I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Literature & Government, or L&G with the LG, a lecture series engaging campuses across Virginia in thoughtful dialogue on democracy, leadership, and public life.
Coming to a campus near you!
Posts by Karin Kitchens
Well this is interesting
Excellent thread.
The TL:DR from a large randomized control trial, is that AI use makes you dumb and lazy, and does so very quickly
RESULT: Democrats have flipped this school board seat in Tulsa.
They ousted the conservative board member I wrote about here, who suggested that immigrant children endanger other kids.
hey @abigailspanberger.com please pay some attention to the BOV at Virginia Tech. GOP members are trying to kill our on campus living learning programs using your name.
they claim "affordability" but what it'll do is drive upperclassmen off campus and into housing owned by some members of the BOV
Washington Post Trump warns ‘a whole civilization will die’ if Iran doesn’t make a deal The president had issued a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time for Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz, pledging destruction by midnight if leaders don’t comply. April 7, 2026 at 9:22 a.m. EDT26 minutes ago 2 min
Completely unstable and perilous. The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a president who wants to commit war crimes. We cannot sit idly by as Donald Trump threatens to end an entire civilization.
President Trump threatened to obliterate every power station and bridge in a country of 90 million people on Tuesday night in prime time and basically no one is bothering to even ask him how that is not a “war” that would require authorization from Congress under Article I of the Constitution.
Quick reminder that the US Congress can stop this anytime it wants to, and that it is the appropriate remedy for executive lawlessness.
Yeah, yeah. I know.
"My patient is refusing a drug studied in 170,000 people because of side effects that a 124,000-person analysis just confirmed do not exist — while injecting a compound studied in 14 humans, from unregulated sources, based on the recommendation of someone who profits from selling it."
Heather Cox Richardson has a larger audience than almost any dudefluencer. More informed. Better values & policy preferences. And yet there are no profiles, no elevation or lionization, because there's *nothing* US media is less interested in than middle-aged lib women. No diner interviews for them.
Unions get all the hate, but school district leaders have been an effective counter to right-wing plans for schools—especially in the South.
Whatever else it is, targeting school districts themselves is about removing a major voice for local communities
Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities
Nerd time! :)
I mapped every 4-year college in U.S. higher education along two dimensions (institutional resilience & post-college market position) using federal data plus a novel measure of institutional AI exposure I created.
Institution search on the front page!
kylesaunders.com/university-m...
The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled.
A truly extraordinary moment.
We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.
Act like it.
tomorrow is with one of the biggest election days of the year. there's so much to go over it's hard to know where to start.
so, let me help:
here are the *10* elections i'm watching the most closely, *at the state and local level* (=no federal elections included!)
🧵:
I know all eyes are on Minneapolis, but there's a fast-approaching nightmare in Springfield, Ohio.
Trump is revoking protected status for tens of thousands of Haitians living there on Feb. 3.
Reportedly, on Feb. 4, 1000 ICE agents are arriving to remove this population. Ethnic cleansing.
Post from Pete Buttigieg that reads: If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we’re in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity.
I am not being snarky. I need my colleagues who wrote on covid school lockdowns to engage with this. To be as loud as they have been about prior "learning loss." Hell, you can cite Tom & Mark's AERJ paper so you feel better that there's some econ somewhere in your argument.
This is such valuable advice and put plainly. Please take a moment.
TY @tressiemcphd.bsky.social
This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.
This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...
Congress scholar here. This is good advice.
For some reason, very few people these days will stand up and say it, but: the US federal bureaucracy is one of the great wonders of the world, staffed with incredibly diligent people who do their jobs well and care deeply.
Trump's destruction of the federal apparaus was a historic crime.
Explain to Congress how important it is to keep multiyear funding of NIH grants in the funding bill.
This protects against Russell Vought's trick, which is to make this year's NIH budget cover multiple years of research in advance.
Tell your Congresscritter. US Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.
APSA Ed Politics & Policy Virtual Conference Presentation Schedule is up! It is free to attend and will take place February 26th from 12:00 to 3:30pm EST. connect.apsanet.org/s51/events/
This beautifully written piece by my pal @adambonica.bsky.social is worth your time today.
A bit of light amid the darkness.
open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...
Stephen Colbert on the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good: “The message from this administration is clear. Only they determine the truth. And when their forces come to your city: obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey. This should be an alarm bell for the entire country.”
To ring in the new year, I'm excited to announce the launch of the Politics of Education Lab (PEdL) at the Stanford GSE. The goal is to advance understanding of the political dimensions of education policymaking to help policymakers and practitioners strengthen school systems.
pedl.stanford.edu
When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.) Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.
The right, along the Roberts Court, is trying to nullify the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing equality under the law, in order to restore the Antebellum Constitution, which envisions “liberty” as an eternal aristocracy of race and class (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
Don’t look away. sahanjournal.com/immigration/...