Katie Jgln
katiejgln.bsky.social
Katie Jgln
@katiejgln.bsky.social
Social scientist, writer, unruly woman.
📚 Newsletter: The Noösphere
📍 London
👇 read my work: thenoosphere.substack.com
Someone should run a study to find out how many people understand how much a billion (one thousand million) and a trillion (one million million) are, and then make the participants complete some exercises estimating how many lifetimes a person could comfortably live on each of these figures.
November 10, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Erysichthon, mythical king of Thessaly, once ordered his men to cut down trees sacred to Ceres so he could expand his palace and host larger feasts. His hunger for more eventually led him to devour everything around him and himself.

America has its own Erysichthon now. And he's in the White House.
November 4, 2025 at 10:14 AM
I fear the biggest ‘legacies’ of our era will be plastic waste and chicken bones and AI slop and more plastic waste.
October 28, 2025 at 3:25 PM
I still sometimes find it hard to believe that we live in a world run by assholes and idiots and clowns because they managed to convince so many people that the fact that our world seems to be run by assholes and idiots and clowns is not their fault, but those with the least power and money.
October 22, 2025 at 1:34 PM
It wasn’t brute strength or ruthless competition that helped our ancestors survive, even in the most unforgiving conditions. It was caring for one another and sticking together.
How Caring Made Us Human
It’s one of our oldest and most crucial survival strategies
open.substack.com
October 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM
‘Fascism hates women just as much as it needs them. And it needs most of them on their knees, scrubbing both factory floors and their own kitchens, and working day and night to birth and feed and raise the next generation so that those in power can spend very little while accumulating a lot .’
Why Fascism Can’t Survive Without the Women It Hates
Systems of oppression often turn their targets into their lifeline
open.substack.com
October 10, 2025 at 12:26 PM
So far there are already more men named John than women among this year’s Nobel Prize winners. Considering there was only one female winner last year, I’d say the odds of breaking that pattern are, well, not great.
October 7, 2025 at 12:35 PM
The growing gender gap among young people is political, yes, but it’s also cultural, personal, and rooted in struggles over power. Young women want to have power over their own lives, while some young men still equate power with dominance over others.
What the Gender Gap Among Young People Is Actually About
It goes deeper than just politics
thenoosphere.substack.com
October 3, 2025 at 8:58 AM
Jane Goodall was a pioneer, a legend, and a remarkable human being. What a loss. But I'm sure her legacy will endure for generations — including this gem of a quote: 'In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals.'
October 2, 2025 at 12:26 PM
'Far too many of us today are so enamoured by the rhetoric about "freedom", we don’t realise that unlimited freedom for some actually means very little freedom for the rest of us.'
Extreme Wealth Inequality Is a Choice, Not Our Destiny
But we might be running out of time to change it
thenoosphere.substack.com
September 29, 2025 at 3:24 PM
A massive new study of nearly 50,000 homes from 1,000 archaeological sites spanning 10,000 years reveals that wealth inequality was neither universal nor an inevitable consequence of population growth or progress.
Extreme Wealth Inequality Is a Choice, Not Our Destiny
But we might be running out of time to change it
thenoosphere.substack.com
September 26, 2025 at 10:58 AM
I can’t help but feel that if we didn’t have to keep wasting energy arguing over things that should be common sense by now, we’d probably already be commuting on jetpacks powered by food waste or something.
September 25, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Drowning people in constant, enraging noise is the whole point. You never get to step back and reflect and see the bigger picture because you're pulled too far under it all.
September 23, 2025 at 1:05 PM
This idea that if you're ‘unproblematic' then you'll 'age well,' so often thrown at public figures (especially female, because, of course), is just a reheated version of the old belief that beauty equals virtue. And just as it was rubbish then, it's rubbish now.
September 22, 2025 at 3:14 PM
A study of pre-industrial Swiss parish registers (Spa et al., 2025) finds that having older brothers reduced girls' chances of survival, while having older sisters had a positive effect on both girls and boys.
September 18, 2025 at 11:03 AM
A recent survey once again claimed that marriage makes people — this time, women — much happier than their unmarried counterparts. But research tells a far less flattering story. Marriage’s impact on happiness is inconsistent, short-lived, and barely distinguishable from cohabitation.
September 17, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Knitting is a technology, a science, and an art all at once. The same can be said for weaving, quilting, pottery, cooking, and countless other practices.
September 10, 2025 at 1:44 PM
It’s predicted that women will soon control 38% of financial wealth in the US, 47% in Europe, and 39% globally, growing at about 8–10% per year. This surge is driven by ’the great wealth transfer’—a massive shift of assets, mostly from men to their surviving female spouses.
How Women’s Growing Wealth Could Change the World
And how it might not
thenoosphere.substack.com
September 6, 2025 at 9:56 AM
One of the key reasons people in high-income countries often forget how deeply interconnected we all are—with each other, the planet, every living thing—is because modern convenience keeps us largely insulated from reality.
September 2, 2025 at 2:22 PM
It’s almost hard to believe this is happening in 2025, but at the upcoming surgeons’ conference in Poland, one of the scheduled ‘debates’ is literally whether women should be surgeons.

Yet another reminder that the idea that women no longer face bias & barriers in the workplace is pure nonsense.
August 27, 2025 at 10:30 AM
One fascinating new study estimated that providing decent living standards for *every* person on the planet would require just 30% of current global resource and energy use.
August 24, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Katie Jgln
@katiejgln.bsky.social: "There’s a real danger in allowing our online environment to become so thoroughly polluted with digital sludge — and then rewarding people for pumping out more of it."

A solid read on rampant plagiarism, AI slop and other "digital pollutants," and the pace of "the machine."
Mama, There’s a Plagiarist Behind You
On being plagiarised and the disconcerting pollution and decay of the online world
thenoosphere.substack.com
July 30, 2025 at 5:16 PM
One rarely talked about cost of the relentless pursuit of beauty is its devastating impact on the planet. After the food industry, the cosmetics industry is actually the second-largest source of plastic waste globally—churning out around 120 billion units of packaging every year.
July 25, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Katie Jgln
Amazing piece by @katiejgln.bsky.social. Wealth inequality is collapsing our world, while billionaires continue to exacerbate the problems their hoarding of resources creates.
July 22, 2025 at 8:56 PM
In the 1970s, CEOs earned about 20 to 30 times what the average worker made. By the 1980s, that ratio had doubled to around 60 to 1. And by the 2020s, it skyrocketed to nearly 400 to 1.

At this point, CEOs aren’t just getting a bigger slice of the pie — they’re eating nearly the whole thing.
Survival of the Greediest
How unchecked greed and wealth worship are devouring the world — and us with it
thenoosphere.substack.com
June 25, 2025 at 4:23 PM