jon ben-menachem

@jbenmenachem

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

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jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· 25d

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· 29d

can we all agree not to do this? I disagree that we are under any obligation to pay for AI screening services… you also don’t know which service someone will use to evaluate your work…

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jul 9

The uncited analogy to journalism is interesting—my work finds that news outlets have transitioned from click-focused business models to subscription models. The result: “You can’t sustain a news organization on clicks.” Would be interesting to see a study of journal editor motivations.

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jul 5

people seemed to like this on ig so i will share here too

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jul 5

you’d be surprised how freeing this can be

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jul 5

it’s time

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jul 2

I was enjoying this one recently muse.jhu.edu/article/956839

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 30

I'm judging relative progress according to the city's own historical figures -- the decline is less pronounced (though still great)

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 30

also super interesting to get firm estimates on AI prevalence in submissions vs peer reviews

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 30

Wow, submission volume triples between 2013-2026.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 30

shrinkflation has come for the trader joe’s paper bags 😩

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 29

Missed this story last week

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 27

Betting on Open Soul Autism to win big

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 25

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

It's definitely in the research articles too

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

Sure seems like this race needed a poll or Kessler to stand down... Was impossible to tell whether I should have voted for Kessler or Siffert based on candidate strength against the center lane.

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%

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

For context re: the extreme cope and seethe shit the Manhattan Institute flunkies are on

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.

Do New Yorkers want a mayor who is like, "FIFA is crony-capitalist authoritarianism and I won't participate in its sportswashing by grabbing a few cheap tickets for New Yorkers and then sitting in my luxury box to endorse the whole thing"?
Or, who is like, "Hey, this is great fun!" Mamdani has always known that voters want the latter. That's why during the campaign, he wasn't like, "you can save money on groceries by cooking your own whole chicken." He was like, "you can get the branded boxed & bagged junk food I'm standing in front of for cheap at our government-run grocery stores!"
Mamdani makes no sense at all but political sense.
And he makes very good political sense.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

Hmm not sure you are literate

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

Legions of New York Times editors permanently seething

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 24

why do 20 of my mutuals follow

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 22

Some reporters are also using metrics to argue for a different type of crime coverage. When editors voice skepticism that a story humanizing criminalized people is worth running, some reporters use metrics as "ammunition" to win newsroom arguments. Quite different from clickbait sensationalism!

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 22

"If it bleeds, it leads"—many people assume crime news is just about chasing clicks. After interviewing 58 crime journalists across 40 newsrooms, I found something more complicated. My first dissertation paper is live at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social 🧵 sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 20

Please enjoy some rather withering critique written by Canadian social scientists in the 80s. Basically, investigative journalism is when journalism is time consuming.

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 …

A:
hell is happening? What's going on? What's the situation? Where you have to
Generally spean.
so. What the
go out and do a fair amount of leg work to uncover what the hell is going on.
But you're going to ask those questions in most situations or most stories. So is it a matter of length: that it's an extensive questioning? Or is it a matter of
4: No, it's a matter of the amount of time and effort you have put into it. The
methodology?
happens to people of limited intelligence| is going to take somebody the better part of a month to do. On the other hand we've had stories take six months.
We've just gone through one that's taken... ten weeks with four people, would be forty weeks for one person... in man hours you'd be talking about the better part of a year.
In these terms, investigative reporting is no different from other types of reporting except for aspects of intensity (more personnel, time, and technical resources committed) and scale (aimed at righting more significant wrongs).
In the newspaper there was concerted effort to have teams work on something over time, for example, on continuing stories related to deaths of babies on the cardiac ward of a children's hospital, and on continuing stories related to possibly illegal financial transactions involving major corporations and trust companies. However, these were exceptional; did not seem to involve exceptional methods; and in the eyes of some reporters involved, fell short of their ideal of what investigative reporting should be.
Particular individuals in the newspaper newsroom were seen as full-time investigative reporters. While some looked up to these investigative reporters, others stated that their methods were no different. A reporter talked about a colleague who was a 'star investigative reporter. He noted that his colleague actually did very little investigation. Rather, he relied upon the cultivation of contacts or 'deep throats' inside source organizations to supply basic information which then…

118 Visualizing Deviance
In fact what was most often pointed to as an instance of investigative journalism was a reporter working on a continuing story who was keeping abreast of developments through the assistance of key informants. These were usually known informants who favoured particular reporters because they had proven fair and helpful in previous dealings and reports. For example, in the case of the baby deaths on the hospital ward, some reporters cultivated the victims' parents as sources to learn of developments and to use them publicly to pressure the authorities into disclosure. In general the secret source finds it easy to maintain secrecy since the reporter himself is motivated to collaborate in order to sustain his investigative mystique. The reporter can convey the image that his work was accomplished by long. hard, diligent investigation, rather than by sporadic tit-for-tat chats on the telephone lasting a few minutes.
The limitations on long-term and intensive investigative reporting are threefold. There is the problem of scarce resources in the news organization.
There is the enclosure by sources over access to information. And, there is self-enclosure by journalists themselves, who often do not bother to use approaches that lie beyond their own methodological limitations and criteria of objectivity, balance, and fairness.
Limited news-organization resources curtailed serious investigative work.
This was especially the case in the television newsroom, where the dozen or so reporters were needed to supply a story a day to keep the show filled. It was simply too costly to assign reporters to something that took them a long time to develop and had no predictable payoff compared to tapping regular sources for a daily supply (see also Epstein, 1974: esp. 24, 36-7).
Sources are another major limitation. Ongoing relations with regular sources mean that reporters are typically precluded from even contemplating more thorough searches for information using …

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 20

as I have argued elsewhere, I'm not really sure what we get from sacrificing survey standardization and interview richness. I would welcome more research making the case for what is gained, empirically osf.io/preprints/so...

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

LLM-administered interviewing as a form of qualitative research with more participants and a faster production timeline. Even the most methodologically rigorous approaches to LLM social simulation (Ma 2026) explicitly bracket the question of external sociological validity, acknowledging that whether model behavior corresponds to human social processes requires separate empirical demonstration.
LLM adaptive surveys (Cuevas et al. 2024) sacrifice the advantages that semi-structured interviews provide relative to typical surveys. A skilled interviewer recognizes when a respondent has not understood the question, when an initial answer is a placeholder that will deepen with patient follow-up, or when meaning is being communicated indirectly through hesitation, deflection, or narrative structure. These capacities justify the slow pace of qualitative data collection. The empirical evidence reviewed in earlier sections suggests that LLM interviewers fail at these tasks, and fail most consequentially with the respondents who would gain the most from human interpretation. The method matches the low richness of survey data without the inferential leverage of survey sampling. And even if technical improvements improve LLM performance on such tasks, the adaptive survey will never be the same as the interview. It is better conceptualized as Qualtrics with extra steps.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 20

Okay okay here we go

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)

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 20

Bringing this home like it’s a thread from the shroud of turin

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 13

The cop unions were basically silent during this whole run up

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 12

Wait the article names *students* who received the email but not the prof? Come on!

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.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 12

Funny you should say so... osf.io/preprints/so...

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem· Jun 12

"The administrators gave us a big pot of money to hire someone else to ask ChatGPT why your work sucks."