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 trajectory
The opening post in August 2023 is revealing. 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 revealing 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 prose
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 still not be worth doing.
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 kind of work.
This matters rhetorically. It lets him be harsher because he places himself within the class being indicted.
There is also much more visible pleasure than in his academic writing. He likes writing these pieces. You can hear it.
The front-page test
My rough judgment is that about four-fifths of the free corpus passes easily. Perhaps another 10 to 15 percent passes if the quote contains enough of the actual 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.
That is not because those pieces are necessarily bad. It is because he has increasingly adopted a prose technology that is unusually vulnerable to context collapse.
The clearest 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 genuine 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 very 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 almost engineered for context collapse. The essay begins by affirming bodily autonomy, then investigates circumstances where the maxim cannot literally be universal. The title plus “there are exceptions” is far more combustible than the actual 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 wonderfully 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 an actual 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 perfectly well. He simply keeps writing sentences that create the risk.
Does he show fear?
Yes, but not much fear of cancellation. What I see is 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 plainly 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 exactly this Substack with the same expected costs.
Bloom knows this. Much of the professors essay is precisely about how professional dependence creates caution.
His real fear seems to be something else: 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.
That is a subtler fear and probably the correct one for somebody in his position.
Is Small Potatoes damaging his standing?
I find no public evidence that it is.
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 an editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the more distinctive high-level journals in psychology and cognitive science.
Toronto’s psychology department itself features his provocatively titled 2024 Theory and Society paper, “Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.”
Meanwhile The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken several arguments from this general phase of his writing and put them before a professional academic readership.
I therefore would distinguish standing from positioning.
His standing appears intact. His positioning has changed.
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 an unusually good public 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” is especially revealing. He 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 almost a pure example of this kind of intellectual play.
Is the Substack seeping into his academic work?
Yes. This may be the most interesting finding.
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 not merely similarity of style. It 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 characteristically 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 mode of 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.
I would therefore say the Substack is affecting his scholarship at the conceptual level more than at the sentence 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.
What I find most interesting
The most interesting thing is that Bloom seems to have created a controlled experiment in audience capture while simultaneously 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 does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him a fascinating case.
The audience is almost certainly 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. That distinction seems crucial.
He frequently starts from territory favored by the heterodox or anti-woke Internet 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 not whether Paul Bloom “moves right.” That is too crude.
I would watch 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 is protecting him. It is also producing some of his most interesting work.