I worked through the free Small Potatoes archive from Bloom’s first post in August 2023 through the current August 2026 material, including the re-released pieces and some comment threads where his replies clarify what he thinks he is doing.
Bloom has undergone a progressive de-editing. He begins as an eminent psychologist experimenting with an informal notebook. He discovers that he likes writing without gatekeepers. Then he discovers that readers especially like him when he enters forbidden territory. He notices that incentive and worries about it. Instead of retreating, he devises ways to manage it. By 2025 he has become a Substack-native public intellectual, one who deliberately chooses propositions that initially sound disreputable and then tries to make them respectable through argument.
The danger is built into that form. Bloom’s characteristic move has become front-loaded provocation followed by back-loaded qualification. The whole essay can be quite careful while the first three paragraphs are radioactive.
The opening post in August 2023 says Small Potatoes begins because a writing project “fell through suddenly and unpleasantly.” A friend suggests Substack. Bloom likes the prospect of writing and receiving feedback “without editors and other gatekeepers.” At the same time, he goes out of his way to praise his editors at The New Yorker and The Atlantic, who, he says, made his essays much better. What he wants is another register, a “less constrained” writing.
The first six months feel like an intellectual notebook. There are pieces on implicit bias, trigger warnings, plagiarism, envy, teaching, giving talks, books, the experience machine, AI morality, productivity and social media. The politics are usually incidental. Even where the topic is politically loaded, Bloom’s instinct is anti-coalitional. On implicit bias, people who dismiss it as woke nonsense are wrong, and social psychologists who overstate the evidence and smear critics are wrong too.
That is the basic Bloom move before Small Potatoes. Take a dispute organized into two camps and tell both camps that their conceptual categories are lousy.
By November 2023 he is already contrasting Substack with Twitter. Twitter has become nasty, unproductive and mob-driven, while Substack gives him thoughtful conversation. He says Small Potatoes is taking far more time than expected simply because he enjoys writing it and talking with readers.
Then something significant happens. In March 2024 he says he spends at least an hour on it every morning, has 34 posts in draft, and works on it “more than any other single project in my life.” The money comes afterward. He has fallen in love with the activity first. He also introduces a safety mechanism. Longer and more controversial pieces can first go to paid subscribers for criticism before he gives them to everyone else.
By the first anniversary he has published 54 pieces plus two guest posts, accumulated more than 10,000 free subscribers, and explains the appeal in three words: “Writing is how I think.” A year later he reports more than 19,000 free subscribers and repeats the same formulation.
The major turn comes in late 2024. “Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings” argues that politically congenial findings may deserve extra skepticism when journals themselves possess political preferences. It becomes a hit. The Chronicle of Higher Education asks to reprint it.
Bloom then diagnoses his own incentives. In “This and That (11)” he says the post succeeded because it was a culture-war post critical of a “woke” tendency in science. He admits liking the attention. He says he is “usually on the anti-woke side.” More importantly, he dislikes the tribal response these subjects generate. He wants readers thinking, “Huh, interesting,” not cheering because he has humiliated the enemy. He concludes that he will keep writing about culture-war questions, “but not too often.”
That is the hinge in the history of Small Potatoes. Bloom sees audience capture happening in real time.
And then, he partly succumbs to it and partly resists it.
The 2025 newsletter is noticeably more combustible. There is the humiliation theory of American politics, embryo selection and AI love, professorial cowardice, sexual desire and the Internet, sex differences and academic truth-seeking, and eventually “Wokeness and effective altruism.”
Yet it never settles into the conventional anti-woke Substack groove. He still writes the trigger-warning piece in a way that essentially sides with a practice many heterodox writers despise. He attacks male intellectual culture immediately after criticizing female intellectual culture. He takes seriously the attractions of AI companionship as well as its dangers. He criticizes professors for timidity while repeatedly acknowledging that professional retaliation can make caution rational.
The 2026 writing broadens again. There is religion and the alleged God-shaped hole, consent, immortality, parenthood, books and AI. His recent “Death by AI” is a good example. The hook is inflammatory, involving deaths caused by AI systems, but the argument is a lesson in denominators and control groups. Don’t ask whether AI ever kills or harms somebody. Ask whether it does so more frequently than the available human alternative.
So I would describe the three years this way. 2023 is discovery. 2024 is audience formation. 2025 is boundary testing. 2026 is consolidation. He now possesses a house style and a significant audience. His Substack might be the most thrilling thing in his life.
The easiest way to characterize Bloom’s Substack prose is to compare it with his magazine prose.
Bloom gives us the experiment. In “Credit the editors”, he reproduces a much-praised passage from one of his New Yorker articles and reveals that Henry Finder substantially wrote the sentences people admired. He says reading one of his edited New Yorker pieces is like looking into a mirror and seeing a better-looking version of himself.
Small Potatoes is the unretouched Bloom.
He is less elegant there and more alive. The prose is full of “bullshit,” “shit,” “fuck,” jokes about sex, parenthetical asides and self-mockery. He makes himself a comic character. The old Canadian at the sex debate. The professor who likes his colleagues but thinks they are timid. The writer who discovers that the beautiful sentence everyone praises isn’t really his sentence.
His best natural unit is the seminar intervention. “Okay, but what exactly do we mean?” “What would follow if that were true?” “Suppose we reversed the case.” “What is the comparison group?” “Who would be surprised if the experiment came out the other way?”
He likes thought experiments because they permit him to strip away moral coloration. The parenthood essay proceeds by imagining when you would want Hitler to have a safe car ride. Answer: when your children are in the back seat. The point is clear once he has made the case grotesque.
He also loves inversion. Maybe trigger warnings are good for reasons having nothing to do with trauma. Maybe professors are politically radical but temperamentally conservative. Maybe female academic culture damages truth-seeking and male academic culture damages it even more. Maybe AI’s capacity to eliminate loneliness is itself the problem. Maybe immortality isn’t terrifying but obviously desirable. Maybe developmental research can be technically excellent and a bad idea.
That is why so many titles have the structure of a dare.
His other important technique is confession. He tells you where he was wrong, where his own work has committed the sin he is criticizing, what his editor changed, what argument he abandoned, what he hesitated to publish. In the developmental psychology essay, after complaining that researchers run theoretically pointless studies because they can publish them, he admits that he and his students have published exactly that.
This lets him be harsher because he places himself within the class being indicted.
There is also much visible pleasure. He likes it. He really likes it.
