First time first comment! I listened to that Freakonomics episode and was thinking the same thing. While it is probably not the sole factor, I am positive it is a large one.

Kosko is big on the kids aren't reading. And he teaches them.

The linked article is based on a falsehood: male college enrolment is not dropping. At best it has dropped slightly in the last three years, but those were hardly typical years. Before that, to quote the article that the post author herself links to, but clearly hasn't read, "the percent of men enrolling in college has been more stagnant. The rate of immediate college enrollment for men is the same in 2022 as it was in 1964".

What this woman has done is that she has read something saying "the percentage of college graduates who are male is falling" and she has misread this as "the percentage of men who graduate from college each year is falling".

These are not equivalent statements but, because she has a story to tell and she is either not very bright or not very honest, she is acting like they are.

She spends ages saying "men are being driven away from college because there are more and more women there" but the numbers simply don't back this up - except for the last three years, when the percentage of women going to college also dropped.

We have gone from a state where this cafe has ten boys and four girls in it, to a state where the cafe now has ten boys and twelve girls, and this dope is saying "wow, the boys just hate this cafe now, must be because there are so many girls in it". No! You clot! Look at the numbers!

"Clot" really is a pretty great insult.

"Today the ratio is 4:6"

I realize this is the very least important nit to pick in the entire article, but after citing ratios of 2:1 and 1:1, why not use 2:3 here?

As for the other article, I got as far as "no comprehensive data exist on this trend" and stopped. As a former elite college student, I no longer have the patience to read stuff that is clearly made up. Horowitch could have dug out reading lists from forty years ago and compared them to reading lists for the same course today. "Look at this. First year English students at this university were expected to read this list 46 books totalling 12,000 pages in 1979. Now they're expected to read 16 books totalling just 8,500 pages."

She doesn't say anything like that. So either she didn't bother doing it - in which case she's lazy - or she did, and it didn't back up her anecdotes - in which case she's dishonest.

Either way, she's not worth my time.

I've been teaching one section of intro to environmental science per semester. I can only teach in the evenings. Not sure if that is why for for two semesters now, I've only gotten two or three women in my class of thirty. (Perhaps they don't want to be on campus in the evening? Perhaps they have other obligations in the evening? Don't know.) Anyway, they're a bunch of brown and black freshman boys in my class and it feels just like my high school.

I don't assign long reading materials, but it sure seems to me that they have short attention spans.

This reminds me very strongly of another "men vs women" trendpiece that turned out to be bollocks - the one about how young men were starting to return to religion. The mistake in this case was very similar. Young men weren't any more likely to go to church now than in 2002 - rather less, in fact. But the percentage of young people in church who were male had been rising because young women had been abandoning church even faster. The whole article was about "ooh these trends must be attracting men back to church" - which wasn't happening.

5: I think it's easier to get an overall gist from 4-to-6 because it translates easily into percentages. The other ratios are easy because they have a 1 in them.

3: The author is a woman and therefore not expected to be good with math. But she says quite directly: "What has changed is an increase in girls" so I'm thinking she understands the situation. Her thesis doesn't really change if you say, "The increase in student enrollment as we become a wealthier society has been a result almost entirely of more women enrolling, and that increase is continuing today." This data still requires an explanation, and she offers one that is applicable, whether or not it is correct.

Colleges have been running a DEI for men for a couple of decades more, haven't they?

Historical note: the idea that modern technology is ruining young people's attention spans goes back more than two thousand years, to Socrates in the Phaedrus, when the modern technology under discussion was writing.

she says quite directly: "What has changed is an increase in girls" so I'm thinking she understands the situation

Counterpoint: the entire piece is about men apparently "fleeing", which requires getting rid of them somewhere.

The well-regarded NIH-funded survey of US high school seniors does show a notable increase in disinterest in higher ed among Republican boys between 2002-2022, as illustrated by this chart.

The author is a woman and therefore not expected to be good with math

I think, to give her credit, she is more likely to be lying than to be simply making mistakes in arithmetic.

Her thesis doesn't really change if you say, "The increase in student enrollment as we become a wealthier society has been a result almost entirely of more women enrolling, and that increase is continuing today."

I think it does! Her thesis is that men are being driven away from college. She literally says "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boys are going to college."

FEWER BOYS ARE GOING TO COLLEGE, she says.

Again, she says:
"In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment..."

DRASTIC DROP IN MALE ENROLMENT, she says. But, again, we have here a stupid or innumerate person who doesn't understand the difference between "percentage of men" and "absolute number of men" and so has utterly misread the problem. In 1987 according to the AAVMC (whose numbers don't go back beyond 1980) there were around 6,000 students enrolling in vet medicine courses in the US. So, 3,000 men (assuming Lincoln's numbers are right which is a huge gamble). By 2009 that number was north of 12,000. So, 22.4% of that is... about 2,500 men.

That's not a tremendous plummet, really, is it? This is a story about colleges getting bigger and more women going. This isn't a story about a drastic fall in the number of men going. What it looks like is that in 1987 every man who wanted to be a vet got to be one and that hasn't changed, but vet medicine colleges have grown and now lots more women can go who previously couldn't.

Table 1 in this Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce report is also interesting, showing degree attainment broken out by gender and race.

I'm less educated than all of the women in my family.

she says quite directly: "What has changed is an increase in girls" so I'm thinking she understands the situation

No, the increase in girls is, according to her thesis, causing men to flee. The increase in girls is definitely happening but this woman thinks that it is the cause of a separate thing, which is men fleeing.

I think what has happened, in her tiny little confused brain, is that she has got carried away by the analogy to white flight. There's a limited number of houses in a suburb, so it is necessarily true that if you have 100 white families, and then a black family moves in, a white family has moved out. But there's no possible situation where white people don't mind living alongside black people and so you end up with 100 white families and 20 black families. However white people feel about black people, that's just not physically possible, because there's only 100 houses. You can do that with colleges because colleges grow.

I probably read fewer books than all the women in my family too, but I've committed more science than any of them.

Ajay, I think you're overlooking an important factor. Over the past few decades, credential inflation* means that many jobs that didn't use to require higher education now require them.

Given those seismic changes in the labor market, you would expect a higher percentage of men to enroll in and graduate from degree programs. If the percentage of male students enrolling is holding steady, that is a surprising** finding.

*There has been a modest movement toward "skills-based hiring" in the past few years, with a dozen governors signing executive orders to review state government job descriptions to remove unnecessary degree requirements, and various nonprofit efforts to get private-sector employers to do the same, but actual impact on hiring of workers without degrees has been extremely minimal.

**Although the Georgetown report linked above does illustrate that white men with a HS diploma still outearn women with associate's degrees, so it's not entirely economically irrational for men to discount the value of higher ed.

"Higher Ed" would be a good name for a weed store near campus that's run by a guy named Edward.

16 is interesting and the use of lifetime earnings makes me think that even if men and women doing the same job get the exact same pay, if you require women to have more qualifications to get the job, then their lifetime earnings will suffer because of the time taken to get the extra qualifications during which they won't be working.

But I also note that it shows an increase in the percentage of men of all races getting degrees in the US in the last 10 years (figure 16) which, again, emphasises that the substacker woman is talking nonsense. There is clearly no "male flight" from college. Not even "white male flight".

"Demographic Cliff" would be a good name for an indoor climbing wall near campus, one that is struggling to get enough business to keep operating.

20: credential inflation no doubt exists, but I think that its expected effect on male higher education choices is not as clear as you say, because there has also been a massive shift in the gender makeup of a lot of jobs.

Take teaching. It's plausible that in 1960 a lot of secondary school teachers didn't have postgraduate degrees. And it's plausible that now almost all of them have postgraduate degrees. You're saying "that should drive more men to get postgraduate degrees!" but that only holds if you hold the number of male teachers constant. And that obviously isn't the case.

