iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Come be my colleague! The College of New Jersey's Department of Political Science is hiring for an Assistant Professor in IR. Happy to answer any questions about the job. Please share widely! tcnj.taleo.net/careersectio...

tcnj.taleo.net

Assistant Professor-Political Science

Click the link provided to see the complete job description.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Thank you APSA, both for the opportunity to do a Congressional Fellowship and for the additional funding support to continue studying LGBTQ representation in Congress!

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Really proud of my wife for discovering how fun political science is!

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

So all colleges and universities will bring back the DEI stuff they cut when obeying in advance right...............................................................................................................................................right?

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Cristian Farias @cristianfarias.com · 03/01/2026

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

Twitter thread in Spanish by José Mario de la Garza, a human rights lawyer in Mexico, translated using Google Translate:

1. Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful. That's why it prohibits force almost without exception: not because it ignores injustice, but because it knows that if each country decides whom to "liberate" by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest.

2. The problem is not Maduro. The problem is the precedent. When military force is used to change governments without clear rules, sovereignty ceases to be a limit and becomes an obstacle. Today it is “overthrowing a dictator”; tomorrow it will be “correcting an election,” “protecting interests,” “restoring order.” The law does not absolve dictatorships, but neither does it legitimize unilateral crusades.

Cont’d:

3. The uncomfortable question is not whether a tyrant deserves to fall, but who decides when and how. Because history teaches something brutal: removing a dictator is easy; building justice afterward is not. And when legality is broken in the name of good, what almost always follows is not freedom, but chaos, violence, and new victims. The law exists to remind us of this, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Maduro isn't the problem: he's the face of the problem. Removing him from power would be merely opening the door. Behind him is the machine: Rodríguez, Cabello, the military command, the operators of repression and plunder. If you only change the person at the top and leave the system intact, what follows isn't democracy: it's a reshuffling.

And there's something even more difficult: Chavismo didn't just capture institutions, it captured daily life. Economy, media, bureaucracy, employment, fear, favors, blackmail. A country can't be "de-Chavistaized" by decree or by an electoral miracle. The real transition begins when that network is broken without setting the country ablaze.

The challenge is enormous, and it's also a moral one: to unite without vengeance, but without impunity. Targeted justice for those most responsible, truth for the victims, guarantees that the rest will dismantle the system, and a plan for people to live again—not just survive. Because freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 03/01/2026

an “inherent power” to respond to an “imminent” attack is just a license for aggressive war on the president’s whim

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

And he specifically references the mentee asking for feedback on a paper. So we know that this is a situation where the mentee is reliant on him for support and guidance.

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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Texas A&M Tightens Rules on Talking About Race and Gender in Classes www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u... “The policy defines race ideology as, among other things, ‘a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity.’” These GOP-led efforts will ruin their states’ public universities. Sad!

nytimes.com

Texas A&M Tightens Rules on Talking About Race and Gender in Classes

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

An important reminder that we shouldn't make confident election takes too quickly after an election, especially when generalizing about large groups of voters.

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

(And there's a real question about whether he'll comply)

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Eric Umansky @ericumansky.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

BREAKING from PP We found immigration agents have held more than 170 *citizens* The govt doesn't track citizens held. So we did. We tallied: Nearly 20 kids, two w/ cancer More than 20 citizens held for day or more, incommunicado www.propublica.org/article/immi... by @nicolefoy.bsky.social

propublica.org

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

It's both not going to tell you anything you don't already know and the sheer scope is just exhausting to read through.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

This somehow managed to be even worse than what I was expecting.

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Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

JUST IN: A new class action lawsuit challenges ICE's warrantless immigration arrests in Washington, D.C., which they say are occuring without probable cause and based largely on perceived ethnicity. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

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Justin Zimmerman @jztidecat.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

A reminder that the DOJ wants to investigate the issue. The DOJ wasting time investigating our classrooms is an open invitation for any frivolous complaint from any student, anywhere with too much time on their hands.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

The justification for the occupation of DC is that a DOGE employee was carjacked. What does this look like?

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Immediately after his "segregation forever!" line in his inaugural address, George Wallace asserted that the federal troops at Ole Miss -- sent there after a racist riot killed two and injured hundreds -- were needed more in Washington, DC. This is a very old, very obvious play from racists.

Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

The Washington D.C. school riot report is disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice our children to any such type school system, and you can write that down. The federal troops in Mississippi could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington D.C., where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ballgame, and that is the nation's capitol. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid, than the people of Washington are walking to the White House neighborhood. A closer example is Atlanta. The city officials fawn for political reasons over school integration and then build barricades to stop residential integration, what hypocrisy!

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?

I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry.

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

I have never wanted a piece of sports memorabilia more in my life. Obsessed.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

It’s a complete misunderstanding of the causes of backlash to civil rights. Anti-discrimination ordinances were followed by Anita Bryant. Baehr v Miike — the first state court ruling about gay marriage — was followed by DOMA. Blaming minorities for the backlash to efforts to advance their rights...

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Target is also the big box store with the most (relative) city presence. I think they really underestimated how many Democrats in major cities would just stop shopping at them. It's really wild to me they didn't realize this.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

As a professor at a public college in New Jersey, I cannot accept thank you gifts from students (including baked goods -- basically anything more than a hand-written note) as we're state employees and it would violate state lobbying laws.

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Pam Herd @pamherd.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Brutal account of what it’s like to teach at the University of Florida right now in the NYT—extraordinary climate of fear. People afraid to say intersectional and talk about lynchings. Fake students trying to entrap Muslim faculty or just making things up altogether. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/o...

In the three years since Ron DeSantis set out to rid Florida’s universities of woke ideology, my campus changed significantly. Professors suddenly worried about what they could say and teach. Some started avoiding terms like “racism.” One student recently told me that when someone used “intersectional” in class, the instructor told her not to use that word.

