We have discussed potlatch a lot so far but obfuscated exchange is one of my two major research interests, and it’s what first got me really interested in Ashley’s work.1 At some level the fundamental nature of the interaction is that rich men are paying for models to hang out with them, yet that rarely happens directly. Instead there are multiple ways in which the nature of this transaction is obfuscated. And note, it’s not because anything about bottle service is illegal, because it ain’t. Unlike prostitution, there are no laws against paying for arm candy, it’s just that it’s seen as extremely tacky and kind of a desperate move.
At this point, it’s worth digressing from Ashley’s work and laying out my own theory of obfuscated exchange before showing how Ashley applies the model to her data.2 So the starting point is to recognize that there are certain goods and services that may be more or less OK if you get them for free, but are gross, shameful, and/or illegal if you pay for them. For instance, payment transforms casual sex into prostitution and constituent service into bribery.
Now suppose you’re someone who has money, and who really wants to have no-strings sex with someone who isn’t really attracted to you, or to get a government service that the legislator or bureaucrat thinks you’re not entitled to. One way to handle this is you just do it anyway and break the taboo: you hire the prostitute or bribe the public official. Another way is you don’t do it: you think something like “I would gladly pay $200 for sex or $10,000 to get this zoning exemption, but that would be wrong and so I’m not doing it”. But what I find really interesting is when you find a way to have your cake and eat it too by buying the non-market good while obfuscating that you paid for it, hence obfuscated exchange.
In my 2014 Sociological Theory paper, I outline three forms of obfuscation:
- Gift exchange — I give you a gift and at some point in the future you give me a gift. There is a continuous tension between whether the gifts are traded for each other or are both expressions of a relationship.3 This ambiguity effectively allows gift exchange to trade goods that it would be immoral to directly exchange for one another. The classic example is that the difference between a sugar baby/sugar daddy relationship and a prostitute/john relationship is gift exchange vs cash on the barrelhead.
- Bundling — You and I engage in some type of innocuous commercial transaction, but we also have a relationship involving things that ought not to be sold. The classic example is a boss having sex with his worker, or a lawyer with his client.4 Is this just that two people with a business relationship also find one another irresistible, or is it quid pro quo sexual harassment? Interpreted as bundling, it is the latter, and there are some cases where it’s obviously little more than money laundering (as with the Congressman who went to prison for selling his house to a defense contractor, who immediately resold the house at a substantial loss).
- Brokerage — I hire someone to help me acquire something, and they pay the person I need it from, who then gives it to me. A majority of settlements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act look like this: AmericaCo is doing business in Corruptistan and hires LocalFixer who in turn just bribes PublicOfficial.
After that first paper, I introduced a fourth type, “pawning”, which is when an explicit debt is forgiven in exchange for a non-market good. This is how the mob gets gambling addicts to serve as co-conspirators in embezzlement and robbery. However Ashley didn’t find any pawning to speak of in her ethnography.
So back to Ashley, one of the things I love about her ethnography is you see three different obfuscation structures all at once. Again, at a fundamental level, what is happening is rich guys are paying for models to hang out with them, but not explicitly. Let’s start with the rich guys and work towards the models. What it says on the $30,000 credit card receipt is “champagne” or “vodka”. In theory the arm candy is incidental, even though that’s why the guys aren’t spending much less at BevMo and getting drunk in their hotel room. So the arm candy is bundled with the alcohol.
We might then think, OK, so the club provides the models, and in a sense they do, but the club doesn’t do this directly. Instead it pays a commission to night club promoters who arrange that the models be there in exchange for a commission on the table’s check. So the promoters act as brokers between the club and the models.
Now we might be thinking, OK, so the promoter gets a cut of the check and out of that he pays the models. Nope. As a rule promoters don’t pay models, and when they do it is widely seen as a death spiral desperation move. Rather, promoters recruit models through gift exchange. For reasons discussed in Ashley’s first book, models are constantly short on cash, and promoters will hang out in fashion districts looking for models who they can offer favors to and befriend. For instance, she talks about promoters who will drive SUVs around Manhattan offering models rides. A common pattern is to meet a group of models, identify the most popular girl in the clique, seduce her, and then get her to constantly mobilize her girlfriends to help you get paid by staying out until 4am, even though this means that they are so tired and hungover the next day that they miss their own auditions and photoshoots.
