Dr. Amanda J. Phalin

If you missed the Olympics opening ceremony, go back and watch it. Wow, Italy. The world needed that.

WHAT?!?!? NO! My students and I use this literally every day, including in my class this afternoon!

And in tandem: Expand funding and support for student papers and journalists, high school and higher ed. As local print media have been hollowed out, some of the best reporting now comes from student-run papers— Univ of Fl and FSU, Brown and Columbia, Harvard, among many, many others.

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023.

The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets.

https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

screenshot of text from Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive - because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."

bars

I get this question a lot (not always in such polite language), so worth addressing directly. (Short thread)

What can history teach us about what happens when a populist strongman with an idiosyncratic taste for low interest rates undermines central bank independence?

For those keeping score, Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, & Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the President & his cronies

Fun, fun thread.

Opinion | I was a red state governor. What I saw at Harvard surprised me. The spirit of association remains alive in unexpected places.

1/ This op-ed is like 75% of the way to getting it ... www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Opinion | I was a red state governor. What I saw at Harvard surprised me. The spirit of association remains alive in unexpected places.

This is an incredibly revealing op-ed

[Gift Link]

wapo.st/4aQQABT

1/7

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: Student journalists around the country are doing amazing work, helping to fill the void left by the unfortunate collapse of local print media.

Hello, 'Murrica: "If tariffs stay at current levels, they will impose an annual tax increase of $1,700 for an average household, generating more than $2 trillion in revenue over ten years—the largest tax increase on US households since 1982 as a share of GDP" via @piie.com

This.

How do I know that the next generation of economists will be impacted by how these institutions react?

"Exposure to a field-specific faculty sexual misconduct incident decreases degree completion in that field by 3.4 percent four years after the incident." 🙃

#news #harvard #econsky

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that how Harvard and the economics profession respond to Larry Summers will determine who makes up the next generation of economists.

#econsky #news #harvard

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

Did DOGE save us $2 trillion?

“Not even close. .. Total spending excluding interest rose $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year.” 🤡

@wsj.com
www.wsj.com/economy/tari...

We must stand resolutely against political assassination and political violence of all kinds, and just as resolutely against everyone who exploits acts of violence as the pretext or excuse for political repression of political opponents.

My latest at @theatlantic.com is on how Trump's 2nd-term economic policies (import substitution, "emergency" declarations, personal dealmaking, fiscal/monetary recklessness, & govt control of private enterprise) increasingly resemble post-war Argentina.

Not good.
www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Robot flipping a switch on his body from "mad about politics" to "mad about football"

It's the weekend

Lemme just say if President Bernie Sanders had unilaterally imposed, by executive fiat, hundreds of billions of new taxes, personally browbeat executives about job cuts and investments and then fired the head of BLS, the Chamber of Commerce and the business orgs would not be sitting idly by.

Just to reiterate: What this administration is doing right now is orders of magnitude more dangerous for academic freedom and free speech than anything the right has spent the last 30 years complaining about.

What a graph

JPMORGAN: “.. Even with these various deals either inked or getting closer, we still think we are on track for an average effective tariff rate somewhere in the very high teens. This wouldn’t be much lower than the immediate post-Liberation Day tariffs that were the cause of so much market angst.”

It is fucking insane that we had a decade of people complaining about the dangers of cancel culture, and now literally hundreds of thousands of people are being purged from government jobs for ideological reasons, but that is not cancel culture.

Trump & Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” would be one of the largest wealth transfers from the working class to the wealthy in U.S. history.

But how would it affect YOU?

We built a calculator.

Plug in your info to see what it’d mean for your finances.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

Not at all a surprise.

Thursday night preview kicking off soon and the cosplaying has already started! Thanks @dr-phalin.sky.social for letting us share these lovely Hatsune Miku and Toga cosplays!

Over on the other platform, I keep getting notifications. They’re all from Elmo, whom I don’t follow.