iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Wish I could be there! I know exactly what I’d bring:

John Stehlin @jstehlin.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Reposted by Will B. Payne

Park Police have had it in for Davey Hearn ever since 1995 when they tried to drag him out of his canoe for surfing a wave on the flooded Potomac and an officer fell in and fell ill with pneumonia. He was charged with resisting arrest but IIRC they floated charges of assault on a police officer.

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Nothing wrong with me that the Monster Energy canal boat can’t fix…

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Rutgers Bloustein School @bloustein.rutgers.edu · 16/06/2026

How might digital mapping move beyond the conventions of traditional GIS? A new special issue of Cartographic Perspectives, co-edited by Bloustein's Dr. @willbpayne.bsky.social and Harvard's Dr. Evangeline McGlynn explores experimental approaches. cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/jo...

The cover of this issue features "Madison Area Dog Parks," a collaboration between cartographer Stephen Kennedy of
LATLONG.SHOP and illustrator Megan Stout. This piece reimagines Madison’s canine recreational geography with whimsical,
hand-drawn character. Different breeds denote each dog park, with smaller pups specifically indicating parks with areas
reserved for small dogs. See more of Kennedy’s maps of Madison and the Midwest at www.latlong.shop.

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Jameel Jaffer @jameeljaffer.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Why do faculty and students have so little say in the governance of American universities? This terrific new paper by Daniel Hemel and David Pozen asks why American universities are liberal autocracies rather than stakeholder democracies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com · 25/05/2026

NJ Senator @andykimnj.bsky.social pepper sprayed at Newark ICE detention center, which is owned by for-profit corrections company GEO Group. Feel like this should be a big thing. www.nj.com/news/2026/05...

U.S. Sen. Andy Kim receives first aid after he was caught in a cloud of pepper spray during a clash between protesters and ICE agents in Newark, New Jersey on Monday, May 25, 2026. Jelani Gibson

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Just saw the Descendents and Circle Jerks there last year, at 39 then I was precisely in the middle of the age distribution lol

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

It is about the Edison/Woodbridge borderlands, after all!

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

People who make airport lounge access their whole personality: “Lebanese Blonde” (Thievery Corporation)

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Giving review gigs to people based not on expertise, but pure vibes: “Mr. Smith is the Journal’s film critic and a columnist for WSJ Opinion’s Free Expression.” Congrats on the book @dygottlieb.bsky.social!

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/05/2026

horrible. this country’s turn away from science based medicine in the name of “wellness” is killing children and will kill a lot more. www.propublica.org/article/more...

propublica.org

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

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Rutgers Bloustein School @bloustein.rutgers.edu · 30/04/2026

You can choose not to buy the $40 chicken, but you can’t choose not to pay your rent." Bloustein professor @willbpayne.bsky.social breaks down why pricey restaurants reshape whole #neighborhoods, even for people who never eat there. Read bit.ly/4t7TEPF

Chicken parmigiana lunch sandwich on a table with a glass of red wine.

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

After a brutal winter, the catkins are enacting their revenge plot.

Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

This recent album can also scratch some of that itch: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steep_S...

en.wikipedia.org

Steep Stims - Wikipedia

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

This and A Little to the Left have been a hit with 10.3 in our house

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

My former student @dygottlieb.bsky.social has his amazing first book coming out in May. It's all about the way NYC helped create the "yuppies" and how those yuppies then remade NYC. It's brilliant. You'll never think about Zagat's or the NYC Marathon the same way, trust me. Pre-order here:

bookshop.org

Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York

The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York

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christopher webb @christopherwebb.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

I wrote about Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism for @theguardian.com —it’s a brilliant take on why we ought to focus on the hellish 21st century update on Fordism rather than the man himself.

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New Jersey State Policy Lab @policylab.rutgers.edu · 11/03/2026

🏠 Today #Rutgers researchers presented at the State House in Trenton discussing their recent and ongoing research into affordable housing and the corporate acquisition of property in #NJ. @stuartshapiroblou.bsky.social @bloustein.rutgers.edu @ericseymour.bsky.social @willbpayne.bsky.social

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There’s a lot more, including how some of these overwhelmingly young male influencers use imagery of luxury cars and parties alongside trolling about how they love evicting tenants and charging monthly rent for ceiling fans etc. All publicity (perhaps even this paper 🙃) is good if new clients sign…

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Finally, this map, showing Small-Area Fair Market Rent implementation progress by HUD, shows that the spatial arbitrage loophole Section 8 investors targeted (rents set by metro area, higher than local asking, see work of @evarosen.bsky.social etc.) has already been closed in these markets

Map of HUD Metro Areas with Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMR) Status

This map shows the results of me taking the advice of one of these finfluencers and repeatedly prompting ChatGPT & Gemini to suggest turnkey low-cost housing markets (investment message boards like BiggerPockets likely in training data), with most markets in the Rust Belt & Deep South

Map of the United States showing turnkey rental markets suggested by ChatGPT and Google Gemini sized by total Housing Choice Vouchers

A few images; first, this page shows the kind of promotional strategy influencers use to sell training courses & coaching. Almost every post mentions that rents are government-guaranteed (true besides the tenant contribution), and encourages inexperienced investors to participate

Image from “Section 8 Training” website home page talking about how this is a method to “build passive income” with “government guaranteed rent”

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The Section 8 (F)influencer economy

I have a new open access article in Geoforum, looking at how abrasive online “finfluencers” promise riches through buying cheap properties to rent to Housing Choice Voucher (“Section 8”) holders, using outdated spatial arbitrage strategies and AI automation: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, colloquially known as “Section 8” vouchers) program is one of the largest affordable housing programs in the United S…

