if I may: necropic?

I'm not imagining that windows file search has gotten much worse over the last several years, right? I can type an exact filename in the search and it'll still bury the result. I don't remember it being this bad...

"Croesus then asked if he should make war on the Persians and if he should take to himself any allied force. The oracles to whom he sent this question included those at Delphi and Thebes. Both oracles gave the same response, that if Croesus made war on the Persians he would destroy a mighty empire."

Book cover shows an alleyway in a Rio favela, the black and white photo has been given a bluish tinge; my name is upper left, the title of the book "Poverty of the Imagination" is at lower left and at right, in reddish text is the subtitle "The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America"

Your humble servant has a written a book about the social science of poverty in Cold War Latin America and the contexts that shaped its creation, from international sources like the Ford Foundation to dictatorships across the region. The book is in production and will be ready at the end of 2026

Abstract As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of authorship and interpretation.

new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...

This has been a LONG time in works: my paper on how dollar hegemony is a form of international law-making power. It includes a long methodological/theoretical section on why strong versions of the 'law constitutes political economy' aren't convincing papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Local agricultural transition, crisis and migration in the Southern Andes - Nature In the Uspallata Valley, agriculture was adopted by local populations, as evidenced by genetic continuity from earlier hunter-gatherers to farmers; maize-dependent groups from the same regional p...

How did farming reach the Southern Andes? Through migration or cultural transmission? Our new paper in @nature.com combines ancient DNA, isotopes, archaeology & paleoclimate to reconstruct 2,000+ years of history in Uspallata, Mendoza.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A Thread🧵 (1/25+)

Perhaps this existential threat to scientific research & education at the country’s research universities was something the presidents & chancellors of those universities thought was worthy of loudly & collectively speaking out against in the public square at some point in the last year or so? 🤷‍♂️

Strike has begun, 3,800 meat packing workers in Colorado have walked off the job

Tracking the impacted inputs outside of oil (helium, aluminum, fertilizer, etc) that travel thru the Gulf does not make me think that this disruption will be straightforwardly limited to energy. One other lesson of '21-22 is that wishful thinking is dangerous when dealing with complex systems.

Let's return to this Weber piece from the inflation debate for a second and think about whether price increases in oil are likely to stay narrowly concentrated. Assuming a shock will be transitory and narrow does not make it so!

academic.oup.com/icc/article/...

Through Tariff Walls Higher, Higher Up They Climbed The Republican Hawley-Smoot Tariff almost DOUBLED our tariff rates. Since foreign nations could no longer sell their goods here, they had no money to buy our goods. And, in return, 60 nations struck back at us by raising their own tariff walls. By 1932 American foreign trade had shrunk to less than a third of what it was in 1929. Our farm exports declined 82 per cent between 1929 and 1933. Factories closed Workers lost their jobs. Surplus farm crops went to waste. A chief cause of depression was the loss of foreign markets from Republican policy. Three Steps Back to Neighborly Trade 1. THE RECIPROCAL TARIFF ACT giving the President authority to alter existing rates by as much as 50 per cent and to develop foreign markets by trade agreements with other countries. 2. MOST-FAVORED-NATION POLICY whereby we extend the benefit of a low duty on goods imported from any one country to similar goods from all countries which do not discriminate against American trade. Since imports of a country are usually its "specialties" this does not result in a flood of competing imports. On the other hand, each country pledges itself to extend to us any future concessions it may give another nation so that our trade is safeguarded and expanded automatically. Secretary of State Hull regards this principle as the "heart" of our trade program because it tends to lower world tariffs and to turn international commerce back into normal channels. 3. RECIPROCAL TRADE PACTS with 14 countries with which United States transacts more than one-third of its foreign trade, including such major countries as Canada, France, Sweden, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands. Several more pacts are being planned. Pacts of Mutual Profit WHAT WE GIVE: The new Trade Pacts cut duties on about 12 per cent of American im-ports. Most of these imports do not compete closely with American products and, wherever competition does exist, safeguards are set. Thus, a…

And with that, the tariff question was forever put to bed, never to disrupt politics or trade again.

For me something about living through an era full of unreliable narrators everywhere you look makes Wolfe feel less like fiction and more like field notes.

The usefulness of useless knowledge [FREE TO READ] Politicians aren’t the best judges of the merits of scientific research

Of honey bees, long shots, and the usefulness of useless knowledge
as.ft.com/r/80525f53-e...

Postdoc job! I'm looking to recruit a postdoc to work on a project about research evaluation & metadata. More info here: www.yorku.ca/research/wp-...

Salary: CDN$70,000 (+ benefits)
Location: Toronto, ON (can be remote in ON)
Length: 18 months
Deadline: 31 March 2026
Start date: 1 July 2026

Is this a blacklist situation or does he just keep it around for when he wants to make himself mad?

Well that is just bait to make a chart for @neilwarner.bsky.social

observablehq.com/@yusuf-imaad...

Running rm -rf was at least your own fault. giving local agents root access is you signing a waiver so someone else can do it. It's the year of living --dangerously-skip-permissions, folks!

I think this connects up to the Kalecki-labor market story. They hire so many tech workers that they see a decent amount of stuff in SV companies that they can't really differentiate from the communists in their mentions: largely standard Woke 1.0 + organizing (eg the 2020 google anti-ICE petitions)

Line graph that shows a blue line of # protests since Trump's 2nd inauguration surpassed, showing these to have exceeded 42k by the end of Jan 2026. A green line counts # of protests during the same time period in Trump's first term and just exceeds 10k.

Overall, we have tallied 4x more protests through Jan 31, 2026 than we had through Jan 31, 2018

drives me nuts that wealthy blue states are not moving to expand their own public university systems in response

People Think | Ben Tarnoff Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Added onto that the exfiltration of data for God knows what ends, the creation of new surveillance tools, the embedding of partisans in key positions, and I'd say DOGE has been one of the most successful parts of Trump II.

By its stated goals, DOGE failed. By its actual goals (shrinking parts of the state the Trump-Musk coalition opposed) it worked pretty much as planned. The deficit talk was just the sales pitch.

Nothing for the Claremont Institute as far as I can tell, which is a little surprising given his penchant for pseudo-intellectual right wing dross

Yeah you definitely nailed it there. Man, Hampshire...

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college:
1. Inflatable Public Sculpture
2. Century of the Gene
3. Drugs in History
4. Food, Farms, and Famine
5. Science Fictions

We may not have had a lot of humanities at RPI, but we had a great STS dept and a great Arts dept

3-4:30 today at the monument fyi

Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge's warrant, memo says An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press reveals that the agency allows immigration officers to forcibly enter homes to make arrests without a judicial warrant.

BREAKING: Immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, a memo obtained by AP says.