iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"Why can't I just degrade democracy and kayak in peace?"

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Deadline is September 1st, so get your applications in soon!

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I take back every critical comment I have ever made about LeBron James. x.com/ShamsCharani...

x.com

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I'm excited to let you all know that Middlebury is hiring a comparativist who works on African Politics! I am the search committee chair, so hit me up with any questions you may have. Deadline is 9/1. apply.interfolio.com/188248

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I’m in @foreignpolicy.com taking a big swing (but not a hot take): Trump’s defeat in Iran is a bigger US defeat in strategic terms than the US loss in Vietnam foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/16/i...

foreignpolicy.com

Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam

A war of choice has turned into a strategic disaster for Washington.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Just hearing about this. Devastating.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Really happy to announce that my article "A New Survey Measure of Hindu Religiosity" will be coming out in Sociology of Religion! I will share it when it's available.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Me to my daughters every single morning at around 6:15 AM:

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Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

"citation count & journal impact factor reveals quantitative studies on secularization tend to be published in higher ranked journals & get more citations. Topics related to philosophy, Catholicism & law get fewer citations. The topic of science & religion is often found in lower ranked journals."

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

"As the founding generation of Republicans understood, the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to regulate the court. By contrast, the document says nothing about the court’s claimed authority to regulate Congress."

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism

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Peter Head @peterheadcbe.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

With 150GW solar, India achieved its target of having 50% of its total installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources in June 2025, reaching this milestone 5 years ahead of its original 2030 deadline set under the Paris Agreement www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/10/i...

pv-magazine.com

India hits 150 GW solar milestone

The country added around 44.6 GW of new PV capacity in fiscal year 2026, according to new figures released by JMK Research.

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 13/04/2026

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Conditional accept for my survey paper on Hinduism! You have no idea how hard it has been to get this published (data is from 2018) -- not just because it's hard to get anything published, but also many religion journals don't seem to care about Hinduism. More soon.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

My piece in Comparative Politics on the metamorphosis in qualitative methods is now officially out! Send me a message if you want a PDF. doi.org/10.5129/001041525X17607275497485

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AAUP @aaup.org · 16/03/2026

Oscar-winner Ryan Coogler recalling how a college writing professor pushed him to become a screenwriter & the possibility of #Sinners being taught in film curriculums someday: “I have so much respect for professors…for dedicating their life to future generations & making sure their minds are solid.”

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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Inadvertently makes a case here for why we need to keep the humanities in school

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

My piece in Comparative Politics on the metamorphosis in qualitative methods is now officially out! Send me a message if you want a PDF. doi.org/10.5129/001041525X17607275497485

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Really enjoyed this book, which I would recommend to academics. Some very good tips. And in true "slow" fashion, I had to renew it six times from the library because I took my time reading it... www.amazon.com/Slow-Product...

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Constant feeling about living in Vermont

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

This statement by Ariely to The New York Times literally made me lol.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

It's been a very cold winter in Vermont. My thoughts:

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Had a run of success at journals recently, but got absolutely creamed on my last submission:

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

"The Big Bang has been confirmed by observational evidence but not experimental evidence therefore it is NOT causal" - poli sci reviewers

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Tom Pepinsky @tompepinsky.com · 19/12/2025

It is important to understand that these are all lies. Deans don't tell applicants why they don't get a job that they applied for. The job market doesn't react to PhD defenses with phone calls for interviews. This is all false. These people are liars, and they are lying to you to start a race panic.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Now that I'm off ElonTwitterX, I realized that I had so many good jokes on there lost to the ether. In short: I'm sorry, my political science comedy albums are going to really delayed.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

When I first heard the term "LLM" I was terrified it was yet another regression model that I needed to pretend to know about, whew thank god it was not that.

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Jason "Red5" Lyall @jaylyall.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

"About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024" due mostly to DOGE's illegal dismantling of USAID

wsj.com

For First Time in Decades, Child Deaths Will Rise This Year

Almost a quarter of a million more children around the world are projected to die in 2025 than in 2024.

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BK. Titanji @boghuma.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

A picture is worth a 1000 words. The birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines in the USA eliminated perinatally acquired hepatitis B infection from over 20,000 cases a year before the vaccine was introduced to <20 cases a year. The gaslighting by the current members ACIP is obscene, unethical and cruel.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

New idea to measure academic impact: how many books of yours were illegally downloaded and used to train LLMs by Anthropic.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Just want to mention two articles of mine since we are talking about the hilariously-named "Credibility Revolution." 1. "Randomized Controlled History?" It explores design-based inference approaches to history and finds them mostly problematic. (www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...)

nowpublishers.com

now publishers - Randomized Controlled History?

Publishers of Foundations and Trends, making research accessible

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

This is an interesting paper. I continue to sense that we as a field have concluded, either you have an identification strategy as defined here, or you don’t have a valid causal claim. And that is really not true.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

nowpublishers.com

now publishers - Randomized Controlled History?

Publishers of Foundations and Trends, making research accessible

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Alan White @aljwhite.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Amazing letter in The Times (also an unbelievable play fwiw)

Saved by Stoppard

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL

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Abe Goldfarb @abegoldfarb.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

Scene from OFFICE SPACE with Michael Bolton replying to Samir Nagheenanajar:

“No way. Why should I change?
He's the one who sucks.”

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/b... Corporations: wait a minute, if everyone is poor, who is going to buy pizza?

nytimes.com

People Are Ordering Smaller Pizzas and Fewer Toppings. What Does That Tell Us?

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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Public man-made death: The dismantling of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” That’s 1000+ excess dead children every day. Every day. hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

hsph.harvard.edu

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

This is the type of hater energy that will fuel us in the years ahead.

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

I have been thinking about writing this paper for over a decade: my definition and conceptualization of "religion." No idea if any of this makes sense. Feedback welcome. Enjoy! t.co/ykdwhEAEsK

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andy™ @andylevy.net · 22/11/2025

this is a metaphor for waking up and logging on

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Ajay Verghese @ajayverghese.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I think the main problem with existing definitions of religion is that they also work for other items like "magic" or "astrology" or "Alcoholics Anonymous." Read my paper that tries to differentiate religion from other "supernaturalisms." papers.ssrn.com/abstract=577...

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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

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