I've got a new paper out in the Journal of Organizational Sociology, "Polygenic Prediction: How Contested Genetic Technologies Organize Fields of Expertise." Coauthored with Aaron Panofsky. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Really important piece from @philiprocco.bsky.social today www.crisesnotes.com/r/beea98d7?m...

Russell Vought is Using the Plumbing of Fiscal Federalism to Create a New Patronage System

EDITORS NOTE: I (Nathan) have struggled whether to rush to comment on this proposed OMB rule. Being a recent Fiscal Year 2026 OMB memo, and knowing that the OMB will continue to create new forms of bu...

crisesnotes.com

See, people always want to make this just about "sports," but the real upshot here is that, 6-3, trans women can't make a claim under the Equal Protection Clause. And if they can't do that, it's hard to see how they have constitutional rights.

Good morning! I published this post in my newsletter, on my notebook assignment, my diagnosis on where we stand in relation to AI and EdTech and my view of the role of humanities classes in all of this. Link: ignaciosanchezprado.substack.com/p/a-year-of-...

Obviously university admin don't realize this, but they are destroying the "value proposition" of their institutions. The more you make a university like a tech company, the more you give people a reason to NOT be part of it. Google will hire you w/o a college degree.

Lisa Messeri@lmesseri.bsky.social · 6mo ago

USC said "it would use a *venture capitalist’s* $200 million donation to apply AI across academic disciplines." "The donation... came from Mark and Mary Stevens. Stevens... is among the largest individual shareholders of the chip giant Nvidia, where he has spent decades on the board." Screaming.

The union data space is a mess but so is everything and honestly this is one of the most exciting messes to fix rn. Closest you can come to doing military logistics for the good guys. We also know we have trouble hiring from within for this skillset, so do-gooders running from tech/finance welcome

The @uofcalifornia.bsky.social is developing new ways to pit #highereducation workers against each other: 1) put faculty on management bargaining teams; 2) require teachers to pick up the work of striking TAs and graders; 3) make faculty collect TA/RA timesheets; and 4) offer $ for adjuncts to scab.

🧵 NSF is reducing external review requirements and eliminating routine expert panels, citing staff shortages that this administration implemented. This change expands program officer authority. But the solution to flawed accountability isn't less public accountability.

Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · 11mo ago

NSF plans to streamline merit review to heal self-inflicted staffing wound www.science.org/content/arti...

Last week of the semester at NYU 🥲

Currently heading home on Amtrak after a great time at the History and Political Economy Project grantee conference. Learned a ton from folks doing archival research and fieldwork all over the world

The History and Political Economy Project@hpe-project.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Zach Griffen (NYU Grossman) followed with a presentation examining the rise of "quality improvement" and management science in the modern U.S. healthcare system.

New article based on my dissertation, which shows how economic experts have historically conceptualized and measured “quality” through a comparison of education and healthcare journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/19...

From “Quality, Not Quantity” to “Quality as Quantity”: How the “Car...

At a time when seemingly every aspect of social life is being subjected to quantification in one way or another, “quality, not quantity” remains an omnipresent aphorism. Scholars have meticulously ...

journals.openedition.org

Spent the last day of Thanksgiving break writing three job applications, submitting extraordinarily detailed revisions on a 12,000 word article about the history of the economics of social policy (conditionally accepted and forthcoming at a journal near you), and making a lamb ragu 💫

Elon Musk is set to make more than every U.S. elementary teacher combined

Elon Musk is set to make more than every U.S. elementary teacher combined

See how Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s new payment package compares with other occupations in the United States.

washingtonpost.com

Here's the full Summers email, btw.

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time: It rules

Wired has just published an in-depth piece on Alpha Schools ... giving us a deep-dive on the realities of AI-driven schools sold on the promise of students plugged into personalised learning systems and doing ('crushing') a full day's schoolwork in only 2 hours: www.wired.com/story/ai-tea...

Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school’s methods—surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers—to be an education in and of itself.

wired.com

New from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social: we argue that the practice of maintaining AI models in healthcare exists in a "responsibility vacuum," resulting in the emergence of creative forms of invisible labor to monitor and repair technical systems bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Managing a “responsibility vacuum” in AI monitoring and governance in healthcare: a qualitative study - BMC Health Services Research

Background Despite the increasing implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in healthcare, their long-term safety, effectiveness, and equity remain compromised by a lack of sustained oversight. This study explores the phenomenon of a “responsibility vacuum” in AI governance, wherein maintenance and monitoring tasks are poorly defined, inconsistently performed, and undervalued across healthcare systems. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 experts involved in AI implementation in healthcare, including clinicians, clinical informaticists, computer scientists, and legal/policy professionals. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed using abductive qualitative methods to identify themes related to maintenance practices, institutional incentives, and responsibility attribution. Results Participants widely recognized that AI models degrade over time due to factors such as data drift, changes in clinical practice, and poor generalizability. However, monitoring practices remain ad hoc and fragmented, with few institutions investing in structured oversight infrastructure. This “responsibility vacuum” is perpetuated by institutional incentives favoring rapid innovation and strategic ignorance of AI failures. Despite these challenges, some participants described grassroots efforts to monitor and maintain AI systems, drawing inspiration from fields such as radiology, laboratory medicine, and transportation safety. Conclusions Our findings suggest that institutional and cultural forces in healthcare deprioritize the maintenance of AI tools, creating a governance gap that may lead to patient harm and inequitable outcomes. Addressing this responsibility vacuum will require formalized accountability structures, interdisciplinary collaboration, and policy reforms that center long-term safety and equity. Without such changes, AI/ML technologies designed to improve patient health may introduce new forms of harm, ultimately eroding trust in AI and machine learning for healthcare.

bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com

New piece from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social on ambient documentation systems ("AI scribes") and the potential risks this technology may pose for medical education and the socialization of trainees www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...

Ambient Documentation And The Dilemma Of Deskilling In Medical Education | Health Affairs Forefront

The digitization of health care has had important consequences for how medical training is conducted, and with the advent of ambient documentation, this important social component of health care is li...

healthaffairs.org

New: The Education Department's cuts have left the niche, government-backed "industry" of education research in a dire state. www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Trump’s Job Cuts Leave a Profession Looking for Its Next Act

Niche researchers in a government-dependent education field are trying to pivot. “There are no crops coming out of this ground anymore.”

wsj.com

#ASA2025 regular sessions on Knowledge were fantastic! Wonderful mix of undergraduate (!) and graduate students, junior and senior faculty. Kudos to @runzach.bsky.social @peterore.bsky.social serving as discussants and putting the papers in conversation. No more regular sessions at ASA next year!

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget

NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.

donmoynihan.substack.com

Glad my graduate alma mater cut 60 degree programs in subjects that require people to think so that they could offer this. Looking forward to living in a world full of Prompt Engineers.

thinking about how the times called Mahmoud Mamdani and asked him whether any of his ancestors had intermarried while in Africa like ok the creepy race science here goes beyond the sourcing

Mahmood was in pan-African nationalist movements in the 70s until Idi Amin expelled Indo-Ugandans? Zohran’s dad gave him the middle name Kwame to honour the first President of Ghana? idk maybe three white American journalists aren’t the best ones to opine on whether or not he’s African.

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Mahmood Mamdani · The Asian Question: On Leaving Uganda

President Yoweri Museveni was careful not to refer to Asians as citizens; he explained that they were ‘investors’,...

lrb.co.uk

You know, when I heard that all of our personal data had been hacked, I didn't expect the first major use of it to be the NYT trying to fuck over Zohran but maybe I'm naive www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/n...

Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application

nytimes.com

So am I reading this court decision correctly? We now have 50 micronations with their own laws interpreting the U.S. Constitution wholly separate from one another? But there's one guy with private law enforcement who is immune from all punishment who can do whatever he wants in those 50 states?

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious. "The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]." Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

Voted for Zohran