The European Parliament voting to support an EU fund that expands access to abortion, allowing women from countries where it’s restricted or banned to obtain care in another member state, free of charge, has to be some of the best news of the year.

@katiejgln.bsky.social substack about women's skepticism re AI is great, comparing women's adoption rates of AI to adoption rates of similar tech and citing all my favorite sources about the ways AI tools systematically reinforce bias. open.substack.com/pub/thenoosp...

@katiejgln.bsky.social thenoosphere.substack.com/p/how-corpor...

Over 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists had been granted access to the recent UN climate summit, COP30, significantly outnumbering almost every single country’s delegation, except the host, Brazil. Why do we keep allowing massive corporations to keep hijacking the climate agenda, over and over again?

When humans interact with AI labelled as female, they’re more likely to exploit it than when the same system is labelled male, a recent study (Bazazi et al. 2025) finds.

The 'man the protector' myth has really only ever meant one thing: men in power protecting other men in power from the consequences of their actions. The Epstein scandal is a clear illustration of that dynamic, too.

Someone should run a study to find out how many people understand how much a billion (one thousand million) and a trillion (one million million) are, and then make the participants complete some exercises estimating how many lifetimes a person could comfortably live on each of these figures.

Erysichthon, mythical king of Thessaly, once ordered his men to cut down trees sacred to Ceres so he could expand his palace and host larger feasts. His hunger for more eventually led him to devour everything around him and himself. America has its own Erysichthon now. And he's in the White House.

I fear the biggest ‘legacies’ of our era will be plastic waste and chicken bones and AI slop and more plastic waste.

I still sometimes find it hard to believe that we live in a world run by assholes and idiots and clowns because they managed to convince so many people that the fact that our world seems to be run by assholes and idiots and clowns is not their fault, but those with the least power and money.

It wasn’t brute strength or ruthless competition that helped our ancestors survive, even in the most unforgiving conditions. It was caring for one another and sticking together.

‘Fascism hates women just as much as it needs them. And it needs most of them on their knees, scrubbing both factory floors and their own kitchens, and working day and night to birth and feed and raise the next generation so that those in power can spend very little while accumulating a lot .’

So far there are already more men named John than women among this year’s Nobel Prize winners. Considering there was only one female winner last year, I’d say the odds of breaking that pattern are, well, not great.

The growing gender gap among young people is political, yes, but it’s also cultural, personal, and rooted in struggles over power. Young women want to have power over their own lives, while some young men still equate power with dominance over others.

Jane Goodall was a pioneer, a legend, and a remarkable human being. What a loss. But I'm sure her legacy will endure for generations — including this gem of a quote: 'In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals.'

'Far too many of us today are so enamoured by the rhetoric about "freedom", we don’t realise that unlimited freedom for some actually means very little freedom for the rest of us.'

A massive new study of nearly 50,000 homes from 1,000 archaeological sites spanning 10,000 years reveals that wealth inequality was neither universal nor an inevitable consequence of population growth or progress.

I can’t help but feel that if we didn’t have to keep wasting energy arguing over things that should be common sense by now, we’d probably already be commuting on jetpacks powered by food waste or something.

Drowning people in constant, enraging noise is the whole point. You never get to step back and reflect and see the bigger picture because you're pulled too far under it all.

This idea that if you're ‘unproblematic' then you'll 'age well,' so often thrown at public figures (especially female, because, of course), is just a reheated version of the old belief that beauty equals virtue. And just as it was rubbish then, it's rubbish now.

A study of pre-industrial Swiss parish registers (Spa et al., 2025) finds that having older brothers reduced girls' chances of survival, while having older sisters had a positive effect on both girls and boys.

A recent survey once again claimed that marriage makes people — this time, women — much happier than their unmarried counterparts. But research tells a far less flattering story. Marriage’s impact on happiness is inconsistent, short-lived, and barely distinguishable from cohabitation.

Knitting is a technology, a science, and an art all at once. The same can be said for weaving, quilting, pottery, cooking, and countless other practices.

It’s predicted that women will soon control 38% of financial wealth in the US, 47% in Europe, and 39% globally, growing at about 8–10% per year. This surge is driven by ’the great wealth transfer’—a massive shift of assets, mostly from men to their surviving female spouses.

One of the key reasons people in high-income countries often forget how deeply interconnected we all are—with each other, the planet, every living thing—is because modern convenience keeps us largely insulated from reality.

