The Boston Globe, Elite Status Signals, Political Activism
My Boston Globe column + links and recommendations
Here is my recent appearance on The Spectator, where I spoke with Freddy Gray:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Boston Globe
I recently accepted a role as a monthly columnist at the Boston Globe, where I will contribute one opinion piece per month for their special Sunday edition. Here is my debut piece:
Why are women becoming so much more liberal than men?
Upon publication it was the #1 most read opinion piece. Excerpt:
In 2021, 44 percent of young women in the United States identified as liberal compared with just 25 percent of young men — the biggest gender gap in 24 years of polling.
The [gender-equality] paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.
The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.
[…]
The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.
However, even among college students, women are more left-leaning than men. A Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of 254 colleges and universities found that 55 percent of female students identify as liberal, compared with only 40 percent of male students. Interestingly, at schools ranked below 200 by US News and World Report, 45 percent of women and 33 percent of men identify as liberal. At top 25 schools, though, the difference is more pronounced, with 71 percent of women and 54 percent of men identifying as liberal.
[…]
In the most equal nations of the world, it’s not harsh gender socialization by parents and media, strict societal expectations, or institutional forces that widen the differences between men and women. In the absence of dire poverty and strict social expectations, people are in a position to express their intrinsic attributes and preferences.
The freer people are and the more fairly they are treated, the more differences tend to grow rather than shrink. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Z men and women are diverging along political lines to a greater extent than earlier generations did.
Do read the whole thing here.
Links and recommendations
"All the memories, the emotions were all still there on some level. That was surprising to me." by Ryan
The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education by George Packer
This Guy Used ChatGPT to Talk to 5,000 Women on Tinder and Met His Wife by Maxwell Zeff
A rational view of female modesty by Tove K
London, please love yourself. by Alex Kaschuta
Getting Too Good at the Wrong Thing by Nat Eliason
One of the reasons I don’t devote more time to live events, public speaking, social media, emailing, etc. is because I need to have a clear head to do my work. And in order to do that, my schedule has to be clean. My mind and my time must be free. This was how simultaneously I wrote a book, completed my PhD thesis, and built a newsletter. Each minute spent screwing around on social media or traveling on the road to another gig is a minute I’m not actively thinking, reading, writing, and so on. In his biography about the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the author Michael Ignatieff notes that in the old days, to be a good scholar, you had to have lots of unstructured time to connect dots that most people are understandably too busy to immediately notice. You have to be a little bit selfish. The comedian Adam Carolla says “I like to work really hard, but only once in a while.” Many people in creative professions are like this. They kind of bob around for a while thinking about things. They do a few live events, take part in a few low-effort endeavors. And then suddenly, when the moment is right, the person devotes an enormous amount of time or energy to a passion project. This is the right job for me. I’ll read a few books. Browse some academic papers. Take walks. Write notes. Hit the gym. Take a few meetings. Go to Paris for a weekend. Write some essays. Visit my sister in California. Fire off a few tweets. It’s a pretty good life. But first I had to be a normal person working a series of tough jobs for a while and had to learn something about the value of real work in order to be in a position to be thankful for how things are now. At some point I’ll start getting restless, talk to my agent, and maybe see about doing another book or something. But I have a lot of essays I want to write first. Which requires keeping a relatively unoccupied calendar. Jordan Peterson has described how when he was writing Maps of Meaning, the book out of which many of his other ideas grew, he had to make painful sacrifices with his time.
Likewise, from the classic 1986 talk “You and Your Research,” by the mathematician Richard Hamming:
“Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime…I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this…Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity comes out of your subconscious.’ Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.”
Three new reviews of Troubled
No haven by Steven McGregor (The New Criterion)
Excerpt: “It would be easy to dismiss this conclusion as the latest version of Marx’s class envy...But Henderson is making a much different claim...He is attempting to defend the family rather than destroy the class system.” Steve gets it. I’m not anti-elite. I’m not a class warrior. I just want our elites to be better. Or at least less stupid.
What Our Elites Get Wrong about Class by Hannah E. Meyers (National Review)
“Henderson’s memoir will resonate widely, and it’s easy to understand why...a growing divide between the values promoted by elites and the realities of the most vulnerable.”
Growing up in the one percent…of childhood instability by Ryan
A reminder to please post your reviews on Amazon and Goodreads
Three interesting findings
1. Among previous generations, researchers often found that those engaged in political activism were happier. Yet more recent studies of young activists find the opposite: those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health. (source: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt).
2. Prior to age 32, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11%. However, after 32 the odds of divorce increase by 5% per year. For almost everyone, the late twenties seems to be the best time to tie the knot. (source).
3. From a recent paper titled “Negativity drives online news consumption,” the authors find that each additional negative word in a headline is associated with a 2.3% increase in click-through rate (source). Most frequent negative words in headlines:
1. Wrong
2. Bad
3. Awful
4. Hate
5. War
6. Worst
7. Sick
8. Fight
9. Scary
10. Hell
The more equal a society gender wise, the more women feel free to make choices like study the liberal arts. Had I been an Indian immigrant instead of being born here I might have studied a stem field but I felt more free to pick what I wanted to learn instead. In less equal countries women are likelier to study stem. When you point this out people think you’re being sexist. So more women go to college than men, and more women study the liberal arts than men, which puts the political differences on overdrive because leftists and woman are the vast majority of professors in many of those fields. It’s a snowball. And none of my single women friends realize that men’s lower aggregate economic prospects and fewer going to college are major reasons they are still single. It’s a shame because no individual woman can do anything about it, and I fear we’re headed off the cliff of population decline because men mate horizontally and down and women horizontally and up. I’m not sure anyone will convince women to mate horizontally and down based on educational attainment, and people of different classes don’t even mix.
There is no time in history where humanity has attempted this current Western experiment of a female dominated society. I don't think it is going very well. I think as a species we have not evolved nearly fast enough to adopt what are significantly disruptive changes to almost everything. I am not optimistic about the future.
In my long corporate career observing and experiencing gender differences in the workplace, there is a profound difference in how females tend to forge, maintain and manage relationships... and much of their tendency is not healthy for the work culture. I would bet that this behavior is based on years of tribal evolution... where female interactions and behaviors have been patterned for survival and thriving in the context of their existence. Those impulses seem very baked-in and often at odds with how people should behave to optimize outcomes.
For example, I have situations with female coworkers owning personal grudges never go away and they attempt to undermine and destroy the reputation of other people, but in a stealth mode. Typically for the male employees conflict is open and direct and can be cleared up so we can move on. When you add up all the unresolved conflict in a workplace with many females, trust evaporates and the work culture devolves.
Females tend to weirdly gravitate toward a collectivist model of cooperation while internally and individually making cooperation more difficult.
I am generalizing here as there are males that do the same. But there is a definite gender difference and I think much of the chaos we all feel in our politics and society are related to this domination of females and the backroom and underground character assassination tendency they demonstrate.