Was there supposed to be a link for the first quote?

Puts me in mind of this from X when I was on it:

feel like there's a decent essay to be written on how hollowed out american churches are becoming. all the energy is in pentecostal/non-denom churches which teach mostly hippie bs or self-help bs with a veneer of christianity. being a genuine theological conservative must suck

imagine being a guy who cares about the synod of dort or pelagian soteriology and your options for churches are either "five old people in a dying town" or "COWBOY CHURCH - WE DON'T EAT SEED OILS" led by some guy named "rambo"

At the same time, they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.

This one is a bit dubious. The average age of a first-time father is quite a bit higher than the average age of a first-time mother, for a number of reasons (biology, tendency for women to marry older men, that kind of thing). So if you take equal-aged samples, of course there are going to be more childless men who want children than there are childless women who want children - even if the end result is that everyone who wants children ends up having them.

I don't understand what happened to opinions on seed oils.

1: whoops, thanks.

(NYT gifted link)

Young men have different concerns [than young women]. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less.

Outside major cities, of course, they earn more. But we... don't care so much about those ones?

Any possibility sex-selective foeticide among right-wing religious contributes to this?

Over here women were reliably more Conservative than men until the 2017 election - there is now a distinct gap the other way, and it's biggest among young voters.

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/will-there-be-a-gender-gap-in-the-2024-general-election/

Ah, the new hotness is College Republicans, maybe the reactionary youth are going to turn up this cycle. How many times is the msm going to buy this? I can't think of an election since 2008 when this hasn't been announced with breathless excitement, before the 18-34 group breaks massively for the Ds or their local equivalent. We were promised this before the general election in the UK this year. I presume at this point there's a Sulzberger Directive to go and find some reactionary youths, dammit, and don't come back here without a donkey unless you want to be fired. Remember "Dimes Square"? "Puriteens"? Just one bomb-out turkey after another.

6: parents of daughters are more likely to be Republican voters than parents of sons - even though Congressmen with daughters are more likely to be liberal than Congressmen with sons
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/11/25/study-having-daughters-makes-parents-more-likely-to-be-republican/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12055

"Two sociologists have found that parents who have daughters are more inclined to support the GOP and turn a cold shoulder to Democrats. In newly published findings that challenge earlier research, Dalton Conley of New York University and Emily Rauscher of the University of Kansas found that having more daughters than sons and having a daughter first "significantly reduces the likelihood of Democratic identification and significantly increases the strength of Republican Party identification."

Parents are so dumb.

Is there a change in the gender gap? All the historical variation in data just looks random and/or within the margin of error.

Gender gap among all women, 1980-2020 (averaging together when multiple polls are on the page): 8, 6, 7, 4, 11, 10, 7, 7, 10, 9.5, 10.

Among white women, 1992-2020: 4, 10, 11, 7, 5, 7, 7, 7.

So if lower education levels correlate with conservative beliefs (and they do, very strongly), and having children also correlates with conservative beliefs (and they do, and more strongly the more children you have) it should be possible to work out exactly how many children will balance out the liberalising effects of, say, a master's degree...

I was at an event last night for a sort-of trade association (merged with particular advocacy) and it must have been at least 200 people, at a great location except the bathroom had only one stall and one urinal, and the event was lopsidedly male so there was a line. Clearly a group unused to waiting in such a line.

On the OP, I suspect the NYT has somewhat confused itself here.

They're trying, at least in the first half of the story, to tell a story about "something new is happening - in society, or in the churches - that is drawing more Gen Z men to church".

But this is not true. Gen Z men are still much less religious than the men of previous generations. Gen Z women are also much less religious than the women of previous generations. The long-term trend (almost called it a secular trend, heh) of declining religiosity has not stopped in either sex. In other words: men are not the story here. There's nothing new happening with men.

The story is that something new is happening that is driving Gen Z women specifically away from church even faster than was already happening. As the article says:

But they came of age as the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender-based abuse, which inspired widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #ChurchToo. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 compelled many of them to begin paying closer attention to reproductive rights.

