The hottest Academia Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top News Topics

How Jeffrey Epstein Became a Public Intellectual

The Honest Broker • 22008 implied HN points • 21 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Money can buy the appearance of being a public intellectual — rich people can purchase offices, fellowships, media access, and influence even without the usual qualifications.
  2. Universities, journals, and media can be swayed by donations, PR teams, and personal connections, which lets wealthy benefactors gain undeserved credibility and platforms.
  3. Real public intellectuals earn trust through work and ideas, not pay-for-play, and institutions should support those who speak truth to power rather than selling prestige to the highest bidder.

Acknowledgements for *Unbeatable*

Bet On It • 286 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Academia
  1. Economics can transform a life by giving clear mental tools to solve puzzles and by providing deep intellectual enjoyment and a rewarding career.
  2. Decades of study produce distilled, hard‑earned insights that embrace difficult truths and make a candid, robust case for free markets.
  3. Close colleagues, candid critics, and family support are essential for shaping, improving, and finishing major intellectual projects.

Thoughts on the job market in the age of LLMs

Democratizing Automation • 720 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology Academia
  1. Senior engineers and researchers who can steer complex LLM systems and provide long-term vision are hugely valuable, and their impact often outpaces adding more junior people.
  2. Junior candidates need a near-obsessive focus on making measurable progress and deep ownership in a narrow area, plus clear evidence (good evaluations, strong results) or they risk being replaced by tooling.
  3. Getting hired depends on alignment and signals: public writing, meaningful open-source work, and well-crafted cold emails help you stand out, while poor signals (many middle-author papers or low-quality AI-generated posts) hurt, and cultural fit matters as much as raw ability.

Caplan-Rojas Substack Live Today at 4 PM

Bet On It • 85 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. A live Substack event is happening today at 4 PM ET to discuss the book "You Have No Right to Your Culture," and viewers are encouraged to post questions in the comments.
  2. Fabio Rojas, a sociology department chair and longtime friend of the host, will be the guest and his family and immigration story will be part of the conversation.
  3. Subscribe to the Bet On It newsletter to get the Substack invite and watch or ask questions live.

The new academy: modern intellectuals are writing their best ideas on Substack

read • 19320 implied HN points • 01 Jun 23
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Substack provides a platform for academics to share their ideas more freely and immediately with a wider audience than traditional academic journals.
  2. Substack allows scholars to earn revenue from their publications and engage with readers in a more personal and direct manner.
  3. It offers a space for academics to innovate, challenge traditional academic norms, and explore intellectual contributions outside the constraints of conventional academia.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity:

Political Psychology Links, 2/17/2026

In My Tribe • 136 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. Conservatives should aim to cultivate a positive, hopeful intellectual vision as their central task. But people often take a perverse pleasure in hating and conflict, which makes combative, pessimistic narratives more popular than constructive ones.
  2. The rise of social justice or 'woke' ideas is tied to mass higher education and changing social values that see human nature as malleable, making large-scale social transformation and activism morally urgent. Those beliefs also operate as a status strategy, turning approved speech and identities into assets supported by media, education, and institutional networks, while simple economic explanations for the phenomenon look weaker.
  3. Behavior genetics shows most heritable psychological variation comes from many small-effect genes under purifying selection and mutation-selection balance. As a result, many individual differences are likely neutral or slightly maladaptive rather than being direct adaptive traits.

Our new book is out today!

The Path Not Taken • 220 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. A new book, Beyond Woke and Anti-Woke, has been published to explain the rise of social justice ideology; the Kindle is inexpensive, the hardback is priced for academia, and a paperback will follow.
  2. The book argues social justice ideology is a recent and distinctive phenomenon that scholars have largely overlooked and calls for using established academic theories and methods to study it.
  3. Promotion includes articles and extracts on multiple online platforms, readers are invited to support the project, and more related posts are planned soon.

Pronoun Pronouncements

Heterodox STEM • 256 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. The spotlight on third-person pronouns was overblown and often silly; pronouns are mostly functional words, and in direct conversation the important ones are "I" and "you."
  2. The pronoun craze spread partly as a fashion and because institutions found it easy to enforce symbolic rules, but that trend is fading as legal and medical consequences provoke pushback.
  3. Academics were especially quick to adopt and police these norms because it suited their skills and incentives, and too few intellectual dissidents pushed back against the movement.

The Intellectual: Will He Wither Away?

In My Tribe • 501 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Rapid advances in science and technology have put key parts of modern life—war, industry, and innovation—beyond the grasp of traditional writers and thinkers, so they can no longer shape or reliably predict the future.
  2. Many humanistic scholars have retreated into administration, committee work, and nostalgic or antiquarian subjects, which reduces their public relevance and influence.
  3. Social scientists often imitate the methods of natural science with questionnaires and computers, but that formal mimicry fails to bridge the gap, leaving intellectuals well-funded and honored yet at risk of fading into irrelevance.

