zfcook.bsky.social

#polisky #lawsky Lake Forest College in IL (now ranked #1 in US for "improving social mobility" - yes, I know, US News, take with salt grain) is hiring an assistant professor in public law and American politics. Application is due Oct 15. We consider PhDs or JDs. workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

This impressed me: GPT-5.6 Astra turned Zork (the classic 1977 text adventure) into a full 3D playable action-adventure game It kept the original plot & puzzles, added fight scenes, and built all of the characters & environments directly in Threejs code. Play: zork-underground-empire.netlify.app

#polisky #lawsky Lake Forest College, a small liberal arts college in IL, is hiring an assistant professor in public law and American politics for 2027-28. Application is due Oct 15. We are considering PhDs or JDs. Please spread the word. workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

Here’s why AI chatbots (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc) are unreliable for science content, and terrible as “just a starting point” for science communicators. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t something AI chatbots get much better at… although sloppers will get better at hiding it!

New from me: The percentage of high-ranking officer nominations going to women is currently at its lowest level in over two decades. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/u...

If you have time this weekend, please check out the doc (~30 min.) my team & I released this week on Musk’s push into Greater Memphis with xAI and its noisy, methane gas burning turbines, data centers, broken promises & impacts on majority Black communities next door. www.cnbc.com/2026/07/16/e...

NEW from @pewresearch.org: Political party affiliation in the US, 2020-2026, based on the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (paper/phone/online survey conducted January-June 2026 among 5,511 US adults) www.pewresearch.org/politics/fac...

I’m all for improving Americans’ civic knowledge, but if the pollster thinks this was the main purpose of the US Constitution, maybe we can start there

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

Did DoD just admit in a court filing that it used xAI's Grok Gov Model to hit the girls' school on the first day of the Iran war? Based on some passages flagged by @rgoodlaw.bsky.social in DoD's recent filing in NAACP's case against X, it looks like it did 1/

Look what I found: After USAID's Food for Peace program was moved to the USDA last year, Food for Peace seems to have stripped food aid from all Muslim-majority countries. To this amazing chart from the Council on Foreign Relations, I added a column showing the % of the population that is Muslim:

Thank you, birthright citizenship, for that goal

Go ahead and slam journalists when they deserve it. I certainly do. But also realize that New York Times journalists Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi willingly traveled to an Ebola ward in the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to inform the world. Many journalists are heroes. (NYT gift link)

DO YOU SING?

might need this. google’s search engine definitely degrading.

I would be remiss not to point out that "Tricking Milli Vanilli into performing a concert for a dictator" is LITERALLY a storyline from the 1990s 'Super Mario Bros 3' cartoon 🙃

ICE accused Wendy Hernandez Reyes of leaving her 2-year-old son with a violent uncle who allegedly abused and killed him. She says her son would still be alive if officers hadn’t detained and deported her.

Switch over to Canvas now, they said. It’s so much better and reliable. Moodle is useless junk now and this is your last semester you can stay on it, anyway. I have all sympathies for my academic colleagues while I can’t help feeling this is my Admiral Adama moment. www.cnn.com/2026/05/07/u...

This has way too many simple correlations where alternative explanations are not considered. Also, it hangs dramatically on the 2021 GSS without mentioning that the survey mode changed that year. I don't know how the happiness and related measures hold up over that change, but someone else mignt

A small fraction of online actors exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and discusses. In a new paper, we trace how social media influencers turn fringe claims into viral narratives by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms & crowds osf.io/preprints/ps...

Extremely relevant to the “Is Bluesky Dying” debate.

Open-mindedness was the strongest predictor of *rejecting* conspiracy theories in a sample of 46,745 participants in 68 nations In particular, participants who were threatened by people who disagree with them were the most likely to believe conspiracy theories. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

From a new @pspolisci.bsky.social symposium, 'Understanding the Early Trump 47 Presidency' - Swept Away: The Trump 2.0 Tidal Wave of Executive Action - https://cup.org/4tahueB - @rudalev.bsky.social #OpenAccess

The full dataset from Pew's 2025 Global Attitudes Survey is available for download! A great resource for anyone interested in public opinion that contains rich data from 25 countries. www.pewresearch.org/dataset/spri...

In 2023, 50.7% of 18-19 year olds with a high school diploma but no college worked in 3 industries (retail; restaurants; military). Their unemployment rate has increased far more than that of 20-24 year olds with a college degree. Can't blame that on AI...

I love these people.

NASA released the Artemis II astronauts’ first downlinked images, 1.5 days into the first astronaut moonshot in more than half a century . “It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks,” commander Reid Wiseman said.

NEW Economist/YouGov Support for the war in Iran among MAGA Republicans has hardly changed over the past two weeks But non-MAGA Republicans have shifted dramatically from a moderately supportive group two weeks ago — when 56% supported the war — to today, when 33% do yougov.com/en-us/articl...

Good analysis here of how right-wing influencers took a relatively anodyne statement from a Chicago alderman in response to a murder, wildly mischaracterized it, then had a social media pile-on. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Three SCOTUSblog posts: - www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/the-... - www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/when... - www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/birt...

He openly mocks the law. It is a joke to him, a thing to work around. No president has been so wholly unfit for office.

lol wtf

If I am understanding correctly these are cases that were cited by the trial court in an order denying a defendant's motion for a new trial in a criminal case and were cited to the trial court by the state in its briefing In other words, a criminal defendant had a conviction sustained on this shit

This issue of JHPPL, free to read, is a really good analysis of the Trump administration’s war on public health, covering who what why and how as well as key underlying trends

There's been about a 10-point increase in support for attacking Iran since Feb 23, according to YouGov. That's driven entirely by Republicans rallying around Trump

Current events confirm the achieved wisdom of time-honored classics in the social sciences.

This is via @daveweigel.bsky.social, from a Third Way event happening today. This is so malignant and unserious. That these groups have to put their thumb on the scale so egregiously to get the results they've pre-ordained tells you everything you need to know about them. x.com/daveweigel/s...

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

Bullshit.