Jon Green

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

Parks and Rec meme: do you think a sleep deprived person could make this?

writing after paternity leave

my dog eyeing the waffle my daughter is eating

soon

Forestal (2024) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

anyone checked in on those "Trump will restore trust in government" folks today?

To reiterate, as a trained observer of human behavior I’d hazard the opinion that it’s bad for there to be no negative consequences for repeated, barefaced, public lies; and also speculate that it’s bad to subordinate the institutional production of knowledge to the personal vanities of leaders.

Her five word message: {insert five district-specific words here}

yeah I mean that the numbers had been the honest best estimates the office could put together is why they got fired!

the TL was being *so careful* yesterday to say that funkiness in the jobs numbers was the result of understaffed agencies trying to stretch limited resources and just high variance/not direct political interference only for Trump to fire the bureaucrat in charge of numbers he doesn't like

congratulations!

gotta respect coming in hot with "I'm one of the world's top experts on this subject" to make the claim though

an empty discussion section

ah, my nemesis, we meet again...

Braves explode for 8, then allow 8 in historic inning The Braves and Reds combined for 16 runs on 16 hits in the eighth inning Thursday night, marking just the third time in MLB history that both teams scored eight or more runs in the same inning.

"Cincinnati's Emilio Pagán (2-4) retired all three batters he faced but took the loss."

Total mystery how the nerds took over this sport.

www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/...

The latest from YouGov: For context, there are about as many Democrats who found the Sydney Sweeney jeans campaign to be "offensive" as there are Democrats who support Trump's retaliatory tariffs.

Probably not the best issue to capture the views of this group!

today.yougov.com/topics/overv...

Wokeness: a Retrospective In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The d...

My Retrospective on Wokeness in detail! Blogs are for just saying stuff, after all. So here is my attempt to say what was distinctive (if anything) about a recent era of socio-cultural life, what (if anything) changed, and what (if anything) was to the good

sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...

one institution I flew out to accidentally sent me a different finalist's travel itinerary while we were working out mine

Facts Will not Save You AI, history, and Soviet sci-fi

Facts Will Not Save You
hegemon.substack.com/p/facts-will...

I feel like a job that depends pretty heavily on going to specific places so that you can read specific documents that haven't been digitized is at relatively less risk of automation?

to yes-and Zander's point, my sense is she tried to apply the (good!) framework from her parenting book ("all these recommendations...how much evidence is there for them really?") to a new situation where it didn't fit as well because the plane was being built during takeoff

can confirm (w/ @meredithconroy.bsky.social and Ciera Hammond): at around this time during Trump 1, people giving local reasons why they signed up with Run for Something were more likely to actually run than people who gave Trump reasons
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

when people talk politics they’ll get stuff wrong sometimes. it happens! but it matters a lot whether they care when someone points that out, and how they respond.

They also took fact checks seriously. Both candidates dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating. An Obama administration official explained to me how, when faced with a choice of figures, the administration took the more modest number in hopes of avoiding Pinocchios. I heard from a campaign source that during debate prep, Obama, to his great annoyance, was told he couldn’t use a statistic because it had gotten Pinocchios. Obama’s campaign manager even sent a lengthy letter to The Post’s editor complaining that my Pinocchio ratings were undermining his attacks on Romney’s business record. The expectation that politicians would stick close to the truth began to erode with Trump’s emergence. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks — and doubled down even after my fact check proved this was a fantasy. He invented statistics — that the unemployment rate, then pegged at 4.9 percent, was really 42 percent — and kept repeating them, no matter how many times he was fact-checked. In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible). But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.

really key point from @glennkessler.bsky.social in his sign-off column: it's not just the volume of lies that undermine the norm that you should support your views with true rather than false information, it's the shamelessness with which you repeat them www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

oooooooof

it's one thing if a senator from Ohio was like "let's review how much federal funding we give to [city in another state], etc." it's another thing entirely when a senator from Ohio goes after some of their own constituents because it makes a different group of their constituents happy

negative representation (Costa 2025)

We are in a very dangerous phase of politics when a guy caught red-handed watching porn on a zoom meeting can simply say it never happened and rely on his ideological supporters to accept that explanation and move on. I don’t even think they believe it. They’re just happy to accept it as cover.

idk about this for a general election message but yeah I feel like we're owed at least one "not really trying to win but want to get these ideas on the table" primary campaign laser focused on process and institutional design issues in 2028

I'm not sure this has to be either/or. Campaign on real problems for real people, but imposing what costs you can for past norm violations after you win doesn't have to crowd out a legislative agenda.

people love to say "it's not a conspiracy theory" right before they explain their theory about a conspiracy

look I get it you want to be on alert for fascist vibes these days but this one is a false positive