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From the archives:

The True Self is the Person You Want Others to Believe You Are

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

The True Self is the Person You Want Others to Believe You Are

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2 years ago · 230 likes · 8 comments · Rob Henderson

The Only Reading App I Use:

I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:

These screenshots come from my Readwise app.

Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.

Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.

Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use this link →  https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).

I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.

Links and recommendations:

• Two Cents on Buridan’s Ass by Roy Baumeister

  • I shared some thoughts on Buridan’s Ass a while back here

• Reflections on evolutionary ideas in sociology by Rosemary Hopcroft

• Why It’s Normal for Children to Be Demanding by

  • My thoughts on a related idea here

• The Marrying Up Trap by

• Why Socialists Want to Shut Down Prisons by Barry Latzer

• DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge by

  • See also here and here

• Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories

• You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Female sexual problems in adulthood were correlated with mental health problems, whereas male sexual problems in adulthood were correlated with physical health problems. Female sexuality is more mental, which links it to culture and meaning and ideas; male sexuality is more physical. (source).

2. No matter how well you’re doing in life, there’s almost always someone, somewhere, on some dimension who’s doing better. Unhappy people tend to compare themselves with other people; happy people tend to compare themselves with their past. (source: A Little More Social by Nicholas Epley).

3. Fascinating: Young adults are more likely than older adults to say drinking alcohol is “morally wrong.” (source).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Amazon (US)

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Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

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1. In one of the homes as a kid I did a lot of cleaning, sweeping, raking, etc. My Mexican foster mother referred to the scouring powder Ajax as “ay-yax.” 7 years old, I saw the container but couldn’t read so I imitated her pronunciation. Now every time I see Ajax I think ay-yax. Ay-ay-ay. I’m half Mexican (and half Korean); at the last POC meeting they authorized a one-time pass for me to make fun of the accent.

2. I am 5’10.” Meeting in person with my readers and various online friends over the last few years, people have said to me “I thought you’d be taller” and “I thought you’d be shorter.” No one ever says “You’re exactly as tall as I thought you’d be.”

3. In-N-Out will always be my favorite place to eat because that’s where my social worker would take me when I was a foster kid. My In-N-Out order: double double protein style (lettuce wrap) + animal fries well-done. On the rare occasions I get the standard double double with the bun, the bun has to be extra toasted.

4. I have gone bungee jumping and skydiving and have always enjoyed heights. One of the houses I lived in as a kid had an 80 ft valley oak in the backyard which I climbed most days after coming home after school. I enjoy going to the top of various points in NYC to look out at the skyline.

5. I have a scar on my right middle knuckle from hitting a guy in the mouth and cutting the skin across his teeth (not recommended) and an indentation/split on my left pinky knuckle from hitting another guy on top of the head at an awkward angle (also not recommended). I got into a lot of fights from ages 6 to 17, and then a handful from 18 to 24. Most of the fights I document in Troubled are ones that I lose, in part because losses are more vivid and humiliating than wins, and because it’s stupid to write about winning a fight as a kid.

Everything above I'd say on a podcast or perhaps at a dinner party. Below is the stuff I probably shouldn't admit in print. Romantic incompetence, my capacity for revenge, my fat alcoholic era, and what writing a book actually feels like:

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Amid the controversy over Christopher Nolan’s odd diversity casting, the director’s biggest change to “The Odyssey” has been ignored. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. He is a man shaped by the later Western tradition, especially Christian ethics and Machiavelli’s vision of human agency. That shift may make him less recognizable to scholars of ancient Greece, but it turns him into a hero today’s audiences can understand.

Three elements make “The Odyssey” feel timeless. First, it is about a journey home; the hero tries to return to the place where he began. Second, he succeeds, but his ordeal has permanently transformed him. Third, Odysseus is accompanied throughout his journey by the goddess Athena. She advises him, rescues him, and intervenes on his behalf.

The film retains these aspects of the poem. Still, as film critic Roger Ebert is credited with saying, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” In Homer, the great flaw of Odysseus is hubris. In Nolan’s film, it’s moral injury.

Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.

In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.

But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.

During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.

This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.

This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?

Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.

Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film “The Northman” asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But “The Northman” was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.

Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.

In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.

The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.

The ancient Greeks lived within what is often called an honor and shame culture. Moral conflict was largely external. A man worried about his standing, his reputation, his obligations, and the favor or anger of the gods. Their moral psychology was not organized around the same kind of private guilt that later became central to Judeo-Christian ethics.

Christian morality has become so deeply embedded in Western life that even secular people treat many of its assumptions as universal. They reject Christianity as a religion while continuing to believe that compassion is superior to force, that the weak and downtrodden possess inherent moral worth, that guilt should result from cruelty, and that forgiveness rather than retaliation is a sign of strength.

Nolan can’t resist placing a Christian (or secular Post-Christian) moral code within a pagan hero.

The film also gives him a more modern sense of control over his fate. He does not merely endure the will of the gods. He seems to believe that he can bargain with destiny and take responsibility for the outcome. This gives him an internal moral life that feels familiar to us.

Nolan’s Odysseus is skeptical of supernatural power. “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” he tells his crew. “The gods help those who help themselves.” This is not quite the Odysseus of Homer. It’s closer to the modern man who believes that fate may set the conditions of life, but human beings must still decide what to do within them.

The film makes this point through Athena. During a flashback to the sack of Troy, Odysseus sees a young Trojan priestess (portrayed by Zendaya) seized by Greek soldiers. The scene is intercut with soldiers beheading a statue of Athena inside her temple. The woman and the goddess become fused in Odysseus’s mind.

The Athena who appears to Odysseus during the rest of the film is not a goddess intervening on his behalf. She is also the memory of an innocent woman. She represents his guilt, suggesting that what drives him is not divine guidance but his own conscience.

This leaves the film suspended between realism and the supernatural. The gods might exist, but the characters are not their playthings. Human beings possess agency and bear responsibility for what they do. Calypso (Charlize Theron) identifies this quality in Odysseus when she tells him, “You’re a man who needs to control his fate.”

Machiavelli explored the same tension five centuries ago. As he wrote in “The Prince,” “I judge that it might be true that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.”

In this sense, Nolan’s “Odyssey” can be read as a vindication of Machiavelli. Writing in the 16th century, Machiavelli was not shy about his preference for the Roman pagan virtues of strength, glory, and real-world effectiveness over the Christian ideals of mercy, compassion, and otherworldly salvation.

Both pagan and Christian morality can produce admirable lives, Machiavelli believed. But they cannot be obeyed fully at the same time. Each moral system asks something different of us, and each defines goodness in a different way.

