Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences @Columbia and Founder of the Asian American Initiative | #Kaia's human 🦁

NY ↔️ LA
Joined October 2014
When I was a student, research on #AsianAmericans never appeared on my syllabi. Now as faculty, I’m committed to conducting research that makes the study of Asian Americans essential to the social sciences—creating the syllabi I wish I had. #AAPI @TheAAPSS aapss.org/fellows-corner-jen…
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“MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.”
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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Breaking News: Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, challenged sexist assumptions and fought for gender equality, has died at 92. nyti.ms/4gS9EkV
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please join us! if you have a PhD and want to learn to write op-eds from an amazing editor at the NYT and gets years of follow-on support from me and a wheelhouse of brilliant guest experts and be eligible for our annual fellowships and essay prizes, apply apply apply apply appl
Grant News - Public Scholars Project Thanks to a $2.7 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, we are excited to officially launch the Public Scholars Project based here at Wake Forest University. This 5-year project is aimed at training and supporting natural scientists, social scientists, and philosophers from across the globe to be better equipped to do public-facing work. We will run 10 workshops (the first is already open to applications), an alumni network, 5 fellowship competitions, and 5 prize competitions. Please share this widely! To learn more visit: news.wfu.edu/2026/09/01/from…
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macabre = “muh-KAHB” Worcestershire = “WOOSS-ter-sheer” omnipotent = “ahm-NI-puh-tunt” reticent = “RET-uh-sunt” epitome = “ih-PIT-uh-mee” myriad = "MEER-ee-ud" Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.
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After discovering the genetic basis of his family's cancer history, Filko Prugo's law career no longer felt fulfilling—he had to enter the lab. Learn about his path to studying hereditary cancer at Columbia: cancer.columbia.edu/news/no-…
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Expanding H-1B visas boosted US worker incomes and productivity, especially in non-STEM jobs, with gains flowing downstream via supply chains, from Ran Abramitzky, @leah_boustan, Ahmet Gulek, and Jens Hainmueller nber.org/papers/w35560
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🚨 Applications are OPEN! Join @the_IAS, one of the world’s leading centers for foundational research, for the 2027–28 academic year. Accepted scholars from across the globe will be able to pursue their own research within one of the Institute's Schools: ias.edu/news/institute-advan…
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Our @ScienceAdvances Focus piece has 2,390 downloads. This is about scientific rigor not fairness. Biomedical evidence is heavily overfit to men’s health. We cannot build precision medicine on an imbalanced data foundation. Co-author: @DrAlibrahim_H 🔗 science.org/doi/10.1126/scia…
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Is polarization harmful? The answer is a clear Yes. A new study provides causal evidence from 9 countries where they experimentally manipulated intergroup polarization. When polarization decreases, people become less willing to discriminate against political opponents, while support for democratic principles increases and willingness to engage in political compromise grows. "We find a clear causal relationship. Polarization actually leads to greater political intolerance and weaker support for democratic norms. We establish that polarization indeed contributes to these attitudes, and we can conclude that too much polarization is dangerous," Berntzen says. phys.org/news/2026-06-politi…
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Good lord this edit. Insane.
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I love New York 🧡💙
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NEW in @ScienceAdvances, after 3 years of work with a great team: We review and meta-analyze 100 immigrant conjoint experiments in 36 countries. Immigration preferences are surprisingly similar across people and countries, but changing over time and structured by politics. 🧵
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A warning from the president of MIT: “the nation’s research enterprise is shrinking. Scientific funding is drying up. And the funds Congress recently allocated for science are not actually flowing” “At public and private universities across the country, high-impact science is being damaged and derailed. Speaking for my own institution, compared to this time last year, MIT has experienced a decline in campus research activity funded by federal awards of more than 20%.”
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Very happy to see this paper out in PNAS! During the heyday of EconTwitter, tweeting about job market papers increased interviews, flyouts, and job offers for candidates. Several EconTwitter regulars were part of the experiment.
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Prestige bias is a major problem in academia: success in academia leads to numerous unfair advantages (eg., professors at prestigious universities have an easier time getting their papers published). But prestige bias is bigger in fields that are less scientific (eg., art, history, politics, and philosophy). In these fields, the claims of academics are hard to test so people rely more on prestige as a heuristic about the truth of their claims. In contrast, fields where claims are more testable exhibit lower concentrations of prestige markers (eg., math, physics, computer science, and medicine). This makes it easier for unknown or early career researchers to break through and have success. A new analysis finds that a 10% increase in the testability of claims in a field is associated with a 9% decrease in citation concentration. Evaluators rely less on prestige for quality assurance when the work is testable. My field is psychology is in the middle (close to biology). In the last decade, the credibility revolution has dramatically changed the field. As people published replication attempts, several the leading figures in the field lost significant prestige when their claims did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. This is actually the sign of a healthy scientific field: Prestige should not trump empirical evidence. kurtishingl.com/files/PTTS_l…
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Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains That was 6 weeks. I'm going a full year.
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I am concerned all the doom about young college grads is going to convince many that non-college is a better path to prosperity. While obviously true sometimes, the data is clear that college grads are still doing better. nationalreview.com/2026/03/a…
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Five years after the Atlanta spa shootings, we’re reminded of the pain caused by anti-Asian hate & gun violence. Eight lives were lost—six of them Asian women. As we honor the memories of those we lost, we recommit to building a future free from anti-Asian hate and gun violence.
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After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. May God bless America.
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Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.
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