If it was possible to optimise yourself out of systemic poverty and oppression, there wouldn’t be billions of people still trapped by them. Self-optimisation mostly ‘works’ just for people who’ve been handed a pretty good starting hand.

Men are less likely to read than women. At the same time, men are more likely than women to use AI tools such as ChatGPT, excessive use of which likely has a similar negative effect on people's cognitive abilities to not reading.

It's ironic how often AI tools marketing promises to make users the smartest or most interesting person in the room, even as it's been shown that the growing reliance on AI for summarising, diagnosing, researching, and even ‘thinking’—cognitive offloading—can actually threaten our own capabilities.

You know what’s infinitely scarier than low rates of AI literacy? Low rates of actual literacy.

If everyone had to grow a plant from seed at least once, maybe our society might grasp how much care it takes to bring life into being and keep it there. Life doesn't just randomly sprout out of nowhere; in most cases, it needs water, nutrients, warmth, sun, protection, and, above all, care.

Happy Earth Day to a planet that deserves so much better than being ruled by a swarm of confidently incompetent sociopaths and predators, ready to set the whole thing on fire just because they feel like it.

The latest edition of the World Happiness Report makes it clear that young people in many wealthy Western countries are increasingly unhappy and unwell. In fact, happiness among both Gen Z and Millennials has been declining for as long as it’s been measured.

That recent study (Robnett et al., 2026) showing that men most likely to favour ‘tradwife’ lifestyle also score the highest on hostile sexism once again makes it painful clear that even women who do obey pariarchal gender norms and fit the Good Girl mould aren’t guaranteed respect or safety.

Cutting funding for science and education while boosting defence spending is precisely how you build a population that won't easily realise their biggest enemy is not across the border, but at the top.

Women are particularly vulnerable to time poverty, largely because they are still expected to carry the bulk of the unpaid domestic, care, and emotional labour. This then affects nearly every aspect of our lives: our careers, finances, leisure time, health, and even our sleep.

Just imagine if we lived on a planet where it wouldn’t have to be explained to anyone that a person who glorifies war and endless slaughter is in fact the bad guy.

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem being the only two of Trump’s cabinet members to be removed despite all the scandals involving their male counterparts is exactly how patriarchy, especially patriarchal authoritarianism, works.

The current wave of anti-intellectualism has a hidden target: women.

We’ve had three different, brand-name household appliances break down or start malfunctioning in the past week, all of which were bought within the last year or so.

Meta and YouTube have just been found liable in a social media addiction trial. The pull of algorithms is far from accidental and innocuous.

Over just the past decade, the collective fortunes of the ultra-rich have more than doubled. At the same time, the number of people struggling with food insecurity has climbed by 42.6%. A rising tide clearly only lifts very few boats.

Access to unpolluted, thriving nature should be a basic human right, but it sadly feels like we’re still light years away from collectively agreeing on it.

Anti-intellectualism is fueled by both rising authoritarianism and misogyny. It’s no coincidence that intellectual pursuits and even whole fields lose prestige as more women enter higher education and professions once dominated by men, and as they come to dominate reading culture and the book world.

Elon Musk’s fortune could soon reach a trillion dollars, effectively making him the world’s first-ever trillionaire. This wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t spent decades assuming that extreme accumulation of wealth is not only normal and aspirational, but somehow deserved.

In techbro-speak, 'disrupt' usually just means to crush and grind something until it turns into dust that then ends up in our airways, choking us until we finally give in and buy their inhalers.

In just a couple of years, several communities in northern Nigeria reduced marriage rates from 86% to 21% after encouraging girls to stay in school or pursue training (Cohen et al., 2026). Few things empower women quite like education.

I wrote about several exceptional women in the arts, science, and literature whose work was misattributed, dismissed, stolen, or even destroyed—and who still often don’t get the recognition they deserve.

It’s insane to claim that without the promise of financial reward or the threat of poverty we would stop innovating and making things. If writers, artists, inventors, & creators of any other kind had the freedom to work without the constant financial anxiety, our society’s creativity would explode.

A recent study of Elon Musk’s X found that users who relied on the platform’s default 'For You' algorithmic feed were more likely to shift toward right-wing positions on issues such as immigration, crime, and inflation. Even after switching back to a chronological feed, the shift didn’t disappear.

If only we'd worried more about incompetent, mediocre men with fragile egos dominating empires than about women in leadership 'getting their periods and perhaps becoming a bit emotional.'

The fact that so many people care more about climate policies' impact on economy than economy's impacts on our climate really shows that humanity have lost the plot.

Do most people really need another app, another subscription service, another AI chatbot, or do they need groceries that don’t break the bank, a place to live they can call their own, universal healthcare, and childcare?

In bonobo societies, when males are found abusing a female or her offspring, female bonobos band together to intervene and make sure they won't do that again. Some males sometimes join these female-led 'gangs', too. It's about time we were more like bonobos.

Recent news headlines might as well say: the most despicable, disgusting men you can imagine unsurprisingly did the most despicable, disgusting things, and, perhaps even less surprisingly, there will likely be no consequences for any of it.

It makes no sense to bend the human body to fit a capitalist system we humans invented, instead of bending that system to the needs—and limits—of the human body.

Much of the mainstream advice on 'beating the winter blues' treats it as a personal problem that can be fixed with the right mindset or products. But we wouldn’t need any of this if capitalist work culture didn’t expect us to work year-round on the same schedules and at the same productivity levels.

The point of learning from history is to avoid repeating the same atrocities, not to justify and protect existing ones. But if you only learn it from the oppressor's point of view, that's often exactly what ends up happening.

It took just three days for the richest 0.1% of people, and ten days for the richest 1%, to exhaust their fair share of carbon emissions for 2026, according to a new Oxfam report.

Comparing Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok and its new 'digital undressing' function to what Photoshop does is just disingenuous. AI tools make it easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before to allow deranged individuals to mass-produce nonconsensual, sexually explicit imagery of women and children.

In a recent study, a group of young men were immersed in a virtual reality scenario in which they embodied a young woman subjected to verbal harassment in a subway station. Every participant reported strong emotional reactions—most notably fear, disgust, and anger.

Both gender roles are, at their core, about submissiveness—women submitting to all men, and men submitting to a handful of men perched atop the socio-economic pyramid.

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.