13: You can use the sink if you're tall enough.

Covid is over, so you don't need to wash your hands in the sink.

I had a very pleasant religious upbringing and I'd be happy for my children to have something similar, except my partner isn't on board and it's a lot of work on top of a very busy life. The church I'd go to is about a 30 min walk with small children and I'm not that with it on Sunday morning.

I am not a Gen Z male.

14: Why would the NYT rather write a story about "listless, uneducated men are being drawn to the uplifting glow of religion because it gives them purpose and structure" than write the more truthful story about "women are disgusted by misogyny and abuse of power in an important and historic American institution"?

Who can say.

Our local UU church let its full time minister go and is now looking for a part time one. I feel like its my fault for not attending, but also I don't want to go to church.

In other generation gap news, I chided a teenaged boy at the pharmacy this morning for taking the one chair while his mother and several old ladies were standing.

My first impulse was to drag him to his feet by an ear, so I really deserve congratulations and thanks for my hip and with it status.

Social media is bad. 1 is amazing, and 8 misses that this isn't really about colleges students, more the non-college crowd.

17: Welcome! Also LB is going to start telling you to pick a real pseud, better to do it now and not make her complain. Wry cooter is still available.

21: it's the NYT, who did you think they were going to ask, poors or something?

20: Good work on both counts, Flip! How did the teenager respond?

I may be the youngest person still bothered when men wear caps in restaurants.

Be assured, you are not.

24: He looked stunned but young people are all starting to look wide-eyed and stupid to me anyway, in another sign of aging.

25: Don't get me started.

I do see young women in church with their hair covered by some kind of a scarf thing made of lace. Which was something my grandmother stopped doing in 1980 or so.

NMM to Yahya Sinwar.

OBL, Nasrallah, now Sinwar, it's getting like we'll have to suspend terrorist play in the sex grotto entirely

I'd settle for suspending the genocide but I won't hold my breath

"Sinwar is Dead. Will the Fighting Stop?" - NYT news analysis just up

It's amazing how credulous they get in service of erecting Republic serial villains. Like there has to be a cackling master manipulator and when he's out of the way all the puppet strings will fall limp.

To be fair, when Rabin was assassinated, the headline they ran was "Will the weather be uncontrolled?"

Even if the Cleveland baseball team was still racist, I'd root for them over the Yankees.

Despite it being in Ohio, I tried to push the boy to go to college at the school where they disproved the ether, but he insisted on a rural setting.

I think Harris has decided that the way to the White House is to break Trump's brain. It seems like a better plan with every new day.

There's a woman here who looks too much like Valerie Solanas.

I mean, Warhol was probably pretty insufferable. But shooting should be at least plan B.

It's amazing how credulous they get in service of erecting Republic serial villains. Like there has to be a cackling master manipulator and when he's out of the way all the puppet strings will fall limp.

Alternatively, highly centralised authoritarian organisations are actually quite dependent on functional leadership at the top, and when that's gone they tend to see significant drops in effectiveness.

We don't hear much from Al Qaeda these days, do we?

There's a woman here who looks too much like Valerie Solanas.

I had to look up what Valerie Solanas looked like. She looks like she could be vaguely related to James Cromwell.

41 beyond being Muslim there is little to compare Hamas with Al Qaeda. Hamas is a nationalist resistance movement, as long as Palestine is occupied there will be nationalist resistance movements; killing a leader isn't going to end it and a familiarity with the history of the group and its former assassinated leaders will show this.

There is no military solution to this.

Also that video that was released was a big mistake, he wasn't hiding out in a tunnel surrounded by hostages or absurdly wearing an abaya trying to disguise himself as a woman-not that that would have mattered with regard to safety. He was in fatigues and combat gear at the front lines and fighting till the end with whatever was at hand even though he was grievously wounded.

