Karen Benjamin Guzzo
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karenguzzo.bsky.social
Karen Benjamin Guzzo
@karenguzzo.bsky.social

Demographer and Sociologist. Director of the Carolina Population Center. LEGO Karen

Sociology 28%
Political science 28%

Apparently, most bullets have a non-lead casing now.

My husband says the speed at which bullets are fired - at least in contemporary guns - makes them sterile. I have no idea about 1815, but how much faster can guns be?

My husband (an ER doc) & I are watching the 2018 comedy Game Night, & there’s a scene where someone needs to remove a bullet, & my husband tells me you don’t actually need to remove a bullet bc they are sterile. And so there are people out there just walking around with bullets in them.
a man in a dark room with the words this will be a game night to remember
ALT: a man in a dark room with the words this will be a game night to remember
media.tenor.com

LEGO Karen has decided Monday would be more fun strolling the Italian coast, enjoying some gelato, than going to meetings.
I wrote here about Trump’s limited understanding of health insurance and how relying on direct payments to people for payment toward health care costs is a terrible idea. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Reposted by Clark Gray

The Economist claims that Musk's $10M donation to UT-Austin's Population Wellbeing Initiative is specifically to "provide academic ballast to pro-natalist ideas."

Fomenting population panic to provide cover for sexist, racist, ableist, nativist social engineering. www.economist.com/1843/2025/11...

New @pewresearch.org on how the Census has measured race over time. The social construction of race made apparent.
Counting Race: How the Census Measures Identity and What Americans Think About It
How the U.S. government measures race has changed substantially since censuses began in 1790. Today, Americans differ on whether the government should ask about race.
pewrsr.ch
BREAKING: The Supreme Court DENIES former county clerk Kim Davis's request for the justices to take up her longshot bid to overturn 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges marriage equality decision. No justice even writes about the request.

Appointing an unqualified partisan hack to one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies has made not only the US less safe but the entire world. Cool, cool, cool.
F.B.I. Director Is Said to Have Made a Pledge to Head of MI5, Then Broken It
www.nytimes.com

Parties, golf, football games.

He has never been “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but this is exceptionally tone deaf given what’s going on now.
Donald Trump becomes first president to attend regular-season NFL game since 1978
In the third quarter, Trump appeared on the Fox broadcast, answering questions about his time as a football player at New York Military Academy, opining on quarterbacks and more.
www.nbcnews.com
As recently as the late 1980s, tuition at @uwmadison.bsky.social was <$1000/semester. In current dollars, that's about $2500/semester. There is one central reason for that: the . This was a choice. Other choices remain readily available.

LEGO Karen’s walk took her past the latest addition to her neighborhood…this can’t be good!
‘The presence of two words — “equity” and “inclusion” — on page 50 of a 5-year-old grant application just killed a program at UC Berkeley that for half a century helped thousands of East Bay teens recognize that they could go to college and even pay for it.’
Two words in UC Berkeley grant application have led to defunding of 50-year-old program
The Trump administration canceled UC Berkeley’s Educational Talent Search — a 50-year-old program that helped thousands of East Bay teens get to college — over two words in its grant...
www.sfchronicle.com

I am on a prof org board now. Planning future sites means weighing “will foreign scholars come if it’s in the US?” vs “will
US-based foreign scholars feel safe leaving the country if it’s not in the US?” No easy solution.

Similar story here at UNC. Combined with no COL increase bc no state budget, so it’s a de facto pay cut for everyone employed within the UNC system.
The Trump admin fucking up state administrative capacity to provide SNAP benefits is not just a feature of the shutdown. This is their long-term plan to reduce SNAP.

Soon, GOP will start talking block grants due to administrative complexity they created.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...
The Big Beautiful Bill has a SNAP Poison Pill
How states will get the blame for massive cuts to food stamps
donmoynihan.substack.com

I have only had very high-tier places ask for either specific comparisons (supplying names) or asking me to provide comparisons (maybe to people at my own institution or to recently tenured people I am aware of).
Lee Zeldin announces on Fox that there will be "severe" layoffs at the EPA if the shutdown continues
Yikes. USDA sent threatening letter to states telling them that if they sent out EBT money —which many states did during the window when a lower court said SNAP funds had to be released—they have to take it back (?)
Trying to sort out what this means and if states even can claw back the funds

I do!

It would be awesome if instructions for T&P from certain universities didn't specifically ask external letter writers to make such comparisons.
"While serving on my university’s tenure and promotions committee, I’ve lost count of the times I have read 'Professor X is so much better than Professors Y and Z' and thought to myself, 'I don’t know what I am supposed to do with this information.'" physicstoday.aip.org/opinion/comm...
Commentary: On the (ab)use of comparisons in recommendation letters
Comparing candidates for tenure and promotion with other researchers is lazy and fraught with bias.
physicstoday.aip.org
"While serving on my university’s tenure and promotions committee, I’ve lost count of the times I have read 'Professor X is so much better than Professors Y and Z' and thought to myself, 'I don’t know what I am supposed to do with this information.'" physicstoday.aip.org/opinion/comm...
Commentary: On the (ab)use of comparisons in recommendation letters
Comparing candidates for tenure and promotion with other researchers is lazy and fraught with bias.
physicstoday.aip.org
“woke” is when you acknowledge that black people have contributed to the united states
Two panels commemorating the contribution of Black American soldiers towards the liberation of the Netherlands in World War Two have been quietly removed from a cemetery in Limburg. It follows a complaint by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.
nrc.nl NRC @nrc.nl · 3d
Op Margraten zijn twee panelen over zwarte Amerikaanse bevrijders van Nederland opeens weg. ‘Past bij beleid van de regering-Trump’
Two panels commemorating the contribution of Black American soldiers towards the liberation of the Netherlands in World War Two have been quietly removed from a cemetery in Limburg. It follows a complaint by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Trump and his cronies are now pushing 50-year mortgages.

Buckle up. This is going to make the 2008 mortgage crisis look like the good old days.
“More and more cabinet members — Rubio, Miller, Noem — live on military bases now, & it's another parallel to Iraq, where the administration lived in the Green Zone. There’s something deeply unhealthy about a society where leaders are literally shut off from the communities that they govern.”
Don Moynihan on "Purge, Merge, and Surge"
"Instead of surging in Iraq, it’s happening here in American cities."
www.publicnotice.co
NBER @nber.org · 2d
Low-income households denied SNAP due to administrative barriers suffer downstream consequences. Process-related denials increase debt, delinquencies, and decrease credit scores, from Tatiana Homonoff, Min S. Lee, and Katherine Meckel www.nber.org/papers/w34434
Gutting the corporate alternative minimum tax, designed to make sure wildly profitable corporations pay *something*, while cutting food, health, and heating assistance.
How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy
www.nytimes.com
“Despite contributing to Medicare throughout their working lives, Black individuals in the US are less likely to live long enough to reach the qualifying age for coverage.”

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Racial Disparities in Premature Mortality and Unrealized Medicare Benefits
This cohort study examines racial disparities in premature mortality in the US and discusses the implications of these trends for unrealized Medicare benefits among populations with lower life expecta...
jamanetwork.com