Counter-Empathy, Lean Men, Weimar
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my latest appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, where I spoke with Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff. Starts at around 21:05.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
From the archives:
Caesar’s Lean Men. The role of social status in political discontent:
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:
“Sometimes It Pays to Be Gay and Do Crime” by Stu Smith
Therapeutic Culture Is a Luxury Belief: Why Young People Are Struggling (transcript) by Abigail Shrier, Rob Henderson, and Brian C. Anderson
My friend Alex runs one of my favorite book review newsletters
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. The Dugum Dani of Papua New Guinea had a long reputation for frequent warfare. When an Australian police post was set up in their region, the anthropologist Karl Heider expected it would do little to curb the constant violence. Instead, the opposite occurred. With the arrival of colonial authorities providing a clear way to coordinate peace, the Dani quickly ended their fighting. Many later said they felt relieved to finally escape the cycle of violence and revenge. (source: Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton).
2. Women who reported strong agreement with statements such as “I tend to look for negative characteristics in attractive women” and “I wouldn’t hire a very attractive woman as a colleague,” were more likely to recommend shorter haircuts for other women. (source).
3. Aggression is about 65% heritable, while rule-breaking stems more from environment (34% non-shared; 18% shared). Genes largely determine how aggressive people are, but parents and peers shape how that aggression is expressed. (source: The Goodness Paradox by Richard Wrangham).
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:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
“Rob Henderson’s story is one of struggle, resilience, and accomplishment. Spare, searching, and provocative, Troubled chronicles an epic journey from an unstable childhood through foster care, the military, Yale, Cambridge, and now the preeminence needed to prick complacent consciences everywhere. This is a powerful, moving, and necessary book.”
—John Lewis Gaddis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of George F. Kennan: An American Life, Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University