Every line of this article is just completely stunning

Guardian Environment@environment.theguardian.com · 11h ago

Indian oil and gas heir made professor of sustainability at Newcastle University

The fact that *Jacob Rees-Mogg* of all people holds on to - and is willing to publicly defend! - a quite inclusive and fluid notion of nationality is quite something to behold. Has anyone in or near the UK Labour party done anything remotely similar to this?

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · yesterday

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the most stereotypically Tory conservative man of the 21st Century, responded to Suella Braverman with a long-form video criticizing her position and rejecting a race-based theory of Englishness, and in response has been ratioed by the increasingly feral British online far-right.

me, when I try to make jokes during lectures:

Twlldun@twlldun.bsky.social · 2d ago

There has never been a man alive with less rizz

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Can I shock you? I don’t think writing these applications is a good use of 21000 people’s time

Charles West@pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 5d ago

21,627 applications for the Marie Curie early career fellowships.

Instead of doing ‘Anton Jäger should write more clearly’-discourse, let me just recommend this excellent review in the LRB on his book: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

William Davies · Easy to Join, Easy to Leave: Politics on Speed

This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures...

lrb.co.uk

The UK university sector is mired in absolute madness

A lot of this research is really bad. One of these effects people just *want* to be true, so researchers can get away with shoddy crosssectional analyses and handwaving.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3w ago

Contact with nature is good for us Experiments have found that nature contact decreases negative affect, stress & anxiety, and increases positive affect. Lowers cardiovascular disease & mortality risk and greater life satisfaction are associated with living near nature. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Nearly 5000 researchers applied for an ERC starting grand in the last round. Just over 400 (less than 9%) were successful. Many people applying are spending up to 12 months working seriously on their application. This is absolutely crazy. erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

ERC Starting Grants: €705 million to back Europe's next generation of researchers

The European Research Council (ERC) has today announced the winners of its latest Starting Grant competition. The funding, worth €705 million in total, will go to 421 early-career researchers across E...

erc.europa.eu

Conservatively say that the average applicant spends six months of their allotted research time working on their application. Collectively, more than 2000 years of research time has gone into unsuccessful applications in this round alone.

Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

‘Ironic’ (or something) that the country can host a Summer of Academic Freedom and Meritocracy Battle Of Ideas focused on the employment of two men, while at least 5000 academics are getting dismissed on the instructions of Chief Finance Officers

A scathing thread about @nathancofnas.bsky.social's intellectual deficiencies started four months ago by Pieter Beck, a history of science senior postdoc @ Ghent University, 'Cofnas has been called an unoriginal thinker before.'

Pieter T. L. Beck@ptrbck.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Of course, I might be biased. So first: here are the opinions of some journalists /2

Worth reading the thread that led up to this.

Patrick Sturgis@patricksturg.bsky.social · last mo.

Jonathan you are a Pratt. A Pratt who thinks he’s far smarter than he is. And moreover a Pratt who doesn’t understand or support the essential principle of Academic Freedom. I see little point in engaging with you further.

“It’s impossible that Jason Arday could have got his post without DEI,” say people about an industry which can find 200 academics willing to sign a letter in support of David Miller and another 200 academics willing to support Nathan Cofnas.

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · last mo.

I'm sorry, but if you think Nathan Cofnas being suspended for being a racist is an 'academic freedom' issue you are the dumbest fucking mark alive.

Cofnas had a Leverhulme early career fellowship "I called the Leverlhulme Trust this morning, and was surprised that this was, apparently, the first inquiry they had had about Nathan Cofnas" - Afua Hirsch afuahirsch.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-...

A Tale of Two Racists

and the forever war against black bodies

afuahirsch.substack.com

(At the margins, we have to really care about someone's own capacity to do excellent research. But with the sheer material and cultural resources of the Ivy League or Oxbridge, this is much less an issue).

(I definitely think people not only underestimate how many chancers there are in academia but also that you're much more likely to find obviously underqualified people in places like Oxford and Cambridge, where tiny elite networks are used to having the power to decide what reality is).

This is a very common and telling objection to claims around ‘social construction’ and I think it is time we retire the term ‘social construct’ which brings much more confusion than clarity.

Language Machines is out today, can be ordered from @uminnpress.bsky.social www.upress.umn.edu/978151791932... - gathering a few parergonal writings below 1/

Den Mamdani/Nyrup crossover du ikke vidste, du havde brug for

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · last mo.

I'm listening, I'm learning. Safety first, NYC.

'What is diagnosis For?' - Nikolas Rose, 2013 nikolasrose.com/wp-content/u...

<literally thousands of social and historical studies precisely explaning a phenomenon> Psychiatrists: no one understands this phenomenon 🤷 www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Rising number of people seeking ADHD diagnosis without treatment, say experts

Psychiatrists in Channel 4 documentary argue it is more a ‘social construct’ than a medical condition

theguardian.com

The "major public interest" claim, which is being used here to justify the hysterical RW moral panic, presumably rests on an assumption that one individual appointment was somehow typical of university hiring. As I have pointed out, this is a ridiculous claim, initially pushed by a full-ass racist.

Lorenzo Trojan@ltrojan.bsky.social · last mo.

If only that was what the said journalists did... It was never about attacking freedom of speech, it was about how that freedom of speech was abused to construct a hate filled distorted narrative of ideological identity politics

This is the coverage of Arday **just in the Telegraph** in the UK. This is only the first four pages of results, just in one outlet.

This 1-2 (from when the plagiarism story first broke) really struck/still strikes me. The schoolyard bullying that followed an unusual (though, re plagiarism, not unique) story was appalling. Criticism of his practice was clearly fair, but it tipped over into something else - particularly on X.

Basic contention is academia used to be about inquiry, and not just a finishing school for elites as it is nowadays. But my impression is academia has always been to a large extent a finishing school for elites and by historical standards there's an unusually high emphasis on intellectual merit now?

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · last mo.

if there’s one thing every autistic person with a hyperfixation loves it’s constant and vituperative debate

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · last mo.

AI as an addictive cognitive ‘scaffold’ is really not theorized properly, yet. You’d think all the posthumanists and 4E cognition people would be all over this!

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce.com · last mo.

I’m learning that the people who gamified paragraphs are having trouble reading books. www.axios.com/2026/08/11/r...