You can now catch my recent appearance alongside Abigail Shrier on the City Journal Podcast, where we were both interviewed by Brian C. Anderson.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Attend My New Lecture Series at Peterson Academy:
You are invited to be a student at my new lecture series at Peterson Academy. Phoenix, Arizona. November 5-7. The plan is for me to deliver 2 lectures per day over the course of 3 days.
If you want to attend my course and be a part of the live in-studio audience, you can apply here.
From the archives:
The Distinctiveness of Human Aggression
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:
The Shaky Science Behind Harm Reduction and Pediatric Gender Medicine by Adam Zivo
Kōhei Saitō’s tsunami of confusion by Joseph Heath
Fascinating discussion here. One excerpt: “Anyone familiar with the degrowth literature will know there is...a shell game going on in these arguments. Very few proponents of degrowth are willing to come out and say ‘suck it up, you’re going to have to live like a medieval peasant.’ So instead they engage in wordplay.” Somehow the thinking has gone from “Unleash the free market, let people get rich, and impose heavy taxes on them to help everyone else” to “No one is allowed to get rich, growth is bad, and everyone must live in a hovel.”
Reading Books Made a Man Out of Me by Shilo Brooks
What are we really doing on social media? by Lionel Page
In Pursuit: Marriage, Motherhood, and Women’s Well-Being by Jean M. Twenge, Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang, and Brad Wilcox
3 Powerful Factors That Drive Sexual Attraction to Friends by Madeleine A. Fugère
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 Americans most prone to zero-sum thinking included people who lived in cities, those who have especially low or high levels of income, people who identify as strong Democrats, and those who possess graduate degrees. (source: We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi).
2. Intriguing sex differences in the placement of tattoos: Men tend to place them on their upper bodies, whereas women have more abdominal and backside tattoos. The emphasis seems to be on areas highlighting fertility in females and physical strength in males. (source).
3. When you look at societies with very high rates of pathological depression, two things stand out: a high value placed on individualism and high relational mobility—lots of turnover in the characters that inhabit your life. (source: Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier).
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)
Great interview pulling a lot of things together!
A personal note on physical punishment: In school in the Denmark of my time, bad behavior was routinely punished with a notable smack. My own punishment came when I told the music teacher leading the school orchestra that I found the whole thing very boring. He smacked me, hard, and threw me out of both class and orchestra. I left feeling...relieved. It closed the affair completely, and I had nothing to mull over (I was also glad to be out).