Praise Trump
Sociologist and demographer, University of Maryland; director of SocArXiv. New book out! Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists https://cup.columbia.edu/book/citizen-scholar/9780231555418 philipncohen.com
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Praise Trump
Don't give me "holiday staffing gate closures," that is boring
Update on Walter Reed road closures. How fun.
Or 0189
Atlantic hot take, so tired before it was printed. But this is funny: "Today, the American university system continues to receive massive amounts of public funding, Trump’s cuts notwithstanding..." Like, update your info, both-sides dude
Do people have less #Kids because of the #ClimateCrisis? 🌍👶 In our preprint, @katyaoivanova.bsky.social and I find that environmentalists are less likely to have kids in their 20s and 30s... But by their early 40s, the gap closes. Maybe it's rather about #Postponement? 🕰️ 🔗 doi.org/10.31235/osf...
The idea that the US and other major world power could be held legally accountable for complicity is no doubt technically true, but also just signals the death of international law as a system, which this crisis has hastened.
BREAKING: The International Association of Genocide Scholars declares that Israel's actions in Gaza "meet the legal definition of genocide" and "constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity." (Source: genocidescholars.org/wp-content/u...)
Saggy old rich famous people could have medical emergencies right at the start of a holiday weekend but it's not the most likely
Simplest explanation is Trump is just getting some work done and needs a couple days.
2,500+ words on Trump's science policy and not a word about Russ Vought, RFK Jr., Chris Wright, Stephen Miller, etc.
Sometimes we get papers where a human author acknowledges an LLM co-author. We appreciate the honesty but reject these papers.
*day 320 of learning German* Apparently, there are shopping cart return competitions in Germany. 😭🛒🥅 h/t @benjaminschneider.ch
This Labor Day, the Perkins building in DC is a Dear Leader prop (to the delight of a tiny trickle of tourists)
Letting mothers finish college is just going to encourage them to stick with their careers instead of having more children
One in five college students are parents.
Also pretty funny
Fun to be named in today's Doonesbury strip. This point has taken on quite a life on the internet.... www.washingtonpost.com/doonesbury/
Polling place intimidation is real even if some people are brave enough to resist it. (What about a voter with an undocumented spouse?) But the bigger threat may be ICE's voter verification service, which could cause serious chaos: www.uscis.gov/save/current...
Gift link to my op-ed ( @wearehighered.bsky.social ) share.inquirer.com/M8nPzg
116. The total fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.41 in 2024, the lowest recorded, according to the Office of National Statistics.
The UK Office of National Statistics reports the England and Wales total fertility rate fell to 1.41 in 2024, probably the lowest ever. They provided a helpful graph showing the trend, which the Financial Times helpfully rescaled so the lines fall below the lowest markers.
Ok sorry I wasted your time
The most justified killing in the history of state violence.
Who willfully destroys their own public heath system? Stupid, greedy people who think they don't need it. America has become a machine for binding greed and stupidity ever more tightly together.
I agree. And yet I think there is no problem associated with low birth rates that can't be better (quicker, more efficiently) solved by women doing things other than raising children, and that's the choice implied by trying to raise birth rates
Public health physicians as eugenicists remain a somewhat understudied group but this is by and large what they all believed. Basically, if vaccines and milk inspections and water treatment and spitting laws were going to increase life expectancy the “undesirables” must be prevented from reproducing
All bad, of course, but amazingly we have reached the point where we are ranking the eugenicists who run the government. And RFK's views - on this scale! - are very bad. Here's a review article on this: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2... /4
That's because they realized resistance to, e.g., tuberculosis wasn't necessarily correlated with other genetic advantages. So letting babies die of flu or whatever didn't necessarily improve the race/species. Basically they wanted to weed people out more rationally. /3
More progressive eugenicists - sorry! - thought benevolent, modern public health should include dissuading or preventing inferior people from reproducing. Not that they should be allowed to die. /2
RFK's idea that disease is good, actually, is not just eugenicist - it's literally on the extreme bad edge of eugenics. Many original eugenicists understood that preventable disease killed "fit" and "unfit" alike. They wanted to prevent disease and practice public health. /1
Yes China proves you could have science without democracy - though severely limited - if you want
I guess you have to be one of the world's foremost experts on public health to know what a public health epidemic is.
