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Mark Igra

@markigra.bsky.social
389 followers 640 following 257 posts

Sociology PhD at the University of Washington, studying altruism and morality. Former software guy. Started sciences.social.

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Reposted by Mark Igra
jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 29/09/2026
"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/...
A Replication Framework for Observational Research: From Specification Restriction to Specification Expansion
Jonathan Ben-Menachem https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8092-0848 jbenmenachem@gmail.com, Ari Galper https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7909-8837, and Nic Fishman
Abstract
Sociology has remained relatively insulated from debates about the “replication crisis.” Heeding calls to consider replication more deeply, we introduce a distinction between two types of research reforms that have emerged in the wake of the crisis: specification-restricting and specification-expanding reforms. Specification restriction is often promoted as a way to increase the repeatability of research findings by controlling false positives. We argue that this statistical justification is less compelling in observational contexts—where the assumptions licensing false-positive control are harder to sustain and rigid ex ante analytical commitments can instead enshrine fragile specifications—than in experimental contexts. We further argue that apparently low replication rates do not necessarily imply a high prevalence of false positive findings. Instead, we propose a replication framework centered on specification-expanding reforms, stronger incentives for confirmatory research, and meta-analysis. This approach equips sociologists to assess the repeatability of findings and build a more cumulative discipline.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
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...
austinkocher.substack.com
Notes from Mexico City: The View from the South Side of U.S. Deportation Policy
Mexico City is on lots of people’s radars these days, and for good reason: it’s a hip, world-class city with a warm, bohemian exuberance, all the art, culture, and cuisine you can handle, and it’s an ...
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Austin Kocher, PhD @austinkocher.com · 25/09/2026
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...
givebutter.com
Private Screening: Borderland – The Line Within. A Conversation on Immigration Detention, Accountability, and Who Profits
immigration, media, New York, Borderland
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Reposted by Mark Igra
large language marge @mcdonalds.help · 26/09/2026
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
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
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-...
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The Needling @theneedling.com · 25/09/2026
Car-Free Pike Place Market Pilot Deemed Too Successful to Continue: tinyurl.com/uund6kej
People and flowers take up space on street of Pike Place in front of the Public Market Center sign
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Social Forces @socialforcesfan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
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. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/sf/soag084
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Grad school.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Lower percentage of daily requirements for sodium than I thought. Then again, 1942 servings per container. “INGREDIENT” (singular) is a flex
Nutrition Facts 
About 1942 servings per container
Serving size 1/4 tsp (0.7g)


Total Fat 0g 0%
Sodium 280mg 12%
Total Carbohydrate 0g 0%
Protein 0g

Not a significant source of saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, total sugars, added sugars, vitamin D, calcium, iron, and potassium

INGREDIENT: SALT
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
One more day left in this Coltrane Centennial broadcast www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/john-co...
cc-seas.columbia.edu
John Coltrane Centennial | Columbia College
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The New Yorker clearly had an inside source . www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a62026
New Yorker cartoon of a king in a swimsuit going down slide into a moat with 2 advisors to the side. 1 says "Maybe not the best use of the defense budget"
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
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-...
99.97% The share of every refugee the United States admitted in fiscal year 2026 through July 31 who came from South Africa, 10,255 people out
of 10,258. The Trump administration abolished the refugee system, then reopened it for just one group: white South Africans. The fiscal year opened with a ceiling of 7,500, the lowest in the program's history, and an emergency presidential determination signed on May 21 raised it to 17,500 and allocated every one of the additional 10,000 places to Afrikaners from South Africa under Executive Order 14204. Total admissions were 38,102 in fiscal 2025 and 100,034 in fiscal 2024, so this is a program running at about a
tenth of its size two years ago and drawing entirely from one country. Just
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
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.)
Corkboard with rejections from Ballantine, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Free Press, Dutton, and Dial Press
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
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
github.com
GitHub - p-e-w/heretic: Fully automatic censorship removal for language models
Fully automatic censorship removal for language models - p-e-w/heretic
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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).
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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.
According to Mohamed, guards at Guantanamo have said they are being held there because that's what officials in Washington, DC, want. "There's no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison," he told me. "And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us... Washington...ordered to keep Somali people in the Guantanamo Bay."
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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.
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The stability of many things, I believe, rest on the limited capabilities of idiots. But what if we made idiots much more capable.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 16/09/2026
new vid up at the youtube channel youtu.be/aNU0g0UExuU
youtu.be
What Mike Johnson might do to subvert the election — and how you can stop him
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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...
Ms. Frazier was keenly aware of the role her art could play in
helping people deal with pain, including her own. "I always describe it as the food you eat at a funeral," she said in a
2020 interview with the design publication AIGA Eye in Design. "It's nourishing, and we're all at this horrible event together, but
this is helping us cope so we can talk and laugh about it."
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
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
leaflet.pub
Lea: research-oriented social media
Introducing a beta-version of our new research-focused social media platform
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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. +
GENERATIVE AI AND SOCIETY
Laura K. Nelson,
Daniel Karell,
and Thomas Davidson

