prosecutor in bio
criminalization, abolition, labor, politics, journalism—social science theory & methods too. sociology phd candidate @ columbia. @swcolumbia.bsky.social
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prosecutor in bio
always read @laurawags.bsky.social defector.com/semafor-is-t...
lmao semafor.............
I think the only reasonable stress response right now is that I deserve treat
Beyond the physical benefits, lifting has been an important psychological maintenance tool for me during grad school. Academic work mostly consists of sending work out into the ether for 3-6 months, waiting on rejection, just to start over again. Lifting lets you feel constant small improvements
Yeah it took me about 2.5 years! starting as a beginner
Well it looks like I finally achieved my goal of bench pressing my body weight! Using a free weight machine, not barbell, but still
Markets not even open today what are they on about
I’m consistent, both hard
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
The debate is really over two visions of law enforcement: one is based on "race-neutral," technocratic policing that relies on "hot spots" and surveillance data. The other is brute force, street-smarts, never filling out paperwork. The problem is neither one works. www.vice.com/en/article/u...
I sort of do think that epistemological sorting along these lines is very bad for society, but obviously it's incumbent on the right to become a movement that smart people can support, rather than the other way around
Abolish, then create a new DOJ with appointments controlled by the House?
What if we just got rid of the DOJ
Swim instructor for ages 3-11, $12/hr (Rate for lifeguards was $10)
In a landmark victory for student activists, the Supreme Court of New York ruled that CUNY must disclose the school's financial portfolio, specifically contracts with businesses connected to the genocide in Gaza. mondoweiss.net/2025/09/cuny... #Palestine #Israel
In addition to the corporations trying to destroy the NLRB and 90 years of labor law, don’t forget a university is also helping, just to fight their own faculty and students.
It is just wild to me that the largest facility used during Japanese internment will now be used to intern immigrants from ICE raids, people who are disappeared by masked officers off the streets, and there is still a debate about whether naming and shaming those doing it is fair.
Yes, I had an acceptable breakfast sandwich using brioche last month. Still not my favorite but can be ok
Restaurants started doing this as some kind of status signal and it’s so so wrong
Hot take: Brioche has no place anywhere near a burger. Give me a potato bun or give me death
“Criminals” / “regular people” 🫠
Israel threatening to formalize its already-existing regime of annexation & apartheid over the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank in response to European recognition of the State of Palestine is the diplomatic the equivalent of “if you fire me from my job, then I will go home and beat my kids.”
Jesus fucking christ. The Trump administration tried to send a bunch of children to Guatemala at 3 am and justified it by saying that the kids just wanted to return to their parents in Guatemala, but the kids actually told the court that they are afraid of being sent back to Guatemala.
oh damn, "long time listener"! I think I made my twitter in 2017. Back then I was just using it to learn from criminal law attorneys and gun violence researchers. Crazy how much things have changed, in many ways
good work if you can get it
Buhurt sounds like what it is yeah
Between those apps and my manuscripts out for review, there is an absolutely comical number of portals for me to refresh.
I recently attended an armored combat event with a femme combatant!
Alright, submitted a bunch of job applications. Way more time-consuming than any job application I ever filled out pre-academia. Maybe someday I'll have time for research again...
“A racial reckoning?” New study by @amengel.bsky.social & Cindy Kam: “Challenging the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s murder, but in ways dependent upon attitude measure and population subgroup.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
I think that's right. I left it in the building lobby
I often find myself reflecting on the temporal element of incarceration, it terrifies me. I imagine that the ability to develop a wider range of skills, with extreme focus, would make the time chamber much more bearable for someone like me
Really interesting story
Get into niche discord servers
honestly jfk was very decent this month. pizza and bagel from reputable nyc stores.
Trying to get to Queens, I asked the train conductor if the N was gonna take me there, he was like “I’m trying to find out”… Just that kind of night apparently
Ooh ooh let’s do jeff nippard “natty or not” discourse
This was the best August weather in nyc that I can remember as an adult. Max 90, rarely humid. Blessed
If we ever regain power, this agency must be vaporized and the people involved in it permanently prevented from ever regaining state authority
That’s the Biden era FBI, too. Just an average day in American policing
This was also what an FBI agent told my partner after waking her up at 5 AM with 4 flashbangs thrown into the vacant apartment above hers, shattering all the windows. “You’ll have a great story to tell at parties”
I have multiple 💅
Okay I’m not liking how this reply cuts to the subtext 😆 My other train of thought before this post was job interview attire
just saw a guy in a streetwear fit with a bright yellow leather purse. it rocked
Men’s fashion is in a good place, we’re allowed to wear purses now
I know nothing about this and I’m gonna stick to it
who let the dogs out
NEW: Trump this week issued an order to withhold federal funds from cities & states that restrict the use of cash bail. Illinois has fully ended cash bail, & Chicago's public defender responds to Trump: 'this is tyranny 101." He explains why cash bail was a disaster. Well worth reading:
Such an unfortunate acronym
The only issue I can see on the left hand image is that cash bail is not a fine/fee (they could be referring to bail fees)
In fairness I have a different wish list for mayor CJ policy but Z is also pretty weak on that front currently
Tbh though this does echo a problem that Zohran created for himself—posting lots of good, strident messaging about policing around 2020 and then trying to pretend that never happened. You just have to own it
lmao great minds
I can see the 2021 misdemeanor language being more politically tricky but I don’t disagree with it
So DSA used to support fines and fees reform and later stopped? Pretty lame
Sucks that they watered it down tbh
Met someone at ASA who said students regularly take 8+ years in their program
It's technically already Friday morning
Honestly I *never* use acrobat.
