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traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.

Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness

Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.

I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

Can grammatical gender influence speakers’ cognitive processes when they’re speaking another language entirely?

They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine.

peaking English and using materials written in English

The word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people’s thinking, even when they’re speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of —and even when they’re not speaking any language at all!

Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes

It's not as though they're arriving in their interactions having come from an isolated place. They're hearing messages from older siblings, from media, or some of the boys' parents

They're creating a culture for themselves based on the bits and pieces they've gotten elsewhere.

it's more that distinction between compromise and over-compromise, in which they're so focused on setting up a particular image that they believe will get them what they want—acceptance and popularity and success—and realizing that that comes at a cost.

then at these later reports when they get to adolescence where boys are reporting fewer close relationships, lower levels of intimacy within their close relationships, then that kind of suggests that for boys, their socialization and development are associated with a move out of relationships. They start out wanting and thriving in relationships, and then they are moved away from those protective relationships, and there's a cost.

when you take the whole range of human capabilities and qualities, and you say one half is masculine, and one half is feminine, and only boys can be masculine, and only girls can be feminine, then everybody loses, because you're asking e

we live in a culture and a society where we are perceived in our bodies, and people respond to us accordingly. So boys and girls do grow up in a gendered society

infant studies show us that both boys and girls are born with a capacity for and a fundamental desire for relationships—to be close and to be connected. And if anything they find that boy babies need more help regulating themselves. When they are upset they need their primary caregiver to help them regulate and come back to a feeling of contentment.

they need to have at least one place or one relationship where they can do those things.

the single best protector during adolescence, against psychological risks like low self-esteem and depression, and against social risks like unintended pregnancy, was having access to at least one close, confiding relationship. And that could be with a parent or a mentor or a friend or a sibling or whoever. The kids who had at least one close relationship were protected against all of those risks, and were better off for it.  

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

What if, they wondered, you could create a universal written language that could be understood by anyone, a set of “real characters,” just as the creation of Arabic numerals had done for counting? “This writing will be a kind of general algebra and calculus of reason, so that, instead of disputing, we can say that ‘we calculate,’ ” Leibniz wrote, in 1679.

nventing new forms of speech is an almost cosmic urge that stems from what the linguist Marina Yaguello, the author of “Lunatic Lovers of Language,” calls “an ambivalent love-hate relationship.” Language creation is pursued by people who are so in love with what language can do that they hate what it doesn’t. “I don’t believe any other fantasy has ever been pursued with so much ardor by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher’s stone or the proof of the existence of God; or that any other utopia has caused so much ink to flow, apart perhaps from socialism,”

Quijada began wondering, “What if there were one single language that combined the coolest features from all the world’s languages?”

Solresol, the creation of a French musician named Jean-François Sudre, was among the first of these universal languages to gain popular attention. It had only seven syllables: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Si. Words could be sung, or performed on a violin. Or, since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.

“I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees

Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.

In his “Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,” from 1668, Wilkins laid out a sprawling taxonomic tree that was intended to represent a rational classification of every concept, thing, and action in the universe. Each branch along the tree corresponded to a letter or a syllable, so that assembling a word was simply a matter of tracing a set of forking limbs

he started scribbling notes on an entirely new grammar that would eventually incorporate not only Wakashan evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr coördinates but also Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, the nominal cases of Basque, the fourth-person referent found in several nearly extinct Native American languages, and a dozen other wild ways of forming sentences.

he discovered “Metaphors We Live By,” a seminal book, published in 1980, by the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which argues that the way we think is structured by conceptual systems that are largely metaphorical in nature. Life is a journey. Time is money. Argument is war. For better or worse, these figures of speech are profoundly embedded in how we think.

I asked him if he could come up with an entirely new concept on the spot, one for which there was no word in any existing language. He thought about it for a moment. “Well, no language, as far as I know, has a single word for that chin-stroking moment you get, often accompanied by a frown on your face, when someone expresses an idea that you’ve never thought of and you have a moment of suddenly seeing possibilities you never saw before.” He paused, as if leafing through a mental dictionary. “In Ithkuil, it’s ašţal.”

Neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a definitive version of the hypothesis that bears their names, but in general the theory argues that the language we speak actually shapes our experience of reality. Speakers of different languages think differently. Stronger versions of the hypothesis go even further than this, to suggest that language constrains the set of possible thoughts that we can have. In 1955, a sociologist and science-fiction writer named James Cooke Brown decided he would test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by creating a “culturally neutral” “model language” that might recondition its speakers’ brains.

most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, who called conlanging his “secret vice,” maintained that he created the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for the primary purpose of giving his invented languages, Quenya, Sindarin, and Khuzdul, a universe in which they could be spoken. And arguably the most commercially successful invented language of all time is Klingon, which has its own translation of “Hamlet” and a dictionary that has sold more than three hundred thousand copies.