My rough judgment is that about four-fifths of the free corpus passes the front page test easily. Perhaps another 10 to 15 percent passes if the quote contains enough of the argument. A relatively small handful contains sentences or titles that I suspect would make Bloom’s stomach drop if he woke up and saw them isolated beneath a photograph on the front page of The New York Times.
He has increasingly adopted a prose technology that is vulnerable to context collapse.
An example is “Are women unsuited for the pursuit of truth? Yes. But so are men.” Bloom says that what Helen Andrews calls “female modes of interaction” are not optimal for truth-seeking. Only afterward does he argue that male modes may be still worse, because aggressive status competition discourages honesty, collaboration and timid but brilliant scholars.
The full essay is an argument against organizing inquiry around either sex stereotype. But “Paul Bloom: female modes of interaction are not optimal for the pursuit of truth” is also an accurate quotation of his position. That is a front-page-test failure in the narrow reputational sense. He would desperately want paragraph 12 attached to paragraph 5.
The embryo-selection essay is another. He is skeptical that current polygenic screening can deliver what proponents promise, but if it eventually can reduce serious disease or increase desirable characteristics, he sees no categorical moral objection to parents using it. Put accurately but brutally on a front page, “Prominent psychologist defends selecting embryos for intelligence” would produce a different social event from the Substack essay.
His argument about sexual desire has the same vulnerability. He discusses the large rise in bisexual identification among younger liberal women while distinguishing identity and behavior from underlying sexual preference. Whatever one thinks of the evidence, a few accurate sentences from this discussion could travel through academic social media stripped of the distinction on which his argument depends.
“Nobody can touch you without your consent” is engineered for context collapse. The essay begins by affirming bodily autonomy, then investigates circumstances where the maxim cannot be universal. The title plus “there are exceptions” is far more combustible than the discussion. Significantly, it first appeared for paid subscribers and only later emerged publicly in revised form.
“Why are so few professors troublemakers?” has less moral danger but considerable professional danger. Bloom says professors are not very brave and traces some academic success to conformity and risk aversion. Yet here the experiment has already been run. The piece was reworked for The Chronicle of Higher Education as “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?”
In fact, there is a literal answer to the front-page question. “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” became the cover line of the October 31, 2025 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
And his progressive-science argument was also republished by The Chronicle. His January 2026 essay about professors resisting institutional change appeared there too.
So Bloom’s high-wire material is repeatedly passing through a professional gatekeeper after originating on Substack.
There is a delicious irony in the embryo-screening post. Before attacking quotations from two New York Times articles, Bloom pauses to acknowledge that quotes may have been taken out of context and that people sometimes regret things they tell reporters. He understands the front-page test. He simply keeps writing sentences that create the risk.
Bloom shows risk awareness. He pretests controversial essays with paid subscribers. He sometimes publishes them there first and later releases a revised public version. He tells readers when he hesitated before publishing something. He solicits attacks on his argument. His comment section is partly a homebrew peer-review mechanism.
The developmental-psychology piece ends with him admitting that he hesitated because he did not want to anger colleagues. The professors essay was initially paid-only. The consent essay was initially paid-only. He is distinguishing levels of exposure.
But he is also in an extraordinarily favorable position for this experiment. He is a senior scholar with decades of reputation, a Yale emeritus chair, a full professor at Toronto, an extensive publication record and a large public readership. A 30-year-old assistant professor could not write this Substack with the same expected costs.
Bloom knows this. Much of the professors essay is about how professional dependence creates caution.
His deepest fear is becoming stupid through tribalism.
That is what makes “This and That (11)” so important. He does not say, “Culture-war posts might get me canceled.” He says they attract the wrong cognitive and emotional response. They make writers and readers tribal, and favorable responses can be as corrupting as hostile ones.
I find no evidence that his Substack has damaged his standing. His position has changed.
The University of Toronto presently lists him as a professor in psychology and notes his Yale emeritus professorship, awards, popular writing and editorial work. Cambridge University Press presently lists Paul Bloom as the editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a high-level journal in psychology and cognitive science.
Toronto’s psychology department features his provocatively titled 2024 Theory and Society paper, “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.”
Someone encountering Bloom primarily through Against Empathy, Psych, Yale lectures and New Yorker pieces would once have classified him primarily as a prominent cognitive and developmental psychologist who also happened to be a good writer. Someone encountering the 2025 Small Potatoes might classify him as a heterodox public intellectual who happens to be a prominent psychologist.
That shift could carry social costs among some colleagues. I cannot document those private costs. It may also carry benefits. He now has an audience that will follow him from embryo screening to developmental methodology to immortality. He gets podcast invitations. The Chronicle comes to him. He can test an idea on thousands of intelligent readers before deciding what to do with it.
At his career stage, that is probably a favorable exchange.
Why does he write it? His stated explanation turns out to be convincing. He writes to think.
His 2025 account of writing “The End of Loneliness” describes discovering through writing that the structure he had pitched was bad. Putting the argument into sentences revealed “an awful lot of bullshit,” forcing him to rethink it. He regards writing as an epistemic procedure.
Substack gives him a permanent supply of occasions to perform that procedure.
There are secondary motives. Autonomy matters. Feedback matters. Fun clearly matters. Money eventually mattered. Audience matters. Being invited onto podcasts matters. The migration away from Twitter matters. But I don’t think any of these explains an eminent psychologist waking up every morning and spending an hour on 34 unfinished posts.
The better explanation is that Bloom has accidentally constructed an intellectual gym for himself.
That also explains the extraordinary range. A conventional academic must decide whether an idea is worth a paper. A New Yorker writer must decide whether it is worth pitching. On Small Potatoes, Bloom can ask whether immortality would get boring and have the argument in front of readers a few mornings later. His immortality essay is an example of this kind of intellectual play.
Is the Substack seeping into his academic work? Yes.
In July 2024 he publishes “A lot of developmental psychology isn’t worth doing.” Later in 2024 Theory and Society publishes Bloom’s “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.” It is substantially the same intellectual intervention, now in scholarly form.
That is visible traffic from the newsletter into the scholarly literature.
There is another form of traffic around AI. The newsletter repeatedly develops arguments about AI companionship, loneliness, effort and the dangers of making life frictionless. In February 2026 Bloom, Emily Zohar and Michael Inzlicht published “Against frictionless AI” in Communications Psychology. Its thesis is Bloomian: AI’s apparent virtue, removing difficulty, can itself be a vice because difficulty contributes to learning, meaning and development.
The academic version is properly referenced and considerably more formal. Bloom has not started writing “this shit happens all the time” in journal articles.
What is seeping across is the question selection.
