I am delighted to share that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join our Department of Economics @econ.uzh.ch at the University of Zurich on July 1, 2026, as Lemann Foundation Professors of Economics.

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Happy to share my new personal website! I'm available for speaking engagements, esp. related to my academic and post-ac career trajectory as a humanities/social science scholar working in national lab and policy spaces, possibly of interest to grad students/ECRs.

Get in touch!

www.matthenryphd.com

@chrischirp.bsky.social is doing a fantastic work here
www.trumpactiontracker.info

The UK edition of ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM is out today! I loved working on this novel about how to remain human in the age of ubiquitous AI. Readers in the UK can pick it up wherever you prefer to get your books. @headofzeus.bsky.social

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/all-that-...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Post rations. force them to wait in a Scroll breadline. etc.

starting to think this whole "posting" thing is becoming a problem

state security force defections are *the* mechanism for successful dissent! get it together y'all

your post gets at the heart of it. in any civil conflict there is a wide civilian middle that lacks ideological reasons and/or material pressures to become a 'combatant' (broadly defined). but as political violence worsens, they can be persuaded to support the side that can guarantee their security.

right now the primary problem I see is that to the mostly uninterested middle it is not immediately clear that the opposition groups to the revanchist Trump regime can 1) guarantee future safety and 2) deliver any future benefits, either social, economic, or political

Miller's instinct is to propagandize with one hand and repress opposition supporters on the other, and it's a delicate balance that better experts than him have tried to design around and failed (from the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual below)

this unleashes a thorny collective action problem: civvies want to stay safe, and they'll become more active supporters of the side that can keep them safe; but they also fear future reprisals from the opposition if they support one side too strongly.

your post gets at the heart of it. in any civil conflict there is a wide civilian middle that lacks ideological reasons and/or material pressures to become a 'combatant' (broadly defined). but as political violence worsens, they can be persuaded to support the side that can guarantee their security.

Watching so many people in high places go through the motions of polling and median-voter whispering can make you feel like you're in Bodysnatchers. It's worth a reminder that the typical experience of tyranny is...basically normal life. Which means we have to will ourselves to fight harder.

using dark magic to raise Anthony Downs from the grave and force him to score these candidates on his ideological axis

Henry Farrell on the Trump admin’s proposed “compact” for universities, arguing that the rollout signals weakness, and that academics need to band together to reject this authoritarian attack on university independence and academic freedom.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

a very good place to start is this recent piece on civilian social media behavior during civil war:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

so, too, does the time horizon change. elections are no longer the single focus point; there will be many emergent events that require election-like mobilization responses, and unfortunately the state has deep agenda setting power here, typically through the use of repression.

if you're in the US context, it's time to shift your idea of "mobilization" from GOTV and fundraising to more kinetic and immediate audience actions: supplying information to different groups and contesting physical spaces.

this is a good thread that finally reckons with the more primordial politics at play. there is a long, rich research tradition in conflict studies about the behavior of and strategy towards influencing audiences - by state security forces, by non-state armed actors. they all apply in the US now.

Monstrous.

"federal agents detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early Tuesday morning."

that pile of logits is growing very tall indeed

New paper out with @dasalgon.bsky.social: “Far-Right Agenda Setting: How the Far Right influences the Political Mainstream” doi.org/10.1017/S1475676525100066 #openaccess in @ejprjournal.bsky.social🧵

Call for Papers now open for the

Cambridge Disinformation Summit, 8-10 April 2026.

Research on systemic risks from technology that affects information streams or the amplification or monetization of disinformation.

Hosted with @mctd.bsky.social.

Information: www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/events/cambr...