Matt Johnson

I have added my name to this open letter from economists supporting Federal Reserve independence and Governor Lisa Cook. Thank you @tderyugina.bsky.social for facilitating this!

The letter is ready, thanks to all those who helped out! Starting to gather signature now, please consider signing (link at top of letter) & spread the word.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Seems like if we want to increase a culture of work etc etc, this might be more promising than taking food benefits away from 60 year olds or parents of 9 year olds. Of course funding things like this wouldn’t open up budgetary space for tax cuts for rich people.

1/ Want to help US workers? Enforce labor law, not deportation orders. Undocumented immigrants are not the problem. The problem is the govt’s inadequate response to structural shifts in the economy that undermine worker power. NEW REPORT: smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/defaul...

Who do work requirements penalize? @lizananat.bsky.social‬, ‪@agpines.bsky.social‬, and Olivia Howard offer findings on low-income service sector workers whose unpredictable work hours are largely driven by their employers and not by choice. www.brookings.edu/articles/wor...

Research at risk: Life-saving heart pumps for babies | Cornell Chronicle After receiving a stop-work order from the federal government, the future of a device to help children with heart defects is uncertain.

One of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects.

It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this.

The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.

Ooh I haven't read most of these...time for a library trip with the kids!

I couldn't agree more! Reading to our kids is a highlight of my day.

This makes me so sad. My first thought is this is yet another casualty of the "smart phones ruined everything" hypothesis. But I wonder if it's also downstream effects of education policy last few decades treating reading as a skill for standardized tests rather than something fun

awesome, congrats on writing it and we will all be lucky to read it!

While you highlight it, please note is the product of local journalism, which has been carrying a lot of the burden in an environment where national outlets simply can't cover everything everywhere all at once. Support your local journalists!

Alert--one heck of an opportunity to measure the tax incidence of tariffs! (That is, if Amazon measures/announces incidence correctly...)

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” winks Louis Brandies at us.

For your enjoyment: here is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon talking about implementing AI in schools, but pronouncing it "A1," as in "A1 Steak Sauce"

www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28z...

The Immigration-Wage Myth Does the American worker have good reason to fear immigration?

Happy to have come across Michael's Vox piece through this exchange. A nice complement to Jeruselum Demsas' interview with Roge Karma w/ a dive on the literature on all the ways immigrants do NOT harm natives' wages. I wrote a problem set about it this semester www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/arc...

I know you have a million things on your plate. Take 5 minutes to call your senators and your representative to demand that they speak out against this abhorrent and un-American action by the Trump administration. North Carolinians: a staffer picks up at Budd's office; you leave a message for Tillis

Here’s the reality: This government—despite what they’d have us believe—cannot simply do whatever it wants. The moment we accept that bullshit, we become complicit in this blatantly authoritarian move by the president and his administration.

With a loud, collective voice, we must say: fuck this!

If you think empathy is weakness, you're revealing yourself as a psychopath.

It's still hopefully helpful for him to hear that his constituents are furious right now!

Fellow North Carolinians: I just left a message for our Republican Senator Thom Tillis--with whom I rarely agree but who has spoken out in support of Ukraine. Let's rattle our elected representatives to not just sit back as this slide to authoritarianism continues.

The media should relentlessly be explaining three facts:
1. Payroll is a very small part of govt. spending
2. It is possible to cripple govt. and save little
2. In addition to being illegal/unconstitutional, DOGE cuts are a rounding error compared to numbers in budget resolution

Post from NLRB Union: Yesterday, the NLRB’s Buffalo office (Region 3) received word from its landlord that GSA—acting on behalf of DOGE—had unilaterally cancelled the Region’s five-year lease, without any prior notice to the Agency. The Region has been given 90 days to vacate the building.

In 2024, the NLRB filed a complaint against Tesla for interfering in a union drive at their Buffalo, NY assembly plant.

Today:

Anyway, time to get off social media and get to that paper I need to write!!

But having kids is neither necessary nor sufficient for this unraveling! It remains a constant, almost daily task to recognize when I’m not present at dinner because I’m thinking of that paper I so desperately want to get back to. Meditation has helped (when I can stick to it).

One of the many gifts of having kids was how it relaxed work’s grip on me. Part of this was necessity—I simply had to stop working at 5 and on weekends—but mostly it was a preference realignment, a clarity (amidst the fog and sleep deprivation) of just how far this overreach had become.

One of my projects over the last few years has been acknowledging the extent of this overreach and unraveling myself from it. I love my work. I do not love who I am when it consumes me. I am less present as a partner and parent, a crappy friend. My sleep becomes terrible.

YouTube video by Movieclips The Fabelmans (2022) - Uncle Boris Scene | Movieclips

This scene with Uncle Boris, from Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, also hit too close to home for me: "Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely.” youtu.be/5WuMS6bkak0