The BWCAW is a good place to spend three October days not seeing a single other human (only some beaver, many grouse, assorted other birds, and a pine marten). flic.kr/s/aHBqjCxdgE

Courtesy of colleagues at Penn

New Working Paper 🚨

I am introducing the new dataset on Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes (PEAR). It includes information on the composition of parliaments in 819 legislative terms in 130 autocracies from 1945 - based on over 200k individual-level observations.

tinyurl.com/48h68hmh

I think they call this the open exchange of ideas?

lp0 on fire

Yeah, the actual work experience has been great. But I'm not sure I need a Bank email account (there's cake in the break room 1300 miles from me!), or the full suite of corporate ethics trainings to engage in such collaboration.

I repost this every time she posts it. Also, I have consulted for the World Bank. Not to say I wouldn't again, just I'll be thinking about this post while setting up my 2 factor auth and doing the onboarding training modules.

What Americans Die from?

And what the media reports on...

Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

Absurd discourse hack takes over irrelevant failing television news channel nobody watches, will get irritatingly great severance package in about a year when nobody watches after many many many think pieces everyone hate reads. Many terrible people get too much money each step of the way.

I don’t know if I’m late but this @tressiemcphd.bsky.social analysis is so good. Here’s a gift link

People think they’re taking down a rich intellectual sinecure but they’re mostly terrorizing committed public servants who make $58,000 a year after 15 years of experience at a school that has to budget creatively so students can access textbooks.

Flashbacks to a V-dem dinner during the last shutdown where I ended up sitting next to the Swedish (deputy?) foreign minister, who wanted the only American in scolding distance to explain how this could be a thing. I may have panicked and shown him a picture of my fiscal cliff Halloween costume.

this is, no exaggeration, some of the most loser shit i have ever seen in my life

random and chaotic so much of this has been.

I was much more certain my NSF on internet politics was under threat, because it was partially about eliciting expert assessments of global digital misinformation flows. But it took them until April to really get their claws into NSF, so it seemed like it might weirdly survive. Which highlights how

CEPPS=consortium for elections and political process strengthening, one of the many orgs in the USAID orbit that suffered severe knock-on disruption.

I had skin in this game (AID-funded research in progress) and read p2025 before the election. I figured work in the democracy aid space was threatened downstream but was surprised when CEPPS (much less AID proper) quickly ceased to exist. For one thing, it still does exist, by law...

I'm glad to see so many people speaking up about the case at Cornell of egregious harassment of a faculty member and violation of academic freedom.

But let me tell you- your palestinian colleague has been saying this! Your palestinian colleague has likely already been a victim of the same behavior!

Gotta be a special kind of boring to be watchlisted for assigning AER articles.

I feel bad for the intern tasked with finding proof of my wokeness: "And finally, Daniel Pemstein of NDSU assigns mainstream American Economic Review articles on income inequality and racial discrimination. He also conducts research on political candidates’ use of “toxic” language on social media."

In reporting this piece on the new trial for a Huntington's treatment, I was struck by one thing in particular:

The joy.

One of my sources wept for joy. He has spent his entire career studying this disease, he said it was the happiest day. www.sciencenews.org/article/hunt...

Sara Roy has written a deeply poignant and painful piece in @journalgenocide.bsky.social and I hope you will read it: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

TBF, only one of these events involved pyrotechnics