It’s almost hard to believe this is happening in 2025, but at the upcoming surgeons’ conference in Poland, one of the scheduled ‘debates’ is literally whether women should be surgeons. Yet another reminder that the idea that women no longer face bias & barriers in the workplace is pure nonsense.

One fascinating new study estimated that providing decent living standards for *every* person on the planet would require just 30% of current global resource and energy use.

@katiejgln.bsky.social: "There’s a real danger in allowing our online environment to become so thoroughly polluted with digital sludge — and then rewarding people for pumping out more of it." A solid read on rampant plagiarism, AI slop and other "digital pollutants," and the pace of "the machine."

One rarely talked about cost of the relentless pursuit of beauty is its devastating impact on the planet. After the food industry, the cosmetics industry is actually the second-largest source of plastic waste globally—churning out around 120 billion units of packaging every year.

Amazing piece by @katiejgln.bsky.social. Wealth inequality is collapsing our world, while billionaires continue to exacerbate the problems their hoarding of resources creates.

In the 1970s, CEOs earned about 20 to 30 times what the average worker made. By the 1980s, that ratio had doubled to around 60 to 1. And by the 2020s, it skyrocketed to nearly 400 to 1. At this point, CEOs aren’t just getting a bigger slice of the pie — they’re eating nearly the whole thing.

A massive new study analysing the math performance of nearly 3 million children in France found that boys and girls start school with nearly identical average scores. Yet by the beginning of second grade, a significant gender gap in favour of boys has already emerged.

I find it increasingly absurd that, as a young-ish woman, I'm continuously nudged to do everything I can to prevent visible signs of ageing while also not even being sure there will be a liveable planet left to age on.

A recent study found that men who express deep nostalgia for ‘traditional’ gender roles were significantly more likely to hold biases against ‘nontraditional’ women — like working or childfree women. It was also strongly linked to misogyny and an acceptance of violence against women & trans people.

Gender norms aren't fixed truths that have existed in their current form since the dawn of time. Instead, they have continually evolved in response to the needs and goals of the societies that shaped them — and, more specifically, to the goals of those in power.

If only women voted in Poland’s presidential election yesterday, the conservative nationalist Karol Nawrocki wouldn’t have won - exit polls show that 54.2% of women backed centrist Rafał Trzaskowski, while 54.3% of men voted for Nawrocki.

Germany’s recent UBI trial showed, once again, that giving people an unconditional monthly income improves mental well-being, stress levels, sleep, and overall life satisfaction — all without reducing working hours. The myth that ‘free money’ turns people into couch potatoes simply isn't true.

This seems like a good time for a reminder that the Vatican is still the only country in the world where women have no direct say in who governs it.

A recent UK survey found that 76% of secondary and 60% of primary school teachers say they’re extremely concerned about the impact of online misogyny in their schools. We really can’t keep pretending that misogyny and other harmful patriarchal beliefs aren’t an active threat today.

If wealth and social status were the most important or attractive qualities to women, teenage girls would have posters of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other billionaires on their bedroom walls. They don’t. If anything, people who idolise wealthy and powerful men seem to be predominantly other men.

She is the mother of our youngest brothers, the #French and the #strangers. She is the mother of our #dance paraphernalia, of all our #temples and she is the #only mother we possess." The Legend of the #Kágaba people. Full essay by the amazing @katiejgln.bsky.social over on medium [paywall]:

If you go out of your way to demonise and mock empathy, you really don’t get to demand it in return when the consequences of your own shitty beliefs and actions finally catch up with you.

The clearest example of something that’s only acceptable when you’re ultra-rich: taking government money.

If you can't tell the difference between education and indoctrination, then you have clearly only ever experienced the latter.

It's really not surprising there’s such an overwhelming amount of right-wing rhetoric flooding the internet. It’s easy to churn out content when you’re not concerned with accuracy or intellectual rigour or nuance. Quantity over quality is their whole strategy, and sadly, it's working.

To celebrate Women's History Month, I’m launching a short series that centres women in the story of humanity. In the first installment, I explore women's crucial, yet usually completely overlooked, role in shaping human evolution. thenoosphere.substack.com/p/what-if-wo...

The fundamental weakness of western civilisation isn’t empathy. The fundamental weakness of western civilisation is billionaires who lack it.

Instead of asking why women aren’t having children, we should ask why they would want to in a society that doesn’t value their bodies, their health, their time or their labour. thenoosphere.substack.com/p/why-blamin...

Ah yes, billionaires controlling the media and shaping the narrative to benefit themselves, what an absolutely unforeseeable turn of events.

Sassy void mode is definitely turned on tonight.