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On Friendship — On the family we choose

• [audio] You Can Catch Madness — 13 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em> isn’t a rare clinical curiosity. It’s one misleading face of social isolation—intimacy plus loneliness, the same machinery running in all of us. The spectacular cases are selection bias. You can catch it.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 4 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em>, or the ‘madness of two’, is the kind of psychological phenomenon that occasionally captures the imagination of the media. Two people, otherwise normal, suddenly go insane. It’s a premise that we can ghoulishly enjoy from afar because it seems like it could never happen to us. But I’m not so sure. From intra-family murder to Theranos to our own odder moments, I think shared madness is something that is much more common than you’d think. ideology: | <em>Folie</em> à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [marginalium] Romantic Friendships — 24 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Love is about betterment — 24 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Social Media and Moore's Law — 1 May 2025
• [marginalium] Welcome to the Chaoscene — 18 Apr 2025
• [article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
  Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
• [article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
  You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
• [article] Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard — 13 Dec 2024
  For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s <em>hard</em>.
• [marginalium] The Myth Of The Loneliness Epidemic — 27 Nov 2024
• [marginalium] Social media is the new oral history — 15 Nov 2024
• [marginalium] Cats grieve fellow pets — 16 Aug 2024
• [marginalium] One Friend In One Month — 19 Jul 2024
• [marginalium] A Globally Integrated Islamic State — 15 Jul 2024
• [marginalium] Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs — 1 Sep 2023