There is more than a little resemblance between the promoters and pimps. Aside from the vast moral difference that these guys don’t commit felonies and aren’t hyper-misogynists, they all come across as like Andrew Tate with their peacocking, their hustle mindsets, and the basic fact that their livelihood is based on leveraging their own charm into mobilizing pretty girls into making money for them from other men.
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
- My other major research interest is diffusion, or how ideas and behaviors spread. This is the subject of my 2012 pop music radio book and my 2021 PNAS. The upshot of my take on diffusion is that you will be badly misled if you only pay attention to social contagion processes like word-of-mouth as it’s critical to consider the constant hazard (eg, advertising, government mandates, or the legitimacy that comes with a mature product category).
Rossman, Gabriel. 2012. Climbing the Charts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Climbing_the_Charts/E_37GZumy50C?hl=en
Rossman, Gabriel, and Jacob C. Fisher. 2021. “Network Hubs Cease to Be Influential in the Presence of Low Levels of Advertising”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(7). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2013391118
- Rossman, Gabriel. 2014. “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange”. Sociological Theory 32(1):43–63. https://www.chapman.edu/research/institutes-and-centers/economic-science-institute/_files/ifree-papers-and-photos/obfuscatory-relational-work-and-disreputable-exchange.pdf
Rossman, Gabriel, Michael Munger, Alan Fiske, and Alex Tabarrok. 2016. “The Exchanges We Hide”. Cato Unbound. https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/june-2016/exchanges-we-hide/
Schilke, Oliver, and Gabriel Rossman. 2018. “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional: Moral Perceptions of Obfuscated Exchange”. American Sociological Review 83:1079–1107. https://www.oliverschilke.com/fileadmin/pdf/Schilke__Rossman._It_s_Only_Wrong_If_It_s_Transactional_-_Moral_Perceptions_of_Obfuscated_Exchange.pdf
Schilke, Oliver, and Gabriel Rossman. forthcoming. “Honor among crooks: the role of trust in obfuscated disreputable exchange”. American Sociological Review https://osf.io/6b793/
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. especially “Twofold Truth of the Gift”
- Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
July 19, 2026
QotD: Obfuscated exchange
July 18, 2026
The Top WW2 Spy Was a Disabled Woman
World War Two
Published 16 Jul 2026Virginia Hall was one of the most extraordinary spies of World War II. An American operative for Britain’s Special Operations Executive and later the OSS, Hall built resistance networks in occupied France, coordinated intelligence, organized safe houses, helped escaped prisoners and airmen, and supported maquis fighters who sabotaged German operations during the liberation of France.
Known to the Gestapo as “the Limping Lady”, Hall worked with a wooden prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert. After escaping over the Pyrenees, she returned to France in 1944 in disguise, operating a radio, arranging parachute drops, and helping organize resistance forces against the German occupation.
This is the true story of Virginia Hall: the disabled American spy who became one of the most feared Allied agents in Nazi-occupied Europe — and one of the most important women in WWII intelligence history.
July 16, 2026
“Only fans – Europe’s approach to air conditioning”
From the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s most recent article on his Substack:
The EU may not actually believe this, but they thought you would …
Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time. For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.
England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.
Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, “For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.”
I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.
Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call “the 60s”, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.
The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global “sunshine belt”.
Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics … The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.” Indeed, it has often been noted as characteristic of the city-state that the aircon is usually set to icy levels, reflecting their determination to be on work mode throughout the day.
While Singapore is the most famous beneficiary of Carrier’s invention, Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth — just as the globe is warming up.
This year’s European heat wave, still ongoing, saw temperatures reach 37 last month in England, a June record. Many schools shut early, although one in Kent instead used air raid tunnels to teach children. London’s Central Line hit 39.4c, presenting a real risk of heat stroke.
Across Europe the hot weather has closed down not just schools but factories, offices and rail lines, and led to an estimated 10,000 deaths, with France top of the heat mortality charts. Indeed as Boudry writes, Europe has the worst heat-related excess deaths of any region — while fatalities in the US have declined by 75 per cent since the adoption of air conditioning.
Update, 17 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”
An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:
But don’t you understand?
There was a way. There was always a way.
We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.
All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …
Nothing.
Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.
That’s all.
Just keep things the way they were.
But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.
They wanted to be heroes, too.
So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.
They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.
So they could feel like they were doing something important.
Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.
That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.
Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.
Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.
Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.
Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.
Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.
Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.
Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.
Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.
Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.
And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …
Except.
Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.
They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.
They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.
It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.
And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.
Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.
And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.
And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.
He called it the “giant sucking sound”.
Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.
