Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything The Biden administration’s favorite centrist pundit produces smug pseudo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded.

www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-opi...

Alexander Kustov @akoustov Matt nails it: "the point of journalism [or science!] is the outputs—bringing facts to light—not the process." Most slop is still human slop. AI just made it impossible to ignore. So, the Q isn't whether to use AI, but how to use the best tools available to reduce human slop. Quote Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias · 20h The case for more AI in journalism

"the point of journalism (or science) is the output, bringing facts to light, not the process"

is definitely something to say.

The Tariff Refund Nightmare - The American Prospect In principle, Americans are owed $166 billion in refunds of Trump’s illegal tariffs. But actually collecting is like unscrambling an egg.

The tariff refund process is going to be a nightmare.
•businesses seek refunds, not the consumers they passed costs through to
•small businesses don't have the same compliance shops
•some refund claims sold to Wall Street
Bob Kuttner has more.
prospect.org/2026/04/21/t...

Study: California’s $20 minimum wage barely raised prices—and proved economists wrong about job loss | Fortune “The results are nowhere as dire as predicted,” Berkeley’s Michael Reich told Fortune.

fortune.com/2026/04/15/u...

My colleagues look at me with blank expressions whenever I say, "The Chronicle of Higher Education is not a trade magazine for colleges & universities. It is a trade magazine for Higher Education managers." Even when they include faculty voices its always edited from the perspective of the managers

This assumes the Chronicle has the capacity for shame.

This is what he initially posted on Bluesky. He got considerable pushback to his asinine thesis, amended it quietly, and the Chronicle decides to give him the chance to avoid acknowledging this, pretend he is reasonable and anyone irritated with him unreasonable/hysterical.
bsky.app/profile/disa...

In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke about AI becoming as divisive as DEI, the prevalence of scholarly slop, and how Bluesky poisons academic discourse. Evan Goldstein: You’ve described the Substack series as “intentionally provocative.” What — or who — were you trying to provoke? Alexander Kustov: I started using Claude Code and other agentic tools, and I was impressed with the possibilities and functionalities. Yet I still hear a lot of negativity about AI from colleagues who haven’t used those tools. The vast majority of folks in academia still think AI is that chatbot interface from a couple of years ago that hallucinates and cannot really do anything. But that’s not what I saw on my computer. I’d written short items about AI, so I thought to try to see whether Claude could assemble that and create a coherent, substantive post. It did a pretty good job. I just posted it. Then I realized it was a big thing.

Kustov: If we look at the best agentic models right now, they can do most quantitative social-science research tasks better than most professors globally. All of the kind of caveats here are important. What made a lot of people upset about this statement is that they interpret it in a very America-centric way. People were thinking about their colleagues at Oxford and R1 research universities. But I was born in Soviet Russia and went to undergrad in Europe. I have seen a lot of human slop. It should not be a controversial statement to say that agentic tools can do better. The value of qualitative research is going up because that’s something that AI cannot do well — ethnography and actually interviewing people in person, especially in hard-to-reach places. If you are gathering new data that is not yet publicly available, that’s the highest value that you can have as a professor and as a researcher. But I just came from an International Studies Association conference. I saw so much poor research that, if anything, I’m more convinced that my original point is correct. Too many people with Ph.D.s, with tenure, are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle has decided to interview Dr Kustov, who repeats his claim that AI agents do "qualitative social science research better than most professors globally"
Imagine having tenure and stability, and choosing to shit on his colleagues in a time of great instability for academia.

The joke that can be posted is not the eternal joke. The meme that can be memed is not the eternal meme.

British universities paid security firm to monitor pro-Palestine students - Liberty Investigates Horus provided reports about student protesters' social media use and undertook background checks on a Palestinian guest speaker

My former employer is selling one of its campuses, ending almost all journal subscriptions, and shutting down programs (& laying off staff) left and right, but it has plenty of money to subject its community to surveillance and thought policing.

Today I managed to complete three complex tasks that my brain was treating as impossible last week.
(Brain, I know you were just trying to protect us, but these tasks needed doing!)

Everyone needs to read Matthew's latest post, because this is what's in store for all of us at some point--being harmed by HCWs whose inadequate training & supervision are policy choices--unless we mobilize to reverse MAHA's cuts to Medicaid & Medicare

The future of making sure you don’t leave this guy alone with your drink

I'm super proud of the work we did on this episode and it would make me SO HAPPY if folks subscribed to our Patreon to watch it early and ad-free. Access starts at $1/month and the money goes to paying everyone on our team a living wage.

