Writing For Research

Out now & free to download by chapters or whole text, my @LSEPress book with Tim Monteath, Denisa Kostovicova and Hannah Boroudjou is “Doing Open Social Science”. It helps qualitative & quantitative researchers make their work more reproducible & robust. doi.org/10.31389/lsepr…

AI promised to democratise academic publishing – the evidence says otherwise - LSE Impact blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial…

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” Milan Kundera

In Australia 59 per cent of GPs (General Practitioners or Family Doctors) were born outside of Australia. Please don't think you can significantly cut migration without creating lots of unintended consequences. Source: thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2026/0…

How did Palantir embed itself inside the British military? Through a shameless revolving door and a series of massive unadvertised contracts. citizensreunited.substack.com/p/palantirs-ca…

AI systems are more effective persuaders than expert human advisors. scholar.google.com/scholar_url?ur…

New apps ‘humanize’ the outputs of large language models in student essays to make them seem ‘authentic’, while others drip feed content into essays like realistically-timed composition. nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/…

Interviewing is key for much qualitative research. But how can it be adapted to make research more reproducible, well-founded, & cumulative? Ch.9 of “Doing Open Social Science” outlines a path to better practice. Free from doi.org/10.31389/lsepr… Or doi.org/10.31389/lsepr…

Is it really bad that only 50% of social science papers are reproducible? - LSE Impact blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial…

Jasmine Sun - the value of summaries declines with AI, and the value of ‘ secrets’ - and original ideas - increases.

Qualitative research can be made far more open and reproducible – here’s how by @Write4Research medium.com/p/qualitative-…

Nigel Farage is a demagogue who has little regard for facts or the truth. Journalists covering him have no such excuse independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-f…

The aggressiveness of the Israeli intelligence collection on top U.S. officials during the second Trump administration has been “unhinged,” one senior official said … In 2021, Israeli military intelligence officers were caught planting listening devices at D.I.A. headquarters. Last year, officers from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, were discovered to have tried to plant a listening device in a Secret Service vehicle. nytimes.com/2026/06/06/us/…

🔎 Archive: Thiel Spokesman Denies Former Israeli PM's Claim Jeffrey Epstein 'Co-Owned' Palantir Founder’s Venture Fund – But Confirms Epstein was a Limited Partner —… 🔁 Relevant again: More details of Mandelson/Global Counsel & Palantir bylinetimes.com/2026/02/04/jef…

The U.S. military’s promotion system exists for one reason: to put the best officers in charge. A board of senior Navy admirals reviewed hundreds of files and selected the most qualified candidates through one of the most competitive processes in the military.    Pete Hegseth crossed out every woman on the list.    These are decorated officers who earned their ranks through decades of service and sacrifice.     Women and people of color make up less than 20% of senior officers in the Navy, yet 60% of the senior officers Hegseth has fired are female or Black. They are not DEI selections. They are the best people for the job, and they are being pushed out because of their race and their gender.    Call it what it is: discrimination, at the highest levels of our military. This is an affront to the merit-based system our military was built on, and to every officer who has served this country with honor.

The trade connections of ancient Gaza It is often forgotten that Gaza was once the richest port in the Eastern Mediterranean, unbelievably wealthy from the export of Arabian incense and Indian spices.

One of the strangest features of British politics is that we have convinced ourselves we are a uniquely high-tax country. For most low/middle earners, that's simply not true by developed-world standards. Meanwhile, every debate seems to focus on PAYE workers while multinational firms continue to shift profits around the globe. The public are then told the country can't afford decent public services, but rarely asked whether we're collecting all the tax we're actually owed from the likes of tech giants.

Este editorial de NATURE sostiene que la forma en que las nuevas generaciones consumen información está cambiando radicalmente. Concluye que si los científicos quieren seguir influyendo en el debate público, tienen que adaptarse a ese nuevo formato del ecosistema informativo y que la comunicación científica del futuro deberá ser cada vez más breve y visual. Cada época moldea los instrumentos con los que busca la verdad, pero eso, a su vez, también transforma la capacidad para atenderla. En la cultura contemporánea, la atención parece dispersarse en haces cada vez más breves. Y el riesgo de que eso cambie nuestra forma de pensar es elvado. N. Postman advirtió que una sociedad puede llegar a preferir lo que entretiene a lo que explica. Así que el verdadero escollo estará en lograr que la búsqueda de la verdad sobreviva al cambio de formato. Habrá que ver si seguimos siendo capaces de distinguir entre información -que puede consumirse en segundos- y conocimiento -que exige concentración y tiempo-. Ninguna revolución tecnológica debería volver obsoleta esa importante diferencia

Quite the combination of headlines on the New York Times website tonight:

Yep, that's the US Secretary of State for Defense / War / whatever advocating nazi ideology at an event to mark the start of the defeat of an actual nazi regime 82 years ago.

Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million. That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes. The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive. Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time. Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year. The men in the cages are still there.