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Essay
Oct 15, 2026
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3 min read
I can recognize the limitations of my knowledge without deciding that those limitations disqualify me from pursuing knowledge in the first place.
Oct 8, 2026
5 min read
Therefore, take pleasure in the acts of production which develop you as a scholar and do them often. Enjoy the process of creating messy, incoherent, incomplete works - and words - about the topics which inspired you to pursue the life of the scholar in the first place
Oct 1, 2026
7 min read
But when it came to the rules, methods, processes, and practices of doing academic research involved in actually doing academic research, and learning how to play the academic research game, I don’t think I gained these just by going through a PhD program.
Sep 24, 2026
Why is it acceptable to value research work when it comes to a job, but not acceptable to value research when it comes to education, for the sake of learning?
Sep 17, 2026
6 min read
In the essay, he narrates a story of a seventeen-year-old student at the University of Strasbourg who, instead of following the prescribed anatomy curriculum involving dissection and microscopic examinations of tissues, was experimenting with dyes and microscopic specimens.
Sep 3, 2026
4 min read
Perhaps I should submit my recently finished proposal to a proper program? I believe it stands a chance of being considered.
Aug 20, 2026
Scholars are tasked not only with bringing about changes in what we think and do, but also in how we think and do.
Aug 13, 2026
A more interesting question is not whether we should, or should not, use AI in academic research, but what our position on academic research signals about what we believe makes a "good scholar" and where that belief comes from.
Aug 6, 2026
In much the same way, I feel the differences in my writing when using the notes app on my iPhone, compared to when I’m writing on my computer, and the altogether different writing produced using pen and paper alone.
Jul 30, 2026
The implication is that we may pull the academy apart and put it back together any which way we like, without any certainty of making meaningful progress on the problems that have come to define its apparent brokenness.
Jul 23, 2026
While Zhang may be one of the most common surnames in the world, with more than 100 million people sharing the name, I don’t think that fact alone explains why people have started noticing Zhang appearing so frequently in their bibliographies
Jul 17, 2026
I would start on the Wikipedia page for anime, and hours later, when my mum came into my room to turn on the lights because dusk had fallen, I would be on the page about the militarisation of outer space.
Jul 9, 2026
8 min read
We don’t need to place ourselves into a state of eternal yearning – a tragic condition of never being fucking enough – before we can finally call ourselves scholars and academics.
Jul 2, 2026
There’s definitely an element of that; I’ve heard people say things like, ‘I’m shamed into working’, or ‘There’s something about seeing other people work that makes me want to work’.
+1
Jun 25, 2026
In many ways, this arrangement is not entirely new: it resembles, in important respects, how intellectual work was supported before the rise of the modern university.
Jun 18, 2026
9 min read
Why does a feed full of intelligent people and intelligent ideas make me want to open Instagram less and less?
Jun 4, 2026
We had already spent decades building a world organised around writing more and more, faster and faster, until abundance itself began to change what writing was worth.
May 29, 2026
12 min read
It is the experience of sensing that we know things in a light shaped by the structural conditions of our chronically online lives.
Apr 16, 2026
Far from exposing an intellectual life that merely dresses, speaks, and performs itself through pretension and exclusivity, the text has, in many ways, come to romanticise it.
Apr 9, 2026
11 min read
We need to stop treating publics as passive consumers of science
Mar 19, 2026
10 min read
This observation should not be misunderstood as an argument against government support for academic research.
Mar 5, 2026
13 min read
"I'm not at all afraid of the term 'ivory tower'".
Feb 19, 2026
Tick tock tick tock, we were moving on a timeline. The hands on the clock for seduction, I was told, had to be turned to the time of production.
Feb 5, 2026
14 min read
Private universities now receive government funding, public universities prize industry partnerships, and liberal arts colleges emphasise the development of graduates capable of contributing to a nation's economic prosperity and security.
Jan 8, 2026
After all, has not our understanding of the pinnacle of academic excellence become entirely about getting single-authored journal articles in ‘top-tier’ journals?