History is absolutely chocker with nationalist resistance movements that got militarily defeated and ceased fighting, and I'm really not sure what makes Hamas or Palestine an exception in this matter. It's not something we like to think about because plucky resistance fighters are exciting to read about but it does happen a lot.

re: 44

Chechnya or even Sri Lanka might be the most recent examples where massive destruction of life and property and/or genocidal or near-genocidal violence basically worked.

I'm sure Netanyahu is fully aware of those as examples, which is presumably why he's confident that Israel can go all out with the massive war crimes.

The Chechnya case is especially apposite. OTOH Bibi seems to have thought Hamas would be his Kadyrovtsy, so.

> I can't think of an election since 2008 when this hasn't been announced with breathless excitement,

Increasing education polarization in politics (relative to diminishing race and ethnicity polarization) seems to be a pretty clear linear trend since 2008. Insofar as there's also been an increasing gender gap in people going to college in those years, it feels plausible to me that these are trends that will continue to reinforce each other until something pretty fundamental changes.

I don't buy the argument here that there are statistical "male flight" tipping points for participation in fields/institutions/occupations, but it does seem like a big chunk of Gen Z males are retreating into aggro and/or trad bunkers that I am not sure they will ever leave: ttps://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college

45.2 exactly but as Israel is purportedly part of the Western world this is going to have massive repercussions (ICJ, ICC) that Russia and even Sri Lanka were somewhat insulated from. The choice will be either Israel or the post war global rules based order.

Since the OP, the NYT published The Evidence for a Big Youth Gender Gap and a Right Turn for Young Men.

But someone on Bluesky in response posted the "partisan gap" graph in this Grauniad article, comparing young women & young men (US) over 24 years. That suggests the change is young women moving left while young men are staying in place.

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"Unfog" and "unfogging" are deemed not words by Spelling Bee. How gauche.

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The "defog".

Try "defog".

It's a little noisy, but in the second graph in 49 I see a leftward shift in young men from 2006-2016 followed by a rightward shift post-2016. Especially when you keep in mind that those follow pretty clear boundaries in political eras.

Isn't Chechnya sort of like a one-state solution, though? I will fully admit not having kept up, but I thought Chechens are more a part of the Russian state than Israel's current leadership would want for Palestinians within a one-state Israel.

That's the difference between being dominated by imperialists and being dominated by nationalists for you.

cheryl rofer re gender gap -

https://bsky.app/profile/cherylrofer.bsky.social/post/3l6samuvy7s2r

offered wo commentary as asthma completely kicking my ass, largely agree.

47: when I was in grad school in the 1980s I took a course in feminist political economy where this very subject was discussed at length. I remember there were several papers we read studying the phenomenon of job categories that changed from male to female And also therefore droppedSignificantly in statusPretty much at the same time. When I read that substack article you linked, The Echoes to this previous work Were pretty obvious.

I don't buy the argument here that there are statistical "male flight" tipping points for participation in fields/institutions/occupations, but it does seem like a big chunk of Gen Z males are retreating into aggro and/or trad bunkers that I am not sure they will ever leave: https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college

I do think Kevin Drum's post here is a good additional reference point: https://jabberwocking.com/men-are-still-going-to-college/

Drum observes that we aren't seeing fewer men going to college; it's just that the number of women going to college has increased dramatically while the number of men going has remained the same.

59: but which gender is keeping up with population growth?

59: but which gender is keeping up with population growth?

I'm not sure if you're making a joke, but his chart shows the percentage of high school graduates going to college.

It was a good joke.

I do sometimes spoil good jokes.

So, what happens if the anti-Affirmative Action people get their way and colleges can no longer put their thumb on the scale to recruit more men?

63: You didn't spoil it, you just made it explicit. Like that one guy.

following up 58, my personal hypothesis: the tipping point happens when the modal guy brought up in soft sexism* understands that he can expect to lose to a girl, and understands this before he's committed.

* I once listened to a family tell their daughter she could be the best in her class and come in top and beat any boy, and then tell their son that he had to do better, what if he lost to a girl? Not actually very soft! Still really regret not talking to them about it.

