Homelessness, Brain Age, Drug Gangs
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my latest conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on the Open Therapy podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
From The Archives:
The Evolutionary Logic of Emotional Development in Children
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 Moral Hierarchy Among Murderers by Theodore Dalrymple
Islam in America by Reihan Salam
Low-Conscientiousness Losers Are Bad Senate Candidates by Josh Barro
Why we like to believe other people are stupid by Tom Stafford
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. Fewer than 40% of Londoners are now white British; in 1961, it was nearly 98%. A quarter of the population of Brussels is Muslim. More than 40% of elementary and middle school children in Vienna are Muslim.
3. Some human sex differences are genuinely enormous. For example, voice pitch, has an effect size of around d = 4 (a huge difference). Curiously, the sex difference in voice pitch is larger in humans than in any other ape, including those that are much more dimorphic than us in size. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
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)
