So, Pete Hegseth - an alcoholic, wife abusing, rapist, white supremacist tattoo-covered shitbag whose own mother hates him - spent millions of taxpayer $$$ to get all the country's top military leaders in a room to rant at them about "standards". Even for MAGA... lol www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

#AcademicSky Not read @lindatropp.bsky.social 's new #ERSP article yet, but even the title excites me. Getting us to reaffirm our commitment to the public good. How could that advice be bad? To regain lost public trust, the public good *should* be in mind www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

Here are some things that Charlie Kirk said in his life. The man is dead, and so it only seems fair to share his legacy by cataloguing the values he spread while alive.

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

I don't think ppl have grasped how far into fascism the US already is. They've taken over the universities in Florida & Texas. They've successfully turned ICE & the FBI into paramilitary forces. The courts are stacked with loyalist judges. Trump will be running the country until he dies.

Early prediction: Trump will use Kirk's death as a pretext to ramp up the authoritarianism for the midterms next year. Expect armed "poll watchers" (FBI, ICE, and local militias) aggressively checking IDs and intimidating folks in the name of "preventing left wing political violence."

PhD post! 2 students sought to join the BIRES project, taking a body image intervention developed in Nicaragua and Colombia and examining how (and if!) It can be adapted in other LatAm and African youth. Please share with your students. #PsychSciSky #Anthropology www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Unfathomably gross. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/u...

Wild that this isn't even front page news today. I mean, what are the rules now? Can the president... unilaterally execute anyone accused of drug-crime...? Is it international waters? Is it non-citizens? Is it the seriousness of the crime? Where's the line here...? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/u...

My #FutureLearn course — 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 — is now live! I've been talking a lot about how much value #BehaviouralScience can bring to businesses. With that in mind, I put together a 3-week crash course in behavioural science at work. Check it out! www.futurelearn.com/courses/beha...

It is risky for Dems, but not because there's a crime problem. It's politically risky because 🇺🇸 has a racism problem. Targeting racial minorities is hugely popular with Republicans. Putting a Black majority city like DC "in its place" is red meat for Trump's base.

A senior administration official, as well as other officials, told Rolling Stone that it is a priority of Trump that these kinds of military deployments -- in times of relative calm -- become normalized in American political culture. More: rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

How could anyone have possibly thought the military would stand up to Trump? How could someone with such stupid thoughts be a high ranking government official? The ignorance of the political establishment in the States is mindboggling. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/o...

If by "arbitrarily", you mean "in a calculated appeal to its racist and anti-intellectual base", then sure.

Grunge is by far the most enduringly cool musical era. Imagine any other major era-defining musician - for the most part, they'd be cringe if they dropped right now. Kurt Cobain could do exactly the same everything as 1993 and he'd still be the coolest guy in the world in 2025.

Can't get over how dumb this article is. "Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’" www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/w...

This is clearly crisis PR after all the attempted boat sinking last year. The ability to control the media narrative is famously a key indicator of higher order cognition. www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

The challenge is polarisation, in the same way slavery was an intractable disagreement on the nature of the country with no plausible compromise. GOP voters cannot abide a multicultural society where White ppl aren't the majority or dominant sociocultural force. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

All Texas Republicans, along with of course Donald Trump, oversaw the gutting of the National Weather Service's local forecasting capacity that could have saved dozens of lives here. The media shouldn't let them move on from this with the next news cycle. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/u...

No matter how much you want to hate the premise of a hot dog eating contest on principle, it's just impossible with quotes like this from the competitors: "𝑂𝑏𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑦, 𝐼'𝑚 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑠𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑦 𝑔𝑜𝑎𝑙𝑠 ℎ𝑖𝑔ℎ, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑜𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑔𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛'𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔."

Democrats (and the liberal intelligentsia in general) refuse to understand that the vast majority of voters follow very little political news and have no understanding of how any particular bill or law affects them. This won't move the needle at all. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/u...

There's a 0.0% chance that any Trump supporter ever holds Republicans accountable for the outcomes of this bill. They will blame Democrats and immigrants and continue to vote Republican. Article is such a wild overestimation of the average voter's competence. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

I'm a broken record on this, but the Constitutional Crisis was 2016-2024, and the Constitution lost. We're now in the post-Constitutional crisis.

Let's be really clear here. Authoritarian politics just won again. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u...

This ruling is disgusting. It's just an endorsement of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, plain and simple. Kids in public schools will learn about the human condition from their peers and neighbors anyway. All opting out does is signal the parents' hatred for queer kids and their families.

