In which I cite @twallack.bsky.social's excellent WaPo piece on higher ed from this weekend.
"The bachelor's degree is now multiple products that share a name. The hackers priced the cheapest ones first."
Apparently both LaTeX and Typst now support accessible pdfs for screen readers, which is great news.
For folks writing in Quarto, check out this handy guide for making your pdfs accessible with just a quick argument in the file YAML.
quarto.org/docs/blog/po...
LET IT FALL
🚨 I have an article out at APR titled “Educational Polarization in American Politics: More than Just a Diploma Divide” in which i look at how educational attainment shapes public opinion and political behavior across the entire education spectrum, not just the across the degree/no degree binary 1/x
The plan was for Iran to capitulate in response to threats, or quickly fold in the face of airstrikes and assassinations, empowering new leaders who then capitulate.
There is no backup plan. Never was.
Their whole worldview is that strength gets you whatever you want and bluster equals strength.
Ugh. Just the worst
Every glasses wearer's worst nightmare
A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois
Brutal.
They were trying and failing to get people to subscribe at $20/mo and each 60 second video was costing the company $15-18 in costs to make.
That’s it, everybody, right there. That’s the Economics of AI. Visionary stuff.
Anne Applebaum explains Trump
Selection from Dante's Inferno that reads: "here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls far more than were above: they strained their chest against enormous weights and with mad howls rolled them at one another. Then in haste they rolled them back one party shouting out: why do you hoard? And the other? Why do you waste?"
From Wikipedia:
Basically Dante's fourth circle of hell
Graph showing how fast democracy has declined in the USA compared to five prominent cases of autocratization in the last 25 years. The U.S. line show a sharp drop over just two years, while it took Hungary over four years, Serbia eight years, and both India and Türkiye about a decade and Russia almost 14 years to reach the same total drop.
#DR26 The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index (LDI) has declined by 24 %, from 0.75 in 2024 to 0.57 in 2025.
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#Polisky #PoliSciSky #PolDataSky
friend, this is Marcus Junius Brutus
CAESAR has declared himself DICTATOR FOR LIFE and MUST BE STOPPED
can you rush a donation of ten denarii today to show that you STAND WITH THE REPUBLIC?
Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.
My 2 cents: this is random noise plus very cold weather plus long term trend of NYC becoming a playground for the rich and pricing out the poor.
A short history of the end times/rapture in the American military.
Cold war: Forces were seen as the defense against godless communism, but also as a rich environment for missionary outreach.
1959 - National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) estimated 50% of those in service were not affiliated
The Trump administration has such an impoverished view of power. Power only for domination, never service. Power only to cause fear, never love or inspiration or admiration.
That type of power can be successful - for a time. It is the power of empire. But it is also self-defeating in the long-term
Even more important is that in mid-90s, the Republican Party believed in policy. There was real energy at work to craft policy the key actors believed would benefit Americans (whether one agrees with that belief is beside the point). That does not exist in the Trump GOP. Nihilism as platform.
I don't think this is accurate - there are many ways the party's agenda and goals have changed: trade and immigration (which you mention) at the forefront, but major differences in the salience and even direction of election policy, morality policy, civil rights and racial equality, ed policy...
An administration wielding lawless, performative violence—violence for the sake of spectacle—both at home and abroad.
This is so good
context: transgender Americans are moving to other states at at least triple the rate of all American adults.
The fact that there’s a secret network of doulas going around Minneapolis to help with home births for parents afraid of ICE should be front-page news.
These children, born in secrecy, are American citizens.
Interested in learning more advanced approaches to text analysis, machine learning or network analysis this summer? The University of Strathclyde @strathpolir.bsky.social is offering successive methods classes this June.
How do you nominate? Just send an email or DM with the paper attached and tell us that you're submitting. If you want, you can also say what you think is good/innovative/important/useful about the paper, but even that isn't necessary.
You of course could nominate other good papers you saw at conferences in 2025. Perhaps you know of a graduate student at your university who is doing great work on the U.S. states - please nominate them!
I'm on the committee ( with @meghanleonard.bsky.social and Justin Crofoot) to give both awards - you can email me or DM for info.
Deadline is this Monday, Feb 16th!
