Nicholas A. Christakis
@nachristakis.bsky.social
18K followers 560 following 820 posts

Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. Sociologist. Network Scientist. Physician. Author of Apollo's Arrow; Blueprint; Connected; and Death Foretold. Director of the Human Nature Lab: https://humannaturelab.net .. more

Nicholas A. Christakis is a Greek American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the social, economic, biological, and evolutionary determinants of human welfare. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. .. more

Public Health 23%
Physics 18%
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
The official government account for DHS appears to be run by far-right trolls deliberately trying to provoke a response by using a term openly associated with ethnic cleansing. They will attack anyone who points this out and express faux outrage at the suggestion. They know what they are doing.
Remigration Wikipedia Page.


Not to be confused with Return migration.
Remigration is an originally European far-right proposal of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry.
It is popular especially within the Identitarian movement. Some proponents of remigration suggest excluding some persons with non-European background from such a mass deportation, based on a varyingly defined degree of assimilation into European culture.
dremmazang.bsky.social
Z-CAFÉ will soon open a new postdoctoral position. We’re looking for scholars passionate about family, health, demography, policy, and aging, broadly defined, who also bring strong statistical and computational skills.

catherinedevries.bsky.social
Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it.

CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures.

But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do.

👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette...

🧵
Fail Better: Why Your Rejections Will Shape You More Than Your Publications
The Art of Learning from Rejection
catherineeunicedevries.substack.com

paleofuture.bsky.social
Border Patrol “attempted to arrest a plumber working inside a Logan Heights home but left empty-handed after the homeowner refused them entry.

The homeowner told agents she would not allow them inside because the warrant they presented did not include her address and lacked a judge's signature.”
Federal immigration operations target San Diego neighborhoods, sparking community resistance
Federal immigration agents conducted operations in Logan Heights and Southeast San Diego on Friday, with community members capturing footage of the enforcement actions.
www.10news.com
adamgrant.bsky.social
Cursing is rarely a symbol of low class. It's often a mark of high authenticity.

Evidence: Swearing predicts higher rates of honesty and integrity. It signals a willingness to prize candor over courtesy.

A little profanity can show that you're being real and you do give a damn.

nachristakis.bsky.social
Yes. Some people have less consistent preferences. ;-)

nachristakis.bsky.social
In related work, in 2008, we studied whether a man has an increased risk of death when his ex-wife dies, comparable to when his current wife dies (as a test of homogamy) in a sample of one million Americans.

No, the death of an ex-wife has no discernible effect.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Wives and ex-wives: A new test for homogamy bias in the widowhood effect - Demography
Increased mortality following the death of a spouse (the “widowhood effect”) may be due to (1) causation, (2) bias from spousal similarity (homogamy), or (3) bias from shared environmental exposures. This article proposes new tests for bias in the widowhood effect by examining husbands, wives, and ex-wives in a longitudinal sample of over 1 million elderly Americans. If the death of an ex-wife has no causal effect on the mortality of her husband, then an observed association between the mortality of an ex-wife and her husband may indicate bias, while the absence of an effect of an ex-wife’s death on her husband’s mortality would discount the possibility of homogamy bias (and also of one type of shared-exposure bias). Results from three empirical tests provide strong evidence for an effect of a current wife’s death on her husband’s mortality yet no statistically signifi cant evidence for an effect of an ex-wife’s death on her husband’s mortality. These results strengthen the causal interpretation of the widowhood effect by suggesting that the widowhood effect is not due to homogamy bias to any substantial degree.
link.springer.com

nachristakis.bsky.social
Do people have a “type” when it comes to their romantic partners’ personalities? A 2019 analysis of 332 Germans (159 men, 173 women) who had self-reports of personality available from two different partners during a 9-y longitudinal study indicates this is the case.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org

nachristakis.bsky.social
The Trump administration feels that the USA doesn’t need people working on disease prevention and fires the whole office. The incompetence and damage to our nation is breathtaking.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/h...
Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error
www.nytimes.com

nachristakis.bsky.social
Inventive and cool 2020 paper on the universality of facial expressions (and emotions): the occurrence of 16 expressions in 6M videos from 144 countries was examined using machine learning: facial expressions had distinct associations with a set of contexts. nature.com/articles/s41...
@nature.com

nachristakis.bsky.social
The video captures the relocation due to the air-raid in Kyiv like an old-fashioned movie intermission, and the energy of the students was palpable. It was an incredible experience, and I was so impressed with everything I saw at KSE.

