A standing wager in my work: who talks to whom is itself political structure. Networks are where that wager gets tested. Epistemic Elite Networks maps 650,000 interactions among 1,933 foreign-policy elites and finds the split runs national, not professional. Network Shocks asks what a crisis does to a network’s governing mechanisms — relational event models joined to the impulse-response logic macroeconomists use — and finds the reorganization real but short-lived. The thread started early: my first public dataset was a network of pandemic-era Turkish Twitter. What these models can and cannot claim crosses into measurement & validity.