When a novelist invokes “comforts” in the title of a novel, the savvy reader prepares to encounter discomfort, and so it is with Merrill’s book. The novel, his second, is a classic post-campus bildungsroman following aspiring young literary man Colin Phelps as he packs up the car after college and readies to launch into adult life. In short order, Colin’s girlfriend, Julia, breaks up with him — basically the second he’s schlepped her last box into her mom’s house — and he flees to a job teaching English near Paris, motivated partially by the desire to make Julia jealous and win her back.

Once in Paris, Colin meets Laure, herself reeling from the end of a relationship, and falls in love. But is either really done with their ex? Colin is torn between a life in Paris and precipitous marriage to Laure, or a return to America and Julia. In the process, he’s forced to confront his own pretensions to literary grandeur and inability to commit.

The first discomfort posed by this novel springs from the perceived blandness of its subject matter. Colin’s school is never named, but Yale oozes off the page, and Merrill seems to be asking us to take seriously the banal drama of an elite young man, two girls, and a year abroad, conveyed via the traditional means of plot, character, and scene. 

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The form and aesthetics of The Comforts of Exile are almost aggressively normie, as well. In the novel’s first line, Colin exits a Jeep Cherokee and steps “onto the sidewalk in my khaki shorts and sneakers.” This is close to bad writing, and the reader wonders what we’re in for as Colin gazes up at Julia’s dorm, situated beneath a “gothic bell tower” and behind an iron gate. No detail seems too small to linger on. Colin swipes through — with a beep and a click — ostentatiously telling us that he’s not noticing the wrought-iron eagles in the scrollwork and the “humorous stone carvings,” — though clearly he is, because he’s telling us about them — and that his inattentiveness is due to an “uneasy sense that my trip might turn out otherwise than planned.”

Colin’s unease is warranted. Julia dumps him, and in Chapter 2, we find him sleeping on a mattress on a floor in Boston, where the barrage of detail continues. “Upon waking, my first thought was that my pillowcase smelled bad and needed to be washed,” Colin observes. “Exhausted from hours of fruitless creative effort,” he has overslept. The realization slowly dawns that the author knows the khakis and the pillowcase are quotidian and he’s being funny. He also knows that the prose  could come across like a writer uncertain which details are important to include, and he’s playing with a note of humorous mimesis — Colin, possibly, is a bad writer. But Merrill is a very good one. 

The style serves the book’s thematic mission to reground literature in the material and save Colin from his own pomposity. The “exile” of the title is only situationally Paris. Really, it is Colin’s exile from the real. He lives in an airy, over-intellectualized realm of ideas and aspirations that prevent him from achieving an authentic life. He has endless writerly brainwaves: he’s looking for “an all-encompassing insight, the key that would unlock the central theme of my work” and to this end makes absurd, impossible-to-execute notes for “a novel about the metaphysical assumptions of modernity” or “a novel about MORAL PRESSURE” (the capitalization is his). And yet the pages remain blank. He’s also vain, proud, and silly; frets about his clothing, how he smells, and what people think of him; admits to “a horror of rejection and ridicule,” and dreams of how much cooler he’d be if he seemed French. His big fashion risk — a black turtleneck — which he wears sweatily despite warm weather, is another humorous touch.

This alienated and somewhat desperate state isn’t comfortable at all.

Merrill is the author of a previous novel and several monographs, including The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard, and The Situation of the Catholic Novelist. In addition to teaching French at Caltech, he runs the Imitatio program, an institute devoted to the study of Girard, for the Thiel Foundation.

This pedigree suggests that a Girardian analysis of The Comforts of Exile would be fruitful. Also, Girard’s descriptions of political polarization and social breakdown, written in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, have been prescient of trends in the internet age, endowing the French literary critic and philosopher with new influence and authority.

Colin struggles as a writer because of his attraction to big ideas and his inability, as he puts it, to “be specific.” At university, he and Julia both studied creative writing with a famous writer, McClatchy, who provides Colin with entree to the literary scene in Paris, and who will play a role in the denouement. Once in Paris, Colin tries to interest himself in specifics, but begins to think that he has “a mental illness that prevents you from becoming interested in concrete details.” On his search for a cure, he comes across The Forlorn Demon by the poet and literary critic Allen Tate, which argues that contemporary thought is “disdainful of the material world” and that the only authentic experience can come from feeling.

Colin finds the instruction useful in terms of courting Laure, and a version of the idea also appears in Girard’s Deceit, Desire & the Novel, in the guise of “passion.” Girard’s theory is that most human desire, in a secular age, is mimetic — copied from people around us, instead of authentically arising in the self. As a foundation of self, this state is fundamentally unstable, and leads to a “sterile oscillation between pride and shame,” which is very much Colin’s issue. Mimetic desire also leads to a hellish world of polarization, hatred, and envy, as we feel rivalry with the “mediator” from whom our desires are copied. Authentic passion, a possible antidote, is more a quality of the past, when people were “narrowly and superstitiously religious,” and focused their self-modeling on God instead of other people, but it’s one of the few opportunities Girard suggests for an escape from the hell on earth of mimetic desires.

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Another possible escape found in Girard is creative and can be found through the process of writing a great and true book, which requires the “death of pride and birth of humility,” as he outlines in Deceit, Desire & the Novel. Colin pursues both passion and writing clumsily, but in a real way. As the story develops, Merrill’s gentle mockery has made him a sympathetic character, and his great crash-and-burn in the final third of the book, which involves taping a radio show on McClatchy’s legacy in an almost disembodied state of pride, stress, ambition, and fear, has genuine power. Many of us have brought similar emotions to life milestones.

By the end, the quiet drama of settling this earnest, vain, well-meaning, somewhat silly young man down with the right woman has performed a neat trick and become larger than itself, and imbued with dignity. Merrill’s thoughtful attention to his own subject elevates it. 

His attention to craft offers a hopeful note for the future, as well. Bucking most of the trends in contemporary literary fiction, he’s using the old tools: defining characters, motivations, and stakes; plying the art of plotting; manipulating suspense and reader expectation; and writing quietly perfect prose. A laptop is “hefty” and “gray,” — effortlessly setting the time period. A woman meeting Colin in a café reads a few sentences of his book before handing it back, “her face serene” — evocatively French-phlegmatic. We know what the characters look like, which is oddly rare in novels. And their particularities make us care about them. It’s a reminder of how good novels once were, and perhaps could be again, with some attention to detail.

But more than that, Merrill’s work suggests a new direction for literature. He’s writing about writing, to be sure, which has been the novel’s project since the advent of modernism, but he springs the modernist trap of airless self-reference by grounding his character in place, time, and narrative structure. Appropriately, it’s an innovation forged in Paris.

Elsewhere, in a different novel, in present-day America, a young woman drives across the Chihuahuan Desert, after receiving a message on Telegram from George W. Bush. The former president — or, really, a man who has taken his photo as an avatar — gives her a wallet of cryptocurrency, and then makes a mysterious exit. It’s just another fleeting encounter in the life of a canceled e-girl, embarked on a desert vision quest after having been fired from her job for “edgy political opinions” and looking to “seek something tangible within the Void of my life.” 

The first scene occurs in the novel Stranger Beauty, by real-life playwright (and UnHerd contributor) Matthew Gasda; the second in Desolation E-Girl, by real-life e-girl Chloé Happe, who posts to 40,000 followers on X under the avatar Bronze Age Shawty. Both books, published by small presses this month, take on the soul’s penetration by technology, Gasda’s with sophistication and elevated literary analysis, and Happe’s as more of a rough cri de coeur from a young woman in the thick of it, who knows it’s bad, but doesn’t know how to resist, or what it all means. 

Both books are revealing, in their different ways, of the ills of the age. As representatives of an emerging genre, they suggest a twist on the novel, and possible explanation for its persistence as an aspirational activity for writers, even as audiences shrink and complex storytelling withers as an art form. 

Happe has generated nearly 400 pages of short chapters following e-girl Maya, as she attempts to recover from internet-induced ennui. What this might mean, neither author nor protagonist seems to know. Maya is suing her former employer for wrongful dismissal, though she doesn’t know if she’s doing it “for the sake of ‘free speech’ or for the sake of becoming famous” (one does dare suspect the latter). In the meantime, she’s directionless, apathetic, has an “addiction to chaos,” and suffers from an “inability to feel.” “Being addicted to Twitter,” she says, “has completely rendered my dopamine receptors inoperable.” Her “Apollonian” roommate in the desert, who is gainfully employed and throws dinner parties, suggests a direction toward “abundance and fruitfulness,” though what this might mean is also vague. The goal, Maya tells us, is to experience “the feeling of desire.”

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Like all writers who thrive on Twitter, Happe has a knack for cultural ephemera and is skilled at off-the-cuff labeling of people — the roommate is an anarcho-primitivist into seed oils; a friend has a symmetrical face and “regal intelligence and wittiness.” The novel combines feverish speculation on selfhood with ordinary events — hot springs visited; rides given; movies watched; livestreams conducted; guys met — often with amusing modulations of tone along the lines of “Great Clarity of mind has been achieved. Time for some alcohol.” The downside of the internet-brain represented by these skills is that the ideas are disjointed and undeveloped, and there are too many of them, and the characters, even the “MAIN CHARACTER” as Maya refers to herself on occasion, are also undeveloped, and there are too many of them. Welcome to social media.

Maya cycles through men. We meet an “Otter” and a “Wolf”; the latter is better than the former though we don’t know why, besides that the former tried to strangle her. She meets wise directors and meditation gurus and spews forth a salad of maybe-meaningful-sounding ideas that really aren’t. At the beginning of the book, she is “living in a self-created digital samsara hell-realm and … being eaten alive by Hungry Ghosts.” And at the end, she has realized that she wants to follow a “mysterious birth-death divinity” like a salmon. Is this an evolution, or merely an acceptance of the status quo? How does Buddhism relate to the pop-psychology “selfhood” quest, or to dopamine, or to the Beats invoked in the title? Desolation E-Girl is a riff on Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, and to embrace appetite and experience the way the Beats did isn’t a bad suggestion as a cure for the chronically online, but the MAIN CHARACTER would really have to put the phone down to achieve it, and she doesn’t. 

The ending, in which Maya touches grass and achieves enlightenment during a visit home to the Midwest, is no different in tone than anything else that has transpired. Happe sees the trap, and she’s asking some of the right questions, but she has only the internet voice to speak in, and it can’t say anything new. 

By contrast, Matthew Gasda’s poignant, elegantly constructed new novel, Stranger Beauty, his fifth, attempts to wrest the human from the digital by using what we might call the human technologies of authentic voice and painstaking, historically informed, craft. 

Gasda writes a Substack under the name Novalis, a reference to the German Romantic poet who also provides the first epigraph for Stranger Beauty: “life must not be a novel that is given to us, but made by us.” Gasda’s choice of the Romantic period as a lodestar for our own is appropriate in the sense that the Romantics were responding to the first wave of mechanization of human society, and to the first wave of post-Christian loss of meaning. For the Romantics, these conditions inspired ennui, a condition of boredom and anhedonia — an echo of Happe’s character’s plight. The Romantics were jaded by meaningless life, and yet like her, they also yearned for it in the form of experience and sensation. (There’s also an echo of Happe’s invocation of the Beats here.) The contemporary era of terminal-velocity secularization, mechanization, meaninglessness, and despair seems analogous.

M, the playwright character in Stranger Beauty, has a bit of this ennui. He describes himself as bored of his own work, and as living “deep in the midst of things, in a civilization that has told me that none of it matters.” His form of yearning for sensation is to write a kind of “desperate, automatic writing to defeat what’s automatic in me, which at this point is almost everything. Writing to erase what doesn’t have a history and replace it with nothing but history. Scars, mishaps, fury, love.” 

M is “mangled by the digital machinery.” In response, he recounts his own thoughts and feelings about making art, entwined with the tale of his relationship with S — a different, embodied form of creativity, that has resulted in a child. Much of the fragmentary material is clips from their courtship, things they’ve done together, random quiet evenings, descriptions of sex. The story pays heed to sensation, as in one lovely passage in which the narration observes that “there was still delightful, stirred up, sensual emotion in his arms and hands. In his thighs. In the muscles of his face.” And it circles around an “esoteric truth” that M says is at the center of his writing but he can’t quite name. In one line, he implies that it may be a belief in the spiritual qualities of the word, enfleshed.

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These spiritual private reflections are not the only kind of words in Stranger Beauty. The book is a dossier of different types of material: third-person dated and time-stamped scenes from M’s present-day domestic life, which are dialog-heavy and immediate; first-person journals from the beginning of M’s relationship with the now-estranged S; and then, in later sections, dated-and-time stamped scenes from S’s point of view. In the final third of the book, M exits the scene, and S asks Kairos to make a movie about her and M’s early courtship, based on M’s journals, left behind in his unlocked briefcase. We see the couple’s relationship once again through new characters, “in M’s voice,” channeled by Kairos. The brilliant final section, an obvious nod to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, is Kairos’s account of its thoughts while writing the movie.

Gasda is not a technology doomer, as this messy intermingling of the human and the digital makes clear. Kairos’s closing monologue, a free-association that captures the tone and feeling of the couple’s relationship from previous sections, is some of the most beautiful writing in a beautiful book. For example, the passage “such terrible things (a broken heart wishes for a new punishment) you were growing wild like mint heart pressure long stresses of a future Thou made alien in the body’s longing….” feels like a God’s-eye view of falling in love, written outside of linear time. 

Has Kairos immortalized M in a way the fragile, aging M himself never could have? Will a stranger beauty come from the human relationship with AI? Gasda seems open to the possibility, but then again, I’m fairly certain he wrote the Kairos chapter himself, instead of outsourcing it to AI, which suggests a deeper-level vote of no-confidence. The fury with which he throws forms of writing at the topic also suggests a more concerted resistance than he’s willing to overtly state. Scenes, dialog, journals, movie-scripts, soliloquies, the Romantics, DH Lawrence, Joyce, the Bible … all the treasures of human literary history come out as ammunition against the machines. 

This feels like a genuinely new use of the novel, and one that has been slowly percolating as a genre. Reading, as we all know, is in decline, yet the human urge to write has not abated. Every book — even perhaps those written with machine assistance — is a manifestation of its creator’s soul. The writer, skilled or unskilled, has made a claim to meaning, and a statement of their own existence in the process. The more that technology eats away at this formerly stable category, the more we will feel the anguish that Novalis did, when he suggested that we must fight to write the novels of our lives — or something else will do it for us.

So says Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, or DRL. As used in this sense, the term “natural rights” derives from the early-modern age, when thinkers like Hobbes and Locke radically reprogrammed Western political philosophy. Where ancient and medieval thought had viewed the human subject as naturally social — naturally inclined to cooperate for the good — the moderns framed him as naturally turbulent and self-seeking, and forced into a social contract in order to protect his life and property from his equally violent, turbulent neighbors. Life and property were his natural rights, in this telling, and government’s job was to protect them. This new conception formed what the philosopher Leo Strauss called the “low but solid ground” of modernity — and came to shape the American founding.

Samson says natural rights are a cornerstone of his mission at DRL — a directional change that he describes as “anthropological.” This, even as he wants to link natural rights back to the much older account of natural law, developed first by the ancient Greeks and then absorbed by historic Christianity. Heady stuff, now at work (sort of) at the heart of Trumpian soft power and diplomacy.

His branch of the State Department, the DRL, was established in 1977 under a slightly different name, with the mandate of promoting democracy and American values around the world amid the Cold War. Back then, with Soviet Communism still standing as a universalist rival vying for hegemony, American values mostly meant modern liberalism. But now, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Samson’s boss, it is charged with implementing the Trump administration’s ideological pivot towards “tradition” in American foreign policy. 

In the abstract, this has meant embracing the principles of Western civilization and the ideals of the nation’s founders — as if the two were perfectly in accord, with each other and with Trumpism — on topics such as nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy. 

In practical terms, Samson’s work has heralded a change in what kind of causes the US government funds abroad, as well as a shift in emphasis from the developing world to the mostly European countries that Rubio designated America’s “civilizational allies” in remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. 

Not surprisingly, Samson has become something of a lightning rod for the administration’s new philosophy. A Catholic from Houston, the son of a Filipino mother and an American father of European ancestry, he arrived in Washington in 2021 and soon accrued a formidable Right-wing intellectual pedigree: a master’s degree in government from Hillsdale College, the evangelical-ish college that declines government funding in order to preserve its cultural and academic integrity, and a fellowship at the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in DC, with plans for a doctorate to follow. “I thought I was going to be a professor,” he says.

However, “there were exciting things happening in the conservative intellectual space,” and he was drawn to the NGO sector and was eventually offered a role in government. An acquaintanceship with Vice President JD Vance probably didn’t hurt. “Some have tried to spin me as having some particular or personal connection” with Vance, he says. The reality is that Samson has met the vice president a few times, and that he’s a young idealist, enthusiastic to work on causes he considers “critical issues at this critical moment in our country’s history.” 

If Trumpian foreign policy’s “civilizationalist” tilt — viewing the world as divided between large civilizational blocs, with Washington obliged to favor the West — has an architect, Samson has a good claim to being it. A blog post he published on the State Department’s website under the headline “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe” came a full year before Rubio’s remarks in Munich, in which the secretary of state said that post-Cold War the West had succumbed to the “dangerous delusion … that every nation would now be a liberal democracy … and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.” Rubio announced an American return to national autonomy and expressed the wish that Europeans, with whom “we are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally,” join us in being “unapologetic in our heritage” and proud of our “common inheritance.”

In a sense, Samson’s rejiggering of DRL has saved it from the administration’s penchant for slashing government agencies that the Trumpians view, not unjustly, as ideological jobs programs for credentialed progressives. DRL, like the former USAID, is an American governmental channel for ideological advocacy abroad, dispensing about $190 million in funding every year, for the promotion of causes that have come to fall under the rubric of human rights but which Samson describes as “progressive social engineering or Leftist conditioning around the world.” DRL, he says, “was using its mandate as a skin suit to promote ideological Leftism that often ran contrary to the defense of democracy and human rights, and beyond that, just at a practical level, would often get involved in foreign-policy issues in ways that would actually undermine the national interest.” 

These efforts included, he says, “conditioning populations to adopt particular Leftist premises about promoting LGBT; normalizing things like transgenderism and gender surgery, including for children; promoting abortion around the world as if it’s some sort of settled moral question; and facilitating mass migration and elevating mass migration as a humanitarian obligation that developed countries have.” He adds: “All of these things are deeply radical.” In his time at DRL, it has shut down 80% of existing grants, and is currently offering money for causes more aligned with the Western tradition or Trumpian politics, depending on whom you ask.  

On that latter point: the observer would be forgiven for viewing most of its initiatives as narrowly political. In Britain and Europe, for example, Samson’s work has raised grumbles for favoring one side in the continent’s partisan battles, and the fact that some recipients of DRL largesse tend to go silent when it comes to criticizing the Trumpians’ own encroachments on free speech and other rights. Accordingly, Samson has been roundly vilified in the media. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has published a feature on him. The New York Times in April said he’s “the 27-year-old diplomat waging Trump’s cultural war with Europe” and referred pointedly to his Catholic religion in a hit-piece on him. The progressive-leaning investigative site ProPublica criticized his championing of the State Department’s program to protect white Afrikaners under the rubric “the end of aid.” 

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Samson, however, refers to the agenda as one that prioritizes natural rights, and proffers a return to a conservative view of humanity and its purpose. He originally tried to change the bureau’s name to reflect the new orientation but settled for setting up an Office of Natural Rights instead, which he describes as intended to “defend America’s national interest and security by defending the unalienable rights and dignity of American citizens, and championing those same rights around the world.” 

The natural-rights theory of the Enlightenment came as a shock to the upholders of the West’s old order, not least Samson’s Catholic Church. Enlightenment philosophy, and the 18th-century revolutions that sought to bring it to life, shifted the end goal of politics, away from the common good of the whole — as the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas had had it — and toward individual autonomy. In the classical frame, moreover, the happiness of the individual and the community had an objective content. But under the new dispensation, this was much more contested, with modern political orders leaving it up to each person to determine for herself what it meant to pursue happiness.

“Nature” was the common denominator of both natural law (the old view) and natural right (the new one). Yet the substantive content of human nature shifted dramatically in the transition between the premodern world and the modern, concurrent with the collapse of feudal orders and the rise of early market societies.

Natural law, the older vision, first appeared in ancient Greece. Heraclitus, a forerunner of Plato, held that “man’s nature as well as his ethical goal consists in the subordination or conformity of individual and social life to the general law of the universe,” as explained by the German lawyer and theorist Heinrich A. Rommen in his authoritative survey The Natural Law, first published in 1936. (Rest assured, Rommen opposed the Nazis and eventually immigrated to the United States to escape their clutches.) 

The premise was then developed by Aristotle, and later by the medieval Christian Scholastics, and might broadly be described as the proposition that right and wrong, good and evil exist as unchanging ontological truths in the same manner as what we observe in the natural world. A tree exists to fulfill a certain end or range of ends: to grow and bear fruit. Just so, our purpose as human beings is to strive towards the “good and the true,” as Samson puts it. And our laws and social institutions are good or bad, legitimate or not, in so far as they promote these ends.

If human beings are made to strive toward certain kinds of goods, it follows that they have certain rights, also ontologically determined, that will promote this quest. These rights “belong to all people by our nature as human beings — that is what makes them natural,” Samson says. As he puts it, “perhaps in the Aristotelian sense, [man’s nature is that he is] a rational, social being made in the image of God. Some of the foremost natural rights that come from that nature are the rights to life, sovereignty (and security), speech, religion, and life in the polis.”

He goes on: “Natural rights are a much older, more profound conception of human rights — one espoused by America’s founders, and certainly in our founding documents.” Samson argues that his office’s focus on nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy “tend back to those core tenets of human nature and are necessary for human flourishing.”

What Samson is doing here is subtly blending the older, natural-law or Aristotelian worldview into the early-modern, Enlightenment-derived one enshrined in America’s founding documents, now with a dash of 21st-century populism. For the premoderns, for example, there was no general right to free speech as such, except insofar as speaking freely corresponded with a particular citizen’s duties and stature. Freedom of religion was rare, to put it gently; “error has no rights,” the Catholic Church long taught, and often used the business end of the secular state to make sure things stayed that way. And the classical and medieval world that nurtured this tradition was, by and large, dominated by large, multinational empires. Nationalism and nation-states with borders and immigration laws that the Trumpians wish to harden — all these came much later: in the 18th and 19th centuries, right about when the modern vision took hold.

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Yet if the attempt to discern an Aristotle or Aquinas in the figure of Locke or Jefferson is theoretically tenuous, Samson is far from the first to attempt it. The project has a serious lineage and worthwhile aspirations. Plus, it may just work in practice. While we must be thankful for the more capacious rights theorized by the modern thinkers and secured by the American founders, there are ways in which the older, natural-law account can help us today: by elevating our rights discourse, and reminding us what rights are for. 

It sounds good, but the Trump administration’s attempts to promote Western civilization so far have failed to escape accusations of bad faith, and haven’t been taken seriously outside of the most credulous elements of the MAGA base.

Anyone trying to seize the moral high ground and promote the good and the true will have a difficult time explaining many elements of Trump administration policy, from the brutalities of ICE to the betrayal of the America First base represented by a unilateral war with Iran. And Western civilization-focused executive orders, such as one decreeing that all federal buildings should be constructed in a classical style of architecture, are performative and flimsy. You can order a certain style, but intelligent observers understand that it won’t make the buildings resemble the architecture of the classical period unless they’re also designed and constructed beautifully — which is unlikely, given the aesthetics of the Trump administration. In the same vein, you can withhold federal funding for schools teaching racial “indoctrination” and promote “a patriotic” curriculum, but only if you have a plan for how to replace the old ideas with better ones, organically, within the American academic culture — without bowdlerization or hiding the country’s dark side in a mirror image of the woke who hid the noble side. 

The State Department’s activities also leave it open to accusations of being more politically motivated than virtuous, even when the cause of virtue is being served. Samson declined to comment on new grants actively under consideration, however ProPublica has reported that they include one to the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020, which references the “spirit of the Enlightenment” in its statement of values, and defends people “who get into trouble for exercising their right to lawful free speech, whether in the workplace, at university or on social media.” Others are a reported $40 million slated for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; and a reported $7 million for “878” — a new, Washington, DC-based British think tank, whose focus areas include “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture” and “ending mass immigration and deporting illegal immigrants” (as if the two obviously go hand-in-hand). 

These are popular causes on the Right, but how are they being executed? Free speech in Europe has been a marquee initiative. The State Department has declared an erosion of European civil rights, due to limitations on free speech imposed by Britain’s 2023 Online Safety Act; and by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which, among other powers, can fine companies for violation of its standards for up to 6% of global revenue, and which recently went after Elon Musk’s X on transparently thin grounds. 

Both pieces of legislation contain language that can be — and occasionally is — used to suppress conservative speech. In a recent case in Britain, the comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for X posts critical of transgenderism. Defenders, however, claim the laws are necessary to prevent sexual abuse, threats of violence, and actual sexual harassment — forms of speech that are proscribed even under the US Constitution and its First Amendment. In Britain, supporters of the law contend that political arrests are usually a result of bungling execution and affect only a tiny minority of cases. The Free Speech Union itself cites only 300 people arrested under the UK’s law since 2023, and is vague about how many of those arrests were political. 

“At the end of the day, a lot of this is going to be prudential judgment,” Samson says. “No one actually believes in an anarchistic free-speech utopia, right? There is such a thing as harmful content, but we want to defer to the side of speech as much as we can.” (It’s worth noting, again, that you will find no defense for such an expansive libertarian view in Aristotle or Aquinas — or even in the early American tradition, which tolerated blasphemy laws as compatible with the First Amendment.) 

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Presented with the perception of American hypocrisy, regarding the United States’ own suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on campuses, he says that “we have a substantial legal tradition and also practical tradition that says that incitement to violence is a problem. There’s a categorical difference between grandmas praying outside of an abortion clinic, and violent Leftist groups that are calling for the extermination of our civilization.” Many of those facing such restrictions from the Trumpians did no such thing, however, and the courts are increasingly casting a skeptical eye on the administration’s pinched view of speech rights, especially when it comes to visitors and noncitizen migrants.

The disputes about the scope of speech are telling. They arise under both supposedly censorious Eurocrats and an American administration that tub-thumps loudly for speech. If everyone agrees that some limitations on speech are necessary, perhaps our civilizational allies in Europe are going about it in their own way, and how they do so may or may not be the appropriately ordered top concern of the American government. It does, however, play to an American base. 

The issues are real. However, the noise surrounding them drowns out a genuine and important shift. If the MAGA coalition was anything, it was the decisive majority of more-or-less normal Americans seeking a return to the kind of values they feel normal people, broadly, believe in, and that they feel progressive governance has abandoned. This has been branded by the spokesmen of progressivism as uneducated and dim: what, exactly, are the “normal” values? Who determines what’s “good”? Obviously there’s no ultimate authority, or real answer to these questions.  

Here, the natural-law tradition can be especially instructive. By the natural-law formulation, humans are designed to know the good, and thus the vague feeling that certain things are beyond the pale is telling us something. Our reason may be clouded, our will may be weak, our university education may be confusing us, but each human conscience is endowed with a sense of the true and right, and a longing for it. If there’s a MAGA future that could be pro-something, instead of merely anti-woke, it springs from this inchoate sense of a proper human virtue. 

Liberal secular morality and progressive governance have been characterized by the opposite, holding that truth is whatever the individual says it is; and that “the good” is what the people think is good for them, or perhaps what their betters think. That way led to the open border and the pediatric gender clinic, and a broad coalition of Americans has come out against it. 

It is astonishingly radical, actually, both in its metaphysical claims and its practical ones, that in 2026 the American government is even trying to deliver an authoritative stance on the good. To stand for any fixed truth — such as a defense of Western civilization, even if messily put together from discordant elements — is to oppose the ideology of the postwar order. That ideology elevated diversity as the highest good, and was allergic to suggesting that any populations or societies have any characteristics at all. Defense of a civilization requires certain claims: that we believe Western civilization is a good and meaningful category; that it has certain essential characteristics that are proper to it; that we aim to promote those characteristics and discourage others. 

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This isn’t diverse, but nor is it antithetical to the diverse society we currently have — because of Western Civilization’s very insistence that rights are universal, Samson says. The Catholic popes were among the first to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, on natural-law grounds, moral counsel that European conquerors honored only in the breach. Samson is thus clearly right when he says that “the tolerance and acceptance that this country has shown to immigrants is itself a product of the Western ethos…. There are non-Western people who live in America, but that’s distinct from the particular heritage that this country belongs to.” 

He references his own experience as the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, and his experiences in spending summers in the Philippines growing up, which were formative for his Christian faith. “If the prevailing international narrative was true, they would say, ‘Oh, well, the Spanish came and colonized your ancestors, and they were terrible to them.’ And of course, there are historic atrocities that you can’t ignore. But at the same time, I have the faith that I have, because of them. It was the Spanish who first came and taught [my ancestors] about the good and the true. I’m very grateful for that.” 

