Incredibly stupid & racist, but would also be like setting millions of dollars on fire. Changing signs, web sites, stationary, etc. is costly. Taxpayers would foot some of bill, and businesses would pass on costs to consumers. NM trails only MS & LA in poverty, so yeah, they can afford it. </s>

MeidasTouch@meidastouch.com · 5h ago

Trump suggests renaming New Mexico to "New America"

DoD has its own research agency DARPA, which receives -5 billion in funding. A ten year contract to shift NIH funds to DoD is simply a budget cut to NIH. It’s also another example of how this Admin does policymaking by other means.

Nature@nature.com · 2d ago

An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense. go.nature.com/4ycEbk8

The Trump-appointed UN rep objected to the Equal Earth map on the grounds that it's woke ideology. It's a good example of how for this administration, and GOP/MAGA more generally, *anything* that eliminates, reduces, or even just exposes the unearned advantages of the dominant group is anathema.

Alaska just got a lot smaller and more remote. OK, it didn't really, but AK "benefited" more than any other state from the Mercator projection. Below is the Equal Earth map just adopted by the UN, against US objection (of course).

There is an extraordinary disparity between how aggressively Florida now monitors and regulates the education of adults in public universities and the laissez faire approach to regulating kids in publicly funded private schools

ProPublica@propublica.org · 2d ago

A decade ago, Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexually abusing a 16-year-old. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease. As private schools fueled by taxpayer dollars proliferate, states are choosing not to closely regulate who runs them or what they teach:

Meaningful news earlier today. Many of you read and reacted to this story earlier this year on this Samoan woman in Alaska who was being prosecuted for voting alongside many in her family. A judge tossed her case today—a huge win, if just a first step in her story.

Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It - Bolts

In a small Alaska town, American Samoans face prosecution for voting in the only country they’ve ever known. They live in a limbo, created by colonial expansion, that now confuses even public official...

boltsmag.org

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is hands-down the best sociologist I've ever heard at explaining American culture in a way that's legible to everyone. Just a generational talent.

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 3d ago

Pop Syllabus.

A 1998 thesis wouldn't have been accessible outside uni until 1999-2000. A Feb 1999 paper (Pereira) would have been accepted by early/mid 1998. Pereira 1999 may have circulated as a WP 1-3 years before. Possible but much less likely for a diss. It's more likely Ariely plagiarized than reverse.

J.P. Loo@jpl.ac · 4d ago

On further investigation: there are ⩾50 instances of significant overlap between Pereira (‘Factors influencing consumer perceptions…’, 1999) and Ariely’s thesis (‘Controlling the information flow…’, submitted 1998), and Pereira doesn’t cite Ariely, so it seems Ariely was plagiarised here!

I never thought I'd say this but I miss Paul Ryan. He, unlike Mike Johnson, would not have tolerated executive branch interference in the collection and analysis of federal data, or the damage to its credibility. Yet another example of GOP's radicalization and embrace of authoritarian tactics.

Political meddling at the Census Bureau damages the entire US statistical system

This summer marks the worst period for US statistical integrity since President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last August. Two different and seemingly uncoordinated eve...

piie.com

Wendell Berry has passed, and we are poorer for it. He was a remarkable poet, essayist, and advocate for stronger bonds with nature and stronger communities. He kept up a (handwritten!) correspondence with my dad for 30+ years, sharing their thoughts, poems, and I suspect more than a few puns. RIP

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what...

scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

Fascinating study of video data on class differences in parenting styles about food and mealtimes. Class differences in parenting styles are fairly weak and the boundaries blurry. #socsky: a good addition to syllabus if you teach Lareau or Bourdieu, or more generally about social class "cultures."

Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime

Article: Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime | Sociological Science | Posted August 25, 2026

sociologicalscience.com

Interesting new paper on "overwork" (long work hours per week) in China. Shows that, contra the US, overwork is concentrated in blue-collar occupations rather than in the professions, and is associated with a wage penalty -- lower pay per hour of work -- rather than a wage premium.

Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023

Article: Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023 | Sociological Science | Posted August 31, 2026

sociologicalscience.com

Congratulations to Cornell Sociology's Majo Ágreda for winning 1 of 3 Business for a Better World dissertation proposal awards from CSU's College of Business! Majo would post herself except she's busy linking 1/2 million FOIA-d SBA loan records to borrower info. (And applying for jobs, hint hint.)

College of Business announces dissertation proposal competition winners

The three winners each received $6,000 in funding as part of the College of Business’ Business for a Better World Dissertation Proposal Competition.

biz.source.colostate.edu

It's like a parody, but it's deadly serious; the Commerce Department (which includes Census, NOAA, and others) has outright deleted "don't alter or suppress scientific findings for political reasons" from its scientific integrity rules. Seriously.

Hansi Lo Wang (he/him)@hansilowang.bsky.social · 6d ago

SCOOP: After the Census Bureau issued a highly unusual report tied to a President Trump-aligned think tank, the bureau’s parent agency, the Commerce Department, cut language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy, @npr.org has learned www.npr.org/2026/08/31/n...

