My Life as a Ghostwriter
For 15 years, I’ve led a professional double-life, working as editor, writer, author, and podcaster in plain public view, while also helping famous people produce their own books—memoirs, mostly—behind closed doors. This parallel professional existence was outed in 2014, when one of my more well-known clients told
Shame and Silence: The LWS Twin Studies Revisited
Some colleagues refused to speak with me, several did so under conditions of anonymity and others would not answer my emails. I felt rejected and perplexed because this was not the experience I was used to. By the time I began writing Deliberately Divided in the fall of 2019, I
Teaching Us How the World Wags On
No small part of dogs’ value to humankind is the way they effortlessly channel the wondrous nature of reality itself. I’ve recently been thinking about two dogs from my youth, and was suddenly struck by the book-ended lessons they taught me about life and death, and the way our
Weekly Round Up
Bitter Lessons from AfghanistanA review of Can Intervention Work? by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus; W.W. Norton, 272 pages (August 2011) The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian; OUP, 576 pages (July 2021) The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock; Simon
"These Are Very Bad Dudes" — David Buss on Sexual Conflict and the Dark Triad
Editor's note: Earlier this year, I was delighted to interview David Buss, pioneer of evolutionary psychology about his new book When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault. One of the first psychologists to apply Darwinian insights to humans, his research over the past three
Bitter Lessons from Afghanistan
A review of Can Intervention Work? by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus; W.W. Norton, 272 pages (August 2011) The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian; OUP, 576 pages (July 2021) The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock; Simon and Schuster, 368
The Ironies of Sex
In “The Problem with Being Cool About Sex,” the Atlantic’s Helen Lewis meditates on the many contradictions inherent in the sexual experience. Among others, Lewis contrasts the victories of women’s sexual liberation to the costs of being objectified and oversexualized, the ongoing friction between our societal condemnation of
The Progressive Case for Renouncing Gender Extremism: Last of a Three-Part Series
In the first two parts of this essay series, I argued that “gender supremacists” (my preferred term) have created an artificial reality in which words such as “man” and “woman” are defined in a way that ordinary people neither recognize nor agree with. In Canada, the UK, the United States,
