Will B. Payne

The Broadway show was very fun too

AAG 2026 CFP: Putting the ‘Con’ in Economic Geography AAG 2026 CFP: Schemes, Scams, and Flim-flam: Putting the ‘Con’ in Economic Geography Will B. Payne, Rutgers University Desiree Fields, University of California, Berkeley Jovan Scott Lewis, University ...

Along with Will Payne and Jovan Lewis, I'm organizing an AAG session on the economic geography of scams for the 2026 conference in San Francisco. Please share widely! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hong Kong Restaurant 4eva

🤣

Not exactly the same but I have a manuscript in revision looking at Section 8 voucher influencers (landlord get rich quick content) on TikTok and Instagram

Article abstract for Navigating digital geographies: Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data. Click link to read abstract

In which surveillance study scholars, computer scientists, digital geographers, and a random economic geographer (me) collaborate to unpack the black box of how/why cell phone companies model your location in cities. There's more ambiguity than you'd think!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Call for Papers: Locating Power and Resistance Within Global AI Production Networks American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2026 Annual Meeting

Call for Papers: Locating Power & Resistance in Global AI Production Networks

AAG 2026 Annual Meeting

AI is not just “in the cloud.” It relies on global supply chains, with power concentrated in a few countries and corporations.

fair.work/en/fw/blog/c...

#AAG2026

I’m partly spoiled by the fact that the main game I’m playing now is Donkey Kong Bananza, which makes every player feel like a demigod, so going back to dying every 5 minutes is a rude awakening

I tried to get back into Hollow Knight in anticipation and then realized that I have no idea what to do next from my saved game 1/4 of the way through the game, and I forgot how hard even basic traversal can be.

YouTube video by THE MIDDLE FINGER Love Tractor - Love Tractor (Full Album)

No disrespect to Pylon, but Stipe kills it on that one.

Got the Love Tractor self-titled LP a while back, another band in the Athens scene making mostly jangly instrumentals, lots of fun: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JojJ...

IRS: “Crazy” or “Sitting Still”

Post-IRS: “Find the River” or “Sweetness Follows”

Yuppies has a cover! And a release date!

Out May 12 with @harvardpress.bsky.social.

Check out The Drifter on Steam; Aussie team that basically took that as a prompt. Super fun, under 10 hours, pretty reasonable puzzles.

The Birds Flocking Back to the Fresh Kills Dump New Yorkers stuck their garbage in Staten Island for fifty-three years. As the landfill becomes a park, foxes, deer, and grasshopper sparrows are moving in again.

José Ramírez-Garofalo, an ecologist at Freshkills, “will soon defend his Ph.D. dissertation at Rutgers…. He sees the park as a hopeful story at an otherwise ‘grim’ time for conservation efforts. ‘We’re seeing all these species come back… And they’re all here on Staten Island.’”

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) payment technologies are targeting young women and reconfiguring the spaces, practices & relations of digital money and finance. Very happy to have been interviewed for this story based on my research on BNPL and the geographies of consumer fintech w/ @dcockayne.bsky.social

Title, authors’ names, abstract, and keywords from a paper about the perspectives of various actors about flood risks and losses in a coastal area in New Jersey

Sea-level rise & flooding are ongoing due to climate change. How should coastal communities & decision makers respond? In a New Jersey study Geronimo et al. found cultural & institutional factors create barriers to transformative adaptation strategies @willbpayne.bsky.social‬ doi.org/10.1111/risa...

New article by Laura Geronimo, Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social, Clinton J. Andrews, Elisabeth A. Gilmore, Robert E. Kopp: Cultural and Institutional Factors Driving Severe Repetitive Flood Losses: Insights From the Jersey Shore. #research onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cultural and Institutional Factors Driving Severe Repetitive Flood Losses: Insights From the Jersey Shore Decisions about how to respond to coastal flood hazards often involve disagreements over resource allocations. In the United States, large intergovernmental fiscal transfers have enabled rebuilding i...

New paper by former @bloustein.rutgers.edu PhD student and MACH postdoc Laura Geronimo examines how differences in values and worldviews shape attitudes toward coastal adaptation strategies

A digital city on a serving tray

Dr. Will Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social and colleagues published a new article in JPER titled "Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change." journals.sagepub.com/eprint/RDXWS...

