jon ben-menachem

daylightsandiego.orgICE detainee dies at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San DiegoPrivate prison company CoreCivic confirmed that someone in its custody died on Oct. 24 in one of the housing units.

31 July

Autopsies of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests often conclude that movements produced tough-on-crime backlash. My new study in Work and Occupations finds a different kind of movement outcome: BLM changed how local reporters cover cops and jails. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

jon ben-menachem reposted

Gillian Brockell

@gillianbrockell.com

For several days I have been hearing rumors of an ICE detainee death that ICE was not reporting. I've just learned a local journalist has confirmed it and will publish soon. Now I read this and see there are actually TWO deaths ICE is not reporting. www.daylightsandiego.org/ice-detainee...

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Phil Lewis

@phillewis.bsky.social

Detroiter Nicole Williams when asked if Abdul El-Sayed is ‘a bit too left wing to win in Michigan’: “At this point what do we have to worry about? Anything but what we have. We're on our way to hell, so at this point: socialist, socialize, social, dont matter to me, lower my cost of living!”

17h

I’m sad now

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

"AI can draft an essay for you, especially if you give it a high quality prompt." Really? This is what MIT thinks high schoolers should learn? MIT's "Day of AI" dayofai.org provides materials for K-12 teachers and claims to have reached over 5,000,000 students to date. 1/2

Because of You Can See Everything, I ended up looking up that NYT short video Lance Oppenheim did. It's about a federal criminal defense lawyer who started using short films to persuade judges to be more lenient. I think Oppenheim fucked that up pretty badly, it seems to have mostly sparked outrage

Maybe ten years of issue advocacy on criminal justice has made me a humorless scold

donmoynihan.substack.comAutomating the Bribe StateTrump accounts use automation to help the wealthy, while making social programs inaccessible

But yeah on a related note, the Fielder movie seems to have tugged on people's heartstrings because watching anyone prepare for a decade in federal prison shines a light on how bleak US prisons are.

To clarify, I think as a film-student teaching tool it's totally fine. But its distribution meant it mostly did not go to people who understand the finer point of documentary film making, but rather the punishment-fetishizing US public

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Don Moynihan

@donmoyn.bsky.social

New w @pamherd.bsky.social: Trump's Bribe State is a mix of empty promises and real benefits. But watch how automation is used: to buy votes, or allow billionaires to buy off dissent via Trump accounts, even as Trump has made automation harder for Mediciad. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/automating...

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weeder

@weeder.bsky.social

(posting on PeopleWhoLoveToVote dot app) Guys, you should vote.

gking.harvard.eduAI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best: Evidence and Policy Choices | Gary KingWe show that AI-generated article reviews are now better, by every measure we could construct, than reviews written by well-compensated human experts and judged to be of unusually high quality by jour...

Today I learned that Harvard IQSS has a human pre-peer review service where reviewers are compensated. Anyway, the #1 issue I see with this paper is that there is any "AI judge" involved at all. Ideally you'd want a robust set of human judges from a variety of disciplines.

Alessandro Nai@alessandronai.bsky.social

New King & Worthington piece: AI better at peer reviews than humans. Link below. Discuss gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

The solution to increasing journal submission volume is... to dramatically increase the amount of text that journal staff have to review on first submission?

Anyway King's preprint has gone viral on LinkedIn already.

Alessandro Nai@alessandronai.bsky.social

New King & Worthington piece: AI better at peer reviews than humans. Link below. Discuss gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

@gbbranstetter.bsky.social

The #2 issue is that the Harvard human peer review service may differ from the actual population of human peer reviews in some important respect. It's kind of funny in that both the reviews being compared have an aspect of sycophancy/service to them. Journal reviewers are not always constructive lol

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Gillian Branstetter

Woah - boards of service in the Marines and the Navy are ignoring Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's order to purge transgender troops from the military. "Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

nytimes.comMilitary Boards Are Defying Orders and Letting Trans Troops Serve (Gift Article)The service members at Navy and Marine Corps hearings are finding ways to keep trans troops in uniform.

Wow Nathan Fielder. Wow.

The one thing I will say is that I went into that movie literally not knowing what Theranos was or who Holmes is. I think this was the ideal way to experience it tbh

@goldengateblond.bsky.social

apparently not done posting about this. how is there an honest to god review (approvingly shared on this website) that's like 'the movie wasn't about the court case, therefore it was not about facts, therefore it was on the wrong side' 😭

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shauna

this is fucking appalling. i already knew james dolan (who owns the knicks and madison square garden) was a douche but this is next-level. www.nytimes.com/athletic/771...

Wow Nathan Fielder. Wow.

Amanda Seyfried. Sheesh

Increasingly frightened that New York is becoming San Francisco. The subway ads these days… It used to be like, oh yeah, you work in marketing and you like watching TV and going to the climbing gym. Now they’re advertising to Grindset people who are Building Things 100 hours a week.

I don't think we have to engage in ad hominem attacks to recognize that the spam text fundraising stuff is absolutely toxic.

Michael McDonald@electproject.bsky.social

Since we're recently interest in attempts to manipulate elections through fake "experiments", I'll remind everyone of Bonica's illegal and unethical behavior. Kind of rich for him to complain about campaign ethics stanforddaily.com/2014/10/30/s...

Let's be for real for ten seconds here. I get more unblockable spam texts from Dem campaigns than I get from all other categories of scam combined. bsky.app/profile/jben...

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com

This is just repulsive.

