Anti-Manosphere, Chimpanzees, Girlboss
Links and recommendations + event in NYC
New York City Event
You are invited to attend my live event with one of my favorite writers, Freya India. May 13 at 6:30pm.
Details and registration here.
Wall Street Journal:
I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about what we can learn from the first ever documented chimpanzee civil war.
Excerpt:
Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups. But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.
This isn’t uniquely human. A new study in Science describes a vicious civil war among our nearest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees. A community of nearly 200 apes that had lived together, groomed together and raised offspring together slowly fractured into two rival groups. Then one group began killing the other.
Read the whole thing here. Alternate link here.
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
The Rise of the Anti-Manosphere by Ari David Blaff
Excerpt: “[P]odcaster Chris Williamson, writer Rob Henderson, and former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink...offer young guys a space for sustainable personal improvement beyond the cheap upsells of cryptocurrency and online universities peddled by manosphere personalities.”
Cops Are Cool Again by Yael Bar Tur
Btw, the best police drama ever made is The Shield, which I wrote about here
Where Left and Right Both Go Wrong on Crime by Keith Humphreys
The Myth of the Independent Girlboss by Inez Stepman
Stop Pushing College for All by Neetu Arnold
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Extremely conservative men aged 35-45 now have almost 4x as many children (2.14) as extremely liberal men (0.55). (source).
2. California has long depended on a small number of ultrawealthy taxpayers to fund a large share of its government. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the top 1% of taxpayers generate roughly 40% of the state’s personal income-tax revenue. (source). At a time when there is growing support for imposing greater taxes on the rich, geographic mobility is easier than ever. You can talk about taxing the billionaires but you can’t really be shocked when they decide to go elsewhere. As my friend Rory Sutherland has pointed out, look at how politicians proceed. First, they start with legislation. If legislation fails, they move to economic incentives. If economic incentives fail, they move to persuasion. But if anything, the methods used to get the rich to pay more are anti-persuasive. The states that already have the highest taxes have cities that are struggling. Give us more money to squander, they say, that’ll do the trick. Followed by insults and mock guillotines and slogans about how billionaires “shouldn’t exist” (an ambiguous statement perfectly crafted for plausible deniability).
3. In Denmark, collecting the DNA of people charged with felonies reduced their future rate of criminal conviction by 42 percent. The most powerful deterrent is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty of being punished. (source).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
Happy to see you and Chris Willx mentioned in the Manosphere as positive influences, Rob. You are my two preferred sources for the last 3-5 years.
There are so many “influences” that leave me with a strange energy, bad feeling, or just an odd sense of wrongness after watching or reading. But you and Chris almost always leave me feeling like “that was time well spent.”
Keep up the great work!
Everyone loves the Shield (never seen it myself). I remember a fantastic blog explaining how the show is an encapsulation of Aristotle's belief of a story reflected in the outward effects of a single action - the entire series is driven by the Vic's actions in the very first episode (no spoilers)