As the political philosopher and Machiavelli translator Harvey Mansfield wrote of pagan morality, “Men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”

The most notorious metaphor in “The Prince” is as objectionable to modern readers as many scenes in Homer’s “Odyssey.” Machiavelli compares fortune to a woman:

“It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.”

The metaphor is repellent by modern standards. But its meaning is central to Machiavelli’s thought. Fortune favors those who act rather than wait, who impose themselves on events rather than submit passively to them.

Nolan gives Odysseus this Machiavellian impulse. He does not trust omens, sacrifices, or the goodwill of the gods. He believes that fate can be bargained with and contested. Yet the film also gives him a Christian conscience that judges the methods he uses to contest it.

This version of Odysseus feels modern and psychologically rich, but is not recognizably Homeric. In trying to make Odysseus morally legible to us, Nolan makes him less true to the world that created him. Perhaps Nolan softened Odysseus not because he misunderstood the ancient character, but because he understood the modern audience.

This article was originally published at The Daily Wire under the title “What Christopher Nolan Couldn’t Bring Himself To Do.”

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My review of “The Odyssey” (2026):

What Christopher Nolan Couldn’t Bring Himself To Do

The Best Sleep Upgrade I’ve Ever Had:

I’ve been using Eight Sleep for more than a year.

As far back as I can remember I’ve had difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. I solved the first issue years ago by placing my phone on the other side of the room and reading a book before bed each night until my eyes get tired. Usually I fall asleep within 15 minutes.

But staying asleep remained an issue—until I bought an Eight Sleep pod in December of 2024. Prior to that, I’d heard a million ads on podcasts etc. and tuned it all out. Huge mistake on my part. Now I’m mad I didn’t get one way sooner. When I used to wake up in the middle of the night, the problem was always temperature. I’d be too warm, or (less frequently) too cold, and struggle to find a comfortable temperature to fall asleep.

The Eight Sleep Pod fixes that. It adjusts the temperature of the bed automatically. It’s incredible. Your core body temperature needs to drop 2 to 3 degrees for deep sleep to happen. The Pod cools or heats each side of the bed on its own, and it adjusts through the night.

The Eight Sleep Pod is the real deal. It personalizes the temperature of my bed in real-time, so I get uninterrupted, high-quality sleep.

The product has gotten better since I first bought it. I recently learned that most Formula 1 drivers now use it. These are professional race car drivers whose careers depend on split-second reactions. When people like that use the same sleeping technology, that tells you something.

Members see up to 34 percent more deep sleep on average. Individual results may vary, but mine have not. I travel a lot for work, and, sleeping in hotels, I find myself thinking “Damn I miss my Eight Sleep.”

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use my code ROBHENDERSON at eightsleep.com/robhenderson for up to $350 off the Pod.

Your future well-rested self will thank you.

Links and recommendations:

• The Black Markets Fallacy by

• Psychological Dissociation and Big Five Personality by

• The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile by

• Astonishing Change in the Data on Parenthood by Roy Baumeister

• Money Talks: The Price of Status by Nick Maggiulli

• How to Read the Classics: “Critical Reading” or “Respectful Attention”? by James Hankins

• Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories

• You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Just over half of single women believe they and their peers are happier than married women. They’re wrong, at least on average: Married women are more likely to report being “very happy” with their lives than single women, and the same goes for men. (source). You have been carefully conditioned to ask “Does marriage predict happiness or are happy people more likely to get married?” You’ve also been carefully conditioned to never ask “Does money make people happy or are happy people more likely to have higher earnings?”

2. The young people who joined the Summer of Love were not typical of their generation. Most young people in the 1960s did not practice free love, use drugs, or protest the Vietnam War. In a 1967 poll, 63 percent of people in their twenties said couples should wait until marriage to have sex. That was almost the same as the public as a whole. In 1969, 88 percent of people ages twenty-one to twenty-nine said they had never used marijuana. Three-quarters also opposed leaving Vietnam at once, again close to the national average.

Young people were not especially liberal, either. Among those who attended college from 1966 to 1968, 53 percent preferred Richard Nixon or George Wallace in the 1968 election. Among those who attended from 1962 to 1965, the figure was 57 percent, about the same as the final election result. (source). Our collective cultural memory is shaped more by elites than by ordinary people.

3. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. (source). Power laws strike again.

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

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In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class.”

At one point he was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”

Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.”

After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year.” I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women yet—and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line—can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.

This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.

Anyone who isn’t a millionaire gets to be working class now. It sounds absurd but that’s where we’re at now. Remember during the primaries in 2015, Bernie Sanders said that “the millionaires and the billionaires” need to pay their fair share? At some point over the past decade, he dropped “millionaires” because he became one. Now you see the millionaires condemning only the billionaires. Mark my words, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you will see the billionaires disparaging the trillionaires. Maybe inflation will hasten that phenomenon.

Anyway, in that Mamdani interview, the focus on defining class by money is revealing.

People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.

It is easier to discuss income than educational pedigree, accent, hairstyle, clothing, taste, or zip code.

But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does.

Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. If your parents went to college but you didn’t, you’re still middle-class or higher. Not working class.

Education shapes habits, networks, and outlook long after the degree is earned. Higher education bestows cultural capital: patterns of speech, tastes, opinions, and expectations about life. Income may rise and fall over a lifetime. The worldview formed in selective institutions usually endures. By that standard, college graduates, regardless of earnings, are not working class.

Education also shapes political views more strongly than income does.

In 2021, Ezra Klein pointed out that “We tend to think of class as driven by income” but that “A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.”

Plainly, a PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other PhDs, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree.

It is important to note that working class is not the same thing as poor. And upper class is not the same thing as rich. A working-class person can become wealthy without moving into a higher social class. Money alone is not enough. If a manual laborer wins the lottery, he is rich. But still working class.

The focus on economic class (rather than social class) promotes the belief that we could have an egalitarian society if everyone simply had enough money.

This focus is especially convenient for the upper and upper middle classes. It allows them to express concern about inequality without implicating themselves. They can condemn the problems faced by the poor, such as limited access to education, a lack of money for professional clothing, or unreliable transportation, without confronting the less obvious realities of class signaling.

The assumption is that if you could afford the right things, you could pass as upper class. But the main obstacle is cultural rather than financial. You can come into money, but if you do not know how to use it in the “right” ways, or understand the signals, customs, and shibboleths, you’ll still be shut out.

No one spells out the rules for you.

Relatedly, on the point about rules, the organizational psychologist Michele Gelfand has found that “The upper class has a negative connotation about rules. The working class holds a more favorable view. They work in more dangerous jobs where rules help keep people safe. They live in more dangerous neighborhoods where rules can keep kids out of trouble.”

