Kevin Banda

LA Times: "'It backfired,' said one senior administrator at UCLA, reflecting the sense of whiplash. .... 'Within hours of announcing our settlement, the DOJ was on our back.'

WHO COULD'VE SEEN THIS COMING

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0ypqo...

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

Holy heck!

I've received two in the last week. One was fine; the project was a stretch for that journal. The other has been desked... four times? Five times? It's never really been clear to me why.

Not sure if it's good or bad, but the rate of desk rejections sure seems to be getting high.

The Ghost of Christmas Present, from ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’

Toxic Masculinity is OUT!
Ghost of Christmas Present Masculinity is IN!

- Loud laughs
- Roasted meats and spiced drinks
- Hospitality to strangers
- Living in the moment
- Singing in public
- Body positivity
- Emotional generosity
- Sick robes

Chicago White Sox White Sox great Konerko gets gift from Pope Leo XIV in honor of 2005 title Konerko gets jersey signed by Pope Leo XIV

It’s kind of ridiculous but the Pope being such a fan is extremely endearing to me. No one would fake this, no one would claim to be a White Sox fan if it wasn’t genuine. It is a symbol of shame he has gladly accepted.

Measuring Conflict in Local Politics Mirya Holman1 , Rebecca Johnson2 , and Tyler Simko3

It’s publication day!!🎊 In a new Urban Affairs Review @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social piece, Rebecca Johnson, Tyler Simko @simko.bsky.social & I ask: How do you measure conflict in local politics in the United States?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New WP w/ @riazsascha.bsky.social: via >42 million placebo tests, we show type I error inflation in Unexpected Event during Survey Designs (UESD), propose an adjustment, implement via new R package uesdRobust, and demonstrate utility by replicating two top UESD studies.

osf.io/preprints/os...

1/9

I played modified softball for the first time tonight, and that shit is very different than what I'm used to. I swung and missed at a pitch for the first time that I can remember!

Bruce Bochy told his players he was going to the SABR convention. They asked “What does that stand for—sandwiches and baseball?” “No,” he said. “It stands for people who know more about your career than you do.”

2025 Roland Hemond Award winner, Bruce Bochy

Why are Our Heroes all NIMBYs on Resident Alien?

This is nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan from a public opinion standpoint. In both cases, large majorities supported military action. This time, large majorities oppose it. Chart from the great @gelliottmorris.com. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-amer...

Donald the dove, baby

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

Information and Perceptions of Electability in Primary Elections - Political Behavior When citizens vote in primary elections, they have good reason to consider each candidate’s electability—the chances of winning the general election if they become their party’s nominee. Although elec...

A couple of interesting new papers about voting in primaries out

First, an new set of survey experiments on electability and vote choice in competitive primaries out in Political Behavior.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

the destruction of chattel slavery is one of the great accomplishments in our nation's history and the reason conservatives hate celebrating it is because doing so legitimizes the black counter-narrative of the united states

Our latest @cccr.bsky.social survey reveals how unpopular the president’s most notable policy changes are with the American public. The survey also highlights the diversity of views within the GOP, related to their information diets, as well as US economic attitudes. cccr.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

"In Covid's Wake": Lying About… - If Books Could Kill - Apple Podcasts Podcast Episode · If Books Could Kill · 06/17/2025 · 58m

Episode 40: In Covid's Wake

Looking back at a pandemic that killed more than 1 million people, two political scientists bravely ask, "Could we have done even less?"

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

Happy Captain Picard Day to all who celebrate!

Just wait until it's fresh, delicious rocks

The Rockies represent entropy and that is what they should sing about during the 7th inning stretch, they should have a dirge, people in the stands should speak in tongues

a woman carrying a sign that says, "I have friends everywhere," a code phrase for identifying people in the Resistance in ANDOR

Love the ANDOR reference. Here's another.

Here’s mine, which explores the adoption and consolidation of neoliberal urban policy and politics in the US and the UK at the national levels and in Philadelphia and Docklands as case studies.

www.pennpress.org/978081224782...

Looking forward to learning about cool new research and meeting with people at ESRA this week.

Calvin dressed as a noir detective, saying "Yeah. That's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye."

I'll never get over how the best line in all of noir – "I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon" – doesn't come from Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but Calvin and Hobbes

this is like drake and kendrick lamar but they're both drake

Yglesias refuses to update his priors with data. It's lazy

When the Garcia news broke, these people said that "raising the salience" of immigration would be bad for Dems. But addressing the issue decreased Trump's approval and support for deportations, in both experiments and observational data.

Meta's gone all in on trying to convince me to get either an MPA or an MBA from UAlbany.