A little-known invention that made obsolete a lot of child labour: the "scandiscope", invented by George Smart (1757ish – 1834), allowed an adult chimney sweep to avoid employing "climbing boys" as assistants. Words by @antonhowes.bsky.social:

Five years after we started it, I'm super happy to share that Works in Progress is now available as a print magazine! 🥹 It'll have everything on web and more. You can subscribe today for $100/£75 to receive 6 beautiful, 120-page issues of our magazine a year. worksinprogress.co/print

Hallelujah!

small collection of phrases that mean "doing nothing, but on purpose", and the kind of people who say them: - "active surveillance" (physicians) - "masterly inactivity" (19th-c. statesmen) - "monitoring the situation" (dads)

worth a read.

No one could have predicted this. #ableg

"French pensioners now have higher incomes than working-age adults" - extraordinary By @jburnmurdoch.ft.com www.ft.com/content/d419...

In Newfoundland, a recently released report on "Transforming and Modernizing" education had a number of fabricated references. Managers who are encouraging the thoughtless use of AI in their organizations need to stop. They are undermining trust in anything their colleagues produce.

"industrial policy" sounds like hordes of civil servants typing on steam-powered computers

Well, I know I don't have prosopagnosia

The pretty draft is now online. Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

"Esquires were prominent local gentlemen of ancient armigerous lineage" One sees too few terrific words like this in books these days. The quote is from an edited volume of history scholarship from 1991.

Ezra Klein (bold text) has a vision of where American politics is headed, as legal scholar Kate Shaw (normal text) discusses Trump running for a third term

I think it's pretty ahistorical to think calls for replication are modern. A lot of breakthroughs we can identify retrospectively survived skepticism and challenges over years or decades before they became widely accepted by other scientists.

Blog post: github.com/sophieehill/... TL;DR: There are a LOT of errors/inconsistencies in the results reported in this paper (estimates outside CIs, sign errors, duplicates, asymmetric CIs). Even in the abstract itself! This suggests manual editing of results tables. Which is not good... 🧵

"Her vet said the cat could have had any of three or four conditions. To determine which one it was, they'd need—" "A cat scan???"

always a delight to think of a pun-based business idea and then find it's real

The discoverer of GLP-1 agonists in Novo Nordisk, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, has benefitted financially from her discovery almost not at all. And she's quite all right with that. From Der Spiegel: www.spiegel.de/internationa...

"Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds" Or does it? Let's take a look at this "study"... www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

Paying a COVID-era mortgage rate is the devil’s bargain version of the people that bought homes in the early 2010s. www.wsj.com/personal-fin...

and it shall be called Mark Zuccherberg

It was a heavy news day and we parents & educators are tired on this 1st Friday of back to school. But there were some potentially important changes to EI announced today that deserve more attention. open.substack.com/pub/robsonj/... #cdnpoli

missed this amazing story from last year in Vietnam

the recent past was a strange place. From the New York Times archives (spelling mistakes are digital transcription errors):

A case study in how Cowen's uncritical use of GPT/o3 is causing him to spread misinformation on Marginal Revolution, from @pappubahry.com pappubahry.substack.com/p/misinforma...

This book comes out tomorrow. Really looking forward to it. Realizing how much nonhuman animals are capable of is one of the biggest ways my thinking has shifted the past few years

heard an Italian refer to our lightcone as an «isola luminosa». What a beautiful turn of phrase.

😬

guy who adds oregano to everything for health reasons (he's into "oreganic food")

Historians will remember August 22, 2025 as the moment Canada ran out of hockey analogies… (also known as the end of high-schticking?)

I have five items on hold to pick up at the library. It's gonna be such a fun evening

Through all the fake news, through all the algorithmic outrage, I've never been so mad at my experience on social media as when I'm forced to endure dozens of ads daily that a human couldn't even bother to write

LOOKING at this website SOUNDS noisy in my brain blazetype.eu

Because Elon is so terrible at his job, he will be paid more to incent him to do better! Neoliberal orthodox economists used to condescendingly explain to me that high comp was tied to value creation and rewards talent, rather than rent seeking and insular networks that reward themselves. Woops.

Things about the science of longitude I didn't know: * Spain, the Netherlands, and France all had public funds for breakthroughs * these funds were used for many small prizes, for setting up institutions, and to test new innovations, not just for one big prize Read @rhiggitt.bsky.social:

I’m begging you all to consider that tolls affect congestion

Scott called this "one of the best things I've read all year, and the first thing on Alzheimers that makes me actually feel like I understand something".

it will be an amazing plot twist when ticks, not humans or AI systems, end up saving the world

well, TTC's 2024 ridership data is now out, and here are the 10 busiest bus routes by daily boardings: 1. 39/939 finch east - 43k 2. 52/952 lawrence west - 42k 3. 29/929 dufferin - 41k 4. 36 finch west - 40k 5. 35/935 jane - 37k 6. 54/954 lawrence east - 34k 1/3

Reading widely helps in unexpected ways: because I just finished a 2016 book by an Australian philosopher of science, I understood a reference to the primatologist Wolfgang Köhler in a work of a Spanish essayist from 1930

POV: it's August, and you want to buy music from a publisher in France

experts in how Bloomberg Businessweek works — is this article (published online June 6) going to be in the print edition? I looked in the July print edition and can't find it. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

People are now regularly spelling "re-send" without a hyphen. In the past tense this creates so much potential for confusion—a fact I resent.

Savoring that moment in a meeting when an administrator pulls up income/career data on graduates of a "practical" business degree & pulls up, on an impulse, Philosophy as an impractical degree for comparison. Friends, the data quite emphatically did not show what he thought they would show.

Harsh but fair

learning a lot about the Kamchatka Peninsula rn

Interesting to see null results here, not what I would have expected. Also interesting that they focused on the pre-registered metrics in their paper, which is of course how this should work but in practice not how this is always done.

"One or two"

If only spammers knew that for some faculty this is the opposite of a phishing email

If there's one place Canadian universities can make bank from the Trump chaos, it's probably going to be in executive education, as foreign multinationals don't want their staff subject to ICE hell. Rotman & Sauder may do very well indeed.