Anger, Tattoos and Piercings, Liberal White Women

Podcast appearance + links and recommendations

You can listen to my appearance on the Are You Kidding Me? Podcast, where I spoke with Ian Rowe and Naomi Schaefer Riley (who wrote a review of Troubled for Commentary Magazine here).

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

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Book event at Cornell

I’ll be speaking at Cornell University today (September 10) at 5:30pm. Statler Hall, Room 165. Free and open to the public. Details here.

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Boston Globe

Here’s my latest piece in my regular monthly column at The Boston Globe:

Why are you so angry?

Excerpt:

A series of studies published last year led by Heather C. Lench at Texas A&M University found that angry people persisted longer and did better at solving word problems. Angry people also earned higher scores on a challenging video game and were more likely to sign a petition to stop student tuition increases. Furthermore, analyzing survey data from the 2016 and 2020 US general elections, the studies found that a person’s anger at an opposing candidate’s potential win predicted a greater likelihood that the person would vote in the next election.

Our emotions evolved in the context of small hunter-gatherer societies before the rise of agriculture roughly 12,000 years ago. Because culture and technology evolve faster than biology, our emotions are adaptive for those small-scale communities, but our emotions are not necessarily adaptive in the same way in modern technologically advanced societies.

The fact that anger helps us stand up for ourselves and demand better treatment makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, given that showing anger could prevent exploitation and help with survival.

In our modern world, though, anger often leads to frustration. We are regularly exposed to profound societal problems without obvious and immediately actionable ways to resolve them. The mismatch between the causes of our anger and the lack of solutions leaves many of us feeling stuck. Politicians and public figures capitalize on this feeling, aiming to energize people into converting their anger into votes.

Do read the whole thing here.

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Links and recommendations

• The Nature and Nurture of Self-Control by

  Steve Stewart-Williams

• What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It) by Tasha Eurich

• Tattoos and piercings, what do they tell you about someone? by

  Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

• 11 Lessons From 33 Years on This Planet by

  Polina Pompliano

• Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart: A Reconciliation by

  Bryan Caplan

• Behind the fertility crisis, there is an army of worried mothers by

  Tove K

• 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

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Three interesting findings

1. High self-esteem isn't a strong predictor of success at school or work. As just one example: The ethnic group in the U.S. with the lowest self-esteem is Asian Americans—yet they also have the best academic performance and the lowest unemployment rate. (source: Generations by Jean Twenge).

2. 56% of liberal white women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. (source).

3. What women say is important for their own self-perceived mate value, in order of importance: 

1. Appearance

2. Passion

3. Dominance

What actually predicts men's satisfaction with their partner, in order of importance (source): 

1. Passion

2. Warmth

3. Appearance

4. Stability

5. Intellect