🍎your Scholarly Digest 10th July, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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All previous editions of The Letter are available on our website.

Online Thumbnail Credit: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection; Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Hi Scholar,

We’ve been overjoyed to receive your letters. Each one is beautifully written – some thought provoking, others emotionally stirring (some both) – in all the ways we hope our own words might be for you.

If you’re still waiting for a reply, know that it’s coming. We are slow. Yes, because we’re just two humans with never-ending to-do lists. But also because we like to sit with your words and take our time to craft a thoughtful response. To answer such care with a quick emoji or a glib “you got it” feels like missing the point entirely. 

Receiving your letters – so far sent in response to ones we initiated – has led us to wonder: would you like other scholars to read your letters too? You already know the kind of letters we share in this community. So if you have an essay or a Brain Food piece you’d like to publish in The Scholarly Letter, send it in. We’re always open to growing our circle of letter writers, not just readers.

Finally, we’re thinking about hosting our first ever in-person meet-up this August; scholars making it out of the letter, if you will. We’re based in the UK, so the gathering would likely be somewhere in England. If that sounds like something you’d love to be part of, reply to this email and let us know. We’ll get planning.

With care,
The Critic & The Tatler

BRAIN FOOD

More Than Findings: The Performativity of Research Studies

A preprint titled ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task’ has been doing the rounds. You might have come across it under a different name, ‘New MIT study proves ChatGPT is making us dumber’ or something equally dramatic. The study has gone viral, with media headlines and social media posts hailing it as confirmation of their deepest suspicions: “Finally, proof of what I’ve always known!” And perhaps we should apologise for contributing to its virality here. But the kind of polarisation and blind certainty that virality provokes is exactly what makes the study worth looking at twice.

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