomplish this stuff is why they offered the compact. They need universities to help them centralize process under DOJ. (I think, anyway.)

For anyone else who has been trying to find the actual language of the so-called “compact,” here it is. www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/u...

that is always a silver lining, i cant wait to hear more! (& for folks reading the replies that need help or have colleagues that need help > expertvoicestogether.org for person-to-person crisis support and researchersupport.org for resources geared towards institutions)

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Me, tomorrow:

When this broke, I was coming back from a conference where I presented a paper on the public harms from gov’t ethics violations. Bribery is pretty harmful, it seems! I haven’t studied the public harms from dropped ethics investigations yet. 🫠

Nothing is more central to a free society than the right to criticize one’s government. Nothing.

Join us for the next installment in our Election Matters panel series on "Money, Politics, and the First Amendment." This event will explore the impacts of increasingly expensive elections and the tension between campaign finance regulation and free speech. Register here: go.wisc.edu/190re6

Do your mental health a favor and turn this on for today. You really don't want to watch this. It is awful.

A dear friend’s awesome kid is one of these finalists. So I just spent a delightful morning listening to what kids in America are thinking and talking about. I am so proud of all of them and glad I got to listen in on their lives.

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

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has finalized our participation estimates for No Kings Day on 6/14. Here are five key takeaways🧵:

For all of the educators trying to deal with AI, I did a deep dive in early June and these are the four articles I decided to assign to my students. 1. This is the longest of the bunch, but so wonderfully comprehensive. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Outstanding work, @calmatters.org! California police misconduct records now available in public database

Hey LA, COVID is having a heyday around here. It took out a big chunk of my kids’ camp last week. Our local pharmacy just ran out of Paxlovid, too. Returning students, please consider taking precautions so you don’t miss the first week+ of school. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Guys is it biased to favor a shared sense of objective reality

37, though I counted Louisville and have basically only driven through it (twice).

Using our Supreme Connections database, you can search for the organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more. We just updated it with newly released 2024 financial filings ⤵️

Not only is this absolutely true, but the skills and connections and influence you build through engagement in local power can also be used to affect US House, Senate, and even presidential nominations. Or to affect how a non-party groups act at a national level.

Sharing something I just told 140 people in a zoom room when asked for something positive: Your local government is where you have power. Spend your scrolling time engaging locally instead. Local gov affects your quality of life SO much. Put the screen down, make IRL friends, improve your life.+

Ozzy Osbourne visited my magic shop. He said he'd like to buy some stink bombs. How many? All of them. I had to go through drawers finding every last one. He bought 900 of them. To sign the credit card slip I handed him a shock pen, which he thought was hilarious and bought that too. RIP

NEW: We just filed a major brief in our first-of-its-kind suit over a dark money group that secretly boosted Sen. Joni Ernst’s 2020 campaign. A win could reshape campaign finance law enforcement and increase transparency for voters.

The best part of our jobs is the mentorship. 🤩🤩🤩

Let people enjoy things as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, geez. You are not cool for slagging on a band that has done decades of good in the world, helped push the concert industry toward greener policies, visits places neglected by most global stars, and raises the profile of smaller artists.+

My university has announced a fund to essentially poach doctoral students from US institutions. DM me if you do work on the history/social impacts of AI and are interested in being poached 😂

Have you heard the good news? A forthcoming conference will launch the The Association of Law and Political Economy: a membership organization with a regular annual conference, elected leadership, and an architecture for open participation and collaboration.

The way it really is “the economy, stupid” doesn’t penetrate my institutionalist brain. Most of the things I study are so far upstream of the overall macro economy. I just texted my someone about the potential Powell firing and they replied by telling me their investments were at an all time high.+