This “vibe shift”, as Gen Z calls it, reminds me of my then three-year-old nephew’s weekly blasphemy tour of the local supermarket. Back then, corralled into carting the little critter around town, I’d fasten little Jack into a pushchair and head off. He’d say little to nothing between the front door and the edges of the high street.
As we crept closer, mischief would smear across his lips. He’d bide his time. “Now, Jack,” I’d plead. “Remember what your mother said …”
We’d land in the supermarket. Jack would survey the crowds. At the top of his lungs, he’d bellow: “Boobies! Boo-BEES! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Fat — FAT boobies!” With a visceral joy on his face, he’d fold over and repeat the lung-puncturing cycle, laughing himself into a pram-splayed stupor.
For the first time, Jack indulged the timeless power inherent in saying a few forbidden words and basking in the illicit result. Freud, for all of his faults, called this joy “evading the censor”. Of course, Jack hadn’t read much Freud by then. All he knew was that saying what he was forbidden to say was, in fact, uproariously funny.
No doubt, modern scolds would pen a 5,000-word buzzword soup condemning Jack’s internalised misogyny, his unconscious patriarchal programming or some such modern voodoo. They’d miss the point: saying what one is forbidden to say is — and always will be — funny.
Christopher Gage, “No Laughing Matter”, Oxford Sour, 2025-03-14.
June 16, 2025
QotD: Evading the censor
June 14, 2025
QotD: University students or NPCs?
A few semesters on, and that no longer applied. Sure, sure, they were still teenagers, and still pulled typical teenager capers … but a new set of behaviors crept in. I can’t describe them exactly, in detail, but the overall impression was: here’s someone doing a pretty good impersonation of a teenager. Most every kid goes through the faux-sophisticate stage, usually somewhere around age 12, and this kinda looked like that — young kids pretending to be a lot older — but it also looked a lot like the opposite end of the spectrum. Not quite “hello, fellow teens!” — not yet — but there was something like that going on, too. It was weird, but I figured it was mostly in my head — I’ve always been a grouchy old man, but now I was actually chronologically old enough to let my freak flag fly, so I assumed that’s what I was doing. They’re not changing, I am …
Fast forward a few more semesters, and nope, it’s definitely them. The kids at the tail end of my career still looked like bargain basement Rich Littles, doing impersonations of teenagers, but their act was terrible. Remember a few years back, when Facebook or Twitter or whoever tried to make an AI chat bot, and it immediately turned super racist? Not that these kids were racists — they were the furthest thing from that — but they all seemed to have a small stock of crowdsourced responses. And that’s ALL they had, so no matter what the situation, they’d shoehorn it in to one of their canned affects, because that’s all they had.
By the very end, interacting with them was like playing one of those old text-adventure games from the very dawn of the personal computer, like Zork. They’d respond to commands, but only the right commands, in the exact word order. No deviations allowed, and of course their responses were equally programmed.
Severian, “Terminators”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-04.
June 13, 2025
The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”
Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:
The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.
If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.
But that’s not true anymore.
In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.
It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.
It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.
Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:
- Do NOT try to close.
- Do NOT try to sell.
- Do NOT try to persuade.
- Don’t even listen.
The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.
Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.
You will pay just to get rid of the ad.
In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.
That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.
And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.
[…]
We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.
But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.
They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.
June 10, 2025
The limits of female empathy
Janice Fiamengo discusses the 2006 book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man by journalist Norah Vincent. Intended as a kind of exposé of male privilege, her investigations turned into something rather different than she originally intended:
Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.
It’s a strange world in which the above observations — by a woman — are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.
In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.
With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.
Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.
The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and many men expressed gratitude and appreciation for the empathy and insight in Vincent’s work.
Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?
Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.
Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.
Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.
Even when someone goes beyond temporary male drag, there is a palpable surprise that mens’ lives are not a well-watered garden of male privilege:
Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears“. They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.
Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being”.
June 9, 2025
Parenting style choice – “small people who do not yet know very much or … pets who can talk”
I always felt that my son was a person, and did my best to treat him that way while still being his father. I think that was the correct choice, although clearly a lot of other parents choose the other option for their children:
“Happy family cyanotype 2” by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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There are two views of children — that they are small people who do not yet know very much or that they are pets who can talk. I prefer the former. One implication is that children and parents are, in a fundamental sense, peers. Obviously they are not equal in what they know or what they can do or how strong they are. But they are not different sorts of people in a way that goes beyond that. Children should usually believe their parents about things the parents know much more about but parents should believe children when that asymmetry is reversed, as it sometimes is. The mere fact that one is parent and the other child does not determine which is right and which wrong when they disagree; that is determined, as between adults, by which has better arguments, more evidence.