Comic. The Most-Observed Animal and Plant in Each State on iNaturalist. (Not the most common species in the state, just the one people have reported the most times.) [labeled map of the US] WA: Mallard/Western Sword Fern. OR: Mule Deer/Western Ponderosa Pine. CA: Western Fence Lizard/California Poppy. HI: Green Sea Turtle/‘Ōhi’a Lehua. ID: Mallard/Big Sagebrush. NV: Common Side-Blotched Lizard/Creosote Bush. MT: White-Tailed Deer/Common Yarrow. WY: American Bison/Sticky Geranium. UT: Mule Deer/Utah Juniper. AZ: Ornate Tree Lizard/Saguaro. CO: Mule Deer/Great Mullein. NM: Mule Deer/Creosote Bush. AK: Moose/Fireweed. ND: American Bison/Prairie Rose. SD: American Bison/Hoary Vervain. NE: American Robin/Common Milkweed. KS: Ornate Box Turtle/Amur Honeysuckle. OK: Pond Slider/Eastern Redcedar. TX: Northern Cardinal/Pinladies. MN, WI, IL: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Common Milkweed. IA, MI: White-Tailed Deer/Common Milkweed. MO: Brown-Belted Bumble Bee/Amur Honeysuckle. AR: Three-toed Box Turtle/Chinese Privet. LA: Green Anole/Baldcypress. IN: American Robin/Amur Honeysuckle. OH: Eastern Pondhawk/Virginia Springbeauty. KY: Common Box Turtle/Amur Honeysuckle. TN: American Robin/Christmas Fern. MS: Northern Cardinal/Pale Pitcher Plant. AL: Gulf Fritillary/American Sweetgum. GA: Green Anole/American Sweetgum. FL: Brown Anole/White Beggarticks. NY: Eastern Gray Squirrel/White Snakeroot. PA: White-Tailed Deer/Garlic Mustard. WV: White-Tailed Deer/Great Rhododendron. VA: White-Tailed Deer/Eastern Poison Ivy. MD: White-Tailed Deer/Wineberry. DE: Fowler’s Toad/American Pokeweed. NC: Eastern Gray Squirrel/Christmas Fern. SC: Northern Cardinal/American Sweetgum. NJ: Spotted Lanternfly/Common Mugwort. VT: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Eastern White Pine. NH: White-Tailed Deer/Eastern White Pine. MA: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Eastern White Pine. CT: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Striped Wintergreen. RI: American Herring Gull. ME: American Herring Gull/Canadian Bunchberry.

iNaturalist Animals and Plants

xkcd.com/3118/

Mapping Corporate Landlords in New Jersey - New Jersey State Policy Lab As part of our ongoing research project supported by the New Jersey State Policy Lab, we are examining the growth of corporate ownership in the state’s small residential property market. Our focus is ...

Higher #corporate ownership rates of small, 1- to 4-unit properties appear in a range of #NJ municipalities, including Trenton, New Brunswick, Atlantic City, Asbury Park, and Newark:

OnlineFirst - "Mapping elite tastes along New York City’s gourmet gentrification frontier, 1990–2015" by Will B. Payne:

#localreviews #commercialgentrification #NewYorkCity #geographicinformationscience #foodculture

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Forty years before Milo Aukerman from the Descendents started working there (after, famously, Going to College)

Frame of preference A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways?

aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

Comic. [two people in labcoats look at body pierced with blade draped over bench] PERSON 1: We found him lying uncomformably on the lab bench. I wonder if the iron-rich intrusion in his back is related. PERSON 2 with ponytail: It could be clastic. Maybe a rift opened in his body, and the intrusive material later fell into the hole. [caption] The Geology Department Investigates Their First Murder

Geology Murder

xkcd.com/3112/

What’s Happening to Reading? For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.

"Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas." Joshua Rothman on reading in the age of AI www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

Who Are Corporate Landlords Acquiring Homes From? Examining Property Transitions in New Jersey - New Jersey State Policy Lab In this fifth blog post on our research into corporate ownership of New Jersey’s one- to four-unit residential properties, we share more preliminary findings from our analysis of changes in property o...

Approximately 19% of Trenton's one- to four-unit #housing properties transitioned to corporate ownership between 2012 & 2022, totaling just over 4,000 properties in the Garden State capital, according to new research from @ericseymour.bsky.social w/ @bloustein.rutgers.edu:

#Rutgers #NJ #NewJersey

Senator Padilla’s office sends me this video of his take-down and detention at Sec. Noem’s press conference in L.A.