The devil, of course, is in the details. If there are actually correct values and goals that will promote human flourishing, the interpretation of what those values and goals are is a crucial art. An art that sits uneasily next to a president, Trump, who too often resembles the kind of petty, impulse-control-challenged figure the Greco-Roman sages of the natural law had in mind when they warned about the absence of virtue in a leader. Still, one cannot blame Samuel Samson for trying. One key question for the conservative movement, as it leaves the Trump era behind, is whether the intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose Samson exemplifies can be extracted from the wreckage.

On July 4, Wells went with a group of white friends to participate in a local institution: a massive, Independence Day teen boat party off Horn Island, a barrier island about 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi. His body was found two days later, apparently drowned; he was 18. 

There were no signs of foul play, according to the local authorities. The water around Horn Island is unpredictable; the party was large, drunken, and chaotic; an accidental drowning would be the most obvious scenario. Yet Wells’s parents, Christine Wells-Wonsley and Elmore Wonsley, rejected that explanation, and the social-media machine swung into action, claiming there was something ominous in the fact that Wells was the only black kid hanging out with a group of whites. In dreaded Mississippi no less. 

To suspicious, racially charged minds, the preliminary assumption of apparent drowning by Mississippi authorities was another cover-up, a time-honored tradition of theirs. Speculation abounded that Wells may have been the victim of race-based violence at the hands of his friends.

Legacy media institutions have lent credence to the narrative. The Wonsleys, accompanied by their lawyer, Benjamin Crump, a headline-seeking civil-rights attorney who represented the family of George Floyd, appeared on Good Morning America on July 10, where they claimed that Wells’s death was “suspicious,” and that they believed content may have been deleted from his phone. The family has stuck to talking points about wanting justice and the truth — a reasonable demand from any grieving parent. But if Wells’s death is “suspicious,” such suspicions have content, and their only possible implication is that Wells’s white friends were involved in his wrongful death.  

And people are believing it. Wells’s fate, according to a story that ran in The New York Times on Friday, has “sparked anguish among black parents about the safety of their children in predominantly white spaces.” On the surface, this may seem like the paper’s usual project of foregrounding black voices and the black experience. 

But it’s nothing so benign. The Times story contains zero statistics or hard information about real danger to black children from white ones — because, regardless of the eventual findings in the Wells case, such danger statistically doesn’t exist. Undeterred, the paper promotes the idea that it’s the enlightened next frontier of racial justice for black children to be afraid of their white peers. 

But think about it. Such a narrative undermines one of the greatest achievements in American society: the de facto, widespread daily reality of the integrated, post-racial friend group. 

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Viewed in a more rational light, Nolan Wells, prior to his tragic death, was an American triumph. His proud black parents believed in emphasizing the black heritage of Mississippi, and he had friends of all colors, yet he was also popular and thriving among the sons and daughters of the good old boys (and girls) in a wealthy, coastal town in the Deep South. Allegedly, he stayed behind on Horn Island when the boat he’d come out on departed, because he was flirting with a girl — a white girl, a matter that now goes unremarked upon, even in Mississippi. Wells’s friendships represented true American diversity and were a dramatic change from the past. Such outcomes have been the inspiring result of the civil-rights movement and a major goal of societal progress. Only, our prestige institutions seem bent on undermining them.

It’s yet another example of a racial-justice machine run amok and achieving the opposite of its stated outcomes. The grieving parents — whose motives have been questioned, but let’s not — have launched an independent investigation and flown their son’s body to Washington, DC, for a second autopsy, due to concerns about the quality of justice available locally. 

Their lawyer, Crump, is known for taking on cases much less meritorious than Floyd’s. An all-star cast of racial-justice celebrities has also become involved in the Wells case: filmmaker Tyler Perry paid for the funeral, civil-rights activist and former football player Colin Kaepernick paid for the independent autopsy, and the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy. 

Whether it has been the family’s intention or not, what’s followed has been a perfect storm of armchair internet analysis over a murky situation involving hundreds of partying, presumably drunk teenagers, and multiple, obscure pieces of evidence. The white teenagers whom Wells rode out with returned without him, according to an interview given by Wells’s friend Warren Hudson, a member of the group, because they were having trouble with their boat. 

“Nolan decided to stay on the island with the girl that he was with. And the girl is a witness to that, too,” Hudson has said. The family, for its part, disputes that Wells would have remained behind: he wasn’t the type to remain behind, supposedly. The girl’s sister disputes that she and Wells had significant interaction. Countering, the teens and various Reddit threads say that riding out with one group to Horn Island and returning to another for ephemeral or unclear reasons is totally normal practice at such parties. 

And, on the internet, anything can become suspicious or blown out of proportion. Crump claimed that a photograph of Wells in a pool on the mainland with a group of white teenagers was taken later on July 4. If so, it would demand explanation — if Wells was back on the mainland, how did his body end up drifting off Horn Island? But the photo, ABC News has confirmed, wasn’t taken on July 4. A statement by the president of the United Cajun Navy search-and-rescue organization that Wells was “fully clothed” when its operators found him, has also been used by Crump to suggest foul play. This, despite the UCN assertions that in the context of Horn Island, “fully clothed” meant wearing a bathing suit. Crump, the UCN claims, deliberately obscured the facts. 

There is also audio of an emergency call to the Sea Tow emergency service, made by the teenage captain of the boat Wells rode out on, on its return trip. This call is an amazing document of civic dysfunction in its own right. “Hey, we’re at the West tip of Horn, and our bilge pump stopped working,” the caller says. “We’re going. We’re sinking. Can y’all please come, we have a membership?” The connection is poor, and the teenager seems distracted — you know, perhaps because the boat is sinking — while the emergency-services operator puts him through the membership-number rigamarole (he doesn’t have it), and a list of rote questions, and becomes obtuse, annoyed, and legalistic in her interactions. “Is the boat sinking or you have it aground?” she asks. “We are sinking, yes!” the teen replies (he’s said it several times already). “Is it aground is the question?” she counters. “No, we are not aground! We’re in 17, no, 31 feet of water!” he yells. Anyone calling Sea Tow better hope the boat is sinking slowly.  

Five minutes into the call, the emergency dispatcher instructs the caller to please hold (naturally), and switches lines to the captain of a rescue boat, her tone of voice changing from hostile to polite and simpering. “I apologize ahead of time, I really do,” she says, explaining that she’s sending over a “fee-for-service” job, because there is a caller without a membership number. “We’re so tied up right now, we can’t really do any non-member jobs right now,” the captain says. Eventually, the two find the membership number and proceed — just another example of bureaucracy and increasing inhumanity in our essential services. “Have a drink!” the dispatcher tells the captain. 

Internet sleuths and the gossip website TMZ have analyzed the unintelligible background noise during this call to suggest that it captures the moment of Wells’s death, and reveals teens saying things like, “Can we cover it up?”And: “You killed him.” UnHerd couldn’t distinguish any such thing from the audio garble. Reddit threads speculate that the words are there, but refer to the intake hole for the non-working bilge pump, and are “can we cover it up” and “you killed it.”

There is lots, lots more. Are the Wonsleys’ concerns realistic? Is criticism of them for seeming to be mercenary in response to their son’s death itself racist? Would Wells really have stayed behind without his phone (which, along with several other phones, returned to the mainland with the boat)? Do drunk, partying teenagers standing in waist-deep water routinely keep their phones with them? 

The most plausible interpretation of the emergency call and the conflicting evidence on all sides seems to be that Wells tragically drowned. The multiple suspicions that have emerged don’t add up to a narrative. If Wells was left behind maliciously, as the family’s statements suggest, he’d then also have to have suffered violence at the hands of a different group of malicious actors. If Wells was being accidentally killed on the boat during the emergency call, various other theories of phone-tampering or that Wells was the source of an argument heard on shore and captured on video, don’t fit in. But most important, none of even these outlandish scenarios has any clear marker suggesting that the problem was race.

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And this is the additional tragedy of Nolan Wells. 

The race question — until more information surfaces, at least — is in the eyes of the beholders. Even in the possible scenario that an investigation uncovers violence on the part of the white teenagers, and even in the worst-possible-case scenario of an investigation uncovering truly ghoulish racially motivated violence by an island of hundreds of teenagers (who are well known not to be able to keep their mouths shut about anything — so if something happened out there, everyone is covering), there is still, at this early point in the investigation, not a shred of even crazed speculative evidence that says race, specifically, was a factor. 

And if it wasn’t, the response to the Nolan Wells narrative — by the media, and by the racial-justice advocates themselves — undermines one of the strongest foundations of a diverse society: the propensity of children to be colorblind and get along until they’re told otherwise.

True American social diversity started with the integration of schools and has been successful, especially with the great leveling influence of team sports. Players are valued for their skills on sports teams, and friendships form, regardless of color. If we look merely at the obvious, there is every sign that this was the case for Nolan Wells. The supposedly suspicious pool photograph shows him jammed in with a crowd of white kids, one of whom has his arm around him. A very many other photos show him laughing and smiling with his white friends. Kids are also exposed to enormous amounts of diversity programming in schools, which they tend to recognize as inherently right. For generations, their friendships have been building the American future. 

Race-based paranoia is now undermining this great social accomplishment. Stories like the ones in the Times encourage black parents to be afraid, and to pass this fear on to their offspring. 

And for the white peers, might the effect of the Wells story be the same, fear of the other? Wells’s friend Warren Hudson told interviewer Brandon Tatum that he and his family had received “thousands” of death threats. Hudson sat down in front of the camera — bravely, if he’s innocent — to set the story straight and affirm his friendship with Wells. It isn’t impossible that he is perpetuating a cover-up, and that time will reveal him to be a master villain, but if not, his future is being derailed, thanks to his friendship with Wells. Might white parents think twice when a group of white children wants to take a black friend on a boat trip? “But what if something happens to him?” becomes an ignoble but predictable statement.  

Keeping children apart because of perceived danger, of course, has always been a tool of soft racism. No one should bow to such impulses, but people will. 

Nolan Wells graduated in 2025 from Ocean Springs High School, whose website proclaims that it has a 93% graduation rate and a 13-to-1 student-teacher ratio. He was part of an elite friend group in a wealthy town and, by all accounts, had a bright future. His racial success story is being turned into a failure by outsized paranoia about race — a situation that increasingly seems true of America writ large — to our great detriment.

Cusk is brilliant, but her skill has always been at reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces: the violent struggle between men and women; the primal wounds left by abuse; the emptiness at the heart of identity. In other words, obviously, a Cusk book about you is never going to be flattering. 

Is this what happened? Chatter in New York literary circles says that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is based on Cusk’s relationship with Portman. The novel, which will be published next month, is about a famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her. M’s key biographical information is very similar to Portman’s. The actress’s dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of the book, is also said to be true to life. If so, it’s ironic in the extreme, since the impossibility of identity itself — and thus of anything being, truly, “true to life” — is the book’s central theme, a fact that says more about Cusk than it ever could about Portman.

The author-character points this out to the angry actress, but to no avail.

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Life of M begins: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport.” The writer-narrator goes on to explain that she met M in a bookstore (“M is interested in books”) and that “in addition to being a film star, she was the model for a major brand, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked perspex of bus shelters.” 

Portman, famously, pulled back from acting in order to attend Harvard from 1999 to 2003, following her casting in the Star Wars franchise. She runs a book club, and often posts book-selfies on Instagram — with a coy eye peeking around the cover of whatever she’s currently reading —  so she is clearly “interested in books.” She is a global brand ambassador for Christian Dior, the face of the Miss Dior perfume since 2011; in an atomized media landscape, she is one of the few actresses whose faces still really are everywhere. The two characters live in an unnamed European capital with a central river, which could be Paris, where both Cusk and Portman reside, though the details are rendered in Cusk’s usual palette of flattening-neoliberal-global-dystopia: well-groomed men and women run along the river “like gods in the sun,” others “lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains.”  

Such material could be true of many stars, and the comparison is more pointed than this. The narrator tells us, also in the opening sequence, directly after an allusion to a book about a woman who was sexually abused as a child, that M became famous as a child, and that “the script of her first film originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character.” The scenes were cut after M’s mother objected, Cusk writes. 

Portman, famously, was catapulted to stardom by her turn in the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon: The Professional, filmed when she was 11 and 12 years old. In that movie, before we see her face, the camera dwells lovingly on her skinny and formless child’s legs and thighs — a detail perhaps more shocking in 2026 than in 1994, but uncomfortable even in that era. The Professional’s plot is about Portman’s character’s Lolita-like (though unconsummated) relationship with an adult hitman, Léon, played by Besson stalwart Jean Reno. It’s a matter of public record that Portman’s mother demanded that more explicitly sexual material be cut from the script. Nonetheless, Portman’s beautiful baby-face and gangly body are lavishly sexualized by the camera, and Portman has called her adult relationship to the film “complicated.” She has also revealed that she was harassed and slut-shamed as a child after its success, which was traumatizing for her, an experience shared by M. 

There is more. M claims in the novel’s final pages that the author-character has made her “identifiable,” yet “filled the book with things she herself didn’t recognize.” M says the book is full of factual errors, so many she gave up keeping track of them. She hasn’t been to the places the author describes or done the things the author says she has. “It isn’t you,” our narrator-author replies. “It isn’t anyone.” The portrait in the book is what anyone could have written, based on M’s publicly available work and biography. 

The statement, of course, is that of a fictional character, and unless Portman does come forth to correct the record, the truth will never be known — nor can it really matter, except to Portman. Cusk is a slippery and layered writer, and has long trafficked in the roles and archetypes that plague even ordinary mortals. The exploration of a character who is explicitly playing herself, or is trying to, but has no real self underneath, as she characterizes M’s existence, would naturally be attractive to her. In her cosmology, it is a universal condition of the haute-bourgeoise. And a character whose “self” is an object or commodity also has rich Cuskian appeal. She has always seen us as vessels; M’s container is merely more valuable than most. 

The resulting book is a feat, simpler and more direct than 2024’s Parade, with its multiple plot lines and experimental structure, but also more crystalline and just as complex beneath the surface. Cusk is also at her best with aphorism and insight here, always a strength of her work. For readers who have yet to fall in love with Cusk, this might be the book to start with. 

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book also brims with juicy revelations about M’s psychology. It feels like we’re catching a glimpse of Portman. “M had told me that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,” the author-narrator recounts. This event, with its swirling undercurrents of sexual abuse, is a primal violence of a kind that the author also believes she has suffered, a violence that detaches both women from reality and their own identities. The writer is secure in her craft, but it becomes the actress’s healing quest “not to create, but to try to make her life seem more normal.” M occasionally picks up her own children from school; she goes to parties and talks to non-famous people; she reads the news with touching sincerity, as if it will teach her how to be human. 

M wants to be real, but for her “there was nowhere to go back to. There was no dream country where the original self might one day be found.”

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To anyone other than Cusk, it might seem cruel to dash M’s dreams of normality and selfhood. But a darker, more fascinating portrait of celebrity emerges, in which M is both bewildered perpetrator and victim. Yes, she lives in a cold, palatial house that is “like a big doll’s house, with her as a doll inside of it.” She attends meetings in gloriously expensive, ruthlessly designed rooms, takes vacations in equally luxurious faux-farmhouses, and goes to a spa that is “a stern and celestial oasis in the sky.” Everywhere doors are magically opened for her, conveniences are arranged, and she is served by people with “specialized roles,” there “to do M’s bidding.” Cusk’s penchant for satire of this nature — especially the embedded satire of the movie star with pretensions to reading — could not possibly have pleased the real-life Portman, if the behind-the-scenes speculation is true.  

And M wants to live this way. She is secretly irritated when ugliness and inconvenience intrude on her environments: the farmhouse’s sick caretaker coughing, for example. When a visiting relative is hit by a car, and M has to supervise the recovery, it isn’t an opportunity for compassion and connection, but “an episode of primal confusion.” She finds listening to friends talk about themselves in cafés a little challenging, and so on. Still, we feel sorry for her, as the true extent of her alienation sinks in. The bodies of the homeless that litter the story begin to seem a metaphor for M herself.  

It is one of Cusk’s regular narrative innovations to include in her works sections told in a choral “we” voice. Here, the “we” may be intended to represent the narrator and other writers like her, but it also may be intended to speak for herself and M, the pair of friends. In one of these sections, she speculates that “we” have lost the capacity to love — something about “our” separation from reality, or “our” awareness of the underlying truth that such separation is the basic human condition — prevents it. In this matrix, love is attached to the (naive, illusory) experience of the real. “We” are left with hatred. In a beautiful, terrifying passage, she writes about “our” longest love relationship, which ended in a “meticulous and detailed” hatred that appeared “to form a total condemnation of our character…. The hate felt like the stone or the pit that was left when all the fruit of love had been eaten.” 

Cusk tends to land in such places: hatred, somehow, instead of love. The cold intellectualism with which she approaches the human seems to naturally produce this result. As an artist, she has never spared herself the bitter fruit of her own creation — including in several memoirs. M surely should not have expected anything else from the narrator. And if the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy — including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

Naomi Kanakia, for example, probably doesn’t want me — a religious-minded, gender-critical writer — to review her book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You), published on Tuesday. The book is a defense of the classics, written for the Left, and it has agonizingly cringe chapter headings such as “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?” In it, Kanakia trots out all the usual progressive objections to the canon, including that Western novels can psychologically damage marginalized people, and that to say you like Great Books can be read as an endorsement of white men (the horror). The biggest problem with the great books, though, is the people who read them: Right-wingers, religious people, racists, and transphobes. 

Kanakia is a literary critic and author of several young-adult novels, and she writes the excellent literary Substack Woman of Letters. This book sprung out of a lifetime self-improvement (and enjoyment) project in which she read her way through most of a legendary “Great Books” list, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. The process changed her life and her tastes, set her on a rigorous program of reading a wider range of classics, and had unexpected results (the promise to “destroy you” in the title is joking, but the books will change you, she cautions). In her case, several years spent reading the 18-book-long Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, one of the longest epic poems in world literature, caused her, a secular American of Indian origin, to begin finding something “deeply true” in Hinduism; her Substack has mentioned that she now goes to temple. 

However, “the main reason I have trouble endorsing the Great Books is that so many transphobes also love them,” Kanakia writes. She is trans, and “transphobes” in her estimation include people who imagine trans rights are complicated, and those who feel that trans rights might be “up for debate.” (A note on pronouns: it has always been my belief that the usage of transgender pronouns is the provenance of the speaker, and should be decided as a relational matter between individuals. Despite Kanakia’s probable feelings about gender critics like me, a few years ago I had a friendly exchange with her on X, formerly Twitter, and I will refer to her as “her.”) 

All this would appear to be a political gulf too vast to navigate, and What’s So Great About the Great Books? would appear to be a niche product for a niche audience. But it is actually much more. In the same way Kanakia does not want people on the Left to miss out on the Great Books because of their politics, I do not want people on the Right to miss out on her great book because of their politics. 

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The topic of what books we should be reading and teaching is obviously a cultural flashpoint, with the “diversity” versus “tradition” camps well established, and horror stories abounding. Most recently, a professor at Stanford went public with the complaint that the university’s three-course general-education requirement includes, “with the partial exception of Frankenstein,” no literary classics in the Western liberal tradition. In addition, the Stanford scholar complained, “the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and indigenous ways of knowing.” These latter books, he says, are eminently skippable: “if these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.” 

This trend in education, and the backlash against the trend, make Kanakia’s topic of vital significance to anyone interested in culture and education in America. If we want a return to the classics, what do we even mean? What are the Great Books? (They are a concept invented by a president of Harvard in the early 20th century, she tells us, which was only popularized in the 1930s; there’s no definitive list.) Is reading the Great Books really a return to ancient or classical tradition? (No, the classical tradition was almost exclusively to study Greek and Latin; popular-novel-reading represents a withering of tradition.) And can we really say any book is “great” in some kind of objective, existential way, or does that depend on the reader? (We actually can say so, though personal choice is always relevant, too.) 

Kanakia’s treatment of these subjects is wonderfully illuminating. And the extreme skepticism with which she approaches the concept gives her conclusion — that she loves these books; and that they are worth reading —  a beautiful force. What she’s really doing is taking on the haters of the Western canon, giving their arguments the strongest and most sympathetic possible interpretation, and then defeating them. The treatment should be highly satisfying for any lover of literature. 

For instance, in the chapter “Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?,” Kanakia demolishes the idea that it’s possible for a book to be great and also politically correct. “If you’re asking for a book that can only be read as supporting one politically correct viewpoint, then you’re asking for a book that is lacking precisely the quality that makes the Great Books so great,” she writes. In any truly great book, she argues, the author has engaged courageously with thorny “moral, ethical, political and spiritual questions on the deepest and most rigorous level,” which means they have engaged with situations that are legitimately complicated, and they have portrayed the complexity. In her lovely phrase, she promises you’ll often see “the ghosts of other answers” within whatever answer a book produces. Authorial willingness to take on such fearless exploration is “integrity,” in her word, and it is the quality that more than any other defines a Great Book.

This is a reasonably good description of Kanakia’s own method. She is one of the best critics and literary Substackers around, and both are professions that require a person to be able see (or read) something and form an original opinion — not the consensus opinion, not an opinion you learned in school, but an opinion of your own. She has a rare talent for this, and also a rare talent for erudition without pretension. Her piece on New Yorker fiction is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the literary landscape today. Her willingness to take on establishment hits is estimable. And What’s So Great About the Great Books?, itself, is brave given her milieu and the cultural circumstances. 

Kanakia’s list starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and ends in 1958 with Things Fall Apart. It was originally published in 1960, but the new, revised version she is working from, published in 1997, offers an edited selection that includes more works of world literature. She took a casual, pragmatic approach, reading out-of-order, starting with works she considered easiest (in the same order I’d choose myself; maybe we all know “easy” when we see it): American realists and modernists, then British realists and modernists, then 19th century, then Russian …. The hard stuff — epics, philosophy, Old and Middle English and poetry — came last. 

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She doesn’t discuss particular works, except in the few cases she uses a text to make one of her larger points about reading and greatness. Her reading of Proust, for example, serves as the anecdotal material for a discussion of taste: what pleasure is she getting from this difficult-to-read book, she asks, and how does that pleasure differ from the pleasures of an unquestionably simpler one? Or, for another example, a snippet of Old English poetry is used to illustrate a point about diversity: when dealing with vast differences in time, to insist on racial diversity is essentialist and reductive. “It seems rather arbitrary to say that one people, the Anglo-Saxons, were white and therefore more similar to us, whereas another, the Chinese, were a different race and hence very different from us and more worthy of our study.” 

Throughout, she pulls in other writers and thinkers — Husserl on the “lifeworld” or Kant on the limits of human reason, for example — with a truly unusual and admirable simplicity and clarity. Kanakia may be a critic and a professional, but she is first and foremost a reader, and the book’s ultimate thesis is that the Great Books are for everyone — or can be.

It’s a shame, then, that her view of trans rights issues, and of the conservative and religious enemy is one of the few places she does seem unwilling to see complexity. She writes critically about Hillsdale College, a Christian institution that requires the classics of the Western canon as part of its core curriculum, because it “has a history of opposing LGBTQ rights and discriminating against LGBTQ students.” That she’s writing about Hillsdale at all is, in one sense, an example of her integrity and clarity of vision. She’s determined to speak the truth, including that the books she loves are championed by the Right. (“Is it really so surprising that they’d love Anna Karenina?” she asks. “Of course not … it’s an explicitly Christian book!”) 

But in another sense, the greater integrity would be admitting that, obviously, there is a debate over trans rights, and that people, including religious people, might have reasons for this that are more complex than “transphobia” — a fake word, used to simplify and demonize your opponent and win an argument, and thus not a word worthy of a great book.  

Saad, then, has a knack for a viral concept and an undeniable grasp of the behavior of the human animal: many people tend to feel that he’s onto something. He also has a rollicking prose style that’s salty, outrageous, and fun to read. To show up the ridiculousness of re-naming various socially inimical groups to avoid stigmatizing them —“undocumented” instead of “illegal” for illegal immigrants, “unhoused” instead of homeless, for example — he sarcastically suggests the same treatment should be given to rapists. “I have suggested that we stop using the hurtful term ‘rapist’ as this might marginalize the Rapist Community. I propose ‘undocumented lovemaker’ or perhaps ‘altruistic sperm donor,’” he writes. After decades of speech policing, this kind of thing has some appeal. His section on empathetic suicide has a certain virtuosic flair, name-checking, in a single paragraph, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, Romeo and Juliet, the Japanese concept of shinju (mutual suicide by lovers), and the Prince song “I Would Die 4 U.”

His ideas, however, which are so intuitive and broadly sensible in outline, are incoherent in execution, and cumulatively land somewhere between off-putting and hateful. Thus, it’s a matter of some urgency to understand how he can seem so right but be so wrong.  

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The pillar of Saad’s “suicidal-empathy” premise is that some people are dangerous to us, and if we let them have their way, they’ll wipe us out. It’s basic human nature, he says, and this is obviously true. Thus, he argues, it’s self-sacrificing to the point of idiocy that Western elites put the interests of such dangerous (and sometimes anti-Western) people before their own. The reasons he gives for this are a little bit muddled and contradictory, but feel true, as well. At the individual level, people show empathy to their natural enemies out of a “narcissistic moral grandstanding” and desire to seem like “the epitome of kindness, compassion, sympathy and empathy.” This kind of behavior conveys a social benefit to the individual, but is bad for the group as a whole. This, he claims, is a “misfire” of empathy, which he seems to mean in an evolutionary sense: an emotion that once provided an evolutionary advantage (being nice enhances your ability to band together for survival, find a mate, and pass your genes on), has become a disadvantage (your civilization will be wiped out; you yourself are more likely to die at the hands of a criminal). 

The proof is vibes-based at best. In the book’s introduction, Saad airily declares that “while most people understand the meaning of empathy and how it relates to compassion and sympathy, the academic literature draws some fine distinctions that are unnecessary for our current treatment.” Really? We’re in for an allegedly scientific explanation of how a core human virtue has become pathological, and it doesn’t matter what the virtue is? 

Next he purports to explain how empathy might go wrong, with the statement that it is associated with “a wide range of other-oriented behaviors, ranging from the positive (e.g., altruism) to the negative (e.g., aggression).” This sentence is vaguely constructed, but it implies, maybe, that empathy is well known to sometimes be “associated” with aggression. In the following passage, however, the author tells us that serial killers don’t feel any empathy, rendering the “association” with aggression a contraindication. Never mind, here is another way empathy can be “associated” with aggression: in the movie Silence of the Lambs, the character  Buffalo Bill lures a young woman into his van by pretending to be disabled. As per Saad’s loose characterization of the work of some Danish anthropologists, this means empathy “has a darker side”: sometimes it can get us in trouble.

Sure, but is this really empathy going wrong, in an evolutionary sense? Might not kindness to the weaker members of a group, in general, still be a good strategy? Or, if being “the epitome of compassion, kindness, sympathy and empathy” is considered status-enhancing, might this not also be evolutionarily desirable? A perusal of any dating app will tell you that being triple-vaxxed and anti-Trump is the only way to get laid in an elite metropolis. A well-thought out, scholarly argument would be welcome showing that empathy really has become an evolutionary drawback for over-educated humankind. Instead, to prove his point, Saad offers the example of female sperm whales, whose child-protecting “Marguerite formation” behavior, evolved for the wild, makes them more likely to get killed by hunters. A single whale behavior really doesn’t prove anything.  

The whole book is like this: it is a blizzard of references — a study here, a movie there, plus some rage-bating political commentary and internet-stories — that appear to be connected but really aren’t, or that could be connected to other anecdotes, movies, or ideas if you were making the opposing argument, too: just like whales, humans engage in all kinds of group-protecting behaviors, many are noble. And it relies on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime, which is warranted given the anti-police rhetoric of the past few years, but is also a sign that the argument is emotional, not rational. Clean streets, safe public transportation, and robust policing are all positive civilizational values; we might say they’re good in themselves, instead of a hysterical response to evil. By the end of the book, his hammering on the perpetrators of crime started to make the progressives seem like they have a point.   

The treatment of “suicide” is even less developed than that of empathy. In a brief section, Saad talks about ways that suicides are or historically could have been an evolutionary adaptation — human sacrifice served a cultural purpose; so did sacrificing one’s life for honor; and in some cases, mass suicide has been seen as preferable to imprisonment. This section finishes with the statement “to recap, while individual and group suicides have been documented across cultures and eras for many reasons, there is something unique about the West’s feverish desire to commit collective suicide.” 