The titles are becoming thesis-forward. The questions are larger. The willingness to tell an entire field that much of its work is pointless is very Substack. So is the preference for a counterintuitive proposition simple enough to state in one sentence.
Substack changes his scholarship at the conceptual level.
And that may be productive. One chronic disease of academic writing is that the paper has been technically executed before anybody asks whether its question is interesting. Small Potatoes forces Bloom to compete for a reader’s voluntary attention every week. That selects hard for consequential questions.
The risk is that it also selects for controversial ones.
Bloom has created a controlled experiment in audience capture while writing about audience capture.
His September 2023 “Your followers might hate you” is about how social-media feedback teaches writers what gets rewarded and punished. A year later he publishes an anti-woke-adjacent science post, watches the subscriber and engagement numbers jump, and immediately tells his readers that he knows exactly why it happened and distrusts the incentive.
Then he goes on to write more pieces that activate the same audience. That makes him a fascinating case. The audience is changing the distribution of subjects he chooses. I doubt that without Small Potatoes Paul Bloom would have spent this much public time in 2025 on wokeness, female and male intellectual styles, professors’ cowardice, bisexual identification, embryo selection and culture-war epistemology.
But the audience has not yet captured the conclusions.
He frequently starts from territory favored by the heterodox and refuses to deliver the expected ending. Trigger warnings can be good. Male modes of intellectual interaction can be worse than female ones. Anti-woke people can become every bit as tribal and stupid as woke people. AI can alleviate loneliness and damage us by doing so. Professors can be timid because timidity is a rational response to their institutions.
So the thing I would watch is whether the distance between the provocative title and the qualified conclusion begins to shrink. Right now the distinctive Small Potatoes formula is:
Here is something you’re not supposed to say.
Actually, there is something to it.
But not for the reasons the people who usually say it think.
And the opposite side has a point too.
Now here’s a weird psychological experiment.
That formula protects him while he produces interesting work.
Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
Virtually You applies to Bloom as a theory of amplification and feedback. Bloom seems to have developed a distinct “e-personality” that is recognizably him but more uninhibited, more provocative and increasingly capable of feeding back into Paul Bloom the academic.
Aboujaoude argues that online activity can generate an identity that is an extension of the ordinary person that is “more assertive, less restrained” and especially useful for voicing unpopular opinions. That is the difference I saw between journal-and-magazine Bloom and Small Potatoes Bloom.
Bloom presents the Substack as more authentically himself because the editors have been removed. But Aboujaoude’s point is that “more authentic” does not necessarily mean “more representative.” The medium selects and amplifies certain components of the person. The Bloom who swears, tells sex jokes, says that much of developmental psychology is not worth doing, asks whether women are unsuited for truth-seeking and casually wanders into embryo selection is Bloom with several inhibiting institutions stripped away.
This complicates something I said earlier about “de-editing.” Aboujaoude gives us a psychological version of the same idea. Bloom is producing a new version of himself through repeated participation in a medium that rewards a particular version.
Bloom says that Small Potatoes rapidly became a major part of his daily intellectual life. Once he is spending an hour every morning writing it, carrying dozens of draft posts and then appearing on podcasts generated partly by that writing, the online persona is no longer an occasional costume. Aboujaoude’s central concern is that online traits can migrate back into offline behavior. He argues that we may become more daring and less diplomatic away from the screen because behaviors acquired online become incorporated into ordinary personality.
That suggests a stronger hypothesis than the one we were considering before about the Substack seeping into Bloom’s scholarship. It may not merely be that Substack gives Bloom ideas for academic papers. It may be training Paul Bloom to be a different kind of intellectual.
Consider the title “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.” That is an academic argument, but the proposition has the unmistakable architecture of a Substack post. It is declarative, provocative, compressible and immediately legible to an intelligent nonspecialist. His recent academic AI work has some of the same quality. The argument comes first. The literature and qualification follow.
Aboujaoude calls this merging of online and ordinary identity “virtualism.” His idea is that repeated online experience makes it progressively harder to distinguish the virtual personality from the offline one.
The second powerful application is audience feedback. Bloom has supplied us with evidence. He publishes the piece about progressives being insufficiently skeptical of politically congenial science. It takes off. He gains attention. Then he writes that he enjoyed the attention and worries that culture-war writing encourages tribal responses. He knows what the reinforcement is doing.
Aboujaoude wrote long before the mature Substack economy, but he notices the importance of visible followers and instant reactions. Follower counts transform popularity into a publicly visible metric and can suggest that greater popularity means greater authority. Substack has vastly improved the mechanism. The writer now receives subscriber counts, likes, comments, shares, recommendations, podcast invitations and sometimes money.
That means Bloom doesn’t merely discover what he thinks by writing. He discovers which version of Paul Bloom other people most want. And we have direct evidence that he notices the distinction.
This gives us a potentially much better formulation than “audience capture.” Capture sounds binary. Bloom has not been captured. His conclusions remain unpredictable. A better description might be audience selection pressure.
Imagine Bloom has twenty possible essays in his head. One is about an obscure puzzle in developmental cognition. One is about a novel. One is about whether female social norms undermine truth-seeking. The audience does not have to change his opinion about women to change his intellectual output. It merely has to make that essay ten times more rewarding to publish.
The result can be complete sincerity plus a profound shift in output. That is why the trajectory we found matters. Bloom’s anti-woke-adjacent post succeeds spectacularly. He recognizes why it succeeded. He worries about the effect. Yet the subsequent distribution of subjects becomes more culture-war-adjacent.
The third application is the difference between authenticity and performance. Bloom’s Substack persona feels extraordinarily authentic. It is confessional. He admits mistakes. He makes himself the butt of jokes. He tells us when he was scared to publish something. He discusses his editors, colleagues and intellectual failures. That creates the impression that we are finally meeting Paul Bloom rather than Professor Paul Bloom.
But every durable public persona becomes partly performed simply through repetition. Bloom learns that the recognizable Small Potatoes Bloom is curious, mildly naughty, amused by taboos, impatient with pieties, willing to say “bullshit,” politically difficult to classify and delighted by counterintuitive arguments. He repeatedly selects those authentic parts of himself for display.
Eventually the selected self can become more coherent than the person. Bloom’s e-personality can be a real subset of his personality that becomes disproportionately vivid through repetition. Aboujaoude describes the online personality as potentially “bolder, stronger, and more efficient” than its offline source.
