Here's the full Summers email, btw.

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time: It rules

Wired has just published an in-depth piece on Alpha Schools ... giving us a deep-dive on the realities of AI-driven schools sold on the promise of students plugged into personalised learning systems and doing ('crushing') a full day's schoolwork in only 2 hours: www.wired.com/story/ai-tea...

New from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social: we argue that the practice of maintaining AI models in healthcare exists in a "responsibility vacuum," resulting in the emergence of creative forms of invisible labor to monitor and repair technical systems bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

New piece from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social on ambient documentation systems ("AI scribes") and the potential risks this technology may pose for medical education and the socialization of trainees www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...

New: The Education Department's cuts have left the niche, government-backed "industry" of education research in a dire state. www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

#ASA2025 regular sessions on Knowledge were fantastic! Wonderful mix of undergraduate (!) and graduate students, junior and senior faculty. Kudos to @runzach.bsky.social @peterore.bsky.social serving as discussants and putting the papers in conversation. No more regular sessions at ASA next year!

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

Glad my graduate alma mater cut 60 degree programs in subjects that require people to think so that they could offer this. Looking forward to living in a world full of Prompt Engineers.

thinking about how the times called Mahmoud Mamdani and asked him whether any of his ancestors had intermarried while in Africa like ok the creepy race science here goes beyond the sourcing

Mahmood was in pan-African nationalist movements in the 70s until Idi Amin expelled Indo-Ugandans? Zohran’s dad gave him the middle name Kwame to honour the first President of Ghana? idk maybe three white American journalists aren’t the best ones to opine on whether or not he’s African.

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

You know, when I heard that all of our personal data had been hacked, I didn't expect the first major use of it to be the NYT trying to fuck over Zohran but maybe I'm naive www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/n...

So am I reading this court decision correctly? We now have 50 micronations with their own laws interpreting the U.S. Constitution wholly separate from one another? But there's one guy with private law enforcement who is immune from all punishment who can do whatever he wants in those 50 states?

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious. "The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]." Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

Voted for Zohran

🚨 NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya is testifying before the US Senate Appropriations Committee today. The hearing is bound to be spicy, after more than 300 agency staff wrote him a letter decrying his leadership and actions as director. 🔥 I'll be live-posting the hearing, so follow along here.

Erin McDonnell's (@profmcdonnell.bsky.social) amazing new paper "Bureaucracy in Action: The Sociology of Public Administration" is online now at the Annual Review of Sociology. Check it out!!! @ndsociology.bsky.social @artslettersnd.bsky.social @asanews.bsky.social doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Indiana's governor fired all the elected members of Indiana University's Board of Trustees. Given a recent policy change, he'll be able to fill those seats with appointees. Which means he'll basically have unilateral control over IU decisions, including who gets hired, tenured, and fired.

I like to periodically check in on how things are going at Theory and Society. Great to see that they've finally eradicated activism from scholarship and are focused on the wonders of scientific discovery!

Fiction. Art. More fiction. A dash of poetry.

Just submitted a paper that I basically wrote in the last two weeks but my coauthor and I have no joke probably been brainstorming it for five years

You could write a dissertation about this clip

TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.

Reading through the White House's proposed budget and in addition to all the awful cuts to welfare spending, it's really striking how much of this is totally pointless reorganization of federal agencies that will make them unable to function www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

During the pandemic, the US implemented the most effective social welfare policies in our history -- programs that worked because they were big enough, simple, and universal. And then we withdrew them. This remains imo the central economic-policy story of our times. davisvanguard.org/2025/05/3hou...

Congratulations @katiehonan.bsky.social on writing the best piece of predictive science fiction of all time

I know this feels right (and flattering). But that man doesn’t hate smart people. He hates people who won’t do what he wants. Smart people comply all the time.

All NSF GRFPs to students choosing to attend Harvard in the Fall were just terminated

In this constrained policy space, one fiscally responsible progressive agenda to pursue would be giving workers control of the means of production by dramatically expanding labor power and restructuring corporate ownership and governance by statute, policies with an upfront cost to government of $0.

"So far this year, math and statistics grant funding is lagging behind previous years by 72 percent. Funding for physics grants this year has fallen by 85 percent, and funding for materials research grants has dropped by 63 percent." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I have a review out about a book, The Politics of Modelling, in which I reflect on how disorienting it is to read about the problems of governance being pandemics, climate change, and economic stability at this particular historical moment.

I’ll vote for any politician who promises to ban these text messages

“Together, the canceled literary grants amount to $1,227,500—just 0.0000002% of the US government’s 2025 budget… (By comparison, the gov’t of Iceland contributes around $3,700,000 per year to the Icelandic Literature Center alone, despite a federal budget less than one-fifth the size.)”

The NIH Director continues to misunderstand (or mischaracterize) the extent to which research is being gutted. I appreciate this program officer for speaking up.

In my research I’ve been thinking obsessively about how we define “quality” in health care and education, so I was excited to talk to Rachel about how quality metrics are being deployed in child care policy debates

This should be one of the most important stories in the country right now. Trump & Elon Musk via DOGE have intentionally decimated the country's weather forecasting service and people are getting hurt. It's absolutely disgraceful.

something to be said about how these people view americans as inputs to be used up by capital

Love all the technology making our lives better

US business interests have been conspicuously silent in the face of threats to democracy and the rule of law. In this piece, I discuss how business has politically fractured over time, pursuing narrow, particular policy wins over long term collective interests. www.promarket.org/2025/05/09/t...

New W&M tax bill that dropped includes a provision that would take away the child tax credit from US-citizen kids if either of their parents doesn't have an SSN. Estimated to take money away from ~4.5m children who are either citizens or lawful permanent residnets.

"The end result here is most likely exactly what they want: a science-challenged, bureaucratically hamstrung EPA, largely incapable of developing regulations but more than ready to attempt to roll existing regs back, 'unleashing' corporate America back to its glory days of smog, soot, and ruin."

“By 9 June, NSF plans to slash the number of IPAs to 70, according to Cheatham. That shrunken crew, he writes, will help manage research portfolios covering one of five areas: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science.”

So, if I’m reading this right: They gutted the office that runs the government’s award-winning, in-house HR and staffing software, and now they’ve inked a sole-source, no-bid contract so that a private company on proprietary software can do what the office of civil servants did on in-house software

This is honestly worse than I could have ever imagined

The U.S. Dept. of Education has canceled the competition for Fulbright-Hays doctoral, faculty, & group research projects abroad, saying it is reevaluating all such competitions to ensure they "align with the objectives established by the Trump Administration" www.federalregister.gov/public-inspe...