14: I saw that too and I was very interested by it, but in light of the figures above, I'm not sure how meaningful it is. If Republican boys are increasingly uninterested in graduating from college now compared to 2002, and Democratic boys are about as interested now as they were then... well, that's an overall decline, right? Must be.

So why has the college graduation rate for men risen since 2002?

Come to that, the post shows the same thing for girls. Democratic girls are unchanged since 2002; Republican girls are much less interested in college than in 2002. And yet the college graduation rate for women has gone up! A lot!

So I think what this data actually shows is "Republican kids lie about being interested in college" or, more charitably, "kids' interest in college isn't a very good predictor of how likely they are to actually go".

Incidentally, the other thing that put me off that argument is... I can't find the original data that it is based on. (I was going to post it last week; that's the main reason I didn't.) It cites "Monitoring the Future: a continuing study of American youth" but the only survey by that title I could find is a survey focussed on drug use in young people (https://monitoringthefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/mtf2025.pdf), and the most recent annual report has data on college plans, but no data on political affiliation that I could find.

I notice that "Evan Robinson" has no relevant qualifications in the area, no relevant experience, and posts a screenshot rather than linking to an actual report or even naming a source (he just says "I saw this"). There are no Google results for a search for the title of that chart.

25.last have you tried asking ChatGPT?

You can just download the Monitoring the Future data and analyze it. I have no idea if that's what was done, but it's not hard.

I did not conduct my own analysis of the Monitoring the Future data, to be clear. I just thought it was a reliable dataset.

Additional examples of the partisan split on the value of higher ed comes from Gallup, which found that fully half of Republican adults (50%) lack confidence in higher education.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx

When it comes to 2-year colleges specifically, it's not as bad, but still pretty substantial (36% of Republicans):

https://news.gallup.com/poll/646841/americans-confident-two-year-schools.aspx

Sorry, my error. It's only 36% of Republicans who have "a great deal/quite a lot" of confidence in 2-year schools, not the reverse.

Ah, hang on, sorry, they do collect political data. Missed it the first time.

But my first question still applies, then: how is it, if Republicans are becoming less interested in college, and Democrats aren't becoming more interested, that more people are going to college?

Well, the population is growing? Even with a demographic cliff?

I think part of the issue is older students. At least I've seen that in other contexts. Fewer 18 year olds heading to college, but overall enrollment up.

I won't able to come back to this discussion until later, but to 31: last time I saw stats, the median age of a community college student was 26. There are a lot of working adults who enter higher ed programs (both credit-bearing and noncredit) outside of the traditional 18-24 age bracket.

It's also increasingly common for immigrants who come to the US as adults to get a short-term higher ed credential here to add on to whatever degrees they already arrived with, as a way to add something to their resumes that US hiring managers will more easily grasp. (Whether this is a good use of their time and money is a longer question....)

30: Perhaps some people identify as neither Democrats nor Republicans? Perhaps the percentage of such folk has been growing for decades, and not only among college students?

Came here to say 5, but am happy someone beat me to it!

My understanding is that the kids these days don't read *books*. They read excerpts, because reading excerpts is what you can in the timeframe of a standardized test, so reading excerpts is the only thing that matters.

I ran my own numbers from the CPS for percent of men vs women aged 18-26 in college full or part time. A slightly different thing from who has a degree, as people can get a degree later than age 26, but says more about life tracks perhaps. Data goes back to 1986.

First year, 1986, 20.4% of men, 19.4% of women. That's the only year in the data men were higher. The gap slowly opened up after that, but both percentages were indeed rising. The peak of the gap was actually in 2013 when both figures also peaked on their own terms: men 30.2%, women 37.5%, gap 7.3%.

For the rest of the 2010s the two figures stayed more or less flat, men around 29-30%, women 34-36%. During & since the pandemic, both dropped, but men more than women, and the gap has increased.

2019: men 28.9, women 34.5, gap 5.6
2020: 29.3, 35, 5.7
2021: 27.9, 34.1, 6.2
2022: 27.4, 32.6, 5.2
2023: 26.3, 33.3, 7
2024: 26.6, 33.5, 6.9

2019-2024 change: men -2.3, women -1.

35: To participate in cultural discourse, they need to up their game to reading plot summaries on Wikipedia.

And now I found where they put educational attainment in CPS.

Across all adult men, percent with a bachelor's degree or higher also trended up from 22% in 1992 to 33.5% in 2020... but is actually up since then if at a slower rate! 2021 33.3%, 2022 33.2%, 2023 33.7%, 2024 34.0%. Which appears to be the all-time peak.

Adult women: rose from 19.5% in 1992 to 34.8% in 2020, has continued to rise, hit 35.8% in 2024, also an all-time peak.

And same pattern if I recode to look for associate's degree and up, so it's not BAs cannibalizing AAs. That's at an all-time peak of 43.6% for men, and of 48.6% for women.

37: but of course that is how many people have a degree, not how many people get one each year...

Okay, that's 40. LA commenters, holy shit, how are you doing? Nightmare fires in *January* now?

Her thesis is that men are being driven away from college. She literally says "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boys are going to college."

I think it's fair to say that her phrasing is inelegant from a mathematical point of view -- but hey, these chicks and their numerical reasoning, what are you gonna do?

You are missing the work that the word "fewer" does in the sentence that you quote -- and her choice of similar language throughout. Her point is that, all things being equal, fewer men are going to college than the baseline expectation, absent the issue of female attendance that she raises. Whether that's right or wrong, that's her point. In an era of rising college attendance, an explanation is required if a particular group abstains from that trend.

Are you proposing that there is nothing here that requires an explanation? Are you saying that -- controlling for all the various social developments, most obviously wealth -- men aren't less inclined to go to college?

I suspect that, if the wealth of white people increased by 50 percent over the last 10 years and the wealth of Black people increased by 10 percent, you'd understand that there was something race-based taking place here that requires explanation -- and that Black people are experiencing a deficit. I don't suppose you'd make the frivolous argument that, hey, income for black people is not merely static, but actually increasing!*

*I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that despite your 22.2.

41 Jesus https://app.watchduty.org/
Maybe we should have a post?

Sure.

|| Having a weird problem where when I try to open the comment threads in a new tab in Safari it defaults to https instead of http and then doesn't work. Anyone ran into this issue and know a fix? |>

You need to manually delete the 's'.

Reset your Tivo.

The author is a woman and therefore not expected to be good with math.

But she should be expected to be able to spell "loath."

I almost suggested the linked article as a post when I first read it, but I didn't find the "It's the masculinity, dummy!" tone to be convincing and I don't really have a take.

For real though, see the Paywall thread.

Nightmare fires in *January* now?

It's crazy and also I think a trend that has been growing in the past 10 years? The Thomas Fire started in December 2017 and kept burning into January. In January 2021 there wasn't a fire, but we had two days of Santa Anas and long power outages. And now this year.

I'm just far enough north to avoid the smoke. Nearly got blown off a sand dune while taking a walk on a beach this morning when the winds picked up. I had to walk backwards to get back to my car without sand in my eyes. My parents won't have power until tomorrow, so I loaded a bunch of ice into their freezer/fridge. But we've been pretty fortunate so far!

In Southern California specifically it's always the Santa Ana winds that start fires, and that means fall and winter. Historically probably more fall than the middle winter, but like November has always been a normal time for the worst fires in LA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Air_Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinneloa_Fire

It usually rains enough by December to take the risk away when there are January winds. It basically hasn't rained in LA since this spring.

Ah, right, that makes sense. I had forgotten LA had a rainy season since it starts so late, but yeah usually Dec-Mar should be much wetter than the rest of the year.

I didn't find the "It's the masculinity, dummy!" tone to be convincing

Yeah - I think the big contribution of that piece is in the individual factoids. What is it with veterinarians? Or the gay men?

Davis cites nursing as an example of a profession that became feminized - but I don't think that's exactly the story there, especially lately. The number/percentage of male nurses has been increasing. What's up with that?