After we disembowel him we can do a DNA test
I was thinking of subsidizing coffins to address the pandemic but your analogy is better.
Using pronatalism to address the parenting crisis is kind of like outlawing camping to address the housing crisis. Targeting specific visible signs of a problem doesn't address the problem.
"Getting to the root causes of the public health epidemic in this country." The what now
We should definitely "care about" some of the things that cause low birth rates (though most of the causes are great, worthy of celebration). It's like saying we should "care about" the funeral expenses of people who are murdered. Sure, but our policy should focus on the murders.
Funny to see myself in a fake news site LLM hallucination offering commentary on an issue I never heard of.
I think women could accomplish this better through politics
It demonstrates a low opinion of women (no offense) to suggest that the best contribution they can make to fixing humanity's problems is to bear and raise more children
Reasoning toward what conclusion?
"Progressives" and "leftists": You must understand that we have urgent problems and the most important way to address them urgently is to saddle healthy young, productive women with 30 years of intensive parenting, and spend a million dollars each, so their kids can make a difference in the future!
Friends! Inherited Inequality makes its debut Sept 16 🎉 Join me for an open & honest conversation about the power & limits of the two-parent family for improving child outcomes & addressing one of America’s most intractable problems: racial inequality Hope to see you there!
My mom, upon reading the introduction to this book last week: "Why did you wait so long to tell me about this book?"
Recall that last year Trump said he wanted to staple green cards to every international grad student’s diploma and much of the press reported it as fact. Three days ago he suddenly declared he’d bring in 600k Chinese students (?). This is basically the opposite of what his admin has actually done
Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.
I agree it's legitimate to make the argument, I just don't agree with it.
I agree. The concept of "competitive authoritarianism" allows a continuum of statuses, so you don't have to fulfill all the checkboxes.
There's the authoritarianism, and then there's the just shitting on humanity parts - eg, the vaccine and renewable energy cancellations - which are a new nihilist twist on historical authoritarianism, death for its own sake. (Calling RFK eugenicist is giving him too much credit for reasoning.)
“No class today, no ruling class tomorrow” (spontaneous thought triggered by that atrocious bureaucratic doublespeak)
No I think they are all international students appealing their visa denials
Official clip art plus unanticipated expressive activity
If it helps your imagination, it came with this image:
UMD expressive activity policy quotes out of context: "Occasionally, events may occur that result in a sudden and immediate desire for Expressive Activity." (See also, flatulence, unanticipated.)
Enlightening conversation with brillaint Sarah Stillman about the cruel and the humane. virginiaheffernan.substack.com/p/the-deport...
I feel this so, so, so very much. The shift of every single experience—from hotels, to flying, to theme parks, to concerts and theaters—towards the affluent, those 664,000 multimillion dollar households, and away from everyone else. Profit above everything. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/o...
New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...
Don't know but assume there is some US DOT sign-off required before it can start
Trump's cancellation of the almost-done windmill project, and hatred for Maryland and DC in general, makes me wonder what is the chance they will find a way to stop the Purple Line from opening?
Funny, it didn't appear that way to me
The framing here is weird. They describe students dropping out of college because they also had to work full time jobs, take on lots of loans, and help care for family. Not everyone needs/wants college, but they were systematically deprived of having that experience because of insufficient supports.
It also promised 10 new cities on Federal lands with beautiful new homes and flying cars.
What is "mail"?
I guessed the answer would be "yes," what do I win? www.openresearchlab.org/findings/ai-...
There are a lot of sad things in the world and this is unbearably sad
This is a mind-controlling death machine. There are so many ways Adam Raine would be alive if ChatGPT didn't exist
Mississippi: Has banned abortion Hasn't expanded Medicaid Doesn't guarantee paid family or sick leave
This is excellent!
