From Barbara Kingsolver's novel Demon Copperhead, this observation about the rural poor of Appalachia: "Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed."

From Gary Shteyngart's novel Lake Success: Hard-scrabble, casually racist MAGA guys "had so little, but they would give up some of that 'little' to make sure [people of color] had less."

Open #postdoc #job at the Santa Fe Institute to be part of the ENDOW project on the sources of social inequality: "We hope to develop models that more directly articulate (through formal and agent-based models) and test (through statistical models) the hypothesized causal relationships between relational and material wealth."

Two year position, deadline for application January 16th.

https://www.santafe.edu/about/jobs/ap-comp-postdoc

In 2014, Erdogan asked Twitter to censor itself by blocking access to users in Turkey -- Twitter refused.

In 2023, Erdogan asked Twitter to censor itself by blocking access to users in Turkey -- Twitter agreed.

Are you following the Supreme Court case Gonzalez v Google & wondering why people are having such a hard time thinking about the role of recommender algorithms in promoting terrorism?

One reason is that the problem of collective human-algorithm behavior remains elusive to engineers, social scientists, and policymakers alike, as Lucas Wright & I described in this article for the Social Science Research Council.

https://just-tech.ssrc.org/field-reviews/impact-assessment-of-human-algorithm-feedback-loops/