Proud of Virginia voters choosing to fight fire with fire and my Republican Indiana legislators for refusing to be bullied to do it unilaterally. Both are rebukes of authoritarianism.

Elite higher ed has many problems, but the key factor driving down trust is political. Look at the graph - backlash against costs, admissions, etc. can't explain the changes we see. We should still reform our institutions and refocus on our core mission, but blindly blaming ourselves is abuser logic

The old media regime dominated by TV and newspapers has perished, and the social media "revolution" has demonstrated its inability to fill the void left behind...now is the time for serious folks to be imagining the shape of what might come next.

That’s terrible, I’m so sorry. I’m a UMass grad and met many wonderful Hampshire folks during my studies.

Just not the full package!

Environmental Research Communications LETTER Political elites' partisan beliefs about climate change OPEN ACCESS Alexander C Furnas'*®, Timothy M LaPira? O and Salil D Benegal' © Addressing climate change requires political elites to share a basic set of facts about climate science, yet political elites in the United States are divided in their views about climate change. We document this using the first large-scale survey of over 3,500 U.S. political elites-including elected officials, staffers, regulators, lobbyists, and policy professionals—to assess the partisan divide in beliefs about climate change held by political elites. We show near-unanimous agreement among the Democratic elite on the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring, primarily caused by humans, and widely recognized by scientists. In contrast, substantial minorities of Republican elites reject these scientific facts, with fewer than half affirming anthropogenic climate change and nearly one-third endorsing a climate-related conspiracy theory. Comparing elites to the general public, we find that political elites are more aligned with climate science, but partisan gaps among elites are as wide as those observed in mass opinion. Regression analyses show partisan identity explains far more variation in elite climate beliefs than ideology, trust in science, or broader conspiratorial predispositions. These findings suggest that partisan polarization among elites reflects not only strategic electoral behavior but also privately held attitudes.

I've got a new paper out today with @timlapira.bsky.social and @salilb.bsky.social in ERC showing that party ID strongly structures political elites' beliefs about climate change. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

🧵 Democracy feels like it's in a rough state at the moment across the globe, and we hear various explanations, like polarisation, extremism, disinformation, and loss of trust. But what if those explanations are mainly symptoms and we've been trying to treat them rather than the underlying causes?

📄Published Today in Nature:

500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social).

Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

TLDR: 1/11

RELIGION UNBUNDLED
Excited that this paper proposing a new paradigm for the sociology of US religion @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social, @jlkucinskas.bsky.social, @bsteens.bsky.social and I have been working on has been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review.

osf.io/preprints/so...

On a day of much media news, very excited to share this chat w/the CAPTivated podcast team on @bishopofwestsaxons.bsky.social and my new work on right-wing media.

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

is life just a series of days where you're tired in the afternoon and wide awake at night, running behind on weekly deadlines, and seeing pants get slim and big and then slim again over the years until you die?

Continuity and Change in Trust in Scientists in the United States: Demographic Stability and Partisan Polarization Abstract. Americans’ trust in scientists has been stable and high, relative to other political and social institutions, for the last half century (Krause,

"Concomitant with the emergent partisan gap [in trust in science] is a massive perceptual gap among Democrats, who perceive a partisan divide more than double its actual size. Democrats vastly underestimate Republicans’ trust in scientists" academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card

Back in my day, you got your black coffee right at the register.

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️

goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

Study finds potential link between high-fat cheese and lower risk of dementia A study out of Sweden has looked at the possible link between eating more high-fat cheese, like cheddar, gouda and brie, and a lower risk of developing dementia.

me: Nutrition research is often quite lacking in its methods but at the same time the world leader in meme virality, by regularly uncovering things we want to be true to feel better about the food identity we have developed.

also me: this study must be true.

www.ctvnews.ca/health/artic...

20/20. I’m 41. Typewriter is the one that just nicked me.

Cool cool cool

These Indiana Republicans are civic heroes. Shocking and inspiring to see after the collapse of resistance to illiberalism among so many of their counterparts over the last decade.

Proud of my Republican state lawmakers tonight

Abstract: Recent political communication scholarship finds that groups and identities play a central role in the crises faced by political and media systems globally, particularly in democracies. Yet an individualist orientation in the literature has resulted in key theoretical and conceptual limitations, preventing a broader group-centric theoretical framework from emerging. We synthesize disparate bodies of theory on groups, politics, and communication to offer three basic propositions underlying a group theory of political communication. First, it is the group—not the individual—that is the fundamental organizing unit of social and political life. Second, groups are constituted through communication, which is central to how they define their politics. Third, groups and politics are reciprocally influencing forces through political communication, oriented around power. We offer a framework for studying the role of groups in political communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels, providing a concrete agenda for the study of groups in political communication.

🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social, we (w/ @dkreiss.bsky.social, @danlane.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social) critique political communication's "Identity Turn" and offer instead a foundation for studying #polcomm from a *group* perspective. 🧵

Sufjan Stevens: “Should Have Known Better” Read Jeremy Gordon’s review of the track.

pitchfork.com/reviews/trac... "halfway through, an uplifting electric keyboard line kicks in; ... his voice shakes off the ice and forms a chorus with itself ... It’s the dawn at the end of a long night, a prayer that past traumas might be healed by a beautiful present."

This pattern is stark enough, and so confined to political views (same by political party ID), and the pandemic hitting so hard, that it makes me think people might be defining their political views based on their attitude toward science, rather than the reverse.

Anyways, this is really bad.
/4

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Glad to see others taking on the issues with “polarization” as a dominant yet over-simplistic lens through which to see politics. Will be essential reading alongside @dkreiss.bsky.social & @shannimcg.bsky.social (2023): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Abstract for the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-025-00779-4

🚨new article🚨

"Polarisation" has become one of those terms commonly used to discuss the dire state of politics and democracy today

Here @juanroch.bsky.social, @daniel-balinhas.bsky.social and I argue that this simplistic framing is counterproductive

🧵Thread🧵

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Beyond Polarization: Right-Wing News as a Quasi-religious Phenomenon - Marcus Mann, Daniel Winchester, 2025 Research on U.S. political media has demonstrated that mainstream and right-wing news are qualitatively distinct in a variety of ways. However, the dominant par...

Fantastic! Love that many of us are pushing back. Latest from myself and @bishopofwestsaxons.bsky.social if you’re interested. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

On pie. Yes please.