We have a new guest post continuing our practical AI series on professional writing. Instead of worrying like many of us here that AI will make things up, @stevendenney86.bsky.social explains how you can use it as a superhuman fact-checker on your side to boost your human writing. Check it out!

We have a new guest post continuing our practical AI series on professional writing. Instead of worrying like many of us here that AI will make things up, @stevendenney86.bsky.social explains how you can use it as a superhuman fact-checker on your side to boost your human writing. Check it out!

Here's my book mini review of the month where I recommend a sociology (!) book to everyone:

And here we go again. Dropping the actual investigation is profoundly bad, if not exactly surprising. Is there anything those of us who still care about expertise and accountability can do to pressure Cambridge to reconsider? I mean, apart from continuing to sign letters, boycott and ridicule them.

Here's my book mini review of the month where I recommend a sociology (!) book to everyone:

The far right looks set to finish first in yet another German state while the mainstream right loses ground. Yes, people vote for these parties because they don't like immigration. But governments don't have to restrict migration to save democracy due to possible backlash:

The far right looks set to finish first in yet another German state while the mainstream right loses ground. Yes, people vote for these parties because they don't like immigration. But governments don't have to restrict migration to save democracy due to possible backlash:

Germany's version of the same problem is even worse: by 2025, hundreds of thousands of migrants were legally required to leave the country, but only tens of thousands were removed. When the state cannot remove people it has ordered to leave, the politics get ugly regardless of the new arrivals.

After the pandemic, however, it made some mistakes like letting uncapped student and temporary streams break that bargain, leading to a backlash like everywhere else.

Australia, alongside Canada, is probably the best case I know of a democracy that kept immigration popular at enormous scale. It was able to achieve that by pairing one of the world's most generous but selective admission programs with high levels of control that voters could see for themselves.

I see a lot of denial from left-of-center folks of the boring answer that far-right voting is mostly about dissatisfaction with immigration. But I also see a lot of denial from the right-of-center that the answer could be anything other than "harsh" and "restrictive" immigration policies.

I wrote this piece for an Australian magazine last month, but I am reposting it now with Germany in mind where the AfD just took almost 44 percent of the vote in one of its states. I see a lot of denial from folks both on the left and right on what this all means and how to do better.