In late November 2023, seven weeks after Hamas’s 7 October terrorist attacks, I attended a private roundtable at the Jordanian Embassy in London. There, Ambassador Manar Dabbas discussed the unfolding regional catastrophe with the composure of someone reviewing the previous night’s football scores. Some 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, had been murdered; around 250 had been taken hostage into Gaza; and pro-terror rhetoric was spreading across the world. But at this juncture, Dabbas emphasised the importance of de-escalation and the need for Israeli restraint. With respect to Jordan’s position, he remarked: “We sometimes joke among ourselves that we are located between Iraq and a hard place.”

Nearly three years later, the truth of that phrase is becoming difficult to ignore. War has resumed between the United States and Iran following the collapse of their short-lived memorandum of understanding, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) conducts strikes across the Gulf. Israel and Lebanon, meanwhile, have made unprecedented diplomatic headway and agreed a framework for Hezbollah’s disarmament and IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Syria and Iraq are proactively taking steps to combat pro-Iran militias and cultivate closer ties with Washington. In Gaza, the US-backed Board of Peace is pressing for Hamas’s complete disarmament as the group dismantles its administrative apparatus. In Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has scheduled legislative elections for 28 November. It is the first such vote planned in two decades. Amid the regional scramble to shape the “day after”, Jordan appears to be the only country without a plan of its own.

Jordan doesn’t have great borders. Over the past two decades, it has confronted a narcoterrorist threat along its northern frontier, driven in large part by Hezbollah-linked networks operating through Syria—a route finally disrupted by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. To the east, Jordan has repeatedly faced attacks from Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, including Kataib Hezbollah, and more recently from Iran itself. To the west lies the PA-controlled West Bank, where clandestine networks involved in arms smuggling and human trafficking via Jordan remain deeply entrenched. To the south, Saudi Arabia is Jordan’s only relatively stable neighbour, despite a history of rivalry between the two Arab kingdoms. At the 1974 Arab League summit in Rabat, Riyadh helped force King Hussein to recognise the PLO as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people”, effectively ending Jordan’s hopes of re-administering the West Bank following its crushing defeat by Israeli forces in 1967. Relations between the two kingdoms have grown stronger in recent years, and their strategic interests are now broadly aligned. But as I have argued in these pages, Saudi Arabia is confronting persistent fiscal strains and a general population shaped by decades of Islamist religious instruction.

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In 1940, one of the great literary showdowns of the last century took place between one of Britain’s great men of letters and a writer whose name most readers of this essay will never have heard. From one corner of the literary ring strode George Orwell, the ancient-jacketed patron saint of plain speaking, cigarette adroop. Facing him was another assiduous smoker—a pipe man, in this case—and writer of popular children’s stories. This mismatched fight did not go as expected.

The morbidly private Charles Hamilton was the undisputed world champion of that peculiarly British genre, the English school story, and over the previous four decades, he had cranked out his yarns under at least two dozen pseudonyms. For each new setting, he used a different name, populating his schools with their own casts of pupils, spivs, gimlet-eyed form-masters, sadistic prefects, local tradespeople, and ridiculous foreigners. Joining them was a small galaxy of muggers (what Hamilton called “footpads”), would-be kidnappers, and local grifters. Over the course of an uncommonly productive career, Hamilton is reckoned to have created more than a hundred fictional schools in something like 5,000 stories. Understandably—but, as it turned out, incorrectly—Orwell assumed that all this industry could not possibly have been the work of one author. In this, and in much else, Orwell was mistaken.

The best-known of Hamilton’s noms de plume, Frank Richards, appeared most famously on the hundreds of book-length yarns set within the fictional cloisters of Greyfriars School, located somewhere in Kent, for the Magnet. A fabulously popular weekly boys’ story paper in its time, the Magnet was first published by Amalgamated Press in 1908 and was still going strong by the time Orwell weighed in on the matter in the pages of the now long-defunct Horizon, a cultural magazine edited by Cyril Connolly. During the same period, Hamilton also produced—this time writing as Martin Clifford—another series of stories for the Magnet’s companion paper, the Gem. This, too, ran to 20,000 words a week over the same period, but it was set in a different school, St Jim’s, with an almost entirely different cast of characters inhabiting the same sort of stiff-upper-lipped world.

The Magnet series was the better known of the two, however, largely thanks to the popular presence of Billy Bunter, a mischievous schoolboy nicknamed “the fat Owl” for his large round spectacles and rotund figure, who was always getting into comic scrapes and was forever on the brink of getting expelled. Bunter ought to have been an unpleasant chap, but he was a real card. Here he is in the classroom getting grilled by his long-suffering form master, Mr Quelch, about pranking another pupil with a pin:

“No, sir! Nothing of the kind,” stuttered the confused fat Owl. “I never had a pin, sir. Besides, fellows are allowed to have a pin, sir. I—I—I was going to pin a page into my Latin grammar, sir. Not that I had a pin, sir,” added Bunter cautiously. “You can ask Skinner, he knows—he gave it to me.”

Even Orwell was happy to concede that Bunter was a “really first-rate character.” The fat boy’s “tight trousers against which boots and canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal orders which never turn up,” he marvelled, “have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves.” Bunter’s creator, on the other hand, was hardly known at all. Even many of the people who had worked at Amalgamated Press since 1908 knew little about the person behind the byline, or if he even existed. In The Road to Greyfriars, a rosy memoir about his years spent working on the Magnet as a subeditor, George Richmond Samways referred to Hamilton as “an almost mythical personage, much talked of indeed—but nobody working in the general office had the faintest conception of what the man was like.” Stories in “immaculate typescript” addressed to the editor with the briefest of covering notes would arrive, and that was basically that.

Samways eventually discovered that the author was a scrunchy little character, monkish in appearance, with a thing for wearing skullcaps. Born in London in 1876, Hamilton began writing at the age of seventeen and possessed an appetite for words as prodigious as his best-known character’s appetite for snaffled tuck. But while lazy Bunter seized any opportunity to take a badly needed nap, his creator hardly seems to have slept a wink. He tapped out his stories for the Magnet and the Gem at about fifty words a minute, by his own hunt-and-peck count. Somehow, he also found time to write occasional girls’ stories under the pen name Hilda Richards.

By the time Hamilton died in Kent at the age of 85, he is reckoned to have produced the equivalent of 1,200 full-length novels. The Guinness World Records lists him as the most prolific author of all time in the English-speaking world, and one of the Bunter stories was written entirely in the classical Greek that he taught himself when he was Bunter’s age.

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The story of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who has just resigned amid a scandal involving plagiarism, fabulism, and résumé-padding, has rattled a number of skeletons in Western academia’s closet. In 2023, Arday became the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge when he was appointed professor in the sociology of education at the age of 37. Arday had obtained his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. The son of immigrants from Ghana who lived on a Clapham council estate, he claimed to have overcome autism and other disabilities that left him unable to read or write until he was eighteen. That was just one of his many spectacular achievements. Others included raising £5.5 million for charity and running ultra-marathons at an elite international level. On his brisk voyage to the top of British academia, he was showered with prizes and awarded honorary degrees by four UK universities. It is no exaggeration to call him the darling of British higher education.

Alas, this glittering edifice of renown has now crashed to splinters, sending shrapnel far and wide. Arday has been credibly accused of plagiarising large stretches of his PhD thesis, filing bogus claims of harassment, falsifying data, inventing guest professorships, and telling tall tales about his personal background and achievements. Cambridge University initially leapt to Arday’s defence and called the allegations against him a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility”. Awkwardly, the university has now accepted his resignation letter and announced—through gritted teeth—an investigation into his work and background.

Arday’s fate is only the most spectacular instance of a phenomenon that plagues modern academia in the Anglosphere, and increasingly beyond. I spent dozens of years as a student or a professor at various universities in the US and Germany. All the institutions I studied and worked at were, of course, strongly committed to “diversity” (later supplemented by “equity” and “inclusion”). It graced the front page of the marketing brochure, and it was the main theme of every mission statement. A core task of the diversity bureaucracy within every university was “retention”—that is, preventing dropouts.