I knew a guy who switched high schools because he knew he would graduate third in his class if he didn't (behind my sister and a friend of her's). But it is kind of hard when you can have a class size small enough that you can graduate third in your class and not be in the top 10%. Anyway, he switched schools and got what he wanted out of college, getting into medical school. His younger brother did not go to college and was so oppressed that he had to try to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States. And so shitty in general that he turned state's evidence right away and didn't get any prison.

Which is really not on topic, but I find it interesting.

Is turning states evidence always public? So we can at least hope this goober loses all his awful friends too?

Even though he didn't go to college, he wasn't stupid. Following the wisdom of Trump, we stayed outside the Capitol and urged others in. He was just a piece of shit to everyone.

69: It was public and he tried to lie about what he. I don't think he lost any friends because I don't think anyone he was involved with politically was anything but a tool.

I think he was afraid of getting physically attacked by some of the people he testified against.

They taste like passenger pigeon, probably.

Celeste Davis should be more embarrassed than she apparently is about not being able to tell the difference between "a smaller percentage of students are men" and "a smaller percentage of men are students".

But if the new standard is "men don't want to study in majority female classes and this represents a failing on the part of men" then it will be great fun applying it more widely.

60-63: the funny thing is that I wasn't making a joke. I was semi-distracted and didn't look hard enough at the graph. I thought it was raw numbers.

Celeste Davis should be more embarrassed than she apparently is about not being able to tell the difference between "a smaller percentage of students are men" and "a smaller percentage of men are students".

Mandom occupies a smaller percentage of each student.

I knew a guy who switched high schools because he knew he would graduate third in his class if he didn't (behind my sister and a friend of her's). But it is kind of hard when you can have a class size small enough that you can graduate third in your class and not be in the top 10%.

I'm always surprised that the vast majority of people in Texas still want to game the system by going to the fanciest school district, and not by optimizing their chances of being in the top 10%.

I used to think that it was internally contradictory to want to redshirt your kid for kindergarten and also put a great deal of effort into going to the rich school district. The source of my dumbness is this: I thought that the reason that parents wanted their kids to go to a good school district is because otherwise the kids wouldn't be challenged in school. So it seemed to me that they were making two moves that would cancel each other out: making school more challenging but then redshirting your kid to make it easier again. Finally I realized everyone is just racist and/or classist, and there is no internal contradiction.

I thought it was funny.

Challenging? They don't want their kids to learn anything. They just want them to be successful

To be clear, mine was not a rich school district. People redshirted kids (or at least boys) all the time, but it was for sports.

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So, I met either an undecided voter or a closet Trump supporter. Probably not going to vote. She was unaware of the comments about immigrants eating cats and dog and thought that was awful. She said she generally wasn't political, but didn't "like Harris's mannerisms." Is that just code for "black people"?

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Yes, it is.

66: Lose at what? Committed to what?

78: I have thoughts on this. I went to Weatherford HS (grad '81), a typically incredibly shitty Texas high school (literally the guidance counselor didn't know what AP classes were, and of course the school didn't offer them). Three things:

(1) b/c it was a shitty school, I pretty much didn't learn much in my classes. Graduated a year early, spent that last year working full-time in fast-food, sleeping in class, still got straight-A's, b/c when you're one of the few who can string together words into grammatically-correct sentences, you're a genius. And as the next point shows, I wasn't some super-genius.

(2) Imagine how much more I could have learned at a real school. When I arrived at Rice I met all sorts of kids from all over (even from high schools in Texas) who had actual educations in high school. I felt kinda robbed. And I had to work hard to catch up.

(3) BUT/BUT/BUT b/c I came from this shitty, backward place (notwithstanding that the parents all worked in the defense plants in Fort Worth, so had money, hence their kids all got nice cars, etc), it turned out I got a bump up when it came time for NSF postgraduate fellowships (as I learned when I got to Cornell for grad school).