I guess I'd look for an explanation in some of the places that Davis either discounts or glosses over. Maybe men have more alternatives. Maybe the virtues that code as feminine are more suited to college, and we're seeing the results of that now that various impediments to female accomplishment are waning.

Davis cites nursing as an example of a profession that became feminized - but I don't think that's exactly the story there, especially lately. The number/percentage of male nurses has been increasing. What's up with that?

With nurses specifically I suspect a big part of it is that the pay is good and has been getting better, as more and more work gets shifted to them from doctors due to the limited supply of doctors. That's an unusual dynamic compared to other "feminized" jobs and may be enough to overcome the stigma of feminization.

Yeah. Money can be exchanged for good and services, like a pick-up truck big enough to compensate for a shrunken penis.

In 2023, I had a PICC line installed to deliver antibiotics over a period of months to a vein near my heart. Being the manly man that I am, I endured the installation without complaint.

But I'll tell you what: There's no way I could insert PICC lines for a living, and I found out that's exactly what my brother-in-law the nurse does. Apparently it does pay quite well, but I'm not he-man enough for that work.

Any job where you have to wash your hands a bunch, even in the winter, is right out for me.

I spent a hospitalization week chatting with my male nurse a few years ago. He ha been in the marine corps, then worked in shipbuilding at the Naval Yard. then got into a retraining program after a layoff. Nurse training significantly overlapped with previous combat training, because keeping wounded buddies alive is a big part of combat. He said that hospital nursing is totally a male advantage job: it requires upper body strength for moving 600 pound MRI machines or 600 pound patients more frequently than his shipbuilding work did. Also, he uses his combat training for restraining and incapacitating violent or drugged out humans more often as a nurse than when when he was in the marines.

I'm far less enamored of recreationally googling statistics than the rest of you, but I've had an unexamined belief for a while that men without college degrees have significantly better options than women without college degrees in terms of income. I don't know if it's true now, once true but not now, never true, etc., but if one of you avid data-hunters wants to look for data, knock yourselves out.

I still remember walking by the bariatric Sitz bath when my dad was in a hospital. That would be an ass.

60 is right. I think. I'm not looking it up either.

Colleges have been running a DEI for men for a couple of decades more, haven't they?

I read something to that effect recently, and my reaction was, "Oooh, so that explains it."

My daughter is one of those hypercompetent people that everyone finds so annoying. Super-smart with excellent grades in tough courses and varied extra-curricular activities. She went to college for engineering -- a male-dominated major where you could expect a little affirmative action, right?

Her older brother, well, he takes after his father, and he majored in the somewhat more pedestrian field of data analysis. He got noticeably better offers of support from colleges, particularly from out-of-state schools. I was puzzled until I became aware of the pro-male incentives that colleges have nowadays.

(If anyone knows of any entry-level data analysis jobs, I know a guy with a college degree and internship experience who is currently working for a florist.)

Right, residential colleges really want to be close to 50/50. Though with 30% of Gen Z women dating women (which presumably is higher among people going to college) perhaps that may become less of an imperative going forward.

I read the OP article and then, for no particular reason, scrolled down to look at the comments. I had to stop quickly, but it looked like one of the top comments was a guy saying "I hadn't thought about it before, but if sizeable numbers of women started entering the workforce I would leave. You're spot on. Working with women isn't enjoyable, I like working with other men. I used to be a school teacher and I find the idea of going back to working with lots of women quite dispiriting. I don't want to oppress anyone or anything, I just want to be left to get on with it." Some other guys chime in with agreement, and some women remark that they also prefer a masculine style of workforce. This is the Substack pitch, right? No echo chambers?

It does make me idly curious about the numbers, if people are being utterly honest, of people who prefer an environment with mostly same-gender peers, people who prefer balance, and people who prefer majority opposite-gender peers. Anyone here want to go presidential? (I've always strongly preferred 50/50 workplaces. But I can't remotely imagine feeling like I needed, and was entitled, to leave a workplace because of a gender imbalance. All else is never equal.)

I much prefer a female-dominated workplace, and I have one. So I'm doing great.

My own group that I supervise actually happens to have a 50-50 balance but the overall department skews female to a high degree.

All the supervisory roles above me are held by women, up to and including the mayor. It's great.

I prefer a female-dominated workplace, and yet am somehow in a math department. Utter failure on that front.

I recommend finding a way into public health.

Her point is that, all things being equal, fewer men are going to college than the baseline expectation, absent the issue of female attendance that she raises. Whether that's right or wrong, that's her point. In an era of rising college attendance, an explanation is required if a particular group abstains from that trend.

I think you're right - that is what she thinks. She thinks, basically, that women are the default - that more women are going to college, and therefore to find another group whose attendance is not increasing is weird and needs explaining.

But why not look at it the other way round? I mean, who's seen the biggest change in their economic and social freedom in the last fifty years - men, or women? And who has seen the biggest change in their rate of college attendance - men, or women? Well, then.
Why not say "the general trend is for college attendance to rise slowly, but women's attendance is rising twice as fast! What's going on?" Because the answer is very obviously "women have more opportunities now, and they're less discriminated against in education, and so more of them go to college".

(You make the analogy with a situation where overall wealth is rising 50% and black wealth is only rising 10%, but analogies are banned for a reason. Black people are a minority which has been historically disadvantaged in a lot of ways. Men aren't and they also make up 50% of the population - so they aren't inherently a small weird group which isn't following the general trend. They are half the general trend!

It does make me idly curious about the numbers, if people are being utterly honest, of people who prefer an environment with mostly same-gender peers, people who prefer balance, and people who prefer majority opposite-gender peers. Anyone here want to go presidential?

I'm not going to go presidential because my answer is going to be a bit dull; I don't think I've had enough different workplaces to know. My current workplace is 80% female and it's fine. My previous ones have all been large-majority male or roughly 50:50 and they have been, in order, bad, OK, great, OK, good, great. I honestly don't think I have a preference one way or the other. My best and worst workplaces were both at least, I would say, 75% male and I don't think they were good (or bad) because of that specifically.

I tried to tell Donald Trump my detailed and reasoned argument for why the US should not annexe any part of Canada and he seemed to be agreeing with me at first but then firmly announced that he would have Nunavut.

I regret nothing.

60: this is correct. Or, at least, I don't know if non-college men have better options than women, because I don't know how you'd measure that, but they have higher lifetime incomes. Witt linked the proof in 16.

He said that hospital nursing is totally a male advantage job: it requires upper body strength for moving 600 pound MRI machines or 600 pound patients more frequently than his shipbuilding work did.

I am always amazed at the size of our nurses vs the size of the patients they are moving around. It's like those nature videos where the ant is lifting fifty times its body weight. A lot of it is technique, and, of course, getting another nurse to help you out if needed - it's rare that a single nurse would be getting a patient out of bed anyway, regardless of the patient's size. .

65: Also no need to be presidential on the gender stuff, but also nothing super interesting. I've worked on one overwhelmingly male workplace (summer internship at an engineering (buildings) firm when I was 19) and that wasn't ideal, but wasn't terrible. I was definitely conspicuous, and I prefer not to be.

Law firms were weird because the three I worked at were pretty gender-mixed at my level, but the partnership level was overwhelmingly male. That was a bummer in terms of my perception of potential for advancement, but not so much on a day to day level. And the last seventeen years of working for NYS has been almost exactly 50/50, and that's been fine too. (Although I have had conversations with male coworkers in which they described the place as a matriarchy -- half women at all levels does look like a lot of women.)

I am kind of a lousy employee with authority problems, and so I've had issues with every boss I can remember. Plausibly there are gender-based patterns on why I've been enraged at my male bosses versus at my female bosses, but the number is small enough that it's hard to be sure that the patterns are about gender.