It was all well and good, at American universities, to admit a percentage of incoming black students approximately equal to the black share of the US population (thirteen percent), but these students had an unfortunate tendency to drop out more frequently than students from other backgrounds, with only forty percent completing a degree within six years of college enrolment. If only five percent of black students actually graduated, this guaranteed static from advocacy groups and foundations. Here is where the diversity department resorted to the subtle art of “retention.” From the outset, the university ensures every student—in particular, students from “marginalised” backgrounds—may seek special assistance. Many such students contact the administration voluntarily. Others are identified by algorithms and receive a discreet email. The assistant deans or senior officers for retention assess the needs of these students. Are they having family problems? Are they suffering from undiagnosed attention disorders or other mental-health issues? Are they partying too much? Or are they taking courses which their high-school education didn’t prepare them for? And how are their study habits?

There’s nothing objectionable about retention programs, which are also used to straighten out student athletes and the scions of wealthy alumni. Regardless of race, a student from a working-class single-mother home who graduated from a marginally functional high school will face challenges adjusting to university life. Retention programs often help vulnerable students get back on track and graduate successfully. Naturally, the retainers insist that they do not lower academic standards; they heighten student performance. But everybody knows that’s not the whole story.

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In what we know as the Middle East, a dramatic jump in the emerging pattern of human violence took place around 5500 BCE, the primary evidence being circumvallation, the construction of walled fortifications around population centres.

Circumvallation was not unprecedented. The massive and fabled walls of Jericho appeared around 8000 BCE. Twelve feet high and six feet thick, an estimated 1,800 feet in circumference, the walls were a mute indicator of both the place’s unprecedented wealth—perhaps derived from trading Dead Sea salt—and the need to protect it. But these fortifications stood alone for 2,500 years; and then, rather suddenly, equivalents began to spring up again, as town after town in the Middle East either was destroyed, built walled fortifications, or both.

What was responsible? Had the forces of social complexity simply reached a stage that it had turned these agricultural communities against each other? This was certainly possible; but why had so many simultaneously perceived the environment as being dangerous enough to undertake the massive task of circumvallation? What had changed?

From out of the Steppe, nomads on horseback

The best theory at present is that the process was catalysed by a now-independent shepherd culture that, initially driven by hunger and desperation, had decided to attack the settled because that’s
where grain stores and other good things were to be found and taken.

But even if they managed to surprise their victims, getting away with the loot was an inherent problem, since they came on foot and could be run down. Logically, the best counter to pursuit was brutality, a level of violence that would leave the victims passive and in a state of shock.

Killing quickly and without emotion must have come naturally to shepherds; but verifying this pattern of aggression, and establishing their role in the growing mayhem, remain difficult. One thing is clear, however: War marched steadily onward, becoming a universal feature of the settled societies emergent in the region by 3300 BCE, when things got even more intense with the introduction of bronze and the wheel.

Yet warfare’s future had already taken a wildly divergent path nine hundred years earlier, far to the north, along the edges of the vast steppe above the Black Sea. Here, the rich grasslands could support bigger animals, and pastoralists added cattle to their herds—and after a while the wild horses indigenous to the steppe. At first, it was just for meat, since horse hoofs could poke through ice in winter to reach the grass below, which helped keep them from starving like sheep and goats.

But carbon dating of remaining bones and teeth indicate that, beginning around 4200 BCE, horses started living much longer. This meant they were being used for another purpose. Careful analysis of grooves worn in teeth by what must have been bits, along with characteristic human pelvic and lower-back changes, has now firmly established that the horses were being ridden.

Horses had long been bred for meat. But carbon dating of remaining bones and teeth indicate that, beginning around 4200 BCE, horses started living much longer—indicating that they were now used for another purpose

This added the mobility to reach much farther out into the virgin grasslands of the deep steppe, a capacity further energised around 3000 BCE with the introduction of wheeled wagons drawn by oxen. Now herders could bring everything they needed, including their families. Rather abruptly, the evidence shows a completely independent pastoral existence becoming a fact of life.

Judging by the contents of their kurgans, or burial mounds, things were definitely better out here, but not necessarily more peaceful. Herds thrived and multiplied, as did the attached human groupings. Growing familiarity with the new environment revealed rich copper deposits, soon to be the basis of a relatively huge trade far south with the squabbling city-states of Mesopotamia. Copper, when mixed with a little arsenic, produced bronze hard enough for a variety of weapons they could deploy against each other.

The lesson was plainly not lost on the steppe dwellers. Kurgan contents show they became master metalworkers, fashioning a host of personal ornamentation, along with daggers and spear and javelin tips, not to mention arrowheads—lots of them. Very likely they were propelled by what became the signature weapon of the steppe warrior.

Because of its portability and high rate of fire, the bow is a natural complement to the mobility provided a human combatant, or hunter for that matter, on horseback.

Compounding this was the development of the composite bow—combining their animals’ horns, sinew, and glue to create what would become a veritable ancient superweapon in the hands of riders who spent large portions of their lives on the backs of their surefooted steppe ponies.

This awesome military combination was likely first achieved by a people known to archaeologists as the Yamnayans and assigned by linguists a tongue known as Proto-Indo-European. In a matter of several centuries, these Yamnayans and their derivative cultures were destined to sweep 3,000 miles east and west, over the vast steppe extending from Hungary to western China.

But if the horses and cattle that thrived out here were bigger than flock animals, they were still subject to the same quick starvation from the wild weather, the only salvation being the herds of others. Since they were eminently portable and the featureless environment allowed for escape in any direction, the skills involved in stealing herds naturally developed into the swirling tactics that would prove the end of so many armies of the settled.

But it also resulted in a highly unstable environment on the steppe itself, with various groups being pushed off or simply choosing to leave. The first were the Yamnayans.

On the occidental side, a pattern of long-range raiding was quickly established, the targets being the generally peaceful, female-deity-worshipping communities extending down the Balkan Peninsula, known collectively as Old Europe. Since this was followed by their collapse and replacement with what were now a variety of Indo-European speakers, including pre-Greeks, a violent end might be assumed. But as with most things human, it was likely more complicated.

The archaeological record indicates that frequently the herders peacefully infiltrated areas between Old Europe settlements and formed mutually beneficial trade relationships. This sort of social symbiosis was apparently accompanied by feasting and prestige-based potlatching by the newcomers, which could have resulted in the gradual supplanting of one culture by the other.

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In this episode of Quillette Cetera, Zoe Sankey speaks with Jordan Lasker—better known by his pen name Crémieux—the bioinformatician and writer whose contrarian analyses of genetics, demographics and medicine have drawn a following of hundreds of thousands on X.

They discuss why birth rates across the Anglosphere began falling after a Victorian obscenity trial, what Crémieux makes of the evidence on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and the panic over microplastics, and his own experience being mauled by a pit bull—which, he argues, is a question of nature, not nurture. They also turn to El Salvador's transformation under Nayib Bukele, IQ testing and embryo selection, the tangle of politics and personality, free will, and the strange business of being Jewish and atheist at once.

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He who only knows his own side knows of the case, knows little of that.
~John Stuart Mill

I started graduate school in 2006. Like a lot of anthropology departments at the time, Rutgers was split between the biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists. Although we were all supposedly in the same department and required to take some of the same classes, it was like putting the math and the art departments together—except they hated each other.

In anthropology, graduate students have to conduct field research, and the first few years are spent figuring out the topic and where to go. I had come to Rutgers to study under Robert Trivers, a well-known evolutionary biologist who died a few months ago, and I decided to do my fieldwork in Iceland, testing hypotheses based on Trivers’s theories of parental investment and sexual selection. What was the trade-off between having more children and investment in each one (quantity vs quality)? How many kids should parents have when mortality was high (say, after a massive volcano) vs when it was low? How did a parent’s wealth and resources predict whether they invested more in boys vs girls?

