Professor, international relations, Spartan & Cyclone alumni, studies conflict, institutions, and disasters; mother of awesome rehabilitation counselor

Joined December 2015
1,852 Photos and videos
Sara Mitchell retweeted
Trump is getting fleeced by Iran The deal: • $24B cash oil sales • Just 60 days of open Hormuz Iran pockets $30B in two months Day 61, Iran can close Hormuz again, and repeat the extortion Massive loss for Trump—Huge win for Iran
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
“Critical maritime chokepoints around the world have become fraught with new risks.” Read @IBKardon on why “accelerating challenges to free navigation are fragmenting the formerly open trading system.” foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
The World Is Draining Oil Reserves, Raising Pressure for a Peace Deal The amount of oil and fuel stored by businesses and governments has fallen sharply since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran nytimes.com/2026/06/12/busin…
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
I was very pleased that Judicature magazine decided to highlight the recent article that Tara Grove and I wrote, “Disfavored Supreme Court Precedent in the Lower Federal Courts.” (A link to the magazine article is provided in the comment below.) In our article (which was published in the Virginia Law Review), we discussed how lower courts do and should respond when the Supreme Court starts pulling back from its key precedents. We provided several case studies, involving the Lemon test for establishment clause claims, the Bivens line of cases concerning damages for constitutional violations, and the (now-overturned) Chevron deference doctrine. @TaraLeighGrove1
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What’s wrong with Iowa (and GOP legislation)
Iowa education falls into bottom half of states, new report finds desmoinesregister.com/story/…
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Trump: I’m attacking Iran. I’m not attacking Iran. I’m attacking Iran. I’m not attacking Iran. Markets:
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
US wholesale prices rise to highest level since 2022 as Iran war's oil shock continues to drive up business costs cnn.it/49UuwFv
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I feel this when reading my students’ discussion posts for my online summer class 😂
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
Deadline Extended! Apply by 6/15! Submit full-panel proposals for the International Conference Panel #TravelGrant! We invite APSA members to utilize these panel allocations at conferences of select national political science associations. View here: buff.ly/JK59Olb
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
The man running the agency responsible for 340 million Americans' health arrives at 10am, leaves by 4pm, skips his own division chief meetings, and when he does show up - scrolls his phone and gets described by colleagues as "checked out." Ebola is spreading. Six Americans already exposed. He has not briefed himself with CDC scientists. His response to a reporter asking if he was worried: "Yeah, we're working on it." The CDC is being run by a health economist with no public health experience who already has another full-time job running NIH. Half of the 27 NIH institutes have no permanent director. The top FDA drug regulator got fired in May - Kennedy found out after it happened. When measles killed two children in Texas, the CDC official leading the response asked repeatedly to brief Kennedy. He was rebuffed every time. The person actually running HHS operations is a longtime personal adviser whose policy spreadsheet - more than 50 items - is hidden from the department's own policy team. When Kennedy gets asked a question, his standing answer is "just run that by Stefanie." This is not a management philosophy. This is a vacancy wearing a title.
NEW: Major posts are vacant. Waves of scientists are gone. Ebola looms. How RFK Jr. manages HHS: “If the C.E.O. lacked deep expertise in the company’s business and the leaders of its most important divisions were missing, investors would revolt." nytimes.com/2026/06/07/us/po…
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
The Iran War bumped inflation over nominal wage growth for 2 months. That means real wages actually shrank last month by 0.8%.
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
Plenty of awful things happening worldwide. One that hasn't gotten much attention is the brutal repression of women and girls in Afghanistan, including the denial of education. This holds back not just girls but the entire country.
Afghanistan faces a fragile and uncertain future as worsening humanitarian conditions, restrictions on women and girls, and mounting economic pressures deepen the crisis. UN officials warn of a potential “lost generation of talent and potential”. news.un.org/en/story/2026/06…
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Not to mention the small budget allocated for something that is very expensive (unless this is some giant MOOC).
Mandatory UI civics classes raise concerns about academic freedom desmoinesregister.com/story/…
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Funny how this story says nothing about immigration or abortion policies or maternal care dead zones
i9 Investigation: Why are fewer babies being born in Iowa? kcrg.com/video/2026/06/08/i9…
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Yes, shredding territorial integrity norms is a bad idea
BREAKING NEWS: The number of armed conflicts fought directly between states doubled in 2025, reaching the highest level recorded since World War II, according to PRIO’s annual conflict trends report, with @UU_Peace data. Read more: prio.org/news/3719
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Having coded Peruvian disasters since 1900, I know how devastating this will be 😢
The record-breaking freight train of warmth that has crossed the undersea Pacific since April is now arriving on the shores of Peru, forming El Niño Costero. That has caused summer-like temperatures in Lima, despite it being the start of winter, shares @hombredeltiempo 🧵
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Sara Mitchell retweeted
In the new interview, Trump told NBC that “I didn’t guarantee no war” and that “I didn’t promise anything.” Not true. There was often some nuance to his rhetoric on this subject. He repeatedly promised in 2024 to avoid “endless” wars or “world” wars (not specifically all wars) or boasted (without an explicit future promise) about not having started a new war in his first term. You can argue the nuance was lost on a lot of voters, or that boasting about not having started one is a de facto promise not to start one in the future, but the nuance frequently existed. In other cases, though, he was categorical. At an August 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, he promised, “Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.” That month in North Carolina, he pledged, “No more wars.” And here’s what he said in two of his highest-profile speeches. In his July 2024 address accepting the GOP nomination, he said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.” In his November 2024 victory address, he said, “I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars.”
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