Chad Topaz Queer DEI Race Traitor

@chadtopaz.bsky.social

9603 Followers 1590 Following

Data science + math for social justice. Violist, yogi, husband, dad to human & dogs. 🏳️‍🌈 Views do not represent my employers. Author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change. Order at: https://bit.ly/4nT7qUh

Two adorable puppos under the covers in bed.
Lisa Simpson holding burning Ace of Spades card (Twin Peaks reference) with caption Burns' suit! Burns' suit!
Acknowledgments page from the book Unlocking Justice by Chad M. Topaz. Text: My brilliant and magnanimous pre-submission editor, Nancy Rawlinson, made this book — to provide some data — 10 million times better than it otherwise would have been. I also received invaluable advice from two seasoned authors: Joel Derfner, who wrote Swish, Lawfully Wedded Husband, and other gems, and Sarah Rose, who penned the riveting D-Day Girls and For All the Tea in China. If not for Nancy, Joel, and Sarah, you would not be reading this book. I am equally grateful to the remarkable team at Princeton University Press, who believed in this book from the very beginning. My editor, Diana Gillooly, brought deep insight and rigor, strengthening the manuscript in countless ways. I also owe thanks to Whitney Rauenhorst, Molly Grote, Sydney Bartlett, Matt Taylor, Barbara Tonetti, and Terri O'Prey for their steadfast support, and to Maia Vaswani, my meticulous copy editor.
CAPTCHA-style puzzle asks “Select all images with sandwiches” and shows a 3×3 grid of foods, including a deli sandwich, hoagie, grilled cheese, hot dog, taco, pizza slice, hamburger, burrito, and ice cream sandwich.
Professor Topaz's book, Unlocking Justice, uses lively writing and concrete data to illustrate how we can learn from data to make our society more just and equitable. He shares engaging stories and offers context for interpreting information to show how the sum of individual experiences is really the story of the structural application of our legal system. Only after understanding who we are and how we got here can we transform our criminal legal system into a criminal *justice* system. Unlocking Justice is hopeful and galvanizing. It is fun to read and I'm filled with hope! I think it is particularly important to mention this as we grapple with the book's serious subject during a precarious moment in American history when we are collectively asking big questions about how committed we are to democracy and justice.
Me holding a physical copy of my book for the first time
Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change by Chad M. Topaz Release date: May 19, 2026 #1 New Release in General Elections & Political Process
Authors Chad M. Topaz, Anvi Kurongonayini, Bennett Ptak, Arden Fluehr, Ariana Mendible, Rachel Roca, Nancy Rodríguez, Lu Xian, Régan Schwartz, Jude Higdon Abstract Five countries account for over 80% of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries. Because high-prestige recognition redirects resources and talent, such concentration can be self-reinforcing, yet whether it originates in institutional design or individual evaluator behavior is unknown. We decomposed Nobel selection into a five-layer network spanning 8,134 individuals, 514,111 edges, and five prize categories (1901–1975). The Swedish and Norwegian bodies that oversee Nobel selection assembled a geographically diverse nominator pool, yet within it, nominators select same-country nominees 4.85 times as often as expected (p < 0.001), from 8.58 times in Literature to 3.01 times in Physics. This concentration persisted as the nominee pool diversified over seven decades. Geographic sorting enters at the discretionary nomination decision, not the institutional pipeline—a specific, targetable point in the selection process.
Where a legal scholar works matters more than what they write. In the law review submission system---the primary publication market for legal scholarship in the United States---student editors face thousands of submissions for a handful of slots and rely heavily on institutional prestige as a proxy for article quality. We show that this credential dependence produces inequity that persists even after controlling for article quality: among articles of comparable merit, authors from prestigious institutions receive substantially better placements. We build a calibrated simulation of the law review market and benchmark it against deferred acceptance, a centralized matching algorithm used in markets like medical residencies. The current system produces severe misallocation: more than 60\% of top-tier placements differ from what quality-based matching would produce, and the rank correlation between article quality and journal prestige is 0.45 versus 0.79 under centralized matching. Which system achieves higher overall welfare depends on market tightness; as competition for slots intensifies---a trend already underway---the current system's disadvantage grows, losing up to 13.5\% of overall match quality. Partial reforms like extending deadlines have negligible effects; the primary source of both inefficiency and inequity is the decentralized structure of the market itself. Notably, centralized matching fixes the sorting problem but not the equity problem: prestige bias is embedded in editorial signals and would require changes to how articles are evaluated, not just how they are assigned.
The Retreat from DEI: The Impact of Legal and Political Developments on DEI Language in U.S. Private Foundations Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, large private foundations in the United States widely adopted language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on their public-facing websites. In 2023, a series of legal and political developments began reversing the institutional pressures that had encouraged this adoption: first the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), then state-level anti-DEI legislation, and culminating in President Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (2025). Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we constructed a longitudinal corpus of 3,612 archived web pages from thirteen large U.S. private foundations and tracked the frequency of sixty-seven DEI-related terms from 2019 to 2025. Among the nine foundations with data in both years, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicates a decline from 2023 to 2025 (one-sided p = .029, two-sided p = .059), with median usage falling approximately 40 percent. The decline was broad-based across many terms. These patterns are consistent with coercive isomorphism: the same process that drove widespread, convergent adoption of DEI language after 2020 now appears to be reversing it. The findings establish an empirical baseline for tracking how political pressure reshapes organizational communication about equity.
