Does the latest jobs report really reflect sluggish hiring — or decent levels of hiring in a country with a working-age population that is growing sluggishly? | @RameshPonnuru

Today's Daily Sceptic update is here. Is Argentina preparing to invade the Falklands? wonders David Craig; James Alexander appraises the Odyssey; and Ramesh Thakur warns the ICJ's climate ruling will have catastrophic consequences for public health.

The International Court of Justice climate liability ruling sets a worrying precedent for pandemics and public health, says Professor Ramesh Thakur. These new 'legally binding' duties are quickly going to multiply.

Congratulations to seven research projects that were selected for the Spring 2026 cohort. - Emmanuel Candès, Stanford University: Statistically Efficient LLM Evaluation and Ranking with Pairwise Human Preference Data - Haifeng Xu @haifengxu0, University of Chicago: Towards a Principled Evaluation of LLMs’ Predictive Intelligence - Lihua Lei @lihua_lei_stat, Stanford University: Is Bradley–Terry Enough? Heterogeneous Preference Modeling for RLHF - Negin Golrezaei @NeginGolrezaei, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Causal inference framework for multi-turn AI evaluation. - Ramesh Raskar @raskarmit, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Toward Adaptive, Task-Conditional Evaluation for AI Agents - Steven Wu @zstevenwu and Andrew Ilyas @andrew_ilyas, Carnegie Mellon University: Goodhart’s Law on the Leaderboard: Can Cheap Preference Optimization Game Arena? -Tal Linzen @tallinzen, New York University: A Rigorous Evaluation of Meta-Cognitive Monitoring in LLMs Read more about the program details and submit your proposal for Fall 2026 here: