jon ben-menachem

@jbenmenachem.com

19590 Followers 950 Following

criminalization, abolition, labor, politics, journalism—social science theory & methods too. sociology phd candidate @ columbia. @swcolumbia.bsky.social

d.w. holding fence meme
As a result, I just paid Pangram - another AI-detection company - $20 to verify that a recently submitted journal article wasn't AI-generated before submission. It wasn't, and I knew it wasn't. It agreed. That's what I paid for: not to learn whether I wrote it, but to be told it wouldn't flag me. Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion.
Journal editors in particular are incentivized to publish splashy work, just as journalism has been incentivized toward clickbait in the last decade-plus. Editors may see a provocative, politically engaged piece as ensuring clicks, reads, citations, and publicity. And while many editors will decide that publishing integrity is more important than clicks, some will not.
Member of the Assembly 66th Assembly District - Democratic (Vote for one) Name Party Votes Percentage 1 David Siffert Democratic 4113 27.24% 2 Benjamin Yee Democratic 2110 13.98% 3 Furhan Ahmad Democratic 567 3.76% 4 Ryder Kessler Democratic 3424 22.68% 5 Jeannine Kiely Democratic 4169 27.61% 6 Corinne Arnold Democratic 682 4.52% 7 WRITE-IN 33 0.22%
It is interesting (or not) that Mamdani has fully embraced a sportstainment economy, even though sportstainment is exploitative to both fans and workers, massively corrupt, and environmentally unfriendly. Sportstainment, though, is useful to the new mayor, as it distracts the masses from urban reality, and you see the continued attempt at the split screen with the mayor absolutely intent on never saying another word about the Penn Station mass attack.
Some of Ms. Avila Chevalier's views may be considered too extreme for mainstream politics, and should she be chosen to represent Upper Manhattan in Congress, her views could pose a challenge for the greater Democratic Party. In an interview last week with The New York Editorial Board, a substack, Ms. Avila Chevalier repeatedly avoided answering whether she would send a man who randomly killed another man to prison.
Appropriation could also benefit reporters who aimed to contest editors’ formal authority. Some reporters who articulated a more critical professional identity (Ben-Menachem 2026) appropriated metrics to bolster their professional judgment in arguments or negotiations with newsroom managers to justify their preferred genres of coverage. Chris explained that quantitative evidence of audience interest in a story about police accountability became “ammunition” to argue for continued coverage of related issues. Of course, amassing ammunition did not always guarantee success-newsrooms are hierarchical, and editorial disagreements cannot always be resolved by appeals to quantitative evidence. Chris recalled his failures to argue for prison coverage at prior newsrooms: “I wrote memos and story pitches and pulled all these metrics. I tried to make this argument, and then it never happened.” Yet some evidence suggests that numbers can persuade editors who otherwise disagree on the merits. Amanda said that her editors “would shy away from stories that could be construed as sympathetic to people in prison, people on the wrong side of the criminal justice system.” Yet, because “stories that challenge traditional coverage of the criminal justice system” received substantial audience interest, her editors “became more open” to such coverage.
Clickbait Crime News? Metrics and Professional Authority in Local Newsrooms Jonathan Ben-Menachem Columbia University Abstract: Existing research on newsroom metrics documents how journalists construct compatibility between discordant professional and commercial evaluation frameworks. This study examines the underexplored case where metrics validate existing practices. Drawing on interviews with 58 crime journalists in 40 U.S. newsrooms, I find that reporters whose work consistently performed well on audience metrics often defended professional evaluation criteria. Editors facilitated this defense through brokerage, absorbing commercial logics so reporters could experience their work as profes- sionally guided. Market position structured interpretive responses: reporters could avoid metrics, override them, selectively appropriate them, or integrate them into practice. The transition from pageview to subscription regimes reshaped whether concordance was experienced as contaminating or legitimating. Even under concordance, journalists defended professional evaluation criteria.