One implication of treating children as people not pets is that you have to keep promises to them, as to other people. Another is that if you assert something to them you have the same obligation you would have if you said it to an adult to defend it or, if you find you cannot, admit that you can’t.
I once heard an elderly man tell a child who disagreed with him on something that he should never contradict his elders. The statement struck me as not merely wrong but blasphemous. The elder was probably correct on what they disagreed about but the appropriate response is to demonstrate that, at worst decline to argue it, not to imply either that truth is determined by seniority or that it is discourteous to point out errors to a status superior. I am reasonably sure that neither of my parents ever told me to believe something just because they said so or refused to entertain arguments against their views. The son of my first marriage, who spent summers with me and my wife when he was growing up, told a friend that his project for that summer was to get my wife to say “because I told you so.” I doubt that he succeeded.
Treating your children as your peers is easier if you sometimes interact with them in contexts where they demonstrably are at least your equal. I was the first member of our family to play World of Warcraft, so when my wife and our children, then eleven and fourteen, joined the game I was more skilled, had a higher level character, more in-game resources. They improved over time and there was a long period, during which we sometimes played separately, sometimes as a family team, were all on about the same level. By the time I eventually quit the game some years later we all had top level characters and all three of them had become more skilled at the game than I was.
Going back to my childhood, the nearest equivalent that occurs to me is ping-pong. We had a table in the basement on which my father and I played. We equalized the contest with a sliding handicap, a number of points I started each game with. Every time he won the handicap went up, every time I won it went down. Over a period of years, as I got better, the handicap went down, eventually to zero, I think occasionally below zero. The family also played bridge together, there being conveniently four of us.
I spent a lot of time arguing with my father on a wide range of subjects. Someone who met us skiing on Colorado when I was in high school told a friend of mine that we spent all our time arguing and I won half the arguments. I don’t think the latter was true, but if my father won a majority of the arguments he won them fair.
May 21, 2025
QotD: The sandpaper people
On the other hand, most people aren’t artistes, so a well-ordered society is a well-lubricated society (“ah so!” yells our Japanese businessman, and look, y’all, much like my poor old high school physics teacher, we’re just going to have to ignore the obvious sexual connotations for the sake of the lesson). “Better a false ‘good morning!’ than a sincere ‘go to hell!'”, the old proverb runs, and that’s because the false “good morning!” is social lubricant; it keeps the friction of living packed cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of strangers down to a manageable level.
That’s what that mystifyingly old-timey word “manners” really means. What the frustrated artistes of the 20th century decried as stultifying conformity is actually lubricant. You don’t do that whole bourgeois thing, maaaannn, because you like being a sheep; you do it because that’s what keeps your world from catching on fire. Replace enough false good mornings with sincere go to hells, and pretty soon you’ve got Chicago, Philadelphia, Bodymore Murderland …
Alas, modern prosperity enables the sandpaper people. If normal people oil themselves up with manners before they go out into the world, these freaks wrap themselves in sandpaper. The really gritty stuff, too, the real paint-strippers you load onto big belt sanders. The kind of assholes who make up elaborate pronouns for themselves and get theatrically mad on social media when normal people can’t figure out what the hell they’re talking about, for instance.
And in an at least Alanis-level irony, the sandpaper people do some of their most abrasive work by pretending, high school physics-style, that obviously frictive situations are frictionless. […]
And so it goes … except physics is a real thing that exists. Our high school teacher instructed us to ignore things like wind resistance in order to teach us the basics. We all knew there was a lot more than F=MA to answering even so basic a question as whether or not Mickey Mantle’s line drive cleared the fence. Not only do the sandpaper people not know that, they wouldn’t care if they did, because equations be rayciss. Alas for them — and us — friction is real. Ever seen a car engine catch fire? Too much friction for the lubricant to handle, and the lubricant becomes a fire accelerant.
Severian, “The Sandpaper People”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-03.
