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Javier E

Elon Musk Has the World's Strangest Social Calendar - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elon-musk-social-calendar.html

billionaire lifestyle tech

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • They describe someone whose closest friendships (many of them longstanding) are with other wealthy tech luminaries of middle age.
  • He regularly takes meetings until 9 or 10 p.m., but when he goes out, he does so with frenetic bombast, almost as if live-action role-playing a billionaire playboy
  • A fan of lavish costume parties, Mr. Musk revels in settings, like the desert art festival/rave Burning Man, where he can take on a role outside himself.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr. Musk favors intense, one-on-one conversations — one person described a party conversation with him for 90 unbroken minutes about astrophysics.
  • Mr. Musk once acknowledged in an interview with Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that he gets lonely; in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that as a child he vowed to never be alone.
  • One obvious way that he staves off loneliness is using Twitter. Mr. Musk, who frequently responds to the many Regular Joe accounts that tweet at him, uses the service almost every day, in a way that suggests the website is an outlet not just for his ideas but for his emotions.
  • “I spent almost every day with Elon for five years — apart from family time, he spends nearly every waking hour working,” Mr. Teller said. “If your idea of fun is a long weekend of rocket engineering in a humid, sparsely populated corner of South Texas, then you should be jealous of Elon’s social life.”
  • Many of his closest friends are longtime investors in his companies and share his technical worldview and his geeky preoccupations. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, these friends often see Mr. Musk at quiet dinners in the private back rooms of restaurants — low-key affairs in which the conversation turns to subjects like science fiction or World War II fighter planes.
  • ebecca Eisenberg, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who was senior counsel at PayPal from 2001 to 2007, was catching up with Mr. Thiel, she said, when Mr. Musk broke into the conversation. According to Ms. Eisenberg, Mr. Musk expressed his opinion that China was likely to invade Taiwan and that the American workers at a new Taiwan-owned chip factory in Arizona would never be as skillful as their Taiwan counterparts. Mr. Thiel, meanwhile, was largely quiet.
  • “I have two teenagers and four pets,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “It seemed like Peter was the dominant dog, and Elon was trying to impress him.”
Javier E

How Greg Gutfeld on 'Fox News' Is Beating 'The Tonight Show' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...greg-gutfeld-fox-news.html

right-wing humor culture nihilism

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • “I was very anti-Trump up until when he won, and then I had to realize, ‘OK, do I continue as a broken person?’ Because he legitimately was breaking people. Because once the thing that you hate wins, what do you do?”
  • What Mr. Gutfeld did, in part, was capitalize on a defining talent that he and the former president share: a kind of insult conservatism that can frame any serious argument as a joke and any joke as a serious argument, leaving viewers to suss out the distinction.
  • “There’s sort of a nihilism at the core of that,” said Nick Marx, a Colorado State University professor and co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” a book about right-leaning comedy. He suggested that Mr. Gutfeld’s shtick was the troubling culmination of Fox’s commingling of news and entertainment.
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  • Mr. Gutfeld has said he initially connected with network executives through his friendship with Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Californian and an early contributor to The Huffington Post. Mr. Gutfeld had been writing there as he moved beyond magazines, embracing the rollicking venom of the nascent blogosphere and tormenting the in-house liberals.
  • “He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.”
  • What he did not know was that Fox was looking for someone like him — or at least someone unusual enough to advance an unusual new venture: proving that the right knew how to laugh.
  • “In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”
  • “He was using a lot of all-caps,” Arianna Huffington recalled, mostly warmly.
  • Like media personalities before and since — including Joe Rogan and a constellation of other podcaster-comedians — Mr. Gutfeld took care to convey a vital quality to his audience: that he was getting away with something, saying what should not be said. He names Norm Macdonald, David Letterman and Tim Dillon as favored comedy minds.
  • Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor and Mr. Marx’s co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” said Mr. Gutfeld’s emergence was a signal accomplishment for the right: “somehow claiming conservativism or right-wing-ness as being against the squares.”
  • Around this period, he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.
  • “I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”
  • “He is a salesman,” Mr. Gutfeld said, cradling his French bulldog, Gus, on his lap in the home the host shares with his wife, Elena Moussa. “Once you understand that, the derangement just kind of washes away.”
  • While Mr. Gutfeld mostly agrees with other Fox personalities in the lineup of Republican-friendly hours — that progressives are nuts, that Mr. Trump is unduly targeted, that President Biden is a doddering mess — “Gutfeld!” does land differently, with a host who seems adamant that his exclamation point is in on the joke.
  • “He’s today’s Don Rickles,” Candace Caine, a devotee from Birmingham, Ala., said after a recent taping — her third visit to see Mr. Gutfeld — where she leaned over a railing to shout “I love you!” during a commercial break.
Javier E

