iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sumita Pahwa

AmeriKraut @inchargeofthegirls.bsky.social · 7h

y'all... 🤭😭

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 11h

OLS
OLS
This month's revolutionary estimator

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 9h

Beyond this, there's a certain kind of American man who feels he can assert masculine control/demand gratitude from an immigrant spouse because he's doing her a favor by accepting her, and he stands for America broadly in ensuring she Knows Her Place & will be deferential to him.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 9h

Oh I can bet you he does. It's a familiar phenomenon.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 10h

Yup. The Dalit Panthers were similarly a thing in Maharashtra.

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Jonah Blank @jonahblank.bsky.social · 10h

This USA Today editor has just burned all of his paper's reporters: Every time any source gives any reporter an interview, it's based on trust: Trust that they'll be quoted accurately, and fairly, and in context. ♦️Why should ANYONE consent to an interview by ANY reporter from USA Today?

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Katie Spoon @kspoon.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

As a PhD student designing my first survey, I added what I thought was a throwaway question at the end. To my surprise, thousands of academics answered it! The paper is out today: doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Also see: tying health insurance to jobs, tying work visas to specific employers, and having a weak social safety net so that anyone with family to support rather than family as a source of money and care, is stuck and can't push back against employer abuse.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Student debt is at the heart of why campus sexual violence derails victims’ lives too. The primary reason victims drop out of college is because they are encouraged to take temporary leaves of absence—and then they can’t return until they are current on student loan payments.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

In many ways, it felt like the findings of the study were determined in advance. I watched for years as Shamus spoke publicly about the project—even while the student research assistants who actually conducted interviews for the project raised concerns that the findings didn’t match the data.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I’ve been biting my tongue on this one. But I’m just going to come out and say it: The Sexual Citizenship approach is the next era of symbolic compliance for campus sexual violence. It’s trying to solve sexual violence by putting more chairs in dorm rooms. Literally.

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ceej @ceej.online · 14/10/2026

I asked my two-year-old if she respected me last night and she responded with “respect my poopy butt!” it’s so over

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Lily Mason @lilymasonphd.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Edsall wrote an article on my recent article. I do think it’s important to point out here that Sean Westwood has been attacking my work since 2021, regardless of topic. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | What if Political Polarization Is Not the Disease but the Cure? (Gift Article)

A debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Rather like the globalization panic in the 1990s, which scholars of political economy later argued was effective in allowing managers to cut wages and blame outsiders.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

4. DOGE officials were told datasharing under certain conditions was illegal. The most obvious is IRS data. Need an act of Congress to share. They did not care.

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen.

“No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”.

Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access.

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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 13/10/2026

This is a loss. At the absolute nadir of the COVID-19 pandemic her reporting helped keep me sane. STAT became one of my go-to news sources for honest, factual reporting on the crisis in large measure because of her. A Branswell report, good news or bad, made me sit up and take notice.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

3. DOGE made false claims about employee performance in order to fire them, but did not want to put their names to these emails. So they would coerce civil servants into doing so. If the civil servants refused, they were fired. (Not just DOGE, other Trump appointees like Kash Patel did this).

The revealing moments in the civil service were lonelier. They occurred inside people’s hearts and minds, and seldom leaked to the press. After his arrival at the IRS, one of Gavin Kliger’s first acts had been to demand that the agency fire its 6,700 probationary workers, who had yet to be granted civil service protection. By law they could be fired only for poor performance. Gavin had asked Traci DiMartini, in her capacity as head of human resources, to agree to put her name on an email to the mostly young employees telling them that they had failed at their jobs. The Doge people played this trick often. They’d use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Excerpts from Michael Lewis on DOGE (Guardian article). 1. Gavin Kliger, white nationalist, refused to shake hands with the Black IRS staffer who briefed him on privacy issues. Or pay attention. Kliger now has a defense start-up valued at 1.4B thanks to DOGE. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”

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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

a transformation which renders them in every respect similar to the dethroned tyrants.” R. Michels, Political Parties, 1911.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

“As soon as the new leaders have attained their ends, as soon as they have succeeded (in the name of the injured rights of the anonymous masses) in overthrowing the odious tyranny of their precedessors & in attaining power in their turn, we see them undergo..."

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

"We should be asking ourselves: When is civility useful and when is it a canard for oppression? When is anger a detriment and when is it a righteous tool?" www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

insidehighered.com

What’s Wrong With Civility?

Civility can be a tool of engagement. But history has shown it can also be used to oppress the powerless.

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 13/10/2026

NEW: Fraudsters stole $470 million last year from Americans who need help paying for food. Adopting the same microchip that credit cards have had for years would prevent most of the theft, but Congress won’t pay for it.

propublica.org

Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.

Fraudsters stole $470 million last year from Americans who need help paying for food. Adopting the same microchip that credit cards have had for years would prevent most of the theft, but Congress won...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 12/10/2026

man, if you wanna post on Twitter then post on Twitter, nobody’s gonna stop you most of us are just not going to join you

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Marcella Hazan, c'mon, no question.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This one, and a particular Egypt Jan 2011 song, are songs I can't listen to again.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Sounds like the town where I live. 100% higher than 2018, and let's just say since it's SoCal the starting point was not exactly low.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Whenever you find a place friendly and non-cliquish, remember that you're seeing a small part of it and experiencing it most likely as an in-group member.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Spotlight search on my mac has also become utterly useless over the past year.

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Frances: Meh and Loving It @francesmeh.reviews · 09/01/2024

ok time to log on to the information superhighway and use my little ape brain to process the individual traumas of 8 billion people at once this will be fine

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The gold dress is just amazing.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Reuters, the Guardian, BBC etc have good reporters and are doing a decent job. But there's nothing like reporting from the ground. Also instagram is the preferred medium for a lot of young people who are out there on the streets.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Ah, lamb and goat - always good reasons to break out the pressure cooker.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I also love how people scolding others about civility feel free to tell them to 'shut up.' But Brooks doesn't get that an elected senator's job is to talk about politics, and to defend democracy - Brooks' life is a dinner party, and his career depends on flattering those in power.

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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Do you have the Clifford Wright Real Stew cookbook? It's fabulous, and based on excellent recipes from around the world.

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Christopher Julian @chrisajulian.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I reanalyzed the CDC data behind the LGB “free fall” headline. It rests on a change in bisexual identification among one grade, in one wave, of one survey. Gay or lesbian identification did not change significantly. Calling it a "free fall" is sensational and just gives bad actors talking points.

Six small line charts showing the percent of U.S. high school students choosing each sexual identity response option by grade (9th to 12th), 2015 to 2025, with 95% confidence intervals. Heterosexual falls from about 85 to 90 percent before 2021 to about 73 percent in 2021 and 2023, then rises to about 78 to 80 percent in 2025. Gay or lesbian stays between about 2 and 5 percent throughout. Bisexual rises to about 12 percent in 2021 in every grade, then among 9th graders falls to about 7 percent in 2025, its 2019 level, while other grades stay near 10 percent. “Some other way,” added in 2021, falls from about 4 percent to about 2.5 percent. “Not sure” stays near 3 to 5 percent. A dotted line marks 2021, when CDC changed the response options.

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