May 17, 2025
Learning racism in Japan
John Carter recounts how his views and opinions on racism changed while living for an extended period in Japan:
We started the conversation talking about the Shiloh Hendrix affair, but ultimately got onto the subject of the Land of the Rising Sun. As it turns out, Alexandru and I have both spent quite some time living in Japan, an experience which contributed to both of us becoming incorrigible racists. This is a very common occurrence: almost anyone who spends a significant amount of time living in a very different country will start to draw conclusions about the differences between human groups. Your levels of epistemic closure need to be extraordinarily high to avoid this.
When I first moved to Japan I was, in most ways, an unreconstructed liberal. I took the axiomatic precept of the Boomer Truth Regime – that stereotypes are both incorrect and evil, because all people are basically the same – more or less for granted. This was very easy for me to do: I’d grown up in a remote, homogeneously Anglo part of rural Canada, and while I’d had some degree of exposure to different ethne at university, this was during a period in which Canada was making a real effort to filter immigrants for quality, and most of the non-white, second-generation immigrants I interacted with were heavily westernized. I wasn’t unaware of cultural differences, but I generally assumed that it went no deeper than that, and that inside every human being there was a liberal Anglo struggling to break free.
Japan of course is a completely alien culture. Among the many profound differences with the contemporary West is that the Japanese are, famously, intensely and unashamedly racist, or “xenophobic” as it is usually framed. I was initially taken aback by how frank the Japanese could be about this, for instance by asking questions about me that were clearly in rooted in their stereotypical understanding of what young North American white boys were generally like. But there were two things about this experience that quickly made me stop and think. First, these questions were almost never hostile, but rather came from a place of genuine curiosity: they were simply trying to get to know me, which they would do by starting with a default mental picture and then testing to see if and how I conformed or departed from that picture so that they could update their model accordingly. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always hateful! Second, a great many of their stereotypical assumptions about me were uncomfortably accurate. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always wrong!
It didn’t take me long to get over this cognitive dissonance, which I resolved by the simple expedient of concluding that I’d been lied to by my culture, which is something that even then I’d realized happens a lot. This then gave me internal permission to observe the Japanese themselves, to notice the myriad differences in character and behaviour as compared to my own people, and to connect these individual level differences to their emergent societal consequences.
Learning racism in Japan is a humbling experience for a Westerner. I’ve travelled to a lot of different countries, and everywhere else I’ve either felt like my own people were basically on the same civilizational level (Europe), or at a noticeably higher level (South America). Japan is the only place I’ve ever been where I felt like an unlettered, uncouth, savage, stinky barbarian primitive one step removed from the cave – where it was obvious that my own people could learn quite a bit about how to comport themselves in a civilized fashion. Then again, at the same time, this taught me to value that very barbarism: it’s quite possible, as the Greek understood when regarding the Mede, to be overcivilized.
I could go on about this subject for hours, but I’ve got things I need to do today – like go to the gym and get some work done on other projects I’ve been engrossed in – and I wanted to get this out fast. In any case, I did go on about this subject for hours, with Alexandru and Phisto, so if you’d like to hear more about Japan you’ll just have to click through and listen.
May 16, 2025
For some reason, men who sleep around don’t want to marry women who sleep around
Young women who approach casual sex the way that young men do (or used to, anyway) are shocked to find that men don’t want to settle down in a long term relationship with a woman with a similar “bodycount”:
A young woman at a club with unrealistically disinterested young men.
Image generated by Grok.
First of all, men are very different than women, but guys are also fairly simple creatures.
Here are the fundamentals, ladies …
If a man sees you as a potential match, is attracted to you, you feed him, seem to want to take care of him, you’re a good mom (if you have kids), have good sex with him, are nice to him, he enjoys talking to you and you genuinely seem to think he’s great, he will think he’s the luckiest guy on earth. The great thing about all of this is that it’s mostly under your control. Yes, you might have to dress up and have some open conversations about what the two of you like in bed, but it’s a doable list. Being 6’4′ or making $500,000 per year to get some woman’s attention may be outside of a man’s control, but if a man considers a woman relationship material, she is probably capable of locking him in if she wants to do it.
Of course, like everything else in life, there is some nuance involved here.
For one thing, good sex is a key part of a good relationship, BUT unlike a lot of women, men are also generally very comfortable with the idea of having sex OUTSIDE OF RELATIONSHIPS. A lot of men can enjoy sex with women they just met, women they know they’ll never see again, or even women THEY DON’T EVEN LIKE AS HUMAN BEINGS. Men just have a biological drive toward sex, the same way, for example, a lot of dogs have a biological drive toward prey. The second my dog sees a cat; she wants to chase it. If she catches up to the cat, she doesn’t even know what to do, but she does know she wants it to run so she can have the fun of running after it. It’s an innate drive for her and most men have that same kind of innate drive around sex, even though most of us never have the opportunity to fully express it.
