Jonathan Horowitz

I wonder what happened the last time the government limited Bostonians access to their favorite drink.

I've sort of internalized that this is my new reality, and am no longer upset about it. But when I tell people about it they look so horrified. And then I realize that yes, it really was that bad.

Thanks. I've never had an experience quite like this before, and it's made me think a lot about how I want to live and work.

Thanks to both of you. It's been a very strange experience, it feels like I'm a historian digging around in the archives trying to figure out how this person (me) lived in the Winter of 2024-2025. But mostly I'm relieved that I feel like my old self again.

The good news is that whatever treatment I've been getting seems to have helped. I think I was approximately back to my old self by December 2025. I've been telling people slowly in person at conferences, and I think now I'm finally ready for it to be out there.

I don't have many memories of the Winter of 2024-2025 but I remember reading my own notes to myself at some point. Unless I am an unreliable narrator I have some sense of what happened in the gaps of my memory. But the memory issues may go earlier and definitely stretched through this past fall.

What happened next is pretty weird, because apparently I realized that my memory was bad and I started leaving notes for myself and telling people about it. So I left a paper trail of notes to myself and others documenting a few months.

You're probably wondering what happened. I don't know for sure. I got what seemed like a very bad cold, and I didn't really get better. Probably post-viral syndrome of some kind, maybe Long COVID. My blood chemistry was way off, which may or may not be related.

I don't want anyone to be offended at conferences this summer. If you say hi to me and I give you a blank look, you should feel free to briefly reintroduce yourself. Sometimes that works, but a lot from December 2024 through October 2025 is just gone.

Finally ready to say this in public.

If you met me at some point over the last two (3? 4?) years I may not remember you. It is not personal. I had a lot of memory loss. I'm doing better now, but I'm still filling in the blanks. I'm going to try and just roll with it, I hope you can do the same.

They learned *nothing* from the Max debacle. Absolutely nothing.

It's not that you hate the time switch, you hate the fact that it's getting darker. It *feels* like it's the fault of the time switch but your real enemy is the tilt of the earth's axis. That's where you should be focusing your policy proposals.

In the original trilogy the record is way better.
I: Won the duel vs Kenobi, the ghost thing is a consolation prize
II: Duel in Cloud City shows how impossible it is to beat Vader without using the force effectively
III: Loses, but kills Palpatine despite losing a hand and being electrocuted

So yeah, there won't be much of a difference for a lot of people today. Most of these other things are going to add up over time, or lead to a crisis that the government can't respond to effectively.

I was looking at the Wikipedia page for this. Aside from the 30K people cut from the IRS (which is a revenue-negative move, and a big one) the cuts they have made are primarily for agencies that are responsible for preventing bad things from happening.

As long as I'm apologizing for stuff, I'm also really sorry to the roughly 100 authors I am not going to cite in this R&R.

This is what happens when you include the reference list in the word count...angry reviewers and one author who is desperately trying to not offend everyone.

I went months without a review request and then I get something like six in a month, right in the most miserable stretch of the year.

If you asked me for a review recently, I'm really sorry, I definitely already requested an extension and I'm probably going to have to request another one!

Breaking: Economists have discovered something called the "Second Demographic Transition"

The Star-Spangled Banner as performed actually doesn't mention the country!

(later verses do mention it. nobody knows or cares about them)

I have no counterfactual for it, so I have no idea.

It's a sports movie but real life.

But now the kid has learned to trust his teammates, the rest of the kids have improved their skills, and they space really well on offense and defense and know what the others are doing and support them. The team is just a nightmare for opponents now. Almost nobody gets a clean shot against them.

If I were to model it, the model would attribute it to the outsider who joined the team at midseason. That is partly correct, but for the wrong reason. The kid (while talented) plays totally out of control. But he gave the other kids confidence, and it coincided with other kids drawing up plays.

Literally every trope in the book is here. Relentlessly positive coach? Talented outsider joins team at midseason? Current players improve their skills by leaning into their seemingly ridiculous outlier abilities? All for one and one for all ethos? And now they're on the cusp of the playoffs.

Friends and colleagues, I bear witness to a real-life sports movie: The worst youth ice hockey team I've ever seen or heard of transformed into a team-first passing and defense machine that overwhelms more talented opponents by being in the right place at the right time.

I'm a huge fan of methodological pluralism. McGrath's Dilemmatics is a good take on it, and provides my favorite rebuttal to methodological nihilism by taking the "all research is bad" and flipping it.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Skepticism about the relationship between data and reality is good, methodological nihilism is bad.

HEADLINE: NOT EVERYONE FEELS LONELY, IT IS JUST YOU

I think I am more proud of this paper than any other study I've ever done so I am going to be devastated if it gets rejected (again).

I will try and remember to send it to you. It's due in about 3 weeks and I'm still kind of recovering from an illness I had over a year ago so it's been quite a process. If I forget it's because of that, and not because I decided not to send it to you.