Anyone sitting around and want to make a special GoogleMap of a legislative district for me?
Профиль
Dr. Katherine Haenschen
Профиль VivelyAsst Prof at Northeastern. Digital media & politics. Proud NJ native. Brookline TMM. Fan of #UCONN, enabling multi-family housing near transit, meatballs, field experiments.
The DSA is filling a vacuum, both rhetorically and (see below) practically that a lot of mainstream Democrats seem to have forgotten: Make people's daily lives materially better.
wishdaThe DSA in Wilmingotn, N.C. has created a "crisis" by putting benches at city bus stops, after literal decades of the city promising and failing to do so.
Social norms largely inhibited candidates (mostly—but not—solely GOP) from pandering at scale to these most anti-social of impulses. Trump changed that by showing it’s a viable electoral strategy in a Republican primary. Social norms are social constructs chapter eleventy-billion.
Faine GreenwoodI’ve been thinking a lot about how MAGA is the feral embodiment of every single negative stereotype about Americans and American culture, brought to putrid and wildly destructive life.
This is, IMO, the big moral challenge (failing?) of analytics and testing: picking the winner with no regard to why or how it may harm people.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover *why* a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM. 12/
It is profoundly unfortunate that it took the dead body of a 36-year-old municipal employee to get @mayorwu.boston.gov to say she’ll act on safer streets.
Peter Cheungwww.wbur.org/news/2026/07...
Ah, the paradox of tolerance rears its head again. Hey @wnba.com, you’re a private entity and you can decide that transphobia is not welcome at your games. Or, I guess, you can cater to a bunch of bigots who don’t actually care about women’s sports! 🏳️⚧️
DefectorWNBA suspends Seattle Storm minority owner for being rude to transphobic shitheads:
Shout out to Sasha and Malia for keeping their old man up to date
Barack ObamaHere are some of the songs I've been listening to this summer. It starts with a song Michelle and I love by Glen Hansard, a great musician who passed tragically this week. Our hearts go out to his family.
Great reminder of how much American democracy and government is (was?) a system of social norms, and people NOT doing bad things because the threat of being-thought-of-poorly was a consequence, if the basic immorality itself wasn’t enough motivation!
Seth MasketI've been seeing a lot of people responding to this with "there ought to be a law," but importantly, we haven't needed a law for this sort of thing because no prior president wanted to be known as a leader who would literally kill people in their hour of need for not voting for him
Are car insurers culpable in civil suits against drivers who use their products as murder machines? How can we, as a society, make it too expensive to operate these giant road-user-killers?
MiserThese two vehicles were just involved in a very public fatal crash in NYC, can you guess which everyone rushed to blame and called to ban? (PS: they should both be banned.)
And if we can’t ban them in the classroom, then let’s make sure that faculty members can wear them in private meetings with higher admins! Especially over thorny topics like discrimination and cheating. They’ll be cool with it, right??
Dr. Damien P. Williams has to go the way his blood beatsYeah this "pervert glasses in the classroom" thing is bothering me enough that I emailed both my departments asking if we can get practical guidance from the chancellor & IT. What I'm really, increasingly wanting is a Wi-Fi kill switch for each classroom, but i don't know that that's in the offing.
The movie industry has always used novelty as a marketing device, since its origins. it works!
Will McKinleyThose novelty popcorn buckets that I mock every time I go the multiplex? They're expected to generate $100 million in revenue for AMC. “This is a real business." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/b... #FilmSky