Mo Torres
LightNews LightNews
banner
motorres.bsky.social
Mo Torres
@motorres.bsky.social
1.4K followers 300 following 470 posts
sociologist: cities, political economy, race/racism
umich.edu/~motorres
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mo Torres
veenadubal.bsky.social
Maybe it’s not that TOO MANY students are getting emotional/psychological related accommodations when they don’t really need them, & more that record inequality, growing authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, & massive debt together are actually having a fraying impact on young people.
December 3, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
amlibraryassoc.bsky.social
NEWS: The Institute of Museum & Library Services has restored ALL previously canceled federal grants to libraries, following a ruling by a federal judge in Rhode Island last month.

This is a massive win for libraries & communities in every state & territory!

Learn more: www.ala.org/news/2025/12...
ALL IMLS grants restored in every state & territory. In response to a ruling from a federal judge in Rhode Island, the Institute of Museum and Library Services reinstated all previously canceled grants in every state and territory. It's a huge win for libraries and our communities. "The reinstatement of all IMLS grants means that libraries across the country will be able to resume vital services for learning, imagination, and economic opportunity. We are breathing a sigh of relief, but the fight is not over." ALA President Sam Helmick. Show up for our libraries, American Library Association.
December 3, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
tressiemcphd.bsky.social
I will say, if I never again hear “private public partnership” again in my life, I will have heard it enough.
December 3, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
erikmbaker.bsky.social
Very honored to see Make Your Own Job recommended on the New Yorker's "Best Books of 2025" list www.newyorker.com/best-books-2...
December 3, 2025 at 5:45 PM
motorres.bsky.social
Another year as a loyal @thedigradio.bsky.social listener 🎧💙
December 3, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
gilduran.com
Unfortunately, in US journalism it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered "biased" to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.
November 30, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social
"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms. 令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.
December 3, 2025 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
stanfordpress.bsky.social
In Demolishing Detroit by Nick Caverly, innovative field work reveals how infrastructural systems—buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins—maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

https://ow.ly/sKpa50XAiag
Book cove of Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures by Nicholas L. Caverly
December 2, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
jboothhistory.bsky.social
Finally, a good and powerful response from a dem elected official (combined with action! see the thread)
mollycoleman.bsky.social Molly Coleman @mollycoleman.bsky.social · 1d
Today, the president said some of the most racist, vile shit I’ve ever heard said out loud about our Somali neighbors, friends, and family members. And it’s not just words—he also launched new attacks on our community because we’ve dared to try to build an inclusive, multiracial society.
December 3, 2025 at 5:12 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
anodynesix.bsky.social
"My workplace is one of the few rooms in the prison with air conditioning. It's there to keep the computers cool, but I feel the added benefit myself ... I fall into my work. When I get into a groove, it almost feels like I'm back in a college computer lab."
December 2, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
prisonjournalism.bsky.social
No prison job has ever stimulated me as much as Braille transcriber.
How I Learned to Transcribe Braille in Prison
Braille books, business cards and tactile maps are often crafted in prisons throughout the U.S. The job is more fun than most prison work.
prisonjournalismproject.org
December 2, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
bachynski.bsky.social
“They’re bending traffic laws, getting impatient with pedestrians and embracing the idea that when it comes to city driving, politeness doesn’t pay… Waymo has been trying to make its cars “confidently assertive,” says Chris Ludwick, a senior director of product management with Waymo”
December 3, 2025 at 4:01 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
Federal Government Announces Racial Profiling Campaign, Explains It’s Because of the President’s Personal Bigotry
December 2, 2025 at 11:35 PM
motorres.bsky.social
“Capitol Gains” would be an excellent title
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 1d
After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social
"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms. 令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.
December 3, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
erikmbaker.bsky.social
Please check out the whole thing – this is just scraping the surface of all that this issue has to offer! And in case you missed it, you can read my contribution here. www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learne...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life
Self-Help Gets Philosophical
www.thedriftmag.com
December 2, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
danimmergluck.bsky.social
💥 💥💥New Article Alert.

"The ‘Beginning of the end’ for the Atlanta Way? Not so fast."

First 50 copies free (please use your library access if available).

Library access: doi.org/10.1080/0266...

First 50 free (if no library access): www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CQ4VX...
ABSTRACT The city of Atlanta is well known for its corporate-led white–Black urban regime and the ‘Atlanta Way,’ an approach that neglects the city’s low-income residents. Under Mayor Andre Dickens, the city made some changes in affordable housing policy, including standing up a new social housing developer and implementing a housing trust fund. National media and think tanks have praised the Dickens Administration for these efforts. Because affordable housing is a key component of equitable urban policy and planning, do such efforts signal a ‘beginning of the end’ of the Atlanta Way? Unfortunately, I find that the answer is no. I argue that these somewhat stronger affordable housing efforts do not constitute any sort of paradigm shift. The city has yet to address the undertaxation of commercial real estate, leaving it unable to capture a sufficient share of the growth in land values for more equitable development, and it has failed to devote sufficient resources towards deeply affordable housing for the lowest-income Atlantans. Moreover, the city derailed a referendum on its Cop City project, a major investment in policing favored by corporate interests. In the end, the Atlanta Way still seems to be very much alive.
December 2, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
anthonymkreis.bsky.social
Imagine doing something so repugnant that you get a lifetime ban from the American Economic Association.
aeainformation.bsky.social AEA Information @aeainformation.bsky.social · 1d
The AEA has imposed a lifetime ban on Lawrence H. Summers’ membership and participation in AEA activities. See the full statement here. www.aeaweb.org/news/aea-sta...
Statement from the American Economic Association
www.aeaweb.org
December 2, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
pardoguerra.bsky.social
Some quick thoughts on who is to blame for the fact that many admits to UCSD don't meet the standards for middle school math.

