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. Ya think?
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.