Microclimates are odd things. When walking through my neighborhood I tend to avoid one particular street, because when I enter it the humidity shoots up and the wind dies down to nothing. It’s like walking through a damp closet. Today I followed it for three blocks and emerged sweating. It’s the lowest point in my immediate neighborhood, but the difference is slight, and in other respects, such as tree cover, it’s indistinguishable from every other street.
Here’s my theory: my neighborhood is traversed by a series of arroyos, but there are none near that street. The arroyos must serve as convectors of air, keeping breezes moving and lowering humidity. That theory may be nonsense — but whatever the cause, the difference between that one street and all the others in the neighborhood is really striking.
An older but excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins:
Quite regularly, the media produce claims about supposedly startling new discoveries concerning the Bible, alternative gospels, and/or Christian origins – just over the past decade, think for instance of “Jesus’s Wife” or the Gospel of Judas. A common theme in such reporting is just how astonishing and unexpected such finds are, and how their novelty would have shocked earlier generations. And in most cases, the weary academic response should properly be that actually, we have known all this stuff for a good long while, and usually for well over a century. The fact that we so often forget those earlier discoveries, and so grievously underestimate the intellectual daring of earlier generations, is in itself a significant component of the sociology of knowledge.
Jessica Yellin says that she’s an “evidence-based creator,” that she has an “obsession with facts,” and so on. But isn’t that just self-promotion? She also says “Substack, for instance, is proving that audiences are willing to stop scrolling and financially support ‘verifiers’ they trust” — but should people trust those “verifiers”? I don’t see anything more here than I promise, I really do care about evidence. What we need is a system of verification, not “creators” who testify on their own behalf. (Of course, we probably won’t get what we need.)
My typical day, technologically speaking.
Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed:
We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes. These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. The result is not conviction but compliance….
Authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. And this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door. Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.
Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment. In attempting to engineer moral unity, higher education has mistaken consensus for growth and compliance for care.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed. No shit, Sherlock.
I’ve said it before, but not for a while: My entire writing workflow is, and has been for years, made possible by pandoc. It’s pandoc that makes it possible for me to write everything in a text editor and then easily convert to html, docx, pdf — whatever I need.
I am pretty broken up about the death of my friend of nearly forty years, Jay Wood, but I tried to write about him.
Researchers from Arizona State University:
Our investigation, conducted through the controlled environment of DataAlchemy, reveals that the apparent reasoning prowess of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is largely a brittle mirage. The findings across task, length, and format generalization experiments converge on a conclusion: CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training. When pushed even slightly beyond this distribution, its performance degrades significantly, exposing the superficial nature of the “reasoning” it produces.
I wrote about Richard Wilbur’s greatest poem and how a bit of it was (I think) inspired by his reading Dorothy L. Sayers.
2023 workflow: web search and then click through pages until you find the info
2024 workflow: Ask chatbot, copy and paste answer
2025 workflow: Ask chatbot, doubt its answer, web search and then click through pages until you find the info
Stopped reading: The Big Goodbye by Sam Wasson. It’s a very well-written book, but the people involved in the making of Chinatown — one of the truly great American movies — are so horrible that after a while I couldn’t stand to read about them any more. 📚
Matteo Wong’s Atlantic piece on ChatGPT 5 acknowledges certain small limitations of the new version, but then pivots — I’m going to be straightforward here — to an absolutely mindless press release. Wong could not do more explicit salesmanship if he were paid by OpenAI. This echoes the non-journalism about machine learn that’s been dominating the NYT tech beat for some time. They all write like they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with our new insect overlords — which I suppose they are.
Meanwhile, Kieran Healey actually used ChatGPT 5. Read his post and draw your own conclusions. The especially interesting point here is that ChatGPT has learned to sneer at anyone who points to its obvious errors.
My conclusion is this: No legacy-media journalist writes honestly and thoughtfully about the big AI companies. Not one. You have to seek the truth elsewhere.
Angus’s new photo for his LinkedIn page