Could you just imagine?! The gnashed teeth. The clutched pearls. It would be the end of knowledge as we know it!

Hurrah! My article on the Twilight 2000 RPG in the Journal of American Studies is now open access (OA), so anyone who wants to can have a read. OA is important to me, as I want my work on RPG history to go beyond the academy and reach the gaming public. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

There factual inaccuracy is the point. It is in the service of smuggling in the claim about 'rights'.

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

3 year postdoc funded by @ukri.org NERC on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins is now live - please share widely 🙏 www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

📢 Here is my commentary about the pitfalls of taking an impoverished evolutionary approach to culture, which include 'the limitations of a unidirectional model of evolution' and 'the neglect of niche construction theory'. #ehbea #evolution #psychscisky 🧪 🧵 1/2 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Four interesting methods & stats winter courses at Leiden University also open to researchers and PhD candidates who are not affiliated with us. www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/social-be...

👉 A reminder that the deadline for submitting your abstract to the CES 2026 #CESRabat is the 16th of November. 🔗Submit here: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 We look forward to seeing you in Rabat!

The latest in a series of papers that redefine and, in this case, corrects what we think about the evidence for early wooden weapons. @annemiekemilks.bsky.social bringscexcelkebce in scientific method and research partners to the work. The results speak for themselves. 🦣🏺

Evolutionary psychology makes a big to-do about their finding that sexual selection favors a "feminine body type" that "signals fertility/reproductive potential", including some rather... silly research. Turns out, those traits don't seem to signal reproductive success. Oops! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Wow. There's a lot of hidden moderation on bsky.

Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!

A great opportunity for ECRs studying ritual!

Let's go one step further. When you go to a book store to buy a book you want, you should be forced to take home another book you didn't want, and won't enjoy.

I mean, sure, the term 'useful idiot' is obviously valid here. The data viz crime here is a little more subtle than most, and while generally good, it still contains at least one major, awful and unjustified practice.

Any social psychologists or identity theorists ever look at folks who go on informal pilgrimages to 'find themselves' (like travelling to India, etc)? Ideally in comparison to those who form values/identities through non-deliberate or passive means?

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

There still seems to be a lot of confusion about significance testing in psych. No, p-values *don’t* become useless at large N. This flawed point also used to be framed as "too much power". But power isn't the problem – it's 1) unbalanced error rates and 2) the (lack of a) SESOI. 1/ >

Airports should have barbers.

There are less than two weeks left to apply for the British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships. The scheme supports senior researchers in the humanities and social sciences towards the completion of a major piece of research. Find out more and apply: https://bit.ly/3VMeTZ9

Out of Office: ON.

The Mamdani 'Auntie' thing is funny as there's a meme in conservative circles derived from a Waytz et al (2019) paper, which is used mocks liberals for 'caring for trees'. While the 'Autie' claim is a useful rhetorical device, conservatives are also probably unlikely to extend kin-terms to non-kin

Broke: LLMs permeate academia and rot it from the inside. Woke: LLMs permeate academia, leading to reform and the abandonment of grades. Bespoke: LLMs permeate academia, a new grading system is established, reflecting whether the work is better than whatever industry standard for LLM exists.

I'd happily make my genie wish 'Get rid of [this form of] AI', but I skimmed the lengthy entry on Grokopedia for 'ritual', my topic of academic expertise .... and it's pretty good? I mean, there's some strange decisions about what to include, but it's not *wrong* (as far as I can tell)

📢 Apply to our (2-year) research fellowships at @iast.fr Join a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and indisciplinary group of scholars in Toulouse, walkable/cyclable pink city of chocolatines in the South of France. Deadline: November 15, 2025. www.iast.fr/research-fel...

This train is the most feral train I've been on in a long-time. Children screaming, old folks coughing, people watching tiktok at full volume. What the hell? No lads drinking tinnies though, at least not on this carriage.

This is why AI art doesn't meet any meaningful definition of art. It's not 'about' anything. And it can't be. Because, generally speaking, there's no artist. The mediated process of prompting cannot meaningfully produce text and subtext. And it probably (and principally) never will.

I've hung on to the glory days of Reply All as long as I can. 'Search Engine' had the whiff of it. But PJ Vogt is an idiot. He's curious in the same Joe Rogan is, and has only 10% more critical faculties. He's an easy mark, an can't seem to apply anything he learns.

We analyzed 200 cancer & autism videos on TikTok - the majority contain #misinformation www.cbc.ca/news/marketp... Me: "Testimonials, anecdotes, stories — probably the number one way that unproven therapies are pushed on social media." Harmful & exploitive BS.

Posting this for those who've never encoutered it. An evergreen post about relability, and how we regularly underestimate how important it is. medium.com/@Sam_D_Parso...

check out this absolutely terrifying ancient babylonian lullaby

How is outlook so bad? I mean, ctrl-f doesn't even 'find', it is 'respond' (for some godforsaken reason). Why would you change that functionality? Why?

I got an email from [email protected] offering me some money to act as a mentor. Is this a scam thing? Anyone with experience on this?

Y'all. I was wrong. If you look at whether a man dies childless or if they never married, the numbers mean nothing. Men just marry later and father children later, but do so eventually. Though the ABM does suggest you don't need so many assumptions for this to be true. So that's something.

Beautiful crisp, blue autumn day on campus. On such days the grad-student instinct to go drink wine by the river is strong.

Shared with students Wansink's 'The grad who never said no' blog post this morning. They were shocked. It's like "Yeah, they used to put lead in everything" or "You used to be able to smoke in bars". They just didn't understand the norms.

I might be wrong (and this seems likely, given I threw this model together in about 3 hours), but an ABM sharing model assumptions shows a strong counter for the claims in "High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market" by Gaddy et al (2025)

Organized a meeting today with some students. I accidentally invite the wrong student (autocomplete in outlook calendar). The dude didn't email a response, showed up on time, didn't make a peep till I got round to him, and then was neither surprised nor unsurprised that he was in the wrong place.

Is this is vandalism, rather than an inconvenience.... What else is vandalism?

I'm hoping that this is a very clever strategy to set a precedent of what constitutes damage to a "natural" object, that can be leveraged against the big polluters. www.bbc.com/news/article...

My favourite genre of skeet is people complaining about the branding of D&D. Like, you know it's a game of imagination that happens in your head, right?

Trying to save £140,000,000 in staff? People need to end up in *jail* over this. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2555792...

On a regular train route but accidentally booked X - Y, not Y - X. I explained my simple error to the ticket-man. He replied, without apparent agency in the matter, "You gotta buy a ticket". New ticket cost as much as return trip. Thanks dude, powerful choice to make at 0730 on a Monday.

tl;dr 1. Studies of genAI in the classroom show that it harms learning 2. The quality of AI-generated text is irrelevant to its most negative effects on teaching 3. The way AI has entered the classroom is as a money-making project extracting new labour, not a “tool” serving teachers’ actual needs

What's the best told characterization of the black death in media? Is there some hbo miniseries on it or something?