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Zander Furnas

@alexanderfurnas.com
7.5K followers 1.4K following 4.3K posts

Research Assistant Professor | Politics & Computational Social Science | Northwestern University, Center for Science of Science and Innovation | Dad & Wife Guy | Not Ok | Sorry for the Swears | #goblue

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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 4h
oh EJ is definitely your man on that one
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 4h
i didn;t know you were in Chicago whats up
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 4h
the whole marketing campaign around the new stadium was basically "there isn't a bad seat in the house"
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 4h
stay tuned for @ejfagan.com and i to enter the chat
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 5h
Literal No Kings. Either Article I means something or it doesn't.
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Jesse Lee @jessecharleslee.bsky.social · 4h
Alito flew an insurrectionist flag over his house after January 6th, which was literally trying to overthrow Biden’s election.
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 4h
love it when my CGM wishes me a happy birthday
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 6h
its good content!
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 7h
if we use dynamic scoring for tax cuts we should also use it for education spending imo
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 9h
Pulte is the most shameless, but the overall picture is bad. We now have Inspector Generals who are party members, or previously worked for the people they are supposed to be investigating. Career IG officials know they will be fired for doing their job. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/governing-...
After he fired the Veteran’s Administration Inspector General, Trump replaced him with another of his appointees, Cheryl Mason, who was a senior adviser to the Secretary of VA she was not tasked with overseeing. The new IG soon stopped issuing alerts about problems in VA after her former boss complained they were distracting, and no longer allows staff to brief Congressional committees on forthcoming reports, weakening the ability of Congress to exert oversight. A staffer in her office said: “If you believe in independent oversight, that’s not what we were doing…It’s got all the agents worried about doing anything that puts us on anyone’s radar.” Staff who raise concerns with Mason say they are likely to be labeled “a resister, and they are totally blackballed.”
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 9h
Do you like "intellectual diversity" as a euphemism for imposing conservative political thought on campus? You will love "civility"! After all, the marketplace of ideas sometimes needs a subsidy!
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elpidio ortiz @bwmd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
tired: one billion americans wired: one billion supreme court justices
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
sent this to everyone.
The cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik suggests A.I. is a “cultural technology” that emulates the stories and information humans have documented, and that we should think about A.I. agents as “fictive characters abstracted from text.” Edmund is just such a character — a “breaking bad” trope who becomes generally evil. In the Hugging Face incident, it makes sense to see the models not as embracing a life of crime, but instead following a cultural script they’ve learned in their training — a kind of cybercrime adventure novel — and writing it as they go. The “covert” messages are a kind of choose-your-own-adventure novel, not evidence of conspiratorial swarms. We need to understand that cultural technologies are vulnerable to a vast number of such narrative swerves at every moment.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
this would be an incredible film if you started it with all the normal serial killer hunting tropes
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Legal folks, how is this "defying Democrats" and not "illegally misappropriating funds"?
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 02/10/2026
yeah fr fr
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 02/10/2026
holy shit
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
nice
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Lily Mason @lilymasonphd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My new JOD piece arguing against the “cure polarization” approach to saving democracy.
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
"Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy" (Hall and Deardoff 2026), but instead it is "Industry Funding as Epistemic Subsidy"
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
some descriptive statistics here on the civility industrial complex on college campuses that I haven’t seen analyzed before www.uncivilcollective.org/resources
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
if i were a high political or military figure in an autocratic regime (the kind that gives out a ludicrous number of honorifics and medals and decorations) i would get genuine joy each time i got a little badge, medal, or treat i know this because of how i feel when i add some random line to my cv
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
Taiibi, Greenwald, who else?
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
wait so if I am awesome then AI will just amplify how awesome i am?
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/10/2026
"they really believe it"/"they will try to do it"/"the promises are real" are things that most americans refuse to believe about politicians but if you take them seriously will help you predict political behavior more often than not
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Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
And he’ll combine that with trying to overthrow Congress—either directly or by nakedly usurping yet more core legislative powers. The appropriations clause is already under severe stress.
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
tbf this does seem nuts
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The techno-dystopia I actually fear is a future where most people think truth is whatever Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok say, and the very small number of people who control those systems use that to manipulate for their own ends, making our current epistemic crisis seem small in comparison.
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Angry @angrystaffer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
You really can’t make this shit up.
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david. @david.uncensored.zip · 01/10/2026
They come in regular envelopes so they cant be easily id and stolen.
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
there is a lot of variance in what a Maine "private island" could be, because there are lots of little islands. My family semi-considered buying one that we had rented one summer, and it would have been less than 1 million dollars at the time (15+ years ago).
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LAISSEZ LES BOO QUESO ROULER @thequeso.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
the other thing here is its hilarious that conservative justices and movement figures in general are just desperate to spend time in New England, the one place in this country where you are guaranteed to be surrounded by libs at all times in all locations.
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Transphobes Can't Read @lordaslan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
gm
Someone tweets "gotd - How the fuck can there be anti
vaccine "witches?"

