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Jan 15, 2025 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
A novel of gothic horror and suspense. Also...stuff about science, Dungeons and Dragons, video games and more science. No thanks
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
A novel of gothic horror and suspense. Also...stuff about science, Dungeons and Dragons, video games and more science. No thanks
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
In early November, the chief psychiatry resident at Yale went on live television to encourage liberal voters to vocally reject their Trump-supporting family members come time to make plans for Thanksgiving. This is pretty straightforwardly bad advice for reasons I’ll discuss below, but it does raise some nuances? When should we avoid certain relatives for the Holidays?
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Oct 19, 2024 | 
wokewatchcanada.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support. By Christopher FergusonIn the recent culture war percolations surrounding covid19 and the protests (and riots) following the murder of George Floyd, at several points I heard the name of Howard Zinn.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
unsafescience.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson |Lee Jussim
This is a collaborative post involving Cory Clark, Chris Ferguson and me on the merits of and obstacles to adversarial collaborations, which refers to researchers who have very different views about some phenomena, and often have publicly staked out very different positions, working together to empirically resolve some, or maybe all, of those differences. Cory Clark is a Visiting Scholar at University of Pennsylvania.
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Jun 24, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
OneD&D…Dungeons and Dragons’ next edition/not edition is around the corner and they’ve released some teaser material and artwork from the forthcoming Player’s Handbook (PHB). Predictably, it’s generating a lot of strong feelings among tabletop gamers. There’s been a lot of tension in the gaming community over multiple issues, including the cultural/political direction that Wizards is taking the game. The new artwork has provided strong clues for what lies in store for D&D.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
Last near Netflix drew criticism over a documentary which portrayed Cleopatra (the VII, that Cleopatra), pharaoh of Egypt, as a black African queen. British actress Adele James who, according to her Wikipedia page, is half Jamaican and half English, played Cleopatra in the documentary. Was it cultural appropriation for Netflix to claim a Greek/Egyptian Queen as sub-Saharan black? What ethnicity was Cleopatra really?
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
This week the New York Times produced an essay on Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is the Boston University professor who introduced us to the concept of “anti-racism” and, in doing so, may have set back race relations more comprehensively than anyone else in 2020 (and in a year with Derek Chauvin and Robin DiAngelo, that’s saying something). The NYT essay is vaguely sympathetic to Kendi, who it portrays as a poor schlub out of his league.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
On a recent long-haul flight from Hong Kong, I decided to while my time binging Band of Brothers. If you’re not familiar, Band of Brothers is a 2001 miniseries by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks who, right off the success of Saving Private Ryan, decided we needed more of that. 10 hours more to be exact. Based on the book by noted historian Stephen Ambrose, the miniseries follows a group of paratroopers from D-Day until the end of the war. Secrets of Grimoire Manor is a reader-supported publication.
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May 12, 2024 | 
grimoiremanor.substack.com | Christopher Ferguson
A recent study made a small splash for claiming that a ban on cell phones in Norway resulted in better mental health and grades for teens. I first heard of this study was in a Twitter post from psychologist Jay Van Bavel, who was not involved with the study. Van Bavel highlighted that the study claimed the ban resulted in a 29% decrease in psychological symptoms, a 43 % reduction in bullying and improved grades by .08 standard deviations. But…did Norway actually ban phones in schools?
