In a 29 June, 2026 segment of MS Now, Maddow talks with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, authors of “On Courage: How to be a dissident in an age of fear,” about how to live as an American during a time of authoritarianism. The book, On Courage, quotes Patrick Ball, whom Maddow refers to as “a human rights statistician who has spent his whole career cataloguing perpetrators of state violence.”

“They’re one of the most important NGOs that no one’s ever heard of. … What they do is very rigorous statistical extrapolations of information that’s not in the record, about wars, civil wars, coups, oppressive states, and they’re used for truth and reconciliation, human rights tribunals, war crimes trials. … They’ve worked on every high-profile war crimes trial in the century.”

“You look at all the huge problems in the world, and you are trying to find ways to plug in. And it turns out—whether it is cooking a meal for somebody who’s hungry or cleaning some data so that you can do analysis on the things that we actually need to do to advance our work to make the world a little bit better— the main thing they require is somebody to care enough to do it.”

How do scientists and statisticians stand up to authoritarianism, especially when it happens in their home countries? That was the topic tackled by the Computer Says Maybe podcast, featuring HRDAG’s Executive Director Megan Price, Data and Society’s Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan, and podcast host Alix Dunn.

“The story of missing data is what I’ve spent my whole career thinking about,” explained Patrick. “The joke in our team is if the data were perfect, lawyers would do this with excel.”