Jamie Castle

And specifically faith in *quantitative* social science.

There's a wealth of insight from *qualitative* research in fields like sociology that gets very little attention politics- and policy-wise.

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across.

If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers.

If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Chromosome Testing Will Take Sports Back To The Dark Ages | Defector In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to…

No new science is behind this push to resurrect chromosome tests. These tests are just as discriminatory and confused as they were three decades ago. defector.com/chromosome-t...

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...

Yes and, those letters can help demonstrate impact in the promotion/tenure/post tenure review dossier!

If you want a heartbreaking example of what this looks like when it happens... And it does happen... Read this very good work from Dr. Ng and team.

doi.org/10.1177/0161...

"Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: 'You cannot make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market. Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.” 9:12 AM Feb 12, 2026 604.8K Views

In terms of what cures are being lost:

- Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis
- herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis
- shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

If we've learned anything from the part of our history where we created the extremely powerful, world-changing, uncontrollable new technology of a social internet, it should be that whatever is about to happen with AI will, if nothing else, be extremely dumb.

Who among us hasn't felt languid and bedeviled, especially lately?

In other words, perception hits fast, but personal knowledge shapes more sustained processing.

This suggests impression formation isn’t a single moment. It’s a layered neural process unfolding over time.

The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends.

Increasing autism rates over the last 25 years may just be kids with mild forms getting diagnosed. Rates of moderate to severe impairment due to autism have actually fallen slightly.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

Do you wanna make sure you didn’t miss a single second of symbolism from Bad Bunny’s halftime show? This thread gotchu!

If you are new to Bad Bunny, you need to check out @beckyhammer.bsky.social's crash course on Benito, Reggaeton, the culture that shaped him and (por supuesto) Perreo

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

I'd watch a muppet show movie where the muppets infiltrate an academic conference.

Need a mood boost?

Watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet celebrate the Seattle Seahawks being in the Super Bowl

White House says it won’t withhold funding from NH schools with DEI programs Lawsuits challenging New Hampshire laws that ban DEI initiatives and limit teaching about racism and discrimination remain unresolved.

This is why they must be challenged every single time. Not accommodated. Not bargained with. Just challenged.

image of a report cover, with a US flag in the background, and the text "The Political Disconnect: Working-Class and Low-Income People on What Politics Means to Them and How They Might be Mobilized”

Today I'm releasing probably the most important scholarly thing I've ever worked on - a report based on talking with 144 people about why they don't vote or only vote regularly, and on what needs to be done to build a democracy that can include everyone.
www.swarthmore.edu/u...
please share!

We live in a moment of both continuity with the past, and rupture from it.

Insisting that it’s only one or the other does not make for clear analysis.

A Day for Gaza Today, The Nation is turning over its website exclusively to stories from Gaza and its people. This is why.

Media coverage of Gaza has plummeted. So today on @thenation.com, we're doing something pretty special: we're only running pieces by people in and from Gaza.

We're calling it "A Day for Gaza." You can find links to all of the incredible pieces here. Please read! www.thenation.com/article/worl...

The thing that a lot of these guys have in common is that for them science is about personal brand-building and advancement of the self. Their norms serve their status competition, not a greater good.

Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age

Setting aside elementary curriculum & instruction for the moment, we've known for decades much of what it takes to encourage reading in and out of school by secondary students regardless of gender, and instead of doing this, we've plied them with edtech, apps, test prep, and devices they carry 24/7.

And in case anyone is wondering whether I only took science courses in college, here are five more:

1. Music Appreciation (I & II)
2. French Language (I & II)
3. Italian Language I
4. Readings in Modern Literature
5. Vocal Performance I

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college:

1. Gross Human Anatomy
2. Cardiopulmonary Pathophysiology
3. Cellular Exercise Physiology
4. Drugs and Behavior
5. Neuropsychology

What an enormously talented woman. I'm shocked by her passing (much too young!) and grateful we have so many iconic performances through which we can remember her.

As someone who taught human anatomy and physiology for about a decade, can confirm.

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

You know Alex Pretti & Renee Good—the 2 white people ICE killed.

ICE has also killed Keith Porter, a Black man, Parady La, a Cambodian man, & 5 Latinos—Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.

9 TOTAL.

ABOLISH ICE.

And even before the incontrovertible video evidence appears, maybe consider that the current administration has a documented history of lying, and remind your audience of that track record as context for the "conflicting accounts."