It's NASA's birthday! 🚀 Did you know a Library of Congress researcher helped launch NASA? During the Sputnik crisis, Eilene Galloway was working as a National Defense Analyst for the Library's Legislative Research Service, now called the Congressional Research Service. 🧵

There's always next World Cup (because it's never this World Cup)

Everyone at that England-Norway game looks too gassed to even celebrate the outcome

There’s a CRS report for everything: ‘Presenting Measures to the President for Approval: Possible Delays’ www.congress.gov/crs_external...

NB: Nowadays, the House and Senate can receive veto messages during adjournments, so pocket vetoes are only possible after the final adjournment sine die at the end of a Congress.

Reconstructionist@unavaleable.bsky.social · last mo.

I wonder if we're gonna enter the "stupid pocket veto" phase or "distract grandpa for 10 days every time a bill passes" phase

If you don't like that Google Search is becoming increasingly just AI, but don't want to actually switch to another search engine, it's actually very easy to fix your Google searches to be just old-style blue links again. My walkthrough:

Process is boring, and yes, it can be used to delay things to death. But it can give interested parties and the public a chance to weigh in, offering lawmakers a better insights in benefits, drawbacks, and tradeoffs.

Celebrating 50 years … ✨ More than 15 billion trips … ✨ And even more memories! Thank you to all who made our anniversary ride unforgettable. What Metro means to you means the world to us! You keep us moving!

This feels like a good take on a genuine puzzle: why is economic sentiment so much worse than the economic data? David French points to deepening inequality, and rational market responses to that inequality. Interesting stuff!

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 4mo ago

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “We can’t have what we can’t afford, and we can’t have what we used to afford, and that combination can make even a middle-class American who may be well-off by historical standards feel very poor indeed,” our columnist David French writes.

My reminder to stop thinking of policy positions as purely campaign stuff that candidates and parties are free to optimize for electoral reasons; they are instead substantive questions party actors deeply care about, and electoral considerations are at best only part of the decision. That said...

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 5mo ago

To me it matters that even under the most favorable conditions presidential candidates, not House (where party brand matters) holding turnout fixed voters have knowledge of all policy positions, no media The paper finds that going moderate is half as effective as Yglesias wrote in Boston Review

A very smooth, predictable Oscars. That’s not a criticism.

Cinematography for Sinners is the first win I’d consider a genuine surprise (aside from Casting which was always going to be hard to call). 27% chance on GoldDerby.

Oscars 2026: Who I predict will win, and who I would vote for. Visual Effects: Avatar will win, and I would vote for it. Nothing in the same ballpark. Sound: F1 will win, and I would vote for it. A really powerful theater experience.

@ringwiss.bsky.social Has voting by thumbs up or thumbs down always been accepted in the U.S. Senate for roll call votes? Any interesting procedural history there?

Really thoughtful and nuanced work from NPR’s Planet Money!

Is the YIMBY movement doomed?

For decades, rising home prices have been an engine for middle-class wealth. Now a growing movement wants to slow — or even reverse — that trend. Are the politics around new housing development inhere...

npr.org

This phenomenon was the subject of my dissertation research, specifically in local politics where internal expertise can be particularly hard to come by.

This data collection is so valuable, and the qualitative work is very welcome!

Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley@ternerhousing.bsky.social · 6mo ago

As states nationwide work to streamline fragmented systems for financing & building affordable housing, new resources makes it easy to understand how different states’ housing finance systems are structured and what’s working to establish more integrated governance models. ow.ly/Yvnt50Yc2gI

One irony here: a shutdown won't shut down ICE or the Border Patrol, which got massive infusion of money last year in the GOP's 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' and the White House would surely deem these operations 'essential.'

Worth remembering, when you see passages like the one below, that this was not inevitable--the WPR mechanism does not allow for a presidential veto. It is only because of the Supreme Court's Chadha opinion that the president could veto the Venezuela resolution. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

A solid crop of books this year! I definitely recommend the Fable app to anyone who loves reading (transferring your data from Goodreads is easy!)

The trend is real, but this NYT analysis at the Congressional district level has big ecological bias Poor *areas* vote Republican, but it's often the richer *individuals* within those poorer areas that are most Republican And many poor *individuals* rich blue urban *areas* vote Dem

Policymakers do listen to strong evidence & rate it more highly, regardless of ideological alignment with policy goodauthority.org/news/do-poli...

Do policymakers listen to evidence or their own biases?

A new experiment with local officials across the U.S. shows that yes, strong evidence can shift attitudes.

goodauthority.org

Note that terminating the emergency control of DC’s police before 30 days requires the “enactment into law of a joint resolution,” or “the end of such emergency” as determined by the President. A one-house resolution isn’t sufficient as of a 1984 amendment. code.dccouncil.gov/us/dc/counci...

Amusing, but also a useful example. If you squint, this *looks* like the diagram as requested. But it doesn’t provide reliable or useful information; it is just an imitation of similar content. Worth keeping in mind whenever you use AI to generate “information” on a topic.

Geoff Green@geoffgreen.org · 12mo ago

I've seen this on Bluesky and had to try it myself. The image below was the response to the prompt: "Show me a diagram of the US presidents since Herbert Hoover, with their names and years in office under their photos" Bravo, OpenAI, bravo.

This article is now open access: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Alex Garlick@garlicksauce.bsky.social · last yr.

Are lobbyists influential? The public sure thinks so, but applied political science since lobbying registration data emerged (late 90s) struggled to produce evidence that it does. In new review @wmjunk.bsky.social @heathbrown.bsky.social and I chart a wave of research showing that lobbying matters.

Any list of “Best Movies” is fraught, but these are ones that have stuck with me.

Two separate plans hatched in 1960 by Congress—to build a third Library of Congress building & to dedicate a national monument to James Madison—eventually converged. Nine years after excavation began, the Library's James Madison Building opened to the public on this day in 1980.

Mission Impossible very subjective Tier List: Tier 1: Fallout, Ghost Protocol Tier 2: Rogue Nation, Dead Reckoning, Final Reckoning Tier 3: The OG, Mission 3 Tier 4 (Much worse): Mission 2