In a world without forest and creeks, where do the children play? My new essay explores peer cultures and the strangeness of Western childhood. Heavily inspired by work from @dorsaamir.bsky.social and Sheina Lew-Levy :)
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Thanks to @slatestarcodex , I'm pleased to announce that a fundraising page for my fieldwork on psilocybin use in Lesotho is now live on Manifund! Share (or support) if you want to further our medical and ethnographic understanding of psychedelics🍄🌍
manifund.org/projects/doc...

Patterns recur through various mythologies: floods, tricksters, battles with monsters, creation and apocalypse. Some scholars believe there is a common source—and hope to find it.

Those who wish to judge the crimes of the past should not support the crimes of the present. Link below.
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The last twenty years of the cognitive science of religion have been defined by religious belief. The next twenty years will be defined by religious experience. Here's one reason why!

"the decline of religious belief doesn’t imply the emergence of true disbelief"

New commentary out w/ @manvir.bsky.social
in Religion, Brain, and Behavior! We argue that social learning fails to explain three patterns in religious belief and practice: SBNR beliefs, strategic endorsement of beliefs, and religious experience. Check it out:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"A well-designed PhD program teaches you how to ask good questions. Trivial as this may sound, no ability is more central to scientific progress than asking good questions. And doing it is much, much harder than you think."

OpenAI was mocked for saying GPT-5 would display "PhD-level intelligence." If we took that concept seriously, what might it mean? Which capacity is uniquely cultivated through a PhD?
I think it's mostly one thing: learning how to ask Goldilocks questions.
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Graduate school is hard, because sometimes it requires you to explain the word “boofing” to your grandparents. Context below!

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Not science, but wrote this short essay about Jesse Welles and the meaning of ‘Dylanesque.’ If you don’t know who Jesse is — you should check him out!
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Yes, I’m serious. But don’t get mad until you’ve read the piece! Ft. recommendations for work by @edhagen.net , @lukeglowacki.bsky.social , Will Buckner and others.
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Amidst the destruction of Gaza, what does it mean to be Jewish? In my latest Substack, I look for answers in an unlikely source: Superman. Link below! @jacobgeller.com

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What technologies, if any, should we expect any alien civilization to invent? Find out in my latest Substack, linked below. Inspiration creds to @etiennefd.blogsky.venki.dev and his lovely Historical Tech Tree 👽😃
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For Substack (link below), I explore why the media won't shut up about trans athletes. It's because they're political cheesecake, to borrow a phrase from Steven Pinker. The special ingredient? Disgust.

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Hello, Bluesky! Pleased to share that my first public-press article, on the shifting debate over what makes human culture unique, was published today in @us.theconversation.com. I review recent literature suggesting that cultural open-endedness, not cumulative culture, is our true defining trait.