UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea,” but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech. He also recommends that readers watch his video (here), and notes two time stamps for when he talks about telos and identitarianism. I should have listened to his talk, but I couldn’t find it and I assumed that the UnHerd talk was correct. My apologies to Jon.
I should add that while discussing this correction, Jon noted that he does feel that a university should have policies against calling directly for violence, even if it those calls are protected by the First Amendment. Here we differ, as I think calls for violence should be permissible except under the stipulations of the courts: they become impermissible if they are likely to incite imminent lawless violence. If they aren’t likely to do this, I’d say to allow them; Jon would apparently disagree.
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A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI. New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the five things that needed attention. To wit:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
I’ve always opposed DEI because, though its proponents may be well meaning, the acronym has now become synonymous with compelled speech, attacks on freedom of speech (via “hate speech”), authoritarianism, policing of speech, censorship, and racism. By the latter I don’t just mean racism against “majority” groups, but, recently, the anti-Semitism growing on college campuses. I’m convinced that hatred of Jews is somewhat egged on by DEIers, who, with their view that Jews are “privileged” and “white adjacent”, while their opponents are oppressed people of color, have promoted antisemitism on campus. And schools like my own are reluctant to punish those who demonstrate against Israel even when those protestors violate college regulations. It doesn’t looks good to sanction people who demonstrate on behalf of “the oppressed.”
Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university (see his famous talk at Duke here). But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.” It’s a short piece, based on a talk at UNC, which I haven’t found.
Here are two excerpts, which are, in effect, most of the piece:
Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.
Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.
On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.
. . . He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:
Privileged people have power. Power is evil. They use their power to oppress the good people. What a sick thing to teach 18-year-olds coming into college in a multi-ethnic democracy. But that’s what we’ve been doing, especially at elite college campuses since 2014-2015, since the DEI revolution… The inevitable outcome in terms of antisemitism is Jews are white, Jews are oppressors, it’s okay to kill Jews because that’s just resistance.
Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.
“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.
There’s no doubt DEI is divisive, and I’ve often thought that the “D” really stood for “divisiveness” and the “E” for “exclusion”, for DEI encourages racial and gender animosity. It does not bring people together, but rather encourages people to not only see their gender or race as the most important part of their character but, importantly, sets up a hierarchy of oppression, which is inherently divisive.
It’s intriguing that Haidt’s mind seem to have been changed largely by “the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.” In saying that, he’s also saying that universities shouldn’t have complete free speech—at least the kind that allows genocidal slogans against the Jews. (These would be chants like “Globalize the intifada” or “From the river to the sea, yadda, yadda.”) If he’s really saying that some kinds of speech are intolerable on campus, I wish he’d be clearer about what kind of speech he means, and who would police it. After all, if Haidt really favors “Truth University” over “Social Justice University,” he must then feel that some kinds of speech are incompatible with seeking truth. My own view is that speech should be free, but the university has a right to set the times, places of speech, and to regulate rules of when speech violations university regulations by acting to actually harm the dissemination of knowledge. Finally universities must stipulate that permitted speakers can’t be deplatformed or shouted down.
But there remain good reasons to abolish DEI beyond the fact that it may encourage hatred of Jews (and the use of specified pronouns, which isn’t comparable at all). Pinker gives some of them above. If we want to get rid of illegal prejudice and bullying on campus, there can be an apparatus for doing that. But that’s not the same thing as DEI.
Given how deeply DEI has sunk its hooks into American universities, though, having huge budgets and armies of bureaucrats, fulfilling Pinker and Haidt’s call won’t be easy.
As for Republican legislatures helping run American universities, I know where Haidt’s coming from, but I’m not on board with that, either.
The talk at UNC is this one, I suppose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7hnX-e-i4k
Thank you for the link, maurice. Just finished watching. Though the video of his slides was a bit hit and miss, I thought that overall it was an informative 1.5 hours including the q&a which was unusually well managed by the organizers. I have read coddling and am a regular reader of Haidt’s material here on WEIT and found this talk from just a few days ago to be a worthwhile expenditure of 85 minutes .
… and the I is for Inquisition (the Spanish one) for anyone out of line with woke orthodoxy.
how about I for Inequality, so Divisiveness, Exclusion and Inequality
DEI has also sunk its teeth into private high schools. See, for example Horace Mann Office for Identity, Culture and Institutional Equity as well as a DEI committee. Fieldston says DEI is part of everything they do. All those people with DEI backgrounds who haven’t found jobs in higher education are out taking over secondary education.
