Chris Bennett

Letter below is by surgical oncologist and professor Dr. Michael Baum about how a character explaining chaos theory in a Tom Stoppard play sparked an expansion in his understanding of breast cancer, leading to exploration of adjuvant therapy that protects distant organs.

This is what art can do.

Wording from a report that says "Deceive, Subdue & Seize." Next to the text is a clip art image of Groucho Mark glasses with a moustache.

Much like the Antwerp Diamond Heist, this report is full of gems! With graphics like this, the report authors knew exactly what they were doing.

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

Red Panda (acrobat) - Wikipedia

She’s been at it for 32 years! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Pan...

Have any NCES data users gotten a disclosure review approved for a paper/report since spring? I've been waiting for 6+ months 😞

Rudy Bridges is younger than the Sitting President of the United States and 29 sitting United States Senators

Oreoboros

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Homefront: Black Servicemembers and Black Voters in the Civil Rights Era The role of Black World War II veterans in the Civil Rights Movement has been well documented, but the effect of Black military service on Black voting patterns remains unclear. Combining detailed in...

This Veterans Day I want to acknowledge the Black veterans of WWII who fought fascism and nazism and came home to fight for civil rights and democracy here. New research shows Black veterans were critical in securing the voting rights currently under attack.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A screenshot of the title page of the Common App Call for Research Proposals, AY 2025-2026. The Executive Summary and main requirements for the Letter of Intent are visible. Exact text can be found at the link in the main post.

🚨Calling all education+social science researchers! 🚨

For the second time ever, Common App is hosting an open Call for Research Proposals to solicit innovative and rigorous research projects using our expansive (& still mostly untapped) data warehouse!
www.commonapp.org/files/DAR/Co...

Hi writers! I’m looking to assign a couple of features for Slate before the end of the year. If you have anything in mind that you think would be a fit please send me a pitch! Jenée.Desmond- harris@slate.com or dm me.

RTs are appreciated so this can reach more people. Thanks!

Slide title: "network effects in scientific labor" networks mediate most scientific activities: 1. scientific training, hiring, collaboration, teaching, attention, peer review, etc. 2. networks act like a form of unequally distributed social capital a productive collaborator --> increases your productivity a prominent collaborator --> increases your prominence How much does who you work with impact your productivity and prominence?

Slide title: "model checking". Shows the results of applying our probabilistic generative from Li et al. Nature Communications (2022) for estimating individual productivity and prominence parameters from observed collaboration network data. This "nets out" the network, and estimates individual levels of activity. Left figure is joint distribution of productivity lambda and prominence theta, showing productivity is tightly concentrated around 0.42 papers/year, while prominence has a long tail, with most mid-career scientists (we studied 200,000 from 6 STEM fields) have very low prominence. Right figure shows pairwise correlation matrix of measures like number of papers, number of citations, lambda, theta, having a high-lambda coauthor, and having a high-theta coauthor. Strong correlation between your own number of papers and having a high-lambda (very productive) coauthor, etc. Good sanity checks for the model.

Slide title "gender vs. productivity & prominence" Notes decades of past work showing a "productivity gap" between men and women, in which men publish more papers and receive more citations over time. But, after "netting out" their collaboration networks, we find no gender difference at all between individual productivity and individual prominence, implying that it's difference in who men and women work with (the size and composition of their collaboration networks) that drives the observed gap in productivity, not differences at the individual level.

Slide title "how important is who you work with?" This is a wrap-up slide from the end of the talk: networks act like unequally distributed social capital in science they mediate our scientific attention, evaluation, and collaboration differences in collaboration networks can explain gendered differences in productivity & prominence early-career productivity & prominence what else? can we intervene in these networks to mitigate inequalities? funds for new collaborations, eg, after parenthood? early-career fellowships to work with elite senior coauthors?

Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week

I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital

aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

Comic. [Person sitting at desk with laptop with machine labeled E-21 making “click click” noises on the floor behind] VOICE FROM LAPTOP: Hey all! Does your E-21 humidifier make an annoying clicking noise? Mine did, but I finally figured out that there’s an easy fix, so I made this video in case anyone else… PERSON AT DESK: Oh my god. Yes. *Yes.* [caption] I know there’s more important work in the world, but I feel like these people deserve, at minimum a statue.

Repair Video

xkcd.com/3163/

Economics Literature Search Full-text search across 15,000+ papers from top economics journals and NBER working papers. Track how empirical methods have evolved over time.

Dropping a beta version of this page while everyone is up and processing baseball!

This tool lets you search the full text of papers from the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal series, and over 30,000 NBER working papers.

paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

And in that pause between pitch and contact - longer than logic, shorter than hope - we remembered why baseball existed long before we judged a sport's value by viral moments and betting apps. It is the romance of failure. The mortal beauty of trying and missing seven times out of 10 and still being considered great. It is the only sport where patience is a weapon, and panic the surest death. You cannot simply run out the clock in baseball; you must face it, pitch by terrifying pitch, until it finally releases you.

Did not expect one of the best paragraphs I’d read about baseball would come from an Irish newspaper

www.irishexaminer.com/sport-column...

Cute light beige dog dressed as a Halloween ghost.

Even winning this year’s Halloween costume prize couldn’t ease Carol’s existential ennui. “Another October, another ghost, another shiny prize. Maybe a pig’s ear would cheer me. Ah nuts, who am I kidding.”

Meet Paul Maddox Paul Maddox is a world-renowned cancer researcher, two-time entrepreneur, and native son of Western North Carolina–and now, a candidate for U.S. Congress. ....

🧪hey all, a friend and colleague, @maddoxfornc.bsky.social, is running for Congress in North Carolina. He is a scientist, professor, and parent, perspectives that are especially important right now. I hope you will support his run for Congress. Find out more here: www.maddoxforcongress.com/about/

Image showing the S&P 500 price on October 29, 2025. It closed at a value that was 0.0044% below the previous day’s close. Google shades the value in red on the line graph because of the slight decline.

I remain fascinated at Google’s insistence on showing two significant digits for the daily percent change in the stock market.

Change one letter, ruin a candy:

Spittles

Food relief orgs can do a LOT with a little. $50 to the Atlanta Food Bank provides 150 meals. $100 to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank provides 250 meals. Anything you can share will go a long way. Never feel like your efforts are too small to make a difference.

Now just to find out if reviewers with surnames that start with early letters of the alphabet get a disproportionate of “outstanding reviewer” awards, as well… www.aera.net/Publications...

Impact of New Graduate and Parent Loan Limits Based on our analysis of recent borrowing levels, OBBBA’s new loan limits will curtail borrowing for about one-third of both all parent and all graduate student borrowers. Read more.

🚨 NEW from @PEERResearch.bsky.social: New graduate, parent loan limits will curtail borrowing for about one-third of borrowers. About $10 billion/yr will no longer be available to grad students (more when including new limits for part-time students), parents. www.american.edu/spa/peer/imp...

Research firms continue to shed talented staff—even after the far-reaching cuts earlier this year. Just this week, there have been announcements of significant layoffs at RAND and Mathematica.

Postdoc at the Minnesota Population Center, @minnpop.bsky.social

Applications open now and being evaluated on a rolling basis. Pass on to demographers you know!

(This one requires folks to relocate to the Twin Cities, because it involves work in the restricted data center)

Ryan Coogler Is Rebooting The X-Files for His Mom Ryan Coogler says he’s rebooting ‘The X-Files’ for his mom, a major fan of the show, and she’s already read some pages: ‘She’s fired up.’

Ryan Coogler says he’s rebooting ‘The X-Files’ for his mom, a major fan of the show, and she’s already read some pages: ‘She’s fired up.’

The State of Local News

“Over the past two decades, the number of news desert counties – areas that lack consistent local reporting – has grown steadily. This past year was no exception: in this report, we are tracking 213 U.S. counties without any local news source, up from 206 last year.”

Picture of oak leaf hydrangea leaves that are turning from green to red. Picture was taken in October in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Oak leaf hydrangeas deserve more credit for their contributions to fall foliage

One of my favorite parts about learning Latin was discovering the various meanings of a word. For instance, “hope” and “trust” are translations of the same word, which is awfully poetic.