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January 9, 2025
Meta’s Content Moderation Turnabout
Today, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that it would immediately stop using “fact checkers” to police the content on its platforms, which also include Instagram and Threads. Meta explained: “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content….
December 23, 2024
Fixing Universities
In my courses on policy analysis I teach my students to focus on problem definition before even thinking about policy options. The problem facing major American research universities, as characterized in this series, is that large segments of the public has lost confidence in them, at least in part because faculty are overwhelmingly on the…
December 16, 2024
How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I am the answer to a trivia question. Who is the only person to appear in the leaked 2009 Climategate emails and in the 2016 Hillary Clinton Wikileaks emails? That’d be me. At the time, in both cases the leaks revealed efforts to censor my research and damage my career. In both cases I thought…
December 6, 2024
U.S. Hurricane Overview 2024
Yesterday, The Washington Post published what can only be described as a hit piece on the nominee for Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. The Post took issue with Wright’s claim that: “[R]eports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes.” The Post claimed that Wright was misrepresenting the most recent IPCC assessment report….
December 2, 2024
Partisan Professors
Faculty in U.S. universities overwhelmingly hold views on the political left. That probably won’t be news to most THB readers. Today’s post documents just how extreme today’s left-leaning ideological uniformity has become among professors and shows that in the past, across disciplines faculty were much more politically diverse. The lack of diversity among professors is…
December 2, 2024
Intellectual Hospitality and Genuine Debate
Of the American holidays, Thanksgiving is by far my favorite. Over my academic career, Thanksgiving provided a much-needed respite in the final weeks of the fall semester before the home stretch leading to final exams. Much more importantly, the Thanksgiving week is about spending time with loved ones, celebrating family traditions, gathering together around a…
November 25, 2024
Politicization of the American University
Roger Federer spent 24 years as a professional tennis player. Roger Clemens played 24 years in the major leagues. And at the end of next month, I’ll leave my position as tenured, full professor the University of Colorado Boulder after 24 years on the faculty.1 Roger that! Leaving the faculty has motivated me to try to make sense of the…
November 19, 2024
Energy Realism and Climate Pragmatism at the Department of Energy
He’s a climate denier! That is the standard reaction of many in the climate lobby when encountering views on climate and energy deviating from the monomaniacal view that climate is the world’s single-most important issue. Reactions from climate advocates to the nomination of Chris Wright,1 CEO of Liberty Energy, to serve in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary…
November 13, 2024
Global Existential Risks
In 2022, on a bipartisan basis, the U.S. Congress passed the Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act of 2022 requiring the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate an expert assessment of global catastrophic and existential risks. The Department of Homeland Security published the first Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment two weeks ago, and reached some important — and one surprising —…
November 12, 2024
A Memo for Trump’s Energy Czar
Last week, the Financial Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump is considering appointing an “energy czar,” described as: The new energy tsar role and its powers are not yet finalised, but people familiar with the plans said it would co-ordinate Trump’s deregulatory agenda across a patchwork of agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Federal Energy Regulatory…