Sarang Shah

FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely!

philjobs.org/job/show/30997

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

I hope we can all figure out what it is that we humans can do better than any thing else, and that we have the courage and resolve to build a social system that encourages that.

Airbnb sued San Francisco over a $120 million tax bill. It didn’t work Critics claimed the legal dispute tied up funds for public services amid budget shortfalls.

It's not good that lawsuits, especially ones weak on the merits, require the city to retain money to pay potential damages. It means powerful entities can hold the city and its budget hostage with lawsuits that have yet to succumb to a motion to dismiss or settlement.
sfstandard.com/2026/03/05/a...

Ousted DHS chief Noem praises Lurie, says he works ‘very well’ with feds “[Lurie] probably doesn’t want me to talk about it a lot,” said Kristi Noem at a big city police conference in Tennessee on Thursday. “He has been cooperative, we have great conversations and we talk…

Can't imagine this plays well here in San Francisco sfstandard.com/2026/03/05/k...

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

A fantastic essay that captures many of my own thoughts and fears. But it's very cold comfort to those of us early career scholars who have already devoted many years to "running across the crumbling bridge" to the academy
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

It's also been amazing at writing code for scrapers, API calls, and typesetting tables and charts. It's perfectly fine for doing things for which I need not think too carefully about (so long as I know how to distinguish between what I need to think about and what I don't!)

Of course, all of you dear Bluesky academic friends are exceptions, as am I. But man we gotta get better at doing the things only we can do rather than meeting the machine where it is.

The Easy Promise of Hidden Revelations Don't blame LLMs. We have always yearned for slop.

As an early career academic, I've already noticed how my own writing style has narrowed just purely out of spending so much time appealing to those with little attention span and constrained tastes. No wonder the damn thing seems so imminent in replacing us.
hegemon.substack.com/p/the-easy-p...

Sill Sill streamlines your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to give you a clear picture of what's happening.

I can't believe how effective sill.social is at satisfying my primary social media use case

With the use of LLMs replacing some of the previous functions of research assistants or just plain manual research, I wonder how essential human contact with the data has been to social science knowledge generation. My hope is that we figure out where the human touch is necessary and focus there.

Now that I've played around with it a bit, it's hard not to see the introduction of Claude into the academic research environment as anything but a nuclear explosion-level event. It completely changes what constitutes the "sweat aesthetic" in the quantitative social sciences.

Lower Nob Hill residents want a major shelter closed. It’s not going well A fight is brewing in Lower Nob Hill over the future of a 280-bed homeless shelter. Residents say the neighborhood is oversaturated and want it shut down.

Good on the Standard for evaluating this person's claims through reporting. I suspect many now get their news of what's happening, even on their own block, from sensationalist social media more than their own eyes and ears.
sfstandard.com/2026/02/26/s...

Steyer takes aim at commercial side of Prop. 13 Governor candidate dubs it the ‘Trump tax loophole.’

A good use of Tom Steyer's money!
www.sfexaminer.com/news/state/s...

In general, I'm interested in how much power the judiciary, or Congress for that matter, have over the vast and powerful federal bureaucracy

I would love to know how federal civil servants approach judicial injunctions regarding orders issued by the regime. Do they immediately take heed, regardless of what the political higher-ups say? Or do they wait for the political appointees to abide and continue on with their orders?

I must admit that learning about George Mitchell has hurt the most for me personally. He was a hero of mine as a young man, a role model of someone who came from a poor, child of working class immigrant background such as myself, who went on to great things. What a damn shame.

it is darkly amusing that costco being singularly focused on interested in a) selling a good product b) satisfying the customer and c) making money renders it a unicorn among major consumer-facing firms

What Happens to Business When You Close a Street to Cars The data on pedestrianization and business revenue might surprise you.

This is an excellent post from @mmautner.bsky.social that applies very broadly to street design conversations—and applies well, yet again, to our decade-long debates about Hopkins Street in Berkeley. maxmautner.com/2026/02/22/p...

Yup. I wish I could make it clearer that San Francisco, the city, ought not be identified with tech so freely

Fix Your Hearts or Die It's a invitation, not a threat. The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism.

"A man free of patriarchy is a man who has found not only every woman's humanity, but one who has at last discovered his own. The actual path to liberation for lonely men is feminism—because pursuing an identity based on dominating others is self-isolating."
www.the-reframe.com/fix-your-hea...

mount. Figure 1 presents two plots. Panel (a) displays the percentage of donors in each wealth rank that contributed to each of the six campaigns (i.e., Democratic and Republican nominees in 2012, 2016, and 2020).Footnote 17 Panel (b) displays the per capita dollars from each wealth bin, by campaign (including those who donate nothing). As Figure 1 shows, the association between wealth and contributions is approximately exponential. The wealthiest are much more likely to contribute, and the wealth gradient is even steeper in dollars because the top 0.1% contribute very large sums. This is one of the most robust findings in the campaign finance literature, but the figure demonstrates it with considerably more precision. By measuring wealth independently of contribution size, we avoid misattributing smaller contributions to non-wealthy donors and underestimating wealthy dollars. Most relevant to our analysis, Figure 1 compares the wealth gradients for Trump versus other candidates. In 2016, compared to other candidates, Trump’s wealth gradient is far flatter, because Trump elicited far fewer wealthy contributors and per capita dollars. For example, among the top 0.1%, Trump’s donors and per capita dollars represent about one third of Romney’s. While Trump did worse than all other candidates among nearly all wealth groups, that deficit was larger among the wealthy. In short, in 2016, wealthy donations to Trump are low compared to other presidential candidates. In 2020, Trump’s performance among the wealthy improved considerably over 2016 (Figure 1). Consider donation rates (Panel a). Among the wealthiest 0.1%, for example, Trump roughly doubled his rate, though he still significantly lagged Biden and Romney. He did even better in per capita dollars (Panel b) than in rates. Open access link to paper: http://cup.org/4cfm0Az

The wealthy dominate political donations. Our co-authored research found the top 0.1% contribute at rates 10-15x higher than bottom 90%. They’re not just more likely to donate, they give exponentially more per capita. The wealth gradient in politics is real. cup.org/4cfm0Az

Sounds great! Also seems increasingly like where I'm going to land for a bit (for better or worse lol)

But it takes a while, a lot of patience, and quite frankly, buying people out of their other obligations in the academy. And carefully choosing your participants, those invested in the creative project of scholarship above all. Hard to gather resources for it, I've found to my chagrin.

Yeah totally. The two obstacles I've identified (I'm sure there are more) are (1) trust and (2) disciplinary language. But I've found that if you can dedicate enough time for people with at least some shared normative or area study basis to get together, both can eventually be overcome.

US judiciary asks Congress for authority over courthouses in 'crisis' The U.S. federal judiciary on Tuesday asked Congress to give it the power to manage its own courthouses and shift authority away from the executive branch, saying decades of inadequate oversight exace...

The federal judiciary today asked Congress to give it the power to manage its own courthouses and shift authority away from the GSA, saying decades of inadequate oversight exacerbated by recent actions by Trump's administration had left them in "crisis." www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

😆

Bay Area Transit Agency Leaders OK Standardized Sign Designs

New unified transit design guides are a first for the Bay Area. These guides are intended to make it easier for riders to identify information and use transit by delivering information that is clear, predictable and consistent across service areas and county lines.

One would think but I'm not encouraged by what I've seen of (some of) my fellow lawyers!