In our second year, all the graduate students had to present their hypotheses at something called the Dissertation Proposal Defence. It was a crucial moment in the process of getting your PhD in anthropology. All of the biological anthropologists presented research questions that they were planning to test. My wife, for example, was planning to travel to Kenya, where she would study whether or not male olive baboons recognise and invest in their own offspring. (It turns out they can and do.) Another student, Drew Gerkey, announced that he would spend two years studying cooperation among reindeer herders in Siberia. (It turns out that these herders are some of the most cooperative people ever studied.)

I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and familiar with the jargon employed by the cultural wing (embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but I was still taken aback when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find. Here is an excerpt from a representative defence that was read to us titled “Portside Synaesthetics: Sensing the Politics of Place”:

Architectural models and projections in Marseille are experienced as uncanny, rather than as communicative. … Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material “objects” have on human “subjects.”

There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analysed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence”, but no evidence was ever presented. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions. It sounded like they weren’t interested in actually learning anything at all. Why, I wondered, were they bothering with this field at all?

I had been trained to always ask, “What’s the evidence?” My advisor would never let me get away with vague bullshit about what “the research says” or what “studies show”. If I tried to handwave with that kind of thing, he would immediately interrupt me and ask: “Which studies?” He wouldn’t even give the result of a paper without explaining its methodology. Instead of saying that an Implicit Association Test (IAT) was a measure of unconscious biases, for instance, he would spend eight minutes explaining exactly what was being measured—how quickly people categorise words and pictures associated with black people and white people. This insistence on method and the integrity of data could be exhausting, but it was a discipline I never forgot. He actually wanted to know the answers to questions because he was authentically curious. The idea that people might hold different beliefs, and that data could adjudicate between these beliefs, was as foreign to my cultural anthropology classmates as examining semiotic post-textual theory was to me.

The founding premise of anthropology was audacious: that you could actually go and find out what humans are like, rather than simply assume it from the comfort of your own tiny corner of the world. Franz Boas, the discipline’s American founder, rejected the racial hierarchies earlier scholars had simply assumed instead of testing, and he demanded that anthropologists spend years in the field before making any claims about another culture.

My postdoc advisor at the University of Missouri, Napoleon Chagnon, came straight out of that tradition. He spent more than a decade among the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan Amazon, testing fundamental questions about kinship, violence, and reproduction. He once told me that he awoke in his hammock to find the village headman standing over him with an axe raised over his head ready to strike. Do more violent men have more wives and children? It turns out that—in Yanomamö villages, at least—they do. I spent three years working and publishing with Chagnon, and in his day he was one of the most famous anthropologists alive. Because that’s what anthropologists did in the 1960s and ’70s. They asked the most interesting questions they could think of about people and their cultures, then they conducted field work in an attempt to answer them. Today, asking those same questions can get you labelled a racist or colonialist, and studying small-scale societies at all is dismissed as cultural voyeurism.

What are universities for? They used to be places where humans would search for truth. “It is well worth searching for truth,” the philosopher Karl Popper once remarked; “and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.” My cultural anthropology classmates believed that people like Chagnon, Trivers, and Popper had it backwards. Truth is not an empirical matter of correct or incorrect, it is a moral matter of right and wrong. Objective truths cannot be sought, relative truths can only be defended. And those who demand empirical support for assertions are attempting to destabilise moral truths, usually in the interests of some powerful interest or other.

Carolyn Rouse is the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Earlier this year, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter offered her the chance to respond to a report that alleged an extreme politicisation of anthropology. The authors of that report found “a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” By the time of the interview, Quillette had already published most of the report.

Rather than reckon with these findings, Rouse doubled down on the very claims the report had flagged as most absurd. No criticism that I could offer—not this essay, not the report itself—was as damning as simply letting the discipline’s most prominent member speak for herself. In 2023, her organisation cancelled a panel discussion at its annual conference about the importance of biological sex as an analytic category in anthropology on the grounds that it might have harmed members’ “safety and dignity”, and that its premise contradicted “settled science”. Asked if she regretted that decision, Rouse said:

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A review of Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling by Frank Miller; 224 pages; Canongate (July 2026)

Even outside of comic book circles, Frank Miller is known as a gifted artist and writer who made comics grown up and gritty. From his damaged version of Bruce Wayne to Marv in Sin City (whom Miller pithily describes as “Conan the Barbarian in a trenchcoat”), Miller has created stories that resemble a strikingly original blend of film noir and dark Wagnerian opera. But the Miller who emerges from this memoir—part autobiography, part primer for aspiring graphic novelists—is as much a romantic as a gung-ho rebel.

When Miller arrived in New York in 1976, the city was arguably at its most feral and dangerous. A green kid from Montpelier, Vermont, he pitched up with a sketchbook and a sense of iron-clad determination (the motto he wrote by his high-school photo was “Get the Hell out of My Way”) but very little else. He found that he loved things about New York that caused others to recoil:

I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline—the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.

Manhattan at night was a fantasy land for me—the charged atmosphere held the keys to my imagination. Gotham’s wailing sirens, blustery drunks, and street-corner lurkers: the city’s midnight cast of characters in an edgy melodrama I was finally getting to watch in person. It was all a source of romance for me, not terror.

More importantly, New York was the home of his first great love: “Sure the city was violent, but it was also the hub of comic books and had been since the beginning. Marvel and DC were there, and all my real-life heroes were either still there bent over their drawing boards or they had spent formative time in the city, honing their skills and learning the lessons that only New York can teach you.” Miller was a childhood fan of the medium, and developed a particular fondness for EC comics, which were geared towards adults and “explored forbidden themes such as environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, and the miseries of war.” From EC comics, Miller “learned to always push the walls that others constructed, to challenge the strictures others put in place to stifle and smother.”

Part of EC’s appeal no doubt rested on the reproaches it earned from the Comics Code Authority, which Miller describes as “a crusty remnant of ‘Red Scare’ censorship and the prim morality of postwar America.” The attempt to drum up a moral panic about comics will be familiar to those who have followed similar media and public campaigns to ban and censor video games and “video nasties” in the name of child protection:

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Editor’s note: the following essay discusses Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves in detail and contains spoilers throughout.

I.

It has been thirty years since the release of Breaking the Waves, Danish director Lars von Trier’s film about the self-annihilation of a deeply religious but mentally damaged Scottish girl who loves not wisely but too well. Although hardly popcorn fare, and vehemently criticised by some feminists for creating a heroine defined by passivity and suffering, the film was an arthouse hit, grossing US$23 million on a US$7 million budget. It won the Grand Prix at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, along with a number of awards on the festival circuit for von Trier’s direction and Robby Müller’s unusual photography. Emily Watson, who turned in an astonishing performance in her first feature-film appearance as tormented heroine Bess McNeill, was nominated for Best Actress at the 1997 Academy Awards (she lost to Frances McDormand in Fargo). In 2016, to mark the film’s twentieth anniversary, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek turned von Trier’s movie into a three-act opera that garnered its own awards and acclaim. With its heroine who dies onstage, its themes of self-abnegating passion and villainous malice, and its melodramatic tests of faith and virtue, Breaking the Waves is certainly one of cinema’s more operatic creations.

But despite the awards and the modest box-office success, the film’s critical reception was decidedly mixed. Breaking the Waves certainly had its ardent supporters. It has, Roger Ebert enthused, “the kind of raw power, the kind of unshielded regard for the force of good and evil in the world that we want to shy away from.” And Sight and Sound’s capsule review, marking the film’s appearance on home video, described it as a work of “monumental quality” and “inspirational filmmaking.” But other reactions ranged from conflicted to scornful. At the New York Times, Janet Maslin praised the film’s “flabbergasting transcendence” but was also dismayed by a narrative that led the viewer “from the sincere to the ludicrous.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “I find [Breaking the Waves] simultaneously shameless, boldly original, contrived, highly affecting, transparent, cynical, hopeful, ironic, sincere, ugly, beautiful, and downright baffling.” The British film critic Mark Kermode is one of the film’s noisiest detractors, and never misses an opportunity to declare his disdain for a work he calls “hateful.” Encapsulating the polarised critical response was Peter Bradshaw’s 2023 reassessment for the Guardian, which described the film as “entirely ridiculous from beginning to end,” and then awarded it four stars out of five (largely for Watson’s “luminous” performance as Bess).