Home baked croissants
Socks that say: get in loser. We’re going to die of dysentery. There is a picture of a covered wagon on the socks.
A brilliant and bracing read for anyone who cares about justice in the world, cares about doing better, and cares about doing it rigorously. Chad Topaz leads by example, with a rare combination of generosity, wit, and self-awareness backed up by unwavering mathematical precision.”—Eugenia Cheng, author of Unequal: The Mathematics of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up “Finding effective solutions—especially for big, important problems like structural inequity and social injustice—requires clearly identifying and quantifying the problem. And that is exactly what Unlocking Justice does. Chad Topaz’s careful, quantitative examination and analysis of the criminal justice system isn’t written just for data nerds like me. It is essential reading to truly get to the bottom of the stubbornly persistent injustices in our law enforcement, court and penal systems, and shines a light on how to bring real, lasting change.”—Kimberly Atkins Stohr, columnist, The Boston Globe
Y’all. I am in california. I’m weeks overdue for a haircut. I just got one and the guy asked what I did for work and I said math professor and he said “Can I ask you a question?” Im like, uhhh... “On TikTok they were saying woke lefties don’t believe that 2 + 2 = 4. Is that true?” I was like sir this is a Wendy’s.
How Conflict Aversion Can Enable Authoritarianism:An Evolutionary Dynamics ApproachChad M. TopazDecember 6, 2025AbstractWe use evolutionary game theory to examine how conflict-averse centrism can unintentionallyfacilitate authoritarian success in polarized political conflicts. Many such conflicts are asym-metric: authoritarian actors can employ norm-breaking or coercive tactics, while democraticresistance faces stronger constraints on what counts as normatively acceptable behavior. Yetformal models typically treat opposing sides symmetrically and rarely examine conflict-aversebehavior. Drawing on empirical research on protest backlash, civility norms, and authoritarianresilience, we model these dynamics as a three-strategy evolutionary game in which resistance,authoritarianism, and conflict-averse centrism interact under replicator dynamics. This frame-work yields two distinct outcomes—cyclic resurgence of authoritarian strength through a hete-roclinic cycle and a stable centrist–authoritarian coalition that excludes resistance—dependingon how actors respond to confrontation. The analysis shows how payoff differences can reor-ganize long-run dynamics in asymmetric conflicts. Our contribution is to demonstrate how anestablished dynamical framework, combined with empirically grounded behavioral assumptions,clarifies the strategic conditions under which conflict aversion can diminish the effectiveness ofdemocratic resistance.
Title, author, date, and abstract of paper. How Conflict Aversion Can Enable Authoritarianism: An Evolutionary Dynamics Approach Chad M. Topaz December 4, 2025 We use evolutionary game theory to examine how conflict-averse centrism can unintentionally facilitate authoritarian success in polarized political conflicts. Many such conflicts are asymmetric: authoritarian actors can employ norm-breaking or coercive tactics, while democratic resistance faces stronger constraints on what counts as acceptable behavior. Yet formal models typically treat opposing sides symmetrically and rarely examine conflict-averse behavior. Drawing on empirical research on protest backlash, civility norms, and authoritarian resilience, we model these dynamics as a three-strategy evolutionary game in which resistance, authoritarianism, and conflict-averse centrism interact under replicator dynamics. This framework yields three distinct outcomes—cyclic resurgence of authoritarian strength, an asymptotically stable authoritarian state, and a stable centrist–authoritarian coalition—depending on how actors respond to confrontation. The analysis shows how modest payoff differences can reorganize long-run dynamics in asymmetric conflicts. Our contribution is to show how an established dynamical framework, combined with empirically grounded assumptions about conflict aversion, clarifies the strategic conditions under which conflict aversion can shape, and in some cases weaken, democratic resistance.
Screenshot of an email draft titled “Subject: FORMAL OPEN RECORDS REQUEST – Administrative Communications Concerning Incident Referenced in OU’s Nov. 30, 2025 Public Statement.” The message is addressed to “Dear Records Officer” and requests administrative communications related to an incident referenced in the University of Oklahoma’s November 30, 2025 public statement on X/Twitter. The requester cites the Oklahoma Open Records Act and specifies that relevant records include emails, memoranda, meeting notes, text messages, and messaging-app communications from the Offices of the President, Provost, Legal Counsel, Dean of Arts & Sciences, Chair of Psychology, Public Affairs, and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The date range requested is November 1, 2025 to present. The subject-matter scope includes internal discussions of the incident, public messaging, instructor supervision, policy processes, external interactions, and crisis-response planning. The request emphasizes that student education records are excluded and directs that any incidental student information should be redacted while releasing all non-exempt portions. Production requirements call for electronic records, rolling production, itemized estimates for fees, and specific statutory citations for any withheld material. A statutory reminder notes that the Act must be liberally construed in favor of public access, that the University bears the burden of proving exemptions, and that redaction—not withholding—is required. The message closes by thanking the recipient and noting expectation of timely response under Oklahoma law.