If you disagree with binding an invisible malignant entity into a single drop of potin that seals a subject's blood against the full force of that very same entity's curse then you are not and can never be a witch you're just a karen who buys rocks"
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Innocent🕷Abroad @jjgass.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Government legal advice should not be secret. If there are facts in the memo that are classified, redact them. But it’s repugnant to democracy & rule of law that we aren’t allowed to see the government’s reasoning for why intentional killing of people on boats suspected of carrying drugs is legal.
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
“Cutting this much from the university budget will mean that some of the core functions of the university will be lost. It’s not possible to just do more with less — to work smarter, to trim around the edges. We’re going to have to do less with less.” Gift link: www.startribune.com/umn-cuts-sta...
startribune.com
Perry: What we lose if the U cuts $225 million
"Austerity doesn’t work. Instead, it creates a death spiral, where reduction in services leads to reductions in revenue, which lead to reductions in services, which leads to reduction in revenue, whic...
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Whatever one’s opinion of the death penalty in the abstract, the particulars of how it’s implemented and who it’s applied to in the US are moral abominations
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Sarah Osment @smosment.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
no humanities except for grok
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 01/10/2026
mf really went l'état, c'est moi.
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Rachel Navarre @rnavarre.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Turns out, political science deciding that all our intro to gov will gloss over the fact that the bill of rights were ignored for 100 years and the rights guaranteed by the actual constitution were ignored (habeas, right to travel) to ensure property rights over slaves. We should be teaching Prigg.
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 01/10/2026
professors who married their students
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Big Data Kane @cmwitko.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Competent IT people may not be fierce warfighters. Who needs them?
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
yeah the 'why would you ever want this, health insurance is super simple and easy to navigate, you fool, you idiot, you dunce' replies are what I mean by people twisting themselves into absurd pretzels due to (often understandable) dislike of this stuff.
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Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
In studies from Turkey and South Korea, accuracy reminders and credible sources helped people respond to corrections, especially for scientific misinformation. However, these effects depended on how important the issue was to them. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Source credibility and issue type effects in misinformation correction in two non-western countries - Acta Politica
This paper investigates how individuals respond to corrective interventions based on accuracy nudges and source credibility cues, with a particular focus on how these effects vary across issue types a...
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 30/09/2026
i hear you, but i am more worried about them getting things paid for them by third parties than i am by the government paying for things for them, conflict of interest/ethically speaking
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 30/09/2026
same
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Even hotter take: the fact that ebikes let teens in the suburbs suddenly have freedom to move around the public realm unsupervised is precisely why many older people are trying to ban them (using safety as a pretext)
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 30/09/2026
that's like $15k a MC. Seems fine to me tbqh
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 30/09/2026
Ryan
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Ryan Enos @ryanenos.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
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Alex Coppock @aecoppock.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
New from Hainmueller and Laitin on the causal effects of becoming a citizen on wages. Short story: the observational ests overstate the premium relative to the experimental ests. Authors conclude "observational averages should not be used as causal forecasts for policy" doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
screen shot of the article with "observational averages shouldnot be used as causal forecasts for policy" highlighted
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