[…]
For example, all other things being equal, just about every man would prefer a virgin to a woman with say 50 previous partners. Why? Well, in a man’s book, being promiscuous is a huge negative in a woman you’re interested in long term for reasons great and small, fair and unfair.
Like what?
Well, first and foremost, the traditional concern is that if she’s sleeping around, how do you know your child is yours? The last thing any man wants to do is get cucked and end up spending his life raising a child some other man impregnated his wife with right under his nose. Along similar lines, the more a woman has slept around, the more likely it is that she may cheat. After all, unless you’re the absolute peak of the pyramid for men, having sex requires a lot of effort and work. For women? Not so much. She’ll have easy opportunities every day of the week, probably multiple times per day, and if she feels comfortable sleeping around, can you trust her?
How easy is it? Well, once, I remember talking to a female friend of mine who had moved to another city, was lonely, and she complained to me that she “Just needed to get laid.” I laughed at her over the phone and told her something like, “All you have to do is dress up, go to a hotel bar, look for any attractive single man, sit next to him, and talk to him for 5 minutes, then ask him to take you up to his room. You’ll be having sex 5 minutes after. It’s that easy” – and it is, for women.
We can go on. Promiscuous women are statistically less likely to stay married. You also have to think they probably aren’t going to be as satisfied in bed if they’re comparing you to a large number of men. You know, “Well, Brett had that amazing 8 pack, Jimmy was really hung, Paul could go forever, and Todd did that really cool thing with his tongue, so how good is this compared to those guys?” Furthermore, it’s natural for men to want large numbers of female partners, but not so much for women, which usually means women who sleep around have issues. How many mentally healthy, happy women are racking up truly large numbers of guys? Not many.
May 13, 2025
For boys, sometimes a touch of competition is all that’s required
Jon Miltimore was concerned when a report from his son’s school indicated that his son was lagging behind in reading compared to his classmates:
“Old Victorian Childrens’ Books” by pettifoggist is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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So the fact that my own son — who is quite bright and scores extremely high in math — was struggling hit me a little, but it was not a surprise. Like many children, he had fallen behind in reading during the pandemic, and our efforts to get him caught up at home were pretty ineffective. Part of the problem was that as parents we did not do a good enough job of finding the right books to naturally kindle his interest and curiosity, but another issue was that at some point he began to feel self-conscious about this reading, which created an aversion to books.
[…]
A few months later, I had just finished reading a story to my 6-year-old son, who shares a bedroom with his older brother. I went to flick the light off when my older son said something I’d never heard before.
“Can I read for just ten more minutes,” he pleaded, showing me his book on pro football players.
I quickly gave my approval, then went downstairs to tell my wife. She was not as surprised as I was.
“They’re doing a reading competition at school. It’s boys against girls,” she said. “Every minute he reads is now added to their score. So now he wants to read — because it’s a competition.”
My wife did not say this disapprovingly, but she said it in a way that said of course he wants to read now. (My son is competitive.)
Over the next several weeks I watched as my son made a point of reading every night. Oftentimes he’d ask — just like on that first night — if he could read just 10 more minutes. Many nights he’d fall asleep with a book on his chest.
I have to admit that at first I found this strategy a tad cynical, but then I got the results. Over the span of seven weeks, my son leapt nearly two reading levels. He’s reading comfortably at the third-grade level and we’re now focusing more on reading comprehension than reciting sentences. He’s asking for books on World War I, World War II, and Vietnam for Christmas.
“His fluency has improved so much! I am so proud of him,” his teacher later told me.
Competition as a Virtue
I don’t doubt that some will look on this strategy with disdain.
We’re taught today that competition is crass, even harmful. George Soros, in a highly read piece from the 1990s published in The Atlantic, could have been speaking for many when he wrote that competition can “cause intolerable inequities and instability”. For many, competition is a dirty word, a sinister force to be suppressed and controlled.
This is nonsense, of course. Competition isn’t just innate to humans; it brings out the best in us.
It’s the force that drove Roger Bannister to break the four-minute mile. It’s given us the achievements of Michael Phelps and Michael Jordan. Socially, competition is what prompted the Brooklyn Dodgers to do the unthinkable and sign Jackie Robinson, breaking the color barrier and forever changing sports and America.
