As someone who has immediate family struggling with mental health disorders, this profile was compassionate and very real feeling. It is hard to describe the ups and downs, day by day, but Brendan Quinn’s writing nails it. Much 💝 to Duncan and his family.

Took some time today to get out in nature and see some of the great open spaces near my own backyard. This is the Great Meadows Wildlife Reserve!

Saw Brandon Flowers, whose new album Thrasher is great, was playing down the road from me tonight. Grabbed a last minute ticket and hopped on my bike and it's time to rock!

What we’ve been up to lately: budget reviews for grassroots groups in California and Texas, a growing partnership with the Student Leadership Network, and an unglamorous but critical data harvesting project for the ACLU of Southern California.

This article in the Economist gets to a layer of AI discourse that seems completely absent. Workers by the thousands are using AI to file administrative claims against their employers in Britain, putting a previously overly burdensome legal remedy in their hands. Sorry for the paywall, but this is worth a read.

The proposed changes in EDGAR would harm small businesses like mine and hurt innovation in education research. Register your opposition to the further politicization of education research today.

Maureen Tkacik wrote the heck out of this piece which explains the collusion, consolidation, and consumer exploitation at the root of the censorship of Macklemore. The roots run deep and old, but there is hope that the public is showing we’re fed up!

Scenes from Posit Conf

Wes McKinney’s keynote at #positconf2026 is 🔥 The idea of a clanker constitution is one I’ve been working on as well, but not as elegant. Luckily he’s sharing it so we can read and learn from it.

Really enjoying day 1 of #positconf2026. Lots of great ideas being shared. I definitely need to dig in on ShinyChat and data-dict to make public data more accessible.

Six weeks, roughly 100 human hours, 167 hours of agent time and 6.88 billion tokens went into turning 56 years of Census of Governments finance data into a queryable API. Here is what that actually cost, measured from the session record rather than estimated — including the weeks the ratio of agent output to my own time held steady as the work got harder, the week I switched language models mid-build, and the number this post cannot give you.

I really enjoyed rraxijf the ASA Nation’s Data At Risk 2025 report. I’m very late to the party reading it but it does such a valuable service. I’ll have more to say from it soon, but great work by the authors and ASA for bringing it together.

The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer and a bulk download, aligned across 56 years so a query returns a continuous series. It is a record you can contribute to.

The East Bay bike path in Rhode Island is a wonderful 14mile ride that includes this fun piece of public art.

The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer and a bulk download, aligned across 56 years so a query returns a continuous series. It is a record you can contribute to.

Ten Bayesian models, one case study: what Paterson, NJ’s own arrest history says about whether its reported zero for 2021-22 is real.

Saw Coyote vs. ACME last night - it was wonderful. I take to heart its message of perseverance and the importance of trying looking at our primary election results in MA. We need more bold challengers! All the credit to those who took on incumbents, except Seth of course.

125 large school districts reported exactly zero arrests in 2021-22 – a share that’s statistically implausible if the national arrest rate applied uniformly. Policy change, or under-reporting?

After an exciting and inspiring week it's time to get together one final time and think about how to carry this work forward!

Scenes from PolicyLink Summit 2026

Institutional actors already using AI chatbots as a propaganda vector but if you read the story AI also already surfaced the credibility gap. It’s an incredible story. We have to grapple with the ways this new technology and information dissemination method is being actively used.

Nickel and Dimed, a timeless classic, rests at the driver station for the jet bridge at Boston Logan.

Flying to DC this morning to join PolicyLink Summit 2026. I’m really looking forward to thinking big about our democracy and public life and how social science expertise can fit into and be in service of a more just, equitable, and rich civic life.

Visited the Toltec ruins at Tula today and spent some time reflecting on just how long people have been building and celebrating and puzzling the mysteries of the universe.

Mexico City Contrasts - Libraries

Look I hope Count Binface wins today in Clacton. Far right grifters are much worse for a healthy democracy than satirists, and Count Binface has been an excellent lens to show the world who someone like Nigel Farage really is.

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Absolutely incredible quote to end this article: The firm then enlisted planners to find a new route that avoided the supposed grave. “A lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy.” In the end, he said, “we went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby’s grave”.

I’m excited to be attending PolicyLink Summit 2026: “We Are the Founders: Writing the Unfinished Story of Our Democracy.” I’m passionate about how data, social science, and policy can work together to liberate us and create a society that flourishes. So I’ll be listening and learning with others August 24-28 in DC eager to be inspired and find new ways to contribute. If you’re going get in touch and let’s be sure to meet up! I’d love to see as many people as I can.

I used a stack of Windows, RStudio, MSOffice, and Chrome to do my work from 2011 or so until 2024. 15 years! Now I use Linux, Zed/Positron, NextCloud, and Firefox/Zen for everything - a complete overhaul in the last 2 years. Will it stick as long? 🫣🤔

I am so interested in attribution science and its applicability to social science as a complement (and perhaps corrective) to the obsession with isolating causality in a complex and multi-causal world. Great rundown by Ars Technica.

Pretty in-depth reporting here on what the near-term incentives are for Iran in the war with the US. Not as cut and dry as I thought and I appreciated the depth and breadth of sources in this one.

I’m going to see the Odyssey finally this evening. So I guess get ready for my very late contributions to the discourse around it. Or maybe I’ll just be pleasantly entertained in an air conditioned room for 3 hours!

This is a really cool explanation of Pareto efficiency (which sounds boring I know) using interactive data viz and clear storytelling. It’s a great example of how a concept becomes more approachable when transported into a familiar domain in a friendly and thoughtful manner.