There is no epistemic commons any more, and this turbocharges partisan factionalism.
In a complete lack of certainty, any animal is driven insane. Thus false certainty becomes much more appealing, certainly more appealing than the patience required for scientific process. I have questions.
When did we lose the epistemic commons?
Are the current conditions of knowledge radically different from previous centuries, or are we just more acutely aware of the undermining?
Can epistemic commons be restored, and if so, how? (It would require pluralism.)

Been digging into the ONS statistics for 2020 and 2019, which is disturbing... tracking in 2020 was changed in a way that prevents like-for-like comparisons as categories overlap.

Journalists, when you fancy doing your job again, please investigate. Next tweet discusses death statistics, and may not be suitable reading for those of a sensitive disposition.

There is still a thriving academic niche in game studies for "explaining the uniqueness of videogames" that begins its process by excluding all the most unique videogame examples in order to explain their uniqueness via an appeal to the sameness of everything left over. Struggle to find another medium embroiled in gerrymandering to justify itself. But I suspect it is not videogames that are being justified here but rather the narrow view that game studies as a field tends to take on games. The 'game' in game studies primarily means 'videogames'.

Largely so I could check it out for my 8 year-old son, I’ve been playing #Fortnite - which has been fascinating for numerous reasons.

Some thoughts in an (inevitably long and rambling) thread... Fortnite clearly began as an attempt to compete with Minecraft. The decision to pivot and copy PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds instead was the key to its success. Yet even that was basically classic Death Match play scaled to MMO player sizes, albeit quite cleverly.