As a PhD student designing my first survey, I added what I thought was a throwaway question at the end. To my surprise, thousands of academics answered it! The paper is out today: doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

This is excellent. Connects as well to the Vanderbilt Report which also is intended to stigmatize sociology (among other disciplines).

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · 4d ago

Heritage is explicitly saying they aim to “stigmatize” sociology academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/sociology-...

My colleague Michael Perez has posted part 1 of a detailed response to the Henrich report. Whereas I went after Henrich's methods in my blog post, Michael analyzes the report's content to highlight how Henrich flattens complex topics to put forth a destructive rather than constructive agenda.

Uncommissioned: A Response to the “Special Commission Report on Anthropology” by Joseph Henrich

A first reaction

openinquiryanthro.substack.com

All of this. The fact this pain discourse has continued proliferating online is insane. People need to get a grip.

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last wk.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

The Cornell report on the Future of the American University is a disaster, mainstreaming and endorsing profoundly reactionary right-wing diagnoses of higher education that have no business in a serious report on what higher ed is or should become.

For the uninitiated, @sanders.senate.gov's AI bills are being written by a eugenicist cult full of predators organizing "rape orgies." Michael Vassar in that list is also the former president of MIRI, the organization closely advising Sanders.

Lolll I've been doing this shit forever and saying the same exact thing I'm saying right now more than a decade ago and am "being pushed by contrarian media dynamics." 🙄 All of you are hypnotized by talk of fictional machine gods and it's me who has to bring evidence to the contrary.

Wrote a post inspired by the ubiquitous "rogue AI agents" discourse and the unhinged "AI torture chamber" nonsense from the last couple of days.

I suppose in the same way that eugenics was also the "biggest idea"?

Fabio Chiusi@fabiochiusi.bsky.social · 2w ago

What? Are you ok, Economist?

The Chronicle Review is just publishing Quillette's desk rejections now

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2w ago

Checking in on how things are going over at the Chronicle Against Higher Education:

“cowboys” here really reminds me of a brilliant post I saw on Twitter that I’ve never stopped thinking about, which is how the manosphere brand of toxic patriarchy isn’t about MEN, it’s about BOYS. everything is a 12-year-old’s fantasy. Pete is playing G.I. Joe on a trillion-dollar budget

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3w ago

Hegseth: "The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top."

There it is. The day it happened many of us called it that some shit like this would come out and nothing he was doing was genuine. Corporate media ate that garbage up without a second thought while those of us paying even a little bit of attention saw right through it. These people are FREAKS.

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 3w ago

When Coxon was suddenly ALL OVER the media, it felt to many like that was because his story deserved that much interest i.e. that the media was doing its job informing the public of an important threat. The wall-to-wall media coverage wasn't organic though, it was orchestrated: >>

Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Another day, another institution ignoring systemic problems with sexual assault.

EDITORIAL | Cornell Won’t, We Will

The Editorial Board demands that Cornell stops protecting the alleged Chi Phi rapists through the University's opaque sexual assault policies.

cornellsun.com

Hey, look! The sociology report has basically the same errors with methodological rigging as I posted about on my blog today re: the anthropology report by Henrich. It's almost as if all these people screeching about rigor don't know what that word means!

Julian Go@juliango.bsky.social · 3w ago

Latest news: 2 of my sociology colleagues, John Levi Martin & Geoff Wodtke & I each wrote separate reviews of the Vanderbilt-Wash U Report on Sociology by A. Rubin. For my brief opinion and links to all 3 reviews, see this blogpost: scatter.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/g...

Spent yesterday working on a detailed critique of some of the "methods" that Joseph Henrich used in his recently released report attacking sociocultural anthropology. He was the sole anthropologist involved with the Vanderbilt Report. It's long, but the more I looked the more issues I noticed.

I reviewed A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds Of Men and Women, by evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, for The Conversation. theconversation.com/how-has-evol...

How has evolution shaped men’s and women’s minds? A new book tells an outdated story

Psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams’ third book about evolutionary psychology is A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women.

theconversation.com

the postwar university for all its problems worked according to a pretty complex balance of cultural and economic capital with other kinds thrown in, but it looks like we can simplify our Bourdieu for the phase of neoliberal higher ed we’re in now, where the only thing that matters, ever, is money

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3w ago

The provost of UMass (R1) literally told a group of historians this: “research” means pulling in large external grants and unless you do that, you don’t matter and get nothing internally. “Research“ is about $ and institutions support only those disciplines that bring in $ or raise it privately.

There needs to be a Poe's Law but for AI hype. I could not tell based on the tagline "It also required my most personal data, and trust" if this was satire or not. Definitely a "hahahahaha!!! Oh, you're serious?!" moment for me. I hate this timeline.

I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away

Muse, Meta’s A.I. agent, helped handle my dental insurance, booked dinner reservations and created a podcast for me. It also required my most personal data, and trust.

nytimes.com

it really needs to be more openly discussed that all the people advocating for “we should be fine with losing basic skills if we get more systems thinking” are men, meaning socialized to expect to be able to offload basic tasks of daily living onto a wife as part of their compensation for existing

Matt Ford@mford.bsky.social · 3w ago

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

Well that was one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever laid eyes on.

Opinion | Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, does not want you to be afraid of A.I.

nytimes.com

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

I think that he should've had Altman arrested for running a company committing cybercrimes

Sam Mancuso@sammancuso.com · 4w ago

@edzitron.com keen to hear your thoughts about this one - Australian media media reporting on AI is a bit shit... www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Joseph Henrich's report--sorry, Claude's report with Henrich's name on it--detailing all the supposed evidence about anthropology that was left out of the Vanderbilt report was released. It is, to put it nicely, AI slop. No details about methods or the choices that were made collecting "evidence."

Here's a listing of all the right-wing humanities academic jobs that have been advertised so far this 2026-2027 hiring season. Suffice to say, conservative investment in the university humanities is not being matched by the peer-reviewed humanities community: asheeshksi.substack.com/p/tracking-c...

Tracking Civic Thought Hiring in the 2026-2027 Academic Job Cycle

I wanted to put together a post that tracks how right-wing civic thought programs have rapidly been taking over the academic hiring space in the humanities, especially in fields like history (mostly A...

asheeshksi.substack.com

👀👀👀👀 fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

Free newsletter: I estimate that ~50% of AI chip sales - $200bn to $300bn+ - are sitting in warehouses, with NVIDIA selling hundreds of billions of GPUs years in advance. Data centers take way longer to build than hyperscalers are leading us to believe. www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

wheresyoured.at

"Young said trusting Elon Musk, founder of SpaceXAI, is not important if it can bring more money and resources to Memphis." Just in case anyone was curious how things are going in Memphis with our mayor who invited the national guard in and ignores the community about SpaceXAI.

Memphis mayor responds to criticism over data centers

Memphis Mayor Paul Young says he agrees with residents who are pushing for a tougher approach to data center development and SpaceXAI, but said he cannot speak out publicly as much as he wants.

actionnews5.com

21 paragraphs of whining about people trying to find ways to work around the ubiquity of LLM cheating, and how that will mean no more long-form writing from students. Not a single solution offered. But hey glad you got to do some long-form writing I guess.

The Cures for AI Are Killing the Humanities (opinion)

The retreat from take-home essays jeopardizes the future of the humanities.

insidehighered.com

The LLM millenarianism is exhausting, y'all. I feel like I'm watching a mass psychosis.