THE "EVEN" ADVISORY SYSTEM Used to assess risk of losing the ability to even permanently I LITERALLY CAN'T EVEN Severe I CANNOT High |JUST CAN'T EVEN Elevated I CAN'T EVEN Guarded I CAN'T Low
Me delivering food to my kid.
New York Times headline modified to say Dick Cheney, Actual Satan, Dies at 84.
Charlie Kirk tweet stating "I believe marriage is one man one woman."
Charlie Kirk Tweet saying "Pride is a sin" on first day of pride month, 2023.
Dim sum buns that look like adorable pigs
Picture of me in front of New York Times building giving it the finger.
Picture of me in front of Google NY giving it the finger.
Council meeting in fellowship of the ring
Dog with pride heart pillow that says love is love.
Hi [redacted] Regretfully, I must tender my resignation from [various service roles at professional organization] effective immediately. The reason is that [redacted organization] contacted me yesterday to inform me that they have taken my talk down from the website for the upcoming [redacted conference] because this talk—which is about using data science to fight fascism—is too biased. They have given me the option to rewrite my title and abstract (which were officially accepted months ago), but I have declined. Unfortuantely, this means [redacted] isn’t an organization I can be part of. Please know I still have great admiration for the important work you do. Best wishes, Chad
Max the dog. (Small white dog.)
adorable small white dog with its tongue out
Picture of my husband and me shortly after getting married in San Francisco.
The image is a meme comparing two versions of a USA TODAY article headline with and without 'capitalism.' The first version, labeled 'With Capitalism,' shows the original headline: 'Can Trump eliminate the Education Department? Here's what the Constitution says.' The second version, labeled 'Without Capitalism,' alters the headline by striking out 'Here's what the Constitution says.' and replacing it with 'NO.' in bold red text. This edit humorously implies that without capitalism, the answer to the question is a straightforward 'No.'
REF: FROM: TO: SUBJECT: MEMORANDUM EXECUTIVE ORDER 14168 Department of Justice ALL PERSONNEL Bathroom Usage All humans are female at conception as sex differentiation takes place around 6-7 weeks. Pursuant to the executive order 14168 "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" no one is allowed to use this men's room. ANYONE CAUGHT ENTERING WILL BE REPORTED TO DEIATRUTH@OPM.GOV
AWM Gray Award for Social Justice
A network diagram showing the most influential speakers in the Federalist Society from 2007 onwards. The visualization shows 25 named individuals represented as light blue circles of varying sizes, connected by gray lines of different thicknesses. Larger circles indicate speakers with more network influence, and thicker lines show pairs who frequently speak together. Key figures in the network include Ilya Shapiro and Josh Blackman, who appear as larger nodes with many connections. Each person is clearly labeled with their full name next to their node. The visualization uses a clean, minimalist design with light blue nodes, gray connecting lines, and black text labels against a white background.
The screenshot shows a user interface titled "Misconduct Explorer for the 119th Congress (Incoming)." It includes filters on the left-hand side to narrow down misconduct records by category, chamber, and party, with options to download the data as a CSV file. On the right-hand side is a table titled "Congressional Misconduct Data," displaying rows of records with the following columns: "Name," "Party," "Chamber," "Category," "Date/Period," and "Description." In the table, there are entries for "Tommy Tuberville" and "Katie Britt," both listed under the Republican party in the Senate. Each record includes a category (e.g., "Campaign/Election Violations," "Ethical Misconduct"), the corresponding dates or periods, and detailed descriptions of the alleged misconduct. Examples of descriptions mention violations of the STOCK Act, issues with charitable foundation spending, and involvement in financial schemes.
book cover of book by Atiya Husain. No God But Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism
Screenshot of interactive map showing locations of ICE offices and detention facilities
A graphic with the text "Should we trust the NYPD’s Hate Crime Statistics?" in bold blue font, accompanied by an illustration of a police car on the left and a bar graph with a trendline on the right, all set against a light blue background.
The image combines text and pie charts to convey sentencing disparities alongside a headline about Judge Aileen Cannon. - **Headline and Text (Left):** - Bold headline: "A retired federal judge says Judge Cannon appears to show favoritism toward Trump." - Source: "NPR | Jun 17, 2024 | Scott Detrow, Tyler Bartlam." - Accompanying text discusses Judge Aileen Cannon’s controversial handling of the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, citing delays and slow decision-making on procedural matters. - **Pie Charts (Right):** - Two pie charts visually compare sentencing outcomes for White defendants and Minoritized defendants: - **White defendants (left chart):** - Blue (shorter): 41% - Gray (within range): 44% - Red (longer): 15% - **Minoritized defendants (right chart):** - Blue (shorter): 8% - Gray (within range): 76% - Red (longer): 16% - The color legend above the charts explains: Blue represents "Shorter," Gray represents "Within Range," and Red represents "Longer." The overall layout contrasts the headline and narrative about judicial behavior with data on sentencing disparities by defendant race. The background is light gray, with clear fonts and consistent styling.