Opinion | I rose from poverty, but left part of me behind - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...how-i-rose-from-poverty

culture behavior middle-class poor belonging

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • If it were that easy to hop classes in this country, all you’d have to do is start packing
  • the study acknowledged this is no easy feat in itself: in areas that are largely Black, or where Black and White residents are equally poor together, economic isolation made that jump all but impossible.
  • if you’re lucky enough to simply be around “better,” you’ve got a fighting chance. That’s what happened to me. I grew up in a poor Appalachian town of 900 people, but then moved to a town of about 20,000 in Tennessee, where we lived in a trailer park with a handful of other families like ours, single mothers on welfare.
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  • That didn’t give me instant access to wealthier friends, but it was still a small-enough town that public school did.
  • Nearly all my acquaintances were better off. This meant that by sheer virtue of seeing how other kids acted in school and going to their homes, I saw what middle class looked like — what “better” was.
  • it was my friendship with one family that gave me a window into how I might attain it. Alison’s parents weren’t ostentatiously wealthy, but their lives held all the hallmarks of middle-class aspiration. Books, games and art projects were scattered around the family room; they read newspapers and magazines, and they discussed current events. They not only set a high bar for their children but also reinforced their children’s ability to meet it, daily. Good grades were a baseline. Extracurriculars were not optional. Success was treated as inevitable — not some lucky break, as it had been among my class of origin.
  • acting “right” was the secret sauce, and that was heavily dependent on knowing what was considered acceptable and unacceptable even in normal conversations with other people. They didn’t burp the alphabet, like my sister could, or tell crass jokes, like I did. Money wasn’t discussed.
  • So, I memorized these behaviors and ditched my poverty tells until I figured out my own values
  • Middle class meant napkins neatly folded in laps, pleases and thank yous unrolling sincerely and automatically.
  • my mother certainly did. But working two jobs and the exhaustion of raising four girls alone made those conditions impossible to create to the degree this two-parent family could.
  • Bringing up my con-man father whose name I didn’t even know, or the struggles of my less-educated kin? Not great table talk. Learning when not to talk was a big hurdle.
  • You can still catch me eating bologna, and no study would ever convince me that growing up poor was a loss when I consider the resilience and gratitude it imparted.
  • it didn’t take a good SAT score to notice what I was supposed to act like, dress like, talk like, and seem like to make those friends, to improve my lot. The sooner I accomplished that, the sooner I realized no one knew what class I grew up in — unless I told them.
  • I have no doubt it was critical to succeeding, but it’s still not easy to admit to myself the extent to which I was willing to happily join in on that erasure all on my own. For all the study’s merits, that’s a cost it did not seem able to account for.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Aren't More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...marriage-women-men-dating.html