ABSTRACT
For sociologists, generative AI inherits the legacy of earlier computational technologies:  it is an advancement of machine learning already adopted as a methodology, and it intervenes in a society already shaped by algorithmic systems. Yet it also has a dimension that distinguishes it from previous computational methods, and one that makes it inherently sociological: its interactivity. In this review, we conceptualize the interactivity of generative AI and introduce a framework for understanding how it operates across individual, organizational, and institutional life. Specifically, the framework specifies how generative AI expands users, functions as a proxy for society, and expresses power,
both in sociological practice and in society. We conclude by suggesting three dynamics driven by generative AI that sociology will face in the near future: the transformation of scientific practice, the reorganization of social interaction, and the acceleration of algorithmic governance.

Keywords: generative AI,  interaction, computational sociology, methods, algorithms, algorithmic governance
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Appreciated the metaphor as a conversation starter. In short, soc focuses on -do (internal fights by known rules & inculcation of shared culture) rather than -jutsu (fighting to win against external forces). But discussion/conclusion not sociological enough for audience (author rolls eyes here)...
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Reposted by Mark Igra
Larry Glickman @larryglickman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Perhaps, as one way of combating the dangers of AI, we should develop the writing equivalent of the "slow food" movement.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
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...
liberalcurrents.com
The End of History and the Final Girl
Anton Jäger’s "Hyperpolitics" is, at its best, late marginalia for "The End of History and the Last Man." At its worst, Jäger, like Fukuyama, is a prisoner of his political pieties.
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Reposted by Mark Igra
The Needling @theneedling.com · 12/09/2026
Home Gardening Virtuoso Successfully Turns $800 into a Side Salad: tinyurl.com/4uxmdjtz
Man fondly gazing upon a small garden salad bowl with a giant backyard garden behind him.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Not the sentence I would use to summarize Social Identity Theory, but I never expected to see Tajfel and Turner name dropped in The Athletic. www.nytimes.com/athletic/753... #sociology
In the 1970s and 80s, social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner developed the idea that humans do not only think in terms of, Who am I? They also ask the question,
Who are we?
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Neal Caren in Socius: "Overall, time with friends has fallen by more than half" since early 2000's. If one needs more evidence of what we lost from COVID. Makes me sad. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
🚨🚨🚨 We're hiring a junior professor in Policy Analysis/Public Administration/Public Management here at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy 🚨🚨🚨 aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05497
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
Assistant Professor - General Public Policy and Administration: Policy Analysis, Public Administration and Management - Goldman School of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
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Jill Lawrence @jilldlawrence.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Feeling really encouraged today by this Supreme Court reform op-ed from @schiff.senate.gov. He's on the case, his to-do list is exactly right, and he's in a position to help make sure it happens if Democrats run the table in 2029. 🙏 www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...
latimes.com
Contributor: How Democrats can repair the broken Supreme Court
Eliminate conflicts of interest. Enforce ethics rules. Add term limits and more justices to dilute Trump's lingering influence.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Caro’s Passage of Power describes new pres LBJ secretly demanding newspapers support him by threatening radio stations run by media owners, or even unrelated bank mergers where newspaper owners were investors. Got to be a ton of that now in addition to overt threats.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Best part of #ASA2026 being in NYC is learning about contemporary (?) forms of collective effervescence
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Rahawa Haile @rahawahaile.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
This is one of the most catastrophic developments imaginable for US media and the country. I don’t even have the words for it.
nbcnews.com
Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership
The move sets the stage for more corporate consolidation in the media industry.
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Steven Alvarado @sealvarado.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
JOBS ALERT~! ND Soc has THREE tenure-track lines. (1) Open area/Open rank; (2) AP Education/Strat/Inequality; and (3) AP Quantitative Sociology. I'm on the committee for the open area/open rank job so feel free to reach out with any questions! lnkd.in/g96KVtj7 lnkd.in/gaFQt9f3 lnkd.in/gjYS_Cfk
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Gayle Kaufman @gaylekaufman.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
📣 We are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in sociology at Davidson College! Could this be your dream job? I'm open to chatting about teaching at a liberal arts college and this position. Just message or email me : ) careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311603/...
careercenter.asanet.org
Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Sociology - Davidson, North Carolina job with Davidson College | 1311603
Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Sociology   The Sociology department at Davidson College invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Profe...
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Yuck. Aside from everything else, how di these guys not give everyone the ick?
(Netanyahu's security team insisted that he stay in a six-bedroom hilltop villa, requiring one of Ellison's employees to move.) Ellison is building a house on the island for his good friend Elon Musk, a regular visitor.
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Damon Mayrl @mayrl.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Sociologists: I am teaching our capstone course this fall, which focuses on sociological scholarship published in 2025 or 2026. What recent pubs (books or articles) have you read that you thought were particularly good, and would also be engaging for undergrads? All suggestions welcome--thank you!
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Just deleted a post about how #LLM API calls that include Falun Dafa were being handled weirdly by Qwen, the Alibaba open weights model. They ARE handled weirdly when using "Qwen Plus" through together(dot)ai . But Qwen Plus is not actually open weights unlike other models they serve.
Screen shot of table

