“No self-respecting university could ever accept something like this,” said Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar and former Columbia University president. “Trying to protect conservative ideas against being ‘belittled’ — that’s about as violative of the First Amendment interests as you can get.”

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

This op-ed is excellent and I encourage everyone to read it. Universities must reject the Trump compact. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Are you a scientist, journalist, or civil society researcher studying New York State's distraction-free school policy, the one that bans internet-enabled devices in schools from bell to bell? If so, I want to hear from you, as I refine a project to archive & classify published school policies.

I always pay attention to what stories People Magazine and other consumer media outlets cover. That's how you can tell that something has broken through the usual political and news bubbles. This horrific Chicago story has broken through. people.com/ice-agents-o...

Polling small groups of people like Jewish Americans is always a difficult task - great to see methodologically careful work devoted to it

Spot the North-American anomaly: only region where social media use is still growing. Great work by the FT’s @jburnmurdoch.ft.com www.ft.com/content/a072... “Have we passed peak social media?”

Federal officer blasts chemical spray into vocal but nonviolent Portland protester, video shows The interaction illustrates how federal law enforcement officers do use aggressive tactics against protesters who yell and needle officers but don’t appear to present clear physical threats.

This is what authoritarians do - use the powers of the state to humiliate and degrade their opponents in public so that others will not challenge them

*A Republican lawmaker objected to reference to Charlie Kirk holding “often racist and controversial views” in local Alaska news *The corporate owner took down the story and edited it *The journalists resigned This feels like more and more of our media now. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/u...

Following Apple’s removal of ICEBlock, both Google and Apple have removed a similar app for reporting ICE raids called Red Dot. Google states it removed the app for targeting a vulnerable group that is at risk of violence — ICE agents.

ICE is running around Chicago harassing people for not being white. Just a year ago, that was illegal in the United States and now it’s commonplace. That’s not making America great again.

Was kind of surprised by how good Mediaite’s was

I didn't realize that JAX is taking over in the probabilistic programming space. Very fair (afaict) post from Bob Carpenter, one of the core Stan developers, on how that looks from the Stan side.

This is the obvious absurdity of pulling ICEBlock. It is obviously legal, protected speech for anyone to say, in any forum, “I just witnessed some police activity at location X”. Indeed, people have been doing this regularly on social media since its inception.

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

No footage of the zip tied 67-year-old citizens or wailing kids being taken from their parents but maybe those are in the clips they reserve for private viewing.

The US Administration is now illegally impounding federal funding for our universities unless they turn away international students *regardless of their talent and qualifications*. Arbitrary 15% quota on int'l students, with no more than 5% from a single country (anti-China, anti-India).

We got so many submissions to CODE@MIT this year (up about 35% yoy). It's really tough having to be so selective (30% acceptance for parallel talks). But this is going to be very interesting program, with quite a bit on all of these topics.

What DHS pulled in Chicago on Tuesday is wildly unconstitutional. They smashed down almost every door in the building, dragged entire families into the street, and detained people for hours ("Kavanaugh stops"). Ms. Fisher was held for five hours and another senior citizen was held for three hours.

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion. Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

WOW. Remember this May video of a US citizen wrestled to the ground by ICE agents and detained for an hour despite having a valid REAL ID? It gets worse. Two weeks later, ICE did it AGAIN — handcuffed him and detained him for 20 minutes despite his REAL ID. Now the Institute for Justice is suing.

WhatsApp deactivation experimental results in Brazil, India, and South Africa mirror those from prior social media studies: big changes in content exposure -> minimal changes in attitudes, decreases in political knowledge, increases in subjective wellbeing www.venturatiago.com/talk/vmtn_wh...

Happy Birthday Google For many of your 27 years you were called a lazy vice. Finally you have attained the status of a thoughtful virtue of the good old days. 🥂 🥳

I am almost 99.9% sure that Mr. José Escobar Molina is the same José featured in this episode of The Daily: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/p...? The story begins at 23:55, and, as @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social notes, the circumstances are way worse than in the complaint. (Facts line up almost to a tee.)

The American public need to answer a fundamental question: Do you want to live in a society where masked paramilitary secret police grab people off the street?

It took me 2 minutes to write about how this proposed rule would eliminate all foreign PhD students, who are a critical part of US science and technology, and drive US innovation and economic growth

NSF today released instructions for the next round of applicants to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program. A key group—second-year Ph.D. students—is no longer eligible, and students who are still able to apply will face an unusually narrow timeframe. https://scim.ag/3KlQkQk

In a personalist regime, your business (tariffs) or your life (Comey, ICE) can be upended at a moment's notice at the whim of the authoritarian leader

“CIA footage of god” is truly one of the great little phrases of all time. Distills centuries of paranoid lunacy into just a few words. Amazing. I’ll never forget it.

The New York Times Learning Network is going to be publishing four lessons over the next four weeks on Tuesdays, based on my Math, Revealed series from a few months ago. Here's the first installment: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/l...

Agree very much - Rocío Titiunik and I reached the same conclusion in our Policy Forum article in Science last year www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Alphabet's letter to the House Judiciary Committee is making me physically cringe. Apparently we are now the country where you ritualistically say false things to lawmakers because it is what they want to hear. judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Typically when presidents are oblivious to things the press would go on with a news cycle about how the president is “aloof” and out of touch. It’s just one of many things Trump can exhibit without consequence.

The federal government has censored the work of dozens of scientists, including work by my lab, on the impacts of climate change on Acadia National Park. Signs have been removed from Cadillac and Great Meadow. They’re also removing signs about the Wabanaki’s sacred connections to Cadillac.

ayo @wired.com

"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that." Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.

6/7 Our results are especially interesting in the context of collective attention: Whereas books, news stories, movies, etc. get popular, then lose popularity at a higher and higher pace (see www.nature.com/articles/s41...), the most-popular hit songs now stay popular for longer.

This appears to be the 3rd lethal US strike in the Caribbean. Once again, the specific "terrorist" entity targeted is not identified. No legal justification is offered for this premeditated killing. President Trump is asserting a license to kill outside of the law. 1/n

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018). People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

I had this exact same experience this morning. Same reporter as Heidi. This is *not* normal. I have spoken to the press on these issues for two decades. No government official has ever demanded to know my identity in order to give a comment on a story.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

617 of the world’s top scientists, cryptographers and security researchers have released an open letter today (10 September) calling on governments to reject the upcoming final vote on the EU’s ‘Chat Control’ legislation. www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/c...

The union representing the musicians from Jimmy Kimmel’s band releases a statement calling the FCC’s pressure on Disney “state censorship.”

This story isn't unprecedented. Here is something I wrote five years ago about the strikingly similar creation of RCA from what used to be the American branch of the Marconi company.

I could have sworn I created this before on our Previous Parish, but couldn't find it so made it fresh. I present: OUR BLESSED mixed models // THEIR BARBAROUS fixed effects

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

I know people are overwhelmed by too much news from every angle, and maybe people are distracted by the "terrorist" language, or just plain exhausted. But this is the President of the United States saying he is going to go around killing people because he thinks they're criminals. And already did.

i did not foresee the future in which Markdown was the machine interop format for all human readable documents blog.xeynergy.com/what-is-micr...