This is a new idea, not recapping any previous argument, nor is the uniqueness of the West’s desire later supported. The suicide section raises more questions than it answers. If some suicides were of evolutionary benefit, could there be something beneficial about the current supposed suicidal empathy? Was the young woman lured into Buffalo Bill’s van perhaps sacrificing her life for the honor of not being the type to turn away from a person in need? It sounds absurd but altruism — and empathy — are virtues as old as biblical religion. The book of Exodus repeatedly instructs the Israelites to care for the stranger, because they were once strangers in Egypt. Surely, there’s something to it, though you wouldn’t know it from reading Gad Saad. And surely we need to know precisely, not vaguely, what exactly these virtues are, and how we ought to deploy them, even as we remain vigilant about how they can go too far.

This is Saad’s real problem. He has ahold of a universal — people have a right, and even a moral obligation, to defend themselves and their communities — that is vexed by a countervailing moral principle — altruism and self-sacrifice — and he’s trying to regulate the conflict using evolutionary psychology, which either doesn’t have the tools, or doesn’t seem to in his hands. We are animals, but we aren’t just animals; there is much more than mere survival of a random group of people at stake here; there’s an underlying right and wrong. He feels it — and the readers do too, which is likely why so many like his work — but without religion, culture, scholarship, even science to make sense of the issues, we get mere vitriol, and a shocking lack of empathy, suicidal or otherwise. 

Now, two years later, the stories may not have changed, but Munro’s fall has opened the possibility of a better understanding of them. Writers and critics have already dug through Munro’s work looking for biographical clues and found them in plenty. Her later work often features characters whose lives have been derailed by a failure or an action not taken, a formative crime or mistake; and this may have been her own obsession over her failure to protect Skinner. Several stories are directly about sexual abuse of young women and girls, others invoke the dangerous sexual currents between daughters and their mothers’ boyfriends. 

Alice Munro, we now see, was never an advocate for women. She was a woman caught up in the values of her time, and she and her daughter paid the price for them. 

Much attention has centered on the story “Vandals,” published in the 1994 collection Open Secrets, the first after Munro was informed of the abuse. In it, a young woman burns down the house of the man who abused her as a child. The narrative point of view is from the abuser’s wife, who failed to protect the girl. “Vandals” is “a harrowing and quite direct fictional reflection on [Munro’s] failure to protect her daughter from her husband,” as the critic James Tussing recently observed in the journal Literary Imagination.

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Tussing presents the bold thesis that the abuse scandal not only allows us to look for clues to Munro’s life in her work, but also compels us to notice an aspect of the work that readers had only been “diffusely aware” of: namely, Munro’s skepticism “about the value of moral judgement as such.” The knowledge of this radically changes our understanding of Munro. Her portrayal of sexuality as a force beyond reason and morality — brutal, bestial, untamable, and essentially gendered for female submission — becomes not a critique but a description. And she was never a feminist and never an advocate for what she called “the change” toward women’s equality that the public believed her to be. 

Munro saw the appeal of the sexual revolution — she liked the sex, at least — and she appreciated and benefitted from feminism’s fruits in terms of creative fulfillment and career opportunities. But she was aware of the price, for children and for women’s own fulfillment. Deep down, she believed that the goal of equality between the sexes was both an impossibility and unsatisfying: the human animal is built along different lines. 

This is to say that Munro’s choice of Fremlin — a dominating, magnetic, abusive man — illumines the many Fremlin-like figures in her work, now revealed to be written at least partially in appreciation. The Fremlins degrade women, exert raw power over them, and enforce women’s qualities as lesser. Often, they are dangerous criminals or murderers. Yet they are uniquely the men with whom her women can achieve full sexual and relational satisfaction. The animal demands of sex and gender, as she saw it, are atavistic and beyond morality, and thus the sexual revolution itself can only ever be a partial and painful project.  

Another Fremlin type is the uncle in the story “Haven,” from Munro’s last collection, Dear Life. Here, a teenage-daughter narrator has been abandoned with her old-fashioned uncle and aunt for the summer while her progressive parents are do-gooding in Africa. Her uncle mocks the narrator’s parents and bullies his wife — he is tyrannical, temperamental, cruel. And yet, somehow, the aunt is “younger and fresher and tidier” than the narrator’s mother, who as the beneficiary of equality in marriage, should be more vibrant. The aunt blushes at a mention of the marital bedroom, a space she seems to consider both private and sacred, and dotes on her bully of a husband. She keeps a lovely home, speaks only when it is allowed, and “her life revolves around that man,” as the narrator’s mother remarks. 

The narrator realizes that, contrary to her expectations, “such a regime could be quite agreeable.” She adds, “I don’t mean that I was won over to Uncle Jasper’s way of thinking entirely — just that it did not seem so alien to me as it once had.” And the secret to her aunt’s happiness appears to be sexual. She is prone to radiant smiles. The narrator, “creeping past my aunt and uncle’s closed bedroom door on a Sunday morning” hears “sounds such as I had never heard from my parents or from anyone else — a sort of pleasurable growling and squealing in which there was a complicity and abandonment that disturbed and darkly undermined me.” The progressive parents, free to have any kind of sex at all, aren’t really enjoying it; whereas animalistic “growling and squealing” erupt from the traditional marriage. If this is the better choice is an open question, but it’s obviously hotter. 

I sorted six collections of Munro stories seeking to confirm these insights: The Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), The Progress of Love (1986), The Love of a Good Woman (1998), and Dear Life (2012). The first two were written before Munro’s marriage to Fremlin; the middle two after Fremlin’s abuse of Skinner had taken place but before Munro was explicitly informed of it; and the final two when she knew about it, and was processing it in fiction. 

Of the 61 total stories, the first two collections are the widest-ranging and focus more on childhood and families than men, women, and elemental sexuality, though the theme is present from the start. Thirty-seven, or about 60%, concern “the change” in some significant way. Of the 40 stories published after Munro’s marriage to Fremlin, 28 (70%) are significantly about a romantic relationship, with 10 presenting a man with abusive, dominating characteristics in an attractive light. Thirteen more substantially involve female dissatisfaction with men who are abusive in their unattainableness, thanks to the new morality allowing endless affairs, partner-changing, and lack of commitment, or who are disappointing husbands. Counted generously, there are, at most, three or four outliers that present happy-ish couples not involved in a dynamic of gendered brutality and abuse.  

To name just a few of these dominating, abusive, desired men in Munro’s middle period: Duncan in the story “Dulse,” a man for the sake of whom the narrator has given up “all pride and common sense”; Mr. Cryderman in the story “Jesse and Meribeth,” who molests the teenage narrator while denigrating and humiliating her, an experience which she finds to be very arousing; Dr. Streeter in the story “Eskimo,” who has “the mind of a dinosaur,” plus a man referred to as “the Khan” in the same story, whose domination inspires “a trance of devotion” in his possibly kidnapped teenage girlfriend — this couple’s lovemaking inspires both sickness and “sudden and punishing” desire in the narrator. 

In the later work, after Munro learned of Skinner’s abuse, there are many more Fremlins, often of a more explicitly criminal nature. Both Mr. Gorrie and Rupert Quinn in the collection The Love of a Good Woman have probably killed someone — and each inspires passion and self-immolation in women who are otherwise seeking an independent, modern path. 

There are various ways to interpret what Munro’s personal choice of such a man means about her theory of men and women. Rachel Aviv, in her authoritative reporting on the scandal for The New Yorker, presents the facts in such a way as to suggest that Munro was a victim of her generation. She was an abuse survivor herself, beaten by a ruthless patriarch of a father, and she was raised in an earlier time, when women were expected to be subservient to men. And then she also lived under Fremlin’s thumb. “Her mode of writing feels almost traumatized,” Aviv observes. The relationship with Fremlin, in this interpretation, is a kind of retrograde submission to the hierarchies of the past. And Munro’s oft-presented fantasy of “total surrender” to a man isn’t a deep female need, but a mistake of her upbringing — redeemed, possibly, as a kind of extreme bent towards passive observation that’s useful for writing fiction. 

Munro herself made this justification on occasion. She recognized that submission wasn’t “something the modern woman is supposed to be content with,” as she told the BBC in 1976. Munro went on to note that this tendency of hers was an observational asset, the strategy of a true storyteller: “I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them, just to see what will happen, to see what people will say, to see what people will do.” This form of whitewashing has been a fairly common response to the disturbing elements of Munro’s work. Upon awarding her the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy extolled her for championing “the silent and the silenced, the passive, those who choose not to choose.”

Tussing, however, ferrets out a darker Munro: not a nice lady a little confused about sex, nor a great humanist and ideal mother — but a woman “writing beyond good and evil,” willing to face our brutality, and her own. He contends that Munro kept Fremlin around because she believed that “the springs of creativity and sex are all together,” as she once said, and that she needed the sexual fulfillment he provided in order to write. 

Like Aviv, Tussing queasily suggests that the writing can semi-redeem her choice of Fremlin over Skinner. Hers is “the poetic role of mediating between reason and brutality,” he writes, adding the high-flown justification that “this need to tame by explanation is … the shared origin of both religion and poetry, perhaps even of language.” 

Alice Munro was misguided not by the evils of patriarchy, but by the sexual revolution and the spirit of her age. Munro criticized the effects of the sexual revolution and she doubted its potential to transform human relations, but she believed in the underlying secular-individualist metaphysics that made it possible. The Canadian countryside of her youth had already lost the sense of order or supernatural order upon which standards of moral behavior and institutions like marriage and the family were once based. There was no “before.” She was born into a time ripe for a new set of values that elevated individual pleasure and perhaps a misty sacredness of sex or art as the highest goods. 

We see this with a special clarity in Munro’s breakout collection, Lives of Girls and Women, a set of linked short stories set in the mythical Wawanash County, in the Ontario that would become her lifelong terrain. This is the collection in which Munro delves most deeply into her familial past, and it is startling to discover the scenes of darkness, chaos, and abandonment where we might expect “tradition.” Religion is vestigial in this county; a higher order is non-existent; and the sexual revolution has already begun. 

In the first story in this collection, “The Flats Road,” Del, a character who shares many biographical points of similarity with Munro, launches into the tale of an ur-marriage that would resonate throughout the author’s work. Del’s neighbor Uncle Benny (a false relative, “he was not our uncle, or anybody’s”) answers a newspaper ad for a bride and is subsequently frog-marched into marrying the teenaged mother of a bastard child. The bride turns out to be mentally disturbed — she wears an incongruous red jacket, has legs “like scissors,” and beats her infant. The groom is a great man for the land but also a hoarder, a fabulist, and set in his ways. This grim couple is a more extreme echo of Del’s stolid, farmer father and his eccentric, intellectual, outsider mother, who attempts to sell encyclopedias to the locals and writes letters to the newspapers promoting contraception. 

Already then, in this raw, new country, marriage is accidental, and familial relations are false or weak. And as if these unstable married figures weren’t grim enough, Del describes her memory of Uncle Benny’s parents, now deceased, as “old and heavy and half-blind, sitting on the porch in the sunlight, wearing many dark layers of disintegrating clothing.” 

These, and many other individuals in Munro’s work, cling to a kind of tradition — even Uncle Benny’s hoarding resonates both into the past and into an uncertain future. But for most, it is vanishing (“disintegrating”) around them, and it wasn’t much to begin with. In the second story, “Heirs of the Living Body,” an uncle of Del’s is attempting to write a history of the region — a project of great manly and intellectual importance — but his one blind eye, “dark and clouded,” metaphorically suggests impaired vision. Nothing of any importance has happened, so he is attempting to record everything, and has only reached the year 1906 at the time of his death. Del inherits his manuscript unappreciatively, and allows it to be ruined in a flood.

The idea of the rural past as already corrupted is counterintuitive to contemporary readers, raised on the fantasy of infinite social progress, but it rings true. My own mother was born nine years after Alice Munro and lived an American-township analog of Munro’s life. A few times in my deep childhood, we visited the totemic old farm relatives, and I recall the flies, the swollen ankles, the stultifying boredom, and my mother’s genuine horror and gratitude to have escaped such a place. She laughs at farmhouse chic to this day. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live like that.

No one did want to live like that, and thus Wawanash County got the sexual revolution.

 Young Del senses she is different from the people around her; she is academically gifted and wants more out of life. In the title story, when she is a young teen, she engages in an affair (or is sexually abused, depending on how you want to look at it) with Mr. Chamberlain, a smooth-talking bachelor who is friends with her mother’s boarder. (Her mother, discontented, has moved into town and left her father out on Flats Road.) The relationship begins as Del performs a half-beseeching, half-humiliating routine, pretending to be a seal and barking, crawling around her living room floor in front of Mr. Chamberlain, and he secretly grabs her developing breast. “It was like a slap, to leave me stung,” Del says.  

Del is aroused by these violent attentions and seeks out opportunities in which they might continue. Mr. Chamberlain is a proto-Fremlin, written years before Munro married the real-life one. But the story asks us to believe, as Munro does, that Del’s choice of the situation, her willingness to engage with her own raw sexuality, even to the point of seeking brutality, is in some sense what sets her apart from her best friend, whose traditional life path serves as the story’s counterpoint. Mr. Chamberlain writes, “Del is a bad girl,” on an envelope. Del asks: “Had he hit upon my true self?” She seems to believe he has. 

This is another theme that would reappear throughout Munro’s work — an instance of sexual boldness or transgression as expressive of a character’s core identity. Her women are always running away from their husbands and toward it, as are so many of us in the world built by the sexual revolution. Munro believed in this form of fulfillment, as she believed that marriage could be a kind of incoherent, fatal seizure (see the story “The Moon Over the Orange Park Skating Rink,” for the best example of this). But in this, too, perhaps she was expressing more about her time, place, and upbringing than about humanity writ large. If the era of peak pornography has taught us anything, it’s that the desire for transgression is easily manufactured and doesn’t say much about the individual at all. 

Nonetheless, Munro was an astute observer, and even as she asserted the appeal of sexual freedom, her stories convey, again and again, the mystery that for women somehow it doesn’t work out. If relations between men and women were broken before the change, the cracks widened still more afterward. Munro’s subject matter was always narrow in scope; seen in this light, it becomes a monomania. She spent her career pushing and pulling and rearranging the possibilities of male-female romantic relations, post-change, in an obsessive attempt to make things right, or to catalog all the ways things can go wrong. (If one recalls Uncle Craig’s manuscript or her mother’s encyclopedias, there’s a beautiful kind of order to it.)  

Do we want evidence that the philosophy of the sexual revolution doesn’t work for women? 

We don’t, of course, we don’t. Which explains the decades-long critical misunderstanding of Alice Munro — I went through more than a dozen reviews, obituaries, and blog posts at random, and none of them mentioned sex — and also the squeamish blankness with which even the best minds confront her crime. An honest appraisal would see that Munro’s treatment of her daughter expressed the values of the sexual revolution in an extreme form: she chose her personal sexual fulfillment and her art over her child. She did this knowingly. She had been doing it all along. She told us about women who did this every chance she got, and she tallied the costs they bore. The revelations about Skinner’s abuse are such a fitting coda to her fictional output, she couldn’t have written it better herself.

To acknowledge this while still valuing Munro’s work would challenge the past 70-some years of feminist dogma. What Munro saw and couldn’t unsee was the difficulty — the impossibility, really — of rewriting certain rules of human existence. We might call these rules the natural outcome of human nature; Christianity would call them the fruits of original sin. We can choose ourselves over the web of relations in which we are enmeshed. We can deny that there’s something about male dominance that turns women on; we can skip out on marriages; we can choose to see a fictional scenario about a young girl choosing to be molested by an older man as empowering; we can do many things. But somehow, as Munro reveals, both in life and in fiction, we can’t prevent a bad choice from having a bad consequence. 

By this reckoning, the debate about condemning Munro but not her art has it backwards. Her art stands as a gorgeously drawn catalog of dysfunction, but the values it expresses can be comfortably condemned. The writer herself can then, perhaps, be forgiven. She betrayed her daughter, but she saw as best she could, and she worked very hard to tell us about it.  

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When Munro looked to express the good in human life, as she occasionally did, she found it in the brutal truth and inexplicable beauty of nature, or in the almost-devotional love present in the artist’s gaze, or in moments of fleeting human connection that were to be treasured because they were so partial and so rare. Men and women, she thought, might occasionally find each other. Sometimes, a certain quiet being-together was possible, and a kind of peace. 

And families, even damaged ones, had their moments. She wrote of Del’s parents in “The Flats Road”: “We were in a house as small and shut up as any boat is on the sea, in the middle of a tide of howling weather.” Del imagines this as she goes to sleep, and thinks of her parents downstairs on the floor below her: “They seemed to be talking, playing cards, a long way away in a tiny spot of light, irrelevantly; yet this thought of them, prosaic as a hiccup, familiar as breath, was what held me …”.    

These are the kinds of “quiet truths” that Alice Munro was so celebrated for. They are also, to some extent, banalities.

We might aim higher. We might aim for marital love that doesn’t involve abuse, perhaps a form of male dominance harnessed to male responsibility and care. Women might enjoy that, too. We might aim for familial love that takes that “tiny spot of light” and grows it through lifelong care and commitment to each other. We might drop everything and visit our dying mothers, as Munro didn’t do, and unrepentantly wrote about. We might develop a theory of sexuality that gives a mother the psychological ammunition to protect her child, and a teenage girl a reason to say no to her darker sexual impulses. 

For a decade before she died, Alice Munro had Alzheimer’s. She forgot what she’d done, her middle daughter, Jenny, told The New Yorker. Jenny, in an extraordinary act of grace, cared for her mother during her decline, inverting Munro’s behavior with her own mother. Jenny told Aviv that Munro, wiped clean of memory and unable to write, seemed to have an ability to love in a new way that she hadn’t before. This, too, was a fitting ending. 

In the Christian order, the soul is supernatural and must remain untarnished. It is each human being’s job to carry this precious cargo back to God through the difficult moral labor of seeking salvation with fear and trembling (cf. Phil 2:12). Munro believed in no such thing, of course. The religious impulse, for her, like the sexual impulse, was somehow atavistic and operated despite our better knowledge. Yet all the unbelief in the world can’t hide the ways the old religious law does seem to be borne out. Freed of her acts, Alice Munro’s soul was beautiful.

This stunning statistic comes to us courtesy of a viral essay by Costin Alamariu, a Yale-educated Right-wing philosopher and eugenicist, who is interested in the problems of breeding “high-human-capital” individuals. Alamariu writes in a distinctive typo-larded and grammatically scrambled style, under the nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, and has been one of the influential figures in the rise of hyper-masculinism and the return of biological vitalism on the Right. (Men of the Bronze Age don’t use spellcheck, get it?)

BAP believes that egalitarian, collectivist, female-led torpor has been the human norm since prehistory — echoing Camille Paglia’s statement that “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” — and that Western civilization has been a fluke, the fragile accomplishment of the violent seizure of power by a naturally (genetically) excellent male-warrior-aristocrat class. Such rule is inherently patriarchal, violent, expansionist, racialist, and misogynist, he believes — but it has been responsible for the flowers of human culture, from technology to the Renaissance. Our current “gyno-gerontocracy” — rule by women and old people — hello, Biden-Harris ticket — represents a return to the droopy baseline. BAP is pessimistic that the state of affairs can be changed, but the solution, as he sees it, is selective breeding of elite humans. 

But how to persuade the high-human-capital women, who BAP believes are responsible for the population drain in the upper echelons, to have more sex and more babies? 

The answer is turning “the anxious professional female” on to penis-worship, the celebration of male beauty, and pagan-style orgiastic sex cults. The non-fertile female type, he says, is one we’re all familiar with: “an intelligent, articulate woman, not bad-looking has a series of monogamous relationships, often including cohabitation…. None of these ‘work out,’ none result in children. At some point she realizes she’s 44 and childless. Why … I’m not sure even she knows.” 

What these ladies need is not “reason, civic consciousness, and state law,” but an “obscure or even occult” remedy: an inspiration to penis-worship, and an increase of ecstatic sexuality, sexual frenzy, fuck-craziness, glamor and vigor. “Impregnation and births come from the erect phallus, and from … the male instinct and male sexual desire,” he writes. Only hot young men can “reignite fertility” in young women, using the device endowed to them by nature.

As an anxious professional woman of somewhat this demographic, I have no love for the individualism and nihilism of the manosphere, but: this is an excellent idea. 

The lack of frenzied penis-worship among women is a huge social problem. Any sexual encounter that inspires truly sincere frenzied penis-worship, might, given the mystical properties of sexuality, melt the ice between the genders that is at least in part responsible for the population collapse. It might also be a gateway to the kind of thinking that values children.  

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BAP’s concern is less narrow than perhaps it seems. Even non-eugenicists are aware that we are experiencing a global population decline, with fertility in the United States at 1.6 births per woman, part of a downward trend that’s visible everywhere in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (and even there, rates are on a downward trajectory). 

These trends cut across cultures and income levels and aren’t hugely impacted by family-leave policies or the other factors we tend to fight about, like a society’s relative liberalism versus conservatism and religiosity. One driver is science — obviously, in a world with universal contraception, no one has to get pregnant anymore; and rising infertility is also an issue — but another is that people are remaining single (fertility among married people is also declining, but much less precipitously). People can’t find partners they like, and even if they do, they make a rational cost-benefit analysis that chooses known goods such as money and travel and organic cocktails over potential goods, such as the happiness they might experience having children.  

BAP is correct that the conventional wisdom on how to reverse these trends is inadequate and somewhat circular — it has been observed that people who are married and religious have more children, but that doesn’t mean that promoting marriage and religion (for the purpose of promoting more children) will have any influence on people who don’t want children in the first place. And he is also correct that the shift would have to bring men and women together, and must take place in the spiritual, not the material realm. His reliance on the “occult,” which I’d interpret as mystery or the transcendent, is apt.  

Unfortunately, he’s also a nihilist hyper-individualist who worships technology, hates women, and sees no inherent value in human life; so there are some flaws in his social reasoning. He has a glimmer that something transcendent is needed, but his best idea on how to inspire “veneration” of the penis and how to “valorize” male beauty is … government sponsored PR campaigns. Just imagine: We’ll text you a picture of a penis if you text us a six-digit code. He admits, reluctantly, that female consent is necessary. But his suggestion for what might inspire women to go wild is porn-brained … an orgy. It’s a popular female fantasy, according to PornHub and Allure magazine, which published an article entitled “Yes, Your Gangbang Fantasy is Normal” in 2018. But it certainly isn’t a popular female activity. (He might also consider that whatever Allure magazine is selling young women, the Right shouldn’t be.) 

He is aware that carrying a baby to term will take a high toll on the woman … so he suggests government payments of $500,000 per birth. This is less tepid than the current $2,200 child tax credit, but hardly represents the lost income possibilities for a high-human-capital earner. And he makes no provision for the dads sticking around: $500,000 goes even less far over 18 years if you aren’t receiving childcare. Essentially, he’s writing a polemic on fertility, while holding all the cultural attitudes that have created the fertility crisis: he has no interest in actual children, believes that a woman’s “reluctance at being impregnated and taking a pregnancy to term” is entirely rational, and suggests that maybe the kids could be given away to government-sponsored daycares in order to not inconvenience the parents as they individualism-maxx their way towards eternity. Universal Pre-K and younger is already the socialist-mediocre ideal — he is no different. 

These are problems of the manosphere overall: in response to the excesses of toxic feminism, its adherents have adopted an equal and opposite kind of toxic masculinism that attempts to rehabilitate masculine vice without adopting any form of masculine virtue. Husbandry, paternity, nurture, protectiveness, loyalty, self-mastery, responsibility, legitimate authority, generosity, self-sacrifice, gentleness-in-strength, are all either unknown or unnecessary. BAP, who prescribes pregnancy and “creampie” porn for his utopia is either unaware or doesn’t care that virility originally meant resisting the urge to live full time in the goon cave. 

To accomplish BAP’s goal more realistically, and for everyone, not just the elite, the manosphere would do well to consult two books on sexuality and fertility penned by women outside the mainstream feminist orbit. The first, Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography, published in 2013, supports BAP’s intuition that a kind of mystic-ecstatic sexual pairing is the key to female creativity and happiness. The second, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, published in 2024 by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, is a serious scholarly work by a Catholic economist and mother of eight, which sheds light on the reasons women might become hyper-fertile. 

Wolf’s Vagina starts with the author’s personal story of how a pinched pelvic nerve from a degenerative back condition interfered with her orgasms and also drained her life of creativity and meaning. Her journey toward recovery set her off on a deep dive into female sexual biology and the science of female pleasure, which brought her to some startling — though highly speculative — conclusions: that women are more “animal” and more sexual than men; that the seat of a woman’s selfhood and soul is her sexuality; and that her creative powers are fundamentally tied to having good sex.  

She based some of this on her discovery of the pelvic nerve, which, “like most women,” she had known nothing at all about before her injury. Beneath the superficial organs we are all familiar with, lies a tangled, complex, multiply branching, and “completely unique for every individual woman” (emphasis hers) network of nerves that originates at the sacral vertebrae, swirls throughout the pelvis, and laces densely around multiple locations (walls of the vagina, clitoris, cervix, perineum and anus). It’s well-known to neuroscience, she discovers, that variations in female orgasms (clitoral, vaginal, both-at-once) as well as the level of difficulty in attaining them, depend largely on the arrangement and density of these nerves. (A world of Freudian theory about the female orgasm, defeated in a single blow.) To have good sex with a woman, in other words, you must know her as an individual; you must be paying attention; it is a relational as well as a physical act. 

The male pelvic nerve, on the other hand, is vastly smaller and simpler, is basically the same for all men, and is arranged in a grid. 

Next, Wolf discussed the role of the autonomic nervous system, which controls what our bodies do beyond our conscious control, and regulates many of the other biological processes of female arousal besides brute stimulation. Science, she says, has proved that the “activation” of this system depends on how women feel — along an axis of safe, valued, relaxed, not-in-danger, etc. The “activated” ANS produces arousal and causes women to release euphoric affection-and-emotion chemicals, much more intensely than men do. It also has profound effects on the brain, including “deactivating centers for behavioral regulation,” changing responses to pain, and producing altered states of consciousness: when the ANS is fully activated, “one could say that [the woman] actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman.”

The ANS arousal process is similar in men but again is vastly less sensitive and complex — and less responsive to touch and more to “words of respect and appreciation.” (Pro tip: “men’s physiological distress levels in relationship conflicts” also lower in response to such words.) 

These facts of biology suggested to Wolf a particular kind of lovemaking — slow, attentive, exploratory, particular — that will produce intense attachment and emotion, and also a kind of transcendent bliss. The BAP dream is real, but it’s achieved through actual human intimacy, not at the orgy.

Women are even programmed, Wolf said, by the balance of chemicals released by pressure against the cervix (penetration) to get the greatest reward through the agency of “the other,” meaning a man and his penis. Penis-worship thus is hard-wired and doesn’t need the PR campaign — it needs only the functioning penis and a man who knows what to do with it. Wolf argued that it was a mistake of second-wave feminism to suggest that women could do without men: we are unhappy and incomplete without them, biologically. (This book marked the end of her acceptance in the feminist mainstream.) 

As a feminist in the era of contraception, Wolf did not connect the relationship-building and female-creativity-stoking properties of sex with procreation, nor did she ask what the hormonal and chemical effects of specifically procreative sex might be. In the 2020s, we might extrapolate that these effects exist, thanks to the research of Sarah E. Hill on how hormonal birth control changes not just women’s bodies, but their minds and life-choices, as well. Might the vaginally fulfilled woman Wolf described, experiencing her natural reproductive cycle, spread her creative urges more widely, and wish to create not just art, but life? Might the feelings such as love and appreciation for the other experienced in this kind of ideal union make her less selfish, less individualist, and more open to caring for a child, both spiritually and biochemically?  

Some indications that it’s possible come from economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. The author and her research team performed the first qualitative study of American women who have more than 5 children (around 5% of the population), operating on the essential insight that “if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must be consequential” — if most women have low fertility, studying those who don’t have low fertility will tell us something about how to cure the disease. She notes that the cure for smallpox was discovered when it was noticed that some people — dairymen and milkmaids — were immune to it. (The milder cowpox virus provided immunity to smallpox, and was crucial in developing the vaccine.) 

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Pakaluk and her team visited 55 college-educated women of varied socioeconomic status across America, conducting interviews that might provide insights into their motivation, and a clue into what’s lacking in the culture at large. The author chose women who would describe their child-bearing as purposeful, because she was looking for the reasons behind the choice; and she picked college-educated women because she wanted subjects to be facing the modern dilemma in which “education raises the opportunity cost of forgoing the labor market to have children.” 

Pakaluk finds variation, of course, but also deep similarities. Some of the women she interviewed grew up in big families and always knew they wanted to have a large family; others, like the Hannah of her title, quoted in chapter two, say they could never have imagined having so many, and invoke the mystical and spiritual to explain their reasoning. “People think on a rational level, and I think maybe a little bit more super-rational thinking has to infiltrate the masses to know that things are possible, like the possibilities of expansion in your life,” Hannah says. 