i hate windows, but i don't hate windows enough to move to linux, my experience using desktop mode on the steam deck has not been encouraging. libreoffice though seems interesting.
also to be clear i don't hate gemini itself. i just don't want my word processor and spreadsheets to barrage me with popups for a service, that i am already perfectly capable of choosing when to use (or not)
might give it a shot if docs gets worse. I've been using drive for storage so it would be a whole migration to a different cloud file system probably
tbh anything beyond very basic spreadsheet tasks, I just switch to R
we need open source word processing/ spreadsheet/ slideshow software
actually crazy how microsoft ruined their office products with subscription fees, everyone switched to google drive, and now they're ruining it by forcing gemini pop-ups every 12 seconds
After Attica, officials found writings by Black anarchist Martin Sostre in the yard—uprising leaders had been reading these for inspiration. Orisanmi Burton interviews Garrett Felber on their new bio of Sostre, including what we could learn from his "revolutionary optimism"
everybodys gotta eat i guess
feels odd to be heads-down, working on research about crime panics that won't see the light of day for months/years, while the federal government is seizing power via crime panic in real time
Thanks!!
I could get someone to read a redacted/edited quote but I think that would kinda defeat the point
This definitely makes sense to me, it just puts me in the position of reading off of a script, but I guess it's a choice between that or reading off of slides
The diss is about crime news, so news events are easy to bring in :)
Got it. I think doing both is definitely possible. It's an applied/substantive contribution, but the advice I've gotten thus far has been to weight findings > data/design > implications > theory (so still a lot of data talk).
One thing I think I'm just stuck with is reading quotes verbatim. Some people have used audio supplements to have participants 'speak' during a presentation, which I love. I won't be able to do that because of confidentiality agreements. No other great way to 'show' the data afaik
Thanks! I think this is pretty close to what I have right now (hook -> contribution -> design and data -> findings -> implications -> future directions). I'm unsure whether I want the hook to come from my data, or to use a news event that everyone in the room already intuitively understands.
Thanks! I was considering talking through why I did interviews rather than ethnography. Curiously, in journal peer review, a reviewer actually advised me to strike mentions of how ethnography could have afforded certain advantages...
Thanks! No invites but I've been told to practice as if there will be... Appreciate the reply!
Social scientists: anyone have thoughts on what makes for a great qualitative job talk? I have read a lot of the blog posts/books out there w/ guidance on job talks in general.
I think a good summary is that theorists have agreed on something like the social construction of race but applied work doesn't really operationalize theory // the randomistas are sacrificing theory at the altar of clean ATEs
The other thing that comes to mind, I know not helpful because not books, is this pairing. I find it fascinating bc critical sociologists/theorists find it compelling but applied people hate it (1) scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/nulr/vol113/... (2) www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/dir...
another thread resuscitation bsky.app/profile/coli...
Geographers win again
Oh interesting, this is new to me, thanks
I would love a book that's succinctly titled like this but angled towards criminal justice (I know of various works that get at this point but it's not a central argument, maybe I'm missing something that already exists though)
I’ve been working on some syllabi and the range of topics where I feel compelled to assign the book is pretty remarkable lol
Last week @pewresearch.org looked at educational differences in the audiences of 30 major news outlets: pewresearch.org/short-reads/... New follow-up analysis looks at age differences in those same audiences: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
Something to be said here about NYT social milieu and how unlike Harvard, NYT projects that elitism outward for all to see
You’re assigning Condemnation of Blackness, right?? I know it’s not recent but I had this thought the first time I saw this post
Wow this is making me recall a very specific moment
This looks good
Also playing as a disaster-human detective is a great experience for anyone in the criminal justice space imo
Yeah there's a couple more! Mieville just recently said on a podcast that he hasn't returned to the setting because he sets a high bar for what merits a return (and also he described his earlier writerly self as more brash and edgy) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag
Dangerous stuff because their content is engineered to produce hate shares. It’s their value proposition
Oh god I almost quote tweeted a post with a link to that new debate team blog. Close shave
Have yall noticed search declining?? That’s surprising to me but I guess it makes sense
"debate" gamifies politic conversation and replaces the actual stakes of the subject being debated with interpersonal stakes of clout and such. the demand for the version of civility that features in these conversations amounts to trying to water down even the interpersonal stakes
Also idk if you read the “sequels” to Perdido but they’re good and Iron Council has some scenes in New Crobuzon
Helpful to think about science workers like tech workers tbh