Shobita Parthasarathy

In my new Expert Voices column @science.org, I argue that the Trump admin's science strategy (as written in Kratsios' Science: A Golden Age)--which gives more authority & funding to the private sector to direct the research enterprise--will harm science, and further erode its public accountability.

Today's AI debates trace back to Cold War-era efforts to use computers to predict conflict, model adversaries, and make policy more "rational." Public policy historian Joy Rohde shared her expertise with us in a Q&A in the latest State & Hill. Read: https://myumi.ch/1161r

You know it's true🎶 Everything Mike does🎶 He does it for Trump🎶 Hey Mike Rogers, when you see Trump today, show him this!

I mean it really is this

Sheeet. Can we pick another HHS secretary instead?

Sadly, not much seems to have changed in 30 years. See Jonathan Larsen's typed (!) letter to Steven Sondheim about his intentions for RENT. From a very cool NYT article about Larsen's papers/archive in the Library of Congress: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/t...

I think that is the very point

Privatization is a bad idea: It aims to replace university responsibilities across domains, establishing industry-led consortia instead of academic collaborations, diverting PhD & postdoctoral training funds toward industry & prohibiting access (to gov research facilities) to university researchers

Since Tyler Cowen/NYT decided to platform White Office Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios and his plan for a "Golden Age of Science" today, here are my thoughts on why that plan is extremely risky.

I held this postdoc ages ago and it was a wonderful experience with a lovely group of people (and it's only grown more diverse since). Apply!

I disavow the tech brotherhood....

There are no words for how angry this story makes me. Academic freedom is dead in Texas public universities.

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

The first subpoena from the new Democratic Congress should be to Mark Zuckerberg, for taking down the No Kings Instagram account in the middle of one of the largest days of civic activism in American history. No Kings. No Courtiers.

Love Arundhati Roy's AI intervention: "The auguries are raining down hard. Think or Sink. Comply or Die. Look Up or be Left Out. And so, with these not-so-gentle threats, it has come to pass that the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us...."

An attempted attack on a Hindu temple came amid a weeks-long right-wing frenzy over "The Indian Question"; police found a manifesto from the alleged shooter "containing statements expressing white supremacist and extremist ideologies."

Love Arundhati Roy's AI intervention: "The auguries are raining down hard. Think or Sink. Comply or Die. Look Up or be Left Out. And so, with these not-so-gentle threats, it has come to pass that the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us...."

🌏 CFP: Global Political Economy in the Age of AI 🌍 Through the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, @alondra.bsky.social, Taberez Neyazi, Ayesha Omer, Lucas Pinheiro, and I are organizing a June 2027 workshop, edited volume to follow. Abstracts due 11/1!

I am absolutely delighted to announce that the open access version of "In Referees We Trust? How Peer Review Became a Mark of Scientific Legitimacy" is now live! Want to know more about how scholars' lives came to be ruled by Reviewer 2? Download the book FREE at: direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

What are your favorite articles/books about repair and rebirth of the United States after this authoritarian moment? (Thinking about good items for teaching.)

What are your favorite articles/books about repair and rebirth of the United States after this authoritarian moment? (Thinking about good items for teaching.)

You can read Professor Rohde's full analysis on the history and impacts of such projects here. 👇🏽

University of Michigan's proposed partnership with Los Alamos isn't just a disaster for community relations and public trust. It will also hurt academic research at the *public* university, says historian and #umich public policy professor Joy Rohde.

The first copies of Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice have arrived! It's pretty surreal to hold a physical copy after years of staring at Word docs and PDFs. The book comes out next week, so get your preorders in now! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205570...

There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

Australia tried something like this and it backfired. Among its consequences? Fewer people of color got college degrees.

I've talked to a few journal editors who are concerned about similar problems re: anonymous reviewers. If a peer reviewer wants a little help & feeds your unpublished submission into an AI system, they've just shared your proprietary work & broken confidentiality. A nightmare to think about

I look forward to reading Khalil's book. "Natural-born Americans who have never been at the mercy of the immigration system will learn a lot from his clear parsing of the differences between immigration courts and federal courts, as well as from his descriptions of 'bureaucratic quicksand.'"

Haven’t laughed this hard in a minute…“We thank our glorious administration for their brilliant technical solution to a social problem. This is how it should be, because all social & political problems definitely have a technical solution, and usually we just need to pay for something involving AI…”

🔬 Career opportunities: The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies is inviting applications for postdoctoral researchers and visiting researchers in: - Political Economy - Economic Sociology - Technology and Statehood - Field of wealth and social inequality (postdoc only).