matchmaking dating marriage men male dysfunction culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, who recently scoffed at “the notion that love, not marriage, makes a family,” has a forthcoming book titled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” All of these scolds typically rely on the same batch of academic studies, now compiled by economist Melissa Kearney in her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” which show that kids with two parents fare better on a variety of life outcomes than those raised by single parents, who are overwhelmingly women.
  • harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.
  • On the rare occasions that women are actually asked about their experiences with relationships, the answers are rarely what anyone wants to hear.
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  • In the late 1990s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed 162 low-income single mothers in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia to understand why they had children without being married. “Money is seldom the primary reason” why mothers say they are no longer with their children’s fathers. Instead, mothers point to “far more serious” offenses: “It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”
  • But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.
  • Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.
  • “There are women that are just out here trying, and the men aren’t ready,” she told me. “They don’t care, most of them.” Who, exactly, is Ms. Camino supposed to marry?
  • For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find
  • what was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data
  • The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health.
  • even this nod ignores the qualitative aspect of the dating experience — the part that’s hard to cover in surveys, or address with policy.
  • a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men.
  • For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
  • Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,
  • He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully
  • Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”
  • educated women freeze their eggs because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner: Ms. Inhorn points to a large gap in the number of college-educated women versus college-educated men during their reproductive years — on the order of several million.
  • Ms. Inhorn’s book goes beyond these quantitative mismatches to document the qualitative experience of women who are actively searching for partners — the frustration, hurt and disappointment.
  • “Almost without exception,” she writes, “women in this study were ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner,” mostly through dating sites and apps. Women in their late 30s reported “online ageism,” others described removing their Ph.D from their profiles so as not to intimidate potential dates; still others found that men were often commitment-averse.
  • Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.
  • to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation
  • in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.
  • It requires taking the stories of single women seriously, and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent, but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do.
Javier E

Opinion | What Happens When Global Human Population Peaks? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-population-global-growth.html

human population forecast crash graphics

shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.
  • All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.
  • then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.
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  • As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
  • there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion.
  • What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements
  • In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.
  • It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges
  • If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100
  • Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.
  • This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of u
  • If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control
  • Births won’t automatically rebound just because it would be convenient for advancing living standards or sharing the burden of care work
  • We know that fertility rates can stay below replacement because they have. They’ve been below that level in Brazil and Chile for about 20 years; in Thailand for about 30 years; and in Canada, Germany and Japan for about 50.
  • In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two.
  • Nor can humanity count on any one region or subgroup to buoy us all over the long run. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the current highest average rates, as education and economic opportunities continue to improve
  • The main reason that birthrates are low is simple: People today want smaller families than people did in the past. That’s true in different cultures and economies around the world. It’s what both women and men report in surveys.
  • Humanity is building a better, freer world with more opportunities for everyone, especially for women
  • That progress also means that, for many of us, the desire to build a family can clash with other important goals, including having a career, pursuing projects and maintaining relationships
  • In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example
  • Nobody yet knows what to do about global depopulation. But it wasn’t long ago that nobody knew what to do about climate change. These shared challenges have much in common,
  • As with climate change, our individual decisions on family size add up to an outcome that we all share.
  • Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal.
Javier E

'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging a generation | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation

social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
  • He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.
  • his message is quite horrifying.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
  • For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
  • The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.
  • But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
  • a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
  • irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
  • boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
  • Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.
  • And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
  • ‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’
  • So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
  • Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
  • Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
  • I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous
  • if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
  • ‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
  • If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
  • ‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
  • TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
  • Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
  • why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
  • we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
  • he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
  • His third rule: no phones in schools.
  • What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
  • ‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
  • Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.
  • ‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other
  • Rule two: no social media before 16
  • In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
  • finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.
Javier E

Vladimir Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power | Vladimir Sorokin | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...mir-putin-russia-ukraine-power

