This Granta debacle is going to produce a million thinkpieces. Brutal all the way around. Sad literary collapse.

If Burnham wins, he’ll treat it as a mandate to do whatever terrible leftist policies he wants (nationwide rent controls, wealth tax, exit tax, ultra-high CGT). This could be quite bad. If he loses, Rayner or Miliband will become PM instead as obvious second-best choices, wounded and weak from day one and with no claim to a mandate. They are also clearly less electorally appealling. Reform winning in Makerfield therefore seems very desireable, and a lot of economic growth may be at stake.

I think when a top ten heavyweight in the world - and a heavyweight whose main talent is ungodly power rather than technique - unloads on a relatively untrained celebrity, "career ending" is actually the expected outcome and not crazy at all.

There's probably no singular topic that encompasses more explanatory phenomena than economics. Information asymmetry, bottlenecks and constraints, feedback loops, externalities, time horizons, comparative advantage, opportunity cost, marginal thinking, rent-seeking.

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time. A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B. Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself. GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won. Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect. Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance. 99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time. If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars. Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

Isn't this a plot of the Three-Body Problem?

This new academic paper claims that @jk_rowling has essentially become Voldemort via her “celebrified transphobia,” which is apparently the authors’ term for Rowling publicly acknowledging basic biology. It argues that the “Wizarding World should be considered a cultural field” whose defining principle is “trans/queer inclusivity,” and says Rowling’s views have “significantly depleted her once-elite status.” It says Harry Potter has been read as “resisting binary gendering” and presenting gender as “varied, easily shifting, exploratory, and ‘slippery,’” with the Wizarding World offering trans and queer fans “identification and community” and “a ‘place of belonging.’” So Rowling became the moral equivalent of her own villain because some readers projected gender ideology onto the books, then felt shocked when the author turned out to believe sex is real. And in case the paper was not absurd enough already, its conclusion declares: “You’re a muggle, Joanne.”

Some news...I am writing a book on resistance for @VikingBooks!

The Equality Act protects everyone from unlawful discrimination and harassment. You shouldn’t have to be a lawyer to make sense of it. We should all be able to know and understand our rights. sex-matters.org/posts/update…

What are your other favorite charts in this genre? Thinking of stuff like this:

COMRADES! MANCHUKUO 1987, THE ALT HISTORY MILITARY SCIFI DETECTIVE NOVEL... IS NOW AVAILABLE! IN A DYING FASCIST EMPIRE, WAR CRIMINAL KEIZO MUNEKATA TRIES TO FIND JUSTICE PURCHASE LINK BELOW VVVVVV