Wokeness Is the Psychic Epidemic Carl Jung Warned About

Heterodox STEM • 362 implied HN points • 25 Jan 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Wokeness is framed as a social-level mental health crisis that spreads like a psychic epidemic. It promotes reality-distorting beliefs, moral splitting, and scapegoating.
  2. Social media and institutional incentives amplify this dynamic by rewarding outrage and victimhood over calm, accurate thinking. That amplification helps explain rising anxiety and depression among young people.
  3. The proposed remedies are protecting free speech, encouraging personal responsibility, and rebuilding stabilizing communities or parallel institutions. These steps aim to anchor truth, reduce moral panic, and restore psychological resilience.

Freedom to write, freedom to research, to do something together: An interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat 

read • 10220 implied HN points • 31 Jul 23
🚌 Education Academia
  1. Scholars on Substack are reaching new audiences and earning income for their research and writing.
  2. Substack provides academics like Ruth Ben-Ghiat with financial freedom to pursue public-interfacing research.
  3. Academic writers use Substack for engaging with readers, testing new ideas, and shaping their research through feedback.

Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein

Michael Tracey • 184 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. A strong public backlash has formed against Noam Chomsky, with many former colleagues disowning him while he is elderly and partly incapacitated, and critics often haven't checked the facts.
  2. The alleged sexual misconduct by Epstein mainly dates to 2005 or earlier, so Chomsky's meetings with him in the 2010s occurred long after those incidents and claims that he ignored ongoing child abuse are misleading.
  3. Chomsky and other academics exchanged intellectual ideas with Epstein, and some innocuous communications are being misread as sinister, prompting overbroad institutional reactions and a moral panic.

Why Do Research Institutes Look the Same?

Asimov Press • 535 implied HN points • 08 Jan 26
🔬 Science Academia
  1. Many new research organizations end up resembling traditional universities or startups, because a few familiar institutional models dominate the space.
  2. Forces like researchers' fear of harming future academic careers, investor demands for market-fit and growth, and tax/legal categories push organizations to conform to existing forms.
  3. To create truly different institutions, funders and founders can experiment with new legal structures, hire people less bound to academic incentives, use patient philanthropy, or try time-limited and project-based models.

Northwestern University urged to apologize for “unjust treatment” of Jane Ying Wu

Pekingnology • 105 implied HN points • 22 Feb 26
đź“° News Academia
  1. Northwestern is accused of punishing Jane Ying Wu by limiting her work, shutting her lab, reassigning her grants, cutting her pay, and having police remove and involuntarily commit her; her estate says these actions helped lead to her taking her life and is suing the university.
  2. More than 1,000 academics from over 300 institutions, including prominent scholars, signed a letter urging Northwestern to publicly acknowledge the harm and apologize for its treatment of Wu.
  3. The allegations stem from an NIH investigation tied to the broader "China Initiative" that produced no charges, and Northwestern vehemently denies wrongdoing and has moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Fine Woke Cannibals

TK News by Matt Taibbi • 8966 implied HN points • 14 Dec 24
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. The term 'symbolic capitalists' describes professionals who focus on ideas and narratives rather than physical labor. This group spans various fields like education, media, and consulting.
  2. The book examines modern politics, claiming that recent conflicts were more about upper-class struggles rather than genuine ideological fights. It suggests that both sides misunderstood each other's motivations.
  3. The author reflects on his role in promoting 'woke' movements, showing how political actions often come from a desire for social status rather than true concern for people on the ground.

Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried

The Honest Broker • 26862 implied HN points • 04 Nov 23
đź“– Philosophy Academia
  1. The philosophy of Effective Altruism may prioritize long-term consequences over immediate actions, leading to risky ethical decisions.
  2. Analytic philosophy, specifically of the Anglo-American variety, can promote perspectives that prioritize maximizing pleasure, potentially leading to damaging outcomes.
  3. Beware of philosophical systems that justify harmful actions by focusing on a 'larger context' and be cautious of practitioners who calculate consequences before performing acts of kindness or generosity.

READING: Judith Shklar as Proto-Feminist in the 1950s

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 123 implied HN points • 03 Feb 26
đź’ľ History Academia
  1. In elite academic settings, informal social policing—like faculty wives' sewing circles and gossip—pressures women to prioritize husbands and children and enforces hierarchies through malice and envy.
  2. Some progressive mentors and male allies promoted fairness and merit, which opened professional doors, but visible success still invited invasive gossip and resentment.
  3. Personal choices, spousal influence, and institutional opportunities combined to steer women into academic careers while they tried to balance family and intellectual ambitions.