Most poor and working-class people value rules, partly because they are exposed to so much disorder and misbehavior from the people around them. Naturally, the luxury belief class sides not with the poor people who prefer rules and order, but the poor people who engage in disorder. And will then pay a lot of money to distance themselves from the resulting squalor.

The best way to learn class rules is through exposure. Most people, though, do not get many chances to live, work, and socialize with those outside their own social class. And when they do, the discomfort of crossing that cultural divide often sends them back to familiar territory. This is one overlooked reason why people who are capable of upward mobility don’t always pursue it. It’s uncomfortable.

What makes someone working class is not income. Of course, social categories can be difficult to define. Still, there are identifiable regularities.

One thing that distinguishes the working class is the kind of work they do and how much oversight is involved.

A working-class job is often (not always) closely supervised. A frontline supervisor or foreman is in close proximity to the worker and judges his work as he does it. When I washed dishes for minimum wage, the manager or assistant manager was always walking through the kitchen and dish room keeping an eye on everyone in the back of the restaurant.

Another feature is danger. Many working-class jobs expose people to some degree of physical risk. This is one reason why a cab driver or a roofer counts as working class while a schoolteacher who might earn less than either counts as middle class.

In my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class I recall the story of one of my high school history teachers who’d worked as a manual laborer at a lumber mill before attending college relatively late in his life. He explained to me and the other students that teaching didn’t really feel like “work” to him because he was sipping coffee in an air-conditioned building.

Not all working class jobs carry the risk of physical injury. Some just make your feet tired from standing all day. But if you spend most of your work day sitting and there is zero risk of any injury, you’re almost certainly not working class. (No, your ergonomic standing/walking desk doesn’t count as “being on your feet all day;” owning one means you’re probably upper middle class).

The high working class is made up of craftspeople. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on.

The middle layer is made up of operators: train conductors, forklift operators, sewer and water plant operators, short-order cooks, cab drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers. One thing I’ve noticed is that white Uber drivers sometimes tell me that their driving job is a temporary stopgap and they have some other career ambition they’re working on, whereas nonwhite drivers seem to feel no status anxiety about their job.

The low layer of the working class is unskilled labor. Just about anyone could be trained in a day to do one of these jobs, which means there’s a lot more uncertainty about employment stability. Day laborers, farmhands, hotel maids, car wash workers, the guy who delivers your DoorDash, dishwashers, stock clerks.

The sociologist Lauren A. Rivera has written that, “Whether it involves the weathered hands of a manual laborer or the straightened and whitened teeth of those who can afford them, social class manifests in people’s bodies.”

Clothing style is a giveaway. My sports journalist friend Ethan Strauss says that at NBA games (and presumably other sports as well), the more expensive the seat, the less likely you are to see the person sitting in it wearing NBA apparel. Wearing the jersey of your favorite player or whatever is gauche I guess.

This is consistent with the general pattern that working-class people are more likely to wear clothes with words on them. T-shirts, caps, and jackets with brand names or slogans. A t-shirt with GOODYEAR on the front and that kind of thing. Trump knew what he was doing with those red MAGA caps. The cap upset his critics for obvious political reasons, but there is also an undercurrent of class prejudice at the loud red hat with the ALL-CAP words.

You’ll see hipsters or post-hipsters or whatever wearing loud logos but it’s usually irony and/or working class-larping. The Brooklyn or Silver Lake guy in a NASCAR T-shirt he bought at a thrift store. Carhartt jackets or Dickies workpants on people who have never framed a wall.

On this point, formal dress codes are useful because they make expectations clear. When everyone knows what they’re supposed to wear, it levels the playing field.

But when you say, “Wear whatever you want,” people don’t stop making judgments. If anything, they make more of them based on the choices you make.

A few years ago The Atlantic published an interview with a couple of sociologists describing the subtleties of class and clothing in the context of the workplace:

Pinsker: You also talk a lot about the unwritten codes of behavior that can shape who advances and who doesn’t at certain workplaces. What’s an example of how that played out?

Laurison: Probably the best example of this is the television-production firm we studied. The name that we gave to the culture there was “studied informality”—nobody wore suits and ties, nobody even wore standard business casual. People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes. There was a sort of “right” way to do it and a “wrong” way to do it: A number of people talked about this one man—who was black and from a working-class background—who just stood out. He worked there for a while and eventually left. He wore tracksuits, and the ways he chose to be casual and fashionable were not the ways that everybody else did.

There were all kinds of things, like who puts their feet up on the table and when they do it, when they swear—things that don’t seem like what you might expect from a place full of high-prestige, powerful television producers. But that was in some ways, I think, more off-putting and harder to navigate for some of our working-class respondents than hearing “just wear a suit and tie every day” might have been. The rules weren’t obvious, but everybody else seemed to know them.

Paul Fussell in his 1983 book Class described how romantic couples arrange themselves in cars:

Working class: Men sit in front, women in back

Middle class: One couple in front, one in back

Upper middle class: Spouses trade places, men and women from differing couples sit together. Perhaps—my view, not Fussell’s—to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are superior beings, unbothered by trivial romantic jealousies. How basic.

Working class people are comparatively unconcerned with being called “basic,” whereas many upper middle class people lay awake at night terrified that someone might bestow that label upon them. They crave distinction from the commoners.

Anyway, the working class is defined not by income but by a lack of a college degree (especially if one’s parents are not college graduates), an absence of control over how their work days are spent, physical strain or proximity to physical danger in their jobs, and how they dress and carry themselves.

But we can expect that Mamdani and his base will continue to focus on income for the obvious reason that few of them are actually working class, but many of them feel financially strapped. Some of this of course is self-inflicted. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has written, describing people in high-prestige/low-pay jobs, “they would prefer to be a freelance writer rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory.”

Look, Mamdani is free to define “working class” however he wants. He can draw the line at a million dollars if he likes. Regardless of where his line is, the roofer, the hotel maid, and the dishwasher know that he and his base are on the other side of it.

Freya and I discuss the forces reshaping Gen Z—from the monetization of insecurity and the commodification of mental health to the pressures of performative identity online.

Freya India is also the author of the Substack GIRLS, where she writes about the challenges girls and young women face in the modern world, reaching over 50,000 subscribers. She has contributed to numerous outlets including The New Statesman, The Spectator, and The Free Press.

Enjoy:

A lot of talk about wokeness in The Odyssey.

After reading Scott Alexander’s discussion of the Frankfurt School, I came across a relevant and fascinating essay.

Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, the 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment contains a chapter titled “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.” Left-wing intellectuals used to be of a much higher caliber in terms of IQ and erudition. Today we unfortunately get treated to their intellectual heirs. People of far duller and cruder minds.

This Horkheimer/Adorno essay was way more interesting than I anticipated. Even if the Christopher Nolan film turns out to suck (going to see it tonight), I’ll still be glad its impending release led me to read this.