Breaking the Waves is set in a fishing village in the western Highlands (the film’s exteriors were mostly shot on the Isle of Skye and the near mainland) during the early 1970s, when the recent discovery of North Sea oil reserves was starting to bring prosperity to rural Scotland, although not quickly enough. Life in this remote part of the world was still raw and shabby, and we are offered glimpses of bleak pre-Thatcherite interiors with their tacky wallpaper and kitschy art. Everything looks primitive: the stony, treeless landscape; the dirt roads; the ponderous drilling machinery on the North Sea oil rigs; the archaic-looking medical equipment at the local hospital. Almost nobody in the film seems to have a telephone, and motor vehicles are occasional things. Von Trier had Müller shoot with handheld cameras and the footage was transferred from film to video and then back again, which gives the film the bleached-out and grainy appearance of a home-movie, as though the northern rain and bitter winds had swept away the colour of the environment.

The church that dominates the small island community is a particularly severe version of the Free Church of Scotland—a collection of rump congregations that splintered from Scottish Presbyterianism during the 19th century over (among other things) the established church’s perceived lack of Calvinist rigour. This is a congregation of unusual grimness (“Our church has no bells,” the minister explains to Jan. “We do not need them to worship God.”), and “sinner’s funerals” are held in public to shame disgraced reprobates: “You deserve your place in hell,” the minister declares as he consigns one such body to the soil. An austere life of religious severity and unforgiving weather has toughened the community’s inhabitants: at Bess’s wedding reception, her grandfather (Phil McCall), one of the church elders, crushes a glass of lemonade in his own bare hand until blood runs over his fingers.

Bess is a naive and sweet-natured soul, although she can be obstinately courageous in her childlike way, standing up to the church elders’ disapproval after she decides to marry an outsider—a Scandinavian oil-rig worker named Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). Marriage, she informs the elders, is “when two people are joined in God.” It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Bess is also mentally fragile, dangerously impulsive, prone to extreme behaviour, and at the mercy of whatever violent emotion seizes her from moment to moment. We learn that when her brother was killed in an accident a few years earlier, she suffered a breakdown that sent her to a mental hospital in Glasgow. When the helicopter carrying Jan from the rig to the wedding is a little late in arriving, Bess furiously pounds her fists against his chest as though it were his fault. So eager is she to consummate their marriage that she drags him into the ladies’ room in the middle of the reception, her wedding dress crumpled up behind her on the sink counter. Bess loves Jan, and she loves having sex with him. Jan is large, good-looking, and open-hearted—he loves her devotion and he encourages Bess to talk dirty to him over the telephone when he’s working on the rig. “She’s stronger than you and me,” he tells Bess’s dubious sister-in-law and best friend, Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge).

Bess regularly cleans the church as an act of piety, and while she is on her knees, she talks to God—and then ventriloquises his stern responses in a low, masculine register. She becomes distraught when Jan has to return to the oil rig after the wedding and begs God to return him to her. Then, in a particularly nasty curl of the monkey’s paw, Jan suffers a shattering accident when a blow from the rig’s machinery leaves him paralysed from the neck down. Bess is tormented by the belief that she is responsible for Jan’s condition. So when Jan asks her to sleep with other men and report her experiences to him, she begins a harrowing slide into sexual degradation, social ostracism, and self-destruction, convinced that her self-sacrifice and unshakeable devotion will cure her ailing husband. When Dr Richardson (Adrian Rawlins), the young physician in charge of Jan’s treatment, asks Bess why she is sleeping with strange men at her husband’s behest, she replies: “I don’t make love with them. I make love with Jan, and I save him from dying.”

What seemed to enrage many critics is that she turns out to be right! Jan does indeed rise from his bed and walk, but the performance of this apparent miracle seems to require Bess’s brutal martyrdom. Bess is duly consigned to hell by the church she served at a sinner’s funeral, but Jan and his friends from the oil rig steal her body and give her a loving burial at sea. This act of compassion results in the film’s second miracle—the appearance of bells in the skies joyfully tolling to announce Bess’s induction into heaven. Is this magical realism or has the supernatural actually intruded into the hyper-naturalistic film we thought we were watching?

II.

During a 1996 interview with Swedish film critic Stig Björkman around the time of Breaking the Waves’ release, von Trier said that he had “wanted to make a film with a religious theme, a film about miracles.” Von Trier had converted to Catholicism a few years before, shortly after he divorced his first wife and discovered that his father was not his biological kin. But since his films have become notorious for their mix of graphic cruelty and explicit sexuality, it is difficult to discern the degree to which he ever really practiced or even believed in the tenets of his new faith. He told Björkman that his conversion had been mostly an act of rebellion against his mother and stepfather, who had been leftists, atheists, and self-professed antinomians who frequented nudist camps and let their children do whatever they liked. As a consequence of such an upbringing, von Trier told Björkman, “You either go to Tibet or seek out the most rigorous of all faiths. With total abstinence and the like.”

Breaking the Waves was the first of three successive films that von Trier made during the 1990s, which he calls his “Golden Heart” series (the other two were The Idiots in 1998 and Dancer in the Dark in 2000). According to von Trier, the title of this loose trilogy (the films are related only by general theme) was a reference to a Danish children’s book titled Guldhjerte (“gold heart,” literally) that his father had derided as “absolute rubbish” but which allegedly entranced him as a boy. In his interview with Björkman, von Trier recalled:

It was a picture book about a little girl who goes into the forest with some slices of bread and other stuff in her pockets. But at the end of the book, when she’s gotten through the forest, she’s standing there naked and with nothing left. And the last line in the book was: “‘But at least I’m okay,’ said Goldheart.” It seemed to express the ultimate extremity of the martyr’s role.

I say that this story allegedly entranced von Trier, because when I tried to find out more about it from WorldCat, the online international library catalogue, I drew a blank. There are several children’s books about generosity in Danish and English that bear the titles Guldhjerte and Golden Heart (or variants thereof), but none of these tells anything like the story to which von Trier referred. Other film historians who mention the book tend to simply quote or paraphrase von Trier’s own words. Given the director’s penchant for toying with interviewers and his generally mischievous nature, it would not be a surprise to discover that he had invented the book out of whole cloth. (The aristocratic “von” in his surname, for example, is an invention that he adopted when he was in his twenties, presumably to annoy his parents.)

Guldhjerte may well be a von Trier fabrication, but its themes of love, sacrificial death, and female self-abnegation are hardly foreign to the kind of children’s literature that von Trier might have read as a boy. In the perennially popular 1837 story The Little Mermaid (written by von Trier’s fellow Dane, Hans Christian Andersen), the eponymous heroine falls in love with a handsome human prince and trades in her fishtail and her immortality for human legs and feet so she can marry him. She discovers that walking on her new feet is excruciatingly painful—and then the prince marries someone else. She can reverse her transformation if she is willing to kill the young prince and drench her feet with his blood—but she chooses to die herself instead. (Disney’s animated version of this story, for those wondering, bore little relation to the original.)

Oscar Wilde embroidered an 1888 children’s tale titled “The Nightingale and the Rose” on these themes. A nightingale impales her breast on a thorn so that her blood will dye a white rose red, allowing an impoverished student to present it to his sweetheart, who fancies red roses:

And she pressed still closer, and the thorn pierced her heart and the blood flowed out and her song became fainter and her song became wilder, for she sang of the love that is perfected by death and the love that dies not in the tomb.

But the girl tosses the rose to the ground because she has found a richer suitor who can give her real jewels. And generations of American children have wept over E.B. White’s 1952 novel Charlotte’s Web: Charlotte the spider weaves magical words around her friend Wilbur the pig, which enables Wilbur to win a county-fair prize and avoid the slaughterhouse. All rush off to celebrate, but Charlotte, who is at the end of her short spider’s life, dies by herself on the deserted fairground.

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This week on the Quillette podcast, I’ll be speaking with Ashley Rubin, a professor at the University of Hawaii, and the co-author of a recently released report commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University, titled Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

Professor Rubin and her co-authors sound the alarm over recent illiberal trends that have taken over, to varying degrees, history, philosophy, literature, and the arts more generally, including Prof. Rubin’s own discipline, sociology.

