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Opportunity Knocked

Lily Geismer on the Democratic Party’s Failed Vision for the Working Class

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Under Construction

Richard Reeves on Rebuilding Masculinity

McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?

Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.

Sunbeams

How we talk about masculinity might be just as important, if not more so, than what we say. The very idea that there is a strict set of rules needs to be chucked away. The future of masculinity is a plethora of masculinities.

Grayson Perry

Old Souls

Jim Tucker on Children’s Memories of Past Lives

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

Penumbra

If Roe was created in the liminal space of the penumbra, Dobbs is the total eclipse that makes all go dark.

Mind the Gap

Melissa Deckman on the Challenges and Strengths of Gen Z

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Uniforms

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back

I’ve always enjoyed pickup: the sudden poetry of it, the immediate bond and intimacy among strangers. . . . It’s all guts and very little glory—yet there is some glory, even if only a handful of spectators are watching. One OHHHHHHH, after you cross someone so hard they fall on their ass, can make you hold your head high for the rest of the week.