I think that description fits Bloom, and Podcast Bloom strengthens this effect. Podcasts partially collapse the online/offline distinction. We hear his voice, timing, laughter and hesitation. He cannot endlessly revise himself as he can on Substack. That makes the persona seem even more authentic. But podcast incentives still favor the memorable formulation, the surprising answer and the amusing transgression. Bloom is good at all three.
So his Substack may train the propositions, while podcasts train their oral performance.
The fourth application is reputational permanence, and this connects directly to the front-page test. Aboujaoude argues that we disclose things online while underestimating the extent to which other people will construct their picture of us from those disclosures. Somebody’s politics, jokes or casual remarks become employment and reputation data. He also emphasizes that online material is difficult to retract because copies and archives survive deletion.
Bloom has created a several-hundred-thousand-word permanent deposition of Paul Bloom. That is different from publishing five books. A hostile reader investigating one of his books has several hundred carefully edited pages to search. A hostile reader investigating his online life has hundreds of informal judgments, jokes, qualifications, abandoned thoughts, discussions of sex and politics and occasional deliberately provocative sentences. Almost any future controversy involving Bloom can therefore be accompanied by a search through Small Potatoes for the worst accurately quotable sentence.
That is the Aboujaoude problem. That also explains why Bloom’s precautions interest me. Paid-first publication, soliciting objections and revising before making something public are technological substitutes for the editors he removed. Bloom has recreated a little gatekeeping institution inside his supposedly gatekeeper-free project. That suggests that he understands the danger very well.
The online Paul Bloom is more self-centered in subject matter and less self-important in tone. Academic Bloom suppresses most of Paul Bloom while surrounding what remains with the authority of Yale, Toronto, peer review, citations and disciplinary conventions. Substack Bloom talks constantly about himself, his reactions, what he read, what annoyed him, what he got wrong and what he thinks. Yet he sounds less grandiose because he jokes, confesses ignorance and exposes the machinery behind his authority.
So the e-personality simultaneously enlarges the self and punctures it.
The interesting question raised by Virtually You is: Which Paul Bloom is now training which?
In 2023, Professor Bloom seems to have created Small Potatoes Bloom as an outlet where he could write without the restraints governing Professor Bloom. Three years later, Small Potatoes Bloom has a large audience, a recognizable voice, a daily claim on his time, podcast appearances and demonstrable routes back into his professional writing.
At some point the causal arrow can reverse.
That gives us a testable extension of the trajectory essay. Compare Bloom’s scholarly papers, magazine essays, lectures and podcast appearances from roughly 2010-2022 with those from 2024-2026. Code for provocative thesis-first titles, first-person disclosure, taboo examples, profanity, culture-war subject selection, explicit moral judgments, sweeping field-level claims, humorous asides and the characteristic Bloom inversion in which an apparently outrageous claim is introduced and then qualified. If these features rise outside Small Potatoes after 2023, we would have evidence for exactly the phenomenon Aboujaoude describes: not merely an academic acquiring an online persona, but an online persona beginning to remake the academic.
I did a first-pass version of the test, and the result is that Small Potatoes has intensified, routinized and given a distribution system to traits that were already strong in Bloom. It has also become an incubator from which some of his work now moves directly into academic and prestige-media venues.
I did an exploratory coding of 40 items, divided among scholarly publications, magazine essays and substantial podcast appearances before and after the launch of Small Potatoes. I separately checked his public-lecture record. I coded the nine things we identified: provocative thesis-first title, first-person disclosure, taboo examples, profanity, culture-war subject matter, explicit moral judgments, sweeping field-level claims, humorous asides and the Bloom inversion in which he begins with an apparently outrageous proposition and then qualifies or partially reverses it.
I would treat the numbers as descriptive rather than statistical.
The crucial negative control is old Paul Bloom.
Long before Substack, Bloom was already writing titles such as “Against Empathy,” “People Don’t Actually Want Equality,” “The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational,” “Empathy for Trump Voters? No, Thanks,” “Morality Is Not Always Good,” “Arguing With the Vampire” and “The Paradox of Pleasurable Fear.” His 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education contribution was literally titled “Free Will Does Not Exist. So What?”
His 2014 Boston Review essay is particularly devastating to any simple before-and-after theory. It opens with Bloom telling people he is writing a book about empathy and then adding, “I’m against it.” He immediately jokes that this sounds like announcing that you hate kittens. Then comes the characteristic Bloom maneuver: of course he isn’t against kindness or morality. He thinks rejecting empathy will make us more moral.
That is Small Potatoes structure nine years before Small Potatoes.
Likewise, the public lecturer was already using propositions that would make a university communications office nervous. In 2013 he lectured at UBC under the title “There is nothing special about religion” and concluded that there was little evidence that religion had the special moral significance often attributed to it. His 2014 TED material argued that prejudice is natural, often rational and sometimes moral, before explaining where it becomes destructive. In 2022 he was publicly talking about spicy food, horror, BDSM, hate-reading, going to war and the “joys of suffering” in a University of Colorado appearance.
Again, the outrageous proposition followed by the distinction is not a Substack adaptation. It is a Bloom technique.
The podcasts make the case. In 2019 he went on Modern Wisdom for an episode titled “What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common?” In February 2020, Sam Harris and Bloom discussed child sexual abuse, eugenics, loyalty, existential risk and presidential politics.
So when Bloom goes on Tyler Cowen in 2024 and discusses “woke LLMs,” interracial marriage, moral disgust, incest thought experiments and whether wokeness makes aspects of the world worse, it sounds extremely Small Potatoes. But the longitudinal comparison says something important: podcast Bloom was already like this.
My coding bears this out. In the podcast sample, first-person disclosure was essentially universal both before and after Substack. Humor was essentially universal. Moral judgment was essentially universal. Bloom inversions were extremely common in both periods. Taboo examples were actually somewhat more common in my pre-2023 sample. The clear increase was culture-war and current-political subject matter.
That last increase has a confound. Bloom now appears repeatedly in explicitly current-affairs conversations, particularly with Robert Wright and Sam Harris. His July 2025 Harris appearance included Trump and universities, Epstein, MAGA conspiracy theories, Elon Musk and AI companionship. You cannot infer a psychological change from that without accounting for a change in the sort of podcast he is doing.
The scholarly record produces the most surprising result. As a whole, it does not become more Substack-like. In my scholarly sample, provocative titles were actually somewhat more common before 2023 than afterward. First-person disclosure remained rare. Profanity remained essentially nonexistent. Culture-war subject matter remained essentially absent. Sweeping claims and overt moral judgments did not show a general increase. Recent empirical papers still tend to look like empirical psychology papers.