How Few Remain: The Second War Between the States
Feral Historian
Published 13 Mar 2026Let’s take a look at Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain and its many themes and historical extrapolations. And probably argue about the Civil War a little along the way.
If there’s enough interest, this may be the start of a dive into the entire sprawling series that follows.
00:00 Intro
01:37 A War Unfinished
07:09 Adapting and Evolving
10:12 Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
13:15 The Horace Greeley Letter
15:40 Freddie’s Louisville Adventure
18:07 Turtledove, Lost Cause, and Spoilers
(more…)
QotD: The nostalgic British elements of Canadian nationalism
Britishness survives as civic nationalism. Old British Canada may be gone, but aspects of that Britishness live on. We should celebrate our history and our historic symbols, but this alternative shouldn’t set about restoring it all. A future oriented embrace of our history needs to be built around the active parts of this Britishness that have now become truly Canadian. For example, the Crown in Canada is not now just a British institution, it’s a Canadian institution. Same with our democratic institutions and parliamentary traditions, which we must work to strengthen and renew.
Embracing this enables us to thread the needle on our relationship with America. Part of what makes us different historically, culturally, ideationally, and in disposition from America, is this history. Just as Canadian Britishness has survived to the present day in unique ways, our desire not to become Americans is alive and well. A homegrown Canadian Britishness enables us to continue this without falling into crass anti-Americanism, and without requiring us to embrace the new Liberal nationalism to reject America. We should see America as an amicable cousin, but one that we are distinct and different from.
But most importantly, what this new kind of national identity needs to build around needs to be an evolution of the liberal nationalism that emphasizes and consciously builds around our regional pluralism. […] but the kind of rationalistic liberalism that our modern national identity is built around, while sold as a way of dealing with diversity, suffers from some serious internal tensions. Liberalism, especially the Canadian variant of it, implicitly depends upon and encourages a degree of homogenization that flattens hard cultural differences. We need to become more pluralistic, and less liberal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
July 15, 2026
The Korean War Week 108 – The Republican Candidate – July 14th, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Jul 2026In Chicago, the US Republican Party Convention comes to its end and they have chosen Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower as their Presidential Candidate. Part of the official platform is ending the Korean War. The war continues, of course, with a new UN operation designed to take prisoners, massive aerial bombing of Pyongyang, and the build up of the South Korean Army — the ROKA — to one day hopefully take over from the UN forces.
July 14, 2026
Orson Welles – the great failures
On his Substack, Ted Gioia looks at the up-and-down-and-up-and-down career of Orson Welles and selects, from a long list, his ten greatest failures:
Orson Welles in 1937.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons.
It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.
These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985) — who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation — for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time — was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.
He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below) — but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck — problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.
You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.
His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it — fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.
It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.
After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly — always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.
At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all — but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us — so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.
Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.
I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.
July 13, 2026
Teddy Roosevelt versus the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age
In the Coolidge Review, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlines the way President Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressives tried to rein in the wealthy industrialists who had helped create the Gilded Age:
Theodore Roosevelt looks on with glee as his commerce secretary puts the screws to trusts.
(Puck magazine, Alamy Stock Photo, via The Coolidge Review)
The early twentieth century marked the height of the progressive movement, which sought to check the power of free markets and business. To understand what progressives did in the early 1900s, we need to understand what happened in the late 1800s, the period often called the Gilded Age.
After the Civil War, the United States experienced spectacular economic growth. The industries leading the way included railroads, oil, and steel. This expansion made the United States a global economic power. The profits of those businesses enriched the wealthiest — and the average American. That’s in part because bigger, more efficient businesses can offer cheaper prices. Between 1870 and 1880, for example, railroad freight prices fell by half. By 1890, they had fallen by half again. And by 1900, they had been cut nearly in half once more.
Similar advances occurred in many other industries. In the Gilded Age the United States saw perhaps the greatest burst of invention and economic development any country has ever experienced.
[…]
Progressives relied on three tools to restrain business.
The first was the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, this law was used sparingly for a decade. Government enforcement proved difficult in part because the act’s language was vague: the Sherman Act outlawed any contract or “combination” in “restraint of trade or commerce”. In 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law narrowly. In a case involving a sugar-refining business, the Court held that the Sherman Act did not apply to manufacturing. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography that the ruling produced “governmental impotence”.
But soon after entering the White House in 1901, Roosevelt seized on the Sherman Act to engage in “trust busting”. He directed the Justice Department to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that Hill had created. This time, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s intervention. Referring to the 1895 ruling, Roosevelt crowed, “This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered it”, giving the federal government the power “to deal effectively with the trusts”. Roosevelt’s Justice Department soon targeted Standard Oil, which was eventually broken into thirty-four separate companies.
