Oh. My. God. www.popsci.com/environment/...

No surprise GWAR’s critics don’t know indie rock history but they might have at least read Bakhtin on carnivals

When GWAR sent Shimmy Disc a demo it came with a VHS tape of them mock beheading news anchors on their local tv station in Richmond VA. That was 35 years ago, and the mock beheadings never stopped. (We once played a Richmond club the day after their show, the stage was sticky with fake blood)

My paper, with Kareem Khalifa, "Does Functional Connectivity Explain?" is accepted for publication in Synthese! @philsci.bsky.social @epsaphilsci.bsky.social @natneuro.nature.com @nunetsi.bsky.social @danisbassett.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social @hoposjournal.bsky.social @ishpssb.bsky.social

(an angelic halo envelops me as I subtweet): When I’m in a rush I just read the abstract

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

As ever, we are lawyerly advocates of the properties of objects

For the psychologists in my zone: Now is a good time to reflect on how the American Psychological Association enabled torture circa 2005, to think about why that happened and pre-commit to refusal theconversation.com/how-the-larg...

Remembering when I read all the Pynchon I could, except Mason & Dixon, because I was told it was written in an impenetrable dialect. Happy now to find the prose a pure delight—the 1760s filtered through 1960s underground comix, history and seriousness through a cloud of weed-smoke and laughter

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

The profusion of Catholic mystery in The Book of the New Sun feels very resonant now. In so many video games where progress reveals fictional religious knowledge, but also in our fragmented internet micro-subcultures that leverage illegibility and confusion to create an evangelical aura

Helen DeWitt says, “programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England.” statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/14/h...

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

Q: Is extremism electorally beneficial in primary elections? A: All else equal, Dems' & Reps' primary vote share decreases with $ network extremism. However, no penalty is apparent for Reps' campaign platform extremism, & platform extremism is actually *beneficial* to Dems.

Delighted to discover that "Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism" is now available online from JOP 🧵 @thejop.bsky.social Gated: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... Ungated: mellissameisels.com/files/MM_PCP...

a thing I have found increasingly important over the past decade: there is no amount of political or intellectual sophistication that will survive giving into the "history is driven by the people I find personally annoying" impulse

diggin in the crates doesn't have to mean literally digging in the crates. sometimes it's about finding those CD rips you made on an external HD when you were 14.

This is an important corrective to vibes-based, purely reactive political discourse: Democrats mostly do not say the things they are criticized for saying. And when they do, it’s mostly on issues like food, housing, and civil rights.

Motorists will demand replacing a bike lane with a car lane even though it adds a zipper merge because bad merging is a perfectly natural personal failing of other drivers, whereas bike lanes are a tyrannical imposition of the state So many other things are like this. Housing, drugs, policing, etc.

Homeless camps are a policy failure, but "clearing homeless camps" isn't a policy solution, it's the state harassing people for the crime of embarrassing the state with its policy failure.

Since I posted this list of modern indie puzzle books (and adjacent works), a few new stellar works have been released and few older ones were discovered, so I'm posting an updated list in the comments:

Nick Offerman, M Gurloes Luis Guzmán, M Palaemon Timothée Chalamet, Vodalus Gwendoline Christie, Thecla Tilda Swinton, Agia/Agilus Pamela Anderson, Jolenta Hunter Schafer, Dorcas Terry Notary, Baldanders Daniel Day Lewis, Dr Talos Joaquin Phoenix, Jonas Jake Paul, Severian Daniel Radcliffe, Hethor

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Many of the good answers here (Clint Eastwood, Mishima, Norm MacDonald) created work that richly considered widely felt emotional pain and how that pain can change people. But they mistakenly thought the logical, implicit, obvious endpoint of that consideration was tragic, isolated individualism

Woke up in the middle of the night from a dream about a novelty music act called Greg & Nate who had a Nine Inch Nails parody record called Pretty Nate Machine

Direct your research. Forge lifelong connections. Apply for the 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent PhD graduates with quantitative and computational skills interested in theoretical collaborative research. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Performative non-alignment is just insecure alignment

bro this sucks. what i once suspected to be passion might in fact be madness

(very) big if true

One of my deeply held beliefs is that if we could condition people to accept how chance affects their lives, they’d be much better equipped to recognize how systemic things impact them.

Reading Book of the New Sun and watching The Sopranos has brought me into contact with the problematic male viewpoint character discourse, and I’m noticing a scarcely mentioned dynamic. Typically, a progressive moral critic will say something like

The Bitterviper album is out today on Blue Chopsticks, my long distance collab with David Grubbs, Taku Unami, and Nikos Veliotis. Find it on Bandcamp and all other places where you find music! bitterviper.bandcamp.com/album/bitter...

New preprint! We developed new measurement tools to examine moralization in ~2B Twitter/X & Reddit posts and ~5M traditional media texts. Key finding: moralization increased markedly on social media from 2013-2021; more than traditional media; associated with multiple user dynamics 🧵👇

There should be personal, professional, and legal consequences in America for repeatedly publicly lying

A world where individuals are rewarded for making huge and dubious logical leaps, and where journalists are so hamstrung by defensive humility that they only report what people say and never whether it is true or even feasible, is bad

No stronger proof of social decay than reading a novel packed with beautiful prose and then checking out what people say about it on Goodreads

I love the audacity of some nature/science papers on psych "you're wondering about nature v nurture? cool we studied ALL THE KIDS IN FRANCE" (upshot is that sex differences in math performance are driven by schooling, not age) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Major surgical procedures at private equity acquired (PEA) centers were associated with relatively worse patient outcomes." PEA hospitals saw 13% more complications, 7% more of which lead to death, 13% higher 90-day readmission rates, and 17% higher 90-day mortality.

To not lose track of reality, people probably need a community of friends, a community of practice, and also a bunch of randomly distributed obligations to acquaintances, coworkers, close and distant family members, friends of friends, and total strangers

I keep on wanting to say things—online and off—that add up to "No conspiracy is necessary to explain how messed up these institutions are," but it's hard to say that without sounding like I'm defending the institutions, which need to be replaced. Shoutout to everyone struggling with this right now.

One worry I have about the, like, left-tech-elite ritual of invoking Goodhart’s law to explain institutional failure is that it can deemphasize the role of bad faith Measures don’t simply fail on their own, people actively undermine them. Successful measurement requires a culture to sustain it.

Let’s goooooo

This is an old friend from grad school: an earthenware bowl in the collection of @metmuseum.org made in 10th century Nishapur, Iran. It has an inscription in Arabic that reads “Planning before work protects you from regret; prosperity and peace.” 🖤

Big turnout in Oakland; a delightful motley of people with a thousand reasons to be here

Fascinating new work on human universals. I've long felt the field lurching toward a nature-nurture synthesis, understanding abstract capacities as innate and concrete instantiations of those capacities as culturally constructed (+ a shared core). This looks like an important step in that direction