Meredith Slopen

Good timing for thr snow day: NYC expands paid sick leave coverage.

Local Victory: NYC Expands Paid Sick Time Law to Include More Covered Purposes and Protections! - A Better Balance This newest expansion to the city’s law will provide new protections to workers and ensure that New Yorkers can attend to their real-life needs without being forced to risk their job or income.

As of yesterday, NYC workers have stronger paid sick time rights!

Now, the city's law covers paid sick time for childcare, emergency-related closures, housing- and benefits-related legal proceedings, workplace violence, and more. Learn more: www.abetterbalance.org/local-victor...

Miss Ingat Random at your service.

Tonight!

Please share with your colleagues and students who may not be in the loop!

Attending #SSWR2026 as a social policy researcher (or friend)? Join us for our annual happy hour on Friday night at 6:30 at Calico! Be in touch if you need more info and looking forward to learning from your work throughout the conference!

A collage of 49 books/novels I read in 2025.

This year was not my best for reading - it seemed like there were sometimes months between things I really liked, but definitely some great ones in the mix.

Webinar. Rapid Response Data Briefing. Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS). January 8, 2026. 2:00-2:30 PM ET. Logos of the cosponsors displayed at the bottom. The background of the graphic is dark blue and features the dataindex.us star logo in the top right corner.

Rapid Response Data Briefing: Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS)

Join us to learn:
🔵 What's in PRAMS
🔵 Why it's important
🔵 The risks facing its continued collection and publication
🔵 How you can help support this essential data resource

Register: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

This incredible album made me laugh, cry, dance, and feel deeply grateful for my community.

borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/album/strang...

Our paper reflecting on 30 years of Medicaid estate recovery is fully out today! We shed light on policy mechanisms, state variation, and its potential to drive wealth disparities. Thank you to @jhppl.bsky.social for being the perfect home for our work on this understudied, but longstanding, policy.

Three of them, in a trench coat.

Robin Hood - but for journal articles.

This is something my students bring up a lot: really excited to see (and use) the final version).

Extremely excited to see the Breul Prize awarded to this excellent paper about what comes next after the Fight for $15! Congrats to Kess and everybody involved!

Social workers (and friends) attending @appam.bsky.social
in Seattle: we will meet for our annual happy hour on Friday night from 5-7 at Kells' Bar. Be in touch if you need details and share with your students/new colleagues. Looking forward! @arpilarz.bsky.social @calliefreitag.bsky.social

Graphic that reads “JFREJ mass call: what comes after the election? Thursday, November 6th 7:30-9:00 pm Zoom rsvp for details JFREJ.ORG/ MASS-CALL The photo behind it is of dozens of members gathered with city council member Alexis Avilés holding a NYC Jews for Zohran banner with us. Many members are holding signs and wearing Jew doe Zohran merch.

The world changed last night. Thank you for being part of Zohran Mamdani's historic mayoral victory - now we make it real. Join JFREJ tomorrow (Thurs) at 7:30pm for a mass call with special guests to hear about what's next for our movement and how YOU can take part. RSVP at jfrej.org/mass-call

Naomi Klein guest judges Project Runway!

Social workers (and friends) attending @appam.bsky.social
in Seattle: we will meet for our annual happy hour on Friday night from 5-7 at Kells' Bar. Be in touch if you need details and share with your students/new colleagues. Looking forward! @arpilarz.bsky.social @calliefreitag.bsky.social

Jen’s “I’m Too Busy To Understand This” Ballot Measure Explainer Dear friends, Not gonna lie, I wish I lived in less interesting times. I’m finding a lot of hope in Mamdani’s candidacy. When the National Guard is sent to NYC, he’s who I want in the Mayor’s office....

Hey NYC. I did a deep dive on the housing ballot measures. Here's my research, in case you're as confused as I was. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

My kid (12) rides the NYC subway every day, reports "the only thing I'm scared of is if it is running late". These guys need to toughen up.

We are sick and tired of the appalling, Islamophobic attacks on Zohran for daring to care about the well-being of Palestinians.

It's not antisemitic to call out Israel for indiscriminate bombings, war crimes, and killing thousands upon thousands of civilians.

Enough is enough.

Including state as an identifiable variable, and then restricting the data, prevents huge amounts of policy research from happening with very little benefit/trade-off with respect to privacy vs. what we could learn.

The sound you hear is health policy researchers running to their computers to start coding up the diff-in-diff.

Access to paid sick leave continues to grow but remains highly unequal by geography and wage level In a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are on leave without pay for the duration of the shutdown (and possibly worse, if the threatened layoffs occur). If history is a…

A record number of private-sector workers have access to paid sick time in 2025 under state and local laws. But access remains unequal, especially for workers in low-wage jobs and the South. @epi.org: www.epi.org/blog/access-...

Republicans Aren't Just Gutting Health Care. They're Taking Your Sick Leave, Too Republican-controlled legislatures have rolled back state level sick leave policies, leaving gaps in access amid the party's attacks on health care.

3 states passed paid sick leave laws last November by referenda: voters want this low-cost policy that supports workers to stay home when they're sick. Republican politicians are going against the democratic process by overturning or adding restrictions.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

My 12 year old's homework last night consisted of a set of relationships where they had to identities the independent and dependent variables, which is basically what I'm covering in class these days.

Sharing some encouraging news re: CDC PRAMS. The CDC has indicated they will weight and clean the 2024 PRAMS data. Also, the PRAMS data collection system (PIDS) is up and running again and some sites have begun 2025 PRAMS data collection. Hopefully restoration of the ARF portal is coming soon too.

I'll be sharing these questions during "research in the news" part of class this week to reinforce what we've been discussing about critical reading. Thanks @wiringthebrain.bsky.social.

Relatable content!

Thanks for these!