While doing interviews in Mississippi, I was told that the surest path to elected office was to own a car dealership, or a funeral home. Because eventually, everyone in your district buys a car, or a funeral. There was a group of MS state reps that people called The Undertakers.

One of the downsides of being a crime scholar is that this is the kind of image you get when you google your name

Ecuador had a president named Lenin Moreno. He was a conservative.

Nearly all of those arrested by Bukele’s government have not been convicted of anything, but instead held in indefinite pretrial detention. Now their only day in court will be mass trials. The State of Exception is not an anti-gang measure, it is an anti-due process measure.

Interesting! In the Korean community it’s not theological, it’s competition for leadership positions.

If Arab diaspora churches are like Korean diaspora churches, I bet they have so much beef with the second Arabic-speaking Lutheran parish on Staten Island

"We're not as corrupt as our opponents" is not a winning message for center-left parties, even if it's technically true!

The US is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture. It was signed by Reagan and ratified and enacted into the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, which prohibits refoulement, meaning this is illegal under US law.

Half of the new assistant professor job postings in the social sciences are looking for someone who researches AI. Sending the message that, to even have a shot at landing a TT job, you have to have correctly predicted what will be hot 5-7 years from when you started grad school.

China is already the top trade partner for most of S. America. But polls show, despite our imperialist legacy, most people throughout Latin America feel closer to the US than to China, and don't like how China does business. It's a tremendous own goal by Trump to get to this point.

As Brazil votes in the first round election today, it's striking how no amount of scandal or controversy - not the sports betting ban, Moraes probe, or Santini sex parties - is changing voters' minds, if the polls are accurate. The October surprise is that no one is surprised.

This isn’t even imperialism, it’s mercantilism.

These are called extraordinary renditions

I recently read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which details the intel failures leading to 9/11, and Steve Coll’s Directorate S, which details the failures of the war in Afghanistan, and it’s striking how many US government officials who appear in the first book keep their jobs in the second.

Also a good illustration for my research methods class on survey design and how open-ended vs. multiple choice questions can give you different results