Subordinates, I do think there's a systematic difference, in that men (or the ones I've worked with) seem to systematically want and accept less support and direction than the women I work with. This is terrific for the competent ones, who are kind of "set it and forget it" -- you give them a task; they bring it back done well; you tell them they're awesome and give them something else. The ones who need direction, on the other hand, it turns into a bit of a wrestling match trying to keep them from doing stupid shit on their own initiative. Competent women, I end up working with more collaboratively, which means I'm working harder. Maybe higher quality work overall, under the assumption that I'm adding something? But I couldn't be sure of that. And less competent women are more likely to do nothing rather than doing stupid shit, so managing them is more about kicking them into action and giving them step-by-step direction.

But even for subordinates, numbers are small enough (probably low dozens over my career) that even though I just did generalize about working with them by gender, I wouldn't think of that as reliable or enough to form preferences about a workplace based on gender.

76.4 does sound like my experience as well. Though I'm not sure how much of it is that when I've had female subordinates they have tended to be generally younger than my male subordinates - I've actually just been putting it down to the increased fragility of the younger generation, rather than a male/female thing.

59
Also, he uses his combat training for restraining and incapacitating violent or drugged out humans more often as a nurse than when when he was in the marines.

This really feels like an "orphan crushing machine" or "late stage capitalism" story.

65
It does make me idly curious about the numbers, if people are being utterly honest, of people who prefer an environment with mostly same-gender peers, people who prefer balance, and people who prefer majority opposite-gender peers. Anyone here want to go presidential?

I'll use my real name for this but unfortunately it's dull: mild preference for balance but no strong opinion. The gender of the people I actually work with seems less important than their responsiveness and English skill.

However, I have thought it's interesting how often my manager has been a woman. Five women and three men in the past 16 years, and the proportion would be even higher if I counted how long they and I had that relation. (E.g. I'm deliberately not counting a man I worked for for all of three months when I had one foot out the door the whole time.) The numbers are small enough that it could be just random chance, but I can't help wondering if middle management is pink collar or middle management in my specific sector or something.

A deviation of one from perfect equality (that is, 5 to 3 rather than 4 to 4) seems to you like a notable overrepresentation of women? I would put that firmly into "numbers too small to draw a conclusion."

OT: I'm going to be on a large island off the coast of New Jersey next week. I think I can easily access smaller islands in the area. Maybe a meet-up? I'm not sure of availability yet as I'm not in control of my schedule, but probably Wednesday or Thursday.

Let me be the first to suggest Fresh Salt.

Currently the cabinet at Heebie U is disproportionately women, and I think it's working really well. My department is mostly men in tenure track jobs, mostly women as adjuncts.

I'm going to be on a large island off the coast of New Jersey next week.

Unusual time of year to visit Ireland, but have a good trip!

re: 76 and 77

My experiences re: 76.4 slant slightly the other way in some respects. I work in quite a male dominated firm, I think it's about 80/20 overall, although it is a software development consultancy. My team, however, is the other way round. I have more women working for me than men. My experience, overwhelmingly, over the past 4 years has been that my best employees, the ones that need least direction and are the most competent overall, are all younger women. They might not be the most technically expert within the team, although they are very good, but they are the ones that make the best decisions, seek advice when they need it, and can be relied on to get shit done on time. OTOH, similar to LB, my most technically adept employee is a guy who in a lot of ways is very similar to me--similar age, similar educational background, we even come from the same county--but I need to keep wrestling with him to stop him doing stupid shit.****

re: 78.last

I've pretty much always worked for female bosses as the "LAM" sector is very pink collar, to the extent that I've stood in conference rooms at digital humanities events and been one of only a handful of men in the room. Although I generally had very good bosses, I pretty much left my last job because I knew I had hit a ceiling that was partly gendered.* I'm saying that from a position of knowledge, as I'd sat on recruitment committees with the relevant bosses and was on the senior management team of the department, so I heard a lot of explicit conversations on the topic of who they intended to recruit and why. Our department director at one point over-ruled the hiring committee** for a management post to bring in her favoured 20-something female candidate explicitly on the grounds of age and gender*** and my then (female) boss (literally) resigned over it.

* and also, I think, partly about social class
** which I was on
*** I think the phrase used was that she was "on fire" for this particular candidate, and "excited" to recruit a young woman to the role and she was very unhappy that our preferred candidate was a very experienced (female) manager in early middle age which didn't fit her image of what she thought the department should be.
**** technically elegant but massively procrastinatory

My workplace, like my home, is 3F 1M. No one is a 'subordinate' to me although maybe my granddaughter fits that category in some senses. I've worked with and sometimes for women my entire life, and have never had reason to find it unpleasant or even remarkable. I'm friendly with a number of women, could be as many as men, depending on which Dunbar circle we're in.* The differences between how I act with and react to them is probably more about their individual natures than about gender per se. Although I'll get off a gendered joke from time to time.

Last night at pub trivia, I ended up sitting closer to the women on the 4/4 team. (It's a whole story.) Which is the most mountainous country in Europe? We ended up going with Switzerland, although, checking after our answer sheets were in, some folks thought it would be Montenegro. OK, the question is pretty ambiguous. And we were all laughing about it. I said to the woman across from me that it seems to me that when comparing mountains in other parts of Europe with the Alps, you have to decide not only whether it's the ratio, but also whether size matters. Much laughter, and a refusal to take any sort of position on whether size matters. (We've been together weekly for 2 years, so it's all pretty comfortable.) Anyway, sitting with just the boys, I wouldn't have expressed it this way.

* This is the theory of friendship that posits you can have no more than 5 friends in the closest circle, no more than 15 in the next one, now more than 50 in the next, etc. I think it's basically sound, recognizing temporal fluidity and non-reciprocity of the categories.

79: Eh, when you put it like that, you're right, it's nothing. But I also referred to the time spent working for them. Doing the math as carefully as I can without getting into Linkedin or similar, I've spent 13 of the past 16 years being managed by women. Still probably nothing, and if it is something I don't know what it would be, but that looks like more of a deviation from perfect equality.

I'm in a couple of discords that are overwhelmingly women, and I think the Music League I'm playing in (and I won this week!) is majority women.

The team I manage is 60/40 men (50/50 before I hired the fifth person), but the group of managers reporting to my boss, who meet weekly, are all women but me. This is more or less the gender environment I've been in for ages and I have little to compare it to. The other team I was in before I switched bosses was the same, though it had an extremely different culture, much better-planned meetings.

I've had three female direct managers in the last 15 years and they ranged from very good to excellent - one was the best boss I've ever had; and three males who ranged from very good to one who was the absolute worst boss I've ever had.

Anyway, sitting with just the boys, I wouldn't have expressed it this way.

A bizarre culture in which men are comfortable making obscene jokes, but only to women.

It makes sense if you have a mental category of flirtatiously obscene, which it sounds like Charley does.

||

Charley, any Bozeman recommendations? Alaska Air had some cheap flights and I just got a credit for being bumped on another trip, so I booked a long weekend there at the end of the month on a whim. Museum of the Rockies and Madison Buffalo Jump are definitely on the list of course.

|>

I've spent most of my career in majority-women workplaces, and I have a vague preference for greater balance rather than extreme (that is, closer to 50/50 rather 80/20). In general, I think my female bosses have been quicker to trust my judgement than male bosses, but not by a huge amount. I do like workplaces that feel more like the "real world" than a strange subset.

The quirkiness of the sub-fields where I've worked (e.g., immigration) means that a lot of the men I interact with are people of color, and/or LGBT, and/or minority religion (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh...). Anecdata, but typically it's a lot less of a slog to get them to believe me on certain things than my white, straight, Christian, male colleagues.*

*Coming back from a meeting in Harrisburg with a bunch of white male legislators years ago, I tried to explain to my white male boss that in the meeting we had just been in, I was treated as a piece of furniture and they talked only to him. It took a bit.

Unrelated: Charley! Congrats on your client getting (at long, long, long last) released!