putin power russia history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army – the oprichnina – he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats
  • His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship i
  • And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.
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  • The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it’ll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.
  • Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it’s always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov… Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years.
  • The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: “you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you.”
  • Judging by recent events, the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin.
  • Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn’t destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn’t bury their Soviet past either – unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s
  • Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption. Launching his time machine into the past, it was as if he were returning to his Soviet youth, during which he’d been so comfortable. He gradually forced all of his subjects to return there as well.
  • After the war with Georgia and the seizure of its territories, the “peacemaker” Obama offered Putin … a reset of their relations! Which is to say, c’mon, Vladimir, let’s forget all of that and start from scratch. The result of that “reset” was the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine.
  • The ideology of Putinism is quite eclectic; in it, respect for the Soviet lies side by side with feudal ethics, Lenin sharing a bed with Tsarist Russian and Russian Orthodox Christianity.
  • Putin’s favorite philosopher is Ivan Ilyin – a monarchist, Russian nationalist, anti-Semite, and ideologist of the White movement, who was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia in 1922 and ended his life in exile
  • In his articles, Ilyin hoped that, after the fall of Bolshevism, Russia would have its own great führer, who would bring the country up from its knees. Indeed, “Russia rising from its knees” is the preferred slogan of Putin and of his Putinists.
  • “Under Putin, Russia has gotten up from its knees!” his supporters often chant. Someone once joked: the country got up from its knees, but quickly got down onto all fours: corruption, authoritarianism, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and poverty. Now we might add another: war.
  • A lot has happened in the last 20 years. The president of the Russian Federation’s face has turned into an impenetrable mask, radiating cruelty, anger, and discontent
  • Merkel admitted that, in her opinion, Putin lives in his own fantasy land. If that’s so, what’s the point of seriously engaging with such a ruler?
  • For 16 years, Merkel, who grew up in the GDR and should therefore understand Putin’s true nature, “has established a dialogue”. The results of that dialogue: the seizure of certain territories in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the capture of the DPR and LPR, and now: a full-scale war with Ukraine.
  • Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries.
  • It was also cultivated by the approval of irresponsible western politicians, cynical businessmen, and corrupt journalists and political scientists.
  • I met many admirers of Putin in Germany, from taxi drivers to businessmen and professors. One aged participant in the student revolution of ’68 confessed:
  • “I really like your Putin!”“And why exactly is that?”“He’s strong. Tells the truth. And he’s against America. Not like the slugs we’ve got here.”“And it doesn’t bother you that, in Russia, there’s monstrous corruption, there are practically no elections or independent courts, the opposition is being destroyed, the provinces are impoverished, Nemtsov was murdered, and TV’s become propaganda?”
  • “No. Those are your internal affairs. If Russians accept all of that and don’t protest, that must mean they like Putin.”Ironclad logic. The experience of Germany in the ’30s didn’t seem to have taught such Europeans anything.
  • Now, one thing has become clear: with this war, Putin has crossed a line – a red line. The mask is off, the armor of the “enlightened autocrat” has cracked. Now, all westerners who sympathize with the “strong Russian tsar” have to shut up and realize that a full-scale war is being unleashed in 21st-century Europe.
  • The aggressor is Putin’s Russia. It will bring nothing but death and destruction to Europe. This war was unleashed by a man corrupted by absolute power, who, in his madness, has decided to redraw the map of our world.
  • If you listen to Putin’s speech announcing a “special operation”, America and Nato are mentioned more than Ukraine. Let us also recall his recent “ultimatum” to Nato. As such, his goal isn’t Ukraine, but western civilization, the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat.
  • Who’s to blame? Us. Russians. And we’ll now have to bear this guilt until Putin’s regime collapses
  • People have finally understood this today. He attacked a free and democratic country precisely because it is a free and democratic country. But he’s the one who’s doomed because the world of freedom and democracy is far bigger than his dark and gloomy lair.
criscimagnael

TikTok Ukraine War Videos Raise Questions About Spread of Misinformation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ok-ukraine-misinformation.html

shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • “What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”
  • But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago.
  • TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”
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  • Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.
  • The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.
  • “People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”
  • TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.
  • For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years.
  • The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.
  • That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.
  • But audio can be misused and taken out of context, Ms. Richards said.
  • “Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”
  • “I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”
  • “I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”
peterconnelly

