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When our first kid was born 10+ years ago, I thought I could never love someone quite how I loved them. But I was wrong! When our second was born, I thought "Ok, now I can never love anyone like this." Then, our third (final) kid came, & I was proven wrong again. Being proven wrong isn't so bad.

I'm basically Nate Silver now.

I’m regularly asked how high, or low, youth turnout will be in upcoming elections. So today, on a whim, I pulled the historical numbers and built a simple forecast. At last: my definitive prediction for how many young people will vote in 2026. You’re welcome, America.

Thanks, Paul! Means a lot!

For a discussion on what is in the Federal Register.

I'm also having a tremendous amount of fun with data visualizations. Here are some I made for my day on Bureaucracy.

I say all of this not because I believe AI has no costs for higher education. It certainly does! But it also has some benefits.

I was able to put it together with AI's help in a few days. I had to do lots of prompt engineering. But Claude, ElevenLabs, and D-ID made it pretty seamless.

Could I have done all of this without AI? Sure. But it would have taken weeks (if not more) focusing on this one class period simulation and only this one simulation.

Students then got a whip count and could make choices of what to do next--e.g., revise the bill, proceed anyway, etc.

They then had to whip on the fence members. To up the ante, I had AI make (watermarked) videos of conflicted members explaining their positions. Students could then try to persuade these members. I had AI build in noise to make persuasion difficult, but possible.

The draft budget then leaked to the public. An AI generated attack ad from the opposition then played. The attack ads were tailored to their group's specific budget decisions. It mentioned each group by name.

Once they felt like their budget aligned with what the Trump administration is prioritizing, I had the students pause and reflect on the decisions they had just made. We discussed which choices were the hardest. I made it sound like the simulation was over then. But it wasn't!

The budget wasn't comprehensive. But they did have to make some key decisions all budgeters need to make. All of the numbers in the simulation were real and were pulled from CBO estimates. Deficit projections updated in real time based on students' choices. AI made all of this super easy.

Recently, I used Claude, ElevenLabs, and D-ID to make a budget simulation for my Politics of Public Policy course. In it, the students make a federal budget that aligns with the Trump administration's budget priorities. They had researched the administration's budget positions before class.

There’s a lot of doom & gloom around how AI is affecting higher education. To a certain extent, I get it. AI is making some things harder. But I’ve found that AI has in some ways greatly enhanced my teaching. For one, it’s opened up applied activities that weren’t possible before. One example: 🧵