I just got a frantic call from Allison Statham. She's the mother of Haley Oliveaux, the girl Chris Duncan was wrongly convicted of killing. She says the police are now at her door and demanding a DNA sample. They're threatening to arrest her.

The framing of Chris Duncan: Part Two

“God doesn’t let innocent babies die for no reason. Somebody has to be punished.”

radleybalko.substack.com

Software patents are hard to enforce and obsolete quickly. Hundreds of billions have been invested in AI. If investors anticipate rapid market proliferation of competing AIs before they can recoup investments via monopoly rents, being heavily regulated would, coincidentally, be very attractive

People complain about college athletes not actually getting an education, but clearly legacy wealthy donor kids carrying elite degrees without a lick of learning is a far, far bigger problem.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

Trump: "If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say 'we're not going to trade with you anymore,' we don't lose $50 billion a year. It's very simple. Right?"

Not on my bingo card.

Brendan Nyhan@brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d ago

Karl Rove comes off the sidelines www.wsj.com/opinion/why-...

The easiest way to explain the future of US governance for your lifetime and mine is that Trump has taken us from “easy” to “difficult” permanently

Is there a political party in favor of reverting the Internet to just being a lot of poorly-indexed Geocities pages? 3 megs per person, free! All social problems solved. If you don't like it, use the newly-revived usenet we'll create.

It was an MLM convention. Anyone whose Dad ever sold Amway knows what this was. The downlines have tapped out their networks and are dropping off, garages full of product they can’t move and broken homes waiting for them when they get back.

Acyn@acyn.bsky.social · last wk.

Phang: I’m here in Dallas, Texas, at the Republican National Convention’s midterm convention. I can tell you it’s an incredibly underwhelming energy here. Many of you may have been to conventions in other cities. There is a dynamic, almost frenetic energy surrounding a convention. Here? Womp womp

Good morning with good news: US solar deployment surged 45% to 11.4 GW in Q2 2026. Solar, wind & batteries were 91% of new capacity in H1 2026. Wind was 21%, its best H1 since 2022. EIA says solar will be 51%, battery 28%, wind 14% & gas 7% for 2026! pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/09/10/s... #energysky

Hey #econsky - I've got a grad student whose staggered treatment diff-in-diff event study results are essentially the same if she runs a 2 stage (a la Gardner), stacked EV, Call-Sant, or Sun-Abra saturated model. If you had to pick one to feature as your primary estimation, which would you choose?

A sundowning old man, addicted to AI slop, surrounded by supplicants and apparatchiks, with control over the US nuclear arsenal.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w ago

A string of absolutely bonkers Truth Social posts from Trump in the span of about 10 minutes

"Coyote vs Acme" is to "Erin Brockovich" what "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was to "Chinatown". It was very funny and, as a Gen X'r who always rooted for the Coyote because he never gave up, it suprisingly hit me in the feels a couple times.

Some thoughts on higher ed: 1) Remember, lots of college students go to some type of public college, paying in-state tuition. 2) Overall, prices have slightly declined in the last decade. Yet they were already very high, driven by Baumol's cost disease and reduced subsidies to public colleges.

USAID was a free space for tankie and tankie adjacent dingbats to score edgy contrarian points by wildly exaggerating how imperialist it was, confident in the belief that it wouldn’t just disappear, except now it has and everyone is uncomfortably looking elsewhere

William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · 3w ago

In terms of people who would otherwise have lived dying there’s a case for it being the worst thing any leader has done this century, easily one of the worst, but people usually on about Amerikkka are often silent because it is something good the US was doing that stopped in the worst possible way

ICE has arrested more than half a million people since President Trump returned to office, and nearly 40 percent do not have a criminal record. As of Aug. 6, ICE had detained more people without a criminal record this year than in all of 2025. https://wapo.st/4izoaAb

As I noted at the end of my post, I still think there is a real chance this was intended to become a Sokal-style hoax economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/08/22/i...

This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far). statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/2...

This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far). statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/2...

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

The Bloomberg obit for Dolly is terrific. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Dolly Parton, Country Queen Who Sang of Strong Women, Dies at 80

Dolly Parton, the effervescent and glamorous “Queen of Country” who emerged from extreme poverty in rural Tennessee to become one of America’s most distinguished songwriters and wealthiest self-made w...

bloomberg.com

Only a few more days left to submit a paper for the NBER Economics of Religion conference --> fall 2026 in San Francisco... www.nber.org/conferences/...

Economics of Religion, Fall 2026

nber.org

Two married professors and their son are being held in ICE detention, despite being legal permanent residents and having no criminal records. All, apparently, because their mom/MIL was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before they were even born. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

One Woman’s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention

My husband, son, and I have been locked up for months—despite being permanent residents with no criminal record. It is an unendurable, unending nightmare.

thenation.com

Apropos of nothing and a full week late, I'd like it on the record that I was always entertained watching Russell Westbrook play basketball. The OKC years felt like an apology from the gods for making AI's career so short.

This is, bar none, the stupidest fuckung thing I’ve ever heard. And the idea that there’s nobody in the chain of command - civilian or military - with enough courage to say so is a disgrace.

Navy weighs major warship redesign to match Trump’s preferences

The president wants the new fleet of aircraft carriers to more resemble those from World War II. Such a change could cost billions.

wapo.st

You know that source of US power that's lingering due to network effects—so many use the dollar and dollar-denominated assets that it'd be a pain to switch, there's no alternative—the power we haven't managed to throw away yet? Yeah, we want to trash that one too. While calling it "America First."

Olga Nesterova@onestpress.onestnetwork.com · last mo.

JD Vance wants to end the US dollar's position as a global reserve currency. (Loud cheers in Beijing and Moscow)

Video of an ICE agent pulling a gun on a wife and mother, who is a US citizen born and raised in the area, near Bailey's Crossroads in Northern Virginia yesterday. Chillingly, they claimed she “almost ran them over” until she told them she had video proving that was a lie.

The existence of a "DSA," of a young left, breaks through in old media, and thus to older people, and the existence of a radical left is a legible, understood phenomenon to older people, but insane radicalism among young right-wingers isn't so covered in old media and isn't legible to older people.

Some things I've learned about legislative advocacy, and I think my record speaks for itself. 1. Start by asking for everything you want. Stop preemptively negotiating against yourself. The process of passing the bill will whittle it down. Why started with a whittled down product?

Went through a fair amount of trouble to send my PhD student to JPAL training, only for Delta to screw them at every turn for 48 straight hours. Truly she is an academic now.

"Hassle is regressive" is such a perfect encapsulation of a really deep and important insight for policy design. I will use this regularly. I hope Justin will forgive me if I almost never credit him. Such constant citation would just be too much...trouble.

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers@platypuseconomics.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Means-tested programs like SNAP are shaped not just by benefit levels, but by hassle. And hassle is regressive: it hits hardest when you lack a car, flexibility, cash, or time.⁣ ⁣ https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/how-snaps-new-rules-make-eligible

A group of crime economists is launching an Association for Crime Economics. It's about time this field got the official structure it deserves! Huge thanks to Amanda Agan and others for doing this. Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for updates here: rhahn-niskanen.github.io/Association-...

We're near the ten-year anniversary of this interview, which was viewed as wildly controversial at the time. It led to hit pieces on me from liberal outlets like The New Republic as well as death threats. Now it's seen as conventional wisdom -- but it always was!