116 Visualizing Deviance process. It was evident that the reporter wished to visualize that the evidence had been handled properly, and that this was an important collaborative step with the authorities. This visualization was sustained in face of the fact that what was on offer was essentially old news. In the newspaper newsroom the definition of investigative reporting was focused more on the methods, although it was still connected with uncovering wrongdoing. A senior newspaper executive emphasized that reporting always entails looking for what is wrong so that controls can be improved, and using whatever techniques might allow the matter to be sustained. He indicated that what is regarded as investigative is usually a matter of the time and resources devoted to it, but that in terms of using standard journalistic techniques to visualize deviance all reporting is the same. A: [In investigative reporting] there's just an enormous amount of leg work that has to be done. It sounds awfully exciting, cops-and-robbery sort of stuff, but the weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and months of labour, piecing together this little bit of information with that little bit of information, you never see that. I can tell you from having done some of it myself, the business of going over the records and searching back, it takes a certain kind of person who's prepared to do all that day after day after day - you know if you're doing research how boring it can get. It takes somebody who has a penchant for accuracy. You have to be deadly accurate because almost inevitably you're going to end up with defamatory statements and those defamatory statements are going to be libellous unless you are absolutely right and can prove it, and if you can't, you're going to be looking at tens of thousands of dollars in law-suits. It requires somebody with, usually with a high level of analytical skills who can go through complex problems and issues and arrive at, and separate. the important from …
On the data collection side, the case for LLM-administered “interviewing” rests on scale and standardization—properties that are emblematic of survey research. Surveys with open-ended questions already elicit reasoning in respondents' own language at scale, and survey methodology provides a mature framework that gives higher N (relative to semi-structured interviews) its inferential power. LLM-administered interviews gain sample size outside that framework, but the increased sample size does not buy external validity. Proponents may argue that LLM interviews are adaptive in ways that fixed survey instruments are not—the model can follow up, probe, and adjust phrasing in response to the respondent's answer. This is true, and it may constitute a methodological contribution of some kind. But the burden is on proponents to articulate what that contribution is—to specify which research questions are better served by LLM-administered open-ended data collection than by either surveys or fieldwork, and to evaluate the resulting data on terms appropriate to the method rather than borrowing credibility from qualitative branding. Until that case is made explicitly, the discipline should resist treating
Inclusion criteria This list could do with some tighter inclusion criteria than the current "this list includes racehorses that exist in the historical record", which could get extrememly unwieldy. Any suggestions? Even if they're the same as the notability criteria they wouldn't mandate removing entries that don't yet have an article. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:30, 10 May 2026 (UTC)
GIVEAWAY: TRACK DIRT AQUEDUCT The first 1,000 guests on June 28 will receive an authentic container of Aqueduct track dirt. Free with paid admission, while supplies last.
After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, the richest New Yorkers threw tantrums and lit money on fire. When Mamdani set out to assuage their fears, the scions of capital settled on one demand: Keep Tisch in her job. Adding to the pressure, Democratic party leaders initially stayed silent. Figures from Kathy Hochul to Hakeem Jeffries reportedly conditioned their endorsements on keeping Tisch. Faced with this onslaught, Mamdani yielded. If he wanted to turn his upstart campaign into a bona fide Democratic coalition, it seemed, he had no other choice. Fulfilling their end of the Faustian bargain, Hochul awkwardly yet earnestly joined Mamdani at campaign rallies, and Kathy Wylde, one of the local ruling class’s most influential power brokers, began saying that perhaps all sides could find a way to work together. Now we will all see whether that’s true.