That makes sense when you look beyond the conspicuous titles. A paper such as “Developmental changes in the perceived moral standing of robots” is not Small Potatoes prose. Neither is “Characterizing empathy and compassion using computational linguistic analysis.” Bloom remains perfectly capable of switching registers.
There is, however, one extraordinary exception. On July 29, 2024, Bloom published the Substack post “A lot of developmental psychology isn’t worth doing.” He jokes with the reader, dismisses “civilians,” confesses to having committed the same scholarly sins, says he hesitated because he didn’t want to “piss people off,” mocks ritualized conference questions and makes the sweeping claim that a significant class of developmental research is largely pointless.
In 2024 Theory and Society published Paul Bloom, “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.” The scholarly abstract makes essentially the same argument: many developmental age-comparison studies lack adequate theoretical justification and the field should shift toward questions that matter theoretically.
This is the strongest evidence we have.
We cannot establish from publication dates that the Substack post caused the academic paper. The journal article may already have been drafted or under review when the July post appeared. What we can establish is that the same intervention existed simultaneously in his new informal persona and his scholarly production, and that the informal public version appeared before the journal version appeared publicly.
I previously treated the 2026 Communications Psychology essay “Against frictionless AI” as evidence that Bloom’s Substack voice was entering his academic work. That’s too strong. The published authorship statement says Emily Zohar wrote the original draft. Bloom, Zohar and Michael Inzlicht jointly conceptualized it and revised it. So the wonderfully Substack-like title and argument cannot simply be coded as Bloom’s prose migrating into science.
The magazine evidence initially looks much more supportive of the seepage hypothesis. In my pre-2023 magazine sample, roughly three-quarters of the essays had provocative thesis-first titles. In the four substantial 2024-26 pieces I coded, all four did. First-person disclosure rose from roughly three-fifths to all four. Culture-war subject matter went from something like two-fifths to three of four. Sweeping institutional or field-level claims also became considerably more common.
But there is a gigantic problem with treating this as psychological evidence.
Three of the conspicuous post-2023 examples are Chronicle of Higher Education versions of Small Potatoes posts.
“Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” ends by explicitly telling readers that a version originally appeared on Small Potatoes.
“Why Professors Fear the Future” does the same.
The third is “Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings.” The Chronicle’s author archive places all three together and makes the shift in his recent subject matter rather striking.
This is important, but it isn’t seepage in the psychological sense. It is syndication.
The Substack persona is escaping the Substack because professional publications are buying it.
Bloom’s 2025 New Yorker article “A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem.” Even the title has the classic Bloom inversion built into it. Solving loneliness sounds good. Bloom argues that this apparent good may deprive people of the painful experiences through which they learn to connect to other human beings.
That certainly feels like contemporary Bloom. But once again the control matters. “Against Empathy” did exactly the same rhetorical thing in 2014. The relevant change isn’t invention of the technique.
And Bloom’s account of producing the New Yorker article argues against crude deprofessionalization. He says his original argument turned out to be bad, that writing forced him to discover this, that he repeatedly rewrote the piece and that Henry Finder performed “wise and meticulous editorial work.”
He is not replacing edited Bloom with Substack Bloom. He increasingly seems to maintain both and move ideas between them.
Aboujaoude’s striking claim in Virtually You is that the online self can become “more assertive, less restrained” than the ordinary person, and that the Internet can make voicing unpopular views easier. He goes further and argues that traits cultivated online can eventually become incorporated into offline personality.
With Bloom, the first proposition fits much better than the second. Paul Bloom went online and found a medium that disproportionately rewards one long-established part of Paul Bloom. He began exercising that part of himself far more frequently. The resulting body of work then created new routes into magazines, podcasts and, at least occasionally, scholarly argument.
My coding suggests a useful distinction between four possible effects.
The first is stylistic transformation. I find little evidence for it. Bloom was funny, personal, provocative and fond of inversions long before 2023.
The second is subject selection. Here I find more evidence. Recent public Bloom spends much more time on ideological bias in science, professorial conformity, academic courage, institutional conservatism, AI politics and related culture-war territory.
The third is frequency. Before Small Potatoes, a Bloom provocation had to become a book, journal contribution, commissioned magazine article, lecture or podcast invitation. Now he can produce one whenever the argument interests him. A trait that once appeared intermittently can become the dominant public representation of him.
The fourth is circulation. Here the evidence is undeniable. Small Potatoes arguments are now being republished by The Chronicle, discussed on podcasts and reproduced in closely related scholarly interventions. The newsletter has become part of Bloom’s intellectual production system.
Small Potatoes did not invent the contrarian Paul Bloom. It industrialized him.
There is also a fascinating Aboujaoude reversal here. His model imagines the e-personality escaping from the Internet into ordinary life. Bloom appears to be doing something more conscious. He has built membranes between the personae. Substack supplies speed, provocation, reader feedback and experimentation. Paid subscribers sometimes function as preliminary reviewers. Podcasts supply conversational testing. The New Yorker restores Henry Finder. Journals restore peer review and disciplinary conventions.
So rather than watching the destruction of Bloom’s gatekeepers, we may be watching him construct a new sequence of gatekeepers.
And that gives us another empirical study to do. Instead of merely comparing “before” and “after,” trace individual ideas across media. Start with every Small Potatoes post that later became or fed into a Chronicle article, New Yorker article, scholarly paper, lecture or podcast. Compare the versions sentence by sentence. Ask what gets removed as an idea moves upward through the gatekeeping chain: profanity, personal disclosure, culture-war framing, sweeping claims, jokes, provocative titles and qualifications. That would let us observe the online Paul Bloom being converted back into professional Paul Bloom in real time.
I found six documentable cases in which a Small Potatoes idea moved into another medium, plus a larger AI-companionship sequence that crosses back and forth among scholarship, Substack, The New Yorker, podcasts and TED. I also found an important reverse-flow control where a New Yorker article moved into Small Potatoes.
The main finding is this: The evidence is much stronger for pipeline seepage than for personality seepage.
Bloom’s professional gatekeepers are not removing the dangerous, funny, provocative Bloom and restoring a sober academic. They preserve most of him. What they consistently remove is the Substack furniture: subscriber appeals, chatter about titles, comments to readers, alternate endings, hashtags, draft-stage digressions and some of the rougher diction. They also improve factual precision and argumentative architecture.
The Chronicle is surprisingly permissive. The New Yorker intervenes much more deeply. Podcasts barely sanitize him at all. The scholarly case is somewhere in between.
