Used a thesaurus a bit and checked that one or two of my answers were right, but I have finally completed a cryptic crossword.

Philosophers everywhere cringing at this headline

Hannah asked me if I was going to insist on watching The Holdovers again this Christmas. For some reason, this article sprang to mind.

Often when I tell people I study freshwater mussels, the first question they ask is “Can you eat them?” This is not surprising, but it’s also not the most important question. davoh.medium.com/whats-a-muss...

An appropriate time to reshare this (open access) article on fandom making us vulnerable to exploitation. Full article: Fans and fanaticism: the vulnerability of devotion and sportswashing as exploitation www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It is basic criminology that if a punishment is to deter crime it must be relatively likely you get caught and it must happen reasonably soon after the crime is committed, traffic cameras do both. People hate them because they work lol.

Inspirational

This is a great listen. Realistic and eyes wide open to all that is wrong with football, but still optimistic.

🧵 It's almost a joke. Entshittification by @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy - I order the book, but it doesn't ship for weeks, despite being 'In Stock'. The expected delivery date is changed to May 26, even though the book is still allegedly 'In Stock'. - It suddenly arrives. The postman doesn't...

A fun piece of likely plagiarism from a student: "In *Why It's Ok to Be a Sports Fan* Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso..." The problem is that the authors are Alfred Archer and... Me.

Is a good recording of Stoppard's Arcadia available anywhere?

Who should have won the FIFA peace prize? There must be plenty of people who have used football for good in this last year...

It’s funny that outside academic philosophy, if someone says they’re into metaphysics, it means they probably believe they have supernatural powers, but inside it means they probably spend all their time trying to figure out what sort of thing a table is

Let's hope building appropriate transportation networks does better than the USMNT likely will at the World Cup...

Suffered the same fate, so I'm on the lookout for work. In my 6+ years at Forbes I covered EPL, especially Liverpool, Everton and Man City, international tournaments, and US soccer including lower leagues. I'm uniquely placed ahead of 2026 World Cup given my reporting history and areas of expertise.

Easy to ask for money, hard to summarize the work we've done to earn your trust over the past year (never mind the seven before that). A thread that highlights some of the essays that took off since Trump was reelected.

Sack mead and cyser

BBC Sport doing Big Football’s bidding again today with a hit piece about the dangers of counterfeit shirts because ‘you could come out in a rash’ wearing one. Reading the room yet again

The is a reason normal people are being forced into buying dodgy sticks and blag footy kits Football use to be affordable, live matches were free on BBC & ITV Everything has been made less accessible through legit channels Telling people you might get a rash from a £12 kit so buy the £110 one 🤮

Love it when an author writes a really clear letter alongside their R&R resubmission. Conversely: please do not write really shit letters.

Need a Christmas gift for the sports fan in your life? A mere $20 (and probably cheap in pounds, too)! www.routledge.com/Why-Its-OK-t...

Is there any good philosophy stuff about why AI is bad (or even good) in the humanities classroom and beyond? I'm teaching an entirely asynchronous intro to philosophy class next year, and I'm fed up of the AI crap in student assignments, so I want to address it intellectually.

I have received a single-paragraph email with the following forms of emphasis: Brown text, bold, bigger, underlined. Bold (x2). Bold, bigger, underlined, italic. Underlined. Red, bold, italic. Red. Bigger, bold. Painful to try to understand what is important here!

As a reminder, the traditional gift to the philosopher in your life on World Philosophy Day is cash

my wife just said "the larry summers of our discontent" and i had to sit down for a minute

My favorite ever letter of recommendation is one Ficino wrote in the late 1500s, recommending a pupil for a secretary job with King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, in which he says the young man is “the reincarnation of Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

Someone needs to create a guide to Wilson books as Christmas presents. The Outsider for your mad uncle. The Names Heard Long Ago for my wife who speaks some Hungarian, etc.

Not long now till Christmas. Imagine the joy on their faces if they open a biography of the Charltons on Christmas morning… www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Brothers...

Watching the Ken Burns American Revolution documentary. I'm planning to watch as a partisan.

Excellent discovery yesterday that FIFA 26 (or whatever it's called) is on sale *and* I had enough blood money to buy it.* *This is what I call the gift cards I get when I give blood.

Impressed by this Frenchman's 28 hour days.

BBC News bulletins leading on the story of an Algerian man being mistakenly released by the prison service. Funnily enough I don't remember these cases ever leading the bulletins when an average of ten prisoners were mistakenly released a month in the final year of the last Government

What does it mean to be a member of a fan community, and why does this matter? Preprint up on PhilPapers: philpapers.org/rec/WOJFAC

Latest papers: Jake Wojtowicz, Alfred Archer & Kyle Fruh sketch the similarities between fandom and fanaticism and argue that sports fandom is often a form of fanaticism in this open access article doi.org/10.1080/0951...

My word but the BBC used to make some really good programmes. Here on the BBC iPlayer you can get Bryan Magee's 1987 'The Great Philosophers' series, where you can (as I currently am doing) watch Sydney Morgenbesser talking about Peirce, James and Dewey. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

The London Business School might want to rethink the name of this course. www.london.edu/executive-ed...

I am an avid sports jersey collector. What is the favorite jersey in YOUR collection? Please include pic!

Vertical queueing at the market is a disgrace. Bring back civility.

So, the plan is to cut English, the arts, and sociology - the degrees that actually study culture - while on another part of your platform claiming to “defend” British culture. It’s performance nationalism with a reading age of seven.

A little odd to be in an anthology next to Barack Obama. I'm sure he feels honoured.

It helps to be able to spell the country you say only you are competent enough to run.

I see two big differences between this and sportswashing: 1. We *love* and also root for sports teams, tournaments have a historical mythos about them. I don't think that quite translates. 2. Video games are way more interactive. Interested to hear more. theconversation.com/what-saudi-a...

Another classic at Daily Nous. Someone does point out that this first comment was likely a joke..

My review of Paddy McQueen's excellent "Regret" is out in Ethics www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

My review of Paddy McQueen's excellent "Regret" is out in Ethics www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Having an open access book is so helpful for teaching. I can set my own stuff without feeling like I'm doing it for evil reasons (the massive amounts of money I get whenever anyone buys a copy)

Dave Matthews has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

Why are they advertising this as "FIFA" tickets. It's the World Cup!

Watching a Swindon episode of Come Dine with Me. Painful.