Sam Harper

I seriously doubt you would have even run across that old commentary, but just made me happy to see that I'm not the only one that starts channeling Jackson 5 when I see "APC"... as I said, great post!

Invited Commentary: A-P-C … It's Easy as 1-2-3! Abstract. Investigations of age, period, and cohort effects are difficult because the 3 factors are linearly dependent. In a novel application, Kramer et a

This is a great post and happy to see more advice for doing interesting descriptive work. Also, that first paragraph heading is a banger... :)

academic.oup.com/aje/article/...

Job opening for postdoctoral researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic-Epidemiology.

The Medical Demography research group explains its goals for studying disease progression and its effects on health and the population.

We are looking for a PhD in demography, sociology, epidemiology, or related fields with experience in quantitative health data analysis.

Apply now: The application deadline is March 22, 2026. For more information, visit www.demogr.mpg.de/go/jobs.

📢Job Offer‼️New Max Planck Research Group on Medical Demography
Marcus Ebeling will lead the team starting on 1 July 2026. The research group will be based at the MPIDR in Rostock. Read an interview with Marcus on his future research here: www.demogr.mpg.de/go/rgmd (including link to job) #postdoc

Nurses' Health Study. The gift that keeps on giving...

A New Era for Pitchfork: Introducing Reader Scores and Commenting After 30 years, we’re expanding the role readers have in our music criticism and giving you full access to the reviews archive

Enshittification comes to Pitchfork:

"But to read unlimited reviews, see the reader scores, and comment yourself or read the comments of others, you’ll have to smash subscribe."

pitchfork.com/news/a-new-e...

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

"The target was numbers, and quality was mentioned only in terms of a journal’s prestige, never the work itself."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The full report is posted here www.healtheffects.org/system/files...

along with commentary from HEI's Research Committee and Appendix material here: www.healtheffects.org/publication/...

A new @mcgill.ca study led by me and Jill Baumgartner released by @heiresearch.bsky.social reports that China’s Clean Heating Policy, one of the largest #CleanEnergy policies yet implemented, reduced household coal use, improved air quality, and reduced blood pressure in rural Beijing.

‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body Exclusive: Some scientists say many detections are most likely error, with one high-profile study called a ‘joke’ High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”. Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. Continue reading...

‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body

Yes, I believe the technical term for this is enshittification.

Lived in Copenhagen last year and New Year's Eve was 100% the worst time to be there. I just do not understand it.

Overshoot (again I've only read the first few chapters) is extensively documented but written in a much more polemical and frustrated style that I think KT are keen to avoid. Maybe that's what appealed to the NYRB reviewer. Hope to see your take soon!

Yes, that rings true. I've only read the "Invent" chapter of Abundance, which is all about the stifling effects of risk aversion and excess paperwork on scientific innovation [likely true], but pays little attention to the role of perverse incentives (counting up pubs and grant dollars, etc.).

It's not a particularly deep critique of Abundance, but I did enjoy this review essay by economic historian Trevor Jackson, which simultaneously reviewed "Overshoot" by Malm and Carton. Happy to send you the full text if you don't have access. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

It's happening! Canada launched two programs to recruit international researchers.

Canada Impact+ Research Chairs (1 million/yr for 8 yrs +)
Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders.

I will do my best to facilitate the process for those interested. Hit me up.

www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl...

Tanner Lecture on Human Values: David D. Cole Progressives have increasingly lost faith in the First Amendment—at least as it has been interpreted and applied by the Supreme Court.  They argue that free speech has been “weaponized” by big busines...

I look forward to defending free speech from its progressive critics — and conservative assailants == as the Tanner Letures Nov. 12 and 13 @princeton.edu

A timely topic, sadly

lectures.princeton.edu/lectures/202...

I think the answer is no. I recall an interesting short overview in Mutz’s ‘Population-Based Survey Experiments’ but perhaps dated now (2011).

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing - Research Professional News Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts, says Caroline Edwards

Opinion: Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing.

Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts, says Caroline Edwards (@theblochian.bsky.social).

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

title page of article: There is a skeleton in the social science closet. Almost all of us have heard it rattled at one time or another.! Nevertheless, we collectively ignore it. Some ignore it because they do not think it is very scary: others because its putting to rest would require a major restructuring of our scholarly journals. Perhaps others even fear that admitting its existence would undermine belief in the empirical progress? the social sciences have apparently enjoyed since the widespread diffusion of statistical training and the ready availability of the computer. I will argue that the skeleton, the bias social science journals exhibit for publishing articles reporting statistically significant results, is dangerous

The results of statistical tests should not be submitted to or als until after articles have been accepted for publica- tion.. would base their decisions on theory under discussions of the theory under consideration, the specific hypotheses to be tested, and the data sample to be used.? This would divert attention from the final result to the a priori specification of hypotheses and the appropriateness of data and statistical technique for testing them. Unfortunate-ly, this approach would not work unless adopted by all the relevant journals. If a single journal adopted it, researchers

Any journal that publishes an article with statistical models should be required (by the disciplines?) to provide a page of space to anyone who wants to report the results of applying the authors' models to different sets of data. This approach would provide a less biased sampling of research results. It would also allow us to better gauge the robustness of our theories.8 Some journals now provide some space for veri-fications; doing so should be standard editorial practice.

Researchers should be required to submit a statement with indicating their articles indicating whether or not the model being presented is the one actually first estimated from the data. A general description of statistical techniques would also be included in the submission. Is the presented model the first specification or is it the end product of stepwise regression or some other questionable data search? Where appropriate, the editor would affix a warning along the following lines next to results:

encountered this article by David Weimer from 1986 (cited by 7) with three good ideas for improving science that just a few short decades later, we've started to implement.

Collective Delusion In The Social Sciences: Publishing Incentives For Empirical Abuse

doi.org/10.1111/j.15...

Associate Director, Equity Lab Salary: £120,800 Closing date: 9th November Contract type: Permanent Interview dates: 24th and 28th November The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation. We improve health for everyone by fun...

Fantastic opportunity to lead the Equity Lab @wellcometrust.bsky.social working with the legendary Jimmy Volmink, details here wellcome.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/Wellco... Please repost so as many as possible can see this great opportunity

Does One Size Fit All? | Los Angeles Review of Books In the 10th essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Jay S. Kaufman shows how the science of human body size is suffused with cultural assumptions.

McGill's @healthsciences.mcgill.ca Jay Kaufman critiquing public health guidance that "promote the powerful ideological message that being normal or abnormal ultimately depends on one’s race. That premise should be regarded as the truly malignant pathology"

lareviewofbooks.org/article/does...

Horrors of Trump detention centre: Lisburn man tells his story after arrest for 'looking like a Mexican'

Lee Stinton was lifted by US immigration police on an American street — in an incident he compared to a kidnapping.

Here, he tells us his story.

"Credit card perks for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less. In other words, when you book a hotel room or enjoy entry to an airport lounge at no cost, poor consumers are ultimately footing the bill." www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/o...

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

A Zoo in Denmark Wants to Feed Your Pets to Its Predators

What is going on here?

Why does Aalborg (or Copenhagen, Montreal, San Diego, etc.) even need a zoo?

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/s...

Two PhD studentships available in real-time infectious disease modelling, jointly with LSHTM, Imperial and UKHSA. January 2026 start + 3.5 years of funding: www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

Fully agree. In exactly the same way that making all of the material (protocol, data, code) available for reproducing research also is no guarantee of "better" research. Transparency is (largely) good, but can't delude ourselves that improved transparency equals improved quality.

That Cup of Coffee May Have a Longer-Term Perk

🤔🤔🤔

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/w...