Leonardo Carella

Our national neurosis contains multitudes of subnational neuroses.

Italian cuisine wins UNESCO World Heritage status - Food & Wine - Ansa.it Italian cuisine was added to UNESCO's 'Intangible Cultural Heritage' lists at a meeting of the UN agency's Intergovernmental Committee in New Delhi on Wednesday. (ANSA)

Italy's entire foreign policy is geared towards making ketchup on pasta an actual crime against humanity. www.ansa.it/english/news...

Incredible how Japan and Italy keep adopting similar institutional reforms at similar times. A conspiracy of Mill’s most-different-design holdouts.

(D’oh it’s 40% higher than pre-PhD by the fifth year, “only” about 20% higher than the matched sample.)

Use of mental health medications in the population of Swedish PhD students is 40% higher than a matched sample by the fifth PhD year.

Be kind to PhD students. Don't take up PhD students you can't invest in. Alert prospective students of the reality of a PhD.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Going through my data cleaning replication files is an emotional journey.

Rachel Reeves energy

Two screenshots designed in the style of Spotify Wrapped but they're presented as being a (nonexistent) Bluesky Wrapped Screenshot 1: You spent 738 posts on the following topics: 1. Dunking on the New York Times op-ed section 2. Talking about drama at New York Magazine 3. Weighing in on the New York City mayoral election Screenshot 2: Based on this, your most likely place to be located would be: New York, NY Instead, swipe to see where, based on geotagging, you actually live

Man, the Bluesky Wrapped 2025 is pretty brutal

I didn't know this! And, of course, I never helped anyone accessing the thesis of the other Rachel Reeves either.

World Chess Championship 1993 - Wikipedia

Not the main point here but in 1993 - when Rachel Reeves was British Girls' under-14 champion, but not the right type of British Girls' under-14 champion - there wasn't even a single World Chess Champion, because of course chess drama. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_C...

What offends me is the presumption that they can ask researchers and PhD students for this stuff *for free*. There’s a cost of living crisis out there.

When I was at an Oxford college whose library for some reason has a copy of Reeves’ BA thesis, I was separately approached by two different people asking for help to get hold of it. The obsession with taking down her intellectual credentials is revealing - and absolutely mental.

Edit: this obvs should have said “I can see..”

(This also helps with my sanity as class sizes get bigger.)

I can’t see that being a big issue with classes with significant variance in writing skills, yes. Broadly speaking I’m moving towards reducing the weight/length of writing components of the assessments, and I think next term I’ll go even further.

Yes, agreed. Also, under clear rules, AI use in assessments has been rarer than expected so far.

I had the same conversation with a colleague yesterday. It seems to me that students who started university well post-covid have adjusted to significantly better standards of attendance, participation, engagement than 2-3 years ago. AI is a problem but not as much as covid disruption was.

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project

You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna!

⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025

wratil.eu/files/MULTIR...

1/4 🧵

Arguably, the last deliverable* manifesto from a major party was Theresa May's in 2017, and was monstered by the media for it.

*Ok, it still had the "tens of thousands" pledge on migration, but immigration promises have long been divorced from reality.

POV: you're teaching political science but the internet has turned your brain to mush.

It’s Michael Tesler all the time way down.

Do policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ in European democracies?

My new article in @ejprjournal.bsky.social finds: Yes, sometimes, but this is not the norm.

Let's break it down. 🧵 1/10

(1/10) 🚨Preprint alert!🚨

In this article, I challenge claims of a generational rise of conservative men. In the media and recent academic publications, the so-called ‘youth gender gap’ has been interpreted as a generational phenomenon.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I'm sorry to burst the bubble but the idea that Republican elites and/or base are a couple of pieces of evidence from the Epstein files away from the tipping point is a fantasy. We've been through this for 10 years now. It's not going to happen. It's not who they are.

It’s very revealing how the techno-futurist crowd assumes that the rest of us also treat other people as props and gadgets in our lives, as opposed to valuing the fact that there’s a thinking, feeling person there.

A modern tragedy.

Hate crimed by the homework.

The Anglo consensus of the first half of 2010s was that where continental Europeans were endemically subject to crises and demagoguery, "we" were distinctly were more enlightened. Cameron's Britain. Obama's America. Ponderous essays about Magna Carta and the "golden thread".

How wrong it all was.

ugh in two weeks I will have to teach NHST I feel so dirty