I read the story in high school and recently revisited it in preparation for the Nolan film. Throughout his journey from Troy to Ithaca, Odysseus confronts the forces of the ancient mythical world. Sirens, Cyclopes, Circe, the Lotus-eaters, and so on. Rather than raw violence, though, Odysseus uses cunning and self-control to achieve victory. Horkheimer and Adorno claim this symbolizes an important shift.

Their literary interpretation of Homer turns into something much darker, explaining why modern people are materially comfortable yet psychologically restless.

The more you think about it, the more disturbing its central claim becomes:

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From the archives:

The Ideology of the Dangerous Female

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

The Ideology of the Dangerous Female

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2 years ago · 83 likes · 28 comments · Rob Henderson

The Psychology of Morality:

My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.

I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.

Enroll here for immediate access.

Here’s the trailer:

Links and recommendations:

• No, Seriously, Decriminalizing Drugs Kills People by

• The Curious MAGA Kabuki Celebrity of Sophie Cunningham by

• Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders by

• Backrooms: the Dangers of Nostalgia, and When Therapy Fails (written by a Therapist) by

• The Average Kid is Better Than the Average Adult by

• What Made The Sopranos Great by

  • See my essay on The Sopranos here and my discussion about the show with Richard here

• Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories

• You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Men with two children had an estimated brain age that was 0.6 years younger than their childless peers had, and for men with three children, it was 0.7 years younger. That’s similar to the brain benefit associated with exercising 2.5 hours a week. (source).

2. Whereas men in their twenties and above tend to find younger women more attractive, teenage boys tend to be more attracted to women somewhat older than themselves. Men’s preference isn’t for younger age per se, but rather traits associated with fertility. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

3. Sentences are getting shorter and simpler. The Economist analyzed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s. (source).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

• Louise and I debate whether successful parents have a duty to protect their children from downward mobility, or whether helping your adult children is nothing more than nepotism

• Will millennials treat their own future adult children more generously than the boomers treated them, or will they simply repeat the same pattern with a new excuse?

• How many complaints about baby boomers stem from misguidedly comparing modern life to a brief and extremely peculiar and prosperous period in the 20th century

• We explore the conflict between two moral systems: Western individualism condemns nepotism, while many other cultures regard helping your family as a basic duty. More on this here

• Are millennials truly poorer than earlier generations? Or are there just a few vivid stories that have coalesced into a misleading myth?

• The education treadmill and why, between generations, more college degrees have not produced much higher incomes

• How American, British and Australian debates often get blurred together, even though culture, history, and the economic situation differs across countries. See Louise’s piece on this here

• How social media raises the standard for what counts as a normal home, a normal income and a normal adult life

• The loudest complaints about “economic inequality” tend to come from highly educated people in prestigious but poorly paid careers. Recall that participants of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York were overwhelmingly affluent. 72% were from households above the NYC median and 76% had a BA degree or higher

• I suggest many OWS participants were angry that their earnings were lower than their college graduate peers who pursued finance, a more lucrative path. So often the real battle isn’t between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” but between the “haves” and the “have-mores”

• We discuss why nepotism is often hidden, and how that secrecy breeds resentment among people who think their peers succeeded entirely on their own. You might be surprised at the number of writers and artists who are only able to pursue their dreams because a parent, spouse, or trust fund is paying their bills

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In 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth sat down and did some math. The American colonies were doubling in population every 20 years, primarily due to a high birth rate. Projecting forward, he calculated that by the year 2000, America would have a population of 1.28 billion people. He wrote the number in capital letters, as he was so overwhelmed by the thought.

When the year 2000 arrived, we came in about a billion short.

A new report from the Institute for Family Studies, “The Demographic Dead End,” opens with Wigglesworth’s forecast and then explains, in careful and sometimes alarming detail, why it failed and what comes next. The authors, demographer Lyman Stone and researcher Peter Foreshaw Brookes, have built what they call the most reliable published reconstruction of historic American fertility: birth rates for every state back to 1917, and for Massachusetts back to 1660. The report was released to mark the country’s 250th birthday.

The headline finding is simple. The American birthrate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman. Replacement fertility requires about 2.1. The United States is now in its third extended period of below-replacement fertility, after the Great Depression years and a stretch from 1972 to 1989. The current period, though, has lasted longer and fallen lower than either of the previous two. If the trend continues, Stone and Brookes project that the American population will peak around 351 million in the 2050s and then decline.

Why? Here the authors have uncovered something genuinely novel: evidence that the fertility collapse is not only economic, but social. Americans are not having fewer children because they want fewer children. They are having fewer children, in part, because friendship has thinned and social support for family life has weakened.

Surveys show that Americans want more children than they are likely to have. The IFS report puts desired family size at about 2.4 children on average; a 2025 Gallup survey found an even higher ideal family size of 2.7 children. Americans are actually on track for fewer than 1.6. The gap between desired and actual family size is the widest it has been since the early 1970s.

So what is blocking people? The standard answers are money and housing, and the report takes those seriously. But its centerpiece is a new survey of 4,784 Americans between 18 and 50, and the results point somewhere else: at peer culture.

The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Compare that with religion, the variable social scientists often concentrate on when looking at birth rates. Young Americans who never attend religious services want about two children. Regular attendees want about 2.7. Religion matters, but helpful friends matter just as much, if not more, and the statistical models suggest the two effects are separate.

Additionally, having friends with kids predicts wanting more kids yourself. The report shares a striking null result: the closeness of people’s relationships with their own parents predicts almost nothing about how many children they want. The average family size of peers matters about twice as much as the respondent’s own number of siblings in childhood.

Psychologists will not find this shocking. Humans are mimetic creatures. We calibrate our appetites, our outlooks, and our life plans by watching the people around us, as well as the people just above us. So it should not surprise us that the report finds a “celebrity effect” as well.

Respondents named the public figure they most admired. The researchers then looked up how many children that figure had. Each additional child born to an admired celebrity predicted about 0.15 more desired children for the fan. The effect was strongest among young women.

It is “empirically possible,” the authors write, “that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars to have children might produce more children in society than spending the same money on child tax credits, if her choice sways her wide fanbase.”

Still, there is a crucial catch in the data. Admired celebrities and friends with kids shape what people want. They do not shape what people do. When the researchers looked at actual intentions—meaning couples who wanted more children and concretely planned to have them—the celebrity effect nearly vanished.

In fact, the only social variable that still moved intentions was having friends who would actually help: watch the baby, bring the meals, change the diapers. Having supportive friends raised the share of couples intending to have another child from around 30 percent to about 45 percent.

Put simply: ambient culture sets the aspiration, but real-world friends lead to actual births. A society can be awash in pro-family influencers and still be barren if nobody is willing to babysit.