They’re in the corporations and the governments too. They’re so deeply entrenched by now I can’t see how they can be uprooted quickly. Or even at all. So many young people accept it as gospel.
I think the problem of spineless administrations is exacerbated by the emergence of sycophantic faculty members with administrative aspirations. The following essay was rejected by the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom (seemingly edited by true believers in wokeness), but later published by Lawrence Krause on Critical Mass:
https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-they-is
Cornell has already dialectically synthesized DEI into EEB – Equity Empowerment and Belonging.
The White House defines “equity” with a direct connection to “underserved communities”. One “community” they “include” is … wait for it … LGBTQ+.
Let that sink in.
DEI = Deny Excellent Individuals
NO ONE deserves anything they haven’t earned no matter their “group affiliation.”
But, but … [insert spluttering sound effects here] .. their group affiliation earns them their appointments and entitlements. Just like the short freeloader gets to stand on two stolen milk crates so he can see over the ballpark fence instead of buying a ticket.
What if he stands on two boxes or crates of his own making or that were discarded and are therefore up for grabs?
Haidt completely lost me when he said, “let the Republicans run our Universities”. I can’t think of a more horrific idea. Talk about a remedy that is a 100 times worse than the problem.
My reaction too. It’s strange when someone smart says something so unwise. It makes me wonder, is this person a good thinker or not?
Haidt has expressed his profound lack of confidence in universities’ ability to correct themselves. He perceives this as potentially the worst-case scenario, suggesting that Republican intervention might actually be justified as a desperate measure (since Democrats are likely too cautious to risk upsetting their voter base).
That being said, the notion of Republican intervention strikes me as a profoundly misguided idea. However, I must admit, the adoption of free speech codes seems like a feeble attempt at addressing the issue. The administrative class in universities often plays a significant role in perpetuating this decay. Moreover, principles without enforcement are hollow, and forcing them upon those who are resistant only leads to more cunning forms of subversion. Take Harvard as an example: Claudine Gay’s resignation might seem like a turning point, but the real issue is the deep-rooted complicity within the Harvard Corporation. At the heart of it, unless those in power are prepared to forsake their luxury beliefs, any hope for substantial change is nothing but a pipe dream.
On a personal note, my school in Southeast Asia is starting to succumb to this insidious nonsense. My experiences with the sociology department have been incredibly frustrating, and an email about “decolonizing” our school library is a glaring indicator of the encroaching rot. Regrettably, my options for action are severely limited. It’s infuriating to see such madness not just taking root, but flourishing everywhere.
In response to Nuts
Yes, well your last two sentences are probably why Haidt is warming towards Republicans.
Mitch Daniels was probably the best university president of recent history. Ben Sasse seems like he might be a good one. Not all Rs are nuts.
I agree. One can imagine, even if it didn’t actually happen, Republican-influenced universities somehow making universities more Christian. That always scares me, especially in regards to teaching evolution biology, geology…well, basically all science!
But they might be great at some other things, like being able to say that color- blind goals for admission, hiring, and promotions are good things. Business-minded, some Republicans might realize just how awful administrative bloat has become at some of these institutions and takes steps to reduce this.
Absolutely agree with Jerry’s last sentence and Brian’s comment (#7). Encouraging political intervention just sets a precedent that would enable outside attacks on any aspect of university life that politicians object to. Not hard to imagine additional ones from the right, and of course more liberal politicians in power could insist on even stronger DEI initiatives. Not clear that there is an immediate solution for a problem that has developed over decades.
Hirsi Ali’s description of the DEI mentality/system as “the mediocre mafia” brings to mind Valery Soyfer’s account of Lysenkoism. Lysenko “lived in a world where mediocrities had seized power and ruled every sphere of life. The Soviet system had not created mediocrities, but it provided them with opportunities for power.”
As a result, Soviet biological science recovered from the Lysenkovshchina only slowly. By the 1970s, the once obligatory attacks on Mendelism-Morganism-Weismannism were omitted from textbooks, while institutes and laboratories were beginning to make a show, in some cases quite phony, of “molecular biology”. Of this period, Soyfer writes: “Lysenko had fallen, but the restoration of biology was a slow, ill-managed, and halting process”. Perhaps we can look forward, at best, to a similarly slow and halting recovery in academia from our period of DEIshchina.
