Evan Roberts

Humanity’s greatest vocation is safe from automation

Could requiring fewer apartment stairways help solve Minnesota’s housing shortage? Many Minnesota apartment buildings are required to have two stairways. Some legislators want to change that.

oh hey @katiejonesmpls.bsky.social is going to introduce a 6 story single stair bill

rad!

www.startribune.com/could-requir...

No indirects on this either 😀

Is the World Baseball Classic more niche and less global than the Winter Olympics? (He asks as he gears up to watch the world championships of cricket this weekend)

Job Opening: Postdoctoral Fellowship – Department of the History of Medicine The Department of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine (CMHSM), Johns Hopkins University, seeks applicants for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in…

Job Opening: Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Medicine & Medical Humanities to begin 7/1/2026. For more info & to apply: hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/2026/03/06/j... Deadline to apply is April 5th.

We watched that episode recently, and the academic aspects were charmingly not quite right!

The new rules: housing shortage as an explanation for family and household change across large metro areas in Canada, 1981–2021 We examine whether housing shortages can usefully explain household and family change. We contextualize our investigation within the cultural history of emerging normative rules guiding both househ...

And @lausterna.bsky.social and @jensvb.bsky.social have a recent paper on related things.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Labor Force Trends: Per-Adult vs. Per Capita I frequently note that housing supply-crisis skeptics get led off target by looking at homes per capita.

A recent post by @kevinerdmann.bsky.social is kinda sorta related. Looking at it from the other end of the kalidescope in some ways, by showing how *actually* adult household size in the US has been rising because we've forced young adults to live at home
kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/labor-forc...

For the record, this was making minor title and abstract changes for a talk I'm giving in a couple of months. Should take 5, but what if I started reading the abstract, and wanted to tinker with the words, or come up with a new clever title. There's 30 minutes that seem productive, but not really!

I had a task on my to-do list I'd been putting off for a month. A classic of this genre: "it'll probably take 5 minutes once you get to it, but it could also spiral into 30". Decided to finally do it today, did the work, it took ~5 minutes, switched over to email to send it ... I did it a month ago

Harper to the judge: "Your driver's license doesn't list your height and weight at birth. It doesn't list where you used to live. It identifies who you are now."

They don't put it like this directly, but it's a great example of how many city planners tacitly assume that our society is stuck at the income levels of the 1920s or 1960s, and therefore have the same demands for indoor space. We're richer, and people can afford more space for more of their life.

Cities Keep Planning for Seniors to Downsize. The Data Shows They're Not Moving. How flawed assumptions about seniors helped shape today’s housing shortage.

Great discussion by @mikepmoffatt.bsky.social at @missingmiddleca.bsky.social about the wrong-headed assumption city planners have that seniors without children at home will (should in planners' minds) downsize in their 60s instead of their 80s.
www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/cities-kee...

These are great stories!

It Wasn't Fascism All Along Conservatism was a distinct ideology but it is dead and it is not coming back.

Important and correct by @polphilpod.bsky.social Toby Buckle at @liberalcurrents.com Liberal Currents.

The "all conservatism was always already Trumpist and fascist" line is ultimately a way to normalize Trump, and should be resisted.

www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...

Minnesota is running a 4 year pilot in two cities (Minneapolis and a suburb) of speed cameras before they'll consider anything broader. As if there wasn't 40 years of evidence about speed cameras ...

A war with Iran, and maybe NZ gets its third Prime Minister in a row named Chris. Big week for international politics 😀

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

New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)

davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

What you need to know about navigating the new Portage & Main safely

Winnipeg had a long-standing epic urban planning fustercluck in the heart of its downtown (which it has corrected) but despite that everytime I've been there it's impressed me as being more vibrant than American metros of same size or larger
www.winnipeg.ca/people-cultu...

Lacy gray silhouettes of trees gently shrouded in fog, atop a low gray-gold hillock of slumbering turf.

Morning’s mood. Quiet grace.

Humboldt Park, Milwaukee

In another city on a river beginning with M*, you can lose your license for just one of the offences Minneapolis gives an $80 fine for, and you lose your license for four offences Minneapolis thinks are worth $40 fines. Road fatalities are < half the Minneapolis rate over there.
* Melbourne

Cambridge is hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor in Sociology - great opportunity for colleagues looking for positions in the UK. The job listing shows it's with Caius & Homerton colleges. Worth checking out for those on the academic job market. #AcademicJobs #sociology

jobs.ac.uk/job/DQ...

Claude Code 27: Research and Publishing Are Now Two Different Things Some Claude Code fan fiction about the economics of publishing with AI agents set in the very near future

This entire post is a very good read. And also depressing/disorienting. Unrelatedly, I also just ate an entire container of supermarket boneless buffalo wings.

causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

Oh I see, sorry.

The North Loop is also not in Ward 2, no-one should be taking the placement of these text boxes too literally here. If they were further over the map they'd obscure more of the vital parts of the map.

Indeed it is!

Genuine question, given a lot of these weird results are from different years, how much is differential turnout. Or put another way, given a narrowly divided electorate and Wisconsin levels of turnout, what's the percentage of individuals who are actual Johnson-Baldwin voters?

"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

I love that the first guy Googled him and then the second guy asked his mom for advice and SHE Googled him.

Helping train LLMs by replacing my co-authors parentheses with em-dashes. You're welcome, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT et al