I think that in the past, when college was less winner-take-all (and was less of a mere credential), getting your kid into a better high school meant getting them a better education, which meant that even if they didn't get into that oh-so-posh college, they'd still do better in life. That idea wasn't stupid: I certainly think that going to Rice was good b/c for a few years I had to work hard to catch up. But going to Cornell was stupid: I should have gone to MIT (even though they didn't offer any $$) b/c I'd have had to keep on working to catch up. It wasn't stupid to want your kid to go to a place where they have to work to catch up to their peers. But today, I'm not so sure about that: there are fewer second chances for the non-rich, education is more of a credential than a real education, and so yeah, it seems somewhat sensible, if you can do it, to send your kid to a shitty, shitty, shitty high school where they'll be one of the top two students, and arrange for private tutors to make sure they get a real education anyway.

Which is really not on topic, but I find it interesting.

From the perspective of someone who's started dropping by after 15 years of not doing so, this is a good community motto, isn't it?

Speaking of making the joke explicit, of course.

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Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is well worth your time, even if you're only passingly a a Ghibli person.
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83: It was kind of a great story, because she said that her daughter was visiting her mother-in-law with her "well he's not her husband". And the boyfruend/partner started to say some Trumpy things, her mother-in-law told her granddaughter's boyfriend that she would not put up with that in her house and kicked him out.

The thing I don't really get is why employers care about a credential qua credential, and not about education.

My main theory is it has to do with professionalization of HR.

> The thing I don't really get is why employers care about a credential qua credential, and not about education.

A lot of professional life is being able to summon the motivation to complete public milestones of work that has no inherent value

Right, it's a marker of successful compliance with a multi-year burdensome bureaucratic task, because it's the normal socially expected thing to do. That's going to be related to how easy you are to have as an employee, regardless of what you actually know.

But then it only works if colleges keep it being a burdensome task. And the trend is to remove as many burdens as possible.

I had several HR folks of the more candid variety admit to me over the years that it was one of the few things they could reliably fact check, as educational institutions generally kept reliable records of who actually graduated (military service was another). Who actually knows if you know something or were run out of your last job, but this you know.

And the most absolutely final HR "nyet" in my experience was any fudging on education credentials. And it was not as uncommon as I would have thought. A heartbreaking case was a reliable contractor about to be hired full-time who claimed he had graduated from local crappy HS but in fact had left early and gotten a GED.

Even if it's easy to get through, it's still going to be a sorting mechanism.

Trumpism's devolution into straight anti-intellectualism is reminding me of the Khmer Rouge.

https://www.nysscpa.org/article-content/kpmg-us-head-says-easier-path-to-accounting-career-needed-to-avert-crisis-100924

Knopp is the first head of a Big Four firm--KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC-- to publicly support eliminating the requirement for a fifth year of higher education in addition to the four-year undergraduate degree. In an interview, Knopp told the Financial Times that he is backing an "apprenticeship" model to take the place of the fifth year of education. "We have a brewing crisis right now, with the number of students going to college and the number going into accounting, and we need to absolutely address it in the very near term,"
[...]
US accounting undergraduates have dropped to the lowest level in 15 years, decreasing the pipeline of possible new CPAs when 75 % of existing CPAs are at or near retirement age

I've noticed an uptick around here in interest in vocational high schools where you can come out with skills that prepare you to do an apprenticeship as an electrician or plumber.without having to go to any post graduate school. It's an expensive education, though, and there are more people who want it than slots. So, some people have to pay tuition after graduating to get the same skills.

There's actually a bit of a scandal where kids from higher income neighborhoods were getting in to the regional technical schools (they offer some STEM training) at higher rates, because they do better on our state-wide academic assessment test.

95: accounting is suffering because it still requires math and certifications and people inclined towards those talents can study data science more easily and make more money (and locally, busy season coincides with ski season.).

92: it was a decent signal (most people who start college don't finish it) with a job market full of millennials. It's less of a good signal now and Gen Z and Alpha have demographics on their side.

