𝙰𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚑 𝙰𝚋𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚑

Montreal gains 15th spot in the 2025 Copenhagenize Index’s global ranking of bicycle-friendly cities, 1st in North America, and the only non-European country in the top 25.

Quebec universities weather an unprecedented storm - University Affairs The province’s institutes of higher learning are navigating immigration restrictions, language policies, budget cuts and challenges to academic freedom.

universityaffairs.ca/features/que...

Vietnamese food has a concept I don't often see in western cuisine - "ngán."
It's translated as being bored but applies when your palate is dulled by the sameness in texture, taste.
We want our food to hit different notes. A bánh mì is simultaneously soft and crunchy, spicy and cool, fatty and sour.

Arendt’s warning: “Though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it first of all destroys the national institutions of its own people.”

Congratulations to Ryan Pevnick, whose article “The Representation-Enabling Approach to Campaign Finance Reform” has win the 2025 Rockwell Prize for the Best Article on Ethics, Leadership, and Public Policy.

#poliphil #polisky #PolTheory

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) invites applications for its 2026 manuscript workshop award.

It’s been finally assigned a volume and issue number

Democracy Is in Trouble. This Region Is Turning to Its People.

Nyt article on randomly selected citizen assemblies in Belgium

Misinformation, democratic breakdown, social identity: An excellent set of reflections from @samuel-bagg.bsky.social

O wow: Chrystia Freeland (Prairies & St Antony’s 1991) has just been selected the next Warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust.

#canpol

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion Commentators have traditionally assumed that the key interpretive question concerning Hobbes’s theology is whether he was a theist (as he proclaim...

I reviewed Thomas Holden’s excellent new book, _Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion_, in NDPR.

TLDR;: theological expressivism yes, justified theism no, rational piety yes.

The four-fold drain of scientific publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤

If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
10/10

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing.

Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

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/...

Back to the future: 1934 ad for electric car charger

Aux fumeurs: Vous pouvez vaincre l’habitude de fumer en trois jours améliorer votre santé

Do they DID know that smoking was bad for health in 1934

Quebec’s brain drain: Universities warn CAQ foreign talent cuts threaten economic future At National Assembly immigration hearings, universities are challenging what they call myths about international students — and warning that the Legault government's attitude toward newcomers will lea...

montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...

“Stalin’s method of accusing a fictitious enemy of the crime he himself was about to commit”

(Yes, am reading Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism for the first time.)

Closing Central Madrid To Cars Resulted In 9.5% Boost To Retail Spending, Finds Bank Analysis City of Madrid significantly boosted the takings of its shops and restaurants last Christmas by banning cars from the CBD, finds an analysis by Spain's second largest bank.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY.

There was also a 71% drop in air pollution.

Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

‘These men think they’ve done nothing wrong’: the philosopher who tried to understand Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists When 50 men went on trial in France, accused of raping a woman who had been drugged by her husband, Manon Garcia was in the courtroom – and in the prosecutors’ closing arguments. How does she make sen...

Interview with @manongarcia.bsky.social
On the Pelicot rape trials in France

Curious to know the answer!

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

This op-ed published in the @nytimes.com by Stephen Witt thoughtfully captures the urgency and complexity of navigating AI's risks, but also my sincere conviction that technical solutions are possible — we still have agency and an opportunity to act.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

Super interesting challenge to the current banking regime by Aaron James:

US Ambassador threatens to tariff, annex, and bomb Canada if anti-American sentiment doesn't improve OTTAWA - U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra has vowed to improve anti-American sentiment he sees in Canada, no matter how many illegal tariffs, forced annexations, or literal bombs it takes to do it.

US Ambassador threatens to tariff, annex, and bomb Canada if anti-American sentiment doesn't improve

Universities should lead on the plant-based dietary transition As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1 and the EAT–Lancet Commission2 have pointed out in recent reports, substantial reductions in demand for animal-based foods are vital for achieving cli...

Institutional food policy matters. When it comes to addressing food insecurity, school lunches matter most. But I would be remiss not to note mine and my co-authors' article from Lancet Planetary Health arguing that universities should lead on food sustainability.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Montreal Makes People Feel Welcome With Safe Streets, Happy Places & Green Spaces — Streetfilms My standing piece of advice for those who live in North America who pine to see the best-practice streets of dozens of places in Europe or want to educate colleague/friends what’s possible: just go to...

“My standing piece of advice for those who live in North America who pine to see the best-practice streets of dozens of places in Europe or want to educate colleagues/friends what’s possible: just go to Montreal. It’s much closer. They really have it all.”

it serves the purposes of determining how to fulfil our aims; of assigning responsibility and blame; and of critically assessing a society’s normative standing in light of its power structure. /5

Recognizing non-decisive, elicitory and structural, and non-causal categories of power is practically, morally, and evaluatively significant: /4

It defends the idea that one can play a causal role without making a difference; structural power as a species of “elicitory” power, which does not operate by way of one’s intentional actions; and a non-causal category of power, whereby outcomes obtain without one playing a causal role. /3

Abstract: Many theorists assume that social power operates only by way of agents’ intentional actions and their causal influence on outcomes—where causality is understood to imply making a difference. This paper challenges all three assumptions. /2