Mark Igra

Likely the most important thing I've ever written — if you're an academic and the AI mania unsettles you, here's my best shot at presenting some intellectual tools that might help you articulate why. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251

As @joshtpm.bsky.social says, the top political priority of the next 2 years is getting the public on board for court reform. Oligarch money+presidential immunity(+ pardons) undermined democracy. It's gonna collapse like an oceanside cliff without reform. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/2027-...

Seems like it didn't take too long to catch up to the latest fraudulent pollster. blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftypluso...

"For a mariner to respect the waves is not to refuse the crossing." Missed this interesting read by @quinnae.com on Francis Fukuyama that takes on his opposition to trans rights www.liberalcurrents.com/fukuyamas-gl...

This must be real, because it's too over-the-top for fiction. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/w...

New book from IEHS member @rewasem.bsky.social : The Struggle for Fairness: Forging the Immigration Act of 1965 @degruyterbrill.bsky.social www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

“The modal number of citations to a political science article is zero is true, but most political science articles have more than zero citations is also true.” — @tompepinsky.com

Highlighting the (automatic) Cost of Living Adjustment in a *headline* about inflation is a choice by NPR. Maybe they know all their listeners are on social security, but even then, a COLA is not news.

Dominance Politics, Elite Gatekeeping and Jon Ossoff talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/domin...

Please post more of your research On Here. Bring me more working papers

sheets.works/data-viz/hol...

🚨new working paper🚨 Chris Blair (@chriswblair.bsky.social), Jeremy Weinstein, and I describe here The Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies, in which we code de jure asylum policy for 205 countries, from 1951-2022. We hope you will find the paper and data helpful. osf.io/preprints/so...

Amazon thinks I have an “ongoing academic reading habit”. I wish. Sadly browsing isn’t acquiring & acquiring isn’t reading. Plus, local bookshop can order most academic books.

The Capabilibara project seeks to understand how a language model learns to interpret people's beliefs, emotions, intentions, and everyday moral choices. We trace that ability back to the training data using influence functions and unlearning hcai-lab-gt.github.io/capabilibara/ Find us at COLM!

+++ PUBLICATION ALERT +++ My first solo-authored PhD paper is finally out in Network Science! I am so happy that it finally happened! TL;DR: Representatives in Congress do not just disagree on issues, they oftentimes do not even talk about the same things at all. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"The Department of Jewish Studies and the Department of Sociology invite applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position (Segal Chair in Jewish Studies), commencing August 1, 2027." Come work with us at McGill! More information can be found here: www.mcgill.ca/jewishstudie...

For other nerds who do what @kjhealy.co calls Modern Plain Text computing, how do you keep quarto/markdown/obsidian files synced across devices (e.g. iPad/laptop)? In a pinch I used a file sync service & it messed up my git history. But constant git commits are painful, not iPad friendly.

The conclusion that drones et. al. lead to stagnant conflicts and more attacks on "Factories. Infrastructure. 'Morale.' Individual human lives." is a gut punch that's hard to deny. From @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com at www.liberalcurrents.com/the-return-o...

"Replication crisis" reforms like preregistration & pre-analysis plans were developed to control false positives in experimental research. Does that work in observational studies? Our new paper in Sociological Methods & Research argues for a different approach. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Got this newsletter from @austinkocher.com in my inbox & had to pass it on for the info about responses to deportation to Mexico, but also for the appreciation of CDMX (can't wait to go back) & the take on brutalist architecture austinkocher.substack.com/p/notes-from...

I'll be in New York on Oct 20 to talk about The Truth Tellers, a new film by Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, and about documenting immigration detention right now. With @documentedny.bsky.social. Tue, Oct 20, 6 p.m., Columbia SIPA, NYC. Get tickets: givebutter.com/Documented-T...

it's kind of the dominant culture of text based social media. People who could read critically but prefer to offload the work of interpretation by skipping the article and going straight to the comments so they have a quick digest of what they should think about something

The classic Racial Dot Map inspired me and a whole generation of mapmakers. Today, I'm publishing a modern take on this map, built with the geospatial tools I've been developing over the past decade. Interact with the map here: walker-data.com/maps/census-...

Car-Free Pike Place Market Pilot Deemed Too Successful to Continue: tinyurl.com/uund6kej

From "Reflections on Editing <i>Social Forces,</i> …" by Arne L Kalleberg: Sixteen years editing one of sociology's flagship journals, and a candid look back at what changed in the field and in the craft of an editor. 🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soag084

Lower percentage of daily requirements for sodium than I thought. Then again, 1942 servings per container. “INGREDIENT” (singular) is a flex

One more day left in this Coltrane Centennial broadcast www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/john-co...

The New Yorker clearly had an inside source . www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a62026

3 non-white refugees and 10,255 white ones. This happened at the same time that the Supreme Court decided that political gerrymandering was not racial gerrymandering. From @austinkocher.com austinkocher.substack.com/p/this-week-...

Seeking courage in getting my book proposal together I came across this set of rejections for what became the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. (Of course nobody proudly posts the wall of rejections from a proposal that never amounted to anything.)

AI "alignment" will not prevent bad actors from using open models for bad acts: "Heretic is a tool that removes censorship (aka "safety alignment") from transformer-based language models...anyone who knows how to run a command-line program can use Heretic" github.com/p-e-w/heretic

I am confused by this. Isn’t it Congress’s job to set taxes? Are there limits to fees that the executive branch can set? Is this a “major question”? (Not a fan of major questions doctrine, but if it exists it’s worth establishing boundaries).

This is APPALLING. The Trump administration is detaining multiple random Somali immigrants with no criminal record at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly because the White House ordered ICE specifically to detain Somalis at Gitmo as part of its effort to punish an ethnic group Trump has attacked.

How did I not know about @paper-feed.bsky.social until today? Seems like a promising way to see the academic stuff I care about.

The stability of many things, I believe, rest on the limited capabilities of idiots. But what if we made idiots much more capable.

new vid up at the youtube channel youtu.be/aNU0g0UExuU

Art as "the food you eat at a funeral "is an intriguing metaphor. Sad that I did not know of Cat Frazier before reading her obit. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/a...

For the past six months @mariaa.bsky.social and I have been working on creating an improved research experience on atproto. It's now live! Check out: lea.ac

New preprint! A review article on Generative AI and Society, with the fantastic @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Danny Karell (smartly not online!) osf.io/preprints/so... The lit on genAI is sprawling and mostly not in sociology. Our goal is to synthesize core themes relevant to sociologists. +

Perhaps, as one way of combating the dangers of AI, we should develop the writing equivalent of the "slow food" movement.

Been mostly offline the last couple of weeks so missed this thoughtful and thought provoking piece from @quinnae.com Worth a read if you haven’t www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-h...

Home Gardening Virtuoso Successfully Turns $800 into a Side Salad: tinyurl.com/4uxmdjtz