You can now catch my recent conversation with Meghan Daum on The Unspeakable podcast:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
NYC Event:
You are invited to attend my live event with author and professional boxer Ed Latimore in New York City. September 18 at 6pm.
Details and registration here.
The Times
Here’s my latest piece for The Times of London
A new kind of cancel culture is brewing — on the right
Excerpt:
In a recent interview to discuss his latest film, Denzel Washington was asked if he ever worried about being cancelled.
The Oscar-winning actor just shrugged.
“Who cares?” he replied. “What made public support so important to begin with? You can’t be cancelled if you haven’t signed up. Don’t sign up.”
It’s easy for Washington to say this at a time when the social media mob has seemingly lost its power. From 2013 until last year, people’s lives were ruined even if they hadn’t “signed up” for public support. Some were even cancelled for expressing ideas that were actually supported by the public.
Take, for example, the New York Times editorial page editor who was sacked for running a piece backing National Guard deployments during the 2020 riots. He was run out of his job for publishing a commentary that the majority of Americans agreed with.
[…]
Now, the progressive mob has ebbed — and it’s not because people have suddenly become more tolerant. Rather, the hunting ground has changed.
The easy targets are gone, and the survivors have learnt to keep quiet. The campaign worked too well. People with heterodox views were either purged or trained to self-censor so thoroughly that there are fewer left-wing targets to cancel.
The shift, however, is mostly down to Elon Musk. When the billionaire bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, he didn’t just acquire a website. He disrupted the central co-ordination hub for the activists, academics and journalists who ran cancellation drives. The people who once set the daily script lost their primary tool.
You can read the whole thing here.
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:
Breakneck or Bottleneck? by Jordan McGillis
What Happens If No One Reads by Spencer Klavan
Giving people money helped less than I thought it would by Kelsey Piper
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. Graduates of top medical schools are the most likely to support vague notions of "social justice," and the least likely to actually work in socioeconomically deprived areas. (source).
2. Adolescents in modern societies spend most of their time with peers of the same age, unlike in traditional cultures where they interact with younger children and provide care for them. Evidence suggests that the lack of mixed-age interaction increases aggression, defiance, attention seeking, and risk-taking behaviors. (source). Anecdotally, as a kid, whenever I was responsible for looking after my adoptive younger sister, I behaved better than when I was off on my own or with my friends. You see this with little kids. A 6-year-old will behave like a menace on his own, but ask him to care for his 3-year-old sibling and watch him transform.
3. Ninety-seven percent of young adults who adhere to the Success Sequence escape poverty by age thirty. Furthermore, 86% of young adults who followed these steps reached the middle or upper class. (source).
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)
For that second finding, my grandmother used to always say the best way to raise boys is to make sure they’re around younger boys because it forces them to be responsible and mature.
I wonder if that does have a bigger impact for boys. Anecdotally, I remember being a teenage boy who would do typical dumb teenage boy things but when I was forced to babysit younger cousins, my act would completely switch up and I would act like a more responsible paternal figure who plays with them and looks out for their safety. I also enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would have, being a big brother-uncle figure for younger cousins. Maybe it would benefit teenagers more.
There’s also an opinion posited by Louise Perry that one of the reasons young people may not want kids as much these days is because they never grew up around kids and for many of them they’ve never even held a baby, especially if they didn’t have a close tie to extended family and as a result, their tolerance for children decreases.