iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is what I get for complaining about traffic caused by basketball games and concerts

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Thought a spam caller was hitting on me, but turns out I just have a new Sweetwater rep.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Curiously, I think one can read the new Levitsky and Way article as suggesting that the United States actually is something of an exceptional case even after 10 years of trying to think about Trumpism in comparative perspective.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Damn I can't believe people have different preferences about pop culture than me

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My favorite part of the NFL is when they talk about the rules like it's a practice LSAT question. Great sport.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Some people seem to be criticizing Adam Jentleson because they think he's wrong and some because they think he's just regurgitating basic findings from political science in the 1960s (implying he's right). It can't be both though!

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I was going to make a joke about how to dress for APSA, but then it occurred to me there probably aren't even that many grad students on Bluesky because that tends to involve being under 40

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

"I wish we were the top story on the Wall Street Journal website!" "Oh no."

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I can only assume some Syracuse administrator not familiar with the monkey's paw story wished we'd get more media coverage

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Social media surely makes things much worse, but the American people were always kind of like this

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Language changes over time, The American Voter (1960) edition

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Sure, but the agenda control of being the majority party is important here. It's one thing to vote on a nominee that's brought to the floor (and probably going to succeed with or without your vote). It's another thing for Trump to have to get Dems to actually cooperate at the earlier stages.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Crazy to see Hampshire (RIP) so high

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

At my first conference, the chair asked us write our own intros. Thinking it was just what you did, I listed a forthcoming publication & probably some minor award or something. After my long flowery intro, the more established person on the panel got introduced as "this is so and so at X university"

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I convinced myself I'd eat a bagged salad when I went grocery shopping a few days ago, but now that the moment has arrived I've chickened out

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I really dislike reading obviously AI generated writing and even if students produce the prose themselves I worry they will let Claude explain and critique an article for them. But realistically, hard to see how I can stop that by just saying "no AI, promise me"

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I'm teaching our grad American politics field survey for the first time and am struggling over whether to stick to strict no AI or switch to "you can use AI if you declare it and also I expect you to be able to prove in our discussions that you understand what you wrote" for reading response papers

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I wouldn’t sign the letter, but I think the argument is 1. Ghent hired him presumably knowing who he was and 2. now they’re firing him in a way that certainly correlates with him pointing out actual academic misconduct and possibly using his racism as cover for that.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

If I’m understanding correctly, Ghent hired him not that long ago despite surely knowing these things about him. Now they’ve turned him into some sort of martyr.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Tough break for econ, living out their worst nightmare of getting lumped in with the rest of the social sciences

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Obviously breaking down agency independence can empower the executive and *that* can be bad for democracy. But it's also easier to think highly of a powerful bureaucracy when you like what it does (as I, and most people here, do). I worry about conceptual slippage I guess.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Does democracy require bureaucratic agencies to be able to act independently of elected officials? If so, what's the line exactly? Like most people here, I think agency independence/capacity is largely a good thing for *other reasons*. But I'm not sure *democracy* is the best way to think about it.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

There's plenty of good sociology and anthropology research out there, but....come on we all know there's some weird stuff.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I've definitely seen a lot of people reticent to criticize entire academic disciplines like this, but (to use the example of my own discipline) political scientists IRL regularly criticize fields where the empirical standards are obviously...lax. We all know there's a lot of bad research out there.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

We should let high schools assign students to read the Bible just to hear students refer to the Bible as a "novel"

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A lot of the quant social science AI enthusiasm comes from this

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Without defending any particular example, I think one of the biggest gaps between the humanities (& probably much qualitative social science) and quantitative social science is that the latter often fundamentally revolves around something like a regression coefficient. If anything, prose can mislead

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Because I think this is how journalistic coverage of the paper is going to be framed

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I worry the implications of this are getting blown out of proportion. Do @adambonica.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social really not think, for example, Hong is less likely to win WI-Gov than Crowley? Or that AES performs as well as Stevens in the general (margins, not win vs loss)?

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Earlier I thought it might be smart to buy Stevens contracts when they were at 1 cent (not because I thought she'd win, but I thought things might at least fluctuate), but I talked myself out of it because gambling is bad, etc. I guess what I've learned here is gambling is good and has no downsides.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I find this genuinely confusing and would be open to hearing from people about why they think it's a good idea. Just empirically speaking, I can't imagine it helps El-Sayed and I don't understand how it's supposed to help professors either.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Too much social media focus on the contentious (but conventionally so) Michigan Senate primary, not enough focus on the utterly bizarre Wisconsin Gubernatorial primary

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Brooklyn and South Carolina are almost exactly the same percent Black

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I dunno, seems pretty easy to imagine 3 different candidates winning the first 3 Democratic primaries in 2028.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I've always been curious if historians even talk about impact factors (or even citation counts, relative to how much they get talked about in more quantitative social science fields)

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I guess you mean the AAA shouldn't have done this, but my questions are assuming they aren't responsive to these criticisms.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I guess I don't get what reform would mean. If, to use a recurring example here, anthropologists sometimes do things that are embarrassing to academia more broadly, should universities have a policy response to that? Is other academics criticizing them publicly enough to constitute reform?

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

You gave the example of a silly thing an anthropologist said. But what policy somehow prevents that without obviously undercutting academic freedom? There's already oversight in tenure decisions above the department level, for example.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I think part of the response you're getting is people can't imagine what sort of policy solution you have in mind, whereas the bad-faith actors at least have offered clear (but bad) policy solutions. So the mind wanders to those.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Wegmans has a store brand version of this in the US, but that's the only one I've seen

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

My sense is the sentiment in this quote (a) definitely exists within some niche parts of academia (and it's fine to criticize openly, I think), but (b) it's fairly marginalized, particularly at the broader university level, where anthropologists are generally not power brokers.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Genuinely funny local politics story here, made all the more well suited for poli sci discourse because the bill was about term limits

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

There was a recent Chris Hayes/Ezra Klein podcast where one thing that came up was risk aversion among the sort of candidates people on here want the party to nominate, which leaves open space for risk-tolerant (and often risky) candidates in their place.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I feel like an underappreciated part of the Maine situation is all the high-quality Dem candidates ran for governor because they were too afraid of Collins. Ironically, Maine will likely have a higher quality Dem Senate candidate *because* Platner won (and dropped out) than if Mills had just won.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

This is kind of just what high end restaurants in Asheville are like

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

As one of the few Maine residents I follow here, do you have any thoughts on if there's an obvious person Platner prefers as an alternative to himself? Reporting suggests he wants to have influence on the replacement, but it wasn't clear to me if that meant a particular candidate or not.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

The 2024 optimism largely seemed premised on thinking things were "different," I think mostly because of Dobbs? But the super boring/conventional Americanist electoral forecasting research (not very popular on this site at the time) seemed more inclined to see a close race that was in Trump's favor:

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I think it's largely true that Harris's loss is mostly explained by macro-level things like the economy and anti-incumbent sentiment. But it's interesting that many political scientists on Bluesky have only convinced themselves of this now after spending 2024 thinking she was probably going to win.

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

What about governors? Virginia doesn't let governors serve even a second consecutive term, but New York has no term limits at all. It feels like the answer is somewhere in the middle, but does it even matter really?

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