Presidents can go to jail for crimes? www.cnbc.com/2025/09/25/f...

"Per the ACEA, Tesla EV registrations in Europe fell to just 8,837 units in July, a 40.2% drop compared to a year ago. ... Meanwhile, China's BYD (BYDDY), which sells both full EVs and hybrids, saw registrations surge 225% in July to 13,503"

🎓Did you know? In 2024, combined Political Science and International Studies students achieved an impressive 90% law school acceptance rate—well above the national average of 69.4%! 📈

Helpful reminder that the "average consumer", if it was anything other than a mathematical notion, is an idea from a by-gone era in the US economy now that about half the spending is done by the top 10% of earners

Honored to see the review of my book by Eduardo Duran published in @actasociologica.bsky.social Truly appreciate the attention! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

NEW from me @newrepublic.com: If progressives don’t seize this moment to define a democratic, public-minded state capitalism, they will find themselves living in one designed by the Trump administration. newrepublic.com/article/2000...

My book on phenomenology and interpretive social science is now available in (a much more reasonably priced) paperback edition! www.routledge.com/Alfred-Schut...

Extremely honored to have a chapter included in this forthcoming Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation, featuring some of the top scholars working on questions of global transformation anywhere and edited by an outstanding group of researchers www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

Factory robots once replaced assembly lines; now AI targets high-level tasks. Will history repeat itself, or can we steer innovation in emancipatory ways? My latest essay explores the legacy and past promises of automation in the era of Big Tech open.substack.com/pub/indicati...

America has lost 116k manufacturing jobs over the last year—that's the fastest pace of job loss since the early COVID era and worse than any period from 2011-2019. Big drops in the transportation (-49k) & electronics (-32k) industries drive most of the decline

Did the EU blink first, or was it a strategic play? My new article dissects the US-EU trade deal that left many Europeans frustrated. We also draw surprising lessons from the 15th-century Hanseatic League, which once faced foreign tolls and crumbled under disunity. open.substack.com/pub/indicati...

New survey evidence on university faculty views and teaching practices: "The one-dimensional portrayal of US universities as bastions of the political left filled with 'woke' faculty who impose their views on students is at odds w/the findings of this study" scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outp...

Did the EU blink first, or was it a strategic play? My new article dissects the US-EU trade deal that left many Europeans frustrated. We also draw surprising lessons from the 15th-century Hanseatic League, which once faced foreign tolls and crumbled under disunity. open.substack.com/pub/indicati...

My entry in @asaskat.bsky.social's blog discusses the role of hobbyists and computer groups in co-creating modern computing platforms and the lessons they offer for the AI era, building on Alfred Schutz's classic essay on the well-informed citizen

My latest post discusses the recent turmoil faced by the dollar and the potentials for global shifts in world currencies, particularly the challenges faced by the euro indications.substack.com/p/uncertain-...

My latest post discusses the recent turmoil faced by the dollar and the potentials for global shifts in world currencies, particularly the challenges faced by the euro indications.substack.com/p/uncertain-...

Great read on the historically unprecedented (and exceptionally dangerous) nature of oligarchy in today's U.S.

📣 Thanks to generous support from Fulbright Austria, I am thrilled that I will be spending the Spring 2026 semester as a Visiting Professor of Social Science at the University of Vienna 🇦🇹✨. I look forward to this incredible opportunity to connect with colleagues and fellow scholars across Europe 🌍🤝📚

Different rules of the game would have radically changed history. Our counterfactual simulations show that without colonial transfers, Europe would have been a debtor — and South Asia or Latin America could have become global creditors. [5/8]

Someday we'll have to reckon with the fact that not only are billionaires bad for society, having that much money seems to be genuinely bad for their own mental health. This is a problem we need to address--if not for our sakes, then for theirs.

I had a really enjoyable time at the Schutz Circle 2025 conference held at the University of Vienna last week. With 100+ participants from over 25 countries, it was wonderful to see the many ways the work of Alfred Schutz is explored and developed in a truly global fashion #phenomenology #sociology

Making iPhones in America? What about mattresses? Keychains? Yeah... it's impossible for most small businesses to manufacture in the US. And amid the trade war with China, business owners are struggling to plan for the future of their companies.