The women in this cohort describe the choice to have many children as a rejection of selfish individualism: “a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood,” Pakaluk writes. Some work, some don’t, but all are making “costly personal sacrifices” — because they seem worth it. These women believe they are getting more than they are giving up. They value the children themselves, and the expansion of heart and soul they experience by being mother to many. The many voices in the book all converge on this theme: nothing is as good — we just fell in love with babies. 

Most women in this day and age won’t recognize this. Motherhood is hard, and hard to adjust to when you are raised with careerist expectations of status and success. New York Magazine’s The Cut recently shared with us, “Stories from Real Women Who Regret Having Children” — and I’m quite sure none of them were making it up. However most modern women are also, in some sense, resisting: trying to “keep my identity,” hold onto “me time,” make sure “nothing changes.”  They don’t do motherhood  the way the pronatalists Pakaluk interviewed do: fully accepted, as a “vocation” and a “calling,” and a place to find an identity rather than lose one.   

Unhappy mothers may also be stopping too soon. Pakaluk discovered that having a lot of siblings benefits the family in unexpected ways. In larger families, the necessity for everyone to pull together, teaches children responsibility, is a natural corrective for selfishness, and gives them a sense of purpose as well. With just one or two: you get brats. New babies, for 20% of Pakaluk’s interviewees, are discovered to solve emotional or other family problems. 

Moreover, despite our careers and fully maximized lives, we are also experiencing an epidemic of specifically female unhappiness, which may be related to lack of childbearing. Women’s rates of happiness have been declining since 1970, “both absolutely and relative to men,” Pakaluk reports. At the same time, we are having fewer children overall, and fewer than we say we want.

So here’s a different, more radical, less modest proposal: for happiness and fulfillment, women need men, and a lot of babies. The solution to the fertility crisis is overcoming 100 years of feminism and taboo, and telling them so. 

He is us, an equal creation of the Left and the Right, and our leaders will all be Trumps from now on — unless we do something. Gavin Newsom, the democratic frontrunner for 2028 has explicitly styled himself after Trump. And a new crop of politicians from Republican James Fishback in Florida to Democrat Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago have adopted his divisive, confrontation-all-the-time style.   

I first noticed the total-hatred phenomenon while living in Moscow in 2004, in the months leading up to the Orange Revolution. At that time, a corrupt outgoing president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, widely seen as a Kremlin puppet, had anointed his corrupt, Russian-leaning prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a representative of the oligarchic crime syndicate from the Donbas, as a successor. Yanukovych was facing a stiff challenge from the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who was campaigning against corruption and who had been spectacularly disfigured by an attempted assassination with the poison dioxin. 

To Americans in Moscow, already high on blue passports and cultural superiority, and to the Western-leaning Ukrainians among us, this was a clear battle of democracy against autocracy, and good against evil, with Yushchenko’s scarred face as a banner to elicit passionate feelings of outrage and righteousness. It was easy to dismiss the more pragmatic Russian opinion: that Yushchenko was merely the representative of a different crime syndicate; and that Russia and Ukraine were neighbors with mixed populations and deeply intertwined trade and military relationships, and they had to get along.

Prior to this point, at least in the United States, politics had been the business of politicians and a niche interest among wonks and lobbyists. To the extent that anyone got angry at their friends over dinner over the issues of the day, it was a foible. We lambasted our presidents — Reagan was an evil representative of wealth and greed, Clinton a liar with bad morals, George W. legendarily stupid. But personally, passionately, hating them, and delegitimizing them through the intensity of our hatred, that was still in its infancy.

Yanukovych — who appeared to deserve it — was the first politician I saw receive this kind of total character annihilation. 

He was a criminal and a rapist, Ukrainian friends told me, a person so tarred by savagery that any means were necessary to prevent his ascendency. One young Ukrainian woman, married to an American banker, trembled with rage when she discussed him over drinks. Her anger seemed so justified that it was easy not to notice that it shut down consideration of the issues. Frankly, there didn’t seem to be any issues — always a warning sign.

According to the website of the now-shuttered, reformist English-language daily The Moscow Times, Yanukovych was convicted for robbery as a teenager, served time three years later for severely beating someone, and was accused of large-scale theft, tearing earrings from people’s ears, and an attempted rape, all prior to being appointed Kuchma’s prime minister as a representative of the Donetsk oligarchy. Records of these crimes were missing from the local police stations that handled the crimes. 

In the event, Yanukovych won the election, which was swiftly condemned as rigged by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell. My Ukrainian friends decamped Moscow for Maidan Square and, along with many others, overturned the election through sheer force of rage, and the rest was a beautiful Orange victory for democracy. 

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Except, from this early, larval form of total-virtue politics, sprung the hideous insect of total-hatred politics that afflicts us today. 

Total hatred, on the Left, is the belief that our political opponents are not just people with reasonable disagreements about how to achieve the common good, or different beliefs about what the common good should be — but that they are, personally, bad people, who want something bad, and their leaders are really bad people. To demonstrate your hatred of these bad people, in the most explicit and grotesque terms possible, becomes the highest good. You #Resist, nevermind that you’re resisting the results of a free and fair election in your own country. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, is the flower of total-hatred politics; as is cancel culture, and the split between Twitter and Bluesky, and all the broken families and broken friendships that have come in the wake of polarization. The arts have fallen victim, with satire and rage becoming the dominant mode of production. The Netanyahus, a satirical, fictionalized version of Bibi’s family’s visit to Harold Bloom at Cornell in 1960, by Joshua Cohen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022. Satirist laureate George Saunders, once a good writer, has turned full-time to Trump-parody dreck. Since when has it been a virtue to make each other appear worse than we are? Performances demeaning the American president — he’s a giant inflatable toddler, wearing a crown! — have become so routine that even The New York Times is bored. 

The hatred has never felt quite so personal coming from the Right, but it’s equally destructive, taking the form of pointless norm-breaking, aggression, and rebellion against perceived injustices from the Left. One of the most insightful comments I’ve seen about Trump was that he had a seven-letter platform that starts in F and ends in U. Decisive pluralities of Americans voted for this — and relished doing so. And now we’re seeing the fruits. 

F-U to the Gulf of Mexico, to Europe, to Greenland, to Venezuela, to Iran. F-U to the illegal immigrants, and to the blue states that want to shield them, and to the many Americans who will be distressed by seeing long-standing neighbors ripped from their homes and deported.

Neither form of hatred has respect for American institutions or the rule of law. Democrats turned the mainstream media into organs of overt activism, discriminated based on race, passed off a vegetative president, and engaged in frivolous impeachments. Republicans are attacking free speech and academic freedom, and breaking norms on a massive scale. 

The emotional manifestation of total hatred is an urge toward murder and death, as we can see on social media, where calls for people to die have become their own form of parody. Trump should die. Netanyahu should die. A departing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books thinks that the upper management — of a nonprofit book review — should die (for failing to pay staff and contributors). And of course, people are actually killing each other or trying to: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, three people in an Austin bar on Sunday. 

The political manifestation is what we have today: a politics that is increasingly incoherent, illiberal, and anti-democratic, and which makes no effort to fulfill its core function of negotiating a shared settlement. When the Democrats are in power, they illegally throw open the borders. When the Republicans take their place, they pursue the legitimate end of deporting people by cruel means. They kill people.  “Fuck Trump” and “Fuck ICE” the other side responds, and surges onto the streets to carry out its agenda by force.  

When we discuss this kind of dynamic, the usual culprit is social media. As the writer Freddie DeBoer once said, “the human mind was not meant to be constantly rubbing up against other human minds.” 

And surely that’s been an accelerant, but I’d place the moment we gave up on each other many years earlier, during the transition that, paradoxically, occurred with the triumph of Western liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era. 

Which brings us back to my first brush with Ukrainian hate politics. The fall of the Soviet Union was perceived as a victory for the West, chalked up to Ronald Reagan’s commitment to the arms race and his promotion of democracy and American values. Reagan’s foreign policy was a pivot for Republicans, who had previously stuck to a Kissinger doctrine of realpolitik — the idea that politicians should seek stability, rather than pursue a foreign policy that promoted ideology. Arguably, realpolitik worked — at least, it was inclusive, in the form of Nixon bringing both China and Russian into political relation — but it was easy to brand as both amoral and soft, and we’ve abandoned it. With Reagan, it became impermissible to demand anything less than Total Victory Over Evil in foreign policy.

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The moral high produced by winning the Cold War has been long-lasting. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a deeply influential and treacly good television show about exporting liberal democracy to the entire galaxy aired from 1987 to 1994. The West Wing, a similar idealization of the liberal project, ran from 1999 to 2006. The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, a deeply influential show that formed the moral architecture of most of today’s educated Left, was a grittier version of the same good-versus-evil narrative. These shows ran through the presidencies of George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush to Obama, all offering different flavors of the same virtue. A virtue that criticizes America, to be sure, but in the deep grounding of each human soul, a prideful, crusading one, that tells us we’re the good guys.  

This has rendered us unable to face reality and grapple with opposition. If Evil Russia has interests in Ukraine, we erase them. If Muslim theocrats wouldn’t actually be nice people to live with, and that contradicts our tolerant self-image, we deny it (Queers for Palestine, folks. Hands off Iran). If people in our own country aren’t totally with the program, we bully them into submission. And it’s that slippery spot where we can’t see our own pride that has shifted the political ground from reason to emotion, and from negotiation to sheer rage.

 Democracy is better than autocracy; Viktor Yanukovych stole an election and was a bad guy; Ukraine should be allowed to govern itself — none of these things is wrong. But promoting these goals in a complex world requires a foundation in the older, more rigorous Judeo-Christian values, which caution against pride, and promote self-sacrifice, and don’t ever allow us to view the other as all-bad. 

Without this kind of tempering, we get total virtue, and its corollary, total hatred. 

The pitiful fact is that unlike most political problems, the power to end total hatred really does rest in the hands the individual haters — in their personal relationships (stop canceling your friends and family), in how they behave online (stop telling people to die), and in how they consider their politics (consider the other side; give more than you’d like to). Given the state of world and domestic affairs, it would be impossible not to be angry; everyone is angry. But the first step toward healing the body politic and ourselves would be to consider that a vice. 

In one video that circulated on Instagram, the fallen teen’s foot can be seen, and a voice can be heard saying, “He dead fell.” In another video, described to UnHerd by a teen who saw it, the fallen boy “was pleading and groaning and making all these noises. You could see blood all around the shaft.” 

It was only three to four hours later that news of the incident filtered out widely enough into the New York teenager ecosystem that someone — members of a group chat to which the videos had been posted, a teen familiar with the situation told UnHerd — called the police. 

What transpired next was a high-wire search-and-rescue, a video of which is posted on the Citizen App Instagram page. The teen, whose limp body can be seen being lowered in a harness along what looks like a guy-line, was taken to a Gotham hospital. He reportedly has hypothermia, among other presumed injuries, and is in critical but stable condition.

Comments on the shaft-boy rescue video on the apps are predictably ghoulish, along the lines of: he got what was coming to him, lol. But both this view and the characterization of the event as a “social media stunt” miss some truths we should be more aware of about what’s going on with the kids, and why they’re pursuing the hidden-in-plain-view subculture of urbexing, short for “urban exploring.” 

In brief: climbing the bridges, scaling the roofs, traversing the construction sites and exploring the abandoned buildings of our great, sweeping and majestic city is dangerous, yes, but also breathtakingly ballsy and cool. The young men doing it are demonstrating nerve, daring, incredible physical prowess and at least the raw material of manly virtue. 

If you spend any time on Instagram accounts devoted to urbexing, you will soon be made aware that while the accident was a one-off, there are probably teenagers climbing the Queensboro Bridge every night. This suspicion was corroborated by two frequent urbexers I spoke with, both of whom wished to remain anonymous. (What they do is illegal, since it requires them to trespass, break and enter, and often vandalize property in the process.)

The Queensboro Bridge is the easiest of Manhattan’s major bridges to access, my sources said, precisely because of the convenient interior ladder in the towers. Both told me they’ve climbed that bridge repeatedly, and one had recently had a scare from running into another group of kids (“going up to smoke a big blunt”), coming in as he and his friends were going out. The same source, a 14-year-old public high-school student from Brooklyn, had climbed the Manhattan Bridge early Monday morning, the same day as the other teenager fell. 

Urbexing is attractive, the 14-year-old told me, because the city is like a wilderness and can be explored with the nearly unlimited potential of public transportation. He likes it because “you see the city in a way most people never do.” Most people, in his view, never see most of the city — they don’t see its bridge stanchions and scaffoldings, its hoppable fences and poppable doors, its unguarded lobbies, its construction sites and roofs. This teen provided me with a Google document he’s compiling on the practice, which he hopes (somewhat naively) to someday use as the basis for a college-admissions essay. 

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“Urban exploring,” the essay reads, “is a diverse community of people who illegally trespass and explore rooftops, subways, abandoned buildings, and city facilities.” To do it, “one must find a spot they want to hit” and find a way to enter and exit. “Many different entrance methods require climbing, crawling, running, pretending to be someone you’re not, deceiving, and more rigorous tactics.…” 

The other teen, a 17-year-old public-school student from Manhattan, told me that he’d gotten into urbexing when he was 12 years old, starting with what he called “local abandoned spots” that are easy targets, like “the abandoned school in the East Village, right around Tompkins [Square Park] and whatnot,” and then moving on to spots that are “harder to access.”  

The 17-year-old described the appeal of urbexing. Above all, he said, it’s about the rush. “A lot of things in today’s day and age are so dull,” he said. He has been admitted to college, and says that “getting good grades is a necessity.” However, he feels that his mental acuity, even more than his physical strength, has been enhanced by pushing himself consistently through fear and danger. “I’m aware that my body is physically capable of doing all the things I want to do,” he says, “but it comes down to a mental thing … you have to believe you can do it.” 

The fear, he said, becomes “an enjoyment factor.” And learning to master it teaches you “to be peaceful and stay in control in tense situations.” He acknowledged that urbexing is dangerous but explained that part of his self-training is to be “alert,” aware of the boundaries of risk, and careful to avoid them. (Both teens I spoke with eschew train-surfing as too dangerous, though these are also popular forms of urbexing. Sixteen teens have died trying to ride the top of moving trains in New York City since 2023, ten of them boys.) 

And there’s also the sheer glory of it, visible in the photos and videos, terrifying and illegal as they are. The 17-year-old told me that if he lived in the countryside, he’d climb mountains, trees, “everything.” The 14-year-old described the views from the bridges and roofs he’s explored as “so beautiful.”

Maybe what these boys are doing is stupid, but it stops seeming entirely so when you listen to their reasoning. Young men have always sought to hone themselves with risk and challenge — and that’s a good thing. The bravery of the bonehead demographic has been useful to the rest of us, too. Hunting a mammoth? Stupid. The first man to set off in a flimsy little piece of wood to see what was on the other side of an unknown body of water? Very stupid. Obediently marching off to war? Fighting fires? Noble, but “stupid.”  

In an urban nanny-state where most aspects of a young man’s existence are ruthlessly circumscribed, it begins to seem admirable that some find a way to encounter real danger. As a parent, I don’t want my child to urbex, but sometimes I believe that it’s a better choice for boys than sitting at home isolated, playing video games or obediently feeding AI-slop assignments into the AI-slop machine. Boys, especially, have had their language, their behavior, the way they play, and the way they move their bodies ruthlessly policed since earliest childhood, both at home and at school. So on the glittering tops of skyscrapers, and on cranes of midtown, and on the bridges and in the tunnels, some are slipping the leash. 

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One of the cruel comments on the video about the 16-year-old who fell on Monday suggests putting young men on actual leashes. User @mz_petty_cashflowlanez epitomizes the safetyist mentality with the remark that “maybe adult leashes are needed at this point. An AirTag in clothes could save lives.” Her justification is that “people are dying” because of the ambulances delayed “on these type [sic] of calls.” The contempt for youth and masculinity is staggering. 

What happened on the bridge on Monday was a tragedy, of course. My 17-year-old source, who was of the opinion that the ladder where the accident occurred is “not hard at all,” also remarked that on Monday, the weather was “wet, sunny, and all the snow is melting … it’s possible that if your hands were cold, you could lose your grip and you just fall.” He also pointed out that, especially with train-surfing deaths, the role of drugs has been underreported. “A lot of those kids have carts [electric weed pens] on them,” he told me. “I’m convinced a lot of the people who fall are also extremely fried.” Most people, he thinks, really shouldn’t urbex. 

Worse, though, in his mind, is the group of teens on Monday who left their friend and didn’t call the police. The New York social-media urbex ecosystem has turned against them. “Those people that did that aren’t respected at all anymore,” the 17-year-old told me, adding that they’re being doxxed on many accounts, and it’s not difficult to find out their names. One Instagram post on a video that has now been deleted read: “Whoever leaves their manz deserves to rot, hope y’all get charged to the fullest extent and rot in prison y’all.” 

“If you put yourself in that position, you would always want someone to help you,” the 17-year-old said. 

He’s right, and it’s a reminder that, while the raw young-man energy that makes these stunts possible is admirable, it’s also a force that needs to be shaped and trained, ideally by adults and other men. In our rush as a culture to limit danger, we’ve also limited the possibilities for the kind of character formation that might have helped the boys in the access shaft on Monday be better men about it. But in a world where risk is forced underground (or very far above it),  they’re on their own in the wild landscape, loving it until they aren’t anymore, and climbing until they fall, maybe with an easily obtained weed “cart” in their pocket. 

We give them little to do that’s either worthwhile or commensurate with their physical and moral abilities, so they do this. They deserve better. 

Such arrangements are the subject of A Better Life, a new novel that sends up migrant-hosting in New York City. The book’s author, Lionel Shriver, is a writer of literary thrillers, and has never been one to shy away from the big political issues. She was an early and brave voice of dissent against political correctness and “own voices” in fiction. And she was canceled in 2016 for wearing a sombrero during a speech defending the fiction writer’s right to “be an appropriator par excellence” because stealing, prying and presuming are essential tools of the trade. A Better Life takes a harsh view of precisely the type of Brooklyn woman Holley represents.

The novel’s main character, Gloria Bonaventura, is a divorced bourgeoise liberal in the arts. In response to New York’s Biden-era migrant crisis, Gloria takes in Martine, a migrant from Honduras. In Shriver’s eyes, Gloria is silly and a little desperate: she has a business hand-knitting stuffed animals and cashmere “packers” for transgender men, and spouts obtuse clichés: the migrants, she says, “just want to participate in our democracy, work hard, and raise a new generation of Americans”. The novel is written from the perspective of Gloria’s adult son Nico, a self-described incel who is still living at home, unemployed, four years after his college graduation, and who resents the intrusion of Martine into his home. Gloria soon describes Martine as a member of the family, but Nico fears his mother is being taken in.

Shriver is a smart and compelling writer, a cut above most novelists working today. By mining the headlines on the migration crisis, she produces an excellent thriller. Martine, it turns out, has criminal gang-member relatives who prey on the book’s liberal do-gooding characters with ease. The set-ups are funny — Gloria stocks Martine’s kitchenette in the basement with a bougie spread of “salted almonds, rosemary potato chips, whole-grain crackers and corn nuts,” for example, and puts the fluffy towels for company and “Cornish hedgerow” bath gel in her guest’s shower. And the plot twists are satisfying, but the novel also asks potent questions on migration. What is lost when we invite “too many” others into our country? Who really belongs here? And if we’re being taken advantage of, who is at fault?

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Through Nico, the incel son, Shriver explores such questions. He’s not, as the cliché might have it, a hateful racist, but rather a young man who, after a youth of promise and privilege, has become strangely stalled in life. He is living in his mother’s home while drawing money from a small inheritance, and has the explicit goal of doing nothing. He watches YouTube, orders DoorDash and has a standing date with internet porn every night at midnight. He believes that he’s happy: in his view, his peers are empty strivers; his mother and sisters are moral neurotics; and by contrast his activities are a rational response to his comfortable economic situation.

The migration wave, however, creates the competitive conditions that finally encourage Nico to pursue a more fulfilling life. Martine’s arrival pushes him out of his basement room and back to his childhood bedroom, forcing him to confront his failure to launch. Then, her surly and possibly dangerous brother Domingo moves in, intimidating Nico out of his own living room, and causing him to contemplate his manhood or lack thereof. After an escalation of violence and intrigue, it’s a toss-up as to who “deserves” Nico’s mother’s Brooklyn mansion: its original occupants, or Martine and her crew.

Shriver allows herself an extremely non-PC ending (the immigrants are everything we feared, basically), but the book’s larger take is ambivalent. Nico’s father, Carlin, a Right-wing journalist, laments that whites of European origin are being replaced (not a conspiracy theory, just a fact, he says) by people they have nothing in common with. Carlin’s friend Vernon, a documentary filmmaker, expands on the point, arguing that “the country’s been so successful not because it’s so ‘diverse’ but because it is, or used to be, relatively homogeneous.” However, if Nico is a symbol of the whites of European origin in the 2020s, this vaunted European “culture” has devolved into entitlement, DoorDash and masturbation — so the argument feels perhaps deliberately weak. As one of Martine’s friends puts it: “Migrants do all the work? Then USA belong to migrants. Maybe you Americans are the freeloaders.”

The novel appears at a time when illegal migrants have once again become a flashpoint in America. But while it succeeds at giving voice to ideas that are usually forbidden in the Left-leaning world of literary fiction, its various forms of satire, especially the characterization of Gloria, are limiting. It’s enjoyable to poke fun at an imaginary insufferable liberal woman, but it’s simply not true that one side of the debate is wholly ridiculous: nothing is ever entirely black and white. And the ways in which the women who host illegal migrants aren’t ridiculous are worth exploring.

In addition to Holley, I spoke with two other Brooklyn women who have also hosted migrants at some point since 2023: Louise Bauso, a high-school teacher, and Sarah*, a social worker. Bauso is the founder of Red Hook Mutual Aid, a “hyper-local” neighborhood organization. At the height of the migration crisis in 2023 and 2024, she tells me, men, mainly from West Africa, who were being housed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard not far from her Red Hook neighborhood, would be lined up 25 deep outside her organization’s free store.

Bauso ended up taking in two asylum seekers from Guinea, boys aged 18 and 16, in the winter of 2023-2024. As she describes it, they’d somehow started “diligently” messaging the mutual aid line every day, asking for assistance with transfer to a youth shelter. They were soon due to lose their spot in an adult city shelter, because the city at the time had a 30-day rule. When you had stayed for your allotted 30 days, you had to leave and be re-admitted, a process that could take weeks. On the day the Guinean teenagers lost their housing, they called Bauso. She met them for the first time at a coffee shop. They’d been turned away by all the city agencies, Bauso says, and “they said, ‘We don’t have anywhere to go, we don’t know what to do. It’s cold’”.

She took them into her 850-square-foot railroad apartment with few interior doors, where they slept on her sofa on and off for three months. “It was an extreme thing to do,” she says, “and not everyone understood it.” When pressed to explain her choice, she says, “They were literal children, and so young-looking. They had to stay with me. I had nowhere to send them.”

Bauso says the experience was “definitely complicated”. She was never afraid for her safety: “These are young Muslim men. They pray every day. They are really trying to be good, good people.” But she had to teach them to cook and clean, and the need in the city was so great that eventually she found herself putting up as many as five migrants at a time.

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The women I talked to had different takeaways from their experience hosting. For Holley, those 18 months were enriching. Reflecting on her relationship with Babacar, Holley says: “I love him; he’s like a son to me.” “I only had one child,” she says, “and it turns out I had room for more.” Holley and her husband have become friendly with Babacar’s large extended family over Zoom, and hope someday to go to Dakar to meet them. She wishes more people were aware of the ongoing opportunities to help. In particular, there is a short supply of Americans willing to be legal guardians to minors.

For Sarah, the experience was a little more difficult. She hosted a Guinean man in his early twenties for eight months after he lost his place in a shelter. She enjoyed hosting, she tells me, and her guest was no trouble, but her teenage daughter wanted her privacy back. Eventually, due to lack of patience from family members, Sarah had to tell the young man it was time to find another place. She still has regrets about asking him to leave. “I’m sure he was confused by it,” she says. He now has documentation allowing him to work, and has two jobs and an apartment with a roommate. He and Sarah still keep in touch. His tax documents came to Sarah’s house, and they recently attended a chili cook-off together.

What strikes me about all these stories is the reordering power of direct personal charity. All of these women, when presented with a crisis, made a choice to do something. They may all share a commitment to social justice, but the larger issues of the kind we debate online, and that Shriver brings to life in her novel, felt much less present in their retellings than the moment of human need, and the innate human desire to respond. All three spoke of the unfolding situation of a particular person, rather than an ideology. Holley’s reasoning — “We had a spare room and he needed a room. It was really just luck” — was typical.

To encounter a human being in a situation of crisis, and to stop to help them, is a rare moment of stepping outside our usual self-centeredness, and it tends to be oddly humbling. And every woman I spoke with seemed humble — not flighty, not silly, not entitled, not like Gloria. They didn’t say so, but they did something that, in the Catholic tradition at least, is a virtue — and is even more virtuous when it isn’t named. An understanding of this virtue is missing in A Better Life. “Charity” of a direct personal kind doesn’t offer a simple answer to the contentious question of what to do about immigration policy — or at least it won’t to everyone — but in practice it equalizes us, and creates common ground. To dwell on it in a real way, acknowledging its concreteness and its challenges, but also its value, would make a better life for migrants and citizens alike.

*Some names have been changed at the subject’s request. 

When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.

It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance. 

To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility. 

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Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.  

Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage. 

In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented. 

Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts. 

No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,  “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.” 

This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.

In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”

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Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.    

In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay. 

The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives. 

The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI PowerPoints, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia. 

As the Trump administration begins to roll out changes to the nation’s nutrition policies, such as Wednesday’s announcement that whole milk will once again be served in schools, understanding Kalayjian’s insights, and the history of the bias against animal fats, becomes more essential than ever. 

Today, Kalayjian is one of the co-founders of Toward Health, a medical programme available in all 50 states that offers holistic, diet-focused health care for weight loss and other conditions, with minimal medications and medical interventions. He now weighs 215 pounds, and like everyone on staff, he says, has lost weight and kept it off by following a combination of techniques that included a high-animal-protein, low-carb diet (meaning, yes, whole milk and yogurt, in addition to red meats, dark-meat chicken and other fatty cuts). Trial results for Toward Health’s weight-loss programme, after one year, he says, are very similar to the results for patients on Ozempic. 

In other words: the old food pyramid was all wrong, and the new guidelines are much better advice for losing or maintaining weight, including the controversial advice around meat, cheese and whole milk.  

Kalayjian is on one side of the intense medical debate surrounding diet and health that lay behind the recent inversion of the food pyramid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services. The establishment side believes that the traditional low-fat, low-calorie diet, pushed upon Americans since the Sixties, is better for weight loss and overall health. This side is supported by much of the medical establishment, and various anti-meat interests, including vegetarians, environmentalists, religious objectors, and the processed-foods and synthetic-meat industries. It’s why schools were, until Wednesday’s reversal, only allowed to serve skim and low-fat dairy products. 

On Kalayjian’s side are the healthy-fat doctors and scientists, whom Kalayjian calls “the metabolic-lifestyle camp”. They claim that the satiating effects of animal fats have a series of positive impacts on weight loss, from making a person feel full sooner to preventing the kind of blood-sugar spikes and crashes that lead to overeating. This camp believes that the other side is “bad science” and that — tragically — “everyone who is overweight is essentially being gaslighted by the medical profession”, as Kalayjian says. 

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By all accounts, the new guidelines are a victory for the metabolic-lifestylers — the directives to avoid processed foods and “eat real food”, and the inversion of the food pyramid to promote full fats and animal proteins, represent a renunciation of the previous high-carb, low-fat advice. This is good news, since most health-conscious Americans — and anyone who has eaten a pint of ice cream for dinner, then been hungry 45 minutes later — have already intuitively felt the perils of the blood-sugar spike. It’s also worth noting that in the era prior to easily available high-carb, low-fat processed foods, people were thinner and much healthier, and they ate their meat and two veg, whole fat dairy and so on, with no problems.  

So how did we get here? 

American fear of saturated fat started in the Sixties, according to Nina Teicholz, a journalist with a doctorate in nutrition science who is a leading authority on the topic. It all began with an enterprising physiologist named Ancel Keys, who put forth the “diet-heart hypothesis”, based on bombshell scientific findings with high intuitive appeal. Keys studied people’s diets and rates of heart diseases in seven countries, with the apparent discovery that people who ate little saturated fat and cholesterol were less likely to die from heart disease. The general public was captivated by the research, Keys became TIME magazine’s Man of the Year for 1961, and the American Heart Association adopted his findings, issuing its first exhortation for Americans to avoid saturated fats and dietary cholesterol.

