Carlyle Carl

One of those kinks -- one that doesn't get much attention - is the extent to which the media (and politicians and the people who work for them) overrate the amount of knowledge most voters have about politics and policy. You see it when they use insider jargon and acronyms in their reporting, assuming readers and viewers know what they mean. Do they? Do they really know what FISA is? Pay-Go? "Judicial activism"? This overestimation of how much knowledge most people possess is one of the causes of the media's failure to clearly and consistently report the facts about health care. They don't understand how necessary it is. They think they can focus on horse-race political coverage of the debate. They think if they report the facts once, that's often enough. They think the fact that people are satisfied with their health insurance tells us something about the quality and reliability of that insurance -- though it clearly doesn't. So the public, which -- again, understandably -- doesn't know much about a complex policy and lacks the time and resources to find out for itself, is exposed to a nonstop barrage of spin, misinformation, and outright lies about health care. And the media, overestimating how much people actually know, don't think they have to make the facts clear every day, over and over again. Is it really any wonder that people believe things that aren't true? Do we really need to relive the run-up to the Irag war all over again?

Oh hey here's me in 2009, about journalists overestimate how much people already know, and the consequences that has. Holds up pretty well, I think! www.mediamatters.org/legacy/why-w...

Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race–Class Subjugated Communities Against the backdrop of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, we ask what the American politics subfield has to say about the political lives of communities subjugated by race and class. We ar...

Ha! I meant to post these two here + this paper and somehow ended up posting it to my feed, not here! But all these works really get into how people actually interact with and see yhw state www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Submerged State “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler’s provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social be...

Mettler's Submerged State (let us make our deliverisms break thru the surface)

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions in the American Public Abstract. Many Americans hold substantial misperceptions about what the government actually does. However, they get the facts wrong not because they are la

two more good resources for this neck of the woods

Thorson's Invented State (w a hopeful look at remediation)
academic.oup.com/book/55770?l...

Air Pollution From Industrial Facilities Is Far Worse Than Estimated The Trump administration has put a stop to EPA rules that would have required more than 130 industrial facilities to install air monitors to measure pollution. Millions of people living near these pla...

NEW: About 90,000 people living near larger chemical plants face an unacceptable risk of developing cancer, the EPA says.

New rules adopted last year could’ve cut that number to 3,000 residents — a drop of 97%.

But Trump has halted those efforts.

@pengzell.bsky.social asks about the social sciences, which I haven't looked at in a while. Indexing these against 2008 rather than peak, and struck that economics has been on a downslope for 6 years now, while psychology, the worst discipline, continues to rise rapidly.
bsky.app/profile/peng...

Suriname pledges to shield 90% of forests, far beyond global conservation goal Suriname has pledged to permanently protect 90% of its forests, far surpassing the global 30x30 goal.

Suriname’s government has pledged to permanently protect 90% of its tropical forests, a move conservationists say is among the most ambitious commitments to climate and biodiversity ever made by an Amazonian nation.

Journalist Mario Guevara Speaks - Letter from ICE DETENTION FACILITY — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER The only journalist detained by ICE on US soil, sends a letter to The Bitter Southerner.

Mario Guevara @bittersouth.bsky.social The only known journalist detained by ICE on US soil sends a letter to The Bitter Southerner. This is Mario Guevara’s harrowing account of what’s happened to him, in detainment, since his arrest on June 14. bittersoutherner.com/journalist-m...

Hypocritical Conservatives Are Using Charlie Kirk's Horrific Murder to Cynically Smear the Left Have they forgotten all the Trump supporters who have killed, attacked, and threatened both prominent Democrats and opponents of this president in recent years? I haven't – and I have a list of them.

zeteo.com/p/charlie-ki...

Retiring and relocating? Take a holistic approach Looking to retire and relocate? Deciding where to land isn't as easy as it sounds. Retirement experts say many retirees face challenges like rising costs and community support.

Looking to retire and relocate? Deciding where to land isn't as easy as it sounds. Retirement experts say many retirees face challenges like rising costs and community support.

By now, we've all seen the video of Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) being forcibly removed and handcuffed for asking a question during Kristi Noem's press conference.

But what Noem said just moments before the video was taken is "classic authoritarian red-baiting," points out @davidcorn.bsky.social.

NAACP calls for emergency shutdown of Musk's supercomputer in Memphis The civil rights group alleges that the project’s pollution could be harmful to nearby residents.

This is the future they want us all to accept soon, but they’re going to soft launch it by hurting Black communities first, and you know why.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Four Concrete Ways Business Leaders Can Ease the Burden on Working Parents As a mom of two, an executive and someone who’s worked to elect pro-family leaders, I know firsthand how broken our system is for working parents—especially as the Trump administration pushes for high...

New from me in Ms. magazine: Making workplaces more family-friendly will make them better for everyone - I’ve got four specific tips for leaders on how to do it. msmagazine.com/2025/05/30/w...

Fulbright Applicants Rejected Over “DEI” Research Proposals The Trump administration staged an unprecedented intervention in this year’s Fulbright selection process, rejecting finalists whose research deals with race, gender or climate change.

For Fulbright Applicants, a DEI Disqualifier

The Trump administration staged an unprecedented intervention in this year’s Fulbright selection process, rejecting finalists whose research deals with race, gender or climate change. #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky bit.ly/4kg5Fii

How do famous right-wing influencers actually poll with young men in 2025?

Rogan: 27% favorable, 35% unfavorable, 45% don't know/never heard of
Theo Von: 21% fav, 16% unfav, 55% dk
Andrew Tate: 12% fav, 47% unfav, 36% dk

Source: iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/5...

🆕📄Journal of Marriage and Family w/ M. Jacob📄

Parenthood in Europe: Not More Life Satisfaction, but More Meaning in Life

Previous research in soc was very focused on satisfaction & happiness.
BUT: many find meaning equally or more important than happiness.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

The relationship between the percentage of a county's population with a BA and Democratic vote share was basically the same in 2024 as it was in 2020 (B=.89 vs .91). Interestingly, % of the population with a grad degree predicts better predicts Dem vote share relative to BA%. 1/2

Is Trump’s base racist? Social scientists begin to weigh in Is President Donald Trump’s base racist? Social scientists are beginning to weigh in

Sociologists come to shocking conclusion: Trump’s biggest supporters are motivated by bigotry and want him to hurt the people they dislike. (gift link) www.sfchronicle.com/politics/art...

Under Texas’ Abortion Ban, Where a Woman Lives Can Determine Her Risk of Developing Sepsis While the rates of dangerous infections spiked across the state after it banned abortion in 2021, women in Houston fared far worse than those in Dallas, according to ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind ana...

NEW: The rate of sepsis in Houston surged 63% after Texas banned abortion.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where hospital leaders empowered doctors to intervene before patients’ conditions worsened, it rose just 29%.

kfor.com/news/local/w...

More on this concern, as I was able to share with the NYT:

“There may well be a sixth National Climate Assessment...The question is whether it is going to reflect credible science and be of real use to our communities as they prepare for climate change.”

Philadelphia 2025: The State of The City As 2025 began, Philadelphia appeared to be entering a new and different phase after years of pandemic-related reverberations. The question is which effects from the past few years will turn out to hav...

www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-...

Can question format create order effects in online surveys?
We tested two formats for rating political parties – standard grid (both parties on one page, as shown below) and dynamic grid (rating each party separately) – and found the latter to produce stronger systematic effects
tinyurl.com/vu9wj7rr

A line of flames approaches a decommissioned nuclear facility. There is a canal between the plant & the fire. The spent fuel storage is on the bottom right of the picture.

Picture of fire approaching Oyster Creek. It's been shut down for a few years now, but there is still spent fuel on-site in the ISFSI. Fire has passed with no damage on site.

Health costs associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care - Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker Pregnancy is one of the most common reasons for a hospitalization among non-elderly people. In addition to the cost of the birth itself, pregnancy care also involves costs associated with prenatal vis...

🤰$5K for having a baby? That’s cute.

Giving birth (with insurance) costs an average of $19K, with women paying $3K out of pocket. 💸

Caring for an infant in the first year costs $10-23K. 💰💰💰
(www.newyorklife.com/articles/bre...)

These are not serious ideas.

Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet In a potential landmark discovery, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs yet of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet's atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases that on Earth are produced only by biological processes.

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet's atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases produced only by biological processes reut.rs/43XJ7Oe

In September 2021, Texas banned nearly all abortions. A JAMA Pediatrics study found that, between 2021 and 2022, infant deaths in Texas surged 12.9%, compared with a much smaller increase in the rest of the US of 1.8%. Infant mortality rates rose 8.3%.

www.cnn.com/2024/06/24/h...