Farewell, Brat Summer.
Hi friends.
How is it possible that it’s already September? I don’t know about you, but it feels to me as though August slipped away like a bottle of wine. (Yes, that’s Taylor Swift, not Charli xcx, but stay with me.)
At The Atlantic, I published a piece on the real song of the summer, which was neither “360” nor anything from TTPD1, but instead the TikTok sensation “Man in Finance.”
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Creator Meg Boni swears the song is tongue-in-cheek, but my theory is that it’s one of those jokes containing more than a grain of truth — highlighting both the bleakness of today’s dating scene and how open more women are about their longing for the soft life.
A few facts I found in the course of reporting this one out: There’s a lack of consensus on how many people in the United States have blue eyes—estimates range from 16 to 27 percent— but fewer than 0.2% of American men are taller than 6’5.
Read the piece here: (gift link!)
I also joined
’s New York Times podcast to discuss J.D. Vance, cat ladies, fertility and the strange ways in which gender and reproductive panics are shaping the 2024 election cycle.It was a delightful conversation, and I’ll have more to say about the topic soon. (I’m going to Philly this week to listen in on a focus group of Gen Z voters discussing gender and politics, so that should be… interesting.)
In the meantime, you could contemplate this recent tweet by David Hogg2, which drew an enormous number of aggrieved responses. Shortened:
“I hope I’m wrong but if we lose in November I think the main reason why will be the number of young men of all races that are no longer Democrats […] I think a lot of this is caused by Covid and the epidemic of male loneliness in this country and the ensuing commodification through social media of misogyny.”
I don’t completely agree, but that last line is getting at something.
Personal news…
Some other updates: I won the National Press Club’s Nell Minnow Award for Cultural Criticism for last year’s Washington Post series on masculinity. (Haven’t read “Men are Lost”? Catch up here.)
I’m also a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award for Excellence in Opinion Writing for the same. Wish me luck?
Random bits:
To end this newsletter on a bit of nonsense, here’s a hilarious note from the editor of New York Magazine regarding an admittedly insane piece The Cut published a week or two ago.
The Cut is really winning the content game right now. Every week there’s a new, wildly inflammatory first-person column — just when it seemed like the last one couldn’t be topped. You thought $50k in a shoebox was bad?3 What about wildly revealing notes on a potential divorce? Maybe you want to “marry an older man”? No, here’s cat fancying gone wrong4.
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On that cheerful note, I’ll leave you. Happy fall!
This had me so exercised that I forced
to dedicate a whole Wisdom of Crowds episode to discussing it.My unpopular opinion is that too many people care too much about their pets, which they seem to forget are pets, not humans. I will one day write about this in a more public-facing forum, but I’m not yet braced enough for the hatred, death threats, and other “troubling” messages that I know I’ll receive. Maybe in a few months.