Very informative and important post here from James Plunkett on community as a policy tool. Especially important for wellbeing policy enthusiasts: open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/p...?

After a provocation from Todd Kashdan I wrote up some frustrations I have with "wellbeing science", specifically the idea that it was born with life satisfaction scales. I think this belief is untrue and unhelpful. profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

The idea the world has been free riding on the backs of poor America was the signal that US elites have taken leave of their senses. The deal was they buy globally, savings from elsewhere fund their extravagant lifestyles. They fund a military that supports this system. That's what they wanted.

Please don't ask me why my brain works like this, because I don't have an answer

New episode of ePODstemology! Brendan Graham Dempsey is on to talk about what I think is one of the most important new ideas on the planet right now, METAMODERNISM! www.buzzsprout.com/1763534/epis...

Beyond Happy made Behavioral Grooves best books of 2025. Check out all their other recommendations (the endorsement kicks off around 12:32). www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSLg...

Does anyone know any "effective" environmental charities? I am especially interested in nature protection charities rather than decarbonisation/tech ones (after reading Waste Wars I'm more convinced than ever that we need values to change not technology). Who do I give money to protect the Amazon?

Does anyone have any recommendations for charities that protect nature? I'm not much interested in technology (e-vehicles etc. won't save us if people keep buying a new car every 3 years). I am interested in *nature protection* e.g. halting Amazon deforestation, or removing plastics from the ocean.

I laughed pretty hard at this meme from Brendan Graham Dempsey here: open.substack.com/pub/brendang...? Could also apply to most of critical theory. Dempsey's blog is one of the few places to read consistently excellent analysis of metamodernism, incidentally.

May your year be blessed with accepts subject to minor corrections.

If you play BG3 this is cinema: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX1X...

This is a great paper on scale norming that also presents a really nice discussion of how people come up with their responses to surveys, and how that can change over time. One read of it has me wanting to put it into my assessment syllabus already.

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather

Right at the death I've got an academic publication for 2025 - coauthored with one of my undergraduate honours students based on his dissertation (what a talent!): Bricolage in local government policymaking on cycling infrastructure: a case study from Coventry www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

December air travel means Mark writes extremely belated movie reviews of stuff he watched on the plane: open.substack.com/pub/profmark...?

I am on holiday so of course I am blogging: open.substack.com/pub/profmark...? My quick analysis of the really genuinely very good new mythology in the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

A beautiful, grounding thread. I want these things too, for all of us 🙏🌏💚

Good clear example of how AI drivel is ruining academic publishing and not just in MPDI-like journals

Canada lynx

It’s what dark persistent predatory personalities (aka malignant narcissists & psychopaths, etc.) do – and not just today, not just in the 20th century, but throughout history. (A bit more in ALT)

(I think people should be able to end their lives if they want to, w support & w/o stigma. But I also think people should have pain medication, good healthcare, mental health therapy, and guaranteed housing, w support & w/o stigma…it is a lack of these which cause depression and suicidal ideation…

Obligatory Japan trip photo booth fun times. I was genuinely too large for the machine.

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

As UKRI explores using LLMs to review grants, it's a good time to revisit Bryan Wilder's excellent blog post. There are a lot of naive reasons to oppose AI review ("you'll never automate human intuition!"). But there are also good reasons, including the *load-bearing role of human disagreement.*

The philosophers were so preoccupied with whether they should that they didn't stop to think if they could.

let's get this graphic into public finance class bsky.app/profile/852d...

Students applying for grad school, or reaching out to professors. I have an important piece of advice for you: STOP DOING THIS 👇 (a thread) #STEM #PhD #gradschool #academictips

You might not like it, but this is what peak male performance looks like

Recently did around 30 requests to ppl who'd published very similar papers to the one I needed reviews for. 3 declines, 25 no response. Please at least decline guys it slows stuff down so much otherwise.

I have extensive instructions on spatchcocking a bird (and why) in COLOR TASTE TEXTURE! (also highly recommend getting poultry shears)

I am Jupiter

The value of knowledge is in having done the work. The value of research is in having done the research. The value of a summary is in having summarized the information. The value of writing is in having done the writing.

and it's a feature, not a bug, of whatever mangled faction this is that is running Labour. these people are able to do one thing and one thing alone - fight factional wars against the left. they're absolutely shit at literally anything else.

The left's unelectability is less a function of centrism brain and more a function of trotting out the same compromised septuagenarians over and over. At least give us new "centrists", clean ones. Summers has been shit for aaaaaaaages. There are good fresh thinkers everywhere. Give them oxygen.

This is a great short article about a #SocialCare movement that was “born of frustration but driven by hope”

Every office has an executive tier whose emails are like: saw on news , , can we replce complianc dept with web 3 and a worker tier whose emails are like: Dear Jim, First of all, I *love* this idea! Unfortunately, I spoke with Legal and identified a few issues with this approach. For starters…

He's already earning £159k per year from his salary for the job he was (narrowly) elected to do. That's more than five times what I earn. I think if I was earning that sort of money I wouldn't need to abandon everything good and right for an extra chunk of money from cunts.

The story of Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple is such a slay and that’s before you realise he braided his own whip

I'm giving a seminar tomorrow (my first!) on my popular book Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It's with the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, register here: isqols.org/event-6357161 Unlike a podcast, here you can ask me questions!

Can someone explain to me why UK university students are so obsessed with the *titles* of their assessments/essays? Not the task/question, the title. Is this drilled into them in high school or something? Every year I get students asking me for guidance about which pun is better etc.

Thus, it becomes ever harder for public institutions to be 'impartial', when the gap between different realities and 'alternative facts' have become so large. A huge threat to our societies and democracies.

Whenever I get a little bit of time off I always tell myself to use it napping and I always end up blogging instead: open.substack.com/pub/profmark...?

New episode of ePODstemology with Harvard's James Geary on aphorisms! www.buzzsprout.com/1763534/epis...

In today's episode of AI can't predict shit, my Netflix suggestions: Did you watch Oscar winning mythologist Miyazaki's solarpunk masterpiece, Castle in the Sky? Well our algorithm thinks you'll love...K-Pop Demon Hunters 😑. It's all anime, right? It is so bad at discovering stuff for me.