Teicholz tells the story in her 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. From there, the AHA expanded the mandate in 1970 to suggest that the public cut back not just on saturated fat but all fat, based, Teicholz says, on an idea that was “completely untested”: that this diet could prevent obesity, since fat has nine calories per gram, versus the four calories in protein or carbohydrates. In 1980, when the US Departments of Agriculture and HHS co-issued the first dietary guidelines for the general population, these agencies adopted the entire roster of anti-saturated-fat ideas. The high-carb, low-fat diet jumped from a precaution for the prevention of heart disease to a general guideline for all Americans.

However, Keys’s research, according to Teicholz, was never any good. He cherry-picked his countries, avoiding those like Switzerland and France, where he knew people ate plentiful meat and cheese but still had low rates of heart disease. He also elided complicating factors: for example, he studied the Greek diet on the island of Crete during Lent, when the healthy, heart-disease-free population was eating a meat-free diet — but only temporarily. 

With America’s adoption of this diet has come the obesity epidemic. The government guidelines aren’t the only factors affecting how people eat, but as Teicholz demonstrates in her book, our diet has, in effect, changed nearly in lockstep with government recommendations. The medical establishment and most medical professionals uniformly dispense the government line, which affects people down to the family-practitioner level. And everyone who eats through a government programme, including schoolchildren, the military, and the poor, are getting offerings in compliance with the guidelines. By Teicholz’s estimate, one in four Americans is affected by them directly.  

At the same time, the American population has grown ever “fatter and sicker”, as Kalayjian puts it. According to a 2018 estimate, 88% of American adults have one or more chronic diseases; they are 50% heavier than comparable countries with similar food supplies; and they die four years sooner, on average. The resulting quality-of-life loss is immeasurable. 

The National Institutes of Health has spent billions of dollars over decades testing Keys’s hypothesis, as Teicholz has documented both in her book and in a separate, peer-reviewed academic paper. But the agency has been unable to confirm Keys’s basic tenets. These studies include the $725 million Women’s Health Initiative, the largest clinical trial in the history of nutrition science, whose results, published in 2006, failed to prove that the low-fat diet had any significant benefit for weight maintenance, and also failed to show any benefit for the prevention of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, or cancer of any kind.

On the flip side, as Teicholz has written, more than 200 clinical trials now show that low-carb diets are superior to low-fat diets for weight loss, and can prevent and treat chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, among others, “often within just weeks”. Moreover, dozens of scientists have reviewed the data, published papers, and come to the conclusion that saturated fats have no effect on heart attacks or death. A review of all these papers was included in the HHS release as part of the guidelines.

And yet, the mythology surrounding saturated fat lives on, fuelled by institutional bias among health authorities and aggressive lobbying efforts on the part of processed-food companies.

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A cursory internet search calls up cautions against saturated fat on websites like Medline Plus and Harvard Health. And newspaper headlines in both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, concurrent with the release of the new dietary guidelines, sounded an alarmist note, with the Times trumpeting in a headline that “Kennedy Flips the Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk”, and writing in the ensuing story that the decision was “despite the fact that scientific evidence does not support doing so”. As far as protein goes, the Times writes “most American already get enough”. 

The prejudice is so fierce that HHS itself, has, to some extent, caved in. The new guidelines fail, in an essential point, to stick to the metabolic-lifestylers’ best practices, and to the stated convictions of champions such as RFK Jr, and Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary. While the government graphics suggest that meat and whole-fat dairy should now be the basis of a healthy diet, in the fine print, the percentage of the daily diet that can come from “saturated fat” (i.e., fatty meat and full-fat dairy) remains unchanged at 10%.

Teicholz claims that “a top adviser to Kennedy” told her that removing the saturated-fat cap would have been too controversial, and would have “overshadowed” the “wins” on sugar and grains. Kalayjian says that the overall direction of the new guidelines is “beyond great”, and cautions that there are some legitimate scientific reasons for concern on saturated fat. “I understand why they punted on it,” he says. There is some evidence that merely adding saturated fats to the traditional American diet, without decreasing carbs, can be worse for health. 

“I think it would have been scientifically appropriate,” he adds, “if they said, ‘We don’t know the answer to this, and that’s why we’re going to remove’” the 10% cap. “That would have been the correct scientific approach. I understand why they didn’t do that, but I think it’s more political than scientific.” 

The new guidelines are an enormous step in the right direction, and should be celebrated. Their only flaw is that they don’t go far enough. Americans must end their irrational fear of saturated fats, especially when it comes to treating obesity and related health conditions. 

“Every day of my life, every part of my body hurt, my back hurt, my joints hurt, I was tired all the time,” Kalayjian says, “I had brain fog. I certainly was not at 100% for myself.” 

Whole foods, including whole milk, saved him; that it will now be available to schoolchildren is a welcome change. 

Vogue’s online obituary for the late Brigitte Bardot is a case in point. The magazine long ago abandoned its mission of providing gorgeous inspirational eye-candy for young women who were never going to be able to afford the clothes, in favor of the dreariest woke-ism. So it’s no surprise that the Vogue cultural critic and body-positivity icon Emma Specter has written about Bardot’s politics instead of her style. 

Bardot was a French actress, singer, sexpot, and style icon, whom Vogue could have celebrated for many things — her smoky eye, her blond beehive, her embodiment of French-girl chic, which combined bombshell cleavage with boyish, gamine stripes. I’ve never particularly liked Bardot — she had the cruel face of a small animal, a sclerotic trout-pout, and looked spray-tanned long before it was a thing — but you could learn a lot about scarves from her. The orange skirt, metallic jacket, and black beret she wore in the video for the song “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Serge Gainsbourg, was both playful and timeless, and would look good on the streets of any city today. If you wanted to know what to pair with pumps, or how to rock an off-shoulder corset top, or the scornful angle at which to hold a cigarette, Bardot was your girl. 

Specter, a writer for a major fashion magazine, doesn’t mention any of this. “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her,” the headline on her obit piece reads. Instead, Specter preaches: “It’s our collective responsibility not to let [Bardot’s] legendary beauty and talent obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia.”  She calls the actress the “embodiment of prototypically ‘perfect’ white womanhood,” and asks readers to consider that her fame “relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism.” We expect such claptrap from Jezebel, but from Vogue? 

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The magazine was ratioed online for the piece — meaning it garnered many more negative comments than likes or reposts — as well as for the identity of its author. Specter, who has been profiled on a Substack called “Big Undies,” is morbidly obese, and in 2024, she published a memoir about her eating disorder, titled More, Please: On Food, Fat, Binging, Longing and the Lust for Enough. She recommends dressing flamboyantly and unabashedly “for the body you have” and has a certain in-your-face approach to it: think sheer red-lace dress over giant red undies, or playful, color-block outfits that seem to emphasize what fashion magazines used to call “problem areas.” 

The urge to criticize her for tearing down Bardot is ignoble, but obvious. 

I worked for Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, decades ago, in the era when you had to be thin to even work at Vogue, let alone be photographed for its pages, and I found its militant policing of the beauty standard as noxious as everyone else did. Little did I know I’d want it back, but I do, though not because I agree with Specter’s online critics. What’s annoying about Specter on Bardot, is not the author’s weight, but her joylessness. She’s a humorless writer, offering only the most predictable of insights, such as that Bardot was a Right-winger and favored restricting immigration. 

In another controversy, in 2024, Specter wrote a piece criticizing the author Sally Rooney for not featuring enough (any) fat girls as romantic leads in her novels — a woeful misunderstanding, for a cultural critic, of Rooney’s brilliant mixture of idealized romance and the millennial hyperreal. Fat girls don’t star in Rooney’s novels — but judging by the books’ mega popularity, they read them, and love them, precisely for their preternaturally beautiful, carved-hollow lead characters, and the handsome men and kinky sex they enjoy. Shouldn’t this tell us something? 

Specter as a critic is a contrast to Specter the persona. In photographs, the writer has a sweet face, a winning smile, and a good sense of the color, cut, and flow of clothing — she’s stylish. When she’s putting her large body out there and looking happy, as she often does, she provides legitimate inspiration to any woman who struggles with her weight but still wants pretty clothing and to enjoy her day. Her choices, like a black dress with loopy boob-piping, or a frothy minidress over bike shorts are often whimsical and charming, and even the ones that seem aggressively-in-your-face offer a frisson of power. You don’t like it? Deal with it. The playful, punk-rock elements of her bodily nonconformity are good in themselves. They don’t rewrite the beauty standard, but they’re an escape valve from some of its more crushing demands. If she were my friend, I’d admire her. 

These elements of Specter’s personality are far more interesting, inspirational, and even subversive than her politics. A more honest body positivity might admit that beauty exists, and we all like to look at it, and that asking people to think otherwise is dumb. At the same time, to be beautiful is a chance of fate, and not a moral good. It’s completely possible for Brigitte Bardot to have been an icon of beauty and style, and also a sour little troll. And it’s enjoyable and appropriate for a fashion magazine to celebrate the one without reference to the other.

Vogue, even at its best, was cruel and status-conscious, but it was also once liberating, wildly creative, and a land of dreams, where death-by-perfume-card was a possibility, but at least you’d die in nice clothes. Its embrace of the woke orthodoxy has constrained the escapism without much diminishing the cruelty. And in some ways, the new demand — that we be fat and love ourselves for it — is crueler than the old. 

Emma Specter isn’t a Vogue writer because she’s beautiful; she’s there as a political token for the magazine to display its conformity to the current body-positivity status quo. And the rage against her online isn’t — or shouldn’t be — because she’s fat, but because she’s peddling a kind of untruth about the value of beauty. To stop pretending would be to free her to be appreciated for her good qualities, which are real, and it would allow us to appropriately censure her detractors, too. It would let Vogue return to fantasy-land, where it belongs. 

He was right about the general state of mind of the artist. I, a writer, could attest to that. But Roman Catholicism, the religion of scolds and prudes and patriarchal oppression, seemed unlikely to help anyone. Little did I know that a few weeks later, I would have my own mystical conversion experience and, in 2023, would become a member of Father Paul’s congregation. 

Nor did I realize I would be part of a trend. Catholicism is hip once again, and writers, artists, and intellectuals are converting in droves. One church that draws such an audience, St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, has seen 10-fold growth in conversions in just a few years: more than 100 participants signed up for its catechetical program this year, up from 15 just three years ago. Eighty percent of the congregation’s members are in their 20s and 30s, according to Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican Friar who is a priest at St. Joseph’s. Numbers are similar at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, another Manhattan parish that is, for lack of a better word, cool.  

A new book, Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, by UK-based Irish journalist Melanie McDonagh, addresses a wave of conversions among the artists and intellectuals of the previous century, and incidentally sheds some light on our own time. 

More than half a million people in England and Wales converted to Roman Catholicism between 1910 and 1960, McDonagh reports, including an unusually high concentration of the era’s most influential artists and writers: Aubrey Beardsley, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Anscombe were just a few of the bold-face names. They were going against their country — where the Church of England reigned, and Catholicism was viewed as the superstition of the underclass — and their era, in which religiosity overall was waning. The trend ended abruptly after Vatican II, which, ironically, was the Church’s attempt to modernize and make the religion more accessible and appealing.

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McDonagh’s book is organized chronologically and by artist, starting in the 1890s with Oscar Wilde, who had a lifelong flirtation with Catholicism and converted in 1900 on his death bed. Wilde’s motivations, she says, were similar to those of many of the fin de siècle artists, in terms of being a mixture of mysticism and rebellion. His cohort may have been drawn to religion, but it was also reacting against Victorian elders, who’d embraced science, reason, and a deadening kind of materialism. If it wasn’t Catholicism, it was theosophy à la William Butler Yeats, or the occult.

Catholicism in the early 20th century was also a form of resistance against the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, McDonagh argues. She quotes art historian John Rothenstein’s theory that since the Catholic Church’s primary concern is the salvation of the individual, and since the Church demands the individual take responsibility for his own salvation, Catholicism worked against the “standardizing tendencies inherent in modern society” and offered adherents a kind of autonomy otherwise lacking in their lives. A commune and back-to-the land movement ran alongside the conversion trend, even back then. 

In many ways, Converts gets a slow start with Wilde and his peers. McDonagh is a workmanlike writer, presenting the biographical details without much peering into her subjects’ souls — the matter of greatest interest in a conversion story. We learn that people entered the Church because their friends did, or because they decided it was “the real thing,” or as a matter of reasoned theology. Many were influenced by Cardinal John Henry Newman (now a saint and Doctor of the Church), a former Anglican priest and theologian who first labored to transform the Church of England to be more like Rome, and then abandoned it, at great personal cost, for Rome itself. Newman died in 1890, but his writings led several of McDonagh’s subjects to conclude the truth of Rome’s claim to being the one true Church, the only one that had “continuity with the pre-Reformation Church,” as novelist and Catholic priest Robert Hugh Benson put it. 

Converts renders this profound transformation somewhat bloodlessly — we understand that Newman was instrumental, but don’t quite catch the divine spark. Newman, more than anyone else in the modern era, made the case for a definitive and exclusionary Catholic truth; by rejecting the Church of England, he rejected the Reformation and all of Protestantism. His claim is historical — the Roman church is the only body that can trace an unbroken lineage to the apostles — and metaphysical: there is one truth, not many, and one institution to interpret it. Modern, liberal thinking often attempts to elide the radicalism here, imagining this as just one of many options that “all lead to the same place,” as the cliché goes. But that isn’t how the Catholics see it.

 Even if McDonagh doesn’t quite bring Newman alive, themes emerge after he appears. The converts are looking for this kind of definitive truth. They leave the Church of England because of its Protestant waffling on dogma, or because they’re inspired by a longing for “spiritual order,” as convert and literary critic Maurice Baring said. To acknowledge “reality” was to become free, he wrote. Writer, convert, and Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton explained it thus: “As for the fundamental reasons for a man joining the Catholic Church, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid, objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other is that he seeks liberation from his sins.” 

I joined the Church for neither reason — at least, not explicitly. I knew little of Catholic dogma. However, much of the joy and glory of the past few years has been in watching the world realign along this axis, as I conform my behavior to God’s truth, not my own. I’ve found answers hiding in plain sight to questions I’ve been asking for a lifetime, and it has been liberating. 

Likewise, the stories in the second half of Converts seem to center on Catholicism’s fundamental claims and challenging structure — though, of course, ultimately they center on God. The religion made significant inroads among the English population during World War I. For Catholics, it matters if you have confessed your sins and received absolution before going into battle; the ritual is more than symbolic. Consequently, the Church sent its priests to the front lines to offer such sacramental ministry, while Church of England policy was for clergymen to avoid the fighting. McDonagh quotes Robert Graves’s observation that the enlisted men had “no respect” for stay-behind clerics, who seemed to have little more to offer than a final cigarette. Graves wrote admiringly of a Catholic priest, who “after all the officers had been killed, ‘stripped off his black badges’ and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.” Elsewhere, we read of priests crawling through the rubble during the blitz, to hear confessions and absolve trapped survivors. 

Poet, painter, and engraver David Jones, whom McDonagh describes as “one of the most significant artists of the 20th century,” was first called to the faith during the war, when he had an epiphany after stumbling onto a Catholic mass in the “panorama of desolation” at the front. Jones discovered a reality to the service that he felt had always been missing during the Anglican office. Later, he wrote that artists had to be Catholic, and that “even if the Catholic religion weren’t true, you’d have to, [as an artist] become one … because the whole notion of art … is frightfully like the doctrine of transubstantiation.” A work of art, he believed, fundamentally was two things: an impression of a thing, and a thing itself. Just as the mass wasn’t a mere symbol or memorial of the sacrifice of Christ, but a portal renewing the real thing.  

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The acerbic novelist Evelyn Waugh believed the religion was equally essential for artists, but understood it differently. If an artist didn’t understand the relationship between God and man, the work would be a failure, Waugh thought. In his view, Henry James was the last of the great writers. And modern, secular novelists, he wrote, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character — that of being God’s creatures with a defined purpose.” If the artist didn’t understand the true grounds of man’s existence, Waugh believed the characters could only be “pure abstractions,” a stakeless and boring task for literature.

It’s not a bad theory of what’s happened to books in our increasingly secular age, though a great Catholic novel revival has yet to accompany the 2020s wave of conversions. To understand the trend today, many of the ideas in McDonagh’s book are useful. As at the fin de siècle, we live in a science-ruled, rational, materialist time, one which often seems to have little to offer the deeper human longings. Techno-feudalism is even more oppressive to our individuality than industrialization was. And of course, in a time of ultimate permissiveness, a devout and restrictive religion is a tiny bit contrarian and rebellious. 

Father Teller floated other reasons for the conversion trend to be happening now. “Gen Z is lonely,” he said, noting that the cohort came of age during the pandemic. “And they’re looking to be told who they are, and who cares for them.” He speaks frequently to young artists, musicians, and intellectuals seeking to convert, though they’re not the majority of his flock. Another reason for the appeal, he adds, is that “all the institutions are breaking apart, but the institution of institutions, the Church, remains.” 

A newly traditionalist bent in some parishes (and notably, the popular ones) — less Vatican II, more Latin and “bells and smells” — may also be playing a role. The final chapter of Converts is a sad one, as McDonagh details what the changes of the 1960s wrought upon many of her subjects. She’s careful to disclaim that many people may have liked the new mass and the more accessible format, but those drawn to the Church by authority and tradition did not. The collapse in conversion numbers is not conclusively because of Vatican II, but after it, collapse they did: to 6,046 new adult converts in England and Wales in 1970, down from more than 15,000 a decade earlier In both 2021 and 2022, the number was under 2,000. Still, McDonagh writes, there has been a modest increase lately, and “the story continues.” More artists and communicators should only amplify the trend. 

Pie is one of America’s most glorious traditions, and one of the few dishes that’s oddly untranslatable to other cultures, as any American who has watched early pie episodes of The Great British Bake-off knows. Every culture has pies, but American pies are a specific thing, requiring a sweet, deep-dish filling usually of fresh fruit, angled sides, and a flaky pastry crust (crumbs or crushed cookies are a distant second). Pies can have some variety: they can be open-faced, or have a lid or a lattice or a pile of whipped cream on top. And their crusts and garnishes offer endless opportunities for decorative flourish. Still, there are rules: if you aren’t making it in an American pie dish, it’s a tart.  

My aunt, now in her 80s, still makes six pies every year for our family Thanksgiving: pumpkin, apple (two of them), pecan, chocolate and banana-cream. Her fillings are simple; her Crisco crusts are perfectly fluted; and we need nothing more.  

This is not to say that all innovation is bad. I’ve gone early-American, with a vinegar pie topped with whipped cream and sugared cranberries, inspired by the spread of pies at the country fair in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy (recipe found in The Little House Cookbook). And I’ve gone bougie-American, making a cranberry pie with pecan-crumble topping, from the website Smitten Kitchen. These offerings suit my palate for acid and unusual flavors. My relatives have been … polite. 

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But if you’re going to innovate, your innovation should be beautiful, well-executed, and have a good flavor profile. The Food & Wine pies, in this regard, are suspect. 

But does anyone really want a cranberry-lime-curd pie, with a crumb crust made from rye flour, complicated by a topping of blackberries, pomegranate arils and large strips of lime zest? That is too much going on, and cranberries and eggs together sound yuck. 

The peanut-butter chess pie drizzled with chocolate sauce gives the impression of appealing Americana, but only on first glance. Like so many early desserts, the chess pie was a response to scarcity, and is basically just a bland, sweetened custard that went out of style for a reason. Peanut butter might punch it up, or it might not — usually, these pies get a flavor spike from acid, either lemon or vinegar. And peanut butter and chocolate together are fine, but no one is going to be excited about the combination as pie. 

Lastly, there’s the sweet potato pie with cocoa crust and a flambéed meringue piping. My aunt skips this classic Thanksgiving offering for the sensible reason that sweet potato pie just isn’t a crowd-pleaser. The chef-upgraded magazine version might look a little better, but sweet potato and chocolate aren’t a natural pairing (unlike pumpkin and chocolate); Food & Wine’s piped meringue layer and blowtorching are 1950s-retro in execution; and the topping is a lot of work just in order to add one extremely sweet, low-flavor element (meringue) atop another (sweet potato). The Food & Wine pie also has a random scattering of pecans on top, and requires chocolate-pearl topping that many people will have to mail-order. 

These are pies that only an editor could love. They sound original, they fit a story-concept, and it doesn’t matter what the cooking or eating is like. And it’s not just Food & Wine. Bon Appétit’s recommended Thanksgiving desserts are scarcely better. The magazine suggests cake instead of pie: marbled chocolate-pumpkin, pecan, and white-chocolate cranberry. Again, these desserts sound original, look nice in photos, and fit a story-premise, but they’re just not likely to find a wide audience on a Thanksgiving table. Here kids, have a slice of pecan cake. No? How about the chocolate-pumpkin bundt? 

It wasn’t always like this. The early aughts saw an explosion of cool food culture — Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in the year 2000; the website Eater launched as a New York City restaurant guide in 2005. The formerly stodgy, high-end food publications transformed around the same time. Editor Dana Cowin took over at Food & Wine in 1995. Adam Rapoport remade Bon Appétit for bros and young people in 2011. This was an era in which both titles had great ideas and great aesthetics. Their recipes were often aspirational, but in the best sense: these were dishes ambitious home cooks would want to try, and would enjoy serving to friends once they’d done so. 

Such content has mostly moved online now, onto platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. And in some respects, the decline of the food magazines is just part of the greater death of the legacy print media. Yet food is also one of the few remaining semi-success stories in print. While so many titles have folded, reduced publication schedules, or gone online-only, both Bon Appétit and Food & Wine are still with us as monthlies. The creature-comfort of flipping through a tangible artifact displaying photos of food is not easily digitized. Nor is it a small thing to cook from a computer — which requires clean, dry hands and no splatters. I still prefer a piece of paper torn from a magazine when I have a choice. 

Food magazines should have an advantage, then, so why aren’t they better? 

It’s not just Thanksgiving; I often flip through my monthly subscriptions and find not a single dish I’d want to cook. One answer is ideological. Like most other spheres of culture conferring status on coastal elites, food went super-woke during peak woke, and is only slowly recovering. Rapoport, the visionary Bon Appétit editor, was canceled and forced to resign in 2020. Parent company Condé Nast replaced him with a black editor with no experience in the food space. (She lasted a year, and was succeeded by Jamila Robison.) Time Inc., the owner of Food & Wine in 2017, replaced the legendary Cowin with Hunter Lewis, a white man presumably intended to compete with Rapoport. Lewis has been carefully virtue-signaling ever since. 

The need for a display of the correct ideology in these magazines’ pages has resulted in many specific sins and one overarching one — a lack of focus on what used to be the core mission: promoting beautiful food the reader is drooling to cook. 

The de-rigueur level of “diverse” content isn’t really a problem in itself — Americans these days have diverse palates — but it becomes homogenized and unappetizing in context. On one page of November Food & Wine, we have “Hong Kong”-style French toast; on the next, cemitas, a “Pueblan-style” sandwich.

I like both French toast and sandwiches, but Hong Kong for breakfast and Latin for lunch seems a little much. And really, if I want authentic Asian or Latin recipes, I won’t get them from Food & Wine. Also, aren’t these cultures and foodways supposed to be meaningfully different? The magazine’s Thanksgiving package offers stuffed butternut squash with curry-coconut rice, tandoori roast turkey, sweet p otatoes with maple chili crisp, and porchetta with “cheesy chard-and-leek” stuffing. If Asian, Indian, Southern-American and Italian can all sit on the same table, how diverse can they really be? 

There’s also the other kind of ideology, which holds that fresh, local, seasonal, organic food is better for our health and for the planet. The Food & Wine “chef-upgrade” story on Thanksgiving pie offers adaptations of recipes by chef Camille Cogswell, of Walnut Family Bakery in North Carolina. Cogswell “constantly pulls ingredients from the farmers and artisans around her.” She’s most likely legitimately making a small-scale, artisanal product.

But can the magazine’s readers do the same? Fresh, seasonal, farmer’s-market ingredients are great, and Food & Wine is for the type of reader who can afford them. But such ingredients are  also, by definition, hard to scale. The recipe suggests chocolate pearls from Michaels to garnish the sweet-potato pie, and tops the cranberry-lime one with blackberries, which are out of season. These are dishes muddled in flavor and concept, of a piece with the braindead diversity mission. 

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Cogswell’s pie is seen above on the left; the Food & Wine slice is on the right. The bakery version isn’t necessarily practical for the home cook to execute. It has cute stamping on the crust; the chef has done something loose and updated with her meringue piping; and someone hand-made those chocolate pearls. The other slice looks (and probably tastes) conservative in comparison.  

Conservative — mainstream, though the high-end version — is what food magazines have always done well. They should get back to it, and give the readers what they really want, too: an apple pie for Thanksgiving.

Their reception depends as much on the author’s clout as on her talent, thus Flat Earth has been widely, and not too negatively, reviewed. The novel’s world of art parties and trust-fund “crust-punks” is the familiar one of the overeducated, underemployed New York that centers on the Dimes Square neighborhood, where status comes from artistic success, and everyone is seeking it. And the blood that drips off the protagonist’s finger every time she swipes her shattered phone-screen is an apt metaphor for the internet’s effect on mental health. But if this is the novel that will “soon be in the hands of cool girls everywhere,” per the headline of a recent review — pity the cool girls. 

Flat Earth is interesting, if at all, as a display of the toxic id of the clout economy, and it is the clearest example yet of a disturbing trend by young women writers toward grabbing eyeballs through porn-coded sexual self-degradation. 

The novel tells the story of a young woman on the downtown scene, Avery, who is jealous of her best friend, the more beautiful and successful Frances — a situation presented without self-interrogation or critique. Avery tells us she would “follow [Frances] anywhere,” yet her main value for Frances seems to be because through her, Avery has met some cooler, richer friends. Avery is also obsessed with being “15 pounds fatter” and less talented than Frances. Might Frances prefer to be viewed as a human being, and not for her weight or social connections? The book doesn’t ask. Avery also takes every opportunity to snipe at Frances — she’s privileged and inauthentic; her art is opportunistic — without narrative awareness that this is shitty behavior, and worse than any friend-crimes we see Frances commit.   

The petty non-drama shares several points of biographical similarity with the author’s life. Levy became a fixture on the downtown lit circuit after co-founding the niche lit-mag Forever with best friend Madeline Cash. Flat Earth, Levy’s first novel, is published by small-press Catapult; Cash’s second novel will be out this January from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, perhaps the most prestigious imprint in America. In the book, Frances makes a successful film, then leaves Avery behind to turn trad-wife; in real life, Cash has departed from the editorial team at Forever. 

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Whatever the truth of the two women’s relationship, the biographical overlap at least marginally gestures at a simulation of truthfulness and self-exposure for the purposes of fiction. This character, Levy suggests, is showing us nothing more than the ugly reality. Avery is “ostensibly in graduate school” for media studies, but actually doing sex work to pay the bills. Her own mother calls her “hypersexual and materialistic.”  

She worries constantly about aging, wants everything she sees advertised, thinks of herself in terms of market value, and casually declares herself self-involved. The author’s choice of forgoing likability in a female protagonist, which can sometimes be interesting, feels merely oblivious. Naturally, Avery is the only character with any reality on the page, and everyone else is a prop, which seems less like a narrative choice than a narrative failing. 

Avery is supposed to be writing “cultural reports” for her degree, but she’s also not very productive, and the reports litter the book as interstitial chapters of lazy trends and flotsam from the online news — she reports on economic conspiracies, art-world scandals, seed oils, and 3-D printed guns. Attempts to be satirical or playful with cliché fall flat. In one, a “popular digital artist” forms a “conceptual online pedophile ring” — for the most trite example of a risqué project one could come up with. In another, the currency “spends like Monopoly money.” The “girls” put it up their noses and the “men spend it at the racetrack,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. 

This reaches its apex in the character’s sexual relationships. The story starts during the Adderall shortage of 2022, when Avery is dating “the first man to be sufficiently violent with me.” After he carves his initials on her chest, she moves on to a married law professor at her university, who is “decrepit and unkind” and misses her signals that she would like to be “choked but not killed” during sex. Which, naturally, she doesn’t really enjoy, instead lying there staring at that old chestnut, the “stains on the ceiling.” Next comes a sculptor, who is “more successful at infantilizing me” than the law professor, though he is younger. Avery tells us that her breasts sag, she sleeps with her stuffed animals, and at one point she blacks out and then takes a bunch of pictures of her bloody face for social media. 

The author seems to intend a social critique in all this. Levy’s cultural referents are red-pilled: she makes random references to marriage, fertility, childbearing, and Catholicism, with little distinction made between maybe someone will marry me and I like to be choked. This could be a vicious critique of patriarchy and red-pilling, but Avery participates so willingly, it doesn’t seem like one. Taking feminism seriously is as off-trend as the climate protesters Frances turns her camera away from in an early scene. Instead, the family values float by interchangeably with the rest of the memes, neither better nor worse for women than what came before. If forming a relationship or becoming a mother might deepen Avery’s humanity is not seriously considered. Levy’s real target seems to be the degrading on-screen world which flattens this, and all other human potential.

