A reader offered to pay Rob and I to review two movies: Zulu (1964), and They Live (1988), and here we take him up on it. Apparently, both of these films have cult followings among far-right types. I happened to like Zulu. I’ve always enjoyed reading military history, and seeing how a siege works in practice, or at least a portrayal of it, is alway…

I was going to call this “From Mosul to McKinsey,” but Rana Mallah (X, Substack) suggested this title instead. I replied that no wonder she works in consulting, since that’s pretty good! ISIS in Mosul, June 2014. Rana and I met at Manifest a few weeks ago and I was deeply impressed with her story. She was born in 1997 in Iraq, which was probably th…

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal link…

Today I have the pleasure of talking to Daniel Hess, a father of six who goes by the name “More Births” on X. Pronatalism in the US as far as I can tell remains mostly an online movement, largely promoted through Elon Musk tweets and the work of the Collinses. To people who spend a lot of time online, this can make it seem more powerful than it act…

An article from last week by Dave Greene places me in a group of thinkers who, in addition to being careerists – which is funny because I don’t have a job and am not looking for one – show a “refusal to examine deeper cultural issues” regarding the supposed failures of liberalism. I’m going to use this article as a kind of stand in to explain what …

Brianna Wu is not someone I would have necessarily wanted to talk to 10 years ago. Not that I would have refused to be in the same room with her or anything, but I would have been skeptical that she had much interesting to say, and so hostile to her identity as a trans woman that I would have barely been able to get over it. I wouldn’t have even ca…