May 6, 2025
QotD: World War I shattered the European notion of what “war” actually was
We’ve actually talked before about just how profoundly our modern view of war and battle (and battlefields) is conditioned by the experience of the first world war and the vast literary production of the generation that went through those trenches. Certainly for English (and German and French, etc.) literature, World War I seems to almost snap the tradition in half, making everything before it feel trite and washing the whole of war literature in grim tones of field grey.
And, of course, that is the point. World War I was a new kind of war that shattered the old certainties born out of the old kinds of war. It is often a mistake to assume those old certainties had been born out of some eternal peace, but while the 1800s had not seen a general European war, they had seen many wars, in the many imperial possessions of European countries, on the edges of what the British or French considered “Europe” and also in the heart of Europe itself (not to mention a few dust–ups in the Americas). These were not peaceful societies confronting their first war and shocked by the experience, but very bellicose societies encountering for the first time a new sort of war and being stunned at how different it was from what they had expected, from the wars of their (recent!) past.
All of which is to say war, war really does change. And warriors with it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
May 4, 2025
QotD: Women and depression
Why wouldn’t powerlessness cause depression in women too?
Well, in a backwards sort of way it actually does.
The difference is this: women feel powerful when they are loved, and powerless when they are not, because their instinct wiring tells them that safety lies in being able to form social coalitions and attract a strong mate.
Women, in general (there are always outlier exceptions) don’t get major antidepressive help from just going outside and chopping up a cord of firewood, the way men do. Because the woman’s game is to give a man a good reason to chop firewood for her.
It’s when she can’t do *that* that she feels powerless.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.
April 29, 2025
QotD: The confidence game
The way in which the con men does this is by flattery. The mark trusts the con man, because the con man finds small ways to confirm the beliefs of the mark. The adept grifter will be a good listener and pick up the little things that the mark thinks are important, like religious beliefs or opinions about personal matters. Seemingly out of the blue, the con man will express those same opinions, which flatters the mark. After all, everyone likes being told that their private opinions are smart.
That’s something you see with the internet grifters. They often have worn a lot of masks as they seek out on-line audiences. […]
Another aspect of the con that remains constant is how the con man uses his alleged status as a victim to work the mark. Con men will use their mark’s natural empathy to win their confidence. Today that often means claiming the big bad tech companies are censoring them. Alternatively, they will claim evil trolls are haunting their internet activity, causing them harm. The term troll has been changed from meaning someone seeking attention to something almost supernatural.
The Z Man, “Carny Town”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-29.
April 16, 2025
The “medicalization” or “syndromization” of aspects of the normal human condition
On his Substack, Freddie deBoer wonders why we can’t be honest about the rise of bespoke “mental disorders” that look remarkably like typical human reaction to stimuli:
I just found a cost-free way to farm sympathy and attention 😊
I will never not be fascinated by those issues or arguments or perspectives that are studiously ignored by the media generally and the New York Times in particular. I’ve whinged about this many times when it comes to education, as the NYT is simply not going to consider the notion that different individual people have fundamentally different levels of academic potential in its pages, not even in an attempt to rebut the idea. I suppose that notion is just too challenging to the elite meritocratic liberalism that the Times epitomizes; the idea that we are all ultimately capable of achieving academic and professional greatness flatters the high-achievers who read and write the paper, and the “anyone can be anything” ethos is pleasant and unchallenging. It’s also destructive, which is the point. Bad ideas grow like weeds in the shade, or whatever the saying is. Disability issues are another place where the Grey Lady is very picky about what ideas to consider, and as usual they set the rhythm for many other publications.
This weekend the Times released a long piece looking at the ever-escalating rates of ADHD diagnoses and what exactly they tell us. What’s in the piece is fine — of course, the ADHD activist class doesn’t like it — but what’s remarkable is what isn’t in it. Once again, there’s just about zero consideration of ADHD as a social contagion, any recognition that there is now a vast and deeply annoying ADHD culture online that acts as a kind of evangelical movement for a neurodevelopment disorder. There are millions of people on ADHD TikTok and ADHD Tumblr and ADHD Twitter. There’s a vast universe of facile memes, dubious statistics, and self-flattering nostrums about ADHD floating around out there, and increasingly they’re penetrating into broader internet culture. (I am genuinely unaware of a subculture that is more directly and shamelessly self-celebrating than the online ADHD community, and I’ve read the comments at LessWrong.) Unsurprisingly, a big subsidiary industry has sprung up, with all kinds of products and services for sale, books and apparel and tchotchkes and conferences and boutique forms of therapy and exclusive members-only Discords … Whether neurodevelopmental disorders should have merch is an open question. What’s not subject to questioning is that this is happening. Five minutes of cursory searching would reveal the remarkable scope of online ADHD culture.