He imagined that Ithkuil might be able to do what Lakoff and Johnson said natural languages could not: force its speakers to precisely identify what they mean to say. No hemming, no hawing, no hiding true meaning behind jargon and metaphor. By requiring speakers to carefully consider the meaning of their words, he hoped that his analytical language would force many of the subterranean quirks of human cognition to the surface, and free people from the bugs that infect their thinking.

Brown based the grammar for his ten-thousand-word language, called Loglan, on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytical philosophers. He hoped that, by training research subjects to speak Loglan, he might turn them into more logical thinkers. If we could change how we think by changing how we speak, then the radical possibility existed of creating a new human condition.

today the stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have “sunk into . . . disrepute among respectable linguists,” as Guy Deutscher writes, in “Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.” But, as Deutscher points out, there is evidence to support the less radical assertion that the particular language we speak influences how we perceive the world. For example, speakers of gendered languages, like Spanish, in which all nouns are either masculine or feminine, actually seem to think about objects differently depending on whether the language treats them as masculine or feminine

The final version of Ithkuil, which Quijada published in 2011, has twenty-two grammatical categories for verbs, compared with the six—tense, aspect, person, number, mood, and voice—that exist in English. Eighteen hundred distinct suffixes further refine a speaker’s intent. Through a process of laborious conjugation that would befuddle even the most competent Latin grammarian, Ithkuil requires a speaker to home in on the exact idea he means to express, and attempts to remove any possibility for vagueness.

Every language has its own phonemic inventory, or library of sounds, from which a speaker can string together words. Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes. English has around forty-two, depending on dialect. In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes. The original version of the language included a repertoire of grunts, wheezes, and hacks that are borrowed from some of the world’s most obscure tongues. One particular hard-to-make clicklike sound, a voiceless uvular ejective affricate, has been found in only a few other languages, including the Caucasian language Ubykh, whose last native speaker died in 1992.

Human interactions are governed by a set of implicit codes that can sometimes seem frustratingly opaque, and whose misreading can quickly put you on the outside looking in. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity: these are the ingenious instruments that allow us to mean more than we say. But in Ithkuil ambiguity is quashed in the interest of making all that is implicit explicit. An ironic statement is tagged with the verbal affix ’kçç. Hyperbolic statements are inflected by the letter ’m.

“I wanted to use Ithkuil to show how you would discuss philosophy and emotional states transparently,” Quijada said. To attempt to translate a thought into Ithkuil requires investigating a spectrum of subtle variations in meaning that are not recorded in any natural language. You cannot express a thought without first considering all the neighboring thoughts that it is not. Though words in Ithkuil may sound like a hacking cough, they have an inherent and unavoidable depth. “It’s the ideal language for political and philosophical debate—any forum where people hide their intent or obfuscate behind language,” Quijada co

In Ithkuil, the difference between glimpsing, glancing, and gawking is the mere flick of a vowel. Each of these distinctions is expressed simply as a conjugation of the root word for vision. Hunched over the dining-room table, Quijada showed me how he would translate “gawk” into Ithkuil. First, though, since words in Ithkuil are assembled from individual atoms of meaning, he had to engage in some introspection about what exactly he meant to say.For fifteen minutes, he flipped backward and forward through his thick spiral-bound manuscript, scratching his head, pondering each of the word’s aspects, as he packed the verb with all of gawking’s many connotations. As he assembled the evolving word from its constituent meanings, he scribbled its pieces on a notepad. He added the “second degree of the affix for expectation of outcome” to suggest an element of surprise that is more than mere unpreparedness but less than outright shock, and the “third degree of the affix for contextual appropriateness” to suggest an element of impropriety that is less than scandalous but more than simply eyebrow-raising. As he rapped his pen against the notepad, he paged through his manuscript in search of the third pattern of the first stem of the root for “shock” to suggest a “non-volitional physiological response,” and then, after several moments of contemplation, he decided that gawking required the use of the “resultative format” to suggest “an event which occurs in conjunction with the conflated sense but is also caused by it.” He eventually emerged with a tiny word that hardly rolled off the tongue: apq’uxasiu. He spoke the first clacking syllable aloud a couple of times before deciding that he had the pronunciation right, and then wrote it down in the script he had invented for printed Ithkuil:

“You can make up words by the millions to describe concepts that have never existed in any language before,” he said.

Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. Kēlen has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

“We think that when a person learns Ithkuil his brain works faster,” Vishneva told him, in Russian. She spoke through a translator, as neither she nor Quijada was yet fluent in their shared language. “With Ithkuil, you always have to be reflecting on yourself. Using Ithkuil, we can see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.”

Lakoff, who is seventy-one, bearded, and, like Quijada, broadly built, seemed to have read a fair portion of the Ithkuil manuscript and familiarized himself with the language’s nuances.“There are a whole lot of questions I have about this,” he told Quijada, and then explained how he felt Quijada had misread his work on metaphor. “Metaphors don’t just show up in language,” he said. “The metaphor isn’t in the word, it’s in the idea,” and it can’t be wished away with grammar.“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said. “But if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating.”

In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian-Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the Earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred.

Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive or tyrannical qualities of masculine love alongside its fictionalising tendencies, stating that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they prevent him having complete access to her as a possession; they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. He writes, “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”

He proposes that love is close to greed and the lust for possession. Love is an instinctual force related to our biological and cultural drives, and as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363).

Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. Whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, “to be taken and accepted as a possession” (363), Nietzsche claims male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover, and states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are “not men.”

In other words, the experiences of both greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: satisfied people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it ‘love’.

In order to be successful in love, he counsels women to “simulate a lack of love” and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comedic because it does not consist in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of male fantasies in which women perform their constructed gender roles.

Nietzsche’s writings on love have not surprisingly been influential on many feminist reflections on sex/gender. Although he is not making moralising claims about how one should love, his discussion of the difficult impact erotic and romantic relationships have on women, as well as his commentary on the ironies both sexes face in love, force his readers of both sexes to examine the roles that they play in love. It is difficult when reading him not to question one’s own performances in romantic relationships.

Last words such as these are only found in 14% of cases. The authors began to notice differences between note leavers and non-leavers in their research, as well as people who attempt suicide and those who complete the act.

Many notes were addressed to one person. Others were to no one in particular.

Nowadays, being a white male is the single biggest risk factor. Why is that? According to Case and Deaton, drastic changes in the labor market is the most significant factor.

“Hegemonic masculinity,” or a perception that heightened masculinity must be portrayed at all times, a goal that no male can live up to.

Another 23% of note writers ended it all due to unrequited love or love lost. 22% said they themselves created the problem which led to their decision.

Meyer and colleagues also propose a national prevention plan, to foster a sense of community and social support.

If you feel suicidal, or are concerned for a friend, don't wait: talk to someone, or learn about suicide prevention here.

Only the women candidates responded with an apology, and both apologized for their occasional anger. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I will ask for forgiveness. I know that sometimes I get really worked up. And sometimes I get a little hot. I don’t really mean to.” Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “Well, I’d ask for forgiveness, any time any of you get mad at me. I can be blunt, but I am doing this because I think it is so important to pick the right candidates here.”

Expressing anger can help you influence others and can help you make change or get your way. But this seems to be truer if you’re a man, especially a white man.

expressions of anger detracted from the credibility and influence of women and African Americans relative to White males. The authors suggest that angry women and angry African Americans are perceived as “emotional” and this is used to discredit them, and consequently their social influence is reduced. 

without warning or explanation, tried to yank all the state funding for a renewable energy research center.

attack by conservative groups like Media Trackers or Professor Watchlist.

unfriendly to free speech

They lecture students that a higher education experience means listening to challenging perspectives, even as they ignore or actively support the erosion of the structural conditions that allow such speech.

Look at the bigger picture beyond a few elite private institutions.

males dislike ornamented females because blue badges indicate a potentially negative quality in females. Although both sexes may develop similar ornaments because they share the genes that underlie the phenotype, expressing the ornament can be beneficial in one sex but detrimental in another.

One solution is to have the expression of [ornamentation] regulated by other factors that are already different between sexes,”

the causation and persistence of ornamentation in females” as well as “unambiguous information on fitness consequences of female ornamentation,” he continued. Because both sexes produce testosterone, added Cox, “regulation by testosterone is not a perfect mechanism for complete sex-limitation [of blue badge expression].”

detrimental ornamentation in females is a paradox that “begs the interesting question of why male-typical ornamentation persists in female fence lizards,” said Langkilde. “We plan to follow this up by examining potential benefits associated with these male-typical ornaments in females.”

Marston's Wonder Woman didn't spend her time encouraging Superman to be awesome, because she was way to busy being awesome herself.

blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero

But the underlying message you get when you watch Wonder Woman defer over and over to Superman's awesomeness is that the most important person in the world has to be a man.

