Asst Professor of Sociology @CityCollegeNY @CUNY, PhD @Columbia | Politics of expertise in science and medicine
Brooklyn/NYC
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📚 My book 𝘿𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙂𝙡𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝘽𝙞𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙄𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 has a publication date of Dec 2026, and the website is live and now available for pre-order at @ColumbiaUP!
cup.columbia.edu/book/dreams…
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Our @GHPPodcast conversation w/ @BU_Tweets @BUSPH @BUexperts Prof Monica Wang about her new @BeaconPressBks book The Collective Cure just dropped! @dadakim @CUGHnews @WHO @PHMglobal @BUCEID @BUPardeeCenter @BostonUResearch @tiagottasca @VeroWirtz @si_wu1 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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"we call on @NYCMayor to begin to address this unfair property tax exemption for two of the city’s largest real estate holders & deliver on his campaign promise of an affordable NYC, a city where we believe in taxing the rich to fund the public good." cityandstateny.com/nyn-media…
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I've got a new paper out in the Journal of Organizational Sociology, "Polygenic Prediction: How Contested Genetic Technologies Organize Fields of Expertise." Coauthored with Aaron Panofsky. degruyterbrill.com/document/…
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Opinion | It’s time to revisit Mamdani’s proposal to have NYU and Columbia help fund CUNY.
cityandstateny.com/nyn-media…
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In our Sept. issue learn how hospitals' location and state-level LGBTQ+ healthcare policies affect levels of healthcare equality: bit.ly/4y5DFoJ
#NewPublication by Hyunmin Yu, Matthew D. McHugh, Stephen Bonett, Daniela Golinelli, Tari Hanneman & José A. Bauermeister
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NEW: Andrew C. Herman, Jens Peter Andersen, Mathias Wullum Nielsen, "Developing Countries Face Falling Circulation Rates and Rising Migration Losses in Science " sociologicalscience.com/arti…
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The attacks on US science continue. This is dictator level political control that stems from a crazed crusade by Vought against the NIH.
Breaking News: Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would help cement President Trump’s ability to control billions of dollars in scientific grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. nyti.ms/4yhi6RS
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Burned out or unemployed, a wave of young people in China are launching solo companies with the help of AI. Beijing is embracing the boom.
This summer, I went to Hangzhou to visit an incubator for these one-person companies. w/@hannahmiao_ wsj.com/business/entrepreneu…
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NEW: OMB chief Russ Vought & NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have been fighting for months over Trump plan to exert political control over NIH grants. It got so bad that Russ V. refused to meet with Jay B. Now Trump is preparing an executive order. nytimes.com/2026/09/20/scien…
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NEW: Trump asked Russ Vought to draft an EO to create a board to decide on NIH grants, after the NIH Director refused Trump’s request to cut Harvard funding in a heated Oval Office meeting on Friday.
- Vought, Bhattacharya & others would be part of the board, which would have to reach unanimous decisions on grant awards
- “The president called him into the principal’s office,” one person said.
- Linda McMahon was also in the meeting but she did not participate in the fighting
- Others present: Bessent, Stephen Miller, Will Scharf & Mark Paoletta.
w/ the great @Tim_Roehn
politico.com/news/2026/09/19…
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Young Chinese AI researchers have long admired their US counterparts.
But now they’re starting to see things as a giant anti-China plot. This will deepen distrust and make AI cooperation harder.
Brilliant piece by Irene Zhang for ChinaTalk chinatalk.media/p/how-anthro…
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"most of what goes into prompting well has everything to do with understanding the field you want the AI tool to work in and the end you want it to realize, and little to do with a separate skill set involved in operating it."
The Ivy League's Surrender to AI Is Insane chronicle.com/article/harvar…
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Pretty insane PhD job market spillover problem in China.
Shenzhen Middle School has over 100 teachers with a PhD, and 150 graduates of Tsinghua/PKU, 100+ alum of Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge
You don’t need a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua to teach middle school math…. but the job market in China basically forces that lol
More doctoral graduates from elite global and domestic universities are bypassing careers in academia and research to work as school teachers in China’s major cities, driven by an oversupplied labor market and fierce competition for university posts. caixinglobal.com/2026-09-17/…
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We have two great PhD students @sahibachopraa and @FarnamMohebi on the market this year from our department at @BerkeleyHaas - they are both bringing a fresh and important sociological/organizational lens to the study of AI and work.
A quick thread on them and their work 👇
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In a new essay from Just Tech, Yifan Miller gives readers a peek behind the curtain of seemingly autonomous robots, including how the labor of engineers and other humans is concealed.
Read more: just-tech.ssrc.org/articles/…
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Genuine career highlight for me + lots of fun to join @ezraklein for a long conversation on Chinese AI policy & what that means for upcoming 🇺🇸-🇨🇳 talks.
We recorded this last Thursday so **if** anything happened after that we might not have covered it...
nytimes.com/2026/09/15/opini…
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Our Fall 2026 issue is out!🍂This issue features articles on ethnographic methods; historical land preservation; gender-based violence; social work; social media use and belonging; multiracial identity; and more! Check it out here: link.springer.com/journal/11…
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“MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.”
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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