And yet the piece’s author, Paul Tough, is just about totally silent on this glaring reality. I find it genuinely bizarre. In a long and rambling (in a good way) piece where he kicks the various rocks of ADHD and asks good-faith questions about how diagnostic rules and social perception of the disorder influence medical practice, he still somehow fails to ever refer to the large, influential, and growing online movement that has raised the profile of the disorder even beyond its prior notoriety and in doing so injected a ton of money into the equation. You can dismiss that community as an online sideshow if you choose, but of course the online world has become profoundly influential on real life, and in other contexts neither the New York Times specifically nor the elite media generally has any problem acknowledging that fact. Why not here?
This tendency extends beyond ADHD. Recently Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the prestigious journal Science, wrote an essay for the NYT that explores the rise of autism diagnoses, which have expanded at truly ludicrous rates. To the extent that it’s referenced at all, the idea of social contagion is dismissed without argument. A couple years ago the Times published a piece by Azeen Ghorayshi about the absurd case of Tourette’s spreading (or “spreading”) among too-online adolescent girls via TikTok; though Ghorayshi is admirably clear that those young women did not in fact have Tourette’s, her piece is also slavishly, almost comically sympathetic to them, never bothering to suggest that maybe these were just bored teenagers who engaged in a frivolous and offensive bit of minstrelsy. (Imagine, judging teenagers for doing something stupid!) The idea that anyone could ever have unserious and wrongheaded motivations for adopting a disability seems to be one of those stories that the New York Times absolutely refuses to tell.
But why? People make up fake illnesses all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. Factitious disorders are real; we have references to what we might now call psychosomatic illnesses that stretch back to antiquity. Munchausen by internet is real. Hypochondria, factitious illness, Munchausen’s, the worried well … these have represented a major challenge for psychiatry for as long as the field has been formalized and integrated into the larger medical project. Why does no one ever talk about this stuff in our stuffy elite publications? Why do so many people in our media dance and shuffle rather than ask direct questions like “How many of these diagnoses are fundamentally faulty?” Why can’t anyone point out that saying you have a medical disorder is a shortcut to getting sympathy and attention, and that human beings crave sympathy and attention the way they crave water and air? We’ve lived through something like a “vibe shift,” and previously-unchallengeable social justice pieties are increasingly challenged, in good ways and bad. Yet under the broad umbrella of disability rhetoric, it’s always 2018, with both traditional and social media operating under a cloud of fear of giving offense. As I’ve said many times, the number of people who privately agree with me about all this is legion. The number who are willing to say so publicly are very few indeed. Nobody wants to paint that target on their back, I suppose. But why do these issues make people feel like targets at all?
April 7, 2025
Confessions of a book-hoarder
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, confessed book-hoarder Ken Whyte has a confession to make:
A small portion of my own book hoard. These shelves at least have a bit of commonality to them, unlike a lot of other shelves I could share.
I’ve been trying to reduce my hoard of books in recent months and it’s not going well.
And let’s be clear, it is a hoard, not a collection. A collection implies the books were selected with deliberation; that they are organized around subjects, themes, authors; that they are displayed with care. In a word, curated.
My books have been accumulated over time, some for work, some for pleasure. More were acquired impulsively than purposefully. Most people would not discern any organizational principles on my shelves. The fiction tends to be separate from the nonfiction, and books I’ve used to write books of my own tend to be grouped together, but not always. Hardbacks are mixed with paperbacks. I have some first editions that may be moderately valuable, although I’m not positive about that and I’ve never checked.
The hoard has been culled on occasion, usually in response to domestic complaints. The last major cull was a decade ago and since then I’ve been on a book diet, meaning that I can’t bring a new book home without getting rid of one already there.
I cheat on my diet all the time.
This part of the post could just as easily have been written by me … except that my sudden ejection from working life ten years back put me on an involuntary book-buying hiatus. From my peak buying years where I’d be accumulating multiple volumes per week, I was down to less than half a dozen new (or new-to-me) books through all of 2024.