I. “Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings” → The Chronicle.
Bloom published the Small Potatoes essay on progressives on October 21, 2024. He later reported that it was a hit, brought likes, comments and new subscribers, and that The Chronicle of Higher Education contacted him “as soon as it was published” about reprinting a slightly edited version. He also diagnosed why the essay had succeeded. It was a culture-war post criticizing a “woke” tendency in science.
Four days later, The Chronicle published “Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings.” The publication itself labels the essay an adaptation from Small Potatoes.
This is therefore about as close as we are going to get to putting Bloom’s e-personality through a professional editing machine and examining what comes out the other end.
What disappeared? First, the Substack title was softened slightly. “Worry more” becomes “Question.” The Ginger Rogers subtitle disappears and is replaced with the sober explanatory deck, “Academic journals are not immune from ideological bias.”
Second, the platform scaffolding disappears. The subscription interruption disappears. Bloom’s late discussion of why he chose the title disappears. The Substack contains two endings. Bloom announces that he likes the optimistic ending he wrote while in a cheerful mood, then says his mood has worsened and supplies a darker alternative. That is quintessential Small Potatoes: we see the writer thinking, changing mood and letting the audience watch the composition process. The Chronicle simply integrates the argument into a finished essay.
Third, at least one important empirical claim becomes more careful. The Substack says that the reported Black-doctor effect “disappears” once low birth weight is taken into account. The Chronicle substitutes the more defensible formulation that the effect is substantially weakened and often loses statistical significance. We cannot know whether Bloom or an editor made the correction, but the professional version is plainly more precise.
Now look at what does not disappear.
“That has to be bullshit!” survives. So does “Meh.” So does the argument about racial diversity research. So does the assertion that politically congenial findings deserve extra skepticism. So do the female-mentor controversy, ideological bias in journals, the Trump and Harris examples and the broad criticism of progressive scientific institutions.
The qualifications survive too. Bloom continues to say that he does not want to exaggerate the extent of political bias, that most research has nothing to do with politics and that politically unwelcome findings do get published.
Even the explicit moral conclusion survives. Bloom says that sacrificing accuracy to affiliation makes the world worse and that scientific culture should reward truth-seeking.
So the coding for this case:
Provocative thesis: retained.
First person: retained.
Culture-war framing: retained.
Taboo examples: retained.
Profanity: retained.
Sweeping institutional claim: retained.
Humor: retained.
Qualifications: retained and in one important place sharpened.
Substack self-performance: removed.
This is not sanitization. It is professionalization.
II. “Why are so few professors troublemakers?” → Robert Wright → The Chronicle
This case is even better because we can observe three stages. Bloom first sent “Why are so few professors troublemakers?” to paid subscribers on May 19, 2025. Eleven days later, his regular podcast with Robert Wright included a paid segment explicitly titled “Why are so few professors troublemakers?”
He later released a mildly edited public Substack version. On September 24, The Chronicle published “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” and explicitly stated that it originated on Small Potatoes.
The first notable deletion comes before the argument even begins. Bloom’s Substack opens by telling us about his struggle to choose a title. “Why are professors so nice?” sounded self-congratulatory. “Why are professors so timid?” sounded too mean. This little glimpse into Bloom managing his persona disappears entirely from The Chronicle.
What replaces it? Nothing. The Chronicle begins immediately with Bloom saying that he likes professors, that he is one, that his wife is one and that most of his friends are professors. That means the first-person disclosure survives almost untouched. So does the joke that if a drunk attacks somebody in a bar, the drunk is unlikely to be a professor. The wording is virtually identical. Then we get to the material one might expect a professional editor to worry about. Bloom discusses academic taboos involving biological sex, racial disparities in crime and social influences on transgender identity. The Chronicle prints them. He writes that the sort of student who says “fuck you” to professors probably won’t accumulate the grades and recommendations necessary for an elite academic career. The Chronicle prints “fuck you.” “Nature and nurture, baby!” survives. “The importance of not pissing people off” survives. The discussion of academics potentially being punished over views about sex, race, Israel and Gaza survives. Bloom’s own substantive view that some psychological sex differences have evolutionary origins survives. So does his aside that he thinks he is right. The concluding assertion that professors are “in the truth business” and ought not squander tenure by being afraid of whom they “piss off” survives too. So does the psychiatrist and light-bulb joke.
What does The Chronicle do to the title? “Troublemakers” becomes “Braver.” That isn’t obviously safer. In one respect it is morally sharper. “Troublemaker” can be pejorative. “Braver” implies that the problem really is courage. And The Chronicle subsequently put “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” on the cover of an issue.
The Robert Wright stage does something different again. It does not edit the proposition. It turns it into conversation. A Substack argument becomes a topic Bloom has to defend spontaneously against another intelligent person. That is a different sort of gatekeeping. It is live adversarial testing rather than textual polishing.
The chain is therefore:
private or semiprivate Substack experiment → podcast stress test → public Substack revision → professional publication.
That looks less like an uncontrolled e-personality leaking out than a new intellectual production process.
III. “Why are so many professors conservative?” → “Why Professors Fear the Future”
This is where I finally found something much closer to sanitization. The January 5, 2026 Substack title is deliberately misleading in a playful way. Bloom knows that professors are overwhelmingly politically liberal. His inversion is that academics are “conservative” about changing the institutions from which they benefit.
Nine days later The Chronicle published essentially the same argument as “Why Professors Fear the Future.” It explicitly identifies the essay as a version of the Small Potatoes piece.
The title “Why are so many professors conservative?” invites a reader to misunderstand Bloom for a moment. “Why Professors Fear the Future” tells the reader what the argument is.
That is a reduction in Substack-style bait. There are small lexical edits too. On Substack, Bloom recalls presenting Yale’s MOOC proposal to faculty and says, “I got my ass handed to me.” In The Chronicle it becomes simply, “It did not go well.” On Substack, rejecting “dumbass ideas” isn’t the same as fearing innovation. In The Chronicle they become “dumb ideas.” The hashtag “#NotAllProfessors” becomes “Not all professors, of course.”
Those are exactly the sorts of changes predicted by the e-personality hypothesis. Internet-native diction gets normalized when the argument enters a professional publication. But the effect is selective. “ChatGPT can quickly handle many of the bullshit tasks that fill a professor’s day” survives. “A hell of an extrapolation” survives. “Being a Democrat is weak sauce” survives. His criticism of “Republican radicals” who want to abolish tenure survives. And most important, the big claim survives. Professors really are conservatives in the sense Bloom means. Their radicalism applies to ideas and politics, while their conservatism appears when their own institutional arrangements are threatened.
