Pinker’s shtick is eloquently projecting mischaracterizations of topics that knows nothing about into the public sphere. He masquerades as an expert, despite never seriously engaging with the fields he critiques. He’s the Trump of popular science writing. www.currentaffairs.org/news/steven-...

I have now read this piece and it is very good. Massive respect for @merenbey.bsky.social and Iva for their persistence and documenting this torturous process. Highly recommended reading for anyone who cares about reproducibility in science.

With administrators like these, who needs an oppositional anti-intellectual influence campaign conducted over the course of decades by right-wing elites

Big news on same-sex marriage outcomes delivered by Ben Karney (co-author of Bradbury & Karney's Intimate Relationships published by W. W. Norton) www.latimes.com/opinion/stor... #samesexmarriage #psychresearch #socialpsych

It's official. The Democratic Party is divided on continued military support for Israel, and leaning in the direction of withdrawing support. If you care about this issue, you should call your senator and praise or complain, depending.

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states! Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A @uclbrainscience.bsky.social

1/4 There is a neo-Nazi concert — NSBM, i.e., National Socialist Black Metal — planned to take place in Romania🇷🇴 in July 2026. 'Wallachian Gates', as per the promoters on the Facebook and (now private) Instagram page, is scheduled for July 10-11 in Buzǎu, a small city 1.5-2h from Bucharest

Oh another day of being an American completely at odds with every orientation of his country.

Tomorrow in Oxford I'm going to be taking about the somewhat surprising relations between inner speech and felt presence... Come along and be as surprised as me! The excellent @rritunnano.bsky.social will also be presenting something much more coherent than me. www.eventbrite.com/e/language-a...

New from us: A special issue on secondary ("organic") psychosis just published in Schizophrenia Research - edited by Graham Blackman and me, but very much led by Graham: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Excellent articles on pressing clinical and scientific issues from a host of authors👇

#AlphabetChallenge #WeekEforEponymous LANEY Amplification was founded in 1967 by Lyndon Laney while playing bass guitar in 'Band of Joy' with Robert Plant and John Bonham. Lyndon's intense interest in electronics led to his building what would become the first Laney amp in his father's garage.

So am now left, like Carrie Bradshaw, wondering: how is it possible that there are men out there - thousands, perhaps millions of men out there - arguing for the benefits of something they literally, by their own admission, don't understand, and believe to be beyond understanding? How are we here?

1/ It's totally understandable that people (me too!) are excited about the end of the Orbán era – 16 years of autocratic rule are over. But Magyar is definitely still "one to watch". LGBTQ+ rights: Magyar hasn't really taken a stance on Orbán's Pride ban.

OTD 2008 Lou Reed married Laurie Anderson in a friend's backyard in Boulder. In 2015 Laurie shared the couple's 3 rules to live by:

One of the most horrific things I've ever read.

Arena is set for an extremely simple version of an assortative mating experience complete with data gathering. The Pairing Game, you can find it from the early 90s in the teaching of psych literature.

Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility www.nber.org/papers/w3269...

It's worth noting here that these aren't bombings. This is demolition The IDF are able to freely walk around here and rig these obviously residential properties with demolition explosives, so it's not like there's any threat at all to them This is, VERY clearly, the war crime of wanton destruction

Nominative Determinism klaxon!

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

Reminder! The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) hosts summaries of what we know vs don't about a host of fascinating issues. All freely available. What a terrific alternative to doomscrolling: learning about (e.g.) The Mind-Body problem, Delusion, or Free Will. oecs.mit.edu

Seems like the lesson that the Trump admin took from 2025 was “we can just do things. No one can stop us, and the consequences won’t hit us personally.” And that was also the lesson they took from Venezuela. “Lol we can do whatever. Consequences aren’t real.” The Strait of Hormuz upends all that.

Scorsese seems particularly prone to this, where he’ll make a movie who’s message is essentially “these are awful, flawed men, who through violence and deceit briefly achieve riches then destroy themselves and those around them” and the rightwing movie viewer comes away with “wow successful man”

Protip: When you think you’ve watered in enough, water a little more. ‘tis the season.