That I’ve enjoyed a surplus of space for most of the last six years — the Sutherland House office is just two blocks from home — has abetted the cheating. The first week I took possession of the office, I lined it with solid metal shelves in optimistic anticipation of Sutherland House books to come. A good number of those shelves soon filled with boxes of personal books I could no longer keep at home and couldn’t bring myself to dump (along with a rather impressive archive of materials related to the founding of the National Post relocated from home to office for similar reasons).
Now Sutherland House is producing more books in one year than we produced in total over our first three years, and there are more of us in the office. Space is getting tight. I’ve been telling myself every weekend since before Christmas that I need to reduce the hoard.
It should not be difficult to jettison a quarter, a third, or even half of an impulsively amassed, haphazardly organized pile of books. You just face the shelf and pull out the ones you least want to keep. First to go are the never-cracked: anything that’s been sitting on the shelf for more than a decade without an attempt at reading. Next, books you’ve read and you know you’ll never want to read again. Then the yellowest paperbacks. Those three rules alone ought to get rid of half.
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-March. I faced a bookcase of eight shelves with about forty books per shelf. I challenged myself to get rid of one book for every book I kept. An hour later, I had half the books on the floor. Hurrah.
The next step was to put the unwanted books in boxes and haul them away.
They’re still sitting on the floor.
[Raises hand sheepishly] Yeah, I’ve got a few piles of books in various rooms of the house that failed the initial culling, yet somehow never made their way to the next stage of leaving the house.
I walk past them regularly and doubt my choices. I ask myself what harm would come from putting them all back on the shelves — makes more sense than leaving them on the floor. I wonder if a better solution to my storage problems wouldn’t be more shelves, or a storage locker.
I’ve read all the reasons why it’s difficult to get rid of books (or records, or art, or collections or hoards of any variety). The individual objects are companions, the scaffolding of your intellectual and emotional life, tokens of time, experience, identity, aspirations. Psychologists talk of loss aversion, the endowment effect that makes things feel more valuable simply because you own them, and the sunk-cost fallacy that leads you to hold onto and keep investing in things because you’ve already invested in them.
None of that makes me feel any better about my hoard (or the more than 10,000 photos and 30,000 emails I have on my laptop). The psychological explanations are just embarrassing.
When I’m levelling with myself, I can admit there are less than a hundred books I own where it genuinely matters to me to keep my particular copy. The rest are fungible. I freely admit that if I were to later miss any individual title I discarded, I could chase down a replacement in a day (in a minute electronically) at modest expense.
It used to matter to me to be surrounded by books in my living space. Now that I’m surrounded by books in my work space, not so much. For every instance when I spot a title on a shelf at home and think I really want to read that one someday, there are many more instances when I look at a whole shelf and think I’m never going to read any of these—they’re just taking up space. And I have a dust allergy, for christ sake.
Yet I can’t seem to do anything about it.
March 29, 2025
QotD: Becoming a human being
She had kids, so despite having some ideological resistance to getting it, she got it. I got it too. It’s hard to describe what “it” is if you haven’t gotten it, but I’ll try to explain. The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. What was I without them? Nothing at all. A cosmic joke, a fluke, or a random collection of atoms. But with them, I was one stage of a process, a chapter of a story.
And not only that, but I was also no longer alone. It had always seemed to me that the problem of intersubjectivity could never be conquered, that between minds there yawned an unbridgeable epistemic chasm. Yet here was an experience that I shared with countless others from the most varied places and times, an experience I shared with emperors and with slaves. André Maurois once said: “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold”. I had always thought he meant this in a practical, or perhaps an emotional sense, but I now realized it was even truer cosmically. I had, as my aunt said, become a human being.
I didn’t just see the past. In that moment, the future also resolved itself into dreadful clarity. I had always known intellectually that someday I would die, and that the world would continue mostly as it had, but I never really believed it. Anything beyond the horizon delimited by my lifetime had been hazy and indistinct. Not anymore. Now I regarded the newborn squirming in my arms, and knew with absolute certainty that if things went well this child would bury me, and then continue living. Suddenly the far-future mattered, I had skin in the game now. I was no longer a temporal provincial, past and future both had an immediate and urgent reality, and I knew that I would never think the same way about them again.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Children of Men by P.D. James”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-17.
1. This was in the days before cancellation, I’ve often wondered since then whether she would have allowed herself to think the thought today.
2. It also caused me to wonder whether people without living descendants should be permitted any political representation at all.