One colleague told me that he stopped assigning an article about lynching and white evangelicalism for fear that those terms could raise red flags. Another said she was censoring her language not just in class and on campus but also on personal social media.

Several professors have been subjected to efforts at entrapment. Last year a man posing as a student tried to encourage Muslim faculty members to criticize Mr. DeSantis and Israel. A similar incident happened to me. In October 2024 my department chair called me into his office to tell me that someone claiming to be a student in my Religion and Science class had complained that I spent 20 minutes talking about specific candidates, including who I was voting for and why. I was stunned. That never happened in that class or any other; it is antithetical to the way I teach. Fortunately

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Absolutely devastating. I'm so sorry Carson.

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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond. I hope you’ll read and share the piece. stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

stanforddaily.com

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly.

Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 22/04/2025

the question to ask about a certain prominent pollster who has the ear of influential figures in media is whether he's trying to inform the public or whether he's trying to win new clients tufts-pol.medium.com/have-young-v...

tufts-pol.medium.com

Have young voters really abandoned the Democrats?

by Caroline Soler, Brian Schaffner, and Stephen Ansolabehere

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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

This, from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

There are three key facts in the Holocaust Encyclopedia produced by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This is the second key fact:

What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.

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Jonathan Blitzer @jonathanblitzer.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

“The customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings.” One way to understand Trump effect in govt: an ever widening circle of people, like low-level customs officials, get to make categorical decisions abt lives of others. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/s...

nytimes.com

She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

President Trump’s immigration crackdown ensnared Kseniia Petrova, a scientist who fled Russia after protesting its invasion of Ukraine. She fears arrest if she is deported there.

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 08/04/2025

"those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past mistake correlation for causation. They think their grandparents had the 'good life' because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, it was unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies—with racism and sexism thrown in"

msnbc.com

Opinion | The manufactured nostalgia of Trump’s tariffs

Those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past America mistake correlation for causation.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/03/2025

jesus christ they want her dead

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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

The (peaceful, First Amendment-protected) scene at Columbia, 3 days after the nearby ICE arrest of a recent alum.

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Philadelphia Inquirer @inquirer.com · 27/02/2025

“Don’t turn away. Keep reading. You need to know this,” writes Inquirer columnist @jenicearmstrong.bsky.social. “The following is a real-life example of how the lives of three local residents have been upended by the presidency of Donald Trump." 🔗 inquirer.com/opinion/fede...

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Really proud of my mom, Cantor Sandy Horowitz, for participating in this ad! <3

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Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Trump can’t move group of three trans women to men’s prisons or deny them gender-affirming care, judge rules. “Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s sweeping order as a likely violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.” www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

the-independent.com

Trump can’t move trans women to men’s prisons or deny affirming care, judge rules

Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s sweeping order as a likely violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

I've also been calling Fetterman at an alarming rate, and it's really depressing to never once be able to talk to a staffer.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

It's really jarring trying to teach undergrads the power and limitations of executive power when we're 10 steps past a Constitutional crisis and only two weeks into the administration. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | There Is No Going Back

The president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was.

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Niko Stratis @nikostratis.com · 02/02/2025

I think a lot of folks could benefit from taking a minute to read this from @tuck.bsky.social (and support Gender Reveal while you’re there). www.patreon.com/posts/121361...

patreon.com

literally what can we do | Tuck Woodstock

Get more from Tuck Woodstock on Patreon

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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 27/01/2025

Oh, per @nbcnews.com: Quaker groups file suit over the end of policy restricting ICE arrests in houses of worship. Note: Quakers were some of the earliest supporters of Sanctuary, even putting out a booklet on the topic in 1984 (it's still available). www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

nbcnews.com

Quaker groups file suit over the end of policy restricting ICE arrests in houses of worship

The suit appears to be the first from a faith-based organization challenging the change in court.

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Auschwitz Memorial @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

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Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Maria Moe had been held in a low-security women's facility with no disturbance, complaints, or disciplinary record. Trump has held her in solitary confinement for the past four days and plans to send Moe, who transitioned at 15, to a men's prison where she risks facing abuse, assault, and rape.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Oh there are definitely some fireworks over here!

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Center for Political Studies @umisrcps.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Boys receive less information about gender inequality-- so family conversations may make a difference. @maraceci.bsky.social and @smorell93.bsky.social present research explaining the gender gap in support for the protection and advancement of women's rights. #PoliSky news.umich.edu/talk-to-him-...

news.umich.edu

Talk to him: How a conversation can shape public support for women's rights

A single conversation with a close family member may not change a young woman's views on policies protecting their rights, but it can strongly influence young men's attitudes.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

This project furthers our understandings of gender differences in family socialization, and helps explain the gender gap in these attitudes in adulthood. Main takeaway: There is real potential for parents to influence the development of boys' ideas about women's rights!

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Interestingly, we find that this is mostly driven by teenage boys who selected their mother as the family member for the experiment. (Family members were selected pre-treatment and so are unrelated to treatment assignment).

Figure shows four conditions -- teenage girls who selected their moms or their dads and teenage boys who selected their moms or their dads. Teenage boys who selected their mothers had a positive and significant impact of the treatment. Teenage girls who selected their fathers had a marginally significantly negative effect of the treatment.

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Sara Morell @smorell93.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

We then asked respondents a battery of women's rights attitudes. The experiment had a large and significant impact on the attitudes of teenage boys but no effect on teenage girls. And there was no effect when looking at non-family authority figures (e.g. a school superintendent)

Graph shows that Teenage Girls in all three treatment conditions have high, but unchanging, support for women's rights. Teenage boys support for women's rights is much lower, but increases based on the pro-#MeToo treatment condition.

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