In this episode of pplpod, we take a deep dive into the Grievance Studies Affair (also known as “Sokal Squared”) — the 2018 academic hoax in which three authors submitted fake papers to peer-reviewed journals in fields such as gender studies, fat studies, and queer theory.

Yes, this is the one with the infamous dog park paper.

Over 10 months, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose wrote 20 intentionally absurd papers designed to test whether certain academic fields would publish ideologically flattering nonsense. Several papers were accepted or published before the project was exposed, triggering a firestorm across academia, media, and politics.

In this episode, we unpack the full story and the fallout, including:

• wha ...