Friendship, though, is collapsing. The number of close friends Americans report has been falling for decades. Time spent with friends has dropped sharply, particularly for the young. The report cites new economics research with a title that says it all: “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” The study contends that smartphone adoption itself depressed birthrates.

Seen this way, the fertility crisis looks less like an economic problem and more like a downstream symptom of the loneliness problem. The friendship recession and the baby bust are the same recession.

What to do? Stone and Brookes offer a policy program bolder than the usual child tax-credit tinkering. The flagship is what they call American Birthday Accounts: invest $15,000 at every citizen’s birth, let it compound, and unlock it only when that child grows up and has children of his or her own. A married couple could receive on the order of $100,000 at a first birth. The authors estimate that this could raise birthrates by 20 to 40 percent, at a cost of less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

But the more original ideas are the cultural ones, and they follow from the friendship data. Perhaps most provocatively, the authors suggest “digital blue laws” that would tax smartphone data usage on weekends to nudge people off their phones and back into each other’s living rooms.

Some of these ideas will strike readers as fanciful. But the diagnosis behind them is hard to dismiss. For most of human history, children were raised inside a thick web of siblings, neighbors, and friends. Nobody had to be persuaded that family life was aspirational, because it was visible everywhere. We have thinned that web to a few strands and are surprised that people hesitate to envision babies within it.

The report ends with a note of optimism: demographic decline is a choice, and choices can be reversed. The question is whether Americans are willing to rebuild the ordinary social world that once made children thinkable: full pews, crowded porches, friends within walking distance. A country that cannot produce friendship will not produce much of anything else.

This article was originally published at City Journal under the title “Want More Babies? We Need More Friends.”

Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups.

But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.

There is an uncomfortable lesson hiding in these stories. First, you have to understand something crucial:

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From the archives:

Why (Some) Women are Attracted to Violent Men. An evolutionary explanation:

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

Why (Some) Women are Attracted to Violent Men

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2 years ago · 104 likes · 23 comments · Rob Henderson

The Only Reading App I Use:

I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:

These screenshots come from my Readwise app.

Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.

Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.

Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use this link →  https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).

I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.

Links and recommendations:

• A Contrarian Argument for Office Romances by Roy Baumeister

• Why do sociologists think that they are critical theorists? by

• How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age? by

• Changing Trust in the US and China by

• How Two California Cities Are Reducing Street Homelessness by Tom Wolf

• Are DSA Mayors the Future of the Democratic Party? by

• Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories

• You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Researchers have long wondered why older siblings tend to be, on average, more successful than younger siblings. Scott Alexander explored this question a few years ago and didn’t reach any strong conclusions. A new study finds that a major factor seems to be that older siblings bring home germs which can affect younger siblings’ brain development. Exposure to respiratory viruses before a baby’s first birthday consistently predicted reduced earnings. Half or more of the gap in life outcomes between older and younger siblings can be attributed to pathogens inadvertently brought home by older siblings. (source). One of those findings that sits in the sweet spot between counter-intuitive and obvious; it is both surprising and immediately makes sense when you hear it. Maybe the lesson here is to make sure older sibs wash up as soon as they get home.

2. Women may have evolved to be more concerned about their looks. A survey of more than 90,000 people from 93 nations found that, in every single one, women devote more time than men to enhancing their appearance. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

3. This isn’t a finding from a study or a survey, just a personal observation: My sister’s 6-month-old infant is going through a phase now where whenever my sister is in conversation with someone, the baby immediately begins babbling or making loud noises. As soon as my sister stops talking, the baby goes quiet. The babbling only comes when she hears her mom engaged in conversation with another person. The evolutionary psychologist in me thinks this is to ensure the mom doesn’t get too distracted; it is as if the infant is saying “While you’re talking to someone else, don’t forget I’m here and your main job is to keep me alive; don’t let your attention wander too far from me!” Related essay here.

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

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In moments of intense disagreement, you’re signaling what kind of person you are.

In a new paper, Zihan Yang and Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania examine how others interpret those signals. The results are striking. Remaining calm, what the authors call a “stoic display,” consistently improves how others see you. Crying and yelling, by contrast, damage your reputation.

This may seem obvious. But the researchers also discovered something more interesting. How you react during a conflict doesn’t only change how others see you. Your reaction also changes how observers see the person with whom you’re arguing. Making someone cry makes you look cold or insensitive. So tears can damage the other side’s reputation. There’s a catch, though. The person who cries is also seen as less competent, less professional and less desirable as a friend or colleague.

This creates a trade-off. Crying can hurt your opponent’s reputation, but it hurts yours as well. Behavioral stoicism—maintaining a calm outward demeanor during a conflict—does the opposite. It protects your own reputation, but does little to diminish the other person.

This trade-off explains why people handle conflict so differently. Some want to win the argument. Others prefer to avoid losing it, focusing less on persuading others and more on protecting how they are perceived.

From an evolutionary standpoint, emotions are critical signals. They tell people around you something important about your intentions and your attributes. Anger signals that you’re willing to push back. Sadness and tears signal that you need social support. Calm (“stoic display”) can signal inner control and self-mastery. Self-control is one of the most valued traits across almost every area of life. People who seem reliable, disciplined and steady tend to be trusted more, both in personal relationships and at work.

One of the clearest findings in the study is that yelling has almost no advantages. From the observer’s perspective, yelling damages the reputation of the person doing the yelling and does almost nothing to diminish the other side. Anger is sometimes thought to be useful. Showing anger can push others to back down, especially in negotiations. In everyday social conflicts, though, raising your voice is costly. Why?

One reason is that observers seem to distinguish between controlled firmness and losing your temper. Staying firm looks like strength. But shouting crosses a line. It suggests you’ve lost control, which undercuts the very impression of strength you were trying to project.

Another reason is that social norms have changed. In most modern settings, especially at work, noisy expressions of anger are seen as inappropriate. The same behavior that once might have signaled dominance now demonstrates a lack of social finesse.

Crying sits in a middle ground. The authors suggest that tears can sometimes serve a spiteful purpose. They can impose costs on someone else while harming you at the same time. This fits with what we know about human behavior. Crying, of course, is typically involuntary—most people don’t choose to cry. But whether deliberate or not, the social signal it sends is the same. Observers respond to the display itself, not the intention behind it. People don’t always act in purely self-interested ways. Sometimes they’re willing to take a personal hit if it also damages a rival or tips the judgment of onlookers in their favor. In this sense, crying can reframe a conflict. It draws attention to perceived mistreatment and invites others to issue blame.

This is a risky move, though. The same signal that draws sympathy can also lead people to see you as less capable and less professional. As the authors of the study put it, “crying imposes costs on conflict partners but also damages the crier’s reputation.”