Siberian Students Uncover Soviet Peers' Wish for Peace in 50-Year-Old Time Capsule - The Moscow Times - 0 views

www.themoscowtimes.com/...0-year-old-time-capsule-a77745

soviet moscow

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Students in Siberia have opened a 50-year-old time capsule containing a wish for peace and international friendship from their Soviet peers, local media reported Thursday.
  • The Soviet students’ message of hope for a peaceful future was unearthed as Russia faces unprecedented economic and political isolation in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. 
  • In a letter placed inside the time capsule, the Soviet middle schoolers recite the history of the Young Pioneers and boast of the engineering achievements of the U.S.S.R. before wishing their descendants peace and international cooperation.
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  • “Life is so beautiful and amazing, and you have to make it even more wonderful, so don’t waste your time ... Live your life the same way that the bright sun shines on everyone, so that your thoughts and deeds warm and delight everyone,” the message reads.
  • “May you have friends all over the world. May there always be peace!” 
peterconnelly

Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee Celebrates Her 70 years on the Throne - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...queen-elizabeth-jubilee.html

queen elizabeth new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.
  • “You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.
  • It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.
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  • In the ensuing decades, the queen has become an irreplaceable figure in Britain, central to its self-identity.
  • That the queen made it to this Platinum Jubilee at all was far from given. She contracted the coronavirus in February and has talked about how the ordeal left her exhausted. She lost her husband, Prince Philip, last year, and her fragile health has forced her to cancel multiple public appearances, including two major events on the royal calendar: a remembrance service for the war dead and the state opening of Parliament.
  • “I like democracies, but I have a fascination with monarchical displays of power,” said Nichola Persic, an Italian exchange student who left his college in Canterbury, England, at dawn to stake out a position along the parade route. “And it’s nice to be a part of something people will remember.”
  • Strictly speaking, Elizabeth has not yet set the longevity record for any monarch.
criscimagnael

Xi and Putin's 'No Limits' Bond Leaves China Few Options on Ukraine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-china-xi.html

shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • They had just finalized a statement declaring their vision of a new international order with Moscow and Beijing at its core, untethered from American power.
  • Over dinner, according to China’s official readout, they discussed “major hot-spot issues of mutual concern.”
  • Publicly, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin had vowed that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.” The Chinese leader also declared that there would be “no wavering” in their partnership, and he added his weight to Mr. Putin’s accusations of Western betrayal in Europe.
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  • The implications for China extend beyond Ukraine, and even Europe.
  • “He’s damned if he did know, and damned if he didn’t,” Paul Haenle, a former director for China on the National Security Council, said of whether Mr. Xi had been aware of Russia’s plans to invade. “If he did know and he didn’t tell people, he’s complicit; if he wasn’t told by Putin, it’s an affront.”
  • In any case, the invasion evidently surprised many in Beijing’s establishment
  • Mr. Xi’s statement with Mr. Putin on Feb. 4 endorsed a Russian security proposal that would exclude Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
  • Even so, as Mr. Putin became determined to reverse Ukraine’s turn to Western security protections, Chinese officials began to echo Russian arguments. Beijing also saw a growing threat from American-led military blocs.
  • “Putin may have done this anyway, but also it was unquestionably an enabling backdrop that was provided by the joint statement, the visit and Xi’s association with all of these things,”
  • “He owns that relationship with Putin,” Mr. Haenle said. “If you’re suggesting in the Chinese system right now that it was not smart to get that close to Russia, you’re in effect criticizing the leader.”
  • For decades it sought to build ties with Russia while also keeping Ukraine close.
  • Over the past years, as growing numbers of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, Chinese diplomats did not raise objections with Kyiv, said Sergiy Gerasymchuk, an analyst with Ukrainian Prism, a foreign policy research organization in Kyiv.
  • For both leaders, their partnership was an answer to Mr. Biden’s effort to forge an “alliance of democracies.”
  • Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.
  • Beijing had its own complaints with NATO, rooted in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, during NATO’s war in 1999 to protect a breakaway region, Kosovo. Those suspicions deepened when NATO in 2021 began to describe China as an emerging challenge to the alliance.
  • n Feb. 23, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, accused Washington of “manufacturing panic.”
  • Chinese officials tweaked their calls to heed Russia’s security, stressing that “any country’s legitimate security concerns should be respected.” They still did not use the word “invasion,” but have acknowledged a “conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”
  • “Many decision makers in China began to perceive relations in black and white: either you are a Chinese ally or an American one,”
  • “They still want to remain sort of neutral, but they bitterly failed.”
Javier E