Not ironic at all that my sarcastic mention of AI claiming to solve climate change is reposted by a climate AI spam bot.
Please suggest a lunch menu that will also solve climate change
Are elites replacing full-freight international students with discount 'mericans? I guess it's still better than empty dorms
Yikes
He also confuses household and family income but whatever I stopped reading www.deseret.com/family/2025/...
Ok, Brad Wilcox: "married moms with young children and a household income of more than $100K have a vastly larger likelihood of working full time than those women with a household income of less than $60K." He's literally observing that high-income people are more likely to have jobs.
Amelia Guo, senior economist, is now Lydia Wei, senior medical chemist
Good news for us: Our democracy is much more established, and our tolerance for political violence is lower, than 1930s Germany. Trump could end up spinning his wheels, feeling for an opening, and not get unchecked state violence off the ground
They took disabled children from their parents and gassed them to death, then backed off for a while after an outcry. They cracked down on the church and backed off. They used military, local police, and paramilitary forces. They purged some scapegoats. But always forward toward power and violence
It's telling that Trump wonders out loud whether Democrats would vote for this. It's cat and mouse - provocation and response, court orders won and lost, corporate capitulation or refusal - feeling his way toward a breaking point. That works better than a clearly delineated plan with knowable steps.
In Germany in the 1930s Hitler was casting about for his internal military force. There was not a single department or agency under one law, but a cascading hodgepodge of violence, with different agencies and leaders jockeying, overlapping jurisdictions, and many unwritten orders. They need chaos.
If you are preparing your bachelor statistics course and would like to add optional material for students to better understand statistics on a conceptual level (see topics in the screenshot) my free textbook provides a state of the art overview. lakens.github.io/statistical_...
"Vaccine skeptic" is a bad term
Which happened in Spain with parental leave : www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Thank you! Hadn't seen that.
Cohorts are great. Love a good cohort analysis
I don't understand the question
Attention journalists (especially editors): Notice how Pew makes this cool interactive feature about social attitudes by AGE and doesn't even mention fake generations and their stupid names at all? How is that possible? They just decided to stop making everyone dumber - and kept doing their jobs.
He turns off replies so whatever. But if you think "patriarchy" is useless jargon you don't revere universities.
Lots of bad jargon in academia (and politics), and great need for better communication. Attacking the work of knowledge creation doesn't help.
Calling universities "academic hothouses" is like using "merely" as a prefix for "academic" - it's foundational to the anti-academic hothouse climate the USA is in today.
That is the wrongest summary of military history in history
But yet should have used the military on January 6 - and might need to against MAGA someday. I might say "don't use the military for fascist stuff" is a more important principle.
Legal permanent resident with 4 citizen daughters, had a 22-year-old marijuana possession charge, long since resolved and sealed. Grabbed from her family, detained for 10 days, never told why, medical conditions untreated, dumped in a parking 30 miles from home with no phone. America, you suck.
Missed our latest podcast episode? Catch up here (it's a good one): spotf.fi/attackonscie... With the fantastic @philipncohen.com
Fun fact: The immigrant population is younger, on average, than the US-born. But there are fewer immigrant children, cuz children of immigrants are US-born. If you want thriving immigrant communities, with immigrant birth rates (as any reasonable person does), you need a flow of immigrants.
it's ok I'm on sabbatical
For the first time in 60 years, more people are leaving the US than arriving. Also, MAGA wants more babies. Look at this way. US-born women need to step up +25% to break even. So if ~5% of US born women (15-49) had a baby in 2023, to replace all immigrant births that would have to be 6.25%.
My class on the racial wealth gap is always a good excuse to show more people the Fed Reserve’s quarterly wealth estimate from Distributional Financial Accounts. This graph shows their estimate that white wealth increased by 45 trillion since 2019. www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/...
Someone is taking their time to actually do this. What a life
My university also asked us to implement a viewpoint neutrality policy by incorporating multiple viewpoints on the syllabus which I interpreted to mean adding a whole range—anarchist to statist, neoliberal to communist, starting off with Indigenous cosmology and ending with radical abolition.