nachristakis.bsky.social
I spoke at the Kyiv School of Economics last month, on "Social Artificial Intelligence" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtaX...) & "Social Network Interventions" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCnZ...).
The latter started in a big airy room but, half way in, an air raid forced relocation to Soviet bomb shelter.
Lecture by Nicholas A. Christakis "Social Network Interventions"
YouTube video by Kyiv School of Economics
www.youtube.com
johnmullahy.bsky.social
"afflicted with the malady of thought"

This excerpt from J.S. Mill's On Liberty is a bit long but so timely.
ophastings.bsky.social
The GSS asked the same people about their childhood income rank three different times. 56% changed their answer, even though what was trying to be measured couldn’t change! We dig into this in a new article at @socialindicators.bsky.social. 



doi.org/10.1007/s112...

🧵👇 (1/5)
Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank - Social Indicators Research
How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.
doi.org

atrupar.com
Trump: "We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts and the courts said you have freedom of speech, but what has happened is when they burn a flag it agitates and irritates crowds."
csh.ac.at
Why do humans live in large-scale societies organized as states? Peter Turchin's "The Great Holocene Transformation" analyzes data from 800+ societies to reveal that #warfare between groups drove humanity's transformation from small bands to complex civilizations. 👉https://shorturl.at/D457n

Reposted by Dean Eckles

nachristakis.bsky.social
Super cool science: Parachutes are expensive and delicate to manufacture, which limits their use for humanitarian airdrops or drone delivery. Laser cutting a closed-loop kirigami pattern in a disc induces porosity and flexibility into an easily fabricated parachute. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Kirigami-inspired parachutes with programmable reconfiguration - Nature
A thin planar disc designed with appropriately patterned cuts transforms itself, due to air flow effects, into an effective parachute exhibiting good positional stability, regardless of its initial orientation.
www.nature.com
robbwiller.bsky.social
🚨New WP!🚨

Structured AI Dialogues Can Increase Happiness and Meaning in Life

In a preregistered RCT, four psychology-grounded #AI chatbots improved well-being across several outcomes.

Co-authors: Jonas Schoene, Johannes Eichstaedt, Aadesh Salecha, Sonja Lyubomirsky

🧵👇
nejm.org
Plague is a high-consequence infectious disease with epidemic potential.

The latest video in our partnership with @glaucomflecken.bsky.social summarizes new research evaluating ciprofloxacin versus aminoglycoside–ciprofloxacin for bubonic plague in Madagascar. 👉 nej.md/DrG27
jowolff.bsky.social
My reaction to reading papers outside my own area. Three categories:

1. Brilliant
2. Obvious
3. Impenetrable
yaledatascience.bsky.social
Join the Social Algorithms Workshop at Yale to learn how algorithms amplify ideas, and (sometimes) mislead us, organized by @jugander.bsky.social w/ talks by @brendannyhan.bsky.social & @informor.bsky.social. Use code sawitonX on last registration page for 25% off yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

nachristakis.bsky.social
@cfcamerer.bsky.social wait doesn’t that violate the efficient markets hypothesis? ;-)
johnpfaff.bsky.social
You.
Are.
Allowed.
To.
Insult.
The.
Police.

It’s a core First Amendment principle. This is utterly lawless behavior, for which there will be no (short-term) consequences.

That he does it so casually, as they are walking away, in front of cameras.

Rightly confident in his impunity.
 “[t]he freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”