The authors are careful to note that they don’t object to the progressive political slant of the humanities more generally. Rather, they object to the distortion of their academic disciplines—as they see it—by the use of explicitly ideological standards to judge the quality of new research.

By way of example: in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”

The authors argue that anthropology has been particularly affected by the tendencies documented in their report. But sociology isn’t far behind. In 2024, the American Sociological Association announced that its annual meeting would be devoted to “Intersectional Solidarity: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy.”

The organisers explained that the theme reflected the idea of sociology as “a form of liberatory praxis: an effort not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in sociopolitical struggles.”

In coming months, the report’s authors, including Professor Rubin, will be preparing specialised reports about their specific fields. But the interview you’re about to hear is based on the general report they published on April 5.

Please enjoy my interview with Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii, and the co-author of Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

Transcript

JK: Professor Rubin, thank you for joining the Quillette Podcast.

Ashley Rubin: Thank you for having me.

JK: The examples given about how anthropology, among the other humanities, has been particularly radicalised, they principally come from proceedings of conferences run by, I think it’s called the American Anthropology Association, which for a variety of reasons, personality, ideology, is not always representative of the rank and file. Is it really the case that anthropology has… And I’m picking on anthropology because, well, you guys picked on it—that it’s really become that radicalised? Or is it just the 17 people who run this particular organisation, who are self-selected and highly motivated to take over acronym groups, that they are highly radicalised?

AR: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I’m gonna kind of shift it to sociology ’cause I don’t wanna speak out of turn about anthropology. But I’ll step back for a moment and say this is a general question for all of the fields. In some cases, the professional associations are more representative, in some cases they’re not.

AR: But there’s also another factor, which is these professional organisations are incredibly important for the field, because a lot of times they’re really part of the job market process. They, a lot of times, issue statements about what it means to be a scholar of a particular type. People look to them for kind of legitimising understandings.

AR: So in my field of sociology, there is kind of a series of presidential addresses that called for more activism and scholarship, that the purpose of sociology is to kind of do more social action, and to kind of shift some of the criteria for doing and evaluating research. That’s gonna have a message on the field, and that’s something that people are gonna look at, and some people are gonna act on that.

AR: So now to the question of representativeness. This is a big issue in sociology, and this is, like, a huge empirical question—is what happens in the American Sociological Association, is that representative of the field? Going into this project, I thought, okay, the ASA is very visible, but it’s not necessarily representative.

AR: But then I also got survey data, and that’s where you see more agreement than disagreement. So that’s one kind of answer to that question. The other one is, at least in my field of sociology, it’s kind of a big deal to go and present at the ASA. The talks themselves are peer-reviewed, so you have to get your paper accepted.

AR: You usually send a paper, or more recently a short version of your paper, and that gets reviewed by a member of the programme committee, who decides, is this good enough? Does it fit our topics? And if not, you don’t get to present. And so it’s kind of like this cherry that you’re reaching for because it’s rare.

AR: But increasingly in recent years, you’ll see a lot of panels that you apply for that are on narrow topics. And so if there’s nothing that your research fits, so if you do kind of politically neutral research on a topic that’s not very politically salient, but it is actually pretty important and kind of foundational to sociology historically, it’s gonna be really hard to get that work accepted at the programme.

AR: In some fields, there might be one out of eight panels where it’s relevant and you only have four slots on that panel.

JK: What kind of panels have been represented lately?

AR: There’s a lot of stuff on kind of inequality, injustice, a lot of things that are specifically about inequality and injustice relating to specific identity groups. So race and gender come up a lot. There’s less on class, for example. Increasingly stuff on criminal justice topics, which is actually my area. So there’s a lot of attention to kind of policing or this kind of informal sense of social control that people kind of label coercerality—just anything that’s kind of vaguely coercive.

JK: This is a tangent, but I was at a Heterodox Academy meeting. There was a sociologist who presented who… I think he was complaining that whenever a film director needs, like, a sort of a pencil neck bad guy type who’s an academic, they always make him a sociologist.

AR: Yeah.

JK: Is that a thing?

AR: Yeah, that goes back a few decades. There have been a couple of movies where people are always making fun of sociologists. I think we’ve had a reputation for a while.

Basically, going back to the beginning of sociology, we’ve always had this tension in the field between kind of like the social progress mindset. So there were, you know, progressive era reformers who were sociologists, and they saw sociology as a tool for reforming society according to their version of what a good society should be.

And there were also the people who were trying to be scientists, some of whom also had their own versions of what society should be, that were also problematic. So we’ve always had this reputation for being a little reformer, little activist. We also are kind of open to looking at the underdog, to taking seriously the perspective of the people below, and kind of saying like, “Hey, we’re gonna go talk to criminals and try to understand them and not demonise them. We wanna understand what their motivation is.” You can’t really understand crime if you don’t take seriously their perspective. That’s kind of given us this flavour of kind of being just a little weird, off, deviant. Deviance is one of our classic topics. And so I think that’s kind of contributed to this sense.

JK: In the current ideological environment, does it make it hard to have basic discussions about determinants of criminal behaviour?

AR: Yeah, I would say so. So one example of that is even just discussing what are the causes of crime. There’s been a shift where some people are not comfortable discussing long-standing variables as potentially explanations for crime.

Even if you give it kind of like, let’s call it a liberal gloss—so structural disadvantages for poor people, for Black people, structural racism, et cetera—you can make the argument that those things lead to what we call social disorganisation, or kind of neighbourhoods that are kind of predisposed to criminality because of the way that they’re set up.

AR: That’s kind of seen as even problematic to say, because you’re implying that Black people commit more crime or poor people commit more crime. Not every type of crime is the same, but for some categories you do see over-representations, and it’s kind of seen as problematic to talk about that. And so that makes even just having the conversation about, okay, so you wanna reform the criminal justice system—how do you do that? Some of the things that we need to talk about to do that well, we’re not really supposed to talk about, and there’s kind of pushback for doing that. So I would say that’s an example of something that’s been difficult. Or a different one is just the kind of blind spots in what we’re studying. So if we wanna understand certain outcomes, we have to look at all the variables. We have to look at the variables we don’t like.

To switch to a totally different topic, female-male wage disparities. You have to look at the explanations that you might not like. Like, maybe there’s something that women are doing that is causing the wage disparity, that it’s not just sexism or structural sexism or something.

There might be choices that women are making. Even if I don’t like that hypothesis, I still have to test it if I’m gonna understand what’s going on about this thing that maybe personally I see as a problem in society. But that mindset is increasingly difficult to have.

JK: A couple years ago, there was a study that showed that, I think, Nordic countries that had the most enlightened policies in regard to letting men and women use their time differently, those are the countries that actually had the greatest disparity in male-female wages, which suggests there’s a choice issue. But you’re saying that kind of thing, that’s not a good subject to get yourself on a panel at an acronyms academic conference?

AR: Or it’ll show up in peer review comments where, you know, “How dare you say this? This is not appropriate to say.”

JK: People write that? They write like the Greta Thunberg, “How dare you?” Like, it appears in the comments, really?

AR: I’m not sure if it would be literally, “How dare you?” I’m paraphrasing.

JK: But something like that, yeah.

AR: Yeah. I mean, I do see that more on social media. But yeah, there are versions of that in actual peer review comments of, you know, “This is offensive. This is an ignorant take,” and things like that. And so during the Q&A on conference presentations, somebody will say—this is a different example, but like, “Why are you using the word prisoner? Why are you not using the phrase person who is incarcerated?”

JK: If you’re giving a talk or doing a paper, you’re almost doing a search and replace on these words with people who ovulate and all this stuff, because you don’t want your presentation to be derailed by, in a crowd of 200 people, one person gets up and rants at you because you used the wrong word. Take me into your creative process when you’re writing an article. Is this front of mind?

AR: Yeah, I would say it is. I mean, okay, one of the very first articles I wrote as a tenure track professor was on this concept of prisoner resistance. This is a topic I absolutely love. But one of the things that I was realising is how little evidence we had that prisoner—

JK: What, sorry, what is prisoner resistance?

