I have no idea what the average age of a PBC reader is, so there’s a good chance everyone is well-versed in this affair. If not, I highly suggest its Wikipedia page.

Here’s my favorite part:

Sokal’s “experiment” directly tested Gross and Levitt’s claims by attempting to get a paper published in a top deconstructionist journal. If they were correct, the content of the paper would not matter and could be filled with complete nonsense; what would matter would be fawning references to other deconstructionist authors and the proper amount of feminist and socialist thought.
Sokal produced a paper that argued that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that Rupert Sheldrake’s New Age concept of the “morphogenetic field” could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. It concludes that, since “physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct”, a “liberatory science” and “emancipatory mathematics” must be developed that spurn “the elite caste canon of ‘high science’” for a “postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project”.