guest post: the sociologist as bystander The following is a guest post by Roi Livne and an anonymous co-author. They called them “aid distribution centers.” Orwell himself would not have thought of a better term. Every day, shortly after …

Two Israeli sociologists on the ASA’s overturning of a member petition for Boycott. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/g...

New research note with my colleague Carla Lewandowski where we make a case for more empirical work on far-right extremism in law enforcement. Open access in Policing: An International Journal (link below):
www.emerald.com/pijpsm/artic...

Official Launch Trailer for The House of Hikmah | Arrives April 8th, 2026 YouTube video by Lunacy Studios

I've wished for Arab-made games about Arab mythology for so long, and despite assisting on the project I still can't believe there's one swinging for the fences this hard. House of Hikmah is something very needed in a time where the world would rather erase us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZTu...

Birth of a Nation had (and still has!) effects on racial hate and violence.

Also side note, Desmond Ang is a shining example of how academic economics changed for the better in recent decades. Most Improved Discipline.

gated: www.aeaweb.org/articles/pdf...

You don't have to gamble for gambling to ruin your life How gambling is eroding empathy, destroying relationships, and changing our culture — even for people who never bet.

"A University of Oregon study found that when states legalize sports betting, intimate partner violence increases by roughly 10 percentage points after upset NFL losses." yourbrainonmoney.substack.com/p/gambling-i...

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.”
That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear
www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

"Rethinking Repeatability in Observational Social Science" by Jonathan Ben-Menachem, Ari Galper, and Nic Fishman. Abstract: Sociology has remained relatively insulated from debates about the ‘replication crisis.’ Heeding calls to consider replication more deeply, we introduce a distinction between two types of research reforms that have emerged in the wake of the crisis: specification-restricting reforms and specification-expanding reforms. Specification-restricting reforms—the more popular of the two—aim to increase the repeatability of research findings by controlling false positives. We show how these reforms’ internal logic breaks down outside of randomized experiments; in observational contexts, they risk enshrining fragile or misspecified models. We further argue that the premise of these reforms is flawed. Replication rates cannot be reduced to the purported prevalence of false positive findings. In their place, we propose a replication framework cen- tered on specification-expanding reforms, stronger incentives for confirmatory research, and meta-analysis. This approach equips sociology to assess the repeatability of findings and build a more cumulative discipline.

Ok now this paper looks amazing. By @jbenmenachem.com and coauthors, forthcoming in Sociological Methods and Research.

Baturday
Bat World Sanctuary

The critique of unmeasured confounding is often levied in a lazy/broad way. It is trivially true in any observational study. But if the critic can't think of a plausible such confounder and posit a reasonable direction/magnitude of its bias then they're not doing productive science.

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

one of the greatest human triumphs of my lifetime is the relentless, unceasing, heroic effort by DECADES' worth of doctors and scientists to find a cure for a disease much of the world didn't take seriously for years because it predominantly affected a community they thought kinda deserved it

Our paper “Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States” is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! We released a new, highly granular migration dataset. 1/9

Pb concentration by decade in hair from Salt Lake City region residents. Value plotted for 1940 includes all samples from 1916 to 1959; value plotted at 2022 includes all samples from 2020 to 2024.

Lead (Pb) in archived hair in Salt Lake City.

"Lead (Pb) in archived hair documents a decline in lead exposure to humans since the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency "

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

Why have I done exactly this thing on a weekly basis for years?

Me, coding a thing and ambiently chatting to a friend:
"I think I know what the issue is, and I think I know how to fix it"

Me, having tried thirty other "potentially better" solutions, three hours later:
"I should've done the thing I told you"

Alex Pretti from his early days working at the VA

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

Under settings -> general, there'll be a "manage workspace smart features settings", just uncheck the first box (I did both)

Judge rules EPA must face Flint kids water crisis lawsuit in 5 days A federal judge has refused to throw out a lawsuit filed against the Environmental Protection Agency by three Flint children who claim they were damaged by contaminated drinking water and the lax resp...

The EPA is about to face trial next week—a suit obo Flint children alleged the EPA failed to obey its own guidelines when handling the city’s high lead levels. This is a really big deal, but has mostly received only local coverage.
www.mlive.com/news/flint/2...

That’s just GOTTA be the inspiration behind Common Side Effects

Opinion | I'm a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here's how ICE observers are helping. Research into how violence occurs shows that disapproval from the people around you can help reduce it.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention.

The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

At one point today, there were 283 Minnesota attorneys doing a training on how to file emergency habeas petitions to keep our neighbors from being shipped out of state and held indefinitely.

That would be the second largest law firm in the state. And that training was just put together this week.

Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns* Abstract. A common concern surrounding minimum wage policies is their impact on independent businesses, which are often feared to be less able to bear or p

#QJE Feb 2026, #7, “Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns,” by Rao (@nirupama.bsky.social) and Risch: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Are you interested in inequality of opportunity / inter-generational mobility? Take a look at this impressive new resource: a public-access database containing cross-nationally comparable estimates of inequality of opportunity for 72 countries, covering 2/3 of the world’s population. 👇👇👇

There is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution.

In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789)

👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc....
👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

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"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social