AR: Great question. This is part of the problem, where the definition itself is pretty expansive. So I would define it as reaction to power in a way that’s intended to produce some sort of larger change. Other people would define resistance as basically any violation of the rules, any act of agency, meaning any time you kind of decide something for yourself, but especially in a way that is combative with, like, the prison regime or the rules or kind of expectations or norms.

AR: So some examples that people have given of prisoner resistance include masturbation and suicide, whereas more classic examples are things like prison riots or protests.

JK: Sorry, I gotta stop you there. Masturbation is a political protest against what?

AR: Against, like, Victorian norms of sexuality. Or another example would be same-sex relations behind bars, because these are kind of challenging heteronormative ideas of society.

JK: Is it the case that people have cited onanistic behaviour as having a political dimension to it if the person is incarcerated?

AR: Yes.

JK: Okay, but that’s super weird.

AR: Yeah. So this is what I’m thinking. I’m a, you know, first-year professor, and I’m like—

JK: Have people published articles like that?

AR: Yeah, yeah.

JK: Disrupting the patriarchy by… Like, I mean, is that—like, this is in the literature?

AR: Yeah, yeah. My very first article on the tenure track talks about this. And so this is me kind of sitting there thinking—

JK: So, so you invented this thesis?

AR: No, no. Sorry, I’m not endorsing the idea that masturbation is resistance. Like, I’m open to the possibility that somebody is sitting there thinking, like, “I’m sticking it to the man,” while, you know—

JK: Seems an unlikely fantasy, but hey, look—it’s not impossible, right. But okay, but you’re saying you wrote about how expansive the—

AR: I wrote critically about this.

JK: Right. Okay.

AR: And in writing it I was pretty nervous, because I thought, “Oh my God, people are gonna think I’m conservative. They’re gonna think I’m not on board with the project of supporting prisoners and the resistance.” ’Cause a lot of the work in this area is kind of seen as this very pro-prisoner, pro-resistance approach of like, “Yeah, stick it to the prison administration!”

I take a more neutral view of our research, where kind of everybody should be able to read our work and appreciate it, and understand it. So I try to not take particular sides. This article, it became a series of articles, and I circulated it to a senior professor who happened to be a Marxist professor.

AR: Really well respected. I really, really like his research. And he responded and said that it was kind of like I had just thrown cold water on basically a bunch of scholarship, and he didn’t like the paper. And he was an editor of a journal.

JK: And last time I checked, Marx didn’t have anything to say about self-love. Wasn’t in Das Kapital or anything like that. But were you able to publish it?

AR: Yeah. So I did get it published. But I circulated it to other friends and I discussed this concern, and other people were like, “Yeah, people are gonna think you’re conservative if you write this.”

AR: And so I added in some additional text in the article to kind of pre-empt this idea that I am coming at this from an anti-prisoner perspective.

JK: The whole idea that you’re interested in the lives of prisoners, to my mind disqualifies the idea that you’re a conservative. You’re telling me that within the community of scholars, who are presumably self-selected as, you know, bleeding hearts who care about prisoners—and I mean that in a good sense—you’re seen as a Trump fan if you don’t see every personal act of sexual flamboyance, presumably in front of other people, which is how they got caught or why they were disciplined, as a disruptive revolutionary political gesture? That that makes you a conservative in your world?

AR: So not a Trump supporter, because this was like 2014, or 2013 and 2014.

JK: Okay. Well, that’s crazier that it was then. I mean, we all assume that this happened fifteen minutes ago, but you’re saying that even then this made you outré?

AR: Yeah. So I mean, it’s not everybody. And you know, some people are open to the argument, like some people who I—

JK: This guy was a journal editor. This guy wasn’t some rando. You’re saying he actually edited the journal of what, like prisoner reform or something? Like, I don’t know.

AR: A particular high-level journal on this topic. And you know, I actually thought it was a pretty liberal point, because I was saying we’re essentially replacing our own views with what we think the prisoners are doing, rather than listening to the prisoners themselves and letting them be the authors of their own actions.

AR: So if we’re looking at this with this assumption that if you break the rules, that’s necessarily resistance—what about prisoners who don’t break the rules, and then that in itself is actually kind of counter-cultural? So I use the example of a formerly incarcerated man who wrote just a huge number of books, and he wrote kind of autobiographically about his time, and he explained that just reading and writing was seen as a rule violation, and he didn’t see this as resistance.

He saw this as I’m just bettering myself. But in this kind of context, that sort of work would be seen as resistance because he got in trouble for it. And it’s like, wait, this doesn’t make any sense.

JK: In this report, you have these lettered headings. “The problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public. The problem is not that many scholars are politically active. The problem is not that political considerations have broadened the focus of scholarship away from the Western high art canon. The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional—unless it’s from you, apparently.”

The focus of the report is replacing traditional scholarly criteria for judging new work, replacing that with overtly political considerations. And I felt kind of like those first sections where it’s kind of like you had a big block of marble, and you chopped off this side, and you chopped off this side, and you chopped off this side, and there was, like, this thing in the middle. And is that what the project was?

AR: Yeah. Yeah.

JK: Did you get critiques from conservatives who are like, “Well, all these things that you say aren’t problems, those are problems”?

AR: Yes. A lot of people didn’t like the report.

JK: Did you please anybody?

AR: I did see a few Twitter threads that kind of, like, seriously engaged it and kind of went one by one in our points, and I thought it was nice engagement. Like, they were, I would say, generally supportive or sympathetic, even if sometimes they would have some quibbles, as people should. So I think there were a few people who did, but yeah, there were a lot of people who didn’t.

JK: Around the same time your report came out, I guess maybe a month or two earlier, two or three months maybe—and I think you know this—is that on this podcast I had on a Yale Law School professor who talked about a report put out by Yale about the sources of distrust in higher education.

JK: It was broader. It wasn’t about the humanities. It was about higher education. I read that report. It wasn’t at all what I expected. It didn’t talk about ideology. It talked about the top-heavy nature of administration, the high tuitions, how students are selected. There was a huge focus on grade inflation.

JK: The two reports side by side actually make for very interesting companions. Were you aware of the Yale mission? Because the two reports really do read like companion pieces.

AR: Yeah, we had no idea about the Yale report, or if anyone on the commission knew about it—

JK: Have you read it?

AR: I have, yes.

JK: It’s good, huh?

AR: Yeah. No, it’s great. It’s very clear. It’s very expansive. I’ve also read a bunch of commentaries on it, including criticisms of it, even though I think it’s actually really good. But I think just weighing in on this topic, it doesn’t even matter what your research question is. It’s just—some people are gonna be mad about it.

JK: Do you agree with the concerns about grade inflation?

AR: Yes. Absolutely.

JK: Do you know any academics who don’t agree with it? I get the sense they were saying out loud what a lot of people believe, and I think since the time that report came out, I think Harvard has actually mandated a top-down thing, essentially a curve, right, where only a certain number of students can get As. Do you agree with that approach?

AR: I have some preferences about, I think, better ways to fix the grade inflation, but they’re, I think, too complicated and too difficult to… I think they’re just never gonna get adopted ’cause they’re just too complicated to explain.

JK: “I have great ideas, but you wouldn’t understand them.”

AR: It’s basically a Bayesian statistical analysis. So you’re never gonna explain it to the average undergrad in a non-statistical field, and even in a lot of statistical fields they’re still not gonna understand it.

JK: You gotta be careful with that coercive stuff–you might get displays of resistance in your class! When I went down the list of the 10 people, I think it’s 10 people who wrote this report— I mean, I realise you’re kind of going off into breakout rooms to write your subject matter specific reports. I’m impressed that 10 academics could have cooperated so constructively. I guess it’s because you’re all in different places, and you never actually had to meet. I thought it was interesting that they’re, like, not well-known cultural warriors.

AR: Within academia, some people would disagree with your characterisation. And they would see some of the names on the list as not necessarily culture warriors, but I guess by their standards they might see it that way. Like, I think a lot of people think that I’m a cultural warrior, which—

JK: Within your field?

