Thinking Class, Free Will, Smokers
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my discussion with Theodore Dalrymple and John Gillam on the Thinking Class podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
NYC Event:
You are invited to attend my live event with Freya India, one of my favorite writers. May 13 at 6:30pm.
Details and registration here.
Wall Street Journal:
I have a new piece out in the WSJ about free will.
A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.
In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”
Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.
Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction.
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
What Historians Make of America’s 250th Anniversary by Edward Short
The Girlboss Lie That’s Breaking Working-class Women’s Hearts by Lisa Britton
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. Researchers asked 64,000 women in 180 countries what traits they look for in a partner and above wealth, status or height, they chose kindness as the most key, followed by supportiveness. (source).
2. Forty years ago, Venezuela and Norway had the same level of both national income and oil reserves. Norway now has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, while millions of Venezuelans are facing malnutrition and, in some cases, starvation. (source).
3. Smokers tend to incur higher annual healthcare costs, but because they die sooner, their lifetime healthcare spending is less than that of non-smokers. Non-smokers live longer and develop more age-related illnesses that cost money. (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)
1-on-1 Coffee Chats
I’ve been thinking about ways to offer paid subscribers more value. Because I’ve already been doing occasional informal coffee chats with readers who reach out to me, I figured I’d open it up to subscribers. Starting this month, I’m setting aside time for a very small number of 1-on-1 coffee chats here in NYC. These will be casual, informal conversations. We can talk about anything from the newsletter, ideas from Troubled, luxury beliefs, psychology, human nature, or whatever else is on your mind. It’s possible I won’t be able to reply to everyone, but I’ll do my best to get back to as many people as I can.
Details:
-NYC only (I’m based here full-time)
-Limited slots (priority given to paid subscribers)
-Free subscribers are welcome to apply but will be lower priority
If you’re interested, please fill out the short form below. I review responses manually and will send a scheduling link.
Looking forward to meeting some of you in person.
-Rob
🔷 This feels like one of the central tensions in modern psychology and neuroscience.
Clearly we are shaped by biology, conditioning, and forces outside awareness, but collapsing that entirely into determinism seems to miss something important: humans also appear capable of developing greater self-awareness, self-regulation, and coherence over time.
Agency isn’t absolute freedom from causation; it’s a developmental capacity that can strengthen or weaken.
I wonder how much peer pressure there is to publicly espouse a "girlboss" mindset while doing otherwise, similar to how guys have long portrayed themselves as "promiscuous players with good game", even (especially!) when they aren't.
It's all fun and games until someone actually believes and acts on this crap.