Sagar Kumar

say what you want about the findings, i can’t get over the fact that they have an interpolated line connecting the dots in a categorical plot 😭

Thrilled to see this out! Congrats to collaborators and please give it a read. Since we wrote this, it’s only become more pressing and timely.

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated)

doi.org/10.57814/557...

i’m blue da boo dee da boo da john cho please save us

the state of media right now has me feeling like frankie muniz in big fat liar

calling him a "conservative activist" is... a fascinating framing

Northern Ireland man from Lisburn kidnapped by Trump’s Ice raids because he “looked like a Mexican”. He had the correct visa, all his documents. He’s never been in trouble with police.

Held in terrible conditions. A fellow captive couldn’t get his medication and dropped dead of a heart attack

ICE released this Mass. mom with no phone, 30 miles from home in the rain after detainment for a sealed marijuana conviction Federal authorities refused to tell the Canton woman's husband or lawyer on what grounds she was being detained until shortly before her release.

“Jimenez Rosa, a legal permanent resident and mother of four U.S. citizens, was detained over what her lawyer believes was a decades-old, personal-use marijuana charge, which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts today… “I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country’”

Boston’s Logan Airport clearly has a preference when it comes to fundamental particles because I haven’t seen a Fermion sign anywhere

Just published my first little bit of science journalism on this great article by @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Jennifer Culbertson about whether communicative efficiencies in language (in this case, differential case marking) are learned or acquired through use. Please give it a look!!

Screenshot reading: Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events Authors: Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Ryan J. Gallager, Kira Klinger, Daniela Stoltenberg, Sagar Kumar, Dominic Ridley, and Brooke Foucault Welles Abstract: The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do not. Addressing this gap, our study investigates the factors influencing the likelihood and size of public attention on Twitter (now X) following extrajudicial police killings. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets in response to 795 police killings between January 1, 2015, and December 8, 2016, in the United States. By examining cases on all scales, from unnoticed to prominent, we provide large-scale empirical evidence on disparities in public attention to police killings and their victims. Results indicate two distinct processes in the emergence of focusing events: While victims’ attributes such as race, age, and gender increased likelihood of receiving any attention (thresholding), variables of context and social construction were related to overall wave size (focusing).

Second, with a large team of authors, led by @anniewald.bsky.social, we study which (personal, temporal, spatial, affordance-based) properties of incidences of extrajudicial police killings facilitate public attention on social media.

Could be more proud to see this publication out!!! So grateful for the wonderful team. Please give it a look!!

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

LLM research for the last few years has been constantly saying "I can't put this in the paper--nobody would use a model that just predicts the next token to make decisions about [insert life-altering scenario here]" then seeing an article titled "Can AI help make decisions about nuclear warfare?"

This is the closest thing i’ve come to a noumenal experience.

i have literally no reference for it. it is only itself-in-itself.

every part of it contradicts itself in so many ways that the only thing left is The Lacanian Real. The Truth.

spending my weekend hate-reading Frege because I’ve realized it’s actually important for me to know if I’m ever to dispute it

“jordan’s furniture is like the narnia of massachusetts”

pragmatics is such a funny topic in linguistics because it’s like “what if everything you worried people were thinking about you was true”

I almost can't believe that Elon Musk's AI called for the extermination of the Jewish people yesterday, and today not a single Congressional Democrat announced they were leaving his media network.

A party that often claims to act against antisemitism didn't do jack shit about straight up Nazism.

Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture - Nature Human Behaviour Newberry and Plotkin show that the frequency of a cultural trait can influence its tendency to be copied. They develop a method to measure frequency-dependent selection and describe how it relates to ...

more cultural evolution, but this 2022 paper discusses frequency dependence in baby names www.nature.com/articles/s41...

funny how donnie is aligning himself with bolsanaro who quite literally calls himself a socialist

I really cooked with this one

Defining and classifying models of groups: The social ontology of higher-order networks In complex systems research, the study of higher-order interactions has exploded in recent years. Researchers have formalized various types of group interactions, such as public goods games, biologica...

There's amazing work on group effects in higher-order networks, but not a lot of connections to social ontology, collective action, and group selection.

Led by @jstonge.bsky.social with expert guidance of @rharp.bsky.social we reviewed and formalized these connections.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.02758

This is really important to understand. Some of the people “bending the knee to Trump” are in fact doing what they feel they must to protect people and institutions they love from the vast (and increasingly unreviewable) power of the President of the United States.

kinda want to write an essay about how the phrase “touch grass” feels rooted in the postmodern desire for the noumenal

but i know if i write that, someone is gonna say that i need to touch grass lol

“Powerpoints are like the cocomelon version of a paper”
- my girlfriend

TIL that Andre from Victorious voiced Tyrone on the Backyardigans

US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' on new visa applications The embassy also wants people to set their social media profiles to public.

"US embassy in Dublin wants 'every social media username of past five years' on new visa applications. The embassy also wants people to set their social media profiles to public." www.thejournal.ie/us-visa-chan...

@mitpress.bsky.social Bookstore cop from the other day 😋
#lingsky #mathsky

taking a mandatory HIPPA course right now and honestly wanna grab some popcorn because these videos are awesome. i wanna meet the real jersey-sounding dude narrating them