This is really cool work & a fascinating read. This particularly stood out to me: "Despite hours of interviews, I found little self-reflection on how their desires might permanently impact local communities or how their easy adoption of these practices is situated within histories of suppression."

Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored | Laurie Penny We were told we couldn’t take a joke, and that social media isn’t real life. Now the misogyny of early chatrooms and Gamergate has made its way to the White House, says journalist and feminist activist Laurie Penny

Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored | Laurie Penny

Post Doc at Uni Tübingen! 100% position for 3 (+3) years; they're looking for somebody to analyze large-scale longitudinal datasets in education research.

Expertise in machine learning is an advantage, commitment to research transparency desirable 😌 proficiency in German beneficial but not required

It’s Time To Grow Up | Defector HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but ...

"On the one hand, you have an imaginative property beloved by millions, and on the other, there are actually existing trans people." 🎁 defector.com/its-time-to-...

Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Line chart of the income share of the richest 1% of the population (before taxes and benefits) showing trends from 1974 to 2024 for Chile, India, the USA, France, and Finland. It shows Chile with the highest and most volatile share, peaking above 30 percent, India and the USA rising steadily to about 20 to 25 percent by 2024, and France and Finland remaining lower and comparatively stable around about 5 to 12 percent. The data source is the World Inequality Database (2026). The chart is licensed CC BY to Our World in Data.

What share of income goes to the richest 1% in your country?

How about the richest 10% or 0.1%? How has that changed over time?

The World Inequality Database (WID) is the leading source for answering questions about incomes and wealth at the very top of the distribution.

The law is a victory for Israel’s far right and reflects the country’s shift to the right in the wake of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war that followed. The death penalty has long been legal in Israel, but only two people have been executed in the country’s 78-year history. The law makes death by hanging the default sentence in Israeli military courts trying Palestinians accused of killing people in militant attacks. Israeli citizens — both Jewish and Palestinian-Arab — could also face the death penalty for attacks that aim to “negate the existence of the state of Israel.” However, experts say the chances of it being applied to Jewish Israelis are minuscule.

The death penalty but it only applies to one ethnic group in the seperate courts you’ve set up to try them in www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/w...

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

"the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology...[and] occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people... Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency."

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

Perfect

Oh really? Is that because pandering to the far-right and assuming they will act rationally, reciprocally, & in good faith has always worked in the past, & because there's good evidence that Reform can be trusted? I totally trust this former Tory advisor report published by a right-wing think tank.

Who Owns Your White Male Child? How Billionaires Harness Young Male Rage for Their Selfish Ends

Who Owns Your White Male Child?

How Billionaires Harness Young Male Rage for Their Selfish Ends

open.substack.com/pub/dissenti...

Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical....

"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.

I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.

🧵/

sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Job losses at research-intensive universities double in two years - Research Professional News Exclusive: Scale of redundancies revealed branded a “disaster” for UK research capacity

Job losses at UK research-intensive universities double in two years.

Exclusive: Scale of redundancies branded a “disaster”.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

THREE strike ballots in universities in Scotland closing next week - that’s 3️⃣
If you’re a member in Aberdeen, Heriot Watt or Stirling universities make sure you post those last minute ballot papers 📨📮✅✊ #StopTheCuts #SaveHE

Postdoc position!

Myself and @jordanaxt.bsky.social are seeking applications for a shared post-doctoral researcher at McGill, beginning Fall 2026.

Topic area broadly centered on intergroup dynamics, prejudice, discrimination

Full description here: hehmanlab.org/ad
1/2

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

A new study on the Gaza genocide should shock you:
www.owenjones.news/p/dont-forge...

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collectiv...

"we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves."
www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

“The Homeland” Is War on America: The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti In the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact: the culture war is an actual war.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: With the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, "Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war"

Government report: "Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair)".

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I'm not surprised | George Monbiot It took an FOI request to bring this national security assessment to light. For ‘doomsayers’ like us, it is the ultimate vindication, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem.
Thank you.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

While the pasty incels who work the federal agencies continue to churn out feeble, bloodless AI pastiches of Axis propaganda, here’s how a living breathing artist powerfully invokes design history. This is by illustrator Emily K in South Philly, a free poster-sized download on her website: →

Which brings us to the House of Lords Digital Committee, which is looking at the government’s brilliant idea of giving away everyone’s copyright to American artificial intelligence giants, in return for a bag of magic beans that can only be seen by the very wisest ministers. A consultation on this last year found it was supported by just three percent of respondents, which must be some kind of record. That’s even smaller than the number of people who believe that the Loch Ness monster is real, or that Keir Starmer is doing a good job. On Tuesday, the committee was treated to a joint appearance from Technology Secretary Liz Kendall and Claims-To-Be-Culture-Secretary Lisa Nandy. Two secretaries of state at once! Or one-and-a-half, anyway. “I don’t think our secretaries of state need much introduction,” Committee Chair Baroness Keeley said. Other opinions are available. They had come, it turned out, not to defend their own proposals, but to bury them. “We are having a genuine reset mom

Artificial Unintelligence: the government is in full retreat over copyright, and the attempts to make it look dignified only make it funnier. My SKETCH.
thecritic.co.uk/arti...

Facepalm Pilot: Where Technology Meets Stupidity: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar Depending on whom you ask, the use of the active voice over the passive is arguably the most fundamental writer’s maxim, thought to lend we...

This was one of our most-read pieces way back in 2015. Unfortunately, it is still relevant today.
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-...

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

Reupping, we start looking next week

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...