If there’s a clear winner across these studies, it’s stoicism. Whether the conflict was at work or in a relationship, staying calm consistently led to improved judgments of the person. That doesn’t mean remaining calm wins every argument or changes the other person’s behavior. But it protects something that often matters more over time: your reputation.

The key insight from this research is not that emotions are bad. It’s that they carry trade-offs. Different responses achieve different social goals, and those goals can come into conflict.

If your aim is to protect your reputation, staying calm appears to be the safest bet. If your aim is to shift blame or elicit sympathy, emotional displays can be more effective, but also more costly.

A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “It’s Cool to Keep Calm.”

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I was born into poverty. My mother, an immigrant from Seoul, suffered from drug addiction. When police and social workers arrived at our slum apartment in Los Angeles in 1993, she told them she didn’t know who my father was. I was three. It wasn’t until I reached 31 that I learnt I am half Mexican on my father’s side.

After being taken from my mother, I grew up in foster homes in California.

As a teenager, I worked as a busboy, a dishwasher and a supermarket bagger. At 17, I enlisted in the US air force.

After leaving the military, I attended Yale with the support of the GI Bill, where I earned a degree in psychology.

I later completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates scholar. My first book became a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of 2024 by The Economist. The New York Times once described me as “self-made” and despite my uneasiness with that phrasing, I can’t fully deny it.

My story is what people often mean when they talk about the American Dream. Someone starts with very little and, through effort, opportunity and a bit of good fortune, builds a better life. Today, I am living proof that it’s possible to overcome hardship to achieve traditional success. It’s a promise that this country still offers, and continues to deliver.

By most broad measures, Americans today are better educated, live longer and have more disposable income than previous generations.

So why, as this country prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, do so few Americans believe the dream is available to everyone?

A new YouGov survey commissioned by The Times reveals that 59 per cent of adult Americans say the American Dream is less attainable today than when they were growing up. Only 38 per cent believe it exists for everyone, and a mere 17 per cent that children today will be better off than their parents.

Moreover, 48 per cent said most of the wealthy made their fortunes by breaking the rules, while only 24 per cent believed they did so by following them — reinforcing the sense that success in the US is not earned but gamed.

The data suggests that we are, as a country, losing faith in ourselves. And when you look at which Americans express scepticism about the future, the pattern becomes even more alarming.

A 2025 study by the Archbridge Institute found that 60 per cent of Americans with only a high school diploma believed their children would do as well or better than themselves. Among college graduates, that number falls to 52 per cent.

Additionally, Americans who earned more than $100,000 a year were more likely to say their kids would have fewer opportunities when they grew up, compared with Americans who earned less than $60,000 a year. Another study found that people with high income and high social status were most likely to say success came from luck rather than hard work.

This is what I call a “luxury belief”, in which the wealthy express an idea that makes them look smart or self-reflective while harming opportunities for the less fortunate. If disadvantaged people come to believe luck is the key factor that determines success, they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives.

But it’s not just our wealthiest citizens who are eroding our belief in the American Dream. Social media is adding another layer to this pessimism, especially among the young.

Every day, people scroll through videos of seemingly ordinary individuals becoming rich and famous overnight. A teenager posts a clip that goes viral and wakes up with hundreds of thousands of followers. A content creator uploads a video and earns more in a month than most people do in a year. This can distort how people think about success. If wealth appears to come from luck rather than effort, the system starts to look unfair. Over time, this weakens faith in the idea that hard work pays off.

But here’s the reality: only 2 per cent of content creators make more than $50,000 a year. The vast majority earn little or nothing. What we see on our screens is not an accurate representation of reality. It is a highlight reel of the extremely lucky.

When people stop believing that effort pays off, they stop making the effort. Over time, that belief can become self-fulfilling.

And yet, as Americans debate whether the dream is fading, people around the world keep risking their lives to achieve it. Even amid widespread pessimism, most Americans recognise this. Fifty-five per cent of respondents in the Times-YouGov survey — and even a majority of adults under 30 — said the US offered above-average opportunities compared with other countries, while only 19 per cent said the opposite.

In short, although many doubt America, most admit it offers better opportunities than anywhere else.

That alone should give us pause. In recent years more than a million immigrants have arrived annually from countries such as Cuba, Mexico and India, escaping economies riven with scarcity, where advancement depends less on effort and more on connections or corruption.

No system is perfectly fair. But a system in which people rise based on their ability and hard work is far superior to any other.

I was reminded of this at a wedding in California two years ago. After dinner, I went into the kitchen and asked the cooks if they had any cigarettes. I ended up outside with the head caterer, who was born in the Philippines. He told me he gave the same advice to everyone on his team, which was entirely composed of fellow immigrants: if you work hard in this country, you can make money. It really is that simple, he said.

It was possible in the Philippines too, he said, but not like it was here. America was different because hard work was more reliably rewarded.

I often think back to that brief conversation as a reminder of what America represents, which is often overlooked by polls and surveys. In 1931, the historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream as a “dream of a land … in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”.

That ideal has never been perfectly realised, but it has been real enough to shape many lives for the better, including my own. All the naysayers and noise on social media can’t change that fact.

If the American Dream is dead, no one told the people who are still chasing it.

Here’s a video I did for The Times, on the question of the American Dream.

A version of this article was originally published by The Times under the title “The American Dream is dead? I’m living proof it’s not.”

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From the archives:

Why You Should Trust Trust and Distrust Distrust

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

Why You Should Trust Trust and Distrust Distrust

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2 years ago · 196 likes · 14 comments · Rob Henderson

The Psychology of Morality:

My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.

I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.

Enroll here for immediate access.

Here’s the trailer:

Links and recommendations:

• Maximizers vs. Satisficers by

• This Is Serious by

• Ambassadors of Ugliness by Theodore Dalrymple

• How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths by

• Race, Income and Why Some Democrats Have the Luxury of Opposing School Choice by Brian Kisida

• America the Beautiful by Norman Podhoretz

• Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories

• You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Men’s child care time has increased in the past few generations. Millennial dads are now spending as much time with their kids as baby boomer moms once did. Interestingly, though, modern fatherhood shows a class-based divergence: Highly educated dads are investing more time and energy into parenthood, while working-class fathers are spending slightly less time with their kids than they did a generation ago (source).

2. Professors at leading US universities were asked to evaluate applications for a tenure-track STEM position. The applications were identical for all participants. The study revealed a 2:1 preference for the female applicants. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

3. Power laws exist even within the top 10 richest people. Elon Musk is worth more than the bottom 5 combined. (source).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

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Sittig completed her master’s degree in International Affairs/European Politics at Columbia University in New York City and regularly publishes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was a Collegiate Associate at the Manhattan Institute in New York and a Research Intern at United Against Nuclear Iran. In 2016, she won the ZEIT Young Talent Award. She is a member of the New York chapter of the internationally active group “Students Supporting Israel.”