The second tool progressives used against business was the Interstate Commerce Commission. Although railroad rates had declined dramatically for decades, progressives objected to the way those rates were structured. Railroads tended to give the largest discounts to customers that transported the most goods. The railroads still profited from these volume discounts, and smaller customers still paid much lower rates than they had earlier. But progressives argued that it was unjust for smaller shippers to pay higher rates than larger businesses.
In his 1905 annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt demanded legislation to put “a complete stop to rebates in every shape and form”. The 1906 Hepburn Act accomplished that goal. The law was expanded to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to inspect railroads’ financial records, eliminate targeted rebates, and set “just and reasonable” rates. In other words, the federal government now had significant pricing power over railroads, America’s largest business sector.
The progressives’ third tool was the federal income tax. In 1909 Congress approved the resolution for a constitutional amendment to establish an income tax. The Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913, after three-quarters of the states had ratified it. That was the year Coolidge was elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate.
From the beginning, the tax system was progressive, imposing higher rates on larger incomes. In 1913 most Americans paid no federal income taxes, while the top marginal rate — for income exceeding the equivalent of $16 million in 2026 dollars — was only 7 percent. But within five years, tax rates had soared, with the top bracket paying 77 percent.
The Tool That Changed Woodworking – the Stanley 42
Wood By Wright How To
Published 12 Mar 2026The Stanley 42 came before the 45 or 55, and it is a fascinating tool!
QotD: They took away recess – and then wondered why boys struggled
But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.
And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.
One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable — a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.
That matters for all children.
But it matters in a special way for boys.
Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.
Tom Golden, “They Took Away Recess – And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled”, Men Are Good, 2026-04-06.
July 11, 2026
British censorship laws do not apply outside the UK’s jurisdiction
On Substack Notes, Lorenzo Warby links to a fascinating discussion about the ongoing struggle between the UK government’s Ofcom and the US-based 4chan and their legal representatives, saying “The totalitarian wannabes currently running the UK do not apparently grasp that the American Revolution and War of Independence was a thing. Also, being totalitarian wannabes, they have no sense of humour.”
A UK cabinet minister, Rt. Hon. Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (“DSIT”), discussed the infamous “hamster e-mail” I sent on behalf of my client 4chan to the UK’s Internet censor, on national radio today in the UK. […] My father always told me, when I was growing up, “when a cabinet minister holding the technology policy brief for a G7 Member State is talking about your e-mailed jokes to an audience of millions on national broadcast media, that is the right time to explain the joke, especially if the cabinet minister didn’t get the joke”.
That explanation follows.
The backstory – Hamster #1
The hamster joke has a bit of a history to it. Ofcom, the UK’s Internet censor, first made contact with my American client 4chan in June of 2025 in its attempt to impose British censorship law on that website. I was subsequently retained as defense counsel, pro bono.
Ofcom then “provisionally fined” 4chan on August 16th, 2025 for refusing to obey the UK’s censorship regime. We were invited to make representations to the regulator following that provisional fine decision.
We did two things in response to that. The most newsworthy response was to file a lawsuit against the regulator in the DDC. Before that, however, we explained our position to Ofcom in writing and gave them an opportunity to walk away:
To wit, Ofcom’s fine notices were not properly served and were not enforceable in the United States. Note that we also gave Ofcom fair notice that while this might have been their first attempt to enforce their censorship orders in America, this was not our first rodeo when it came to successfully refusing such orders.
No quantity of officious and haughty foreign demand letters will change our stance. The UK could even pass a bill of attainder – historically Parliament’s most extreme and powerful legislative weapon – against my client, for all I care. My client’s right to operate its service lawfully in the United States is protected by the First Amendment. There is no law Parliament could enact that would change that fact.
I am very familiar with how this movie ends, and it does not end with 4chan paying Ofcom’s fine.
It may end with the UK’s censors getting a blocking order that it serves on its own ISPs; that would be the UK visibly censoring its own people, rather than censoring my client, and doing so ineffectively, at that, as ISP blocks can be circumvented with a VPN. That is a consequence my client is prepared to accept.
England might have the Online Safety Act, but the United States has the U.S. Constitution. These rulesets do not override each other; they are, rather, mutually exclusive. In America’s domain, the Online Safety Act essentially doesn’t exist. It has about as much legal force as a pile of shredded paper one might use to line a hamster’s cage.