Important to note that the conservative members of the Supreme Court (6/9) don't expect there will ever be another Democratic president. I don't know what other evidence you could possibly need to acknowledge that the aim is fascism. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06...

I appreciate the neutrality of @nytimes.com, but this is just silly. You've got a few trump apparatchiks with a documented history of constantly lying about everything vs. the consensus opinion of 99% of economists + observable objective reality. You don't have to report those two sides as equal 😮‍💨

New study finds that using ChatGPT to write essays led to reduced brain activity & memory compared to writing without tools or using a search engine. While ChatGPT made writing easier, it also caused cognitive offloading, weakening learning and engagement over time. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

There is simply not enough attention on the central motivation of the Trump regime, which is that he has a right to rule untethered from popular consent, and places where dissent is concentrated are unnatural and must be broken and subjugated

This is terribly sad, but I fear we'll see more & more right-wing political violence. The Jan 6 pardons, Marines on city streets, political violence & assassinations... It's all part of the plan. For MAGA, the next 3.5 years aren't about policy or governance. It's about breaking the opposition.

My favourite lecture ever was "Introduction to Behavioural Economics" for third years, where I spent two hours taking the piss out of economists for acting like they discovered the entire field of psychology in 2009.

Nobody's had a more significant influence on pop music over the past 60 years than Brian Wilson. Turn on the radio today and you hear more Beach Boys influence than the Beatles. Could listen to Pet Sounds for days.

LLMs are obviously impressive, but also kind of not really. They're basically really good at bullshitting. They write essays like a student who's rephrasing other people's words w/o really knowing what they mean. Maybe this will change, but so far, I've found spotting ChatGPT'd work very obvious.

The dimwittedness of Democrat strategists still astounds me all these months later. They really believed Liz Cheney and a focus on grocery store prices were going to win over Trump voters.

Some wider lessons here for anyone reconsidering their commitment to #DEI under pressure from authoritarian, ethnonationalist politics. In an unprecedented move, Florida’s Board of Governors rejected the university’s President-Elect, Dr Santa Ono despite the UF Board of Trustees endorsing him...

Such an indictment on the state of journalism in 🇬🇧 that the media have moved so quickly to blaming Labour for societal issues that are obviously the result of 14 years of Conservative rule.

In the class where I teach about the limitations of markets, I do an anonymous poll of who students think are the customers at universities - almost 100% say students Leads to a good discussion about positive externalities & how states used to fund universities because it benefitted society...

"Many world-transforming Silicon Valley technologies from the past 30 years have been promoted as a way to increase human happiness, connection, and self-understanding—in theory—only to produce the opposite in practice." www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺

Can't wait to read pieces from conservative establishment apologists for the rest of my life. Waxing on about the moral and intellectual backbone of the Federalist Society... Give me a fucking break 🤮 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/o...

"Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year."

I've always been a big em dash guy, so I'm a bit annoyed that Chat-GPT has for some reason decided that they're its thing. Flattered that the machines have chosen me to emulate, but annoyed nonetheless.

I am hiring for a new researchers on my @nuffieldfoundation.org young carers project. Closes 4thJune. After someone with strong quant longitudinal skills, passion for communicating research beyond academia & wants to work with people w lived experience/other sectors jobs.sgul.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Ross Douthat is so fascinating. One of the country's most prominent columnists for decades, yet has rarely said anything insightful. Dramatically wrong about or misdiagnosed nearly every political happening. Yet somehow, he continues to be featured more & more prominently at @nytimes.com.

I feel bad for parmesan and feta cheese sometimes. Top-tier cheeses whose reputations have been ruined by cheap supermarket imitations. They're victims of their own success.

💥 BREAKING: The Heritage Foundation withdrew its anti-DEI proposal to IBM for shareholder vote today, originally submitted for vote at IBM's annual meeting. Why Heritage withdrew its anti-DEI proposal is unknown. Earlier today, shareholders at American Express voted to reject an anti-DEI proposal.

Watched Conclave tonight. Controversial take, but I thought the final act was overly contrived and Lithgow and Tucci were miscast. Impressive effort from Fiennes tho.

I've seen this tweet a million times, and I've never not laughed. Really just hits home.

I remain 90% convinced that the US is irrevocably headed toward some modern version of fascism, but this is at least a compelling argument to go down fighting. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Nation Can’t Believe It On Harvard’s Side