Fair enough, but is it literature? That the internet and online pornography are bad is extremely well known. Real life lies behind the cut, whether Avery can see it or not: the friends betrayed; the lovers unseen; the homes wrecked; the mother and grandmother worried. Complex, human, novel-worthy topics lie here, even in our toxic age, and if Levy were able to acknowledge them, it would make a better book. 

There’s also the issue of complicity. When discussing her mentor, an older writer named Sally, Avery observes that “lots of girls felt close to Sally’s writing because she had written about degrading sexual experiences with eroticism and intelligence, which is all anyone really wants from a book.” If that’s all anyone wants from a book, Levy has attempted to supply it, too often minus the eroticism and intelligence. She’s right that the pulse of sexual degradation is inherently interesting, and that Flat Earth’s most engaging quality is the spectacle of violent sex and Avery’s self-directed misogyny. Levy isn’t alone in mining this. A good deal of the enjoyment of Kemp’s Paradise Logic was its zany embrace of similar porn tropes — the female protagonist as cum-dump, hilarious! 

In an attention economy, this makes sense. What do literary it-girls crave and need, beyond attention, achieved by any means necessary? In one of Flat Earth’s funniest moments, Avery observes that “I didn’t understand why men were always talking to me about Mary Gaitskill,” whose work she claims not to like. Gaitskill is our preeminent poet of women’s sexual degradation, and writes brilliant, unflinching, and uncomfortably erotic explorations of sexual damage. Naturally, Avery, who is busy damaging herself and learning nothing from it, wouldn’t like her work. 

The moment is craven and insightful, yet disappointing. In a society in which feminism has triumphed by every measure, and most meaningful barriers to women’s professional and economic achievement have been dismantled, this is still where we are, now more than ever? The male “downtown-scene” novel tends toward grandiose claims of rewriting the canon, and at least makes the attempt at big, epic books addressing politics and history, with accompanying stylistic and structural innovation. We have yet to see one of these books really succeed, and in some ways the ego-fantasy is parallel, yet the men are men, not it-boys, and whatever they’re doing, it’s the opposite of degrading themselves. In 2025, for women writers, isn’t the full porn-world route something of an own-goal?

The bizarre truth of it is that women and men are worse off in their relations than ever. And thus the pain, ugliness, and confusion on display in this book are, at least, signifiers of the complex and real. We need novels — by women — that explore these issues instead of merely attention-seeking and regurgitating the internet. 

The young Republicans aren’t alone. A subsequent Politico story exposed racial animus in chat by Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel (Ingrassia has since withdrawn). On the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, a Left-populist Democrat and former Marine running for the Senate in Maine, has been exposed for having an SS tattoo on his chest, and making obnoxious comments on Reddit a decade ago (blacks “don’t tip,” rural whites are racist and stupid).

We can and should take this stuff less seriously. 

Yes, the suggestion is horrifying to the olds — which includes you, Millennial readers. But we don’t live in the Civil Rights Era, or the Jim Crow South, or even within their recent memory, whose traumas and reconstructions created the language regime most of us are used to. America has a legacy of slavery and segregation, but America’s racial demographics and multi-ethnic makeup have also been explosively evolving. Zoomers and Alphas are growing up in a world that’s unrecognizable from the one in which our sensibilities were formed.  

First, the obvious: The young Republicans are edgelording and joking. Common sense employed by anyone who has ever been in a group chat knows that this is deliberately provocative anti-woke signaling. Chats make dumb jokes; every person among us could be condemned if the contents of their phone were made public by a hostile media outlet. We’ve had too many scandals and cancellations in which normal human behavior — and humor — have been taken out of context and made to look terrible to continue like this, tempting as it is to declare some things inexcusable.

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It’s unfortunate that the repressive language policing and obsessive hammering on race of the past 15 years have given rise to this problem, but here we are. I have personally seen this play out in city schools, to distressing effect for a person raised on liberal codes of speech. The progressive Brooklyn private school that my two children attended (they now go to public school) taught anti-racism and social justice, and focused every year anew on slavery and black history. The result of its well-meaning efforts was to create a hysterical focus on naughty race talk among the school’s little-boy population, and to resurrect antique slurs like “monkey” and “watermelon eater” for blacks and “rice-eater” for Asians. By middle-school standards, the number of slurs found in the 2,900 pages of chat documentation turned over to Politico — a mere 251 — is very low.  

On the surface, this might seem less forgivable in adults, but a closer look at the dynamic complicates the picture. Our private school had little class diversity but was highly racially diverse, and my son and the children around him played basketball on city playgrounds, took fashion cues from the young black guys who worked in the deli next door, and hung out with racially diverse kids from all over the city. While they were being subjected to a relentless narrative of racial animus and remedial propriety at school, the culture all around them was giving different messages. 

For one thing, there wasn’t actually much meaningful difference — or racism — between the white kids, on one hand, and a “waysian” (mixed-race white-Asian) private-school kid, or the half-black son of scientists, on the other. All hailed from similar class backgrounds. How does a kid account for that, given that it’s utterly forbidden to say so? You surely can’t ask questions in the designated forum of class discussion. As for the legendary N-word: At school, the word was grounds for expulsion; yet on the street and in the culture the kids consumed and admired, it was an honorific.

This confusing state of affairs led to a situation where the N-word became every day’s biggest entertainment and hottest sensation for a certain type of little boy — the good kind, I’d posit, who thinks for himself and whose masculinity hasn’t been completely crushed by the Nurse Ratched types who lord over much of his life. They talked about who used it, who didn’t, who whispered it to himself in the bathroom, if the “r” was hard or soft, and so on. 

They wrote it on their scientific calculators by using numbers and letters and turning the calculator upside down. They “tricked” each other into saying it. (Wondering how anyone would do that? Say “Monica” three times fast.) The black kids declared white friends “honorary N-words,” and “gave passes” to use the word, or in some cases sold the passes for things like a haul of Halloween candy. I’ve heard of nearly Talmudic debate on what the protocol is for using your pass. (Only with the person who gave the pass? In the hearing of another black person?)

I mentioned this state of affairs once to a school administrator, who looked utterly crestfallen and said, Well, then nothing we’re doing is working. But he was wrong. The little boys really did take the words seriously — a mis-deployed N-word is a firebomb of transgression. In the absence of sensible adult guidance on the matter, however, they were taking a complicated, divisive, and scary topic and working it out among themselves, inter-racially and un-fragilely — with roasting and insults, passes and upside-down calculators.

Much of this is the insult-and-razzing culture of boys and men. It is a traditional method of blowing off steam, navigating tension, and building mutual tolerance. And even in its current racially offensive formation, it represents a vastly more diverse and tolerant world than the polite, supposedly race-blind one I grew up in.

There were issues, however. The school prosecuted speech crimes because it had to — as we all feel we have to, even in situations where the speaker is probably or definitely joking and no one has been “harmed.” I felt this undermined the kids’ respect for authority, and confused them about what might actually be hurtful or offensive. It also created an economy for tattling on others’ speech violations by way of prosecuting social grievances, which was vigorously taken up — almost universally by girls.  

The analog to the current adult world is pretty sound. The woke Leftist definition of racism has far outstripped the social realities, and our silent-majority fed-up-ness with the state of affairs has played a large part in the rise of Trump. In America, racism doesn’t exist structurally, as any fair reading of our distributive systems will conclude. It doesn’t exist unconsciously, as we’ve seen with the debunking of the great “unconscious-bias” studies. And though it is often defined as such, it rarely exists openly, overtly, or in a self-identified fashion. How many people are really white nationalists, versus guys who say they’re not a racist but feel threatened by immigration? Bad, maybe, but dogwhistle-bad, and people are tired of having their speech decoded by others and turned against them. 

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In many senses, generations of race-sensitive education have won. The responses to Ingrassia’s offensive comments — which included the use of an Italian N-word slur — are telling: his Republican peers censured him. The story on the Republican chats bleeps out the words used (at least, it appears to be doing so; it doesn’t explicitly say so, leaving open the possibility that the transgressive Republicans themselves were writing “n—guh”) but it’s worth noting that even in this bastion of edgelords, we’ve got obedient soft r’s. Platner, meanwhile, says he got the tattoo one evening while drunk in the Marines, had no idea of its SS affiliation, and plans to remove it. Fellow Marines have found this credible. 

And yet, we do have problems. Our school, for example, despite its commitment to anti-racism, told a very different racial story in its demographics than it did in its classrooms. Despite the careful, boutique diversity among students, teachers, and administrators, the service personnel were overwhelmingly black and brown, and from the lower economic classes. Such “members of our community” — the bus drivers, the bus monitors, the recess monitors, the guards, the weekend guards, the women who work for the cafeteria service, the cleaners — were mostly lower-paid contract workers employed by outside organizations, who came and went. What, really, does this teach the kids? 

One year as a parent coordinator in charge of collecting money for holiday teacher-and-staff gifts, I tried to include everyone who worked at the school. This quickly became difficult. Our school didn’t employ the lower-level workers directly; in some cases, the outside contracting agencies, when contacted, didn’t seem to know or care whom they’d sent to us. And then the more people were included, the smaller the slices of parent-giving pie became. Suddenly our inclusive rhetoric changed to pious suggestions that we really should be offering larger gifts “for our teachers.” The next year, the initiative was dropped. 

Generations of race-sensitive education have done absolutely nothing to change the second-class treatment of less-paid workers. And credible cases have been made, most notably by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi in his brilliant book, We Have Never Been Woke, published last year, that accusations of “racism” are more of a cudgel for in-group status warfare, than they are a route to equality. Woke Leftist rhetoric, in al-Gharbi’s telling, is little more than the shameless scramble of elites to cloak themselves in virtue while pursuing personal wealth and power, a process that allows them to fool themselves about the economic circumstances of the mostly black and brown people whose underpaid labor they’re benefiting from, one DoorDash order at at time.

So it’s no surprise that some conservative figures, now in power, are picking up the cudgel and using it: firing staffers for chats, rescinding jobs, and hand-wringing in op-eds. What better way to secure our in-group status than to declare our worth in the same old lingua franca of the elite? What better way to dispatch our enemies than to make these popular, incendiary, and high-traffic allegations? Peter Giunta, a now-disgraced figure who was formerly the chair of the New York State Young Republicans organization, claims that his chats were released as part of a “coordinated character assassination” by a fellow Republican. All the dirt on Platner was dug up by opposition research. This is corrupt, and it’s time to end it. 

Many Americans of the populist, Trumpian bent identify much more with the economically disadvantaged contract worker than they do with the virtue-pushing elites. They understand that all the politically correct language in the world is meaningless when it’s papering over the ugly divide between the private-school parents and the people who drive their kids’ buses. In the rowdy online forums, and among ordinary people confronting street-level conflicts between blacks and whites, people are working it out for themselves, or trying to. If we don’t like each other, why? If someone is to blame for our misfortune, who? If this kind of speech makes elites uncomfortable, that just might mean it’s working. 

To “allow” this kind of speech, of course, raises the specter of a world where we haven’t taken into account the American legacy of slavery, or where open racial hatred is encouraged. This is legitimately alarming and extremely undesirable. However, by not allowing it in the current heavy-handed and distorted fashion, we are draining education and the media of their moral authority, shutting off healthy avenues of negotiation, and empowering legitimately unsavory figures like Ingrassia. The only thing scarier than realizing — to put it in middle-school parlance — that much so-called forbidden speech “is not that deep,” is not realizing it. 

In 2022, Barrett (Shalit is her maiden name) sued The Atlantic for defamation and breach of contract. This summer, the parties settled the suit, to the tune of more than $1 million. (Some of the counts were dismissed.) Nonetheless, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports” remains retracted on The Atlantic’s website, available only in the oddly purgatorial form of a PDF, and an edited version of the original editor’s note that accompanied the retraction remains, and still represents the magazine’s core claims against the writer.

For a freelancer to sue a billionaire-owned prestige outlet and receive a decisive settlement is an unusual occurrence, and seems to suggest missteps on the part of The Atlantic. The publication prides itself on having the highest journalistic standards. Its current website displays a marketing banner touting “Accountability. Transparency. Independence.”  If The Atlantic’s claims against Barrett were so transparent and accountable, why did it settle? And if they weren’t, why did the publication make them in the first place?

At no point has The Atlantic disavowed the basic premise of Barrett’s story: high-level participation in niche sports, once a promising strategy to land a spot at an elite college, has become an arms-race among wealthy families, with diminishing results. Instead, the conflict has centered on a welter of supposed factual errors suggested by Erik Wemple, then The Washington Post’s media critic, in a series of columns about the piece. The publication has also questioned the accuracy of Barrett’s representation of “Sloane,” a Connecticut sports mom who participated in the story on the condition that she and her college-hopeful children would not be identifiable. Concerned that the publication was not honoring its commitments, Sloane misled The Atlantic’s fact-checkers in the 11th hour, and entirely withdrew her cooperation with the magazine post-publication. 

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On one side is the narrative presented by The Atlantic in current and past versions of the editor’s note that accompanied the story’s retraction, and in an internal memo to staff from editor Don Peck. In this telling, The Atlantic fell victim to a serial plagiarist and journalistic untouchable, and only realized this thanks to Wemple, who is now a media reporter for The New York Times.

On the other side is Barrett, who contends that “my niche-sports article was published in October of 2020, at the zenith of America’s great racial reckoning and at the height of social justice-infused callout campaigns,” as she told me. During this time period, elite liberal publications such as The Atlantic were highly sensitive to protecting themselves from allegations of racial wrong-think. This, according to Barrett, “created a perfect opening for The Washington Post — a publication that is unique among major journalistic outlets in allowing its pages to be used to settle scores and malign those who have hurt the newspaper — to attack me.” Wemple, reached via telephone, called this idea “preposterous.”

Nonetheless, at the time he penned a series of critical stories on a single magazine article, questioning the facts in Barrett’s story, doing re-reporting of his own, and assailing her credibility, repeating claims that she had in the past “embellished quotes and exaggerated details,” “stretched quotes and embroidered details,” and “mishandled quotes and story points.” Barrett denies all such allegations, calling them “pure innuendo and insinuation” and “made-up nonsense.” 

Barrett is known to many as a notorious media figure of the Nineties, when her meteoric career fresh out of college as writer for The New Republic and other prestige venues was marred by a plagiarism scandal. She was shown to have lifted minor, boilerplate-type sentences from other writers’ work in four brief instances. She was also an enfant terrible of sorts in the Washington of the period, and a frequent target of media-gossip columnists. Her work did draw many allegations of factual inaccuracies. These often, however, seem to be of a vague or misleading type when you really look into them. Defenders — among them, Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic’s literary editor in those years — have represented much of the controversy as a natural result of a journalist doing hard-hitting reporting.

Detractors, not least David Carr, the legendary media critic, have called Barrett “tremendously self-involved,” “not particularly self aware,” and “a one-woman journalistic disaster area.” (To be fair, she was notoriously disorganized, overcommitted, and late with her deadlines.) Carr has been posthumously canonized, but during his time as the editor of the Washington City Paper in the Nineties (where Wemple also worked), he kept up a steady stream of extremely nasty Barrett-bashing via a regular feature he called “That Darn Ruth.” Some of Carr’s commentary, such as calling Barrett “a kinder-genius, complete with frilly socks” and remarking on the color of her lipstick, seem to bear out her remarks to me that part of her negative reception was due to misogyny.

On the telephone, Barrett is an overwhelmingly voluble conversationalist, and seems to have been driven at least a little crazy, a la Bleak House or Kafka, by defending the details of her case. She provided me with hundreds of pages of documents, including her complaint, a memorandum opinion and order from the federal trial court, an “omnibus write-up” on the case, a summary of the omnibus writeup in case I didn’t want to read its 51 pages, PDFs of relevant articles, screenshots of text messages with editors, and more. These documents presented a compelling counter-narrative to the one put forth by The Atlantic.

The Atlantic editor’s note currently attached to Barrett’s retracted story on the magazine’s website begins: “After The Atlantic published this article, new information emerged that raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett. We have decided to retract this article. We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety.” 

The note goes on to explain that Barrett was complicit in a deception perpetrated by Sloane, regarding the number of children she had, which Sloane included as a masking detail. And it reports “several” additional errors: a thigh injury should have been described as a “skin rupture” rather than “a deep gash”; a lacrosse family was erroneously said to live in Greenwich, Conn., when in truth they lived in another town in Fairfield County; and some private backyard hockey rinks characterized as “Olympic-size” were “large, but not Olympic-size.”

The note also mentions incidents in “1994 and 1995 in which plagiarism and inaccuracies were found in Ms. Barrett’s reporting,” and explains that “we decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades had separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.”

In previous versions of the note, The Atlantic claimed that Barrett “left The New Republic” in 1999 “after plagiarism and inaccurate reporting were discovered in her work.” Both the previous and current versions of the note mention that the story ran under the byline Ruth S. Barrett, asserting that the magazine “should have included” the name that she used in her byline in the Nineties, strongly implying that the Ruth S. Barrett byline was an attempt by Barrett to conceal her identity.

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Barrett, in her complaint against the magazine, contended that she overlooked the deception of the magazine’s fact-checkers by the source, Sloane, in order to honor her agreement to keep her source confidential, and that her behavior was justified, given the magazine’s failure to honor its commitment to sufficiently mask the source’s identity. The court did not deny the truth of this claim, but dismissed the count regarding it.

However, the court accepted the statements of fact behind several other counts: the magazine originally misrepresented the circumstances of Barrett’s departure from The New Republic in 1999; and the author has never sought to conceal her identity via her byline. Barrett explained in her complaint that she’d written under the name Ruth Shalit Barrett or Ruth S. Barrett since her marriage in 2004. She also provided me with the receipts to prove that she added the “S.” to The Atlantic’s proposed byline of “Ruth Barrett” to render herself more identifiable. 

The court agreed with the plaintiff that The Atlantic’s statements could have been “capable of defamatory meaning,” and that “a reasonable reader could infer two negative narratives, both of which ‘imply unstated defamatory facts’: first, that Ms. Barrett sought to conceal her identity and distance herself from her work in the 1990s; second, that her history was sufficiently unsavory to warrant her doing this,” according to an opinion of the trial court allowing some of her claims to go forward before a settlement put an end to the matter.

The Atlantic settled just before Barrett’s lawsuit reached the discovery phase — that is, just before its editors would have had to start turning over their emails. In public statements it has presented the incident as a result of the magazine’s high-mindedness and high standards. 

To momentarily pierce the veil of bullshit: the factual inaccuracies revealed in the magazine’s correction are extremely minor, could easily have been corrected in an online version of the piece, and do not seem to justify a major retraction. Such things are pretty common, even in exhaustively fact-checked stories at premium outlets like The Atlantic, and are not usually the occasion of high-profile defenestrations.

The deception of the fact-checkers is a blacklisting-level offense, possibly, depending on the writer’s clout and the publication, but again, it and the other minor alleged errors don’t quite seem to warrant the total demolition of Barrett’s reputation carried out by the editor’s note and retraction. Nor does it account for the publication’s other acts of apparent bad faith. For just one example — there are many — The Atlantic editor’s note even today mentions allegations by Sloane’s attorney that Barrett made additional mistakes in her story.

In a letter presented to The Atlantic’s attorneys by Barrett’s attorneys, portions of which were made available to me, Barrett claims to have conclusively demonstrated to the publication that these allegations were unfounded. She provided The Atlantic with documentation on two details questioned by Sloane’s attorney: the existence of a beach house and a makeshift basement fencing strip; and she had receipts that editor Don Peck had received the evidence. So why is a transparent and accountable publication still mentioning these allegations in its editor’s note, except to make Barrett look bad?

The editor’s note’s declaration that “we cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety” suggests an answer. A magazine article is, by definition, a quantifiable event, whose veracity is not a mystical quality, but in fact can be determined through the well-established practices of sourcing and fact-checking. The Atlantic fact-checked Barrett’s story before publication, and then again, by its own account, did so forensically, afterward. Despite Wemple’s exhaustive spit-balling and The Atlantic’s very best efforts, the only “errors” it has exposed are of a flimsy and irrelevant nature: a “skin eruption” rather than a “gash,” whatever that means, the square-footage of a hockey rink, and so on.

The writer’s “trustworthiness and credibility,” however, is a different matter. These qualities depend not on her work, but on public perception. The magazine’s suggestion is that Barrett’s history and reputation — exceedingly well known before the article was published — disqualified her from inclusion in its pages. However, it might be more fruitful to look instead at the particular conditions of 2020.

Wemple wrote multiple stories for The Washington Post about Barrett’s piece at the time of its publication. The first, entitled “Ruth Shalit Just Wrote for The Atlantic, Would Readers Know it From the Byline?,” appeared on Oct. 24, 2020, and appears to be the origin of the byline scandal. Wemple’s story also made reference to a legendary and controversial 13,000-word feature Barrett (then Shalit) wrote for The New Republic in 1995 that was critical of racial diversity initiatives in The Washington Post’s newsroom.

Barrett’s 1995 story was a tour de force, and made many well-sourced points on the divisive nature of diversity initiatives, the negative consequences of choosing applicants by race rather than by merit, and the irritating and demoralizing banalities of diversity training. The writer was 24 years old when the piece appeared, and her wunderkind-reporter status was obviously deserved. She reached the prescient conclusion that when newsrooms make the promotion of social justice a priority, they hamper the production of news and fundamentally distort its contents.

In the 1995 essay, Barrett acknowledged the Post’s troubled racial history — an all-white newsroom, protests over racist coverage — but quoted multiple staffers anonymously and one on the record with concerns that its commitment to establishing proportional representation was diluting the talent in the newsroom. Given the size of the candidate pools, she demonstrated, proportional representation with top talent was “flamboyantly unrealistic” and she confirmed this with quotations from a memo by the paper’s own recruitment expert. Moreover, these measures weren’t making anyone happy. Both white and black staff members were now complaining of discrimination. 

This is not to say that the purity police came for Barrett in 2020 as retribution for a 1995 story. However, one might suspect that she was both denounced and purged for racial wrong-think  — which is to say, purged because it was possible, and it was a fun thing to do at the time, and made the purgers feel more secure about their own jobs. The mere mention of a story like “Race in the Newsroom,” in Wemple’s column would not have been lost on editors at The Atlantic in 2020. Wemple responds that it is “simply not true” that racial politics in 2020 had anything to do with his reporting on Barrett. “I do my work the same regardless of what decade it is,” he said. 

In a Nov. 2 follow-up story for the Post, Wemple mentioned an anonymous staffer at the magazine who “raised concerns” in a meeting about the “racial implications” of a passage of Barrett’s story on teen sports, and who “pointed to a connection between that language and the mentality suffusing the author’s long-ago investigation of the Post.” A little more digging reveals a story in The New York Times in 1995, quoting a black reporter from The Washington Post as saying, “the article was the most racist piece of so-called journalism I have read in modern times.” What magazine, in post-George Floyd 2020, would have felt safe platforming Barrett?

 Bottom line: the core of Barrett’s story on niche sports was beyond reproach — and in fact her findings were validated in 2023 by a group of economists at Harvard. And her 1995 reporting was a textbook example of a lost form of hard-hitting investigative reporting. It’s The Atlantic’s failure that it published a true story only to retract it. 

It’s disappointing to see The Atlantic violate its own standards and the standards of journalism to distance itself from Barrett. The original editor’s note appears to have been written not to present a fair portrait, or even the correct facts about Barrett’s history, but in order to align with the publication’s politically motivated and cancel-culture-safe inner truth. The current version of the note does the same thing in even more disjointed fashion. Anna Bross, senior vice president of communications for The Atlantic, commented via email that “the story remains retracted and that will not change.”

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This kind of activist journalism is poor journalism, and is exactly what Barrett’s article in The New Republic predicted would happen as the profession moved to prioritize “diversity” as a social-justice cause. Muddled prose, exaggerated smears, and the weaponization of fact-checking are the tools of the trade, and present a desired truth, instead of the real one.

Barrett has been a victim of this since the beginning. For just one example, “Race in the Newsroom” has been widely reported to contain errors. And it did. Barrett lists four in one of her documents. But the errors are also widely mischaracterized.

In the most serious, she wrote that a city contractor named Roy Littlejohn “served time” on graft charges during the notoriously corrupt reign of DC Mayor Marion Berry. Wemple mentioned this in 2020, writing that “Littlejohn wasn’t even charged with such an offense.” Carr did the same in 1999, noting that “nothing of the sort happened.” Actually, something close to it did happen: Littlejohn was the target of an undercover probe for corruption. Barrett — a 24-year-old reporter, working on a 13,000 word piece, on deadline, made a regrettable error. But suggesting that “nothing of the sort happened,” without more, wasn’t quite right, either.

“The Post’s response to ‘Race in the Newsroom’ was the dawn of fact-checking as a pretext for discourse policing,” Barrett wrote to me in a text. “Rather than address the substantive critique I was making, WaPo sent legions of fact-checkers after me to assert that the piece was riddled with staggering errors. [Their] claim that my article was rife with errors was itself false. But this was the view that congealed and took hold.”

Barrett, an investigative reporter of great capacities, left Washington in 1999, after smear-level media association of her with an unrelated journalism scandal (that of fabulist Stephen Glass, also an employee of The New Republic) made her position untenable. In 2020, she was writing about sports moms — and even this wasn’t allowed. Her silencing has been a loss to the profession, and has been a forerunner of the wider silencing of discourse we see today in the legacy media. Only the bad reporters and craven insinuators are left, and they remain un-fact-checked.

Two new books, Having it All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, by Corinne Low, and The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, by Leah Libresco Sargeant, attempt to offer solutions. Both represent a kind of progress from second- and third-wave feminisms, in that they acknowledge that women are essentially different from men and face different challenges. Both express that the attempt to make us “equal” has been male-normed, which has erased the most significant aspect of our biology — childbearing and childbirth — and has underrated the burden of care-work that falls mostly upon women.

It still feels risky, even after the vibe shift, to say that the potential to bear a child is somehow essential to a woman’s experience, both because good feminists traditionally deny it in order to promote a woman’s right not to bear children, and because of the new issues raised by transgender parents. Low, a Millennial steeped in progressive values, semi-apologizes for being grounded in biology, offering the disclaimer that because her book “deals with data and thus averages, it will at times be cis and heteronormative”. Sargeant, a Catholic writer, celebrates biological reality, beginning her treatise with the observation that “women, more than men, are physically marked by relationships of care”.

These are opposing approaches to the female predicament, and they take women in different directions. Low is an economist, and she sets out to demonstrate with the tools of her trade that, first of all, women aren’t imagining the seriousness of the work-childcare conundrum. By every metric, we are still doing most of the domestic labor, at the same time as we’re being asked to put high “human-capital investments” (education, time, effort) into careers — and it simply isn’t possible. “I not only felt as though I didn’t have it all,” Low writes of early-motherhood. “I felt like I didn’t have anything.” 

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Women also, she argues, bear other gendered burdens, such as discrimination and sexual harassment. The way out, she thinks, would be a world in which men did their share of the work and women faced no such structural barriers. Before this utopia arrives, she urges that women understand the personal economics of our choices, and then play hardball: “I am going to challenge you to rethink the parts of your life where you’re not getting the deals you deserve, and navigate to better ones.”

Low’s synthesis of the research on family life and decision-making regarding marriage and care-work of all kinds is genuinely fascinating. Affluent women entered the workforce, economists have found, not only because of cultural and technological factors like feminism, abortion, and the Pill, but because unilateral divorce laws made staying home to raise kids suddenly a much worse deal: if the job was no longer for life, you might be left with nothing. Women measurably responded to such incentives, research shows. Reform of divorce laws began in the Sixties, and between 1955 and 1985, women’s participation in the labor force increased from 35% to 55%, with married women’s participation doubling. 

Low has done original research to back up the economic-incentive theory, discovering that among controlled, otherwise similar couples who either own or rent homes, the home-owners are more likely to enact traditional gender roles, with the man working and earning more, and the woman specializing in the domestic. The home provides the woman with collateral in case something goes wrong, Low speculates, thus lowering the decision-cost of staying home. 

Once Low moves into the prescriptive, her argument falters. She believes that women can use the principles of economics to maximize a personal “profit” or “utility” function by making different decisions, and uses her personal story, threaded throughout the book, as an example. Low played hardball by divorcing an unhelpful husband and moving with their child to a more affordable city, closer to her work, and now she’s much happier. Caring and love, she explains, are two ways that women get “bad deals”. She’s careful to say that these choices might be right for some people, but she argues they’re primitive desires, based on evolutionary conditioning to carry forward our genes. We’re supposed to decide if they’re what we really value, or not, and then act accordingly. 

Low writes that she tells young women who find it painful to return to work while still breast-feeding that “millions of years of evolutionary selection infused in their DNA in every cell of their body” is fighting their decision so their feelings make sense. But, she says, “gently, I would add that it’s okay to … accept our feelings and then go to work anyway”.

