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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

@wrigleyfield.bsky.social

14K followers 3.6K following 4.6K posts

Sociologist/demographer specializing in mortality, racial inequity, Covid-19. Avid theater-goer, inconsistent powerlifter, and erstwhile operator of an all-volunteer bookstore. Toddler parent. Living not-quite-car-free in Minneapolis. she/her

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · Apr 30

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences?

This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

Three Ways of Looking at Black–White Mortality Differences in the United States | Annual Reviews

Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review arg...

www.annualreviews.org

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Reposted by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Philip Bump @pbump.com · 3h

has patel not read bowling alone

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 4h

I can't find the exact quote, but one of the essays in this book starts with something like, "I can't figure out why nobody seems to like my plays," and I feel this has potential.

(He goes on to rather plaintively note, "I like my plays.")

Essays

Probing essays and observations by acclaimed actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, in his first nonfiction collection.

www.haymarketbooks.org

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 4h

See, this is what I’m saying. It’s a deep bench.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 4h

I’m not a memes person, but I do think it’s surprising that we don’t have a robust ecosystem of Wallace Shawn-based memery

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 9h

“The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability...

The best defense against this weapon is solidarity among groups who disagree ferociously on many questions, but who agree on the need to keep America democratic…“

Deva Woodly @devawo.bsky.social · 9h

@himself.bsky.social talking sense, as usual. Notably: “The administration would have played its cards differently if it had a stronger hand.”

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

www.nytimes.com

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 9h

Presumably your cows did not have the strains of flu that we are now concerned could become pandemic in the future.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 10h

While @bookshop.org is still doing discounts and free shipping, here’s our family’s favorite parenting book that we rarely see recommended. It’s *so good*

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Reposted by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 1d

How should university boards prepare?

- Strategize in advance (could happen here)
- Leverage internal expertise (strategize with political scientists, public policy scholars and law faculty)
- Respond collectively and support one another
-Stay true to the mission

This is the real fiduciary duty!

Jackie Gardina @jackiegardina.bsky.social · 1d

@joshpasek.com, @umich.edu, provides boards of trustees a roadmap for responding to external pressue, like the so-called Educational Compact.

@aaup.org @utaustinaaup.bsky.social @aaup-penn.bsky.social

riverside.fm/shared/expor...

One thing boards can d... | Oct 7, 2025 001 - Riverside - HD Podcast & Video Software

riverside.fm

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

Both of those seem EXTREMELY true to me fwiw

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

I would love to catch up sometime and chat about this!!

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

Thanks! And thank you for giving me the prompt to write an excessively long reply about it 😂

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

I honestly can’t bring myself to read this but I do think it’s very important for people in the US to remember that this is happening right now because of our government.

Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 12h

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

you keep people who want that kind of intellectual engagement in the progression?

Very interested in how all this looks to /is experienced by teachers. K-12 teaching is so much harder than my job.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

it is maybe not the worst thing to have an extremely structured curriculum for core skills if it means all kids get them, and if it also helps teach new teachers to teach, but that you surely also need to retain enough freedom to let teachers use those skills to develop more as they go. Or how do

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

But I also think that curriculum design is a distinctive skill that must be almost impossible to learn at the same time that you learn the other skills of teaching except over many years. And during those many years, a huge number of teachers cycle out of the precession, right?

It strikes me that

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

I’m very interested in this deskilling argument. I teach at the college level, where we would never tolerate being handed a very detailed curriculum we didn’t develop, and I went to a high school that was excellent in part because the teachers had a lot of freedom (we were exempted from state tests)

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

with anything like the experience you were trying to give.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

demographers and that description is surely an oversell for everybody else. But I loved it so much! It made me feel like that reader really got what I was trying to do, because that’s EXACTLY the effect I was hoping for, but you know how it is, you never really know if someone experiences your work

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

without the structure that everyone expects. (This is actually the point where I got the most common critical feedback from draft readers: why don’t I have a “real“ conclusion? But I think I would have lost the momentum of what I was doing.)

Soooooo it really is a “plot twist” for sociologists/

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11h

alongside that, there’s a shift in register and also I abandon the expected format of a review essay like this (in my field) and have a conclusion that actually, I think, tries to do what a conclusion is supposed to do—driving home and critically reflecting on the shift that I made in the essay—but

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 12h

the one who survives distributed in the population; are people able to live out redemption narratives that American culture places incredible value on, or do they die before the “redemption” might come—a really weird and idiosyncratic list of things!

So it’s not the content that people expect, and

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 12h

to talk about things that people in my field have not thought of as measures of mortality disparities—things like, how many Black votes are missing from the electorate because of higher Black death rates; how much cultural memory is missing; how is the guilt of being involved in a death but being

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 12h

literature with a very traditional, and pretty circumscribed, set of methods. So my review starts out by talking about those methods and what we’ve learned from them and how people are innovating with them—the stuff that people in my field would expect such a review to discuss.

But then it goes on

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 12h

Only indirectly—some of the content is but I doubt it has the same effect.

The “plot twist” (I can spoil it bc it’s not a REAL plot twist) might really only work on people in my discipline. It’s that I wrote a review essay on the size of Black/white disparities in mortality and this is a large

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Reposted by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Christina S. Ho @christinasho.bsky.social · 20h

Prof. Jacob Bor, commented, “if the US simply performed at the average of our peers, one out of every two US deaths under 65 years is likely avoidable. Our failure to address this is a national scandal.”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 1d

New podcast episode where I talk about what's going on with mortality in the US

A wide-ranging discussion of what happened before the pandemic & what's happened since then; racial disparities and how to get our heads around their scope; why things might be going so badly for Millennials & Gen Zers

Prof. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field Discusses Excess Deaths

Because the US death rate has exceeded that of 21 other high income countries for over four decades, an estimated 14.7 million US lives have been lost since1980.

www.thehealthcarepolicypodcast.com

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