I've experienced legally actionable levels of bullying and (borderline(?) sexual) harassment in academia, all perpetrated by female scholars who self identify as "feminist." The first time that things approached crisis levels I went to my female advisor who brushed it under the rug and accused me of being "too sensitive." (Later she actually took me out to lunch to apologize extensively for letting me down, which was cathartic.) My male mentor immediately grasped the seriousness of the situation and is the only reason I still have my career.

Obviously there's bad behavior across all genders but I feel like the overwhelming focus on male bad behavior gives free range to female scholars to behave just as poorly. I have stories from grad school friends, e.g. one advisor held slumber parties and where you slept reflected your "ranking." Her favorite student got to sleep in her bed and use her hairbrush. Another scholar picked favorites and then made them serve as an unpaid personal assistant, picking up her dry cleaning and dog sitting her nightmare dog. If they refused they unceremoniously demoted. Obviously women aren't worse than men but I'm pretty sure a male professor holding coed slumber parties would raise many more eyebrows. The kicker is all these academics were co-directors of the gender studies center.

I've of course experienced male chauvinism in academia too, weirdly my worst experiences in grad school came from TAing or teaching undergrads. I'm pretty good at commanding respect and attention in mostly male environments so perhaps unusually I have only rarely experienced feeling invisible in male spaces.

That said, in my current department we do have a number of male colleagues who don't carry their own weight and slough it all off onto their female colleagues. I'm pretty sure this is a common gendered issue.

92: Sounds like a nice tropical getaway!

92: The other options for "Winter Getaways" were Bethel and Utqiagvik, so.

Probably not shocking that as a librarian most of my colleagues and pretty much all my bosses have been women. Looking back even before I became a librarian I mostly worked with women. I pretty much get along fine with everyone. I am glad that there are a few other male librarians at my law firm -- being the only male in a large group of women makes me slightly uncomfortable.

Oof, that's some Avital Ronell shit!

I feel like that particular brand of crazy doesn't really happen much in math. The misconduct I'm aware of all seems to be straightforward "makes advances on students" or "hates women and says sexist stuff" and less... weird? Scientists you get like "work 100 hours a week" abuse, but it seems to mostly be actual scientific work and not the "pick up my dry cleaning" stuff.

It does sound awful. I wouldn't be surprised if women treating subordinates weirdly (anywhere on the harassment spectrum) get away with more bad behavior in open view because of a presumption that they're harmless even if they're being strange. Not that there's more harassment from women, but that plausibly there can be more floridly weird behavior before anyone in authority reacts to it as harmful.

While playing a man I had no interest in being anyone's boss and kept turning down the opportunity. Pretty soon after switching teams I gave in. It's decent. My immediate team is majority male, and that would be more of a problem if it weren't also a very queer team, which cuts across the binary in relieving ways. Sometimes I get put on committees with a bunch of straight guys from farther afield and I enjoy that less. Some of it follows from 90-91, what kind of off-color you're comfortable with in what contexts.

94 is ghastly.

The kicker is all these academics were co-directors of the gender studies center

So believable!

92 Yes to MOR and MBJ! Will there be a basketball game while you're there? Maybe the women's team? If the weather is good, maybe ski a day? There's good XC, and Bridger is fun for downhill. If it's a longer visit, you can think about Yellowstone.

I don't think anyone took my reference to the 'size' of Mont Blanc or the Eiger as flirtation. I'm nobody's hallpass, and I kind of think my energy reflects that. OK, yes, I can answer dumb questions about obscure historical and geographical minutiae -- no better than the average commenter here, I'm quite certain, but well enough to frequently be the mvp of a consistently winning/placing trivia team. (This is no great achievement: Montanans get flummoxed by questions about which of the Great Lakes is which . . .)

Thanks Charley! This'll be too short a visit for Yellowstone but I'll look into your other suggestions.

Oh, not flirting with intent to do anything about it, but if you're making amusingly dirty comments to women that you wouldn't make to men, what else do you call it?

The discussion has moved on from that stupid Atlantic article, but I finally read it, and I wanted to mock the ending.

For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I haven't read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre specifically, but I've read other classics of that general era, and if anyone told me that they were their favorite, I'd assume they were a lizard person.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan's series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we've never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind's greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad-all of it.

Is it not the peak of human achievement to read The Iliad in the original Greek, while sipping strong coffee or maybe some liquor whose name is usually italicized in English, while sitting in a lounge chair within sight of the Mediterranean?

if you're making amusingly dirty comments to women that you wouldn't make to men, what else do you call it?

Well, "sexual harassment" is the commonest term, though I'm sure it doesn't apply in this case.

107: I think he's just outright lying at this point. Or his first-years were.

Is it not the peak of human achievement to read The Iliad in the original Greek, while sipping strong coffee or maybe some liquor whose name is usually italicized in English, while sitting in a lounge chair within sight of the Mediterranean?

It certainly beats reading Aeschylus's "Prometheus" in the original Greek while lying in a ditch during the battle of the Somme with a bullet in your hip. (Famously, Harold Macmillan.)

I haven't read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre specifically, but I've read other classics of that general era, and if anyone told me that they were their favorite, I'd assume they were a lizard person.

If the shoe fits, I guess.

Most of my co-workers are women. Many of the Senior administrators are women, but I would still say that more of the Senior medical leadership is male, or rather there are more doctors in leadership roles as a percentage of the number of male physicians.

30 years ago when half of the Harvard medical school class was women, there were no full professors of medicine.

I'd be really curious to know what white collar fields you can do really well in with just a liberal arts bachelors degree. Like, most of the non academics I know from college are doctors and lawyers and consultants with masters degrees of some kind. Private equity people seem to operate on connections and ruthless numeric success. I know two guys in that with only bachelors degrees. One was Chris Wallace's son, though. I saw a highschool classmate who majored in history at Dartmouth who has dien quite well (until Covid) working in real estate development for the life science sector. His wife does talent marketing for a mutual fund company, I wonder if Dartmouth kids have a leg up, because they have to be on campus one summer and need to work a quarter when there's no competition. But, tbh commercial real estate looked kind of male dominated.

Another guy I know from highschool appears to have dropped out from college. He was always really into music and worked an oracle database administrator. He quit that to build a wedding photography business with his wife, and they do super high end weddings for Indian billionaires

108.1 I agree with this. The number one criteria for determining whether something is a joke, or for that matter whether something is actionable, is the reaction of the hearer. All hearers, in the case of public utterances.

Jane Eyre is such a great read, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised by someone calling it their favorite. Wuthering Heights is a rare book that I hated so much I gave up like 20% in, but I was like 13 so maybe I'd have a different opinion today. But most importantly, Jane Austen is of that era and obviously millions of people would say Pride and Prejudice is their favorite book, no?

(Also shoutouts to Frankenstein and Great Expectations, which are also just delightful.)

Is it not the peak of human achievement to read The Iliad in the original Greek, while sipping strong coffee or maybe some liquor whose name is usually italicized in English, while sitting in a lounge chair within sight of the Mediterranean?

HAH! I just (kindof) did that. We went to Croatia so I figured I was as close as I was likely to get for the foreseeable, so I read that new translation of the Odyssey that made such a big impression while we were there. It was OK, I guess. I read other travelogues that I liked better.

I'd be really curious to know what white collar fields you can do really well in with just a liberal arts bachelors degree.

From my own circle of acquaintances: finance (you can do quite well with a theology or history degree).

Yeah, I love Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Back in high school, I had some weird thing against Charles Dickens, but I reread Great Expectations as an adult and now I love that too. Back in college, I would probably have said my favorite book was The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. I guess I was striving to be both pretentious and idiosyncratic.

Since the Harry Potter craze, I had the impression that teens were reading more books. I don't remember any books for teens/kids becoming pop-culture sensations like Harry Potter, or Twilight, or Hunger Games or Percy Jackson when I was that age.

I ready an abridged version of A Tale of Two Cities and was positively enthralled, but I can't read actual Dickens because he's a wordy fuck. I'm glad my grandma had that book because it meant I understood the episode of Cheers where Fraiser read A Tale of Two Cities to the bar.