This is neither a solution to the age-old conundrum, nor having it all; it’s merely allowing women to choose a side. And it seems to elide the very problem the author promises to address: we don’t want to choose. What Low is really offering is the same old self-actualization rhetoric, dressed up with economics and psuedo-science. Feelings don’t come from DNA. Low may have overridden hers in the pursuit of self-optimization, but this is hardly recommended. Her young son’s geographical distance from his father doesn’t seem to factor in her profit-maximization calculus. Nor does she mention how her decision affected the child from her husband’s first marriage, for whom she was the primary caregiver. (Incidentally, she left men behind entirely, too, switching to dating women, who make much better partners, utility-wise.) Is this really what happiness looks like? 

Sargeant takes the opposite position. In an atmospheric and discursive book, she explores the possibilities of the female body: its comparative weakness; its unpredictability and changeability via menstruation and reproduction; its fuzzy boundaries through gestation and the shedding of maternal cells into the bodies of her children. The modern world perceives such vulnerability, connectedness, and variation as anomalous, a departure from a standard of how things should be. But this is a misconception, Sargeant counters: they’re not just the female norm, but the human one. 

Increasingly, our society is not set up for human beings, she writes. We have embraced a machine age and machine standards, and are required to be more and more like machines ourselves. The optimized work of the Amazon employee, the maternal-leave policies that rip lactating women from their babies, the jobs that reach into our off-hours and even into our sleep with constant connectivity — these realities make no allowance for human bodies or human frailty. Bureaucracies of health care and state benefits limit the ways we can care for each other. And we do our part, embracing materialist individualism and autonomy as the highest goals.   

Such points are made in a suggestive, loosely laced style. In the multiple sections of the chapter “The Lie of the Lonely Individual,” we first read about a man who is ashamed to ask his community for help during a weather emergency. Next, a contrarian-feminist argues that abortion rights degrade women’s full humanity, because we’re considered to need this form of severing to be full citizens. Then comes a passage on the way children upend and complicate life, and a brief meditation on the value of servitude to wash-and-repeat domestic tasks such as chopping broccoli. Autonomy, Sargeant thinks, is a fiction. The fuzzy argument doesn’t quite prove anything, but rings true nonetheless.

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Instead, the book calls us “not to accommodate dependence as a brute, unpleasant fact, but to knit dependence deeply into our understanding of what it means to be a human being”. Rather than throwing off ties of love and care as an unfair burden on women, we should view them as “the foundation for the authentic self”. It’s our vulnerabilities that allow us to “extend ourselves in love and receive love in return”.

The two feminists present mirror-image futures to strive for. In Low’s vision, women must achieve true equality along male-coded lines, which seems possible only by erasing gender for both sexes and denying the facts of human biology (child-work will never be gender-neutral). In Sargeant’s, we should go female-coded and build a more humane future — but it won’t be getting women out of care-work any time soon, and might in fact demand a greater embrace of it. (Her chapter on how men fit into the dependency matrix is one of her best.) 

To decide which is the better path, we might look at the two writers’ conceptions of fulfillment. In Low’s paradigm, what we’re looking for is a maximized “potential joy in life” that’s something like “your personal video game score at the end of your life”. We’re supposed to judge this by the criterion of personal happiness (always difficult to define), and to be making decisions that maximize this future score. She gives us opaque instructions such as: “try to get clear on separating what you truly want and value from the predetermined, socially reinforced ideas of what we’re supposed to want.” 

In Sergeant’s vision, fulfillment comes from self-sacrifice and involves chopping a lot of broccoli, which sounds more realistic. Both agree that society as it is currently set up has a problem. The persistence of the female conundrum over time suggests that in this respect, they’re both right. 

The Times got around to mentioning Westman’s gender identity only halfway through the story, carefully framed by the information that “conservative activists” on social media would use the data to portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. Other mainstream liberal news outlets have treated the issue in a similar manner. A BBC News story described the shooting as an “anti-Catholic hate crime” and avoided pronouns altogether.

Westman killed two children and injured 14 more children and three adults, who were attending an opening-of-school Mass at at Annunciation Catholic School, where his mother until recently worked. Like all such shooters, he became contested terrain in the culture wars the minute he opened fire. The most obvious battleground is his transgenderism. Mainstream outlets like the Times, operating for the defense, have elected to suppress the trans angle. Minneapolis’s progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, chose to get out in front, speaking out at a news conference against transgender hate and in favor of gun control. The Right-of-center New York Post, meanwhile, took what the gender activists no doubt saw as a gleeful opportunity for trans-bashing, with the headline “Minneapolis school shooter confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself.’”

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Without avoiding the shooter’s trans-ness or blaming it, however, we might instead acknowledge that the transgender mass shooter is uniquely telling of the mass-shooting phenomenon, and of our times. The Westman crime happens in the same month as an excellent article by Sam Kriss in The Point magazine. It locates March 30, 1981, as the moment “John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 ‘Devastator’ round into the chest of the president of the United States.”

Kriss argues that Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the first such event to divorce the target from the goal. In 1981, Americans responded to an act of public violence by worrying about “things that used to matter,” such as who was in charge of the country, and if the shooting was a Russia-designed first stage of a nuclear attack. But the real story was elsewhere, in proto-incel Hinckley’s frustrated masculinity and desire for self-expression. Hinckley wasn’t political (and Westman, with his confused jumble of signifiers, isn’t political in any meaningful sense either). The cultural shorthand is that Hinckley, inspired by Taxi Driver, shot Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, who starred in the Scorsese film. But Kriss contends that this merely conceals the seismic event of a young man discovering “the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.”

Mass shootings allow the perpetrator to achieve the ultimate modern currency of selfhood — celebrity. “If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media,” Kriss writes, “you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.”

It’s true, but celebrity is fracturing these days, and Westman’s actions may be less about achieving fame and more about simply achieving something — a concrete, visible and indubitable accomplishment in a world in which young men are increasingly at sea. The action must happen on camera to exist, that’s a given, but it’s no longer about the camera, it’s about imposing and expressing himself, about making himself, finally, matter. This is not to say that the victims of the crime don’t matter in the real scale of things. Of course, they do. But they didn’t matter to Westman.

There’s nothing more male than a mass shooter. Demographically, they are overwhelmingly white, disenfranchised, isolated, young, angry, too online, caught up in paranoias and fringe causes, living with Mom and Dad, have failed to launch, are total losers. The Kriss piece refers to Hinckley as “Mr. Toxic Shock,” allegedly because this was the nickname Foster and her roommates at Yale gave him (he was so unfuckable that you’d go into toxic shock if you tried it). Westman fits perfectly, and the “mystery” of his motivations is no mystery at all. Attempts to attach him to the Left or the Right, a Trump-hater or a Satanist, are irrelevant. It’s perhaps slightly less irrelevant that he worked for a cannabis dispensary and had claimed on social media that the weed was driving him insane. “I cannot control myself, and have been destroying my body through vaping and other means,” he wrote in a journal page circulating on social media.

Nonetheless, the motivation is the condition itself: a man experiencing the complete failure of masculinity. Westman does not represent all trans people any more than mass shooters represent all men, but a transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man. In this quintessentially gendered crime, “she” as a perpetrator was inevitable.

So what should we do about the pronouns? Noah Rothman of National Review posted on X that since “honorifics” are withheld from convicted criminals, “denying attempted mass child murderers their preferred pronouns should be similarly observed.” From one viewpoint, the suggestion is an erosion of trans rights and Rothman is just being an evil conservative. Then again, excluding men like Westman — who are experiencing, fundamentally a crisis of masculinity — from the ranks of women, trans or otherwise, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

The choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction in the YA category for study in school isn’t rare. It plagued both of my kids throughout their private middle school educations. And it’s shutting down debate and turning kids away from authentic learning.

When my daughter started at a different New York City public school three years ago, the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives. This book manipulatively told kids that their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. Later that year, she was tasked with making serious exegesis on the differences between the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and a rejoinder by woke fantasy writer N.K. Jemsin. As if a dystopia designed to prove a particular point provides meaningful evidence on human societies. This summer, an informal polling of my son’s group chat found one teen assigned a different Shusterman book by his school, and everyone else independently reading classics and books for actual adults (David Copperfield, The Devil in the White City, Dracula, the last with the notation “highly recommend to y’all it’s quite disturbing though”).

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In an era of rapidly declining literacy and the decimation of education by artificial intelligence, schools that assign terrible YA literature are hastening the end of reading and critical thought. This isn’t just because of the obvious identity politics behind the choice of such books, though works like Punching the Air, from my son’s list, is stunningly anti-white for a book taught in a city public school. Even worse are the low quality and trite ideas, which actively repel kids from real learning.

To unpack these books a little: Shusterman’s Unwind, the best of the bunch, takes on the abortion issue. It’s set in a dystopian America, after a “second civil war,” called the Heartland War, in which Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces have battled it out until reaching a terrible compromise: Abortion is illegal, but parents have the option to “unwind” their children when they reach their teens. What follows is a Hunger Games-ish adventure in which Connor, a young man whose parents have decided to unwind him, tries to escape his gruesome fate.

The book is fairly readable — Shusterman is a proficient mass market fiction writer — and might appear to offer some grist for intellectual discussion. One can imagine a classroom debate on the similarities and differences between ending a child’s life at 13 versus ending it in utero. But this is lazy, simplistic, and not fit for a classroom. We don’t kill and dismember our own children at 13; a world in which we did would be monstrous and unrecognizable. So how useful is the comparison, really, in shedding any light on the issues at play in the abortion debate? The book employs the same technique that’s currently degrading the public discourse, in which egregious analogies are used to win moral arguments. Ideally, kids in school would learn to not think this way.

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Shusterman may be intending to stir up controversy, but a pro-life message is not really his intention, either — if it were, the book likely wouldn’t be taught. His ultimate point is to suggest that both sides of the abortion issue are deranged, and that no one really knows the right or wrong of it. It’s an appropriately feel-good answer for a work of popular fiction but offensively bland and incurious for academia. A school would ideally have the history of human thought, scientific debate, and moral and religious philosophy to draw upon in addressing the complexities of abortion. Instead, they’re teaching kids that it doesn’t really matter and there’s nothing to learn here, using a clumsy analogy from a fantasy world as evidence.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is less ambitious — so unambitious, in fact, that Asian representation seems to be the only possible reason for its choice as a school book. This is a novel in the Harry Potter model, in which Genie, an ordinary overachieving Asian high schooler in the Bay Area, discovers that she is the reincarnation of Ruyi Jingu Bang, a demon-fighting entity from Chinese mythology. The demon-fighting plot is tedious, the love interest cliché (“He had the cheekbones and sharp jawline of a pop star…”), and to the extent that there’s a larger message, it’s about Genie’s personal development — she has to live up to her enormous powers, and accept the fact that even being a superhero might not get her into Harvard.

The book is boring and badly written, has no aesthetic value, and could easily give children tasked with it the impression that they don’t like to read. Its fantasy world also engages in a relentless, charmless flattening of human history and human experience, with deities whipping out cell phones and banter along the lines of “You died and then came back to life, get with the program.” Resurrection, Chinese gods, ho hum. How about introducing kids to some of the Chinese source material for these legends, or any of China’s wondrous and strange classics instead?

And then there’s Punching the Air, another deeply manipulative book lent moral authority through its affiliation with Yusef Salaam’s story. In it, a sweet, innocent, mother-loving black art student named Amal is falsely accused of beating a white teenager into a coma, and then is convicted and sent to juvenile prison. The free-verse construction allows it to be atmospheric and vague about the details — such as who actually beat up the white kid — yet rich in implication. Amal is an “old soul,” doomed before he was born by his skin color, and traveling a “Pipeline” (one of the poem names) from slave ship to prison. “White Space” and “Blind Justice” (two more poem names) are to blame. The level of the analysis of these incidents can be demonstrated by a representative poem: “All because/ we were in the wrong place/ we were in the wrong skins,” contrasting with “All because/ they were in the right place/ they were in the right skins.” And so on. The book ends with Amal meeting a prison abolitionist and hoping to be exonerated.

It’s difficult to determine whom the book wrongs more — black kids, being presented with this bleakly deterministic future, or their white peers, the monolithic enemy. It surely fails to represent the lively and interactive race climate in Gotham schools, in which blackness and black culture are the arbiters of cool, and it’s downright ludicrous to imagine a group of affluent white kids kicking a group of black kids off a playground, as is the case during the book’s inciting incident. It also freely traffics in the glamorization of prison life that’s popular with young readers of all races. Amal makes beats in prison — of course he does. The school should interrogate the mythology of the prison-to-rap-star pipeline, not promote it.

The real victim, however, is academic rigor. These books’ arguments are lazy, and they present sacred cows that kids know they can’t argue about anyway. There is nothing in them to inspire children or draw them into the world of reading. Most students assigned them will ChatGPT the summary instead — and honestly, they won’t be missing anything.

I was right, and the recent Tulsi Gabbard document release suggests the same. I knew I was right, because elite Moscow power circles are fairly small, and back then, we were in them. My then-husband (we are now divorced) worked for a Russian oligarch; his father was a Russian ambassador. No Russian officials were sharing state secrets with us, but we thought a Trump–Moscow relationship was the kind of thing you’d pick up from silences, or too many denials, or the puzzle pieces of some previously unexplained corruption suddenly falling into place. Russians are not loose-lipped, but one can read the tea leaves. Instead, there was nothing. And to Russian eyes, the details as they emerged were more nothing — paper trails littered with suspicious Cyrillic e-mail addresses, as if that proved anything, shady and powerless people being played up as Kremlin insiders.

We thought that our friends would believe us and be grateful for the information — foolishly, as it turned out. Instead, as a binational couple with a foothold in both worlds, we watched our lives, and our faith in Americans and their institutions, fall apart as the relationship between our two countries did. This has been a tragedy. I lived in Moscow briefly in 1998 and again with my husband from 2003 to 2006, and I remember the heady, early days, when Americans and Russians were exotic and intriguing to each other, business relationships were being developed instead of severed, and, on the Russian side, there was at least a skeptical hope for good political relations.

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What’s gone wrong has not been Russian imperialism, but the American kind, characterised by a stunning rejection of fact and assumption of innocence. Events today, including those in Ukraine, are based on a stealth American chauvinism that flowered during Russiagate. I know, because I experienced it firsthand, over my own dinner table, as my liberal friends, sometimes trembling with rage, Russiasplained its government to us.

This might seem like a narrow thing, a matter of our personal social lives, but it was eerie and stunning to live through the sea change. We remembered that six months earlier, these same people had been generally friendly and culturally tolerant about Russia, despite its many problems, but no one else did. We saw the extremist frame lock into place: Russia murders journalists, or it annexed Crimea, or it’s not a democracy, or it’s anti-gay, and those things are Very Bad and must be opposed by the good Americans. It was time for a reckoning.

We felt helpless, and to some extent, I still do. Some of those things are bad, and Russians know it better than anyone. But some are much more complicated. And American persecution produces Russian defensiveness, and has the frustrating, contrary effect of strengthening Vladimir Putin and blocking paths to necessary organic change within Russia. I saw this in my own life. In the new climate, my husband and I occasionally found ourselves defending Putin, which was new for us. A family photo that included the Russian president which hung on our living-room wall became a battleground with our friends, several of whom told us to take it down. Its original intent had been somewhat ironic, yet we refused, and we felt violated, too. Our Russia was a troubled place, but it was still ours, and not for Americans to dispose of.

The simplicity and ignorance of the frame came to seem like a crime in its own right, and a betrayal of American liberal values. Such thinking — “Russia is bad, and we must oppose it with all our might” — denies a country’s right to set its own values and to have its own imperfect governance. It’s a form of American cultural imperialism; it creates an enemy; it’s stupid and belligerent foreign policy; and it’s richly hypocritical. Americans, after all, invade other countries and manipulate elections themselves. We discovered to our surprise that liberal Americans think they’re critical of their government, but beneath the surface, they’re convinced they’re the good guys, even when they’re harming their own cause and have no idea what they’re talking about. There was delicious irony in being lectured about freedom of the press by people being deranged by fake news.

My Russian husband and I separated in 2020 and divorced in 2024. This was determined mostly by our personal issues. But his experience of being besieged and harassed as a Russian, both personally and professionally, didn’t help. Despite our differences, my now-ex is a smart, savvy businessman with enormous personal honor and unusual skill at translating between the Russian and American business climates. He had much to offer this country, as did his employer, who was sanctioned in 2018 on the abstract grounds of “participating in the Russian energy sector”, and who departed New York, pulling the financing for the US businesses he funded along with him.

These people were the future of relations between our two countries. They were valuable, and they and others were destroyed by a dirty campaign trick and the paroxysms of self-righteous public rage that followed it. Barack Obama’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was measured, taking the mixed populations and military assets, as well as Russia’s legitimate interest in the peninsula into account. Yet in December 2016, he rushed through a package of punitive sanctions, threw out diplomats, and seized property on the grounds of the alleged collusion.

And Trump in his first term was noticeably “tough on Russia”, perhaps through inclination, but one suspects it was also an expedient choice to battle the collusion narrative. He hardened and extended sanctions and rapidly escalated hostile, anti-Russian militarisation in Europe, including providing Poland with Patriot anti-missile systems, and supplying Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles — for use against Russians.

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Current events in Ukraine are more of the same. It has always been obvious that too much Western armament, or Nato membership for Ukraine, would lead to war with Russia, with potentially catastrophic potential for expansion. Russia, at least, has said so clearly. Washington under both Joe Biden and Trump nonetheless pushed these agendas, with the kind of liberal voices who might once have called for moderation fallen silent. On the eve of full-scale invasion, Biden failed to reassure Russia on the Nato question, an enormously provocative act, though naturally supported by the anti-Russian American public.

The results are destroyed cities, more than a million dead, untold economic suffering in Europe, growing hostilities with China and India, and a vastly increased risk of nuclear catastrophe. For what, beyond Americans’ self-righteous belief in a fight for freedom and democracy, based on an enmity they only half-understand? Is this really so right and wonderful, given the current consequences for Ukrainians and the potential consequences for us all?

For me, the outbreak of war in 2022 was Russiagate all over again, including the shockingly distorted coverage in the major media. There’s a creepy thing that happens when people call me “just to check in” or “say hi” or on some pretext, but what they really want to do is discuss Russian politics. They don’t know it’s obvious, but I do, because the phone has been ringing all morning. And there’s no chance they’re going to listen to me, despite that I’ve spent more time in private spaces listening to high-level Russians fume about American provocation in Ukraine than any of them ever will. The blindness concerning our own rectitude is astonishing, especially coming from people who are highly critical of their government in other contexts.

In 2022, the people around me believed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”, and that it could be explained only by Putin’s actual insanity. But it’s not insane at all. Putin seeks an independent Russia, one among several players in a multipolar world, for which he needs the power of strategic military deterrence against Uncle Sam. The people waving their Ukraine flags may believe they’re for “peace”, but they’re actually supporting the reckless expansion of American power and war. The enmity comes from us, and we don’t even realise it.

Jordan watched porn “almost daily” as a teen and in his 20s, and overlaid porn scenarios onto all his sexual experiences. When he finally quit, he noticed that he “had more energy and ambition, significantly less social anxiety; I felt more tenderly toward my now-wife; I wasn’t as tired in the morning; my thinking was clearer.” Castro noticed during the quitting process that his impulses to view porn occurred not when he was “horny,” but when he was “bored or stressed.”

This, and the statistics on teenage porn use — the average American boy is exposed at age 13 — are enough to horrify any parent and to produce the strong conviction that something should be done. “It’s becoming a bigger topic,” says Gail Dines, the CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization of scholars addressing the harms of pornography to youth. “This has become a public-health issue.”

Today, the something being tried is age-verification laws, enacted by 20 states, though most have been blocked by legal challenges until recently. In June, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas law, one of the nation’s most aggressive, meaning these laws will likely eventually take effect. Utah Sen. Mike Lee has also proposed national legislation along the same lines. Our strong convictions, however, might be our downfall in terms of preventing kids from watching porn, and the parent who really wants something done would do well to pause and think it through.

Legally, the debate on age verification has centered around the First Amendment. The latest decision, Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton, held that the government’s interest in protecting children from porn outweighs adults’ rights for unfettered access to this form of speech. The decision lowered previous standards of scrutiny because, as time has shown, alternatives to age-verification, such as content-filtering software, haven’t worked. None of this is wrong, per se, but it’s a narrow approach by definition. Judges respond to existing law; lawmakers respond to constituent demand; neither group is necessarily thinking globally about the whole picture.

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Since being galvanized by Castro’s post, I have been exploring the available parental-control options to protect my teenage son from pornography, and I’ve been struck by the disconnect between the solutions and basic realism regarding human behavior.

There are two flavors of child-protection: one involves greater surveillance than the other. In the first model, the parent can enable “family sharing,” which allows them to personally monitor their child’s devices, or they can use an app, which monitors the devices for them using AI. (All of my research has been done on Apple devices.) This requires a parent to be comfortable with total child surveillance — I am not — and to have a proactive, tech-savvy personality.

The less-intensive approach is to set up blacklisting on adult content, either on your home router or on your child’s devices. The router option is fairly secure, but it only catches devices on the home WiFi, and requires a high degree of confidence with technology (starting with knowing which box is the router). The option on the device itself is an easier setup but is inconvenient to manage and not very secure. I, for example, locked my son’s laptop using an admin account, and then had to unlock it every time he needed to do daily things like downloading a math app, which always occurred when I was cooking dinner. Then I lost the password and my enraged son went online and figured out how to delete the admin account.

None of these methods is designed for a wide range of people to easily use them. To be clear: all children should be protected from pornography, not just those who live in states with age-verification laws, or those who have tech-savvy parents. One problem is that most of the solutions, in the fine tradition of vapid safety-ism, are designed to do much more than combat porn. Years ago, my brief experiment with setting up a child account on Apple for my daughter ended when it prevented her from using Instagram or watching YouTube. These may be commendable goals, but they bundle a necessity that almost everyone agrees on — no porn for kids — with more ambiguous cases. Each additional restriction is a new hassle, and a new incentive for the parent to just give up.

The numbers speak to the successfulness of this approach — or the lack thereof. Apple doesn’t release information on how many users opt for family sharing, but one suspects because it’s low. A May 2025 study from the Family Online Safety Institute found that parental control adoption “remains low,” at less than 50 percent, and is inconsistent across devices, with higher adoption on the tablets. And online-safety apps cover a negligible share of children. Bark, one of the more popular, has only 7.5 million users, mostly in the US.

Given all this, government-mandated age-verification might seem like the solution to concerned parents. Louisiana state Rep. Laurie Schlegel, the champion of the first such law in the country, told me that, like me, she first became interested in the topic after hearing personal testimony from a young person negatively impacted by porn — in her case a 2021 appearance by Billie Eilish on the Howard Stern Show. Eilish told Stern that she started watching porn at age eleven, which gave her nightmares and had damaging effects on her later sex life.

Schlegel had been observing her state’s usage of LA Wallet, a digital-ID app, and suspected that Louisiana had the capacity to anonymously implement age verification. “The technology is very much available where you can protect someone’s privacy,” Schlegel says. “All [LA Wallet] does is send a signal to the website. It’s not your ID. It just says Hey, this user is over 18.” Louisiana’s law, like the Lone Star State’s, relies for enforcement on the government’s ability to sue companies not in compliance.

But this, too, fails to take realistic human usage into account. The rub, as opponents have pointed out, is that most people just after searching “anal,” “gang bang,” or whatever, really don’t want to provide their identification, even if it’s supposedly anonymous and secure. Comparisons such as those to age verification for online gambling fall flat. Paid porn users already provide their credit-card information, but paid users are an unknown and smaller percentage of total users. Some paid content is also à la carte, meaning the users have been drawn in by free content and then convinced to upgrade while their defenses are down.

PornHub has argued that age requirements will result in users navigating to other sites that the law hasn’t yet caught up with. This is self-interested but also plausible: between ravenous user demand and porn-supplier self-interest, the laws could easily provide powerful incentives for the already shady porn market to move away from porn supplied by large, centralized, easy-to-sue companies into less policeable structures and jurisdictions. It would be nice to think these laws will work, but we’re guessing.

The reply of the frightened parent is: who cares, let’s try it. But if the laws break up the big, easily accessible aggregators, we’ve set ourselves back another generation of children addicted to porn while we figure that out. And we’ve also lost the potentially potent blacklisting tool, which works as well as it does because the companies are well-known and stable. As I look at my family’s situation, I see porn not as a shadowy globe-spanning operation that should be conquered lawsuit by lawsuit, but as a problem that enters our home on specific devices, each one from a massive company with enormous technological capabilities and no realistic ability to disband and become fly-by-night. Our lawmakers should make them responsible.

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I’ve programmed my home router, which is rented from Spectrum, to use OpenDNS, an IP solution that blocks traffic to blacklisted adult sites. OpenDNS is one of many services that can block a high percentage of porn sites (estimates run up to 98%), which is already a huge improvement, especially since it gets the big ones kids are more likely to know. One imagines that with more resources thrown behind it, the black list could be even more comprehensive. (OpenDNS is owned by Cisco, which did not reply to my requests for comment.)

So why can’t the option of a porn-locked router be offered at the point of sale? Many parents might choose this if they had the easy option. And it’s much less onerous for the adult porn-user to just choose an adult-content router in the first place, rather than supplying an ID every time they want to watch adult content. Routers can also be programmed to porn-block some devices in the home and not others, so the adults can flourish, while the children are safe. Custom-programming your own router is too much for the average person, but it could easily be done by the ISP’s tech support, either on the phone or at installation — if companies were required to offer this service by law.

Our computers, phones and game consoles could also, I suspect, come with adult-content blocking, to be enabled or not at the point of purchase. An AI-fueled app like Bark costs $14 a month, which to some extent reflects the computing cost of incessantly scanning for adult content but could probably cost less if it were being powered by Apple. (Bark does much more than this, which is fatal mission creep to my purposes, but this is the fine print.) Apple and similar firms could create a widget like Bark, opted into or out of at point of sale. Or Apple could invent something better if it were legally incentivized to do so, and if its engineers were reined in from stupid bells and whistles. In addition, all internet browsers could be legally required to come locked (via the existing and powerful blacklist technology), with ID verification required to unlock them.

It’s unconscionable that the tech companies themselves haven’t already taken the lead on this. Our wealthiest and most powerful companies pump unrestricted access to hardcore porn to our children, scot-free. A conspiracy-minded person might suspect that the tech companies want it this way, because the rumors about technology uptake being mostly fueled by porn consumption are true, and they want to addict us young. A less apocalyptic theory is simply that the bros designing this stuff don’t really have their hearts in it and have no sense of the average, tech-phobic American family experience.

Blacklisting isn’t perfect, and a clever child could probably get around many of these features. But that’s why limiting them to pornography is so essential, giving clever children no reason to do so unless they’re truly determined to navigate to actual porn sites. Don’t block popular video games. Leave Instagram and TikTok alone. Don’t pointlessly require parental approval for the math app. Don’t make life so inconvenient for the porn users that they find new and unregulated delivery methods. And save little Jordan Castro.

The book, which has echoes of American Psycho, is the story of Doughty, a young, handsome, blond blueblood from Darien, Connecticut, who is also a shallow, self-involved sadist, rapist and psychopath. As a child, Doughty fries ants. As a high-schooler he puts cigarettes out on his buddies and passes around Beata, a lower-middle-class girl he’s pretending to date. In college, it’s more of the same until he drops out and moves to New York, increasingly in the grip of alcohol and drugs and ready to victimize women full-time. He pretends to be a real estate agent while insinuating himself into the lives of various women including Beata (now also in NYC, tending bar) and Sophia, a middle-aged publishing executive with a Soho loft. The time period is the late Nineties, though this feels cosmetic; the book’s concerns are contemporary. What could seem more clever in today’s culture than satirizing the very worst, privileged white man on earth?

The premise gleams with made-for-Netflix glamour, but the execution is flawed from the start by Bomer’s ideology, which forces her to be in deadly earnest, and makes Doughty into a walking cliché. “Originally I wanted him to be the devil,” Bomer told Megan Nolan in an interview published this week. “The actual devil, evil incarnate.” As Nolan explains the book, Doughty “represents the male intrusion on female life” and is “the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches.” To these didactic ends Doughty reveres his father and his lineage, believes he has natural advantages over other people, looks down on the poor, and admires his own penis a lot. He is prone to wooden statements about his awesomeness. The book’s humor is supposed to come from the fact that he’s so self-important and dim, he doesn’t realize it’s all a chimera. His mother is an alcoholic (the fault of the horrible men in her life); his father is broke; he himself has none of the intelligence or superior skill he thinks he does. But for this to be funny, there would have to be some pathos or some charm in it, which the underlying ideology could never allow.

