If you're UC faculty, I'd encourage you to sign this letter in support of the University of California reinstating the SAT in admissions. ucstudentsuccess.org

Thrilled to share that my book, No Option But Sabotage, was reviewed in @prospectmagazine.co.uk Roberts engages with my book and highlights the dilemma facing eco activists in a world of rising climate pressures and policy failures. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7363...

The great schism in eco-activism

Some want the movement to have broader appeal. Others want a return to the violence of the past. Will one side win out?

prospectmagazine.co.uk

Seems like the natural next step in the gerrymandering wars is targeting specific members of congress and breaking up their district. Why shouldn’t NY target Stefanik?

Parallel updating (plus floor effects) undefeated

David S. Bernstein @dbernstein.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New Pew on Trump job approval

Getting a PhD is a weird career choice if you aren‘t a curious person, and most curios peoples’ interests don’t lie nearly within a subfield of one discipline. (Not a knock on Paul’s answer I just find it odd that people ask this question.)

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham@paulgp.com · 3mo ago

My friend is teaching to his Economics Ph.D. students and explaining why they should be interested in topics that are not in their subfield. The friend asked for statements about why learning from other fields is good. Here was my answer: " Five things:

Dunno what’s more surprising this or conservatives getting shrooms

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Amazing that in the national divorce the libs are getting the NFL, butter and cooking oil, being attracted to adult women, standup comedy, Bud Light, and now also Catholicism

Great to see some fun coverage of @carleton.edu, but "BREAKING" may be a somewhat exaggerated way to describe a house where students have been making cookies for 40+ years.

Ron Lieber@ronlieber.bsky.social · 4mo ago

BREAKING GOOD NEWS: There is a house at @carleton.edu where you can bake cookies at basically any time. I spent 12 straight hours in the kitchen and came back for breakfast the next morning: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/d...

Judging by the (non)response to this, I should admit I was wrong. The democratic pessimists would not have said Orban losing would be evidence against their position. Rather, there is nothing that they would admit is evidence against their position 🤷‍♂️

Andrew Little@anthlittle.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Something I would like to hear from people who are confident the world is getting less democratic is what evidence or events would lead you to revise that belief? Part of what I'm getting at here is I'd bet a common answer a few years ago would have been "Orban losing" bsky.app/profile/anth...

Something I would like to hear from people who are confident the world is getting less democratic is what evidence or events would lead you to revise that belief? Part of what I'm getting at here is I'd bet a common answer a few years ago would have been "Orban losing" bsky.app/profile/anth...

Andrew Little@anthlittle.bsky.social · 4mo ago

One case is one case but it is remarkable how we just saw another wave of reports about the dire state of global democracy, and the poster child of this purported decline just lost a competitive election.

Don’t totally disagree with this, but peacefully conceding defeat is important! And many figures similar to Orban did not do this. Unclear how much of this is a difference in authoritarian goals vs just losing by so much that trying to fight it was futile.

Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchamp.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A lot of Orbán's American fans are saying that this election proved he was never an authoritarian in the first place. This is completely wrong — and, in fact, betrays a complete misunderstanding of both Hungarian politics and modern authoritarianism. Here's why.

One case is one case but it is remarkable how we just saw another wave of reports about the dire state of global democracy, and the poster child of this purported decline just lost a competitive election.

Reuters says Tisza has at least 135 seats: 133 is the constitutional supermajority! Live by highly disproportional electoral systems (which Orbán made even more disproportional with the extra compensation votes awarded to winners), die by highly disproportional electoral systems.

randy r. potts@thephatic.bsky.social · 4mo ago

now we have to hope Magyar gets that 2/3 majority 🤞

Looks like we have entered the AI-generated email audit experiment era

And they say AI will be bad for the humanities

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 4mo ago

AI finally lets us see Raphael's The School of Athens the way Raphael obviously intended it, illustrating the delicate dance and subtle conflicts between Plato and Artistotle.

It's almost like there is a trade-off between loyalty and competence 🤔

Great articulation of my main worry about AI use among researchers (including myself!) Among current students, a hugely beneficial trait will be the ability to force oneself to sometimes do hard stuff on their own to really understand it even when AI is faster. ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement" The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...

From our FirstView articles: A Precolonial Paradox? Rethinking Political Centralization and Its Legacies by MARTHA WILFAHRT. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

At least we know that the war does have a concrete and achievable goal (creating insider trading opportunities)

Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Lots of suspicious trades in oil/equities just ahead of Trump tweets backing off his ultimatum. Sure looks like somebody close to Trump knew he was about to TACO, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits From @pkrugman.bsky.social: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/treason-in...

Trump admin violating domestic law, international law, and now the law of total variance

Pedro Yokes@pedroyokes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Do you know how hard you have to fail to go backwards in this number over three weeks

it is in fact time for some game theory

New paper with Stephanie Zonszein! Political news is more important than ever, but local papers are shuttering across the US. In recent years, innovative community-centered outlets led by journalists have taken to WhatsApp and social media to reach groups such as immigrants. What are their effects?

New objective indicator of democracy?

Alexandra Petri@petridishes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It was always a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy when people had to demonstrate their allegiance to the leader by wearing certain special garments. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

DebunkBot is live on BlueSky! Tag @debunkbot.bsky.social in reply to any post to get the facts

Very nice paper, to be more spicy I would say it shows how both sides of the "is moderation good" debate misread the implications of spatial models of political competition (or, if you must, the "median voter theorem")

David Broockman@dbroockman.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New short paper w @jkalla.bsky.social ! Candidates gain from moderation, but less than many theories expect. Many conclude voters must not care about issues. This is wrong. Small *average* effects mask large effects on specific issues & are consistent with widespread issue-based voting 🧵

Agreed. “Let’s one shot a mediocre paper in 15 minutes” is a fun parlor trick but the more exciting thing is the ability to produce higher quality research faster by treating AI like a hyper efficient (if not particularly creative and sometimes mistake-prone) collaborator.

Brendan Nyhan@brendannyhan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This essay best captures my experience on how context-aware AI like Claude Code/Codex adds value to my research. AI as a Research Collaborator, Not a Paper Mill modelinganunforeseeablefuture.substack.com/p/ai-as-a-re...

Sort of an obvious point but one drawback to firing all your attorneys and bombing random boats in a way all experts say is illegal is that partners will no longer trust you to follow the law.

Iran news pretty good for the Zeitzoff hypothesis.

Thomas Zeitzoff@zeitzoff.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Trump is deeply unpopular. – Less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his term. – Less popular than he himself was during Trump I. An aging, unpopular, narcissistic leader with autocratic tendencies who doesn't know how to moderate.... It's a recipe for gambling for resurrection.

Order No Option But Sabotage here: -OUP (30% discount code: ASFLYQ6): global.oup.com/academic/pro... -Bookshop: bookshop.org/p/books/no-o... -Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/019779684...

If you aren't checking the reproducibility/robustness of your papers with AI, someone else is going to do it for you!

Yiqing Xu@yiqingxu.bsky.social · 6mo ago

1/ Sorry for double-posting from X. Sharing a new working paper for the Year of the Horce 🐎: "An AI-assisted workflow that scales reproducibility in empirical research" (bit.ly/repro-ai) w/ Leo Yang Yang