It was OK, I guess. I read other travelogues that I liked better.

Excellent review!

Since the Harry Potter craze, I had the impression that teens were reading more books.

I hate to inform you, but kids who were into Harry Potter are now in their 30s. Gen Z doesn't read HP because it's cheugy and millennial, plus Rowling's been cancelled.

I do have to say that I assign maybe 1/5th of the reading I had to do in college and my students still say it's a heavy reading load. Not sure what other faculty are doing, assigning youtube comments? Of course, in fairness I spend way too much time dicking around on my phone instead of reading the classics too.

Ok, fine, I read the article about reading. It does seem to be getting at something real about the place of books in curricula. But I would guess changes in what young adults say are their favorite books have a lot to do with changes in what's seen as an acceptable answer.

By the way, Apple's spellcheck is incapable of suggesting a correction for urricula, apparently. Not vey literate at all.

Over a long career I've worked with a lot of people, though perhaps not enough to achieve statistical significance. Here's how I'd characterize my own experience regarding the outliers -- the ones that separate themselves from the middle of the pack:

--The spectacularly competent people are pretty evenly divided, gender-wise.
--The grossly incompetent tilt strongly male.
--The virtuous are pretty evenly divided.
--The evil are overwhelmingly male.

Every time I look at intro humanities syllabi I'm just shocked by how little reading and writing their is. The Calculus class we teach is basically the same Calculus class that I took in college, but every humanities class I took required something like 3 papers and 20+ pages, and whenever I see syllabi it's like one 3 page paper plus some paragraph responses.

A lot of the lament about the impact of technology on reading is a result of old people recognizing the damage done to their own attention spans and projecting that (perhaps accurately) onto the youth. I haven't clicked the link on reading, though, because I figure it's probably boring and too long.

I do have to say that I assign maybe 1/5th of the reading I had to do in college and my students still say it's a heavy reading load.

Not to pick on you, but more because this is a representative comment: faculty usually attend a more rigorous institution than they end up at, and so I think there's a universality to this. I certainly give much easier math classes than the ones I took, but I don't actually think my classes have gotten worse over the 20+ years I've been teaching.

I'm thinking C might have picked the right school then.

119: Yes, I am aware that the Harry Potter craze was over about 20 years ago, and I also have heard something about the author being cancelled. But my sense was that this started a larger trend that every couple of years there would be a "young adult" series that would become a pop culture sensation, which gave me the impression that it was more common for teens to be reading books for fun. This might have ended 5-10 years ago -- although I'm not quite as clueless as 119 insinuates, I concede that I am fairly clueless.

I read an abridged Moby Dick summer after the 9th grade, but I had an enforced rest time and probably had the patience to read the whole thing.

Here's how I'd characterize my own experience regarding the outliers -- the ones that separate themselves from the middle of the pack:

--The spectacularly competent people are pretty evenly divided, gender-wise.
--The grossly incompetent tilt strongly male.
--The virtuous are pretty evenly divided.
--The evil are overwhelmingly male.

There is something very American about carefully drawing up the lists of Good People and Bad People and sorting them all into their little demographic boxes.

faculty usually attend a more rigorous institution than they end up at, and so I think there's a universality to this.

This is a really good point!

The whole *unabridged* thing.

Re: reading in midlife. How much of the challenge is really due to our poorer attention spans? Is any of it presybopia. Even with reading glasses or progressive lenses, I find it harder to focus on print for long periods of time. I have other less common eye issues though.

my sense was that this started a larger trend that every couple of years there would be a "young adult" series that would become a pop culture sensation

I can't think of anything of this type pre-Harry Potter. There are two key features: it was a pop culture sensation, and it became one while the series was still being written so you had all the fuss around a new one coming out.

When I was of Potterable age, the first Discworld books were coming out and a lot of people liked them but they weren't a pop culture thing in the same way.
What we had instead was television; everyone watched the same shows, either soap operas or sitcoms (Red Dwarf, Blackadder, The Young Ones and so on). That was the pop-culture thing, not least because of course you had to watch it when it was broadcast or miss it forever.

128: If the irony there was intentional, that was pretty funny.

Relevant: "The Atlantic Did Me Dirty", regarding the article in question.

I occasionally sound like an ancient greybeard when I tell co-workers or younger friends how much I had to write as well as read when I was an undergraduate, and especially in my first graduate degree. Since a lot of them are non-humanities people, they are sometimes incredulous that a particular volume of reading or writing is even possible (I think they think I am bullshitting them).

However, I suspect that the amount that high-performing students are being set on reading lists at top Russell group universities is probably not wildly different now to when I was a student.

I just did two samples:

* I just looked at the English lit reading list for the current semester at Glasgow (which is a course I did in 1993), and it's 7 novels and a similar sized list of works of criticism, the novels are mostly slightly shorter--there were a couple of longer novels on the 1993 list--and the number very slightly fewer, but I'd say it's about 90% the same in terms of size compared to 30 years ago.
* I looked at a specific philosophy reading list for a more technical subfield (same institution) and it looks a little less technically demanding, but again, broadly similar

I also think 129 is a really good point.

109, 113, 116: eh, I'll walk it back a bit and say that any teenager like that is a lizard person. And at some point someone should define what "favorite" means, and even "novel," since so many classics were originally published serially.

For the record, my favorite book is probably Guards! Guards! or something else from the Discworld series. The Count of Monte Cristo is somewhere on my top 10 list, but I didn't read it as a teenager. I'd have to think hard about the rest.

I should think a large share of non-readers not anxious to disclose themselves as such, asked to name their favorite book, would simply name something they were assigned in high school.

I do think YA literature is much more common as reading material, though, and actual adults often reference it as among their favourites.

One thing I notice with my son, is that he's quite a proficient and fairly prolific reader,* but he's mostly reading things aimed at his sort of age group: 11-13 or so. I think partly because he's reading books chosen for him from reading lists, or reading series (like the Percy Jackson books, or the [excellent] books of Katherine Rundell) that he really likes. He doesn't have that unfettered freedom to go off and read massively age inappropriate books, or to explore adult fiction like I did at his age. Because I'd just go to the library on my own and browse around for random stuff. So I read lots of fun entertaining stuff like classic detective fiction or spy novels, or historic fiction, or classic sci-fi when I was his age and he's just never likely to decide to, for example, read all of the Philip Marlow novels, or a load of random Agatha Christie novels, which I did at his age.

It feels like kids reading preferences are narrowed in scope, not necessarily because they are less able to read or able to concentrate, but their horizons are just narrower and it's harder to stumble on things.

* he reads for at least an hour a day, and often longer, which I don't think is typical among his peer group.

re: 131.last

That's a good point. I don't remember discussing books much with friends at school or any kind of book phenomenon, except the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which everyone read. A lot of my friends read, but it wasn't a pop cultural thing. TV was definitely where all the shared cultural tropes, etc came from.

There's also this weird phenomenon where a lot of "YA" is actually aimed at grownups who are a little sheltered and/or prudish.

Gen Z doesn't read HP because it's cheugy and millennial, plus Rowling's been cancelled.

I think they still read it, but don't take it on as an identity.

136: yes. And they might not be lying; if you haven't read much or anything outside school, then your favourite book probably is, faute de mieux, something you were set in English class.

133 is unsurprising. The journalist had a story to tell and she's going to tell it whether the facts back it up or not. The bit of 133 is surprising is the claim that language is evolving so fast!

Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. So when I ask them to shift further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare remind me of my own struggles through Chaucer

The teacher writing this is, from her photos, about 45-50. It's difficult to believe that a modern teenager finds Shakespeare as incomprehensible as a teenager in the late 1990s found Chaucer!

I do think YA literature is much more common as reading material, though, and actual adults often reference it as among their favourites.

Right, but I grew up just a hair before YA became much lauded or even commonly acknowledged outside what to buy for kids (I think of 2000's was then that started), so this person who finds it weird might be the same or older. And a prat, obviously.