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Bomer has also gone astray in choosing to write in a close third-person point of view — the story is told in Doughty’s voice, which could be funny when the reader sees what he’s not seeing. Such a choice works well with sympathetic characters, or those with a compelling personality. But since Doughty is required to be a walking cliché, this can only result in a flood of dull prose. “He liked winning. He loathed losing,” Bomer writes. He’s a caveman grunting out the simple sentences, get it? Or, here’s another ungainly passage: “His father, who often exclaimed ‘I’m the king of the castle!’ when bossing his mother around. He had given Doughty so much… He knew authority mattered more than anything.” Bomer has fallen for the mimetic fallacy, making her prose ugly and dumb to suit the character, and it’s a slog to read.

She also seems to be unaware that satire works by skewering pieties, and that the only pieties on display here are those of her class and station. There is nothing satirical about doubling down on the evil of privileged white men in 2025; it’s the status quo perspective. Nor is the information outside the frame — surprise, the female characters are rich in virtue and humanity! — any more interesting. In this flawed work, the satire rebounds, unintentionally, on the book itself. The Stalker’s true innovation is to present what happens to women when they start seeing men as completely evil. And this makes for some ugly and chilling reading.

Bomer isn’t interested in men or masculinity, Doughty is a cardboard cut-out, and deliberately so. If she were attempting to portray a glad-handing Connecticut-bro sociopath with any degree of insight or flair, she’d have to occasionally allow him to think about stereo equipment or the comparative trunk-space in late-model SUVs. But she doesn’t. Her true interest is misogyny, which she writes about in loving detail. Despite the flat dullness of Doughty’s thoughts, his narrative perspective pays enormous attention to women’s bodies, and an unrealistic amount of attention to the women themselves. The title says it all — this is a perspective obsessed with women (though actually betraying little of the psychological profile of stalking). And it’s an excuse to indulge in an orgy of sexualized hatred.

Beata (get it?) has “the hair of a baby or an old woman,” “tiny breasts,” and, when Doughty gets there by force, “a few fine, long, dark hairs on her pussy.” Doughty’s friend Lew’s mom often wears exercise clothes, displaying “her thick hips, the tight aerobic pants crawling up her butt crack and cupping the U-shape of her pussy.” His college girlfriend has “tits larger than her head, each one a softer, and more fun, larger head.” The prose, notably, gets better in these descriptions. It’s horrible to read, but it’s more creative and there’s more invested in it.

Very little of this feels like male thinking. It feels instead like female self-obsession, female insecurity, female self-objectification, and female body-hatred. On Doughty’s first night at Sophia’s place, he describes her: “She came out of the bathroom in a small silk-looking beige nightie. It was nice. At least she wasn’t fat. Although she could gain some weight. But at her age, it would probably go to all the wrong places. Like her stomach.” This is lifted straight from a woman’s internal monologue. What young man has any idea where women in their 40s put on weight? What young man is obsessed with it? A few pages later Doughty grabs Sophia’s hips and again thinks about her weight and her stomach, now upgraded to “a medium-sized pouch.”

This is all disturbing enough, but it’s also, grotesquely, a sexual fantasy. Doughty, the man with zero virtues, is actually good at one thing — performing oral sex on women. It’s highly implausible, but nonetheless, Bomer endows him with this skill, and writes many lavish, graphic passages describing his methods. The dehumanization of her female characters that this entails — please, describe how the man responsible for my death makes me orgasm, in graphic detail, from an up-close view between my legs — again seems confused, less a critique than a fantasy. An author could, of course, write a violent, dehumanizing sex scene that’s a critique of violent, dehumanizing sex, but they’d need to bring more to it than female pleasure and the generic language of pornography. The major rape scene involving Beata at the end is also, long, extremely detailed, and hot if you like that kind of thing, which many people, including women, do. This is an innovation of a sort, revealing as it does the essential sexual co-dependence of the genders. If you are a woman who hates men and believes their essence is to degrade you, you end up fantasizing about it. What else is there?

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That third-wave feminism has devolved into misogyny porn is on the one hand surprising, but on the other not so much. In Bomer’s earlier work, she had a way of leaning into women’s fears about their bodies that felt empowering. In one story from Inside Madeline, a woman has massive, personhood-defining tits — and that’s it, that’s basically the story. In 2014 this still felt critical and risqué, part of the trend that said women could overcome negative stereotypes by embracing them. The book’s title story is about a voracious fat girl masturbating, which again at its time seemed to be doing a kind of reclaiming work. By openly daring to totally objectify and sexualize Madeline, without trying to please the male gaze, the story seemed like a monument to female power.

However if The Stalker proves anything, it’s that this approach hasn’t worked out. Viewing men in a totally negative light has only enshrined misogyny. And the “empowering” self-objectifying, a decade later, has become self-annihilation, a lesson that leaning into a bad thing does not produce something good, as much as we might wish to the contrary. The book ends in an explosion of gore, with both Sophia and Doughty’s gruesome deaths. Bomer means this as a tragedy for Sophia and a deserved comeuppance for Doughty. But what comes across instead is a mutual death-spiral, with a kind of unintentional elegant logic of its own. By fully dehumanizing men, we fully dehumanize ourselves.

Soon enough, the program demystified the material for him, and was easy to interact with. That quickly led to her son using ChatGPT as a therapist. “I’m having these feelings, what should I do?” he would ask. ChatGPT would duly answer: “This is how to think about your negative thoughts; these are the exercises you can do.” Natasha feels its advice is essentially the same as what his therapists and parents have been offering for years: but better organized, more detailed, available on-demand — and free. Encouraged by early successes, Natasha and her son fed ChatGPT detailed information from past evaluations and therapists. “And that,” she adds, “was even more useful.”

Natasha’s son’s situation sounds like a nearly ideal case. At 22, his usage is private, but is supported by clinical data and in-person care. Others, however, are experiencing the same rapid uptake and obvious benefits: just with fewer guard rails. Recent statistics on AI usage have revealed a critical-mass shift towards personal-emotional use, with “therapy/companionship” becoming the most popular reason people turn to tech.

ChatGPT alone had 5.9 billion monthly visits in May: a lot of people turning to AI for their most intimate needs. A Harvard Business Review study found therapy and companionship have knocked “search” and “generating ideas” from the top three usages entirely. Of the people I spoke to who are using AI for therapy, most mentioned a trio of obvious benefits: price, availability, and lack of the judgment or drama you might experience with a human being. Everyone I spoke with felt it was beneficial for them.

Monique, a college professor in her early 50s, writes over email that she has been using ChatGPT 4.0 “obsessively” for the past several months, as she works through a conflict she has been having with colleagues. She says it has helped her gain perspective during moments of catastrophizing, and avoiding burdening friends with the “repetitive revisiting of the same worry I couldn’t let go of.” Monique feels that she can ask “more reckless” and personally revealing questions than she would her regular therapist.

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Dane, a 37-year-old software engineer in New York City, has gone more personal still. He’s been using AI for around a year to discuss problems in his relationship, and spends hours at a time with it during crises, sometimes pasting entire text-message “novels” to the machine. He finds that it provides “immediate emotional relief” and helps him avoid conflict with the woman he’s dating. She uses it too. During fights, he says, “we reference it as if it’s an authority on our relationship.”

Reagan, a 24-year-old copywriter, is more cautious, writing over email that she avoids discussing topics that are more important to her or central to her identity. But she uses it to “deal with my hypochondria,” not annoy her boyfriend with endless worries, and decode confusing work interactions with people she doesn’t “totally understand” or who strike her as “insincere or mind-gamey.”

The problems chatbots can create when they encounter unstable personalities is an emerging issue, as reported recently in The New York Times. There’s also at least one lawsuit underway from a mother who believes that her otherwise healthy teenage son was lured to kill himself by a relationship gone awry with Character AI. At the same time, there may be reasons to question even what seem like the highly positive interactions experienced by the people I spoke with.

I tried soliciting the advice of the basic free version of ChatGPT on a friend-conflict of my own, doing all the due diligence suggested by my interview subjects — telling it to “take a clinical position,” as recommended by Monique, and to “be brutally honest with me,” as suggested by Dane. Its insights felt spot on. ChatGPT’s analysis allowed me to feel that I was in the right in the conflict with my friend; it was very complimentary, and it picked up on a character trait of mine regarding conflict that felt revelatory and will, I’m afraid to say, change the way I think about myself.

I’ve had similar insights from in-person therapy, but never so easily and directly obtained. This had frightening addictive potential. I am a single, divorced mother who sometimes spends the evening with a bottle of wine, doom-scrolling and stalking her exes. How about a date with ChatGPT instead? We can talk about me! All the next day, I felt an itch to return to the interface and input a “more reckless” personal query, as Monique put it. The interaction also seemed to have a mood-lifting quality that I associate with digital flirtation — a pleasant, nearly subconscious feeling that there’s something good to get back to online.

Falling for the flattery and validation seems like one obvious danger — and is notably distinct from what it usually feels like to visit a therapist. Another is the extent that the people I spoke with tended to believe in their AI of choice’s powers of judgment. They were aware, as Dane put it, that they were “speaking to an echo chamber,” but it didn’t seem to sink in. Monique provided me with documentation of her work exploring its decision-making methodology. It was clear that she’d been probing it to reorder its parameters to support her position — and, surprise, it complied. But does this really mean she’s correct and her colleagues are wrong? When I reconfigured my query to represent the conflict from my friend’s point of view, ChatGPT gave me a nearly opposite reading on the situation.

Therapists, naturally, have grave reservations. Sherry Turkle, the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has written about the ways new technologies have changed our deepest understanding of what it is to be human — often, she has found, by luring us to view ourselves as more machine-like. Turkle warns that “pretend empathy” from AI may shift how we define empathy itself. In addition, in her view, the very things we’re trying to avoid by talking to AI — the uncertainty that comes from interacting with a real person — might come to seem like “bugs” and not an essential part of being human.

I felt a version of this in my interactions. In any ordinary conversation with a person, I would be polite and thankful if they were patiently indulging me while I talked about myself, but behaving that way felt silly when talking to ChatGPT. I had to push myself not to do so. Why say goodbye when you can just log off? It’s reasonable to expect that this might affect how I treat real people over time. Being courteous might begin to seem fluffy and irrelevant, and the person who responds badly to brusque treatment might seem oversensitive.

Luke Burgis, a founder of the Cluny Institute, an organization that seeks to promote “the flourishing of the human person,” voices similar concerns. “When content is divorced from incarnational realities,” he says, “it doesn’t have any real power to affect change.” Burgis has “pulled back” on using AI even for work-related purposes. “There’s no life in the AI,” he says, “and the more we interact with dead things, the deader we ourselves become.”

Claudia Krugovoy, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City and Westchester County, provides a down-to-earth, daily-practitioner’s viewpoint. She describes herself as “open-minded” to AI therapy’s possible benefits, such as affirmation and helping to point out behavior patterns, but says, “I don’t believe it replaces the value of a real relationship with a therapist.” Therapists both affirm and challenge — and unlike AI, they read non-verbal cues and offer real empathy.

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Also, Krugovoy says it can be healing when people learn in therapy that “they can develop a relationship with someone and they won’t be rejected.” Ideally they take that trust and insight into the real world. When people choose to specifically avoid real people by interacting with an LLM, it may fail to “challenge their deeply held, and perhaps false, beliefs that they can’t bring their full self to a relationship.” (This called to mind the sentiment expressed in various ways by Monique, Dane and Reagan that they used AI specifically in order to not annoy or upset friends or partners.) Krugovoy also worries that the usage will ultimately reinforce a feeling of loneliness. “We need community more than ever,” she says.

Regardless of these drawbacks, the benefits to families like Natasha’s are compelling. She and many others also bring up the difficulty of finding a good therapist and the downsides of interactions with bad ones, as a reason to turn to AI. “We’ve tried hundreds of therapists over the years,” she says, “and 90% of them are disappointing.” Every time a person tries out a new therapist, they incur expense and put in painful emotional investment that can itself be traumatic. Reagan adds that “all of these professions have become so robotic anyway. I think they should face competition… Maybe a potential development could be the original industries becoming more human?”

Whatever a rational cost-benefit analysis might be, we’re unlikely to perform it in our current political system. In a functioning democracy, we might debate the benefits versus the dangers of unrestricted access to AI, and then vote on it. (Universal mass student cheating, who’s for it? Custom porn chat for kids, yay or nay?) Instead, AI has been unleashed upon us, and we have little recourse against the tech gods who have done so. We’re also on softened ground, as Turkle notes, already shaped by phones and social media, and ready for the next step of an entirely “artificial intimacy.” I’m sympathetic to families like Natasha’s, and can imagine cases where a prescription for supervised AI therapy could be an incredible tool. But personally I wish I’d never touched it — and I’m afraid I’ll do so again.

Strangio, who is elf-like and buff, wore a hip button-down, tailored slacks and a very nice pair of what appeared to be Prada loafers ($1,200 for similar, online). He took the stage to robust applause and proceeded for the next hour to evade and shift away from the crowd’s questions. He was received by appreciative nods, thoughtful “mmmms” and occasional applause from the Boomer audience. The crowd was mostly older and well-heeled, wearing pastel beach-tees and sporting deep, early-season tans. Neither the queer anarchist radicals nor the Ptown party vibe was in effect, and there was no visible representation from the trans kids.

It was a strangely oppressive experience, not exactly boring but more soul-crushing. I am the kind of persuadable centrist voter whom the trans movement has lost, but I’d gone to the event hoping for a clash of ideas and the occasional spark of recognition that the other side had a point. Instead, the audience was presented with a leader who didn’t offer direct answers to the queries posed by his most ardent supporters. And beneath the tans and the bonhomie, some of them, I believe, recognized his avoidance tactics.

The event’s host, Celeste Lecesne, founder of the Trevor Project LGBTQ+ youth hotline service, started with a tribute to Strangio’s heroism in defending the rights of trans youth. This wasn’t a surprising choice for a group of super-fans in America’s preeminent gay beach destination, but it makes the independent observer’s brain hurt given that the ACLU’s miscalculation and overreach had just curtailed the potential to fight similar bans in other states. Lecesne asked Strangio about this: Would the Tennessee decision “pave the way for the other 24 states banning trans youth care to do what they’re going to do?” Strangio explained that those states, for the most part, were already banning the healthcare, and the decision wouldn’t change that.

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The statement is true but also blame-shifting and deliberately misses the point. In his opening remarks he’d implied that the ACLU had known all along that the case was unlikely to succeed, saying, “I know exactly what to expect from [the Supreme Court]” and “I’m very used to reading distorted, disingenuous decisions from this court.” But he showed zero accountability for why the ACLU was willing to gamble something they have continuously claimed to be “necessary” and “lifesaving.” Why take the risk?

What did Strangio think the “core of the objection” to this kind of healthcare is? Lecesne asked, in a tone of deep puzzlement. The answer: A mysterious “retrenchment around gender” that often coincides with the rise of authoritarian governments. (A retrenchment that has nothing to do, of course, with sterilized adolescents or aggressive activism.) The objection is also, Strangio speculated, “a manufactured set of concerns” created by the right-wing media. For the latter argument, he pulled out the shifting and contested numbers often used by the Left to suggest that the trans population is minuscule and should be of no concern to anyone. This too is disingenuous and brain-hurting. The percentage of trans kids undergoing medical care is much higher than minuscule in my observable reality (admittedly, Brooklyn). And trans activism has focused precisely on making it affect everyone by framing themselves as a utopian liberation movement.

There was more. Strangio denounced The New York Times for having “contributed more to the anti-trans laws than almost any other thing in this country.” He elided the Cass Report’s findings that the case for pediatric gender medicine is unusually weak even for pediatrics. He mocked the idea that kids are being rushed into care.

Lecesne criticized the social-contagion theory of trans identities and then explained that “I thought I was a gay man for my whole life” until the pandemic, when whilst leading online workshops for LGBTQ+ youth who were discovering their transness, he’d discovered his own and changed his name and pronouns. “They changed me,” he said. Seems kind of contagious, no? Lecesne described watching kids in those workshops as “watching butterflies coming out of their cocoon,” and said the only contagion was “of happiness.” This is a common trope among trans-activist adults. And it’s unfair to place the burden of proof on the trans kids — but still, if unchecked and glorious happiness was really what most adults were observing as trans kids hit their school systems, the debate today might be very different.

The whole event reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which both the Left and Right having been turning to lately to explain today’s politics. Even if a comparison between the actual totalitarian leaders of the book and our situation today is too strong, Arendt’s description of the political mechanism is revelatory. She describes the conditions that led to totalitarian rule in Germany and the Soviet Union as those in which the “masses” (meaning the bourgeoisie) lost their class identities because of a new focus on individualism, and because of destabilizing social and economic change after the First World War.

People became atomized, isolated, and “superfluous,” meaning, without social purpose or stable employment. Under these conditions (which sound very familiar), they were ripe for totalitarian leadership. One of the central features of this kind of leadership, Arendt says, is that it doesn’t stand for anything coherent. It’s not a movement of people towards a shared goal, but instead confers membership in a safely correct group, whose goals are by necessity always shifting and “expanding.” Totalitarian propaganda, Arendt says, is under no obligation to be consistent, and in fact it’s better if it isn’t. The important thing is loyalty, which can be demonstrated even better when positions are shifting or incoherent.

Totalitarian movements, Arendt says, do not originate with the masses themselves, but with an alliance between “the elite,” and what she describes as “the mob,” which is a collection of criminals and grifters who make up the lowest elements of society. (Columbia student, meet Albanian looting gang.) In times of social instability, elites — and particularly the best and most idealistic elites, perhaps like Strangio — come to believe that the anything-goes tactics of the mob are refreshingly practical, lacking in bourgeois hypocrisy, and so on. These elites feel intense “nausea” when looking at their messed-up social institutions and are ready to destroy them for change. Or at least, this is what happened in the Thirties, when artists and intellectuals were misled by Stalinism and Nazism in numbers we don’t like to think about.

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Part of the beauty of The Origins of Totalitarianism is how well it applies to both sides of the current culture wars. Trump’s resemblance to a totalitarian leader requires no explanation; and in Leftist circles I’d say the totalitarian trend is led not by a person, but by the social-media zeitgeist, with the correct position being whichever is angriest and most extreme, or the most “expansionist” in Arendt’s terms. It strikes me as an awfully good explanation of how we got to the current incoherence of both theory and strategy on transgenderism, despite the sincere passion and actual best efforts of many people involved. The trans movement is riddled with internal contradictions. It has long been a loyalty test. And as the ACLU strategy shows, it has always been about endlessly expanding activism, rather than the best results for trans people. If they hadn’t brought this case to the Supreme Court, which they knew they’d likely lose, trans people would be better off.

An odd bit of hope for Americans today comes in what is almost a side observation of Arendt’s. She notes that Britain never succumbed to fascist or totalitarian rule, despite experiencing many of the same cultural and economic conditions as the European countries, because, she thinks, its robust two-party political system prevented the total atomization that occurred in countries ruled by more fragmentary coalitions. It would be funny if America’s dueling totalitarianisms were in fact its secret strength. Perhaps our vicious polarization is only thing holding back the deluge. But it’s not so funny that we should rely on it.

Strangio offered hope to the faithful through more of the same — the possibility of unexplored legal strategies, new gender clinics popping up on the borders of friendly states, and the historic ability of the LGBT (and now Q+) community to band together and get along through oppression. I found myself wanting a fair and non-totalitarian resolution to the issue, one notably not forthcoming from the Trump administration. If youth gender medicine isn’t settled, let’s settle it, without evasions and twisting the evidence. Instead of destroying our institutions, let’s use them: democracy, the law, the “both sides” media. The good Ptown bourgeoisie in the Hawthorne Barn seemed at least a little bit on the same page as me. They were warm and friendly to Strangio, but they were asking questions.

One woman suggested that no one should be “assigned” a sex at birth, and that we should always give it a couple of years to see what kind of identity develops. In my view this is a denial of human reality and would be terrible for children, but at least she was honest about her objectives, and somewhat consistent. (Strangio said this would be “doing a service to the child,” but also added “I didn’t do that. I took my child’s sex assignment and went with it.”) Another woman, very politely, raised an article critical of the youth gender medicine orthodoxy, written on the Skrmetti decision by Nicholas Confessore and published last week in The New York Times. She asked about Strangio’s response to “a kind of pulling back in the medical opinions not only here but in England and elsewhere in the world.” Strangio ground-shifted away, but the question was brave, and it went over with the crowd just fine. May this too be contagious.

Singal has been a bête noire for transgender activists going back to 2018, when he wrote an essay for The Atlantic suggesting that the medical case for youth gender medicine is weak. Ever since, he has been ruthlessly, relentlessly attacked online. In quieter, more rational circles, his rigor has made him a hero, especially as the evidence mounts that he was right all along.

Democrats and progressives seeking a way to refocus on their party’s strengths — and to walk back the dogmatism that characterized the party during “peak woke” — might learn from him.

Singal and I met in Brooklyn in late April, shortly after the latest round of online drama between him and his critics. In person, he is physically large and unexpectedly striking. And he displays an equally unexpected millennial masculinity — half “my therapist thinks I have ADHD”, half patience and problem-solving. His slight haplessness and disorganization with technology form a running joke on “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast focusing on internet controversies he co-hosts with fellow journalist Katie Herzog. Yet he’s solicitous about my recording and sound quality throughout the interview, perhaps from painful personal experience.

All successful journalists claim integrity and rigor, but few since the journalist-as-activist era began have had the nerve Singal has shown in going against the consensus on their own side. In part as a result, many centrist Democrats who have felt disillusioned with their party’s direction have swung Right. Through it all, Singal has stuck with his bog-standard liberal beliefs, despite the enormous outpouring of hatred against him.

At our meeting, however, he was determined to deflate any grandiose claims about himself or his work, often with the same mild, undramatic rebuttals he has offered before, and that his critics have found unsatisfying. His reporting on trans issues is “a small part of my overall career”, he says. And his unusual ability to be contrarian in his reporting was because “things just worked out in a very lucky way”.

Singal’s early résumé is as normie as it gets for successful male talking heads, including a youthful stand-up comedy phase. He is 41 and grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston. Like many of his generation, he was “politically activated” by the administration of George W. Bush. “I couldn’t believe anyone could be conservative,” he says. “We didn’t think it could get any worse.”

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He spent two years at Brandeis and another two at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, writing columns for his college papers in what he calls the “true-but-insufferable” category of “very basic liberal stuff”. It was only later, while working at The Boston Globe, that he had the distinguishing insight that he was writing ill-informed hot takes (many of us never learn) and that he instead wanted to better understand how the world works. He enrolled in a public-affairs master’s program at Princeton, which he describes as “aimed at do-gooders” and which stressed quantitative skills, teaching him to read and evaluate research papers.

Princeton set him on the path of debunking phony science that has since made his career. His first job out of grad school, in 2014, was working under Adam Moss at New York, where he edited the magazine’s new social-sciences vertical. In his 2021 book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, he writes that when he started the job, “thanks to a fairly stats heavy master’s program… I knew some of the differences between good and bad research, and some of the ways quantitative claims can mislead.”

Even so, he was surprised by “the fire-hose of overhyped findings that would fill my e-mail inbox daily”. Many deeply penetrating, popular, and influential cultural beliefs, it turns out, are based on really questionable research. In fact, the most grabbed-onto claims might be the most specious, Singal argues, in that they’re convenient to believe, and offer us supposedly easy fixes for complex social ills.

He published the first big, in-depth feature on researcher findings that the implicit-bias test — notorious for proving that everyone is secretly racist — was “weak and unreliable, statistically speaking” and “barely measures anything of real-world import”, as he recounted in The Quick Fix. Many of his New York headlines from this era are surprisingly freewheeling, given the later evolution of the magazine, such as “Is a Professor Getting Railroaded for Questioning Social-Justice Dogma?” (2019) and “Business Insider Retracted a Bad Piece — and Set a Terrible Precedent” (2018).

Singal says he believes that today’s version of the magazine has “hollowed out some of the most interesting thinkers”. Nonetheless, he remained an establishment-friendly voice on the larger issues, and places in The Quick Fix read very 2021. The false implicit-bias information, for example, is important because it might be detrimental to “urgent tasks like police reform”. A quote from a song mentioning “crossdressers” gets the apologetic aside that “it was the 1950s”.

None of this — neither the rigor nor the careful hewing to many liberal values — spared Singal from the outrage on his own side over trans issues. Singal is the most blocked user on Bluesky, the Lefty alternative to X (formerly Twitter). He is listed by the GLAAD Accountability Project as a purveyor of disinformation. And at least one trans activist website has compiled a truly sick biographical dossier on him that also targets his family. This and other websites accuse him, among other things, of “sea-lioning” — apparently the crime of harassing others by persisting in asking reasonable and polite questions.

This persecution has taken a new turn recently, with the re-election of President Trump, as the far Left has singled out dissenters on the center Left for the disaster. In a recent thread on X, the Nation columnist David Klion wrote that Singal’s “many haters warned him for like five years that his work was going to empower the Right’s crackdown on trans people. We were all right and he’ll never erase what he did.” Ross Barkan, an UnHerd contributor, also declared himself a “hater” on the same thread for the same reason, and condemned Singal as having “like replacement level Dem opinions coupled with trans obsession”.

Singal tends to counter these charges with several assertions that can seem myopic to his critics. He’s vociferously anti-Trump, and always has been, he says. And he believes that reporting in elite coastal media outlets doesn’t actually influence public opinion in ways that can swing elections. “People don’t realize how small even the big outlets have gotten,” he told me. And “I’ve always been a skeptic of how much influence the media has.” In other words, youth gender medicine was going to be controversial regardless of what Jesse Singal had to say about it. This may be true but seems like a bit of a dodge. Critics like Barkan have called Singal “obsessed” with a “fringe” issue — yet his reporting implies that he thinks otherwise. So why not say so?

On April 30, Singal and Herzog dropped an episode of “Blocked and Reported” on the criticism from the Left, in which they semi-jokingly explored the topic of who was responsible for the so-called vibe shift to the Right and the perceived horrors of Trump II. Asked the duo: “The question is, is it literally our fault?” The charges against them, Singal and Herzog argued, are a case of the “slippery-slope argument.” Meaning: if you allow a whisper of dissent on a topic, before you know it a crazed dictator is making the whole thing illegal.

“What always gets me about these arguments,” Singal said, “is that it’s a very long, very slippery slope, with like spinny parts and tunnels and loop de loops…. We pointed out there’s weak evidence for youth gender medicine… OK, people are going to jump from that to ‘therefore we should elect Trump’?”

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I am, I fear, a person of the slippery-slope mindset, because I can see the connection between debunked trans science and the election. But the more I try out my theories on Singal, the more persuasive his stubborn precision of thought becomes. It’s never flashy, and it’s often something he’s said before, or else a simple and hard-to-evade question: How does X thing you just said actually cause Y? Talking to him reminds me that Democrats were once very good projecting ownership of superior facts — they were the ones who’d followed the process, focused on the details, and had better research and policy on their side. A return to this kind of authority anywhere in government would be incredibly welcome, and Singal’s narrow focus on the granular truth suggests a direction for his party.

I’m not the only critic he’s disarmed. After the online spat with Barkan, the two men participated in a peacemaking podcast, at which Barkan walked back his online claims that Singal had “reaped what he sowed on anti-trans”, and ended up mostly agreeing with Singal on trans policy. “I think trans people are absolutely entitled to lives of safety and dignity,” Singal told me, “but I have some questions about whether the maximalist form of self-ID is tenable. An intelligent liberalism would understand this as an area where there are conflicting rights claims, depending on whether you view biological sex or gender identity as having primacy, and where those conflicting rights claims need to actually be resolved via discussion and compromise and democratic sense-making.”

His friend Mike Pesca, the journalist and host of the daily podcast “The Gist”, tells me via email that while Singal has been “more directionally right and specifically right on [the youth-gender-medicine] issue than anyone else covering it,” he is “still a pariah among the staffs at the major outlets.” In Pesca’s opinion, “the better editors know he’s good and are willing to work with him. The New York Times has published him, I doubt the New Yorker ever would, for fear of a riot. The Atlantic might. New York magazine probably won’t.”

Pesca also tells an anecdote about having coffee with Singal, and his friend telling him “this is the coffee shop where the barista went on Reddit, told the community I was here, and there was an earnest discussion about whether to poison me.” This, of course, represents the epistemic ditch that liberalism has fallen into — on one side of the counter, people like Singal, making their careful case for a balanced and reasonable system of human rights; on the other, those who have turned the rights into a religion and don’t give a shit what the science says.

It’s significant that Singal hasn’t broken through to the people who should be his allies — on the contrary, they want to poison him. And it suggests that human rights on their own can’t sustain serious politics without deeper claims and higher aspirations. Trump has offered his own incoherent version with American Greatness. Singal isn’t the type, but it almost seems he could do the same with a kind of reasoned excellence. “Make Our Systems Work Again” sure has a nice ring to it.

Unfathomably, Singal hasn’t stopped going to the coffee shop. Stubborn to be sure — or perhaps the science on barista-poisoning is weak.