Topic
Result
Falun Dafa: Blocked
Uyghur / Xinjiang human rights: Blocked
Taiwan independence: Blocked
Tibetan culture: OK
Hong Kong democracy: OK
Irish-American (control): OK
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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Q for academics, especially sociology and related fields: has anyone written up a guide for advising PhD students on applying to non-US job markets (either a specific non-US market or more general strategy)?
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Brad Lander @bradlander.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
We’ve seen so much cruelty from ICE over the past year. But using kids as “bait” to arrest & detain their relatives is a new level of evil. I witnessed it last week at 201 Varick Street. Per this article in the Texas Tribune, it’s happened over 100X. (1/3)
texastribune.org
ICE arresting relatives trying to take custody of migrant kids
Attorneys say the federal agencies are using children as “bait” to detain sponsors, leaving kids waiting in shelters for months.
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tenuretracker.info @tenuretracker.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social) is hiring: Lecturer Pool - Sociology #lecturer #sociosky
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Back when I worked at Taco Bell in the 1980’s we had to shred the poop lettuce in-store. None of this pre-packaged bullshit.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
I hate headlines of the form "X is not what you think." Why do you presume to know what I think? Anyway, it's an instant unsubscribe.
Mail header: Katherine Courage, Vox
"Ultra-processed" foods aren't as bad as you think.
To: Mark Igra,
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Wish this instant classic was out before I finished my diss. Something that fits well in this paradigm but not explicit in paper is Christian "service" or Jewish tikkun olam. Some volunteers sought religious context that enabled value-aligned service, others left religion & sought unbundled service.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Last thing I need is to add this to my spelling bee compulsion, but it’s quick & fun (I thought I did well but folks in the replies did much better) hankgreen.com/smush
Game board with 3x3 letter grid & 377 points.
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
This by @jamellebouie.net is an important read for July 4th — the 250th anniversary of the declaration . My only complaint is that it came out on July 1, the 2nd anniversary of Trump v US. July 1 should be commemorated as Corruption Day. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Five Words That Changed America
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
July 1 marks 2 years since the horrific Trump v US ruling. Part of John Roberts roadmap for corruption. 1. Unlimited political donations in exchange for favors or crimes (now including FEC,FTC,…) 2. With presidential immunity and pardons for co-conspirators www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...
supremecourt.gov
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Brandon Moore, PhD @rando.insalubrio.us · 26/06/2026
The Australian ballista spider uses a spring-actuated snare tuned to the defense behavior of its prey: the aggressive green tree ant! 🧪 www.cell.com/current-biol...
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Mark Igra @markigra.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Strolled around Seattle during the match today — so many public watch parties. Love this guy who climbed up to get a better view of the screen & then watched on his phone.
World Cup watch party at Seattle Center. Man in foreground watching on his phone. Screen and base of space needle in background
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