Stuart Gilmour

Lol at « Bene Jizzerit » This stuff also explains a lot of the Epstein island type stuff (which is of course much worse). People were arguing about whether Epstein was a spy who baited powerful men with underaged girls for compromat or just a very well-connected guy who was into that as a hobby. The reality is probably a secret third thing. That there is something inherently bonding about doing something transgressive together and the network created out of such activities are very strong and defection-proof. It’s both naive to believe some of the most powerful men in the world could be remote- controlled by Epstein’s photo album OR that the girls were just some incidental background there becuz Epstein was a perv. There are just all these human patterns that persist and arise in the most unlikely places. Like…people literally got together to be as rational and altruistic as possible and boom it’s a doomsday sex cult. It’s like we found another way to generate electricity and it’s steam driving a turbine.

Social media at least makes you go out and hunt for confirmation of your views yourself, whereas deep research delivers your own rightness straight to your door, gift-wrapped ↓

You can see why this sort of thing, especially in the context of the Second Intifada, swung American politics into “blank check for Israel mode” for an extended period of time in a way that hadn’t really been true in the 80s and 90s but it was still a mistake.

wrote about the mind-numbing experience of watching three of netflix’s latest original movies in one day, and my firm belief that mediocrity is no longer happenstance, but an intentional and integral part of their business model. salon.com/2026/09/02/why-net…

I urge you to read this essay about the potential of AI to render our own systems of value unintelligible to us. thepointmag.com/letter/on-ra…

Teaching Marxist analysis in a social science department is like teaching astrology in the astrophysics department. He's nowhere to be found in serious economics department -- and for good reason. And, unlike some other fields, my field only mildly leans left in academia. We do science here. Go do your tarot card reading where people are gullible enough to believe in it.

Data Centers already use HALF of the water from the Colorado River. HALF!!! We have to ban Data Centers now!!!! Oh no wait. That’s alfalfa for cows.

The root cause of the western water crisis is that farmers get access to huge amounts of very cheap water that they have to use rather than sell, meaning that even though water is moderately scarce it’s mostly used for low-value alfalfa farming. slowboring.com/p/the-western…

A course on Victorian novels sounds great. This one considers "how conceptions of gender, intrigues of sexuality, and fears of foreigners shape the imagination of the power and limit of money in the world that these three eminent Victorians inhabit and illuminate." Interesting.

Alfalfa uses like half the water from the Colorado River for like 0.1% of the economic benefit. To a first approximation it literally just wouldn't matter if we just stopped growing alfalfa forever. It's only viable because farmers don't pay market rate for water.

For the cover of the September issue, I wrote about why I left Bates College, the tenure track, and academia entirely. Come for the attempted lynching, stay for the union-busting, decolonial chemistry, and soft rabbits.

Funniest thing in physics history is that the Royal Society couldn't afford to publish Newton's Principia because they had just blown their entire budget on a massive, highly detailed encyclopedia called De Historia Piscium (The History of Fishes). The fish book was a catastrophic commercial flop. The Society was left so completely broke they couldn't bankroll the foundational text of classical mechanics. It gets worse: they couldn't even make payroll for their clerk, Edmond Halley (of Halley's Comet fame). Instead of a salary, they literally paid him in unsold copies of the fish book. Halley, however, had enough scientific intuition to recognize what Newton was building. He believed in the work so much that he personally bankrolled the Principia out of his own pocket. It is wild to think about. The rigorous, mathematically formalized thought experiments that completely re-engineered our understanding of the physical world, and permanently altered the trajectory of human civilization -- were almost entirely derailed by a bad institutional bet on fish anatomy.

EHRC chair challenged on how to enforce single-sex toilet rules. Mary-Ann Stephenson said some businesses may have to replace single sex toilets with unisex ones, but would not usually be expected to monitor who uses their facilities. She said any questions about a person's sex should be handled discreetly.

‘I don’t look woman enough for them.’ Caller Lil, who has a medical condition that makes her appear more visually male, explains how the ‘anti-trans rhetoric’ has had a ‘massive’ impact on her life.

Good thread. There is a lack of intellectual diversity in academia, with a strong tilt to the left. It's a big problem, and too many academics ignore the consquences (lack of diversity=poverty of thinking + lower public legitimacy - while most universities are publicly funded).

I think one reason we see so much quibbling over how to define this stuff is that while America has a good deal of inequality it does not actually have a rigid and dichotomous class system of the sort you read about in your favorite 19th century British novels.

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward admitting that "free bus" critics were right and quality of service is more important than fares!

is this bad?