Sittig’s book reminded me a little of Thomas Sowell’s classic Intellectuals and Society, updated for the current moment. I spoke with her about her book; transcript below:

Rob Henderson: What is the Marxist-Islamist alliance? You and your co-author, Noam Petri, describe this alliance as a kind of ideological marriage of convenience between hyper-progressive campus culture and Islamist networks. Can you explain this alliance? What I’m really curious about is how each side views the other.

Franziska Sittig: It’s basically an ideological alliance of two groups that, as I’m going to elaborate on further, don’t really have anything in common. They could be further away in many aspects, but they have one united hatred, which is against the West—against America as the big Satan, Israel as the little Satan.

Rob Henderson: America is the big Satan. Israel is the little Satan. Is there a medium-sized Satan?

Franziska Sittig: Germany is the medium Satan. Probably.

Rob Henderson: Alright.

Franziska Sittig: They both share the worldview of viewing the entire West as a system of oppressors versus oppressed. And how they view each other—it’s interesting because Islamists are actually much more clever than we would think they are. They know exactly that they have to deal with more left-wing, hyper-progressive peoples in the West than conservatives. There was an imam, a pretty famous imam, a religious leader, who said that they know they have to talk to the left-wing people in the West because conservatives have principles and left-wing people do not have principles. These were literally his words. So they know pretty much that they can fool the hyper-progressives. And the hyper-progressives—they’re really fools because they don’t know whom they’re marrying, like the Islamists. I’ve talked to so many people, not just me—so many of us talked to progressives at Columbia and in Germany, online, and just asked them those questions: What would they think about Sharia law? How do they view the treatment of women in Arab countries? Were they aware that they would be thrown off a building in Gaza because of being progressive and gay? This is like the “Queers for Palestine” thing, because we both know that queerness and progressiveness often go hand in hand. And they never answered that question. They reacted with slurs toward me—“Oh, f-ck you, Zionists,” whatever. They never answered any of these questions.

Rob Henderson: Who was this person who said conservatives have principles and progressives don’t? What’s his name?

Franziska Sittig: It was an imam. I would have to look up the name.

Rob Henderson: I’m fascinated by that statement because, famously, Mao Zedong, the communist dictator of China, in the late 1960s when he was discussing his decision to meet with President Richard Nixon—who was a conservative right-wing Republican—Mao said that he wanted to meet with Nixon. And Mao's quote was, “I like to deal with rightists because rightists say what they really think, unlike leftists who say one thing and mean another.” The impression, at least from the perspective of at least one leftist icon, is that people on the right have principles and people on the left don’t. The imam’s quote is an interesting echo of history. So, next question. In the foreword by Reihan Salam, he describes your book as a timely warning about a red-green alliance—the sort of woke Marxist alliance between utopian leftism and murderous Islamism. How much of that alliance depends on hating the same things versus sharing a united vision?

Franziska Sittig: Let’s assume those two groups defeated the West—they defeated us capitalists and Westerners. What would happen? The Islamists would have the vision of a theocratic system where divine law would rule everything, would be above everything. Public and private affairs would be governed alike. Civil law, family law, inheritance, sexual behavior, speech—all those things would be subordinated to Sharia law. And we would never have anything remotely like equality before the law, because Muslim men would be first-class citizens, Muslim women would have very little authority, and then non-Muslim citizens would just—no one would care about them. That would be the system they envision. And you might have different views on how hyper-progressives would view their future—but I think we could agree that they would want equality of outcome in every single possible way, which is never going to be possible. But they would force it. Merit would be viewed as suspicious and success would always require some justification in a hyper-progressive, even Marxist system. And I think we would pretty easily understand that those two visions of the future don’t have anything in common. The only thing they would have in common is this totalizing point of view of a world order. But they would have different gods. One of them would subordinate everything under Allah and the other to the warmth of collectivism. That totalizing view would probably be the only common denominator. And if only Islamists and Marxists were left, I don’t know how many years they would get along with this different vision of how society should be. And then they would just cut off each other’s heads. I would predict probably about five years.

Rob Henderson: Five years. That’s how long they would get along with each other.

Franziska Sittig: So the first part of your hypothesis is definitely correct—they share this one common enemy: the West, Israel, America. That’s literally the main thing that unites them. It’s not so much a shared vision of the future, because as we just saw, it would diverge.

Rob Henderson: In your book, you and your co-author argue wokeness functions as an autoimmune disease of civilization, which is a useful analogy to capture what’s happening. A striking, evocative metaphor. Can you walk through what that means? How do you see the West’s moral immune system—commitment to tolerance, pluralism, self-criticism, the hallmarks of a liberal democracy—being turned against the West itself?

Franziska Sittig: An autoimmune disease is basically that the body isn’t able to distinguish between healthy and dangerous cells. The body kind of attacks itself because it can’t distinguish between them. And wokeness is something Noam and I always thought of as—woke people fighting against the very system that would enable all their beliefs and demands of racial justice, social justice, complete equality. They fight against a system that enabled them to live after those beliefs. And they wouldn’t realize that wokeness itself was diametrically opposed to what they wanted to make a permanent order. For example, we both know that woke admissions to jobs or universities—they try to eliminate racism, but they’re often much more racist than anything. If they specifically demand applications from Black or Latino people and white people are frowned upon, I mean, that is much more racist than anything else.

Rob Henderson: I find the categories interesting. With gender, there seems to be this binary: it’s men, and then women plus non-binary are categorized together, which I find interesting. I saw this at Cambridge when I was in grad school. They would have women’s groups, women’s sessions, women’s meetings, and anyone was welcome unless you were a cisgender male. Women and then men who identify as women—they’re all welcome, but no one else. I always thought, why do women willingly go along with being categorized alongside people who are something completely different?

Franziska Sittig: It just shows the function of an autoimmune disease. By establishing this wokeness system, they don’t understand that the very beliefs and assumptions they want to have as an order are being threatened by all their systems of wokeness.

Rob Henderson: One of the most provocative claims in the book—you talk about the US showing the rest of the world the ropes when it comes to ideological capture. I’ve written about this. I wrote an essay many years ago about America exporting wokeness. You’ve lived in both Germany and in the US, and I’m curious if you notice any differences in how this dynamic has played out—what political extremism looks like in Germany versus the US.

Franziska Sittig: Specifically regarding the campus protests, it was on both sides of the Atlantic—and pretty much everywhere else in the world—Jewish students who rang the alarm bells. No one else. The majority society didn’t understand.

