Ryan Hagen

Noem to Harvard Institute of Politics

If LLMs are doing the lit review and the peer review … who is supposed to be reading the work it produces? Where is ‘original thought’ supposed to come from if all the actual work is being done by fifteen acres of silicon brains in a warehouse?

Emergency Managers: Help ProPublica Prepare to Report on the Next Disaster If you are a part of the network of disaster response and recovery partners, we need your help to build a comprehensive picture of the real conditions across the country.

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Tell us what we should be covering.

Like, Qualitative Data Analysis software is notoriously crappy. I’m sure it’s expensive to code and the market isn’t very lucrative. I bet soon you could vibe code something that would blow NVIVO, MaxQDA etc out of the water. It would be a huge boon for researchers, but wouldn’t put us out of work.

One reason this piece is so good: it glimpses a future where AI coding creates abundance by freeing people from having to deal with crappy software. That’s a possible future! But tech execs only talk about wanting to use AI to create scarcity and soak up all value by automating all labor.

YouTube video by American Masters PBS W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause | Official Trailer | American Masters | PBS

Coming this May. A documentary about WEB Du Bois - www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kMs...

Don't give anything an Emmy until it's as good as this.

thank you bad bunny for highlighting the importance of critical power distribution infrastructure bsky.app/profile/cost...

image of a report cover, with a US flag in the background, and the text "The Political Disconnect: Working-Class and Low-Income People on What Politics Means to Them and How They Might be Mobilized”

Today I'm releasing probably the most important scholarly thing I've ever worked on - a report based on talking with 144 people about why they don't vote or only vote regularly, and on what needs to be done to build a democracy that can include everyone.
www.swarthmore.edu/u...
please share!

Prove that you're human song

Could make a strong case that There Will Be Blood is a Moby Dick story

Rereading Moby Dick and thinking about Starbuck, a professional who will take part in a great wrong because he’s uncomfortable with the small wrong of challenging authority, and yeah it checks out that we have a whole chain of coffee shops celebrating that.

Fascinating as usual from my colleague @jamesbreckwoldt.bsky.social. Come for the Simpsons memes, stay for the lesson in US political realignment.

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

"On the Frontlines of Crisis: Intensive Care and the Challenge of COVID-19" by Jason Rodriquez

www.rutgersuniversit...

#HealthPolicy #Nursing #COVID19 #Healthcare #MentalHealth #EssentialWorkers #PublicHealth #Medicine #Nursing

Review of “On the Frontlines of Crisis: Intensive Care and the Challenge of COVID-19.” To name something a crisis is an act of interpretation. Delineating its front lines is a further claim about the essence of the problem. Locating the front

Covid wrought havoc on health care workers, and warped public perception of them, in ways that continue to shape the country. Here I review Jason Rodriquez's excellent @rutgersupress.bsky.social study of how ICU workers handled the depths of the pandemic.

Fed Changes Course and Takes On Trump’s Political Fight

Janet Yellen tells @nytimes.com that the investigation against Powell is the most significant attack ever on Fed independence.

"If you can bring charges for no reason whatsoever against your enemies, we're no longer living in a society governed by the rule of law."

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/b...

The best magazine profile ever written is actually Chapter 41 of Moby Dick, which works as a stand-alone if you don’t have the patience or time for the full novel. 🐋

R.I.P. Bulkington, Melville killed you off early and never bothered to actually write your demise #JusticeForBulkington 🐋

Actor Robert Picardo as the holographic Doctor, dressed as a priest clutching the sides of a wooden pulpit, in a scene from the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Spirit Folk.”

With everything going on, we could use a recording of @robertpicardo.bsky.social reading Father Mapple’s sermon for Moby Dick January tomorrow 🐋

“It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of “The Trap!” Excerpt From “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville

It’s generally assumed that “Moby-Dick” has a canonical start date in December 1841, so there’s a good chance that Ishmael has entered the AME Zion church (then on South Second St, three blocks from the water) and the preacher he sees is Frederick Douglass. 🐋

Kicking off the Month of Dick with this incredible animation set to a semi-lost recording of Orson Welles reading excerpts of the book, one of my favorite internet artifacts. 🐋

Opinion | Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.

The psychologists keep rediscovering sociology

some good climate/energy news:

* 96% of new US power capacity was carbon-free in 2024 (56 gigawatts!)

* 2025 included the first month ever when 51% of power on the U.S. grid was carbon-free

* The golbal trend is overwhelming: The world is now investing more $ in clean energy than fossil fuels

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, is master of Europe, only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.

With a Thankful Heart Wrapping up 2025 with more insane vending machines, fewer peanut allergies, and sincere thanks to you for reading

“We’ve long used digital technology to make forgeries of artwork; generative AI simply forges the work of making art.”

I wrote an end-of-year appreciation of human sociality in creative labor.

Here’s an article that I wrote five years ago in which I call MYSELF Cassandra.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Not for academics it isn’t. You learn by reading and by following citation chains and talking to other people in the field. Letting the AI do the summary is abdicating your job.

We Let AI Run a Vending Machine. It Stocked a Live Fish and a PlayStation. Anthropic’s Claude AI ran a vending machine at WSJ headquarters for several weeks. It lost hundreds of dollars, bought some crazy stuff and taught us a lot about the future of AI agents. WSJ’s Joanna ...

This video of WSJ reporters ruthlessly hazing a Claudius vending machine is no exaggeration the funniest 10-minute short I have seen all year.

Arduous and Unequal: The Fight to Get FEMA Housing Assistance After Helene An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly of the more rural counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene shows that the households that got the most aid tended to have the highest incomes.

Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families.

But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes.

With @theassemblync.bsky.social