In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.

The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.

in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing

While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.

Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with

To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “

Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”

interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not

it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.

Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low

In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.

Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds

Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.

Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.

Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.

For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.

First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.

But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down

COVID-19, and the consequences of the restrictions introduced to help tackle it, could be contributing to a number of serious mental health issues.

Amongst the male participants, the study found that COVID-19-related anxiety and stress was associated with greater desire for muscularity, with anxiety also associated with body fat dissatisfaction.

In some cases, these issues can have very serious repercussions, including triggering eating disorders.

Certainly during the initial spring lockdown period, our screen time increased, meaning that we were more likely to be exposed to thin or athletic ideals through the media, while decreased physical activity may have heightened negative thoughts about weight or shape. At the same time, it is possible that the additional anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 may have diminished the coping mechanisms we typically use to help manage negative thoughts.

uring lockdown, women may have felt under greater pressure to conform to traditionally feminine roles and norms

iven that masculinity typically emphasises the value of toughness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of status, COVID-19-related stress and anxiety may be leading men to place greater value on the importance of being muscular."

It is increasingly common to find yourself apologizing not for watching too much TV but for having failed to spend 70 hours of your precious, finite life binge-watching one of the Golden Age of Television’s finest offerings.

Nussbaum writes of her male classmates at NYU, where she was a literature doctoral student in the late 1990s. These men worshiped literature and film; they thought TV was trash. These men “were also, not coincidentally, the ones whose opinions tended to dominate mainstream media conversation.”

the same forces that marginalize the already-marginalized still work to keep TV shows by and about women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals on a lower tier than those about cis, straight, white men: Your Tony Sopranos, your Walter Whites, your Don Drapers, your True Detectives

Over and over, Nussbaum pushes back against a hierarchy that rewards dramas centered on men and hyperbolically masculine pursuits (dealing drugs, being a cop, committing murders, having sex with beautiful women) and shoves comedies and whatever scans as “female” to the side.

Nussbaum sticks up for soaps, rom-coms, romance novels and reality television, “the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun.

Nussbaum’s writing consistently comes back to the question of “whose stories carried weight . . . what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and who . . . deserved attention . . . Whose story counted as universal?

What does it mean to think morally about the art we consume — and, by extension, financially support, and center in our emotional and imaginative lives? The art that informs, on some near-cellular level, who we want to know and love and be?

maybe the next frontier of cultural thought is in thinking more cohesively about what we’ve long compartmentalized — of not stashing conflicting feelings about good art by bad men in some dark corner of our minds, but in holding our discomfort and contradictions up to the light, for a clearer view.

more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.

various people insisted that I was, essentially, lying; they simply do not believe that anyone remotely reasonable has anything to worry about.

in July I tweeted that I (as well as my Bloggingheads sparring partner Glenn Loury) have been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook.

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.

A statistics professor says: I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I'm now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.

The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”

Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.”

The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as “supremacist,” although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group’s work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.

This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice

let’s face it: Half a dozen reports of teachers grading Black students more harshly than white students would be accepted by many as demonstrating a stain on our entire national fabric. These 150 missives stand as an articulate demonstration of something general—and deeply disturbing—as well.

A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived.

So no one should feign surprise or disbelief that academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties. In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.

The result is academics living out loud only in whispers

A creative-writing instructor:

The majority of my fellow instructors and staff constantly self-censor themselves in fear of being fired for expressing the “wrong opinions.” It’s gotten to the point where many are too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure … They are supporters of free speech, scientific data, and healthy debate, but they are too fearful today to publicly declare such support. However, they’ll tell it to a sympathetic ear in the back corner booth of a quiet bar after two or three pints. These ideas have been reduced to lurking in the shadows now.

Some will process this as a kind of whining, supposing that all we should really be concerned about is whether people are outright dismissed. However, elsewhere a hostile work environment is considered a breach of civil rights, and as one correspondent wrote

“It isn’t just fear of firing that motivates professors and grad students to be quiet. It is a desire to have friends, to be part of a community. This is a fundamental part of human psychology. Indeed, experiments examining the effects of ostracism highlight what a powerful existential threat it is to be ignored, excluded, or rejected. This has been documented at the neurological level. Ostracism is a form of social death. It is a very potent threat.”

Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all

Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic

It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind.

One professor notes, “Even with tenure and authority, I worry that students could file spurious Title IX complaints … or that students could boycott me or remove me as Chair.”

