John Payne

These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable.

In 1991, the typical first-time home buyer was 28 years old. This year, that buyer was 40. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...

Opinion | What Is Sora Slop For, Exactly?

“The British theorist Stafford Beer once said that “the purpose of a system is what it does” — a helpful reminder to judge a process not by its stated mission but by its outcomes” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...

“The output of research is not the point of research. The knowledge that is produced in your own head, and shared—in its richness—with your whole team—is the point of research. The arduous synthesis is the job.”

Trump Administration Will Freeze $2 Billion After Harvard Refuses Demands Federal officials said they would freeze the money after Harvard said it would not submit to requests to overhaul hiring and report international students who break rules.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

For former federal workers, the move to state or local government can come with drawbacks Officials in Maryland, New York, New Mexico and Kansas City are among those launching recruitment campaigns targeting federal workers. But matching those workers’ federal salaries and competing with p...

Officials in Maryland, New York, New Mexico and Kansas City are among those launching recruitment campaigns targeting federal workers and adjusting hiring procedures to scoop up some badly needed talent.

Trump’s Encouragement of Stock Investors Draws Scrutiny Was the president manipulating the market with his comments, as his critics say, or reassuring Americans, as the White House maintains?

“If we still had a rule of law, a robust system for the rule of law, it would be investigated,” a professor focusing at Wash U Law

Defiance and Threats in Deportation Case Renew Fear of Constitutional Crisis Legal scholars say that the nation has reached a tipping point and that the right question is not whether there is a crisis, but rather how much damage it will cause.

“In the fair administration of justice, no man can be judge in his own case, however exalted his station, however righteous his motives,” - Justice Potter Stewart
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/u...

Requiem for 18F A small government unit did what DOGE is pretending to do

In short, 18F works just how Musk and team pretend that they want government to work. But when his team found it, they destroyed it. 18F’s work is evidence that government works well, which undermines their message that it doesn’t.

That’s fascinating, thanks for the pointers! I love the idea of peer review in that context…

Interesting. I don’t know much about aboriginal culture, but what I take from the author reference is that the oral tradition is more concerned with memorability than truth. Is that at odds with your understanding?

Are we becoming a post-literate society? Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, from complex pieces of writing to short video clips

"In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. www.ft.com/content/e2dd...

ChatGPT was tasked with designing a website. The result was as manipulative as you'd expect In a new study, researchers found that ChatGPT creates websites full of deceptive patterns.

“Obviously, if ChatGPT is building unethical websites, it’s because it’s been trained with data of unethical websites.” - Carissa Veliz, Associate Professor in AI ethics at the University of Oxford www.fastcompany.com/91233844/cha...

Guess we can call off the manhunt for the CEO assassin, vigilante killing is legal in NYC

grappling with the implications of The Claims Adjuster turning out to be a hot Italian tech bro gym rat who went to Penn, seems to have had a pretty gnarly back injury, retweets anti-woke nonsense, and has read not one but two books by Steve-O

Are you a graduate student looking to use your design and research skills to improve public services? 🎓 Apply to be Public Policy Lab's next spring intern! All interns are paid, mentored by PPL staff, and contribute to all phases of project work. 💥 www.publicpolicylab.org/announcement...