Titi Olotu, a UCLA junior with an accommodation through UCLA’s Center for Accessible Education, was weighing whether to drop the sociology professor’s course when the mirror email arrived. Her accommodation called for brief snack breaks during exams and the option to write down notes on paper. Olotu said she felt the online proctoring treated any movement as suspect. “Any little thing, moving, breathing, talking, looking, is cheating,” Olotu said. She dropped the class. The UCLA professor did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesperson said the school “takes student concerns seriously” and has processes for reviewing student-faculty conflicts but does not discuss individual cases. While lock-down browsers and sharing screen videos are common in online exams, mirrors and body movement restrictions are more extreme. But students and experts said it is all a reflection of the chaos, confusion and fear a new technology has wreaked upon the classroom. “It just felt so degrading,” said Ashley, another UCLA sociology student who studied under the same professor, who required students to show their arms and hands. A UCLA junior, she said she faced accusations of plagiarism, incorrect citations and suspiciously short intervals for Google Docs time stamps after she said she drafted assignments in a separate notes app and pasted them in the day they were due. Online message boards are full of student complaints about policies gone too far, such as proctoring software that uses keystroke patterns, eye-movement tracking or facial scans to detect if students are using AI prompts.
Appiah: The decision was made to allow the authors of those internal reports to decide whether or not to make them public. They were the basis of our deliberation. I will make mine, which is about literary criticism, public at some point, and I think others will. But on the whole, I think it was right to do it the way we have, because we need people to think about the main conclusions and the main arguments, which are in this document. We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.
The shift to pricing based on usage, and measured by tokens—the basic unit of measurement for AI computing-is creating new challenges for even the most experienced finance teams. CFOs used to paying flat amounts for technology are finding costs more unpredictable and harder to model as they build agents and embark on ambitious Al investments. Twenty-six percent of companies say they have a comprehensive view of their AI costs, while 50% have some visibility and 22% report no visibility or visibility after billing, according to an as-yet-unreleased survey from KPMG. "It's a new resource that needs to be managed that didn't exist quite that way, and we're seeing exponential growth," said Steve Chase, KPMG's global head of AI.
The era of NYC's hotdog supremacy has ended. I love hot dogs, and I'm blessed enough to have lived in the (former) hot dog capital of the world. But after traveling through Europe I have to say, the European's do it far better. Every major European city I've been to (most notably Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen) put New York City dogs to shame. In Europe the dogs are big and meaty, they're served on fresh buns, and they come with all the toppings you could ask for. In both Paris and Berlin specifically I came across carts that had full self service stations. I'm talking shredded cheese, bacon bits, crispy onions, pickled onions, relish, sour kraut, and of course all the condiments like ketchup, mayo and mustard. All included in the price of the dog and with no limits to how much you can pile on. Here in nyc you get wimpy little wieners served on stale buns. The vendors give you attitude when you ask for toppings like you're asking for their kidney. And when they do begrudgingly obliged, they slather it on leaving you with a sloppy dripping mess that's impossible to eat without spilling on yourself. And some of them don't even give napkins unless you request, which is met with even more attitude. And don't get me started on the price. $5 for a tiny hot dog that's finished in three bites. In Europe most carts had option for small dogs for €3 and big dogs for €5, and the big dogs were basically a full meal. What happened? Hot dogs used to be synonymous with NYC. I'm ashamed at what we've become.
Third incident of group entering sewers News Police are tracking two separate incidents in Gravesend and Williamsburg that occurred Thursday and Friday mornings. A third report, accompanied by surveillance video from Astoria, surfaced Monday. Video footage and witness accounts describe groups of approximately six people entering and exiting New York City's sewer network. The individuals reportedly spent several hours underground during the early morning hours. Still no identifiable description.
ok thumb meme
What comes through as a result of this cursory overview of these three somewhat distinct roles played by one fieldworker is the inconsistency associated with the ethnographic research role. At times, I frisked suspects, put handcuffs on prisoners, wrote as- 90 Confe5$ional Tales sault reports, while at other times I simply stood in the shadows and watched the police go about their tasks or, less frequently, but more discretely,. "did a train" and slipped from view entirely .... In the academy, I helped cover for tardy classmates by concocting what I thought to be reasonable tales to tell superior officers. Several times I cheated on exams by passing my answer sheet around the back of the room (as I too looked at others' answers sheets). These mostly mundane matters would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that they point to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of maintaining a clear cut and recognizable observational or participatory research role. At least in the police world, the variation existing in the environment as well as that among the people studied, requires a situational and very flexible set of guidelines not easily categorized-. -even when writing with the luxury of hindsight.