As someone who loves The Great Gatsby to a completely embarrassing degree, I can't judge peoople whose favorite books were assigned reading in high school.

HP was a unique pheonomenon of time and place, and it doesn't really make sense to use it as a reference point, kinda like how Hamilton didn't really revolutionize anyone's relationships to musicals outside of Hamilton.

Only the first act was fun.

I'm not sure that's true. Like obviously HP was a big outlier. But even if you ignore that and look at Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, The Fault in Our Stars, etc. isn't that still a lot more massively popular YA than there used to be?

Twilight.

HP was its own thing, but it kicked off enough other things to constitute a trend.

146: More than the Flowers in the Attic and Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High and whatever else happened in the late 80s when I was in middle school? I mean, maybe but maybe not?

He doesn't have that unfettered freedom to go off and read massively age inappropriate books

"BookTok" did somehow direct a bunch of 12-year-olds of my acquaintance, with obviously not age-verified accounts, toward a bunch of incredibly pornographic romance novels which they enjoyed in varying degrees. I'm not going to name the titles because God will see them, but Elke said she disliked and skipped the smuttiest parts (which I honestly half believe -- it's consistent with her brand) whereas at least one of her friends was more pro-smut. She said a few of the books were well-written and well-plotted, while others were turkeys. Meanwhile, TV and video apps have (temporarily? permanently?) really disrupted her ability to concentrate on books. We talk about it a lot.

I've started hate-skimming the Atlantic for no particular reason. It's so fucking terrible. Even the last Adam Serwer column I saw was pretty much scat.

I'm amused that Upetgi couldn't finish Wuthering Heights as a kid, because that was the one I actually did finish in grade school. I thought it was amazing and kind of scary. Couldn't make it past the death of Helen in Jane Eyre, couldn't make it past the first page of Pride and Prejudice, but yes, I was the little Wednesday Addams who got all the way to the graves at the end of WH.

maybe teens stay with YA books longer because there are so many more now, and they're better? As in 137, I was reading all sorts of adult books as a teen, but only after I had read every available Hardy Boys book, which AIHMHB I revisited when my own kids were 8 and found out were actually incredibly terrible books. Or maybe I'm not even talking about teens. 9-13 ish is more like what I'm thinking.

My kids, now 18 and 21, have been pretty much swallowed by algorithms and don't read any more, though they each were ravenous for the latest Rick Riordan when they were younger, and read a lot.

He doesn't have that unfettered freedom to go off and read massively age inappropriate books

Why is that? What's stopping him?

Favorite book

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Frolic of His Own
Pere Goriot
The Structures of Everyday Life
The Affluent Society
The Selfish Gene

For the longest time my main knowledge of sex acts came from reading the Thornbirds when I was 8.

152: Ebooks are bad that way -- my light reading is mostly electronic now, so I'm not leaving a trail of paperbacks in my wake for unwary teens to trip over. And libraries aren't as immediately necessary for research, so even if they're still there, kids probably spend less time in them.

Back in college, I would probably have said my favorite book was The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. I guess I was striving to be both pretentious and idiosyncratic.

So wait, do you call it pretentious because it wasn't actually your favorite book, or just because the cool people think liking Dostoevsky is inherently pretentious?

153: I am going to bite the bait. Why The Selfish Gene?

I am going to bite the bait. Why The Selfish Gene?

Yes, this.

My favorite books, circa first year in college:
Slaughterhouse Five
Catch-22
The Robber Bride
The Great Gatsby

Since those aren't terribly embarrassing, I bet I'm forgetting some real atrocities.

I used to say that The Brother's Karamozov was my favorite book. I did actually read it and I was impressed with myself.

I'm having a little trouble seeing YA as something other than a marketing category. I'm confused about what distinguishes YA from other low- to middlebrow literature. Is it the young protagonists?

Tolkein wasn't marketed as YA, nor was the fantasy and science fiction I read as a youngster. But it was the YA audience that read that stuff. I have been reading the Murderbot Diaries series (which I am enjoying but won't recommend to the literati here). Those books operate entirely on the YA level, but I don't think they are classified that way.

Tolkein is YA if you skip the long poems in the text and the appendix.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a YA novel. Discuss.

No one is arguing that YA didn't exist before! It just stepped up a level in cultural cachet, imo.

Tom Sawyer was YA novel, Huckleberry Finn was not.

"A Connecticut Yankee in Kind Arthur's Court" is the first high fantasy novel.

I feel like I form "favorites" or not at random, depending on the category, and "favorite novels" has always felt impossibly arbitrary. I was going to contrast with my favorite type of pear or something, but I'm suddenly at a general loss. I guess I have a favorite local coffee roaster, but that's a combination of the product being excellent and loyalty/habits being easy to form and reinforce. I don't know why I overthink this one so much.

A Connecticut Youngster in King Adult's Court

I don't have a favorite type of pear, but I have a favorite pear. Except I already ate it.

Arthur was a very kind king.

When I was in my 20s, I had a blue t-shirt with a big green pear on it. I really liked it a lot, but then I became fixated on the worry that someone would leer at me while saying "Nice pair" and so then I couldn't wear it anymore.

I think Harry Potter has two things going for it that few to no other series did/does.

1. It tracks the "coming of age" schedule very neatly. Seven books spanning seven years for the characters, their formative years in particular, and 10 years for publication. I'm sure there are other series like that out there but I don't know of any. There are lots of tie-ins and ancillary stuff of varying quality and importance on an ongoing basis, but a certain demographic could literally grow up with Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

2. It came out when the Internet was new and still grassroots in a meaningful sense. 5 years before it, most book talk took place in schools and magazines' letters to the editor. Today, almost everything online is rammed into our feeds by an algorithm. But in the late 90s and early 200s, talking to actual people in chat rooms and bulletin boards was surprisingly easy. Those people growing up with Harry could talk to each other (and 40-year-old perverts, let's not whitewash too much) literally around the world.

156.2: I think I was sincerely pretentious. I was much too serious to choose a favorite book to impress people, but much too self-conscious not to give a lot of thought to what kind of impression it would make.

There is a certain age millennial who invariably has a story about the religious nutjob parents who tried to ban Harry Potter from their school because of Satan.

Those people growing up with Harry could talk to each other (and 40-year-old perverts, let's not whitewash too much) literally around the world.

And sometimes, assemble cults around fanfic!

173: Can we do a follow-up story in which we find out what the religious nutjob parents think about JK now?

I'm still so genuinely shocked that my parents came around on Harry Potter. Like I wasn't allowed to celebrate Halloween, they wanted me to burn my Dune board game because the Bene Gesserit were Satanic, and as late as 1997 they were no on Magic: The Gathering because some of the cards were called "Sorcery."

Thank goodness my parents are totally offline. I don't think they know anything about JR Rowling other than Harry Potter.

because the Bene Gesserit were Satanic

They get partial credit at least on that one.

My recent understanding is that the Bene Gesserit basically fictionalized Jesuits (and Muad'dib, JFK). So that probably fits with your parents' worldview.

*were basically

174: Wow! That's a flavor of crazy I was unfamilar with .

I have been trying to get my daughter to read the Dune series so she can tell me how it holds up to modern sensibilities, particularly on the issue of cultural appropriation/representation. Also feminism.

Is there something wrong with Muad'dib in the context of the story?

I haven't got the background to say this with confidence, but I'm thinking that Dostoevsky had the Jesuits in mind with The Grand Inquisitor.

I don't know what he had in mind, but that's not something I think fits.

Don't think it fits. The Bene Gesserit fit the stereotype better.

Is there something wrong with Muad'dib in the context of the story?

"Wrong with" in what sense? Culturally appropriative?

My parents think it's possible to be both Catholic and Christian, but not if you actually believe everything the Catholic Church teaches. And of course you can't possibly know about any particular Catholic, because that would be judging.

The number of Catholics who know everything the Catholic Church teaches is pretty small.

