Dots

Pema Levy at Mother Jones:

By day, Joe Tien is a math professor at Ohio State University, where he studies the spread of infectious diseases. His research maps how a disease like Ebola jumps from village to village and plots the best way to stop its spread. On his own time, Tien has begun putting his skills in network science toward other subjects, including the connection between white nationalists and American politicians.

After the election, Tien and two other mathematicians set out to map the relationship between white nationalists and US senators on social media. The results produced one clear outlier: Based on an analysis of senators' Twitter followers, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President Donald Trump's nominee to be attorney general, had the most overlap with white nationalist groups and individuals.

"He's the closest of all senators to the white nationalist groups," says Tien.

Sessions has a controversial track record on matters of race, including allegations of racist comments toward black colleagues and the targeted prosecution of civil rights activists. But Tien was still surprised by the outcome of his research. He and his colleagues wrote a short paper on their findings and titled it "The Curious Case of Jefferson Sessions."

I don't know if it's ironic or karmic or what, but there's something spiritually delicious when a douchenozzle like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III gets connected to White Supremacists by a guy who tracks Infectious Diseases.

That's some elegant shit right there.