martin t. hall

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has shared a big data update, covering all recorded US protests through Jan 2026. Some key takeaways 🧵:

generally, i'd say people who dot their i's with a circle should not be jailed.

🧵

Trump Shares Video Portraying the Obamas as Apes The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as “fake outrage.”

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others. The White House press secretary dismissed criticism as “fake outrage.”

‘Listen to Students’: How Advocates in Kentucky are Linking Free Expression Rights to Access to Education The Bluegrass Students Collective recognizes that freedom of expression in education is about access to that education in the first place.

“Listen to students,” says student organizer Savannah Dowell of the Bluegrass Students Collective in Kentucky. Learn more about how students are organizing for free expression and their communities in this month’s Conversations on the Quad. pen.org/savannah-dow...

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

@adamserwer.bsky.social nailed it: “The people of Minnesota have forced the Trump administration into a strategic retreat—one inflicted not as rioters or insurgents, but as neighbors.”

(around the No Kings logo, images of megaphones, and a photo of protesters holding signs that read “ICE OUT”) MARCH 28 NO KINGS NO THRONES. NO CROWNS.

The date for the next No Kings Day is set.

But this is a save the date, not a “sit back and wait.” 🧵

hazel. louisville, ky

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

I met an absolutely lovely academic who asked whether my department back home is affected by ICE -- a question dramatizing how little info is getting out.

For the record, the small example I chose:

My dept has a carpool to pick up grad students of color who can't safely commute to campus alone.

ICE detains 5-year old Minnesota boy; school leader says agents used him as ‘bait’ The Columbia Heights school district says federal agents have detained four children in their district. School officials say agents used 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos as “bait” to try and draw family m...

"Liam’s teacher Ella Sullivan was in visible tears during the announcement that Liam had been taken away. 'He’s a bright young student, and he’s so kind and loving, and his classmates miss him, and all I want is for him to be safe and back here,' Sullivan said."

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

a graph of unemployment by immigration status

a graph of employment rates by immigration status

Unsurprisingly, Trump's immigration crackdown is not delivering labor market improvements for the US-born

Over the last year, native-born unemployment is up from 3.9% to 4.3% while native-born employment has decreased by a similar amount

Texas A&M Bans Plato - Daily Nous Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy a...

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."

surreal times

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

National parks change prioritizes Trump birthday over days honoring Black people Free entrance days at national parks no longer include MLK Day and Juneteenth.

It might be easy to find things like this merely petty or superficial, but that would be a mistake. Demeaning, erasing or eliminating celebrations or acknowledgments of Black America is straight from Redemption playbook, and is intended to reinforce the racial hierarchy and signal its reinstatement.

There are 75,977 people born in Somalia who are now citizens of the United States, including those specific people.

He is talking about US citizens. He is talking about *us*.

The truth is that none of us are garbage, and the job of the US president is to represent all of us.

We, the people.

The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search

Chimpanzees use 22 types of tools in the wild but they are capable of doomscrolling like the rest of us.

This video of Sugriva using Instagram is shocking because it's so similar to how humans use social media--engaging with content that triggers our emotions, like images of our friends and foes.

😓

The Kent School of Social Work & Family Science at the University of Louisville is hiring! Send good people our way. We have 5 academic programs, an established research infrastructure, talented and caring faculty, and soooo much bourbon. #SocialWork

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

"I taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you’ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani."

Peter Coviello for @literaryhub.bsky.social: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

😞

Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models - Nature Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differ...

When ChatGPT was asked to rate 40,000 résumés, it ranked the older male candidates as better quality than the younger female applicants.

Incredibly compelling

The economic effects of international students go far beyond their tuition dollars.

Many stay, innovate, & shape the productivity of the entire economy.

My co-authors & I estimate the impact of US international student exclusion policy in this new paper commissioned by the @nationalacademies.org.

❤️❤️❤️

#NoKings in louisville*

*except Bron

We firmly believe the people's power is what fuels the movement to protect our democracy.

That’s why we're proud to sponsor No King Day II on Saturday, Oct 18, to join in peaceful resistance to autocracy.

Together, we will send a clear message: the American people bow to no king.

No Kings As the president escalates his authoritarian power grab, the NO KINGS non-violent movement continues to rise stronger. We are united once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power ...

Make your plans for #NoKings. This Saturday, October 18th.
Free speech is action. Protestors believe that action has meaning. Protestors are exercising the rights enshrined in the Constitution. For me, protest is about love of country.
I'll be there. Please join in.
www.nokings.org