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Kind of sad to have started going to AAG after the legendary Tampa meeting, apparently attendance was way down but people who went said it was great

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Taylor Shelton @jtsphd.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Also Oakland is definitely west of the (Tampa) Bay Area

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Really excited to share my latest paper in @ijurresearch.bsky.social on mapping (a more expansive understanding of) absentee housing ownership in Atlanta! 🗺️🏘️📌 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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Mark Graham @geoplace.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Our new paper audits ChatGPT’s place-based judgements using 20 million pairwise comparisons. We find systematic geographic biases in how places are described and evaluated. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... (authors: Francisco W. Kerche, Matthew Zook, Mark Graham)

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Prefuse 73 was maybe the first concert I got to cover “on assignment” for my college newspaper’s art section, if I remember right it was at the Avalon in 2005 and there were two live drummers… I’m pretty sure my article was in English though

Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Has to be 2010 for me; I don’t know if it’s just that the electro pop bangers of that year were all so similar, but it just works so well and has some great little puns and grace notes in there… www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLA7...

youtube.com

DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2010 (Don't Stop the Pop)

YouTube video by Dj Earworm

Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Counter Culture Hologram beans that were roasted in August using a relative’s very good grinder, but a basket filter on a V60 pourover… a real coffee nerd rollercoaster!

Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Desert Island for me, other songs have wittier lyrics, but that hook is just 💯

Jovanna Rosen @jovannarosen.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Reposted by Will B. Payne

New article with @lfalvarezleon.bsky.social on the different geographies created by digital capitalism, urbanization, and global production networks

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Yeah for me it’s this or “On the Beach” 🏖️

Rutgers Bloustein School @bloustein.rutgers.edu · 11/12/2025

Reposted by Will B. Payne

‪The latest ‪@njpolicylab.bsky.social‬ report written by professors @ericseymour.bsky.social & @willbpayne.bsky.social looks at corporate ownership of 1–4-unit residential properties in #NJ. Between 2012 and 2022 ownership more than doubled. policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/...

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New Jersey State Policy Lab @policylab.rutgers.edu · 08/12/2025

Between 2012 and 2022, corporate ownership of 1–4-unit residential properties more than doubled in #NJ, according to this latest report from NJSPL and authored by #Rutgers researchers @ericseymour.bsky.social & @willbpayne.bsky.social: policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/...

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Burcu Baykurt @baykurt.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Similar to its precursor (smart cities), the real money in these speculative projects lies not in any eventual product but in the ecosystem of summits, workshops, and gatherings that circulate the idea and monetize the fiction itself under the pretense of design or planning.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.

The land and waterhemispheres. Equal-area projection. Map from wikipedia.

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John Stehlin @jstehlin.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

AAG 2026 Call for Papers/Panelists: "Urban Politics from Bidenomics to MAGA Urbanism" organized by myself and @alanwiig.bsky.social. Please send abstracts and/or expressions of panel interest to us by October 24, and share widely!

AAG 2026 Call for Papers/Panelists: Urban Politics from Bidenomics to MAGA Urbanism
Sponsored by the Urban Geography Specialty Group

With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, there is broad agreement that U.S. political culture is at a crisis point (Bouie 2025; Viala-Gaudefroy 2025). Since January 2025, the Trump Administration, an unusual assemblage of impresarios, hustlers, influencers, and hard-core ideologues, has deployed a chaotic program to remake American government and society in the image of authoritarian nationalism across the realms of foreign policy, immigration, trade, social policy, media, and energy (Townley 2025). In short, key figures in the administration have called for “repealing the 20th century,” and more proximately, key policy legacies of the Obama and Biden administrations (Davies 2025). Most recently, the administration has focused its attention on “crime” in “blue” cities and states, sending ICE agents and National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Portland in a show of force against its political enemies (Ward and Fertig 2025; Wong 2025).

While most commentary on the Trump administration focuses on the transformation of the federal government, the changes underway are also profoundly urban (Wyly 2025). This session will explore the urban dimensions of the Biden-Trump transition across a range of domains. We invite paper abstracts and panelists discussing any of the following topics and beyond:

- Urban policy under the Biden and Trump administrations
- Changing city, state, and federal interactions (conflict, cooperation, etc.)
- Implications of legislative changes (IIJA, IRA, BBB, etc.) for cities
- Specific sectoral dimensions (energy, housing, climate, social policy, etc.)
- Urban voting patterns, gerrymandering, and partisanship
- Urban militarization, policing, political violence, and spectacle
- “Sanctuary cities,” immigration, and xenophobia
- Interrelated housing, housing affordability, and homeowners' insurance crises
- Urbanism, suburbanization, and transportation investment
- Nativism, racism, natalism, and cities
- Energy, petronationalism, and urban climate response
- Urban discourses across legacy media, social media, and administration figures
- Tech, venture capital, AI, and cities
- Structural and conjunctural dimensions of each administration in the longue duree

We anticipate at least one paper session and one more open-ended panel session based on this theme, depending on interest. Please submit paper abstracts or expressions of interest in panel participation (including topics of interest) to John Stehlin (jgstehli@uncg.edu) and Alan Wiig (alanwiig@ufl.edu) by 6:00 PM EDT (GMT -5:00) on Friday, October 24.

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Desiree Fields @desireefields.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

It’s your lucky day! We have identified your profile as a winner, but time is running out to claim your reward. Just send us 250 words within the next three days so we can process your claim. Act now! #AAG2026

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Did you take Hoberman’s Cold War cinema class? So good

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Will B. Payne @willbpayne.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

The Broadway show was very fun too