DisInformation Chronicle Podcast with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya

The DisInformation Chronicle • 290 implied HN points • 31 Dec 25
🎙 Podcasts Academia
  1. A new podcast will interview interesting, smart thinkers and plans to release new episodes about twice a month at first.
  2. The first episode features NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya discussing his move from Stanford professor to the government role that manages a huge chunk of biomedical research funding.
  3. Future guests will be announced ahead of time so paid subscribers can suggest questions, and listeners are invited to suggest guests and consider subscribing.

The Online Right Doesn’t Want White Women to Get PhDs

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 445 implied HN points • 08 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Parts of the online right openly harass white women who pursue advanced degrees, saying they should be having children instead of careers.
  2. When Juliet Turner posted about earning her PhD, she was attacked on X and called a race traitor and shamed for not having kids.
  3. These attacks come from a rising white supremacist mindset online that treats white women mainly as reproducers and has escalated alongside broader far‑right harassment of minorities.

Cancelling "Controversial" Scholars

Glenn’s Substack • 439 implied HN points • 16 Jun 24
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. Labeling someone as 'controversial' can shut down meaningful debate. It's important to have open discussions, especially about difficult topics like international conflicts.
  2. Censorship often happens under the guise of protecting moral values, but it can prevent us from understanding the full picture. People need to hear all sides of an argument to make informed decisions.
  3. Understanding the other party's perspective in conflicts is crucial for peace. Instead of dividing ourselves, we should look for ways to engage and resolve issues together.

Savage's 'Lost Generation', or: Thoughts on the DEI scam and what happened after 2015

eugyppius: a plague chronicle • 283 implied HN points • 23 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Starting around 2014–2015, aggressive DEI hiring in journalism, academia, and entertainment prioritized racial and gender targets over merit, and many white male millennials say they were shut out of the careers they trained for.
  2. Senior administrators protected themselves by enforcing these policies, which often led to hires chosen for demographic reasons rather than qualifications and made institutions more female‑skewed, worse to work in, and more politically radicalized.
  3. Those antiracist measures frequently backfired by amplifying racial optics and grievances, generating hypocrisy among progressives, and appearing likely to persist because meritocracy is weak and demographic preferences can be self‑perpetuating.

So I See I Am Quoted in the "New York Times"...

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 376 implied HN points • 25 Nov 25
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. A prominent economist argued in the 2010s that with very low interest rates governments should spend to put people to work, and that ideas like secular stagnation and functional finance are relevant again; following those ideas could have improved economic outcomes.
  2. Fast, deep thinking and active engagement from a single trusted expert can strengthen public debate and left-of-center policy arguments, and losing such a voice would make collective reasoning weaker.
  3. Personal misconduct is serious and can rightly harm a reputation, but people have varied failure modes and friends have a role in holding them accountable while helping them become better contributors.

Save Gad Saad!

Daily Dreher • 1513 implied HN points • 26 Jan 24
đź“° News Academia
  1. Gad Saad needs support for being unwoke at his university in Montreal.
  2. Concordia University in Montreal is facing criticism for its ultra-woke direction.
  3. The university's approach may impact scholarship and cause professors to leave.

Diao Daming: the costs of studying China at a distance

Pekingnology • 139 implied HN points • 16 Jan 26
🌍 World Politics Academia
  1. China studies is drifting away from language skills, fieldwork, and primary sources, so much research is disconnected from the lived experience and context inside China.
  2. Many younger researchers approach China with vigilance and a competition mindset instead of curiosity, which biases questions and pushes attention-grabbing policy claims over balanced understanding.
  3. There is an unhealthy methodological imbalance—heavy reliance on quantitative models, overly narrow specialties, or vague grand-policy talk without historical and cultural grounding—leading to shallow analysis that can worsen mutual distrust.

RKUL: Time Well Spent, 1/1/2026

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning • 154 implied HN points • 01 Jan 26
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Read a few rigorous interdisciplinary books this year; they are a small, high-value way to learn durable ways of thinking about science, history, and culture.
  2. Political activism is reshaping academic norms and sometimes sidelines traditional methods like philology; the worth of scholarship should rest on the usefulness of its methods and insights, not scholars' personal politics.
  3. New ancient DNA and genomics studies are steadily sharpening our view of human history by revealing deep regional roots, admixture, and selection, but in some regions more modern samples give diminishing returns so careful interpretation matters.

