Abby Ostriker

🚨 Call for papers:

Environment week at LSE will be Sept 22-25th.

Submissions are due soon (July 14)!

www.lse-environment-week.com/environment-...

There’s so much happening right now, I thought I’d put together a running thread on the dismantling of #climate and research and knowledge infrastructure in the United States 🧵

Tariffs & ICE raids are connected insofar as they are attempts to blame economic & social conditions entirely on the actions of foreigners while attempting to paint domestic enemies as a traitorous fifth column working with the foreigners to undermine the country

I'm a health reporter at The Washington Post looking to talk to people who do not qualify under these narrowed criteria about why coronavirus vaccination matters to you

If you're comfortable sharing your experiences for an article, please email me at fenit.nirappil@washpost.com

Congrats, Florian!! Well deserved.

Have loved this poem for a while. Also, ooof.

Ah, so they are fine as long as the coverage limit exceeds the amount outstanding of the loan.

Great article. I wonder how many of the stories mentioned in the article are for houses with a mortgage? I would be surprised/even more alarmed if banks were allowing borrowers to under insure to that extent, but it could happen

🚨 New paper alert, with @johnjhorton.bsky.social! Using an experiment run on a large online labor market, we provide evidence that providing employers access to an AI-written first draft of a job post harms the efficiency of the market.

emmawiles.github.io/storage/jobo...

Donate to the ACLU Fight back against bigotry, injustice and inequality. Make your donation to the ACLU today.

Today I tried to protect our democracy by donating to the ACLU. You can join me: action.aclu.org/give/now

a man in a tuxedo with a bow tie is smiling with #schitts creek written below him ALT: a man in a tuxedo with a bow tie is smiling with #schitts creek written below him

the undulating marsh grasses at sunset, golden against the deep blue inlets? the paddling water birds, the messy osprey nests?

“This is happiness… this is what heaven feels like. Everybody else is jealous of us.”

Overheard on Northeast Regional Acela: “I wish I could ride Amtrak every day… I ride it in my dreams”
I think I found your #1 fan @amtrak.com !

Big issue with these kinds of bills is how do you know that the work has actually been done and is maintained - esp if it involves gardening. Inspecting costs ~$200. Too high for most insurance policies to handle. And of course, it matters what your neighbor (who is insured by somebody else) does...

In dramatic overhaul, Cambridge becomes one of the first cities in Mass. to eliminate single-family zoning - The Boston Globe Cambridge will now allow buildings up to six stories to be built in neighborhoods across the city, a plan designed to help put a dent in the region's housing crisis.

Glad to see Cambridge end single-family zoning

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/b...

Colorado wants to force insurance companies to help homeowners understand, mitigate wildfire risk House Bill 1182 would also require insurers to give customers an opportunity to appeal assessments of a property’s wildfire risk, which can lead to increased costs and nonrenewals

Colorado wants to force insurance companies to help homeowners understand, mitigate wildfire risk

To anyone else hitting this snag, IPUMS NHGIS has TIGER/Line shapefiles you can download manually. And it’s always best practice to download your data! (@ past me)

(I am specifically looking for county/tract outlines for 2010, which used to be available in Tigris. Thank you, by the way, for your work on that excellent package!)

Thanks for the alert! This seems to only have 2020 Census boundaries, not older years. Is this right or am I missing something?

Census geographic shapefiles via the R Tigris package are down as of today. Definitely no private companies like oh say insurance companies care about where things are located 😡

Time it took for the new administration to directly impact my work: 15 days
(Grateful at this point to not have NSF funding up in the air… hang in there, everyone)

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The best building code in the world won't help you if you don't use it to build any houses.

Wildfire resilience is also very different from something like hurricane. Put on a good metal roof, doesn't much matter what your neighbor does, your risk goes down. Not so with wildfire:

The Five Feet That Could Prevent the Next Palisades Fire California passed a new fire safety law more than four years ago. It still isn’t in force.

California has a very strong anti-wildfire “home hardening” law on the books, but it’s never been enforced because insurance models can’t account for it — and because people *hate* what it tells them to do. Fascinating @emilypont.bsky.social story: heatmap.news/climate/los-...

California issues landmark rules to improve home insurance market California's Department of Insurance released rules meant to encourage insurers to write more policies in high-fire-risk areas by using computer modeling.

This seems like a big deal for insurance in California. I wonder what the experts on here think of the new rules?

@kellyhereid.bsky.social @michaelwara.bsky.social @stevebowen.bsky.social
@jacobgellman.com

www.latimes.com/business/sto...

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Classic fully hinged job market behavior

What a shortage of IV bags tells us about the impact of climate change on supply chains A plant producing most of the nation's IV bags was wiped out by Hurricane Helene. It's another warning of financial risk.

What a shortage of IV bags tells us about the impact of #climaterisk on supply chains, by @scrawford.bsky.social

A plant producing most of the US's IV bags was wiped out by Hurricane Helene. It's another warning of financial risk...

open.substack.com/pub/susanpcr...

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Despite literally having the book in my possession at one point (didn’t get past the first few chapters bc it was too dark) I only know what I inferred from 2 songs that were on a musical themed mix tape (??) party favor I got at age 13. Soon by gif osmosis I may know it all. End of an era