It took me about 20 hours of work spread over 3 days, but I finished 6 letters of recommendation with 5 hours and 28 minutes to spare. It's beer-thirty.

Reminds me of a comment I once heard from a park ranger: it's nearly impossible to design a dumpster latch that bears with above-average intelligence can't open but humans with average intelligence can.

Massimo (mirror)@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social · last wk.

Belgian Malinois, one of the smartest dog breeds, excel at problem solving, like this one. Naturally, it makes them the global standard for K9, search-n-rescue, and detection work. Original post

As expected, the Lake Ontario change is rolling out in the wake of GNIS updates. Bleah. Sure, “companies should simply refuse”, or “USGS employees should resign en masse”, or blah blah blah but the root cause is that the US was dumb enough to re-elect Trump and here’s another stupid consequence.

The "only 3 measles deaths" bit is bad enough, but notice he's attributing 40% of deaths to food-induced illnesses. Even if you put ALL heart disease, diabetes, and liver disease deaths in the "food-induced" column, his cause of death math only works by counting many cancer deaths as food-induced.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.

RFK Jr defends measles: "In 10 years, there have been 3 measles deaths in America. There are now about 1.2 million deaths every year from food-induced illness. The media and certain demagogic politicians are constantly trying to scare us about infectious disease."

Here is another example of *automated cryptogyny*: LLM removed my co-authors, *three of whom were women*. Instead, LLM states I published the paper with a *man* with whom I co-authored *other* papers. 🧵

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · last yr.

Oh, the irony of people using generative AI to "summarise" my papers 🫠 (here the real paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...)

Canada doesn't even make it onto this graph. In 2022 (last year in this dataset), their gross expenditure on R&D was 4% of the United States ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb2025...

Notably, "Daejon Love" was able to manipulate Gemini to include an AI overview of his non-existent 49-er affiliation. A smarter scammer could easily create more convincing videos, e.g., of him training with the real team rather than running solo "Brewski" routes on the beach. Yay, GenAI.

Mina Kimes@minakimes.bsky.social · last wk.

PSA: How to avoid getting scammed by a fake NFL player

MapQuest is holding firm on Ontario, for now, but I won't forget that they (along with Google & Apple) caved on Denali. Instead of "Great One", the tallest mountain on continent is stuck w/ the name of a racist, imperialist president best known for stripping Indigenous sovereignty & stealing land.

What role do social networks – and the precise nature and structure of social interactions – play in the production of public goods and in human welfare? What about social contagion? A thread on some of our #HNL experiments with many thousands of participants from 2010 to the present. 1/

Social Stratification (fifth edition), edited by Michelle Jackson, Nima Dahir, Claire Daviss, and David B Grusky. Available for pre-order now! www.routledge.com/Social-Strat... Full table of contents in the rest of the thread:

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com Dolly Parton “didn’t see herself as a saint,” our columnist, Tressie McMillan Cottom, writes. “She identified as something we needed even more: a writer.”

Opinion | Loving Dolly Parton Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard.

She didn’t see herself as a saint; she identified as something we needed even more: a writer.

nyti.ms

Riding a public bus in Canada. The two women behind me, basically your stereotypical Canadian grandmas, are talking about how they won’t make plum jelly this year because they refuse to buy plums from the States. Yes, Trump, you’ve even managed to make enemies out of the plum jelly grandmas.

This administration is quietly destroying the infrastructure necessary to collect high-quality, trustworthy data about American society, and replacing nonpartisan analyses of the data with partisan misinformation. It may not be the administration's flashiest act, but it is one of its fasc-iest.

Experts raise alarms over Census Bureau report Trump is touting on noncitizen voting

A Trump-aligned think tank has ties to a highly unusual Census Bureau report that the president is using to renew false claims of widespread voting by non-U.S. citizens in 2020, NPR has learned.

npr.org

Cornell prof, great labor economist, & former US Census Bureau chief scientist John Abowd on the administration's recent corruption of standards at Census. lnkd.in/p/g2asDKSa

How did Sociology become the hate piñata of Concerned Pundits on the education beat? The past month saw calls in the press for the discipline to be "liquidated" bc it's a "scam." My theory: it's bc we expose the harms of inequality. Me in today's @economist.com:🎁 www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Why is sociology the hate-piñata of the social sciences?

Accusations that it is thinly disguised socialism are wide of the mark, writes Brooke Harrington

economist.com

Old Man Shaking Fist at Sky's Cloud C'mon, AP, it was RIGHT THERE.

Enes Kanter Freedom ejected from Fever-Sky game after he was confronted by Sky's Cloud

Former NBA center Enes Kanter Freedom has been ejected from the Fever-Sky WNBA game after Sky guard Natasha Cloud yelled and pointed in his direction late in the third quarter.

apnews.com