Tired: Everything evolves to be a crab. Wired: Everything evolves to eat ants.

A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration. doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵 Thread—>

Plato must be turning in his grave (that they haven't banned the theatre major).

MAGA restoration of "Freedom of Speech" progressing according to plan I see dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

Happy new year! If you are early career or graduate in Phil of Bio, consider European summer school below: fantastic venue, brilliant mix of junior & senior scholars, a wealth of debates, PPTs & skills training organised by @thomasreydon.bsky.social and myself. Deadline EXTENDED to 31 Jan! #philsci

This film has been sponsored by the King John Society and the Sheriff of Nottingham Memorial Fund.

Arguably the biggest irony of MAGA is that it's returning America to a 19th century "pre-greatness" condition, aspiring to regional dominance rather than global leadership.

"Regime tweak"

i think people are wildly overestimating the level of strategic thinking behind what just happened in venezuela

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

It’s a dark night when you look at the news and are forced to admit that you no longer believe in the power of the FIFA peace prize

The great 21st century experiment is exempting publishers (social media companies) from any legal liability for what they publish - a decision that has transformed the world. We could have done the same thing with newspapers, radio or TV but did not, of course, because it's clearly a terrible idea.

The K-pop demon hunters claim it to be "obvious" that a demon with no feelings does not deserve to live. This is naturally read as endorsing both sentience and nondemonhood as individually necessary conditions for the right to life. In this paper...

This post by @carriejenkins.net has prompted me to write up some thoughts at Crooked Timber on the threat AI poses to art

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

You must be tempted to tell the story like this: phil. sci. and the core of analytic epistemology drifted apart; things got so bad that the residual "core" started to see "inquiry" as largely unstudied; by turning back to science we can set the record straight and solve the allegedly new problems.

A while ago, I posted a set of notes about the Bayesian approach to inquiry and how it can help us think about questions raised in the recent literature on zetetic epistemology. I’ve now corralled that material into something like a first draft of a book. I hope it might be of interest to others.

Veganism is not self-denial in my experience. You can do "Veganuary" and gorge yourself on 3D printed steaks, impossible burgers, artisanal fauxmage, cashew ice cream and as much chocolate as you want but it's called cacao so it's healthy now.

This is terrible behavior by FarmKind, many are already saying. I don't actually think most people buy this framing, but never underestimate how good permission structures are at soothing deep defensiveness around eating animals

Egyptian dissident should be deported from UK, Tories say. Which is bizarre, to say the least, as they granted him citizenship in 2021.

For anyone interested in looking at the data on Veganuary, I recommend checking out this summary: faunalytics.org/tactics-in-p... Self-reported data suggests it's effective in reducing AP consumption post-intervention & supermarket data shows that plant-based product sales also remain higher after

I think my favourite artists are Kandinsky and van Eyck. 500yrs apart but with essentially the same goal: to use colour to wake something within.

Possibly it wasn’t Pope but Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster” that convinced them evergreenreview.com/read/dante-a...

Alexander Pope decried the cruelty of cooking lobsters alive in 1713. 313 years later the practice will finally be banned. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

A really hard thing to explain to tech industry insiders is that most people find chatbots annoying even when helpful. From their point of view, it's like having the unconditionally sycophantic friend they always wanted.

Imagine making a terrific Easter movie (Wake up dead man) and then Netflix says "OK this is so good we're dropping it at Christmas."

I was interviewed about my research and my experience with the viral response to my DPhil viva! Video here 👇 youtu.be/v_46GqZDZCk?...

60,000 is the *low end* estimate.

The contempt that university managers have for their academic staff here in the UK is *off the scale*.

What do children and adults in 33 communities think about animal minds? New collaborative research from our team of >50 collaborators show universal beliefs that while animals feel like us, our (human) thoughts are different/unique! Check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #mindperception

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

Is Bluesky getting an influx of Australian teens - or are we so old on here that they would rather have no social media at all than risk being seen interacting with us?

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion. It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

"Region imported 438,000 tons of pesticides and herbicides in 2020, two-thirds more than in 2018. More than half of such chemicals used in Nigeria are highly hazardous, at least 40% of those can’t be sold in Europe" #Pesticide colonialism www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

One thing I have surprisingly detailed opinions on is the psychology behind the narrator's character in Taylor Swift's You're On Your Own, Kid. So I wrote about that here. I think we all know why you read a 40k blog: for Taylor Swift lyrics analysis. sherdenpact.neocities.org/4thWall#Swift

Inveraray from the Dun na Cuaiche Watchtower #Inveraray #Argyll #Scotland damianshields.photoshelter.com/p/2026-calendar

Me, when one of my posts gets over 1000 likes.

just learned about this colin mcginn blog post

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My entry for the SEP on externalism vs. internalism about justification is now live. plato.stanford.edu/entries/just...

Cool new paper on using idea and non-ideal political theory to think about progress away from animal research: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you‘re in London on the 11th December, there’s a great event exploring the role of photography in building empathy towards nonhuman animals. I can really recommend events at this venue, it’s a wonderful space: www.kairos.london/event/why-lo...

The psychological effect of this transition must be massive. Formerly, people were just walking around with these horrendous traumas as the unspoken backdrop of their lives.

New work from Animal Ethics is drawing attention to the growing body of evidence on aquatic animal sentience. Seantience, a short documentary directed by Xiana Castro, brings together recent findings on the capacity to feel in both vertebrates and invertebrates.

"I find that [in] the mainstream philosophy... everything is regulated, controlled, and monitored until the life is squeezed out of it. We’ve lost the ability to cope with anything inhomogeneous or unexpected." | By @axdouglas.bsky.social www.contralytic.co.uk/conversation... #PhilosophySky #philsky

Tagore on the last day of the 19th century, prophesying the 20th (translated from Bengali).

‘Generally speaking, he preferred dogs to human beings, even though they, too, were emanations of the pitiless Will.’ Terry Eagleton on Schopenhauer’s philosophy. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

It amazes me how Americans do Thanksgiving and then go straight back to work. If we had a late November holiday in Britain everyone would say "merry Xmas, see you in January".

📢 Final call for entries to our 2025 Philosophy Essay Prize! ⏰ Make sure you submit your essay in good time - the deadline is Sunday 30 November at 23:59 GMT. Best of luck to everyone submitting. ✨ #philosophy #essay #competition

My article on Schopenhauer‘s alleged misanthropy is now available in early view - and it’s open access!