muting "talarico"
Don't just reset Codex rate limits for fun, it costs money. Don't just reset Codex rate limits for fun, it costs money. ... but the vibes are good ... I have reset Codex rate limits for ALL paid plans to celebrate a good week and allow everyone to build more with GPT-5.5. Enjoy
dril "im not owned" tweet
Whenever inequalities are explicitly written into the system, they produce class-based structures. Manovich (2011) writes of three classes of people in the realm of Big Data: ‘those who create data (both consciously and by leaving digital footprints), those who have the means to collect it, and those who have expertise to analyze it’. We know that the last group is the smallest, and the most privileged: they are also the ones who get to determine the rules about how Big Data will be used, and who gets to participate. While institutional inequalities may be a forgone conclusion in academia, they should nevertheless be examined and questioned. They produce a bias in the data and the types of research that emerge.
Steven Rosenbaum, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Media Center, with a Masters Degree in Truth from the prestigious Gallatin School at NYU, THE FUTURE OF TRUTH, explores the concept of Truth, finds out why it matters now more than ever, and explains how seemingly objective technologies known as Artificial Intelligence are poised to take hold of the concept of Truth and replace human complexity with potentially catastrophic robotic certainty. Published by Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, distributed in partnership with Simon & Schuster, represented by Todd Schuster at Aevitas.
One can imagine scaling this operation further through multi-agent pipelines—one model indexing transcripts sequentially, another analyzing cross-transcript slices. But the analytical agent in such a pipeline would lack everything the human researcher has accumulated across months of fieldwork: knowledge of the field site's culture, memory of how a respondent's tone shifted when a topic arose, awareness of what was conspicuously absent from an interview. The pipeline can process the text, but it cannot replicate the position of the interviewer.
But not every transit line is like the Lexington Avenue subway. Wide swaths of New York City, let alone other parts of the state, are served only by buses that run infrequently. In these areas, the deployment of robotaxis could expand mobility. And to the extent robotaxis do replace low-throughput transit, state and local governments should subsidize rides for people with low incomes. In the long run, robotaxis could change the transportation system for the better. They could make the roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians. They could expand mobility for people who aren’t well served by transit. They could enable denser development outside of downtowns. And in the long run, they might obviate the need for parking, which will allow us to liberate urban land from cars.
construction barrier with tags FUCK ICE NYPD SUPPORT and lots of overlapping stuff
Thus, I argue that education is good in itself because it expands the range of your experience, both temporally and spatially. Education means figuring out how to arrange the finite things you can know, their varying levels of abstraction and detail, their mix of skill and data, fact and theory, so as to maximize the potential array of meaning that you can experience in the now. Whatever your temporal and spatial present, education lets you live more within it, by bringing more meanings into play, by creating a dialogue of complexity and simplification, of distinction and analogy, that transforms your immediate world and reaches beyond it. To be sure, we are all bound to a reality that is local in a million ways—by language, location, race, gender, age, occupation, body type, religion, and so on. Just because you know a lot of abstract stuff doesn’t mean you can escape that locality. After all being located somewhere is, paradoxically, one of the universal human attributes, and there is a provinciality of abstraction that is just as inane as that of detail. But in the mind of a thoughtful person, education is a habit that expands experience so as to overcome that provinciality by increasing ties between your locality and other human meanings. Sometimes abstraction is the mechanism for this, sometimes identification, sometimes grand simplification, sometimes the link goes through the tiniest of similar factual details, such as a similar eye color or a shared hometown.