We've Lost the True Meaning of Cynicism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621314

life lessons cynicism history culture ethic satisfaction discipline self-sufficiency cosmopolitan

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.
  • Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
  • the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
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  • Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
  • original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
  • Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics
  • The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)
  • “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”
  • We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.
  • Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
  • cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle
  • Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years
  • The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.
  • you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
  • The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living
  • If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:
  • in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
  • To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
  • 1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
  • The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.
  • Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.
  • Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
  • 2. Askesis (“discipline”)
  • We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life
  • Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water
  • This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
  • 3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
  • Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.
  • Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely
  • Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
  • 4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
  • Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.
  • Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status
  • he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt
  • The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
Javier E

The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community - 0 views

www.afterbabel.com/...ream-cause-of-the-youth-mental

youth mental health health crisis community

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • In our first post, Zach discussed Robert Putnam’s essential work on the decline of social capital and trust, which happened in part because new individualizing technologies (such as television) emerged and participation in local and communal activities waned. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood.
  • In the second post, we featured an essay by Seth Kaplan, author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins who studies fragile states. In it, he argued that to restore the play-based childhood, we must first rebuild strong in-person local communities
  • A web of overlapping, affect-laden associations and relationships that crisscross and reinforce each other;
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  • On one end is doubling down on technology
  • On the other end is to focus on strengthening the real-world human communities and neighborhoods we live in. Seth advocates for the latter and provides us with a roadmap to get there.
  • A prototypical community consists of most or all of the following:
  • We note that the first generation to move its social life onto social media platforms immediately became the loneliest generation on record. There is a spectrum of approaches that we as a society can take to address the crushing loneliness of Gen Z and Gen Alpha
  • A set of shared values, norms, and goals—a common culture that unifies and constrains;
  • A common identity, ideally based on a common history and narrative and recognition of mutual interdependence
  • Shared rituals that celebrate the group, its past, and future;
  • High levels of trust;
  • High levels of commitment, with limited options for (or high costs to) exit;
  • Recognition of and respect for common authority figures who guide the group’s decision-making;
  • More affluent children had many of their activities organized for them by their parents, putting them in a variety of highly structured functional groups with different kids rather than repeatedly playing freely with their neighbors.
  • A diverse range of skills and personalities that can contribute complementary things of value (e.g., money, time, expertise) to the group;
  • Role models who exhibit the cultural behaviors that the group should ideally replicate or at least aspire to;
  • Exhibiting a high degree of inclusiveness by actively seeking to encompass every member who shares the same identity or location;
  • Capacity to strongly encourage through moral suasion certain norms of conduct and, if necessary, sanction misconduct.
  • As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom.
  • This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices.
  • This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.
  • Why Kids Need Real-World Community
  • Much of a child’s learning and formation is absorbed from the environment rather than directly taught by adults; behavior is better shaped by modeling than by lecturing.
  • The institutions (e.g., schools, churches, and parents’ groups) and norms (e.g., regular family dinners, neighborhood play dates, and the expectation that adults will monitor streets) around us shape our kids' lives in ways we sometimes fail to consider because they are subtle
  • Keystone actors and institutions that bridge and bond different members together;
  • As I documented in a previous essay at After Babel, unsupervised, child-directed play was in decline long before kids had smartphones. Why? Because place-based institutions and the communities they support were in decline
  • This oversupervision or “coddling”—the subject of the 2018 book co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Jon—made the attractions of smartphones and social media even more appealing.
  • Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told.  We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.
  • I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.
  • As Jon writes in The Anxious Generation, only real-world (place-based) social relationships and interactions have the four features that have characterized human interactions for millions of years. Such interactions are embodied, they are  synchronous, they involve one-to-one or one-to-several communications, and they have a high bar for entry and exit.
  • The challenge today is that smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.
  • today, the term “community” is often used in ways that are aspirational and limitless (e.g., many online advertisements for new social networks)—quite different from the original meaning of the term.
  • Why? Perhaps fewer individuals have any experience of what community really means. Young people are marketed to and formed by the twin pursuits of convenience and choice while simultaneously being told that a person’s chief purpose is to express themselves (usually through consumption)
  • First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth.
  • Community differs significantly from friendships, social networks, or what is experienced online. Whereas communities offer mutual support in times of good and bad and are bolstered by robust institutions and norms encouraging frequent, positive interactions, care and concern for one another, and ample opportunities to work together towards common goals, the alternatives typically fall short on these elements. 
  • they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another. 
  • online communities are also voluntary, with many being platforms built for expression or personal advancement. Few provide the diversity of personalities, experiences, income levels, and outlooks that were common in most neighborhoods a few decades ago
  • This vision of the good life is part of the next generation’s socialization. It feels “natural” to them, and yet it does little to prepare them for the demands and delights of membership in a community.   
  • If you are a parent and want to join or build a community to enmesh your kids in, what can you do? Here are a few ideas to get started.
  • Few provide the incentives to earn recognition through the force of character rather than a performative act about oneself. Few provide multifaceted psychological and practical support when needed for members who feel vulnerable or fall into practical difficulties. 
  • we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.
  • Second, consider how you can befriend neighbors and other parents in your immediate vicinity
  • Try the 8 Front Door Challenge, which helps you plan and host a Get-Together with neighbors closest to you
  • Participate in organizations or activities in your neighborhood. Spend time in places where people congregate locally
  • Organize a block party or play street. Create a neighborly block. 
  • Third, leverage local institutions to build neighborhood community. Schools are best placed for this because of their direct ties to local families and kids, but libraries, local businesses, houses of worship, and any other entity with strong ties to your locale can play an important role
  • Working with the local library to organize activities in or geared towards your specific neighborhood would create an opportunity for residents to meet one another.
  • In general, it’s always easier if you find allies among your neighbors, build partnerships with existing institutions, and leverage the assets (cultural, environmental, educational, economic, etc.) you already have locally. Think incrementally, building momentum step by step rather than thinking there is a magic bullet.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Boys Today Struggle With Human Connection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boys-parenting-loneliness.html

