"You bring the judgment"

Jesus Christ this is the most chilling thing I've read in ages. The "new understanding of truth" described here is not new in any way, it is basically a return to pre-literate dark ages & the inevitable result is going to be fascism.

Good news, everyone! I have a short piece coming out in The Conversation on Monday that explains the main issues with this study. It's impossible for me to have the same media reach as the original press release. So I'd be extremely grateful if people could help me share it as widely as possible 🙏

This recent - and deeply flawed - study on the effect of 'arts engagement' on 'aging' may seem like harmless 'fun'. But it's not. There are serious consequences. 1/6 🧵

Fascinated to learn that the favoured cultural pursuits of the middle classes are, in fact, biologically good. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap

I DO NOT WANT TO 'CHAT WITH MY FILES'

We are hiring at the Dept of Sociology @uniluzern.bsky.social ! Applications for Assistant Professor of Sociology with a focus on “Communication and Sociological Theory" (100%, tenure track) are due May 29, 2026 www.unilu.ch/en/universit...

Job announcement: Three Lecturers in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester Details, including the full job description and person specification, are available here: www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

“Someone who cannot criticise the actions of the Israeli government without suggesting that British Jews should be punished for those actions is, at a basic level, incompetent.” Hear, hear @stephenkb.bsky.social as.ft.com/r/a0177a88-e...

"She was pleased"

Who do Americans spend time with? This changes a lot over the course of their lives. 🧵

Tenure Track Assistant Professor position in Quantitative Sociology of Work & Labor Markets. Come join @demosocupf.bsky.social www.upf.edu/web/politiqu...

They're looking for people with strong quant skills (psych/sociology/related fields) to work on subjective well-being across the lifecourse at Uni Lausanne! 1 PhD position + 1 Postdoc position career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree... career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

Newcastle Green Party election candidate Tina Ion’s racist anti-Jewish and anti-Afghan posts are shocking enough, but she is also behind a spoof Anne Frank account on Meta’s Threads platform that takes her antisemitic bile to another level altogether. 🧵

"The Department of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology seeks to appoint one permanent Lecturer post with expertise relevant to criminology and/or critical social policy to join our department in the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool." www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRJ047/l...

BREAKING: University of Sussex wins judicial review of OfS free speech fine. High Court overturns English regulator’s decision to impose £585,000 fine. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

The FT @financialtimes.com is hiring a new data journalist to join our US data and visuals team in New York. Great job, great team, great place to work. Apply here 👉 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X. I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!). So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.) This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

Before rent deregulation in the late 1970s, average rents were about 11% of average earnings. This rose sharply after deregulation, and the high rent-to-income ratios have been the norm since. This is the structural problem.

The absurd and unjustified growth in top university grades has undermined the value of a degree as well as damaging the reputation of the HE sector. My new @hepi-news.bsky.social report explains how to unwind this concerning development: bit.ly/4mBraMN

Bravo

"...we show that multimodal AI systems can appear to see when they do not, reason about images that were never provided, and achieve high benchmark scores without genuine visual access." arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

Regular reminder that the UK’s ban on gay people serving in the armed forces was only lifted after a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights👇 🔗 www.bbc.com/news/article... Surprising how often people don't mention that.

Whoa. "[F]inetuning exclusively on Haruki Murakami's novels unlocks verbatim recall of copyrighted books from over 30 unrelated authors...Our findings offer compelling evidence that model weights store copies of copyrighted works." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Still wondering if inequality is out of control?

What it should've said "Subsequently, 1mL of the final solution was added to 20mL of the skin sample and exposed to light for 7 min." The final (reaction) solution!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeesh

What an unusual use of the word 'predictably'.

Three excellent things have just happened: 1) the Rycroft Review of pol finance has been published 2) govt is implementing key changes with immediate effect 3) those changes got cross-party support in the Commons. Careful scrutiny of the detail will now be essential. www.gov.uk/government/p...

..Rents now are a third higher (33%) than they were in Feb 2021, and 46% higher than where they were in 2016. The average rent is now £1,374, up from £942 in 2016, meaning the average family is spending £432 more a month on rents.

I always had the vague feeling that Scientific Reports and Nature Communications are mainly APC business models. A paper estimated the total APC for gold/hybrid Open Access per journal 2015–2018: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Surprise, surprise - there are 2 outliers at the top😐

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

Oh boy

Reform MP Sarah Pochin says she wanted to come to the party's Scottish conference in a "tartan burka" but was stopped from doing so. "One day lets have one of these events that is not livestreamed and we'll do all the naughty stuff"

they'll be convenient enemies regardless of what they do, that's playing out in the states right now. you can bend over backwards to appease fascists and it will never work, because their whole ideology is irrational and premised on the idea of purging enemies. they need enemies to function

"English cream! Creamy England!" youtu.be/znmjnEMqHeg?...

Maybe next year... friend.com

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Crazy crazy story. Times of Israel reporter ( English language Israeli news site ) gets escalating death threats to change story that’s at center of big polymarket bet. www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-try...

The NHS is making me sick

What in the absolute fuck is this.