Screenshot from Mastodon, white text on black background: Erik Uden @ErikUden@mastodon.de Once libraries are nonexistent any modern fascist movement wouldn't even have to burn books, but flick one switch and they'd be remotely deleted from your Amazon Kindle or similar digital "library". Capitalists are already building the infrastructure to do this through DRM, so stop believing tech is apolitical - the defunding of libraries and paywalling of information are all part of this.

A reminder during #NationalLibraryWeek, libraries are our best and last defense against the fascist monopoly on knowledge and information

Americans are more polarized in their trust in scientists than in virtually any other societal institution. — James N. Druckman.
(@umisrcps.bsky.social)
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260420-top...

Looking forward to the inaugural EPSS conference!!

Congratulations! So glad you’re here!

Someday, with luck and hard work, she will have a name too.

Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026. Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.

Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics!

Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper.

More soon!

The US is off the regressions line: an extremely high income country where residents think politics need big changes www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Federal judge unloads on ‘unserious’ RFK Jr., says anti-trans policy showed his ‘cruelty’ Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai vacated the “Kennedy Declaration,” finding it unlawfully attempted to override medical standards and restrict care for transgender youth.

Breaking: HHS’s ban on gender-affirming care is struck down. Rarely have I read a ruling this sharply worded.

“This case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

www.advocate.com/politics/nat...

Mike Nellis @MikeNellis "I'M NO LONGER CATHOLIC!" Hannity ABANDONS HIS FAITH for Trump NELLIS X.com • +*+

Amazing that in the national divorce the libs are getting the NFL, butter and cooking oil, being attracted to adult women, standup comedy, Bud Light, and now also Catholicism

Fairfax murdering his wife is a CONTINUATION of his sexual assault of other women. His stress over being held accountable for sexual assault did not make him kill, the assualts and murder have the same cause.

Say it with me:

MERITOCRACY!

There's a lot of talk online about Black femicide that reads as half-baked and reactionary. These sources may add necessary context.

- "Of Fast-Tailed Girls and Freedom," Mikki Kendall

-"North American necropolitics and gender: On# BlackLivesMatter and Black femicide," Shatema Threadcraft

Here are a few reliable sources about Black femicide and violence. I use these works in my Black Feminism course:

- INTIMATE JUSTICE, Shatema Threadcraft

- AMERICA, GODDAM, Treva Lindsey

- ARRESTED JUSTICE, Beth Richie

Exactly. And right after Jesus’s whole “Blessed are the gun owners” sermon…

🤣🤣🤣

God helps those who help themselves.

(Not in the Bible, folks!)

UCS just released a very nice and concise guide for how to stay safe in the public eye -- for scholars and researchers, but also for anyone else concerned about safety during autocratization:
www.ucs.org/sites/de...

For the cost of one Harvard Professor of the Constitution Only Applies to White People, you could endow 10 professorships of any less commonly taught language at any university in the USA

honestly it’s hilarious that he’s trying to fight the pope and the pope is like “I don’t think about you at all”

Absolutely no one surprised that Ariel can be bought off with puns.

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

The 2019 ProPublica TurboTax investigation never gets old

🏆

This is an important point to remember every time some yahoo politician who wants to defund the NSF reads the title of a grant in dumbstruck tones: "They're studying the venom of Gila monsters? What? Who's *that* for?"

All of us, Gomer. It's how science actually works.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

I'll admit, I was initially fooled into thinking this was a real photo.

BREAKING: The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine just issued a formal statement defending Pope Leo XIV's teaching authority on just war doctrine — less than twelve hours after JD Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd the pope should “be careful” talking theology.

This is a serious escalation.

Fun fact, "10,000 steps" has no medical or scientific basis whatsoever, it was made up from thin air for a 1964 Tokyo Olympics tie-in marketing campaign by a Japanese watch company that wanted to start selling pedometers.

I mean, you have to admit, the resemblance is uncanny!

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.

How Economics Discovered Women by Shelly Lundberg - Hardcover Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...