This gives us the clearest picture yet of the filter. The editor doesn’t remove the provocation. The editor removes some evidence that the writer is enjoying being provocative.
IV. “A lot of developmental psychology isn’t worth doing” → Theory and Society → Two Psychologists Four Beers
This is the most important academic case. The Substack essay appeared July 29, 2024 under “A lot of developmental psychology isn’t worth doing,” with the joking subtitle “Not your studies, of course. Yours are great!” The Substack version is swimming in Bloom persona. He warns that 99 percent of his subscribers won’t care, tells the “civilians” to leave, then announces, “Ok, the civilians are gone. Now it’s just us.”
He describes developmental research as a recipe. He imagines challenging speakers during question periods by asking who cares whether some capacity appears at age three or five and what theory would change depending on the answer. He confesses that this same approach earned publications for him and his students. Finally he admits that he hesitated to publish the post because he wondered, “Why piss people off?”
Then something remarkable happens. Theory and Society publishes “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing” on October 28, 2024. It is classified as a Brief Communication and runs only five pages.
The journal title is not safer. It is stronger. “A lot of” becomes “Much of.” The comic subtitle disappears, but the indictment remains right in the title.
The abstract is conventionally academic. It speaks of age-comparison studies, theoretical justification, research priorities and developmental mechanisms. Quotations from the published paper reproduced by another researcher show that some of the characteristic Substack rhetoric survives inside the article as well. Thomas Chazelle describes the paper as having a “going for the throat” style and reproduces Bloom’s discussion of the recurrent conference-talk recipe.
That matters. We aren’t just seeing the same abstract proposition re-expressed in disciplinary language. At least some of the conversational attack survives the journal boundary.
Two weeks after the paper appeared, Two Psychologists Four Beers released an episode called “Psychology Worth Doing.” The description says Bloom discusses his recent paper arguing that much developmental psychology is not worth doing. Then, in the same episode, they discuss whether progressive-friendly social-science findings deserve extra skepticism. In other words, two recent Bloom provocations, one that reached Theory and Society and one that reached The Chronicle, are recombined in conversation.
This begins to look like an ecosystem.
V. “Be Right Back” → EconTalk
This one gives us a tight chronology. Bloom published “Be Right Back” on March 25, 2024. Its subtitle called AI simulations of people both “a blessing and an abomination.” Two days later Russ Roberts recorded an EconTalk episode with Bloom. At 1:09 Roberts explicitly says the topic is Bloom’s recent Substack essay and repeats the “blessing and an abomination” formulation. Bloom responds that he likes those two words and their Biblical resonance, then develops the same scenario about AI simulations of living and dead people.
Here there is essentially no de-provocation. The podcast host takes the Substack hook and elevates it into the governing hook of the conversation. What changes is that Bloom now has to answer questions. His thought experiment acquires objections, distinctions and spontaneous qualifications. The medium generates caveats through dialogue rather than editing.
Podcasts look more like ordinary human interaction than written social media. We hear Bloom hesitate, laugh and respond to another person. But the subject has already been selected by the online Paul Bloom.
The Substack persona is supplying the agenda to the apparently less virtual medium.
VI. “The humiliation theory of American politics” → Robert Wright
Bloom published “The humiliation theory of American politics” on January 13, 2025, building an argument around Trump, Obama and the political consequences of humiliation. His January 16 conversation with Robert Wright included a segment called “The humiliation theory of American politics.” When Bloom posted the podcast the following day, he explicitly said they had discussed humiliation, “the topic of my Substack earlier this week.”
Three days from essay to podcast. Small Potatoes is generating talking points for his public appearances.
VII. The AI-companionship sequence is the most important case, but it destroys a simple causal story
This one does not begin on Substack. On December 29, 2023, Trends in Cognitive Sciences published online “In praise of empathic AI,” by Michael Inzlicht, C. Daryl Cameron, Jason D’Cruz and Bloom. They argued that AI could simulate empathy without some human biases and might improve human welfare, while acknowledging serious dangers.
Then Bloom starts worrying at the subject on Small Potatoes. “Showing and sharing” in January 2024 asks what human pleasures of being known, understood and shown things imply for artificial companions. “Be Right Back” in March develops AI substitutions for friends, partners and the dead. In June he publishes “My friend thinks it’s a good idea for us to spend most of our time with AI companions.” Bloom explicitly says it grew out of “Be Right Back.” He recounts trying to tell a friend how dystopian such a world would be, only to discover that he had trouble explaining what was actually wrong with it. That failure becomes the essay. Part II follows a week later and moves from the advantages to the dangers.
Then something happens. Inzlicht and Cameron publish a guest post on Bloom’s own Substack disagreeing with “Paul’s gloomier takes,” despite the fact that Bloom is their coauthor on “In praise of empathic AI.” Bloom continues the exchange with “Get Real” in November. At the end he explains why he is doing this. Writing helps him get his head straight. He wants to continue his dialogue with Inzlicht and Cameron, and he wants a larger audience to read the argument and give him feedback.
That is evidence for Small Potatoes functioning as an intellectual laboratory.
Then comes The New Yorker.
“A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem” appeared in July 2025. The title is pure Bloom inversion. Solving loneliness sounds obviously good. Bloom will argue that success itself creates the danger.
The article starts from “In Praise of Empathic A.I.” and the debate it caused. But it also draws together concerns Bloom had been worrying over on Substack. The need to be understood. The difference between real and simulated companionship. AI’s endless availability. The possibility that a companion designed to satisfy us might make actual humans less attractive. The magazine article then supplies a much stronger organizing proposition. Loneliness may be corrective feedback.
Bloom compares it to hunger and other unpleasant biological signals. Rejection and loneliness hurt partly because that pain pushes us to alter our behavior and make ourselves capable of sustaining human relationships. An AI that perfectly soothes loneliness might interrupt the feedback loop.
That is a synthesis. And Bloom tells us that directly. On the day the article appeared, he wrote that his original proposed structure wasn’t good. He spent weeks discovering that other ideas worked better, repeatedly rethinking and rewriting. He specifically credits Henry Finder for “wise and meticulous editorial work.”
This is the strongest evidence in the whole study for a professional gatekeeper changing Bloom’s thought.
Notice, however, what Finder does not purge. The first person remains. Bloom tells a domestic story about sitting with his wife and two-year-old while neither would speak to him. The inversion remains. The humor remains. The unsettling scenarios remain. Elsewhere in the article even “bullshit” survives.