AR: Yeah, within my field. And you know, that’s kind of annoying ’cause it’s like I really just care about, you know, I wanna do research, I wanna trust the research I’m reading. I can’t do the research I wanna do if the other research in my field is bad.

And, you know, many different definitions of bad—not all of it has to be about political. There are a lot of challenges we’re dealing with. But just to be fair, I think there are a lot of people who would say that about me and about some of the other people on the commission.

And now just the fact that we’re on the commission I think makes us, in their minds, culture warriors, so.

JK: Well, they’re gonna have to set up their own commission.

AR: Yeah. Go for it! A scholarly exchange, that’s what we’re supposed to do.

JK: One of the most important things anyone ever told me is—I mean, I was writing an article about ideological trends in academia. I think it was from Trent University here in Canada. He said, “Jon, the thing you have to know is that 95% of universities’ professors just wanna study their thing.” Like, if they’re studying the three-eyed newt, all they wanna do… They don’t care about, like, whether there’s not enough purple people studying the three-eyed newt or, like, the gender stuff.

Like, they wanna be left alone, and often what we think of as ideological skewing and social panics in these fields, there’s, like, three people leading the charge, and, like, 100 other people who just wanna be left alone and will sign onto anything, and shut up about things, and kind of obey all the rules if it just means they could spend Monday to Friday studying the three-eyed newt.

Do you think that’s a fair characterisation, that some of the radicalism that you talk about is really driven by a small group of people? It isn’t like a mass conscription phenomenon.

AR: One of the big takeaways from the report is the fields are heterogeneous. Like, both within and across the fields, they’re heterogeneous, and this is a huge theme in my own report on sociology.

So I think that’s really important to remember. Like, no group is a monolith, and that’s true of academics. It’s true of any particular discipline. One of the challenges of even answering this question is it really depends on which metric you’re using. It really depends on which piece you wanna talk about.

So I would say it’s no longer clear to me that 90% of academics really do just wanna do their research. I think that’s increasingly not true.

JK: Really? Okay.

AR: Yeah, I think that’s an overestimate. But I do think it varies, and there’s also… They’re kind of different groups. So I do think there’s the group that just wants to be left alone, and that’s just like, “I don’t care. I’m not gonna vote in a presidential election for this professional association. I’m not gonna sign on to this boycott. I don’t care about these things. I just wanna do my work.” Increasingly, those people have just completely left our professional associations, because that is what the professional associations are becoming.

And especially if you’re, like, high status enough, you’re already at a good university, you can get away with that because you can go to small, little workshops on particular topics, and you can exchange your work with other good people who also just wanna do their research. So some people can do that, and it’s great.

You know, if you happen to be at a university where you don’t have very much intellectual stimulation, those national conferences are really important. So anyway, so there’s definitely a group of people who just wanna be left alone, who don’t care about politics. Maybe they do politics on the side, but it’s not part of their research.

There’s also a small, very vocal, very powerful group of, let’s call them activists. Some of them do self-identify as activists. They’re activist scholars, scholar activists. People have their own labels. A lot of people have problems with the word activist, including activists outside of academia kind of think the label for academics is kind of stupid.

But that is a small group, and it’s very visible, and so it can really kind of shift the perception of the field. And it can also, in my view, cause a lot of damage to the field, especially when they’re incredibly organised. But I also don’t think the group is as small as we think it is.

There might be some, like, ringleaders, but, you know, as an example right now, the upcoming ASA meeting is gonna be in New York in just a couple of weeks, and there’s a large boycott of the association. And I forget what the last count was. I think it was more than 1,000 sociologists have agreed—

JK: Because you’re there? [laughs]

AR: Oh, no. No, this is not about me!

JK: No, no, I know it’s not about you.

AR: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I guess I should explain the context. There was a petition that more than, I think, 400 sociologists signed asking the ASA to agree to boycott Israeli universities.

JK: Ugh. That thing, that thing again. What is it with these people? Like, honestly, there’s a lot of crap going on in the world, and it’s just, it’s always about… Anyway, sorry.

AR: Yeah. Why, why is Israel special, right? Like, there are other problems. Yeah.

JK: China is. Okay, anyway, go on.

AR: And also, like, why are we boycotting academic institutions? Old AAUP policy was you don’t do that, but they changed their mind lately, and now it’s kind of open season on places you don’t like, and so you can boycott people and places now.

JK: So people aren’t coming to the meeting because the organisers are not sufficiently anti-Israel?

AR: Yeah. They claim that they are not democratic because, despite the petition, despite having more than 3% of the ASA members, by their read, it should have gone on the ballot.

But the ASA leadership said it’s not going on the ballot ’cause, per our bylaws, this would be not eligible to go on the ballot—not because of the 3%, but because this is actually an operational decision. If it was just you wanna do yet another statement about how Israel is terrible, that would go on the ballot.

We did that a few years ago, and it passed. But if you wanna do that again, fine, it would go on the ballot. But this is about business decisions. This is about, for example, Israeli institutions can’t advertise jobs on our job bank. That’s a business decision. And so the leadership said no, and they say that they consulted with lawyers, who also said, “No, you can’t do this.”

And that decision was not well-received, and so for a variety of reasons, this kind of boycott emerged. And so now a lot of people are agreeing not to go to the conference, or if they do go to the conference, not to stay at the conference hotel, to kind of financially screw over the association.

JK: They really know how to stick it to the man, don’t they? I mean, it’s like those prisoners got nothing on these guys.

AR: Yeah. And they have, like, an alternative conference that they’re going to at a university in the city.

JK: But isn’t that good? Like, shouldn’t they like to stay at your alternative conference? I guess this was my question—

AR: That is one perspective!

JK: You know what? If I went to a conference, I don’t want these people poncing around in their keffiyehs taking photos of each other with raised fists and hashtags about resistance and whatnot. The way this kind of dispute is often settled in other industries, if the northbound axes and the southbound axes can’t get along, they create two different organisations.

Maybe there should be more than one sociology—one for kind of people who just wanna do that crap all the time, and another for just normal people who wanna do sociology stuff. And maybe another one for, like, crazy conservatives who wanna talk about Trumpian sociology or whatnot. Like, is part of the problem here that there’s a conceit that the same umbrella group can represent all scholars in the field just because they have the same word in their professorial designation?

You know, you’re all professors of sociology or criminology or whatnot. Things that are politicised have political parties. That’s the nature of politics.

And if these people… Sorry, I say these people. It’s not like they’re a special species of human being. But if the people who overtly want to politicise the humanities, and which is the subject of your report, if they’re serious about their mission and that they want it to be like politics—well, guess what? Politics has different parties. You’re free to form a party, but that means not everyone’s gonna go to your conference. Some people are gonna go to, like, conferences where we actually talk about the subject matter.

AR: I think that might be the future. And just to clarify, there already are multiple sociology associations.

JK: I know, but you told me it’s a big deal to be at the—that’s a career maker, to give a speech at the… so presumably there is one, like, above the rest, right?

AR: Yeah. But there’s another one, and it used to be that if you thought the ASA was too conservative, you would go to the other one. And that was still a choice, but it’s like a signalling move, and it’s respected enough among kind of left-leaning sociologists, for example, that if you go to the Society for the Study of Social Problems, that would also be seen as okay.

JK: Can you go to both? Like, do you have to get your hand stamped?

AR: You can go to both. They tend to be held—oh, I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to be held in, like, the same place.

JK: So you had to choose.

AR: They would be, like, a few days apart, but I think they kind of overlapped. And then there are other, like, there are affinity groups. Like, there’s a women sociologist group. There’s now a Sociologists for Palestine group. So there are a lot of affinity groups that you can go to, and there’s now a Heterodox Academy sociology group, so—

JK: There’s my raised fist. There’s my raised fist.

AR: So there are these different groups. In terms of the future, and there’s also a new group called Sociological Science. I think that is kind of the way that we’re going. If you take a stance that sociology should be about the scientific study of society, and that’s seen as problematic and inherently political because you’ve just endorsed science, and science itself is this inherently racist, eugenicist movement that has been used in the past for bad things, and we can’t possibly use science for those reasons or for other reasons—we kind of have a problem.