Peace was always an option here, but that would have required the UK to abandon the fiction that its rules override the U.S. Constitution on U.S. soil, which we are not prepared to accept.
My clients did not start this fight, but by golly we do intend to finish it.
My client sued Ofcom two weeks later.
There’s much more, so do read the whole thing.
July 10, 2026
The Pastry War – When France invaded Mexico over pastry
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Jan 2026Puff pastry rings filled with raspberry and apricot preserves and topped with a cherry
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1840The Pastry War between Mexico and France was kicked off when, during a time of political upheaval, Mexican soldiers ransacked Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in the 1830s. Seeking reparations for M. Remontel as well as the repayment of other debts, the French invaded.
While we don’t know what was sold in Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in Mexico, these puits d’amour could certainly have been on the menu. By all means, you can make your own puff pastry, but I gave myself permission to use store bought, and you should, too. You can even use store-bought preserves to simplify things even further, but this preserves recipe is very delicious and very sweet. I used both store-bought apricot preserves and homemade raspberry preserves, and both were delicious. You can also fill them with half jam and half chantilly cream or pastry cream if the fancy strikes you.
PUITS D’AMOUR.
When the puff pastry has received all its turns, roll it out to a thickness of two lines; cut it with a fluted cutter, that is to say with a pastry cutter, and place the first piece on a baking sheet; then, with a cutter of the same type but smaller, cut another piece and place it on top; moisten the round with a little water, press it in slightly, brush these puits with egg, and put them into a hot oven. When they are three-quarters baked, sprinkle them with sugar in order to glaze them — that is, until the sugar melts; then remove them, hollow them out, and fill them with whatever preserves you judge appropriate.
— Le Cuisinier Royal by André Viart, 1840
QotD: Modern conspiracy theories
The best example right now is the Left’s obsession with white supremacy. They cannot accept that their vision of Utopia is not very popular. That’s the first step in a conspiracy theory, the rejection of the most plausible reason. That allows them to spin wild tales of secret Nazis and spectral supremacists. Rather than confront reality, which is frightening and disconcerting, they have created a series of conspiracy theories to explain why the world is not as they imagine it.
This is why conspiracy theories are a useful metric to gauge social trust. When order begins to break down, people naturally look for reasons. That opens the door to speculation and then conspiracy theories. This, in turn, erodes social trust, which is the foundation upon which every ruling class rests. As that foundation falters, the ruling class looks for reasons. Since blaming themselves is always off the table, they naturally begin to speculate, which opens the door to conspiracy theories.
The Z Man, “Conspiratorial Rule”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-01.
July 9, 2026
A new proposal for limiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”
In Reason, Jacob Sullum outlines Justice Gorsuch’s proposed new test for limiting government abilities to surveil and monitor private actions:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swears in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies when people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, continues to shape Fourth Amendment rulings six decades later. That was clear on June 29, when the Court decided Chatrie v. United States, holding that a government-ordered analysis of cellphone location data qualifies as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.
“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by four of her colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the result but not the rationale. The Katz test, he complained, “has no basis in the Constitution’s text or history”. He added that it has proven unworkable in practice because it has never been clear how courts should determine whether an expectation of privacy is “reasonable”.
Gorsuch is surely right that the Katz test has produced inconsistent and puzzling results. In cases addressing intrusions such as trash searches, demands for bank and telephone records, surveillance by low-flying aircraft, and police trespassing on private property, the Supreme Court has perceived no expectations of privacy it was prepared to recognize as reasonable. Applying the same test, it has repeatedly ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that people voluntarily share with third parties. Yet the Court has repeatedly rebelled at the disturbing implications of that principle without explicitly renouncing it.
That is what happened in Chatrie, which involved a Virginia bank robbery investigation. Police used a “geofence” warrant to identify the perpetrator by requiring Google to search customer data collected by its Location History feature, which tracks the whereabouts of cellphone users. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, instead reverting to the original, unmodified Katz test.
A better approach, Gorsuch argued, would be to treat Location History records as “effects” covered by the Fourth Amendment — as a form of personal property, in other words. While it is not clear exactly how that property-rights approach would work in other contexts, it does seem less malleable than the Katz test, which gives courts wide discretion in discerning expectations and deciding whether they are reasonable. Gorsuch aptly likened the Court’s understanding of that test to its definition of obscenity in the 1960s: “We know a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ (and an exception to the third party doctrine) when we see it”.