boys human connection culture crisis psychology emotion loneliness

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.
  • But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.
  • I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness
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  • All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality.
  • in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.
  • The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
  • We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.
  • in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.
  • For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle
  • For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized
  • In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel
  • For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.
  • Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends
  • Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.
  • my own research has fed my fears.
  • the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.
  • almost all of them had the nagging sense that something important was missing in those friendships. They found it almost impossible to talk to their male peers about anything intimate or express vulnerability.
  • One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another revealed that he could recall only one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years
  • they felt unable to articulate this pain or seek help, because of a fear that, because they were boys, no one would listen.
  • As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern, they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges.” He added: “They’d be like, ‘Whatever. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.’”
  • Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved closer, more emotionally open relationships, but had neither the skills nor the social permission to change the story.
  • Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to listen and engage with their friends’ emotions on any deeper level; after all, no one really engages with theirs.
  • in a sexist society, male opinions hold outsized value. But the world — including their own parents — has less time for their feelings.
  • One study from 2014 showed that parents were more likely to use emotional words when talking with their 4-year-old daughters than those speaking to their 4-year-old sons.
  • A more recent study comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that fathers of boys were less attentively engaged with their boys, spent less time talking about their son’s sad feelings and instead were more likely to roughhouse with them. They even used subtly different vocabularies when talking with boys, with fewer feelings-centered words, and more competition and winning-focused language.
  • Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.
  • in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause,
  • Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down
  • But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
  • The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively
  • We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.
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