Rob Henderson: In both the US and Germany?

Franziska Sittig: In both the US and Germany, and also Australia for that matter. The majority society wouldn’t notice what they had gotten into. As a difference, I would say in the US we had Republican politicians, lawmakers, and then also the progressive crowd like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib getting into the debate pretty quickly—they would take a side and either support or call out the protesters. In Germany, it almost didn’t enter the political debate. It was viewed as a student sub-phenomenon that would blow off eventually, that would remain within the realm of universities. Most politicians in Germany didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. As an effect, we didn’t have any federal executives, like task forces against antisemitism, signed in Germany—not a single one—whereas Trump, early 2025, signed an executive order.

In Germany, it didn’t really have an effect on political life. There were not as many encampments in Germany. And if there were, they were covered by media not to the same extent as here. No political leaders would speak out for or against those encampments. And in Germany—this is a problem because of our migration mechanism—we have much more of this than the US. When there were streets filled with anti-America, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, and lately pro-Mullah protesters, they were students, of course, but they were also many non-students—just regular people of Arab and Turkish background. These people are able to fill the streets much more, I feel, than in America because we have a different migration situation than the US. And they’re never being held accountable. A growing number of migrants of this particular background are being treated a bit like children in Germany—they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions. And if anyone has to pay for it, it’s Germans—Germans who are law-abiding citizens—they have to play the adults in the room and are being held responsible for what happened. The blame is often shifted toward the Germans, that we didn’t do enough to integrate them in society, that we didn’t tolerate their beliefs, cultural differences, and that is the reason they radicalized so much. If only we were a little bit more tolerant, then everything would have been fine. But as I said, if anything, we have been overly tolerant and empathetic toward cultural differences and religious practices that normally would be totally opposed to our value system. We have been more than tolerant.

Rob Henderson: On the political left, this belief that if there are any failures to integrate, it’s because the host culture hasn’t done enough—they need to do more, more tolerance, more inclusion, more compassion, more empathy. And then when that fails, to just keep doing that, which backfires. You describe anti-Zionism as a Trojan horse. This is a question I’ve long wondered about, ever since I first set foot on a college campus more than a decade ago: What makes Israel specifically such a uniquely effective mobilization project? It seems to be a lightning rod for political activists. What is it about Israel?

Franziska Sittig: It’s that “the Jew”—the abstract notion of “the Jew”—has been there for centuries, actually ever since the crucifixion of Christ. You could attribute to Jews all kinds of negative traits you could ever come up with: bankers who control the economy, control the weather, people who murder Christian children and drink their blood, people who murder Palestinian children. There has never been a lack of any negative attribute that you could attach to this abstract notion of the Jew. And then when Israel came into existence, it was basically that this abstract version of the bad Jew had a geographic location. And that location just came attached with this. I think it’s really this centuries-, even millennia-old abstract notion of the bad Jew. You could blame-shift at every time—when there was mass hunger, when there was financial crisis, whatever happened, the Jews could always be used as a scapegoat. And I think this enabled people to view the homeland of the Jew as the worst place on earth, no matter if there were many more casualties in South Sudan or Yemen or Iran. This long-held prejudice against the Jew just enabled it.

Rob Henderson: That’s interesting. I think for a lot of people they would think the causal arrow is: Israel, displacement of Palestinians, the land—and that gave rise to anti-Zionism.

Franziska Sittig: But it was never a territorial conflict. If you just look at the different agreements that were offered to the Palestinians—if it had been about territory, they would have agreed to the partition plan in 1948, they would have agreed to many other compromises offered after that. It was never about that. It was because they never wanted to get along with the fact that they would have to live alongside Jews.

Rob Henderson: I think for a lot of people, there has to be some kind of reason for all this antisemitism. “Oh, it must be Israel, it must be some sort of geopolitical conflict or dispute about territory.” But it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s always been this kind of ambient antisemitism and that Israel just gave people an excuse, a justification, to finally let out this hate that had always existed—latent hate. I find that persuasive. After October 7th, I remember seeing a lot of accounts online, left-leaning accounts, and they were posting a lot of ugly antisemitic stuff. And I thought, do they hate Jews or do they just hate white people? Is this just—oh, to them Jews are just white, so they can vent all of this hatred? But then I started to see the memes and online vitriol and it was extremely antisemitic. It wasn’t just anti-white. It was a different and shocking level of hatred. And then I understood these people truly do hate Jewish people specifically. Why do they hate Jews? And maybe this just means I’ve spent too much time on elite campuses and I’ve been marinated in anti-white sentiment for so long I’ve become numb to it, but antisemitism still shocks me.

Franziska Sittig: You can have a lot of prejudice against many minority groups. Here in the US, there was a lot of prejudice against Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants. You can be prejudiced toward Muslim people. But there’s no other group that has simultaneously been described as subhuman and omnipotent at the same time. The Jews are the only group that has those two contradictory attributes ascribed to them. And that’s just something people can’t deal with. On the one hand, you view them as dirty, as people who steal and lie and do all those very low-level things, and then you have the financially successful bankers and the related prejudice that they would control the world economy and the weather and everything else. And we can all agree that this is paradoxical, to view a minority group this way.

Rob Henderson: Whatever bad thing happens, whatever you don’t like, the Jews are responsible. If you don’t like socialism, it’s the Jews. If you don’t like capitalism, it’s the Jews. If you don’t like cosmopolitanism, it’s the Jews.

Franziska Sittig: And once they had established their homeland, they also didn’t like it. They didn’t like that Jews were cosmopolitan and pretty much at home everywhere, that they were a people of the diaspora. Once they had established their homeland and were there to stay, people also didn’t like that.

Rob Henderson: Final question. You and your co-author are both young, relatively early in your careers, and many people your age who write books like this would soften the edges, hedge their bets, qualify their arguments. I wouldn’t, but a lot of people would. So what motivated you to write something this direct and unsparing—something that could potentially get under people’s skin and people might object to or take offense at?

Franziska Sittig: The whole point of writing any book, I think, is that you want to get under people’s skin. There’s no point in writing only half-truths and softening the edges. There’s literally no point—otherwise we could have just dropped the project if that was our goal. And since our generation, Gen Z, has always been described and accused of being snowflakey and soft—like we need to be pampered all the time and we can’t face harsh reality—we wanted to make the point that this is not necessarily the case. We as Gen Z can very well deal with reality. We have to deal with reality. And it was at the same time a call on our generation to be more like the adults in the room, to deal with the reality they have often created themselves, and to understand the consequences they’ve created by their own false ideals and pro-terrorism support and antisemitism. We basically hope that some people from our generation would wake up.

Rob Henderson: Franziska Sittig, thank you.

Franziska Sittig: Thank you.

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