This Data Center is Getting a $77 Million Tax Break to Create One Job No other project in the country has gotten such a large subsidy to create so few jobs, according to watchdogs.

Rockland County, NY, gave a $77 million data center tax break to JP Morgan Chase to create exactly one job. On a dollars-per-job basis it appears to be the costliest subsidy in U.S. history, possibly even a world record

nysfocus.com/2026/04/20/d...

The emotional processing parts of our brain are fundamental to reasoning. When they get damaged, people can’t do basic logic.

Emotion is not counter to reason.

Like anything else—pain, multiple streams of information, noise—it can *distract* you, but that’s different.

It’s incredibly frustrating to me that in 2026 people are still holding to the idea that:

1) feeling emotion is antithetical to being able to reason

2) not showing emotion is the same as not being affected by emotion

People keep seeing techbros/STEM-only fanatics/Silocon Valley as rational because engineer types like to *think* they are the poster children for rationality and we have allowed our cultural archetype for high intelligence to be them, but

they’re HIGHLY irrational and now -> Christian nationalist.

FOR RELEASE: Upon Receipt April 20, 2026 STATEMENT OF THE COMMITTEE ON ETHICS REGARDING SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AND WORKPLACE RIGHTS The Committee on Ethics (Committee) is dedicated to maintaining a congressional workplace free from sexual misconduct and ensuring that any individuals responsible for misconduct are held responsible for their behavior. There should be zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, harassment, or discrimination in the halls of Congress, or in any employment setting. The Committee is also dedicated to providing transparency for the American public. The Committee has a long history of investigating allegations of sexual misconduct by Members of the House, ranging from criminal sexual activity to behavior implicating civil employment discrimination laws and more general standards of conduct. The Committee has always made public its findings whenever allegations of sexual misconduct were substantiated. The Committee does not handle sexual harassment lawsuits or have any involvement in settlements of such claims. In 2018, the Committee championed the passage of the CAA Reform Act, which required automatic referrals to this Committee of Member reimbursement of sexual harassment awards or settlements paid out of a U.S. Treasury fund and publication of such awards or settlements (here). Since the enactment of that legislation, the Committee has not been notified of any awards or settlements relating to allegations of sexual harassment by a Member. Civil claims of sexual harassment can be filed with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR) (here), and the Office of Employee Advocacy (OEA) can assist House staffers in filing such claims and seeking restitution (here). Regardless of whether a claim is brought through formal channels, individuals who have been the victim of or who are otherwise aware of any sexual misconduct, regardless of whether they are a House employee, can submit a complaint with the Committee at any time through the Committee’s

Apropos of, well, everything, the House Ethics Committee is out with a press release declaring, "There should be zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, harassment, or discrimination in the halls of Congress.

ethics.house.gov/wp-content/u...

This goes extra intensely for academic writing, in my opinion. If you're using gAI to think (because that is what writing is) why should anyone read it? And sending AI generated writing off for peer review is just...

If not illegal bribery, why so bribery shaped?

A New, Highly Mutated COVID Variant Called 'Cicada' Is Spreading in the US. Know These Symptoms The heavily mutated new BA.3.2 COVID-19 variant, aka "cicada," is circulating in at least 31 U.S. states, data show. What to know about its spread and symptoms.

I have Long Covid, I don't want you to get it. Please keep track of the latest Covid-19 variations. The newest one is, Cicada. It's currently spreading through 31 states, and could give us trouble this summer! #MASKUP😷

You know what a super spread event is!

www.today.com/health/coron...

alt-text is primarily for people with vision impairments, but *not just* for them.

VERY COOL PERSON: It's four-twenty, you know what that means?

ME: Hell yeah! [starts shoving blackbirds into a pie]

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought

Political strategy 101: it is typically considered Not Great to be apologising for appointing a paedophile enabler as ambassador to the United States two and a half weeks before important local and regional elections.

I have more questions:

What happens to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and small NPR member stations whose budgets were devastated?

Is anyone encouraging rich people to adopt rural NPR stations, rather than the main network?

This is a stopgap. What is the long-term plan?

I've noticed a trend on this platform a lot where people don't do alt text for a lot of things (obviously) but they ESPECIALLY don't do it for graphs and charts. Y'know: the visual data that the general public MOST OFTEN need explained and contextualized? So that's kind of weird.

Also, to be clear and fair, i notice this exact same trend in scientific papers: Tables and figures with names but no actual descriptions, even in the text of the paper that's supposed to contextualize them.

The thing does not always speak for itself, people. Most often does not, in fact.

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.