I put together this "experiment checklist" for the grad students in my experiments class -- practical advice for experimental design. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lwbco...

🚨New Working Paper!🚨

How do Americans mentally map political coalitions?

We often talk as if U.S. politics is just two sorted camps. But when people think about which groups go with which, the picture is more complicated.

🧵👇

I am sympathetic to the COVID years hypothesis, that this batch of 18-22s were 12-17 when COVID started so missed some core years of middle / high school learning to apply concepts; that combined with the word-prediction machine has attenuated these skills.

I would probably give up and xeriscape it with gravel, put in pavers and seating, or another planting bed.

Just saw a Facebook reel of raviolis having a rave (“rave-iolis”) and you know what?! That *is* the kind of content I want more of in my feed.

Screenshotted excerpt from linked article reading as follows: "In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately."

OOP

New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!'

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

Another data point in “originalism is a fraud.” So much for the law is the law we can’t think about the impact. They rail against “results oriented judging” in public but when their corporate clients make requests they know exactly what to do. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

“not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Also may just be that after $100M in ads they’ve made up their minds? 🤷🏻‍♀️

X factor is new voters who skipped round 1.

hey @lukewarfordtx.bsky.social can you please share your polling methods for that survey?

I was working on a doc simultaneously with my RA's today and OneDrive had "word predictor" turned on and I almost lost my shit as it kept predicting incorrect words. Let me fucking type!!!

Ok I decided to read the whole PDF (yes I have other work to do right now duh).
1. Paxton up 48-40 in trial heat
2. Hunt voters split 45-32 for Paxton
3. Looks like Trump-for-Paxton thing could help pull some Cornyn to Paxton; but even so (Q20) Paxton still leads.
4. Ah, question 21. Heh.

Contact method (live dial / SMS / robo), sample, weighting etc.

On the surface to me it’s surprising that in this pool of voters, the Trump endorsement is not more impactful.

Just saw the Sue Bird / Megan Rapinoe news and reader I GASPED 😲😲😲😲

Then thought about how much of their podcast is talking about how much they argue 🤔

Also after some deep inspection, my initial question of “is he smoking a blunt or a carrot” reveals that the orthogonal mouth-adjacent object is, in fact, his finger.

I just want to be clear that I will read an 8000 word article about how his political career is leading people to discover his music.

1. Anyone got a methods survey? That's Luke, former Dem staff / Dem RR Commish candidate.
2. Eeeenteresting that Trump would backfire for this sample of voters AND that this sample seems open to Jimmy (err, James).

I just wanna see James offer a prayer of forgiveness to the Adultering Pen Thief.

... and given that $$ is speech these days, the old-school organic influence over opinion that the socio-cultural elite once partially held is perhaps subsumed now by the economic elite's ability to not just buy up ads, but buy up entire media industries.

This is a really interesting conflation of what "socio-economic status" means. Social =/= economic. There are social roles (based usually on employment) with high(er) culture capital but those may not (often do not!) convey the economic capital of, say, a banking executive.

“The next Einstein” dies every day in a favela or informal settlement, from malaria, dysentery, pollution, dirty water, preventable disease, and poverty. All fixable problems, but humans who *could* fix them choose not to.

final-FINAL-thisone.docx

mamdani being a cheerful normal guy that people project absolute insane things on is one of the things that make him very relatable to me, personally

oh COME ON why are the bad guys so dumb?! Scooby Doo villains had more intellect.

Are more and more politicians embracing profanity? There are now scores of examples of political figures in the English-speaking world who are openly embracing the expletive.

In which I argue that politics is downstream of culture.

news.northeastern.edu/2026/04/15/t...

Not enough to flip districts, gotta elect people who don’t suck.

Two Lessons from Hungary for 2026 and 2028 Unity and accountability.

I think there are two key takeaways for Americans from Peter Magyar’s ouster of Orbán:

1. We must rally overwhelmingly behind the 2028 Dem nominee
2. We have to be ready to send people to prison if we win

My latest for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/two-lessons-...

At this point I’m mostly 😒 at the voters of Maine. Big yikes that it’s all not entirely disqualifying.

School Committee race marked by controversy over candidate’s Town Meeting votes on LGBTQ+ resolutions - Brookline.News Aylit Schultz's decision last year not to vote in favor of two resolutions supporting the LGBTQ+ community has led to widespread criticism.

One candidate's past Town Meeting votes to abstain from LGBTQ+ resolutions take center stage in the Brookline School Committee election.

She's also been criticized for comments on the deaths of children in Gaza that she says were taken out of context.

brookline.news/school-commi...

Who is privileged enough to get so many extra chances? Women legislators must “wait their turn” but this guy gets to fuck up all the way to the U.S. Senate.