"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-...

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...

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 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...

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

"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 UK research-intensive universities double in two years. Exclusive: Scale of redundancies branded a “disaster”. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

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

'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...

"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...

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)".

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: →

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...

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

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...

The term ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion life is returning to normal’ Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

"the issue isn’t that we need more 'boy-friendly' reforms. It’s that boys are socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls." time.com/7335723/auto...

📣Do people across the world want to remember positive ingroup histories? Based on 7,665 ratings of 360 events in 7 countries, we find striking cross-national differences, showing that striving for positive ingroup memories is not a basic principle. 📘In press at JPSP. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Methodology

Hard to find a clearer distillation of the gen ai project.

Sheffield Hallam University complied with Beijing demand to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project on supply chains and forced labour being dropped. It was reinstated after threat of legal action but chilling effect remains www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

We have a new tutorial out in Social Cog methods issue, a resampling tool we made in R that basically tells you when some average is "stable" and can be used to guide data collection or test hypotheses related to variance. Quick explanation here 1/n guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/...

If you'd asked me which celebrity would posthumously unveil a list of people she wanted fired into the sun, I would not have guessed Jane Goodall

"The Architecture of Status Perception: Cues, Categories, and Consequences" Co-chairs: Finneaz Moner, @dongwonoh.bsky.social Speakers: Finneaz Moner, Ben (Ming Huang) Teo, Abhinanda Dash (w/ Kerri L Johnson & @thorabjorns.bsky.social), Bastian Weitz (w/ @freemanjb.bsky.social) Symposium Abstract:

"those who relate to others as though they are not worthy of respect ought to be treated with the regard that orientation deserves"

This is no small reason why pronatalism is so important to this administration. If women are busy having and raising kids - and the US further weakens its childcare infrastructure and job protections - then women will be increasingly relegated to domestic support roles.

"Our portals successfully transport you to another time, but only to a year sometime between when computers were made of tubes and the last time somebody typed out “www.”"

Are you doing research on impression formation, face perception, personality judgment, or related topics? Then you might be interested in joining our collaborative study! Follow the link for more information: tilburgss.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

"What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?"

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

This, from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, perfectly sums up the quandary that educators find ourselves in: “AI hollows out the foundation of learning because it strips you, gets rid of the mistakes, it gets rid of the opportunities for serendipity.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

And just for clarification, "learn to write well" doesn't mean "learn to write with big words and complex grammar" It means: learn to... -articulate an argument and support it with sound evidence and logical reasoning -organize your writing so the reader can easily understand complex ideas

Everyone in DC knows that if you want to hide something, announce it on a Friday in August. Better yet, make it nearly impossible to track down. That's exactly what SCOTUS did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: SCOTUS has decided it's time to destroy the Voting Rights Act.

"One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society."