This is sort of a classic prisoners' dilemma: If nobody defects, nobody has "priority". Which makes it essential that universities coordinate a united front.

Beautiful day on campus today, trying to touch a little grass with everything going on.

Trump's higher ed ransom note is here - everyone would have to acquiesce to their unprecedented demands or not be "given priority for grants," plus they can demand "reimbursement" for "violations" www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

A mechanism to enforce fealty. An attack on academic freedom and democracy

Here is the January-June 2025 APSA eJobs report for the #polisky people: apsanet.org/wp-content/u...

The Damage Done: @marianneguenot.bsky.social tells the story of clinical trials derailed by the administration's reckless science policy, across kidney disease, HIV, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. Years of work and money thrown away, at times just short of a cure.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

useful piece. again and again it seems LLMs can be very useful *if you know what you are doing and are familiar with their strengths and limitations* lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/29/90...

That's quite the chart annotation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Re-reading Skowronek’e “Building a New American State” in 2025 as the administrative state continues to be whittled away is quite the experience.

Trying to phrase as delicately as possible to abide by TOS and cover my ass: Nullifying the plain text of the Constitution as explicitly meant by those that penned it for the purpose of voiding a right to citizenship crosses a threshold that cannot be uncrossed and I hope even this SCOTUS sees that.

"Student arrivals to the US dropped 19% in August year-on-year to just over 313,000 – a fifth consecutive month of declines" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation.

i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.

Ah, the well known “efficiency of operations” exception to the guarantee of speech free from punishment by the government.

“It adds the university's interest in the efficiency of operations may outweigh an employee's rights of free expression.”

krcgtv.com/news/local/m...

New work about how perceptions of social consensus shape belief. My sense is that the design of social media, w/ signals of engagement on top of massive attention flows, shapes social consensus… a key factor (IMO ) of information disorder.

One of Bari Weiss’s reporters over at the Free Press was shocked to discover what Columbia students are reading in class:

lol wat

Cannot recommend enough the @bretdevereaux.bsky.social series on what Sparta was actually like, deep and accessible dive into a monstrous society that built an outsized reputation on a fragile system of pure cruelty and ho-hum but ultimately fleeting military success

acoup.blog/2019/08/16/c...

This “explicit” is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. It’s not ambiguous.

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

Nothing but respect for my Burning Man

NEWS: CVS, the largest pharmacy chain in the country, is currently not offering Covid vaccines in 16 states and DC — even to people who meet the new FDA criteria — because the CDC hasn't signed off and isn't expected to do so (if it does so) for at least three weeks.

A century to build the expert civil service, a few months to burn it down for generations

I hate to say I told you so but...centralizing government data infrastructures and turning them over to inexperiences actors generates big risks to society. We are starting to see the first consequences for social security. Others will follow.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

Looks like we'll get a test of what, exactly, SCOTUS meant in Trump v. Wilcox sooner than we thought.

another orientation, another banner year of "strategic finance."

Notable that AI tools could not even generate accurate meeting summaries beyond “a couple hundred words.” That’s useless for minutes.

And for lit review they *completely* shit the bed.

But these aren’t people’s favorite tasks & AI is way quicker, so many will keep using them, truth be damned.