It is not carrying water for Republicans to point out that Democratic campaigns almost universally behave in the same way as elder scam rings.

I don't think we have to engage in ad hominem attacks to recognize that the spam text fundraising stuff is absolutely toxic.

Michael McDonald@electproject.bsky.social

cbsnews.comJudge rules against DHS's policy of knocking on doors to track down possible noncitizen votersA federal judge ruled DHS's practice of knocking on doors and asking people about their immigration status — and whether they have voted in recent elections — likely violates the Voting Rights Act.

The information is valuable in its own right. It's a real contribution. bsky.app/profile/clas...

lumie's dad@classhuggle.bsky.social

Like. This is such a bizarre takeaway from the information presented that it truly beggars belief. The thing that's more likely to discourage donations is probably the fact that giving one time will result in getting 1000 texts begging me "pretty pretty please" to donate to people I can't vote for.

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Adam Bonica

@adambonica.bsky.social

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

We found that as of right now 73% of your campaign donation goes back to the consultants and vendors (!!!), four times more than just 20 years ago. Only 13% to ads. Even I was shocked.

jon ben-menachem reposted

Austin Kocher, PhD

@austinkocher.com

DHS agents knocking on doors to ask people about their immigration status and whether they've voted likely violate the Voting Rights Act, a federal judge ruled late Wednesday. The order covers nine states through Election Day. www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-d...

erininthemorning.comDCCC Releases Its First Anti-Trans Ad, Supporting SC Democrat Nancy LacoreThe ad is the first known ad from the high-level Democratic congressional campaigning arm targeting trans people this election.

We need a purge of Dem consultants in general, but specifically whoever rubber stamped this.

Jessie Gender@jessiegender.bsky.social

Yes, but you know, how dare I, as a trans woman, question the Democrats? open.substack.com/pub/erininth...

No one will care if the blue team wins, if the blue team is going to do the same shit.

So did the big econ journals ever say anything more about their partnership with Refine (AI reviewer)? Refine’s services will be provided for free to the journal staff. But of course, if authors know that’s the new standard, they will shell out the 50 bucks to get a review of their papers.

Don’t economists uhhh study monopolies

If the Refine people genuinely think their tool improves science, they should open source it.

theverge.comTrump says Sundar Pichai talked him out of renaming the Atlantic OceanPichai allegedly said, “Oceans are different, sir.”

Wish I could time-travel this article back in time and see what the reactions would be 15, 20 years ago.

Bill Kuchman@billkuchman.bsky.social

“Oceans are different, sir.” www.theverge.com/policy/10167...

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Jake Grumbach

@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

Replying to @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

We found that as of right now 73% of your campaign donation goes back to the consultants and vendors (!!!), four times more than just 20 years ago. Only 13% to ads. Even I was shocked.

jon ben-menachem reposted

Jake Grumbach

@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

newrepublic.comHow the Consulting Class Is Eating the Democratic PartyFundraising costs gobble up most of the funds raised. Billions are spent on TV ads that have virtually no impact. Candidates may win or lose—but the consulting class always wins.

what do I do with analysis results that are interesting to me and maybe some other subfield people, but are not really publication worthy? Just put them on my website or something? No idea

thenation.comThe Fall of “Scientific American”When the beloved science publication got too political, its corporate owners stepped in. Now its future is uncertain.

Will be of interest to anyone in higher ed who thinks that corporate actors have too much influence over scientific publishing.

Jack Mirkinson@jackmirkinson.bsky.social

Today in @thenation.com: a jaw-dropping investigation from Emmet Frazier (@woolsox.bsky.social) on the toll that corporate interference and political pressure took on Scientific American. The stuff that Emmet uncovered from inside the magazine is NUTS. A must-read. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

nymag.comThe 75-Year-Old ScreenagersSeniors are spending more time than ever on their slop-filled, scam-riddled feeds. It has become their adult children’s job to save them.

Is there time series data for this? (Wasn't the TV era similar? Or is this a cohort who grew up with TV, now aging?)

Saeed Jones@theferocity.bsky.social

“Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens.”

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Rachel Holliday Smith

@rachelholliday.bsky.social

unbelievably great reporting from @documentedny.bsky.social and Sam Rabiyah:

documentedny.comTikTok Lawyers Face Their AI ClonesDocumented found swarms of fake immigration attorney TikTok accounts and bots targeting immigrants in an analysis of tens of millions of posts.

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Scott Horton

@robertscotthorton.bsky.social

The direct result of data center development? Pretty much so, yes.

jon ben-menachem reposted

Joel S.

@joelhs.bsky.social

Israel’s Foreign Ministry attacking Brad Lander - a self-described liberal Zionist - by name, simply for doing protective presence, should be the final sign that the Israeli government would gladly sacrifice every last Jew in Diaspora to dominate more Palestinians with impunity.

animal collective is performing feels live for the first time in a bazillion years and they posted the most insane promo image lmao

i think noah may need purple bottle

something something celebrity and ritual humiliation

People are now saying “I hope this email finds you well” is a LLM tell. Folks, I have been saying this for approximately a decade.

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR

Did no one consider that LLMs might have started saying this because people already said it

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@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org

"A powerful account of why explicit racial appeals have gained renewed acceptance in contemporary politics" Destabilized: Why White Americans Accept Racist Political Rhetoric by @leahchristiani.bsky.social, Out Now #USPoli #PoliSky #NewBooks #BookSky https://cup.org/4s94XYX