It’s very similar to Lysenkoism. Good example.
I think a charitable interpretation of Haidt is not that he is for speech codes, but that he highlights the targets of the speech codes.
How he thinks that the Republican law makers would be fit to run a uni is beyond me, though.
In the end, I think US academia needs a group of institutions that divorce themselves from DEI and the vastly outperform the rest.
I don’t think that Republican law makers should run universities. But they may play a beneficial rule in passing laws to establish rules such as universities must allow free speech, and may not (as universities) promote ideologies, and may not discriminate over race in admissions, etc.
Haidt is correct that DEI needs to go. Allowing antisemitic chants calling for Jewish genocide while at the same time prohibiting the errant use of a pronoun speaks volumes. DEI is 21st century Lysenkoism—the worst attack on the Enlightenment since, well, the Enlightenment.
That said, universities need to fix the problem from within. Surely administrators are getting the message that unfettered DEI is not helping them. The turnaround may be slow, but it’s coming.
Too many uni administrators owe their jobs to Woke DEI. They won’t act in uni’s best interest.
Here I am to pig pile on Haidt’s suggestion that Republican legislatures ought to run universities. I respect him so it very troubling to read that. I hope he addresses this issue in the near future, as it makes me wonder if he has to jumped the shark.
Current Republican legislature on topics such as children’s books (some of these children’s publications are disturbing) is anti-free speech. Their solutions to extreme left overreach are undemocratic.
For example, who believes that Stefanik cares about antisemitism, and is the best leader to grapple with this problem on campus or elsewhere? The Left should not give up fighting the looney left, leaving it to Republicans.
Every time I hear the phrase ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ I also hear ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ (see Wikipedia article on Theological values).
Now I don’t expect that many Social Justice types are particularly religious but I do wonder if the desire for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ is modern form of the search for social ‘Grace’. Which makes an easy (if fallacious) step to arguing that people who don’t seek grace must be evil…
To my mind, religion is about dogma and not necessarily about belief in supernatural entities. Hence, I do think of wokeness as a religion. DEI is wokeness institutionalized …
My philosopher friend Viminitz uses game theory (specifically the prisoner’s dilemma) to explain why freedom of speech is the stable optimum even though both sides would prefer to censor the other. (No one will die to protect the speech of someone he disagrees with, so forget Voltaire. It’s a nice statement of why freedom of speech is an important good but it’s all cant, or virtue signaling as we call it today.) Unrestrained by game constraints, if Left smashes Right’s printing presses when it is in power, Right will smash Left’s when the pendulum swings back. Both sides making a deal not to censor, ever, saves the cost of replacing the printing presses after every election.
But here’s the rub: despite professing to abjure censorship, the ascendant Left now is in fact busily censoring and canceling and DEI-ing the Right out of existence. This causes the Right to conclude that the deal is off. So when it takes power, as it inevitably will in its turn, it will take licence to crush the Left and its captive colleges. It’s not a case of whether it should. It’s that it will.
Seen this way, Jonathan Haight’s comment about Republican stewardship is not so much a prescription as a Viminitzian prediction (although JH does frame it as the former.) But as Jim Clark #8 observes above, it will be very difficult to restore the freedom from censorship and political interference because it takes a long time to restore the necessary trust once broken.
I’m a professor at a middling Canadian research university. I think Haidt is correct. My university’s president, board of governors, and deans are all woke ideologues supported by hundreds (no kidding) of directors, consultants, and other middle managers who are similarly woke and see their job and the mission of the university as the pursuit of social justice goals. About half of the professoriate (hundreds of people) support that “mission”; the rest are mostly cowed into submission by a combination of fear, ignorance, and indifference. I’m part of a small band of free-speech resisters but we’re too few (dozens) to stop our president from things like race-based hiring of new faculty members (to pick one dire part of this “mission”). We need outside forces to intervene and set us back on a path to pursuing research and teaching excellence. If my provincial politics included a moderate conservative alternative I would have to give that person a serious look at our next election. Sadly that species has been extirpated in my province. Universities are ill with wokeness, and seen from the inside Haidt’s prescription for a cure is not extreme.
So sorry, mike. (From usa)
Sorry to hear that, Mike. Here in the UK, special staff networks are currently being set up in various divisions of the public sector to combat the ideological capture of institutions such as universities, the civil service, the police, etc. on sex and gender issues. People joining them have their anonymity protected and are finding that they are not nearly as outnumbered as they believed.