> most people who start college don't finish it

Hrm, this is a good point that I hadn't thought enough about since I've been at places with high graduation rates. Here the graduation rate is right around 80% (interestingly almost 10 points higher for women, speaking of Gender Gaps) and there's intense pressure from the administration to increase that further. Spending 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to weed out one in four people seems ridiculously wasteful. There's gotta be a better way, if all they care about is attendance.

There's a downturn in Data Science right now though, no? So maybe that will correct itself a little bit. Here there were more accounting majors graduated in 2025 than 2024, but I can't see the data before that. Of course this decline is just in time for all universities to be laser focused on Data Science programs! (Here me out, what if people majored in Math and then went into whichever math-related career is hiring, instead of majoring in Data Science or Accounting and then being locked in to a decision they made 4 years ago?) The Data Science sucking away majors thing is also a big thing Math Ed here, where we've basically gone to 0 Math Ed majors.

I still don't know what data science is.

It's Science! With Data!

Right.

Slightly more seriously, one of my colleagues who was on the committee for developing a Data Science major said that the difference is that in Statistics you have some conclusions you have a relatively small amount of data so you need to sort out what kind of inferences you can really draw from your limited data, while in Data Science you have an embarrassment of riches in terms of data but you're not really sure what patterns you should even be looking for.

Yeah, but with all the recent advances in Vibes Science, Data Science is basically obsolete.

Mathematical medians are passé, as I learned on twitter you gotta take the "spiritual median." That's vibes science!

https://x.com/Tyler_A_Harper/status/1831800883547664744

I've been working in statistics with a M.A. for thirty years.

Apparently some people are still masturbating to Arnold Palmer.

The lemonade keeps it tart

Heh.

I still don't know what data science is.

It's Science! With Data!

I thought it was Statistics! With Colors!

And the most absolutely final HR "nyet" in my experience was any fudging on education credentials. And it was not as uncommon as I would have thought.

Oh man, do I have a story for you.

112 was fantastic.

112: Big deal, so he didn't jump through a few hoops. Who among us hasn't claimed to have two "professional" masters, and a high rank in a military we never joined, and combat experience, and more than double the years of service we actually had, and

112: Whoa. I knew someone who told lies in the same vein, but it never panned out for him like it did for this guy. Pretty awful consequences for the city's staff and residents.

You know, I'm out in and near Latrobe quite a bit. There's lots of evidence of Palmer's impact, things named after him and his businesses still running. But I never heard anyone mention his penis before.

Ohio is where they make crude references to the sexuality of golfers, like the "Golden Bear".

So here I am up on top of Mount Royal on a beautiful day scrolling social media to see if US media is covering a deranged elderly man talking about a dead professional' golfer's penis. I am well.

On that story, a somewhat unremarked aspect is T assuming that professional golfers shower together after the round. (OK he does not really think that, it is all just mush. I did see a sportswriter speculate he was conflating a story Pete Rose told about Joe DiMaggio's penis and a shower in the bush when they were entertaining troops in Vietnam.)

My wife and I are older rubes in a happening cosmopolitan city on this trip for sure.

In a modern hotel here with some interesting features. Complementary apples arrayed on individual mini-shelves on each floor (took us a bit to figure out it was not just art...) Window between the sleeping portion of the room and the shower.

Rwanda says no community transmission of Marburg virus, with zero new infections in recent days

Africa might be doing better an controlling dangerous diseases, but they sure are lacking in ostensibly heterosexual men focusing on the penises of other men.

I forgot David Thewlis is in this.

I remember hearing all about Arnold Palmer's big penis back when it was featured on that show, Big Penises of the Rich and Famous, with that guy Robin Leach.

Also I think Arnold Palmer won People Magazine's Big Penis of the Year one time, and I seem to recall there was some controversy between him and Don Johnson over who's penis was bigger.

The 1980s were a strange time.

That was Aimee Mann's toe.

Heebie - would you be willing to put up a state ballot initiative thread? It's just a bat signal, because I want to get the opinions of my fellow residents.

You're supposed to send a link and a pun with a guest post.

May do that.