Political Psychology Links, 11/26/2025

In My Tribe • 288 implied HN points • 26 Nov 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. People tend to focus more on differences when they learn more about someone. This can make it easier to dislike them, especially on social media that encourages sharing personal details.
  2. Recent studies show that young people with various mental health issues may have similar brain changes. This supports the idea of a common factor in different mental illnesses.
  3. Some researchers believe that education systems should change to improve training quality. They suggest getting rid of outdated methods and emphasizing real-world feedback in training for fields like nursing and journalism.

“Focus like a laser on merit!”

Unsafe Science • 97 implied HN points • 10 Jan 26
🔬 Science Academia
  1. Claims about widespread unconscious bias and pervasive anti‑female hiring discrimination are often overstated; measures like the IAT tap associations in memory rather than proven unconscious prejudice and do not reliably predict discriminatory behavior.
  2. Many DEI and anti‑bias trainings lack solid evidence that they change real‑world behavior and can have unintended costs or even provoke reverse bias, so interventions should be rigorously evaluated for both benefits and harms.
  3. The best practical approach is to focus like a laser on merit by using clear, job‑relevant criteria and individualized evidence, and to improve credibility through adversarial collaboration and honest communication about uncertainty.

DEI Is Destroying My University

Reality's Last Stand • 1965 implied HN points • 16 Feb 23
🚌 Education Academia
  1. The author expresses concerns about DEI initiatives impacting academic freedom and professional standing in universities.
  2. The author discusses the pressure to conform to diversity requirements in academic curricula, leading to challenges in maintaining academic integrity.
  3. The author highlights instances of intolerant behavior and ideological conflict in academia related to DEI measures.

Think Less, Agnes

Freddie deBoer • 11726 implied HN points • 25 Jun 23
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. The article discusses the tendency to overthink and intellectualize everyday experiences.
  2. It critiques the author's perception of love and relationships based on overly philosophical ideals.
  3. The text challenges the notion of profoundness in experiences and questions the need for such intellectualization.

How Academics Destroyed Academia

Daily Dreher • 1690 implied HN points • 27 Oct 23
🚌 Education Academia
  1. A Marxist humanities professor criticizes the impact of Left-wing academics on academia.
  2. Academia being dominated by the Left is seen as unjust and intolerant.
  3. Concerns are raised about the dangerous embrace of extremist ideologies and the potential consequences for society.

Misinformation Scholarship Exposed as Liberal Activist Grift

The DisInformation Chronicle • 720 implied HN points • 07 Aug 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. Some so-called experts on misinformation may actually have political motives. They sometimes portray themselves as neutral scholars while pushing specific agendas.
  2. There's a concern that the field of misinformation studies is not diverse in viewpoints. Most experts seem to lean towards one political ideology, which could affect the objectivity of their work.
  3. Censorship and suppression of dissenting opinions can be justified in the name of fighting misinformation. This raises questions about who gets to decide what is true or false.

The politics of sociology

Just Emil Kirkegaard Things • 884 implied HN points • 29 Jan 24
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. Surveys reveal sociology as an extremely left-wing field compared to others in the social sciences.
  2. Around 25% of sociologists identified as Marxists, the highest percentage among surveyed fields.
  3. Leftist academics engage in a two-faced approach, seeking dominance in their fields while trying to appear as objective scientists to the public.

Unsafe Science Retrospective

Unsafe Science • 106 implied HN points • 26 Dec 25
🔬 Science Academia
  1. An independent newsletter platform can protect free inquiry and host open discussion with guest contributors. Paid subscriptions can be used to fund research, backstop projects, and launch alternative journals and conferences.
  2. Academic mobs and cancellation campaigns can target critics of diversity initiatives. Careful public documentation and rebuttal can turn attacks into increased support, new scholarship, and career opportunities.
  3. A central theme is that DEI programs and the politicization of scholarship can be ineffective or harmful. If academia remains highly partisan, it risks losing funding, credibility, and the ability to function effectively.

What I Saw at the Boulder Attack; How MIT Ruined My Life, Plus…

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 871 implied HN points • 05 Jun 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academia
  1. David Sabatini, a former MIT scientist, believes he was wrongly accused of sexual harassment, which cost him his career and funding. He is now trying to regain his place in academia.
  2. A recent attack in Boulder involved a man throwing Molotov cocktails at peaceful protesters, highlighting ongoing tensions and violence in political demonstrations.
  3. There is a significant drop in murder rates in some American cities, raising questions about whether lessons have been learned from past crime spikes.

Hating the Humanities

Paroxysms • 359 implied HN points • 08 Apr 24
🎭️ Culture Academia
  1. Critiques of humanities research funding highlight tensions between relevance and traditional scholarship.
  2. Context collapse in social media can lead to misinterpretation and polarizing effects.
  3. Online debates on academic freedom and transparency underscore challenges in digital spaces.