So far, the Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN) rollout is focused solely on sex v gender identity, but I see no reason why a broader initiative couldn’t be set up. In the UK, we have the advantage that “gender critical” (or sex realist) beliefs are now legally protected, so that if an employer has an LGBTQIAP+ staff network it can’t object to staff setting up a SEEN one, too.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-staff-networks/seen-network
While I don’t welcome Republican run universities at all, I fear the DEI rot has become so entrenched and is so damaging, and “our” side can’t seem to do much at all in opposition to it, I say bring that (inadequate but SOMETHING) effort on.
I’m watching Florida on that point and Ruffo’s efforts.
There was a guy running for some kind of position at Harvard on a platform of “fire everything DEI”, whom Pinker endorsed, but he got nowhere.
DEI became a monster (up from just being a bad idea) about the time they put so much money into it, around a decade ago. When you pay witch finders they WILL find witches.
D.A.
NYC
I second Jim Batterson’s condolences to Mike, and Mike’s observation that “seen from the inside, Haidt’s prescription for a cure is not extreme.” Two points about this occur to me. (1) Republican government intervention in the groves of academe would certainly look unhealthy; the standard chemotherapy regime for cancer is certainly unhealthy too, but it is warranted to treat an even more dangerous malady of the system. (2) Conservative government intervention will unquestionably be met with resistance, which will moderate its worst potential effects; that dynamic might produce intermediate results, such as weakening the DEI fetish without imposing a right-wing counterpart.
Thanks. Sorry I’m so late to reply. No one will read this but what the heck.
My university president’s 5-year term is ending, and she was recently renewed for 5 more years. Two bookend events to her first term illustrate the depths of wokeness at my university.
The president’s first year as president was 2020. During the lockdown (students and employees only on campus), a black guy disrupted the dining hall, yelling about racism. Campus security couldn’t get him to leave. RCMP came to arrest him, and he assaulted one of the mounties. Arrested ofc, and BLM-style protests ensued, with cries of systemic racism. The president hired outside counsel to report on the incident: the report exonerated campus security and the mounties, and revealed that the black guy had been escorted off campus the day before and told not to return, and had threatened & menaced a student before wandering into the dining hall and busting the place up. When that report was released, the president’s office buried it in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’, and instead announced to the university community that the president would be redoubling efforts to fight anti-black racism on campus.
Fast-forward to 2024. The president’s office has created a brand-new vice president position, hired a black woman from our university’s business school as special consultant to staff it, and hired a friend of that consultant (also a black woman, with an undergraduate degree from our business school, and a PhD from a California on-line “graduate school”) as the first Vice President People Equity & Inclusion. She has no experience or training in university administration and she is not a scholar, but manages to squeeze in her work as vice president alongside her career as a business consultant and motivational speaker. The new vice president’s first job was to sign and put in motion the Scarborough Charter, a pledge by my university and many others in Canada to engage in widespread race-based hiring of black and indigenous faculty members for “representation” and “inclusion”. There is no meaningful consultation on this at my university, and zero public opposition to abandoning merit in favour of race. The first such hires are expected later this semester. The provincial government through its human rights apparatus has blessed this process as an effort to right a past wrong and therefore not in violation of our laws or constitution. Everyone clapped.
One wag has said that, because dozens of Canadian universities have signed Scarborough, and there are not hundreds of highly qualified black academics in Canada waiting to be hired into new jobs, we will inevitably end up hiring away some of the best academics in Africa and we’ll make African universities worse in the process of making ourselves feel better about supposed systemic racism.
My president was a reappointed because of (not in spite of) these initiatives, by a board of governors led by our chancellor who supports BLM from the driver’s seat of her $200,000 electric Taycan.
That’s how bad it is.
I look for your posts and read them no matter what time you put them up, Mike.
Likewise! You set me straight about “mass graves”.
No one will read this but what the heck.
About the only thing that you’ve been wrong about so far, Mike! I loved the HHGTTG allusion, btw.
Free speech is not an end unto itself. Its purpose is to allow all ideas to be put on the table for evaluation. But what happens when one of those ideas rejects the very concept of evaluation? One which claims that there is no truth, no objectivity, that logic is racially supremacist and oppressive, one whose adherents refuse all forms of debate and evaluation? One that insists that its dogma is self-evident and that all other ideas constitute “hate speech” and must be crushed?
