Elizabeth Tsurkov, Princeton Student, Is Released From Iraq, Trump Says Iraq’s prime minister also confirmed the release of Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli graduate student kidnapped in Iraq in 2023 by Kataib Hezbollah, a militant group.

Breaking News: Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Princeton graduate student taken hostage in Iraq, has been freed after more than two years of captivity.

August 1, 2025 AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Committee on Economic Statistics and Committee on Government Relations Statement from the American Economic Association on the Dismissal of the BLS Commissioner Leaders of the American Economic Association express their grave concern over the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier today. The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions. Undermining the independence or credibility of these agencies threatens the integrity of the information that markets, institutions, and the public rely on every day. Measuring the vast and dynamic U.S. economy in real time is inherently challenging. It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as more complete and higher-quality data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor-not failure or bias. The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions. We call upon elected officials to respect and preserve the independence of the nation's statistical infrastructure. Lawrence Katz President, American Economic Association Katharine Abraham President-Elect, American Economic Association Karen Dynan Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics Kenneth Troske Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Government Relations

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing

As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements

This is a big deal

Infographic titled “One Court, Two Standards” compares how the Supreme Court used emergency powers to rule on lower-court injunctions against the Biden and Trump administrations. Two panels show: • Biden Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 21 cases. All 21 cases are represented by red squares, indicating that 0% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. • Trump Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 86 cases. 66 green squares and 20 red squares show that 77% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. Key takeaway box below reads: “Using its ‘shadow docket,’ the Supreme Court granted emergency relief to lift 77% of lower-court injunctions against the Trump administration. It lifted 0% of those against the Biden administration.” Sources and notes below include: CourtListener data through July 7, 2025; analysis by Adam Bonica.

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” has cast very different shadows depending on which party holds the White House.

When lower courts blocked Trump admin policies, SCOTUS intervened on an emergency basis to lift those orders in 77% of cases.

For the Biden administration, that number was 0%.

the insinuation here that Levitsky’s politics might influence his scholarship has the causation exactly backwards

Our call for the 2025 Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) Annual Meeting on Geostrategic Opportunity and Upheaval on October 9-10 is up! Submissions due on June 16. W/ Yuri Zhukov @laiabalcells.bsky.social @austinlw.bsky.social @renardsexton.bsky.social More here: esoc.princeton.edu/events/2025/...

This is what happens when you ask me to indulge your false equivalencies about the Trump tariffs.

🚨Why do masses support democratic backsliding?🚨
A new @AJPS_Editor paper with Yotam Margalit, @liorsheffer.bsky.social and Itamar Yakir explores this question in the Israeli context. Our findings emphasize the role of leader attachment and affective polarization.
doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

Patricia Bauman died a year ago.

ActBlue is a payment processor. Almost anyone who’s given to a D candidate in the last 20 years could be mischaracterized as a “ActBlue funder.”

Listing five Jews, two of whom are long dead, as “ActBlue funders” secretly behind the Tesla protests is antisemitism.

Forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy: We find that consumer product markups increased more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2019.

One contribution is an approach to estimate IO-style models at scale, yielding flexible consumer preferences and estimates of marginal costs.

What's the Matter with Billionaires? How America's wealthiest sabotage their own prosperity (and ours) to avoid paying taxes

As another Trump-induced market crisis unfolds from tariffs, it's time we ask "What's the Matter with Billionaires?" I've run the numbers. Billionaires do better under Dems. So why do billionaires keep supporting GOP policies against their economic interests? See my latest piece on why. (TLDR 🧵⬇️)

This is it. The plausible scenario is not that the 2028 elections don’t happen. It’s that they happen with every financial oligarch and major corporation backing the GOP. And every major media organization backing the GOP, except for The NY Times which is trying to be neutral.

Extract from WSJ story. A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk's social-media platform, or else. X CEO Linda Yaccarino has made comments that seemed like similar warnings in conversations with Interpublic executives, according to people with knowledge of those talks. Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group OMC -0.53% could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration, given Musk's powerful role in the federal government, some of the people said. They also had a front-row seat to Musk's continued criticism of advertisers that ditched X since he bought it in 2022, when it was known as Twitter.

Extraordinary story the Wall Street Journal.

X is threatening advertisers that if they don’t spend more, Elon Musk will use his influence in government to block company mergers.

That’s extortion.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

I have a new piece in @ForeignAffairs titled, "The Post-Neoliberal Delusion and the Tragedy of Bidenomics". They were generous about giving me a lot of words but were less generous with charts--so this long thread partially rectifies that. (And links to the piece at the end.)

Two tweets from Jared Golden. They read “I’ve been getting a lot of calls over the past few days, and the interesting thing is none of them are about Donald Trump. They’re all about Elon Musk. My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.” “Musk is stepping on the president’s toes — making decisions without his approval, pursuing his own agenda. If I had an employee that sidelined me the way Musk is sidelining Trump, I don’t think I’d just sit back and take it.”

For Jared Golden, a Dem in a R+9 district, to be talking like this is actually remarkable. probably gets at some underlying unpopularity of Musk *even relative to Trump*

An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.

DOGE is not a real government agency.
DOGE has no authority to make spending decisions.
DOGE has no authority to shut programs down or to ignore federal law.
DOGE’s conduct cannot be allowed to stand.

Your daughter has died serving her country, and now you have to hide her identity because the President and his supporters will predictably scapegoat her for the accident.

Geometric local systems on very general curves and isomonodromy, JAMS

Canonical representations of surface groups, Annals

I've recently been talking a bit about how difficult it is to carefully check even well-written mathematics. I want to try to explain something about this by telling the story of some errors in the literature that (in part) led to the two papers below. 1/n

a tweet from Elon saying “the price of Fentanyl will rise sharply” as he retweets “Autism Capital” saying Trump will impose large tariffs on Canada and Mexico

you can choose to believe Elon is too dumb to understand tariffs and/or international negotiations work or you can choose to believe he is a billionaire car company owner who benefits from tariffs on competitors’ cars made in Mexico/Canada

I don't know how this has changed over the years, but the rebuild the settlement numbers don't seem too different from the opposition to withdrawal numbers in 2005, so at least it hasn't gotten worse? www.globes.co.il/news/article...

In a shocking intelligence failure, Hamas operatives have crossed the border and infiltrated several Israeli border towns. Some a few km from the border. War seems imminent.