Table B.2: Testability terms: Categories 1–3. Category Subcategory Tier 1 (core) Tier 2 additions Category 1: Core Testing Terms — Direct references to testing, experimentation, and empirical trials. Base terms test, tests, tested, testing, testable, testability, retest, retested, retesting, pretest, pretested, posttest, posttested — Trial terms trial, trials — Experiment terms experiment, experiments, experimental, experimentally, experimentation — Observation terms — observation, observations, observational, observed Lab / medical testing assay, assays screen, screening, screened, diagnostic, diagnosis Preliminary / comparative pilot benchmark, benchmarking, benchmarked Category 2: Statistical & Empirical Terms — Statistical methods and empirical validation. General empirical empirical, empirically evidence, evidential, data-driven, quantitative, measurement, measured Estimation / inference — estimate, estimated, estimation, estimator, inference, inferential, simulation, simulate, simulated Validation / verification validation, validate, validated, validating, verify, verified, verifying, verification confirmatory, confirmation Statistical testing hypothesis test, hypothesis testing, null hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, significance test, statistical test, p-value, confidence interval, power analysis Bayesian, frequentist, likelihood, likelihood function, likelihood ratio Specific methods t-test, F-test, z-test, chi-square, ANOVA, regression analysis, correlation test, bootstrap, permutation test, Wilcoxon, Mann–Whitney, Kruskal–Wallis, Fisher exact test, Fisher test, Kolmogorov–Smirnov, Shapiro–Wilk nonparametric test, parametric test Category 3: Causal Inference Terms — Methods for establishing causal relationships. Randomization randomized, randomization, randomised, randomisation, random assignment, RCT, randomized controlled trial, randomized control trial, randomized experiment — Quasiexperimental quasi-experiment, quasi-experimental, natural experiment,…
The scientific community often indexes on prestige.1 In a preregistered field experiment, peer reviewers of a finance paper were about ten times more likely to recommend “accept” when the author name listed was Economics Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith compared to his less-known coauthor Sabiou Inoua (Huber et al. 2022).2 But how much does a name matter? This paper argues: it depends on the field. Crucially, it depends on the testability of the subject matter.
s&p 500 at a 1month high
Peter Moskos @PeterMoskos There's something anti-vaxxer-like about insisting "a carceral approach to gun violence was never going to work." But it _did_ work. He says serving on a 2020 grand jury "radicalized." It lead to this 2022 indictment of 32 Woos and Choos. (1/5)
The EBP emphasis on quantitative data raises still more issues. It’s widely acknowledged that criminal justice data are terrible. As a researcher, I’m not opposed to efforts to improve the data that I work with, but I don’t think that improvements in data quality are “equal opportunity,” so to speak. It is fairly common for researchers to enter into restrictive data use agreements with criminal legal agencies in order to collect better data. This can create conflicts with aspirations toward data transparency and replication. Scientists expect academic journals to share data that others can use to replicate findings. This is a concern about the integrity of science, but there are also political problems: Law enforcement can freely deny data access to any researcher who is perceived to be too critical, which makes political moderatism and “relationship management” key for the aspiring researcher. Structurally, then, high-quality quantitative criminalization research often depends upon the political calculations of police chiefs and corrections commissioners. If this kind of research is the minimum threshold for “what works,” won’t the substance of EBP proposals tilt toward the preferences of cops and corrections officers (or their relationships with certain academics)? This isn’t to say that every study supporting the efficacy of policing or incarceration can be discredited, but rather that, on balance, the scales will tilt toward the status quo. In this sense, “what works” could boil down to “what the bureaucrats will tolerate.”
Chalfin: The empirical evidence shows that this approach can and has appreciably reduced serious violence in targeted communities: in NYC and elsewhere. See the following article that is specific to NYC. If you incapacitate the right 0.1% of the population, you can see shootings decline by as much as 1/3 for some time afterwards. Homicide in NYC is at a 100 year low. More surgical policing is likely one of the reasons.