Philip N Cohen

Some personal news: My sabbatical ended last week, just as I landed a deal for the book I've been working on for these 12 months. The Cradle Will Fall is now about half done (just need one more sabbatical) and will be edited by @rlevay.bsky.social at @princetonupress.bsky.social. I'm thrilled!

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

Big night for democracy

It's possible to live life without inventing generations and then arguing over their names ad infinitum. In that life nothing of value is lost. It's just life, but without this ridiculousness. Try it!

Violent crime has fallen 35% since I was in middle school ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates

Growing inequality means the Dead got rich playing 200 shows a year at $10 per head and now bands do 20 to shows at $1000 per head. Round numbers

"This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, voters." Also, how come none of these newly disempowered cat ladies want to give us the children we need

The collapse of academic history is a part of this trend - if you dig into the original report, "History & Related Fields dropped from a peak of 7,496 [dissertations per year] in 2015 to 3,583 by 2025, a contraction of 52% in a single decade." Which of course mirrors the trend in academic jobs.

Not likely Jared will land anyplace with an extradition treaty if there is ever a Democrat attorney general

Interesting. Really strongly suggest whoever made that graph just use real age or cohort numbers instead of ridiculous undefined generation labels

From a talk I gave in 2019

191. In the first 18 months of Trump's 2nd term, immigrations courts have ordered more than 10,000 children removed per month. There are ~300,000 births per month. So those child removals are like cutting the birth rate ~3% (or, ~7x more than births are falling) www.propublica.org/article/unac...

Note: US general fertility fell a little less in 2025 (0.6, 1.1%) than it did in 2024 (0.7, 1.3%). At that rate of declining decline, births per woman will stop falling in 2031. You heard it here first.

Turboradikalisierung. Da gibts nix mehr zu deuten. Keine Codes. Nix. Er sagt es einfach ganz offen: Dass er der wirkmächtigsten modernen rechtsextremen Verschwörungsideologie anhängt. Auf die sich viele Rechtsterroristen berufen. Und Staatschefs & Abgeordnete & Medien posten da noch. Wild.

This text came just in time for our class discussion of rational choice and voting. Flipping the Senate is worth $900 to me, and I estimate the chance that my contribution puts him over the top is 1/100, so $9 it is.

I wrote about men in groups in connection with Jane Doe and the Cornell case. Some of what I discovered in my research shocked even me (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/o...

They want young people to think parenting can be "meaningful and pleasant" while the entire political right is bankrolled by tech bro nihilists who fantasize about post-apocalyptic eugenicist walled enclaves and escaping Hellscape Earth.

New IFS report on culture and fertility concludes pronatalists must convince young people that their valid concerns are, in fact, no big deal and validates parents' pressuring adult children into having kids. No need to make structural changes; it's all culture, baby.

I like this. (Therefore I judge the science to be sound. What can I say, my brain is a computer made of meat.)

Sociologist Considers Own Behavior Indicative Of Larger Trends theonion.com/sociologist-...

Families in the top 10% spend 13x more on developmental activities than those in the bottom 25%, compared to 3x in 1980. "Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States" now out at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social doi.org/10.15195/v13... 🧵👇

"technically correct but of no use to the research community" is an exploding category. At SocArXiv we designate these as not "engaging with the research literature." It's not about having cites, it's about having cites that actually help identify a need for this paper.

AI services always look better when they're replacing total crap

Don't bullshit a bullshitter (or a sociology professor), Melania

Today for the first time when I played my go-to clip no one in the class had heard of the show (Frasier).

It's hard not to pair this moral panic with the burgeoning moral panic about adult children not giving their parents the grandchildren those parents feel entitled to. (This is separate from the general moral panic over low birth rates). rcobooth.substack.com/p/on-prospec...