One motivation for the study was to show how traditional behavioral genetic methods that have treated divorce as an individual-level outcome may have overestimated the effects of family history because they do not account for the effect of the (correlated) spouse.

Can we estimate assortative mating for outcomes shared by partners? Yes we can! In a new paper together with @philippdierker.bsky.social, I find that individuals with similar liabilities to divorce are more likely to get married in the first place!

Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.

If our "best" options are to become adversarial to our students, we are well and truly f**ked.

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is obscene, carpet bombing civilians, massacring people in their hundreds, total disregard for human life. Truly plumbing the depths of evil. The single greatest source of violence and instability in the region and it's not even close.

Because no mistake — nudification is sexual violence. Imagine being in middle school and having your peers spread fake nude photos of you. No consent, no boundaries, and no care of how that impacts you. It’s horrific. And we need to do way more to address this. 6/

Before the war, Witkoff and Kushner were offered a deal that would have seen Iran handing over all its enriched uranium, international monitoring, and no interference in the Strait of Hormuz. They turned it down. Because the US was never serious about those negotiations Trump wanted a war.

Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, who is leading the delegation, made it clear earlier that negotiations wouldn’t even begin if the US didn’t agree to unfreeze Iranian assets. So we’ll see who has the cards.

I just woke up from a really immersive fieldwork dream where I was on the trail system at Taï National Park and then remembered that the NSF is no longer going to fund biological anthropology.

men can’t understand what it’s like for women to see story after story after story of women being victims of sexual violence in a culture where it’s routine; what it’s like to live in a world that is fundamentally hostile to our existence. it’s a wonder we leave the fucking house, let alone thrive.

@mcgritterson.industries there were about 40 productive plants along 24 ft of this wall last year (after two different deer incursions).

6 days (in 16 sec) of the “long view” of much of the melon project. I’d tested the Atli X10 elsewhere in the hoop for 7 days before beginning this sequence (every ten min.) Still had 35% battery life left! You see a second Atli X10 get placed in the upper left after 1 day for a close-up view.

Part of the reason they're so good is the Russians are helping them. The Russians have been mapping the social, political, economic, religious, demographic, gender, etc fault lines in American society & exploiting them in their own influence ops. Helping Iran, allows Russia to help themselves.

The Presidential Budget Request for FY2027 calls for dismantling NSF's Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Directorate — and reports suggest it could start this year. @cossa.bsky.social is hosting a Town Hall on April 14 and SPSP members are encouraged to attend! RSVP: https://ow.ly/sFYH50YH3Fl

📣SPSP Members📣 Check out the Action Alert from @cossa.bsky.social below to learn how you can advocate for protecting the SBE Directorate at NSF. (More action items to come from SPSP and our partner organizations soon!) #WhySocialScience #SaveSBE

A century of hair samples shows how sharply lead exposure fell after modern environmental rules took hold in the US. A PNAS study found that current lead concentrations in hair from Utah’s Wasatch Front are almost 100 times lower than before the EPA was established. buff.ly/odLXa0j #ShareGoodNewsToo

“But, as you see, it's a beautiful day, the Strait of Hormuz will be open in two months, and people are having a wonderful time.”

GastroPy is now out in early beta! Please to share our Python toolbox for electrogastrography and stomach-brain coupling analyses. It includes tools for cleaning, visualising, and analysing EGG data, plus fMRI stomach-brain coupling workflows. Docs, code, and preprint below. osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is great, and very important for the Field!

Red shouldered hawk spoiling the fun for the others. 🪶😎

This is what we're setting fire to earth and destroying economies for. Got it. Excellent.

I had the experience of being cited in a publication, and the paper credited to me was a hallucination. I told the author, they blamed their co-author and then ghosted me, and no response at all from the journal. Some people don't care as long as they get published...

New paper: we propose a theory to help explain variation in democratic backsliding. We look at the case of Russia, Israel, & the US. We posit that collective memories about democracy influence models of collective action. advances.in/psychology/1... Led by the brill Neil Lavie-Driver @advances.in

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... "mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation."

Just Gal Pals! The Differential Treatment of Sexual Behavior Among Nonhuman Great Apes onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...