Oh hey, speaking of the Atlantic and Christianity, they recently ran another piece about the "New Apostolic Reformation". I remember that this came up here maybe a few months ago? Does anyone remember the thread?... wait, I think it was Tucker Carlson and the succubus, right before election day.

Yeah. Those people are heritics.

Speaking of pentacostals, I was allowed to go to pentacostal Boy Scouts, which although they didn't really agree with them on some key points, the religious service the Boy Scouts ran was much much worse. (If the Boy Scouts had just not been religious at all, instead of being vaguely religious, that would have been fine.)

I still think the New Apostolic Reformation name is misleading and makes it sound like more of a coherent movement than it actually is.

Even if you're worried that what the pentacostals are doing might be witchcraft, you can't actually say that, because what if you're wrong and then you'd be blaspheming the holy spirit which is the one unforgiveable sin!

Some people's religious trauma was a deep fear of Demons, but I wasn't afraid of Demons, I was very very afraid of the unforgiveable sin.

185: I was just wondering what you meant by "Muad'dib, JFK".

The Saudis beheaded the Muad'dib in the 70s.

Somewhat on topic:

https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccaromney.com/post/3lffqqpr4ak2u

I'm idly fascinated by the story of one of the country's top college basketball players getting blowback for her religious views, for several reasons -- in particular I wonder what it's like to be a conservative Protestant student at Notre Dame. As far as I know, she hasn't really been taken up as a cause célèbre on the right yet, something which would probably be instantaneous if she looked like Caitlin Clark. Um, on-topic because "College."

I have nothing to say about the article in particular, but I've encountered this "why aren't we talking about..." framing in a few places lately and find it to be a really annoying rhetorical move, in that it both presumes that an answer to some question is obvious and then attacks the reader for not talking about the obvious answer instead of trying to convince the reader this is the answer.

195 is very similar to the whole Korbin Albert situation, which seems to repeat every couple years in US women's soccer. Slightly exaggerating, but Women's athletics in the US is like half lesbians and half evangelicals, and so this happens pretty often. The key element to keep in mind here is that lesbians make up a huge chunk of fan base for women's sports, so it's a real bottom line issue for teams.

Why aren't we talking about lesbian bottoms?

195 cont'd: or actually she might be Catholic, my error. So much convergence. Anyway it appears that her father shared the "Beyoncé worships Satan" meme and tagged his children, so maybe that's just a thing where you don't not share your dad's demon memes or you'll have to get into it with him.

half lesbians and half evangelicals

And sometimes both! In series or in parallel.

Interestingly Korbin Albert also seems to be a protestant who went to Notre Dame.

In series is certainly the classic approach.

Scientists you get like "work 100 hours a week" abuse, but it seems to mostly be actual scientific work and not the "pick up my dry cleaning" stuff.

The only example I know of the latter kind of behavior that I know of in my field is from a woman. Actually, if I extrapolate from the colloquium speaker who asked a department admin person to do her hair and run to the drugstore to pick some things up for her, make that two examples.

Uh, delete that first "I know".

Having bad hair is another science thing.

Maybe it's because men with similar tendencies have the simpler approach of making their wife do that kind of grunt work instead of grad students.

It's a bit weird to work in a field that has, overall, very few women, but to have my local environment include a lot of women. Well over half of my grad students so far have been women. I can't really claim this reflects well on me, it's more just that I happen to work at the kind of institution where, if you admit a woman to the PhD program, she is likely to say yes. But it does kind of become self-sustaining.

As for 76.4, the biggest thing I've run into that may be gendered is having some men in the group who were so convinced of their own greatness that they kept refusing to work on projects that they viewed as beneath them or trivial, and as a result didn't publish much and failed to find jobs. They mostly just hurt themselves, but sometimes they would tell other students (mostly women) to stop working on the projects I had suggested to them, because the projects weren't good enough.

Ugh, yeah, that's a type. In math that's often "Why would I learn how to do calculations with a torus, when I should just be reading about infinity-categories." I did once have to play the "Son, I knew Jacob Lurie when he was your age, and he wasn't like that at all" card, but it didn't actually do any good.

My approach, which worked quite well, was to first get to the point where you're producing work at a good rate, and only once you hit the right rate do you worry at all

"Son, that just wrong. Are you using enough amphetamines?"

192: I think it's pretty clear in the book (and even the movie if you listen) that his acceptance as Messiah is based on centuries of way-clearing propaganda. Dune: Messiah and the following books go a fair amount into the problems that follow. The tendentious part is that Herbert apparently thought this was a reasonable takeaway of the reality of JFK.

208 was supposed to end "... about the importance of the results."

210.last: That might have sounded less ridiculous in 1965.

I found the movies quite faithful to the books, and I'm a big fan of the books (at least the first three). Somehow, though, the movies leave me cold. They seem flat and lifeless to me.

I liked to of movie, sick was objectively stupid even compared to the book.

Which was...

213 was just really badly typed. Let me redo.

I liked the old movie, which was objectively stupid even compared to the book.

174: Those people growing up with Harry could talk to each other (and 40-year-old perverts, let's not whitewash too much) literally around the world.

My two oldest children were deeply into the HP fanfic stuff.

My daughter and a friend were somewhat precociously online. At some point they made a friend in a city several hundred miles away. While our families were at a nearby city for a youth sporting event, a meeting at a mall was arranged (via parents). I was not there, but gave the mother of the other girl 9a few years older than ours) credit for leading with "Aren't you glad I'm not a 40-year old man in his underwear."

All of this reminding me of what a nice simple and pretty revolutionary thing AIM (AOL Instant Messaging) was.

No one comments this much if they're not procrastinating, and I am someone, but let me go back to the link in 188:

A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers--about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey--are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

This article has a few linked references, but there isn't one here. I searched for "Denison University survey Christianity" and got a few results, but the only thing that refers to anything like "40% of American Christians, including Catholics..." is this blog post:

As reported previously, I found in the March 2023 sample that 20 percent of American adults and 30 percent of American Christian adults believe in the 7MM [7 Mountain Mandate]: "God wants Christians to stand atop the '7 mountains of society,' including the government, education, media, and others." By January 2024, that figure had grown to 41 percent. [emphasis in original]

But I'm not seeing a version of that survey data published in any sort of scholarly format. There's another post seemingly unpacking the same data in a similarly casual way. There is a longer trail of confusing posts containing mysterious "survey data" but either I'm hopelessly illiterate and can't find the data, or this is a novel and weird way to publish. Anyway, I'd say for "tens of millions of believers" read "vibes."

I have walked from Denison University to a Catholic church (and back), because they schedule college visits on Good Friday and because I'd been through enough of those receptions to get the gist without having to go.

Walking back is harder because someone put the school at the top of the only hill for miles around.

OT: The subway doesn't have tokens anymore? When did that happen?

217,218: I suspect it is these folks and not the University: Denison Organizational Culture Surveys
Or maybe even this guy: Denison Forum.

Oops, but wait it probably is really this guy!: Belief in the 7 Mountain Mandate Appears to be Growing in the Last Year
By Paul A. Djupe, Denison University Who as you see is at Denison,

Central Ohio is probably a very good place from which to write about Christian assholes.

The David Lynch Dune is one of the few movies I've thoroughly where I've thoroughly hated the experience of watching it. Not just the characters, the plot, the dialogue, but also the sets, the costumes, the visuals. Not really successful in generating the kind of hate that makes it memorable though.

It made no sense at all. I might just like looking at Sean Young.

If Sean Young asks you if you like her owl, you say yes.

If Sean Young asks if you like her pear, you try to say yes in a way that doesn't sound salacious but also doesn't sound too oblivious.

"Are you asking if I'm a replicant or if I'm a green grocer?"

Stormcrow, your last link is my first link in 217. I somehow now feel bad for leading you astray, probably because I was possessed by a demon of terse link text.

Sean Young is a Trumper. That actually caused me real pain.

Nooooooo

She's artificial?