Some billionaires still hope that the tariffs can be resolved via "bilateral negotiations." Trump put tariffs on 185 countries. Negotiating bilaterally with each for just two weeks (super optimistic) would take over seven years time! This scenario is exactly what GATT/WTO were designed to avoid

It's annoying when pundits talk about a trade war and compare the current situation to the 1930s. Back then, every major economy was raising tariffs against the other. Right now other countries are still trading. This is more like US trade self-immolation

Oligarchy is the theory that the business elite know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

A blockbuster study from Irene Papanicolas and colleagues linking wealth to mortality. - At every US wealth level., mortality rates were higher than Europe's - The wealthiest Americans have a survival rate similar to the poorest northern/western Europeans www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

A record $233 billion was invested last year in US manufacturing thanks in part to Biden era industrial policy. The Trump tariffs are not hastening that investment but making it more costly to build US factories

I feel very honored that the great John R. Hall reviewed my book for Social Forces #sociology #phenomenology

One cannot but be impressed by Republicans who, after decades of successfully convincing working class folks to support them as they implement policies that go against workers' basic interests, have managed to do the same to capitalists

The question remains: why isn't big business pushing back on Trump's actions? One answer might be that the political economy mechanisms that ruled the post-war era are simply broken as plutocrats now drive the political agenda. 6/

I feel very honored that the great John R. Hall reviewed my book for Social Forces #sociology #phenomenology

Insightful and prescient interview on our current predicament with the late G.M. Tamas, with whom I had the privilege of taking a seminar with many ions ago when Tamas was a visiting prof at Georgetown

What was the drastic change that happened starting about 1933?

We are thrilled to announce Dr. Yingyao Wang, from the University of Virginia, as our guest speaker for our newest "Conversations in International Studies" installment!📚 Join us on Thursday, April 10th, at 12:30PM in Major Williams Hall, Room 502. We hope to see you there!🧡

Proud to be featured in this recollection of the 1990s in #Kosovo, Yugoslavia’s economic collapse and political dissolution, and my own immigrant diaspora experience. What a time to recall a prior era of repression, but also so many lessons in solidarity and resistance to be learned

Excellent statement from a number of Con Law scholars--including some notably conservative ones--on the government's funding cutoff at Columbia/ www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Yep. ICE detention makes enormous sums for the private prison industry. There's a reason that Trump's victory sent their stocks shooting higher.

The big bearish USA / bullish European trade in one stunning chart. The March Bank of America Fund Manager Survey shows the largest monthly drop ever in US equity allocation - whilst investors are ploughing into European equities. As we say in Dutch: one man's death is another man's bread

Not surprisingly, Trump’s overall tax and tariff proposals would make the very rich much richer and working families poorer. If you earn less than $360,000 a year, your taxes are going to go way up. If you’re in the top 1%? Don’t worry. You’ll save big.

From Apollo's Torsten Slok. All of a sudden everyone's worried about getting laid off.

One would think that firing half the DoEd and shuttering OCR while launching massive investigations into 50+ universities makes no sense until you realize that the "investigations" are merely the first salvo in threatening and intimidating institutions into submission

Top notch. "discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. ... Large Models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents, but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated."

FT's Gililian Tett here asks an important question that's been on my mind: when will we see tariffs on goods escalate into capital controls on US$ assets? A precedent exists in the failed 2019 Baldwin-Hawley bill which proposed to charge a fee on all incoming foreign capital to the US

In 1969, Ivan Light wrote a critique of Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality, and suggested that instead of their sociology of (certain) knowledge, we need a sociology of uncertainty. His proposal is well suited to our current era of crisis of expert knowledge and media fragmentation

I was going to make a joke about the quality of the Cyber Truck build by comparing it to the East German Trabant, but then thought how the folks building the Trabant did so under conditions of extreme shortage, built a cheap working machine, and made no extravagant claims about their product

The federal government is attempting to dictate to a private university which departments it may have. If this flagrant first amendment violation doesn’t lead Columbia to grow a backbone and sue, I don’t know what will.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms any university that would sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government. This is absolute cowardice & capitulation to an administration hellbent on the destruction of American higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/n...

Ummmm.......

It's nice of them to spell out their attacks on higher education so clearly: they simply want to prevent women from going to college