TL;DR: The Regents.

pardoguerra.org/2025/12/02/r...
Reading is fundamental. Even for Regents.
UC San Diego was recently in the news and not for the best reasons. Following the publication of a comprehensive report written by faculty and administrators on the preparation of recent undergradu…
pardoguerra.org
December 2, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
hypervisible.blacksky.app
Tech bros 🤝 eugenics
Silicon Valley sets its sights on building the perfect baby | Fortune
Tech-savvy parents to be are using IVF and screening embryos to build families in ways that were unimaginable a few short years ago.
fortune.com
December 1, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
Some new evidence that the 911 non-police mobile crisis response program in Eugene, OR is a helpful criminal justice policy

yotamshemtov.github.io/files/cahoot...
December 1, 2025 at 10:55 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
volts.wtf
Lol, Zillow tried to rate the climate risks facing individual properties. The real estate industry *hated* it, precisely because it worked -- it made selling risky properties more difficult. So they rebelled & Zillow caved.

Don't look up!
Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings
www.nytimes.com
November 30, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
every neoliberal policy analyst wants to "trim the fat" of society until the lean times come. community level resilience, redundancies, etc are good actually
josiegz.bsky.social Josie Glausiusz @josiegz.bsky.social · 3d
When power went out across all of Puerto Rico on 16 April, a lot of the lights in the town of Adjuntas stayed on. A combination of experimental microgrids, solar panels, and storage kept power on for many businesses and residents.

spectrum.ieee.org/puerto-rico-...
Could Microgrids Be Puerto Rico's Answer to Endless Blackouts?
Meanwhile, feds redirect $365 million away from solar toward grid fixes
spectrum.ieee.org
November 30, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
jbenmenachem.com
This critique is elaborated by Kristin Luker (Salsa Dancing in the Social Sciences, Ch. 2). She argues that the switch happens as a result of WW2 and changes in survey technology, which boosted the professional status of sociologists and reconfigured internal methods status hierarchies.
Under the rubric of “social arithmetic,” Addams and her colleagues used surveys and other quantitative methods to do something close to what we moderns might call a “needs assessment” of the community in which she was located, although that doesn’t begin to do justice to the scope and vision of Hull-House Maps and Papers.10 The men in the sociology department at Chicago, however, found social arithmetic (that is, quantitative methods) much too rigid, not subtle enough, and too “feminine” to do the real sociology they had in mind, and turned instead to life documents, participant observation, and verstehen (“sympathetic understanding”), a methodology that reached its apogee in the monumental, much-cited (though not often read these days) Polish Peasant of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki.11 If you wanted to think about this sociologically, you might argue that this disagreement was shaped by the different material and ideal interests (in Max Weber’s terms) of the men and women undertaking social research in and around the University of Chicago in the early years of the twentieth century.12 In terms of material interests, many of the men, having had advanced training in philosophy, often in Germany, possessed the kinds of cultural capital likely to be enhanced and valued should verstehen become the dominant way to view social reality. Or as Albion Small put it, “It should be said that sociology is a pursuit which should be undertaken only by those whose philosophical talents and training are of the first order.”13 The different ideal interests of the men and women, moreover, tended to reinforce their material interests. That same education in philosophy that had given male academics forms of cultural capital amenable to verstehen had at the same time sensitized them to debates about epistemology, and in particular the much-discussed “objectivity” then being actively debated by the leading nineteenth-century philosophers with whom they had studied.14 As a consequence… But today, if you have taken a methodology course as an undergraduate or a graduate student in an American sociology department (or most of the other social sciences), it’s likely you did not get a great deal of training in the study of life documents and participant observation, the kinds of things these early professional (male) sociologists took to be key to social inquiry. (Anthropologists are the only social scientists I know of who are expected to engage in participant observation, and historians sometimes study life documents, but my highly unscientific survey of top departments in these two disciplines suggests that “methodology” is something that students are expected to pick up along the way, rather than something they study formally.)15 In fact, if your training was anything like mine, you may well have picked up quite the opposite message—that qualitative techniques are unscientific, soft, and (although people rarely say this out loud) feminine. Verstehen, the sympathetic understanding of Weber, now has connotations of tea and sympathy—a methodology not quite masculine enough for a “real” science. “Rigorous” training in the social sciences is now defined as quantitative, and the more abstractly mathematical, the better. A typical course in methods briefly covers how to execute a piece of survey research, the brevity premised on the notion that most people will either “outsource” any surveys that they do or will take lots more courses on survey research. Then the bulk of the course, a course designed to teach everyday social scientists how to do research, is spent on learning how to do the statistical manipulation of the data thus gathered, with a particular emphasis on linear models. (I exaggerate to prove my point, but not by much.) The “Swiss Army knife” used so much in social research these days is linear regression, which, along with its relatives, forms the basis of a set of techniques that seem to be at the core of most “methods” courses. Three int…
December 1, 2025 at 12:41 AM
Reposted by Mo Torres
golikehellmachine.com
this is just rank cowardice, the student very obviously disregarded the instructions and the assignment to antagonize her peers and instructors and provoke this exact reaction, society simply can’t function when the people in charge scurry like kicked dogs every time some troll bully says boo
November 30, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Reposted by Mo Torres
golikehellmachine.com
the primary thing that TPUSA provides to young conservatives is a blueprint for weaponizing the abject cowardice of university administrators against individual teachers and instructors, and university admins should take a long look in the mirror and think about what that says about them
kissphoria.bsky.social gwen howerton @kissphoria.bsky.social · 3d
OU has put the professor here on administrative leave:
November 30, 2025 at 8:51 PM