Bloom has written elsewhere that Finder and other magazine editors sometimes improve both his ideas and his individual sentences. His description is that reading a New Yorker piece under his name can feel like looking in a mirror and seeing a better-looking version of himself.
That is the perfect counterpoint to Aboujaoude. Aboujaoude imagines a more assertive virtual self progressively affecting the offline person. Bloom describes an editor taking the virtual or unedited self and producing a better-looking version of it.
Then the idea moves again. In February 2026, Emily Zohar, Bloom and Inzlicht published “Against frictionless AI” in Communications Psychology. Its argument is that AI’s ability to eliminate effort and unpleasant friction can be harmful precisely because struggle, frustration and corrective feedback can generate learning, meaning and growth. Loneliness is one of the forms of friction in the argument.
But here we need a major control against overclaiming. The authorship statement says Zohar wrote the original draft. Bloom, Zohar and Inzlicht jointly conceptualized the paper and jointly revised it. So we cannot call its prose Bloom’s Substack voice entering scholarly publication. What we can call it is conceptual migration through a collaborative research network.
Then at TED2026, Bloom made the “counterintuitive case” that AI companionship may cure loneliness at a cost. Eleven days later his Robert Wright podcast listed “Paul’s TED talk on AI and loneliness” as a segment.
So this lineage is not: Substack → real intellectual work.
It is: academic collaboration → Substack exploration → reader and colleague criticism → more Substack exploration → New Yorker synthesis → academic collaboration → TED → podcast.
That is a productive feedback loop.
In December 2023 Bloom published “We don’t want moral AI” on Small Potatoes. The subtitle is “What I argued in my New Yorker article (and more).” He explicitly describes it as a shorter, snappier version of the magazine piece with additional speculation suitable for his “small and friendly audience.”
When Bloom moves from professional Bloom to Substack Bloom, he says the new version becomes “shorter and snappier” and permits additional speculation. That is an experimental manipulation of register. It also cautions us against imagining a one-way contamination process. Bloom moves material in both directions. The same individual can take a polished magazine argument and de-formalize it for Substack, then take a Substack argument and professionalize it for The Chronicle.
Across the three direct Small Potatoes → Chronicle pairs, the pattern is consistent. All three retain the core provocative thesis. All three retain substantial first-person material. The politically sensitive examples remain when they are central to the argument. Sweeping field-level or institutional claims remain. Humor remains. Qualifications remain and sometimes become stronger. Even profanity survives surprisingly often. “Bullshit,” “fuck you,” “pissing people off,” “hell of an extrapolation” and “weak sauce” all make it through professional publication somewhere in these three essays.
What reliably disappears? The subscription solicitations disappear. Talk about the process of choosing a title disappears. Hashtag syntax disappears. “Here’s another ending because my mood changed” disappears. References to future Substack posts and “teaser trailers” disappear. Some casual vulgarity is downgraded. Reader-address and comment-section choreography are reduced. Factual claims are occasionally tightened. And the argument becomes more linear. This lets us distinguish three kinds of gatekeeping.
The Chronicle mostly performs subtraction. It strips off the platform furniture while leaving the Paul Bloom argument remarkably intact. The New Yorker performs architecture. It can cause Bloom to discover that his original organizing idea doesn’t work and rebuild the article around a better one. Bloom himself says that happened with the loneliness piece. Podcasts perform stress testing. They take a Substack proposition and force Bloom to defend, modify and elaborate it against another mind in real time.
Scholarly publication performs genre conversion. The developmental-psychology case retains a surprisingly aggressive thesis and some conversational rhetoric, while converting the overall intervention into something citable as a journal contribution. The AI case shows that the resulting scholarship may also be collaborative enough that we should stop talking about a single Bloom “voice.”
Aboujaoude’s original mechanism in Virtually You is still relevant. He argues that the online personality can become bolder and less restrained, and that traits cultivated online may eventually become incorporated into offline behavior. But Bloom requires a revision. The evidence does not show a reckless digital Paul Bloom escaping containment and gradually conquering Professor Bloom. It shows something else. Bloom has created an experimental intellectual self that professional institutions increasingly use as an upstream source.
Small Potatoes supplies ideas quickly. It lets him make the thesis maximally visible. It allows jokes, overstatement, personal confession and rhetorical risk. Comments and paid subscribers supply criticism. Podcasts supply argument. Then editors or scholarly collaborators can select from that material. In other words, the online persona has become R&D.
That is why “seepage” is slightly misleading. Seepage suggests an accidental leak.
Much of this is deliberate transmission.
And one of the biggest surprises in the study is that the professional world apparently wants much of the e-personality. The Chronicle does not take Bloom’s inflammatory essay about academic cowardice and make it bland. It publishes the sex-and-race taboos, the “fuck you,” the “pissing people off,” the jokes and the accusation that professors are timid. It simply removes the part where Bloom tells his Substack readers that he couldn’t decide what to call the essay.
The market value of Bloom’s professional persona may now depend partly on qualities developed or exercised intensively in his online persona.
That brings us back to the trajectory question. The question is no longer whether Small Potatoes is making Bloom’s academic prose sound like Substack. I don’t think the evidence is strong enough for that. The more defensible claim is that Small Potatoes is changing where Bloom’s professional ideas come from, how rapidly he develops them, which of them receive reinforcement, and how they travel. That is a much larger effect than whether he says “bullshit” more often.
There is one particularly elegant causal loop here: Bloom publishes a culture-war essay. The audience rewards it. Bloom notices the reward and publicly worries that he is being rewarded for culture-war writing. The Chronicle notices the same success and immediately republishes the essay. The professional reward therefore confirms the audience reward. That is audience selection pressure operating through two institutions at once.
The result is not capture because Bloom keeps writing conclusions that frustrate the coalitions his titles might attract.
Small Potatoes has become part of the machinery by which Paul Bloom produces intellectual work. The online version of Bloom generates, exaggerates and tests propositions. Podcasts pressure-test them. Professional editors remove the platform performance and tighten the argument. Scholarly collaborators convert some of the ideas into research discourse. The traffic also runs backward, with polished professional work being loosened and extended on Substack.
That vindicates the most interesting part of Aboujaoude. The boundary is dissolving. He describes the danger as online and offline personality progressively becoming difficult to separate. With Bloom, that dissolution is happening at the level of intellectual production.
By 2026, asking whether an idea belongs to “Substack Bloom,” “academic Bloom,” “podcast Bloom” or “magazine Bloom” is the wrong question. It belongs to a Paul Bloom production system in which Small Potatoes has become a central node.