From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.

degree of sheer worry among the people

Trump and his White House are mocking presumptive Democratic 2020 rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public as conservative commentators brand the practice as elite liberal fear-mongering. Biden, in his first in-person interview since the stay-at-home orders, lashed back at Trump in reply, telling CNN's Dana Bash that the President's "macho" and "falsely masculine" behavior was "stoking deaths" in comments that will only deepen national estrangement on the issue.

Many Republican governors who strongly support Trump in most areas are beseeching their fellow citizens to wear masks as they try to balance reopening with a desire to avoid a spike in Covid-19 cases.

The battle over masks may inject another heated note into Virginia politics. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said Tuesday that anyone within a public indoor space or who is on public transport in the state would be required to wear a mask.

Talk show titan Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday warned that masks have become a "required symbol on the left to promote fear, to promote indecision, to promote the notion that we're nowhere near out of this."

In a Quinnipiac University poll last week, 64% of Americans said everyone should be required to wear masks in public. But while 90% of Democrats said Trump should mask up, only 38% of Republicans agreed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends "wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission." It has not recommended Americans wear masks in their homes.

For some, the only speech they feel should be truly public should also be “professional.” Hence: LinkedIn, where the only associated image is a professional headshot, and the only conversations are those related to work.

Which is how some people really would like to navigate the public sphere: with total freedom and total impunity

Twitter is where you could publicly (if often anonymously) fight, troll, dunk, harass, joke, and generally speak without consequence; it’s also where the mundane status update/life musing (once the foundation of Facebook) could live peacefully.

Twitter was for publicly observing — through the scroll, but also by tweeting, retweeting, quote tweeting — while remaining effectively invisible, a reply-guy amongst reply-guys, a troll amongst trolls.

The Facebook of the 2010s was for broadcasting ideological stances under your real name and fighting with your close and extended community about them; now it’s (largely) about finding advice (and fighting about advice) in affinity groups (often) composed of people you’ve never met.

It rewards the esoteric, the visually witty, the mimetic — even more than Twitter.

Tiktok is for monologues, for expertise, for timing and performance. It’s without pretense.

On TikTok, you don’t reshare memes, you use them as the soundtrack to your reimagining, even if that reimagining is just “what if I do the same dance, only with my slightly dorky parents?

Instagram is serious and sincere (see: the success of the social justice slideshow) and almost never ironic — maybe because static visual irony is pretty hard to pull off.

Like YouTube, far fewer people are posting than consuming, which means that most people aren’t speaking at all.

And then there’s Instagram. People think Instagram is for extroverts, for people who want to broadcast every bit of their lives, but most Instagram users I know are shy — at least with public words. Instagram is where parents post pictures of their kids with the caption “these guys right here” or a picture of their dog with “a very good boy.”

The text doesn’t matter; the photo speaks loudest. Each post becomes overdetermined, especially when so readily viewed within the context of the greater grid

The more you understand your value as the sum of your visual parts, the more addictive, essential, and anxiety-producing Instagram becomes.

That emphasis on aesthetic perfection is part of what feminizes Instagram — but it’s also what makes it the most natural home for brands, celebrities, and influencers.

a static image can communicate a whole lifestyle — and brands have had decades of practice honing the practice in magazine ads and catalogs.

And what is an influencer if not a conduit for brands? What is a celebrity if not a conduit for their own constellation of brands?

If LinkedIn is the place where you can pretend that your whole life and personality is “business,” then Instagram is where you can pretend it’s all some form of leisure — or at least fun

A “fun” work trip, a “fun” behind-the-scenes shot, a brand doing the very hard work of trying to get you to click through and make a purchase with images that are fun fun fun.

On the flip side, Twitter was where you spoke with your real (verified) name — and with great, algorithm-assisted importance. You could amass clout simply by rephrasing others’ scoops in your own words, declaring opinions as facts, or just declaring. If Twitter was gendered masculine — which it certainly was, and is arguably even more so now — it was only because all of those behaviors are as well.

Instagram is a great place to post an announcement and feel celebrated or consoled but not feel like you have to respond to people

The conversation is easier to both control and ignore; of all the social networks, it most closely resembles the fawning broadcast style of the fan magazine, only the celebs control the final edit, not the magazine publisher

Celebrities initially glommed to Twitte

But its utility gradually faded: part of the problem was harassment, but part of it was context collapse, and the way it allowed words to travel across the platform and out of the celebrity’s control.

Instagram was just so much simpler, the communication so clearly in the celebrity wheelhouse. There is very little context collapse on Instagram — it’s all curation and control. As such, you can look interesting but say very little.

a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.

her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote

A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence

Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.