To allow that idea to take over, let alone be expressed without immediate rejection, illustrates the Paradox of Tolerance. We have reached that point not just across most of academia, but in many parts of society and the corporate world.
Critical Theory (if not all of postmodernism) is such an idea, incompatible with seeking truth and fitting Popper’s description of an idea worthy of being suppressed. It and ideas such as DEI that are derived from it must be driven out or there will never be pursuit of truth again. As Jon Haidt has come to realize, the universities are not going to do it themselves. We need someone who will. I don’t have the slightest confidence that that will happen, though.
As for the GOP, Haidt never suggested having the legislatures actually run the unis (and a Dem one would be terrible at it as well). All I can find in the (generated) transcript is the following [slightly edited for clarity]:
1:21:56
“Four years ago I said I want governments to stay out of this. Let universities try to solve this. When you make it political it’s always bad. But I now think that universities can’t do this on their own, so I actually do think that they need some push, some pressure, some counter-pressure, but I can’t comment on the specific things – just … yeah I shouldn’t go any further.”
A few minutes earlier he had mentioned that “we started seeing legislatures now getting more active” without mentioning any party. This was in response to a question regarding GOP politicians attacking “elites” as the primary cause of the decline in trust of US universities. But the UnHerd writer seems to have made much more out of all this than was there.
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for the coverage, but the UnHerd article is not quite right. My reason for saying we need to end DEI was NOT because the presidents could not condemn calls for genocide against the Jews. As a longtime supporter of free speech I’m on record as saying I think students SHOULD be allowed to say “From the river to the sea…”; see my tweet here:
https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1732389011983900857
The problem was the hypocrisy of then also punishing microaggressions. As the Babylon Bee put it: “Harvard student leaves lecture on microaggressions to atttend ‘Kill the Jews” rally. So in that tweet I said “University presidents: If you’re not going to punish students for calling for the elimination of Israel and Israelis, it’s OK with me, but ONLY if you also immediately dismantle the speech policing apparatus and norms you created in 2015-2016.”
Then in my UNC talk on Feb. 7, I laid out a much more forceful case that DEI needs to be ended because it is based on identitarianism, which I defined as:
*Putting group identity first, analytically
*Ranking identity groups, morally
I showed that this is clear for far right identitarianism (KKK, Nazis, actual white supremacists). I then showed that far left identitarianism is structurally similar, and I argued that it is a terrible thing to teach 18 year olds in a multi-ethnic multi-racial liberal democracy. I said that DEI must go, and cannot be reformed, because it is built on a foundation of left-wing identitarianism.
The full talk is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7hnX-e-i4k&ab_channel=UNCAFSA
The key section begins at minute 31, on telos, and that sets up the section on identitarianism which begins at minute 35.
My argument was not that we should end DEI because now we see that it’s bad for Jews. My argument was that the national humiliation of universities that began with their reactions on October 7 and culminated on Dec 5 has revealed to the world the deeply identitarian nature of DEI. It’s bad for everyone, including those who embrace it (who turn out to have the worst mental health), it is bad for the university (because it causes endless internal conflict among groups), and it is bad for the country (because it causes endless conflict among groups and reduces people’s ability to recognize each other’s common humanity).
I hope you can write another post giving some of the transcript of what I said about identitarianism, rather than giving unHerd’s inaccurate portrayal of my argument against DEI.
thanks
jon
Thanks for the note and corrections. I didn’t hear the talk, but will highlight this comment and your link in the post. I’ll also say that you take issue with UnHerd’s characterization.
cheers,
Jerry
I love that this kind of interaction happens on this site.
Yes, it’s always a great moment when the subject of a piece drops in to comment – and such an honour. Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, and now Jon (and less famous individuals, such as Daniel T. Baldassarre, author of the legendary spoof paper “What’s the Deal with Birds?”, and Octavia Sheepshanks). Doubtless there are others who I have forgotten.
Here’s our host’s post about that bird paper for anyone who missed it:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/04/16/hoax-a-crazy-hilarious-paper-in-a-predatory-journal/
I have found myself looking forward to visiting this site more than any MSM’s when there’s news I care about. Jerry’s always got a thoughtful take on things, and the commenters are shrewd and come from all kinds of interesting countries and intellectual backgrounds. Love this site!