Jedidiah Knode

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

one of the greatest human triumphs of my lifetime is the relentless, unceasing, heroic effort by DECADES' worth of doctors and scientists to find a cure for a disease much of the world didn't take seriously for years because it predominantly affected a community they thought kinda deserved it

Our paper “Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States” is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! We released a new, highly granular migration dataset. 1/9

Pb concentration by decade in hair from Salt Lake City region residents. Value plotted for 1940 includes all samples from 1916 to 1959; value plotted at 2022 includes all samples from 2020 to 2024.

Lead (Pb) in archived hair in Salt Lake City.

"Lead (Pb) in archived hair documents a decline in lead exposure to humans since the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency "

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

Why have I done exactly this thing on a weekly basis for years?

Me, coding a thing and ambiently chatting to a friend:
"I think I know what the issue is, and I think I know how to fix it"

Me, having tried thirty other "potentially better" solutions, three hours later:
"I should've done the thing I told you"

Alex Pretti from his early days working at the VA

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

Under settings -> general, there'll be a "manage workspace smart features settings", just uncheck the first box (I did both)

Judge rules EPA must face Flint kids water crisis lawsuit in 5 days A federal judge has refused to throw out a lawsuit filed against the Environmental Protection Agency by three Flint children who claim they were damaged by contaminated drinking water and the lax resp...

The EPA is about to face trial next week—a suit obo Flint children alleged the EPA failed to obey its own guidelines when handling the city’s high lead levels. This is a really big deal, but has mostly received only local coverage.
www.mlive.com/news/flint/2...

That’s just GOTTA be the inspiration behind Common Side Effects

Opinion | I'm a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here's how ICE observers are helping. Research into how violence occurs shows that disapproval from the people around you can help reduce it.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention.

The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

At one point today, there were 283 Minnesota attorneys doing a training on how to file emergency habeas petitions to keep our neighbors from being shipped out of state and held indefinitely.

That would be the second largest law firm in the state. And that training was just put together this week.

Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns* Abstract. A common concern surrounding minimum wage policies is their impact on independent businesses, which are often feared to be less able to bear or p

#QJE Feb 2026, #7, “Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns,” by Rao (@nirupama.bsky.social) and Risch: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Are you interested in inequality of opportunity / inter-generational mobility? Take a look at this impressive new resource: a public-access database containing cross-nationally comparable estimates of inequality of opportunity for 72 countries, covering 2/3 of the world’s population. 👇👇👇

There is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution.

In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789)

👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc....
👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

🧵1/6

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Pope Leo absolutely cooking

YouTube video by DAngeloVEVO D'Angelo and The Vanguard - Another Life (Audio)

RIP to one of the best to ever do it

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds

open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

Besides honeycrisp TM

They’re SO good. Hasn’t been out long but already think I like this more than their debut

Solid choice. It’s basic but honeycrisp is my GOAT

Really loved The Black Butterfly.

The effects of residential zoning in U.S. housing markets I construct a new nationwide dataset to measure the stringency of residential zoning in the United States and examine its effects on housing productio…

Important new research on the impact of zoning on the housing market. Minimum lot size requirements have two main effects: they increase housing costs and contribute to racial segregation. This was somewhat known to housing folks, but this paper matters because it uses advanced methods and data

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

YouTube video by Dr. Fatima that bad Challenger graph, or: how not to suck at data viz

I’ve used Dr. Fatima’s stuff in classes before for this exact reason!