JK: Right.

AR: I mean, I kind of think about this as, like, this Durkheimian moment. So Durkheim has this great discussion about what he calls organic societies and mechanical societies.

So mechanical societies are these very homogenous societies. They tend to be very religious, and they tend to agree on a lot of things. And if you don’t agree on certain things, that really makes you an outlier and kind of subject to punishment. The solidarity for the society is around punishing those outliers, the people who violate the deeply held values.

Whereas organic societies tend to be diverse societies. They tend to kind of have shifted their notion of the sacred from religion or from a monarch to the individual rights themselves. So human rights becomes really important. And the understanding is, if this diverse society is going to exist, you have to agree to live and let live.

You have to agree on things like free speech or freedom of religion or different political views, because if you don’t, society is just gonna collapse. If you say, “I’m not gonna go to that grocery store because I don’t like your political views,” well, you’re gonna start to have a kind of dysfunctional society where you segregate by politics or something.

And if you do that, that way madness lies, because essentially the narcissism of small differences. And you keep self-isolating further and further until you’re a society of one. So there’s kind of this general wisdom in live and let live and saying, “Look, you and I can disagree about these things, but there’s one fundamental thing we agree on—our right to disagree.”

If we’re gonna have a conversation, we have to kind of agree to the terms of the debate. So there’s just certain baseline things we have to agree on, and if professional associations, or disciplines more generally, if we can’t agree to certain fundamental things, then it’s gonna be difficult to play together.

Like, if I don’t know the rules by which my article’s gonna be reviewed when it goes out for peer review, I don’t know how to prepare my article. If the norms are rapidly changing and it depends on whom you ask—I mean, to some extent that’s always true, but when it’s really volatile and it’s changing week over week or year over year, that becomes a really difficult time.

I don’t know how to advise my students under those circumstances. So I think that’s kind of the problem that we’re facing—is it’s not just that we’re gonna kind of split off, it’s if we keep splitting off, we’re not a discipline anymore.

JK: I know I am not the first person to point out the irony of the fact that the progressive left is extremely focused on diversity and in the process created a Durkheimian totalitarian consciousness to enforce that. That’s been pointed out, right? I’m not the first guy.

AR: You’re definitely not the first person. It’s not something that goes over well when you point it out, though. Like one of my big pet peeves is everybody wants to talk about authoritarianism. But really they mean, you know, Trump authoritarianism.

They mean conservative or Republican authoritarianism. They mean government authoritarianism. And you know, to be fair, government authoritarianism is really, really bad.

JK: Sure, sure.

AR: But they don’t seem to notice authoritarianism when it comes from each other, when we try to censor each other, when we go after each other because we don’t like our political views.

You know, there are a couple of high-profile cases where people’s tenure and promotion cases have been challenged for political reasons. And people don’t seem to recognise that as authoritarianism, and they’ll talk all about the importance of academic freedom, but then not acknowledge it when academic freedom is being attacked from within.

And so that to me is a really big irony. Like if we’re really gonna say we’re anti-authoritarianism, we should probably be consistently anti-authoritarian and not just when the government does it.

JK: Yeah. You know, the call is coming from inside the building. Ashley Rubin is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Hawai’i, also the only podcast guest I’ve ever had who used Durkheimian and Bayesian in the same episode, so. If you want to read the report that Professor Rubin contributed to, it’s called State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

It was published on April 5th, and an excerpt of it can be read at Quillette under the headline “A Crisis in the Humanities”, under the byline of Paul Boghossian, one of the colleagues with whom Professor Rubin collaborated in preparing the report. Thank you again. It was a pleasure.

AR: Thank you so much.

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Like others who have spent years reading, re-reading, studying, teaching, and being entranced by the Homeric epics, I looked forward to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey with an uneasy mixture of hopeful enthusiasm and nail-biting concern. Some ancient-culture aficionados were, I’m sure, fully invested in the enthusiasm, while others were preoccupied with the concern; but most, I’d wager, were experiencing them in equal measure, bouncing from one emotion to the other. The enthusiasm and concern both derive from the fact that the popular culture has once again determined that such ancient works are worthy of attention, that they can still be made to speak a language accessible to anyone, and that they belong in the pop-culture pantheon.

To some extent, that same kind of ambivalence is associated with an adaptation of any classic work for those who read it and care about it. But somehow there doesn’t seem to be as much at stake in another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice or Little Women or Wuthering Heights, or even a modern novel like Harry Potter for that matter. Maybe that’s because they are in less danger of being neglected by the culture entirely. The great works that resist popular packaging, on the other hand—works like Paradise Lost and (for very different reasons) Moby-Dick—are in danger of disappearing from the literary canon. I don’t mean to suggest a causal relationship necessarily, but it is certainly a striking correlation.

What Homer’s Odyssey resists is not the effort to package it for popular-culture consumption, but the possibility of presenting it in its own terms. (I admit that for true purists, that possibility is always out of reach; in this case, it’s a matter of relative access.) This isn’t because the work is too old or too boring. The Odyssey is, after all, an adventure story replete with exotic journeys, monsters, violence, sex, goddesses, sex with goddesses, fantasy islands, reunions with long-lost family, revenge... As the list goes on, it becomes obvious that a single movie couldn’t begin to cover it. But nor could a trilogy of movies or a lengthy TV series.

That hasn’t prevented successive generations of moviemakers—though the numbers are small compared to adaptations of other major works—from exercising their prerogative, not only to adapt the work, but to present it from their own necessarily limited perspective. In an article for the Atlantic about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, George Packer writes, “The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity.” The Odyssey did the same thing a couple of thousand years earlier. Both the poem and its protagonist are unapologetically ambiguous. For that reason, the Homeric epic of homecoming has become whatever each successive era has needed or wanted it to be.

The Hellenistic Greeks had already put their own spin on the Homeric works by the time those works reached ancient Rome. When the Romans conquered the Greek city-states, they ended Greek dominance in literature, the arts, science, and culture overall. Good citizens that the Romans were, they felt a need to justify their victory—surely, they told themselves, the Greeks must have somehow deserved such a crushing defeat. So in Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus—Ulysses in Latin—became a despised character representing Greek mendacity and cowardice. At the same time, Virgil appropriated many of Odysseus’ adventures and awarded them to his own hero, Aeneas. (Some evidence in the text suggests that Virgil was less convinced of Roman uprightness than the authorities he was hired to please, but that’s a topic for another time.)

By the late medieval period, when the ancient classics were rediscovered and began attracting popular interest, the Catholic Church felt a similar need to vilify the ancient Greeks, but for its own fairly obvious reasons. So in Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses is sent to hell for giving false counsel; his death is attributed to his supposedly insatiable desire for adventure and knowledge, which compelled him to travel beyond the limits God set for humans. By the 19th century, the British belief in progress coupled with a belief in the primacy of imperialism turned that adventurer into the ideal hero. Tennyson ends his poem “Ulysses” with the hero famously proclaiming his intent “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (That imperative was quoted favourably by M, the head of MI6, in the James Bond movie Skyfall.)

James Joyce, on the other hand, associated the adventuring hero with the entirely unheroic character of the Wandering (Irish) Jew in Leopold Bloom. And since the 2000s, Odysseus/Ulysses has become the symbol of toxic masculinity run amok, as feminist authors have retold the story from the point of view of the Odyssey’s female characters, in works like Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 2005 novel The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s recent Odyssey-based Circe. As for the two most recent film versions, Nolan’s film and Pasolini’s 2024 The Return, both have drawn upon our current culture’s fixation on the effects of trauma.

Each of the drastically different versions of Odysseus’ story mentioned above can be supported by the original work, but none manages to capture it in its entirety. It isn’t only the author’s worldview that informs the epic’s complexity and ambiguity; the protagonist also embodies that complex and ambiguous dynamic. Indeed, everything about the work and its hero introduces complications and contradictions. Is Odysseus a hero or an anti-hero? Is he the first modern civilised man or a vicious barbarian? Is he the man who unjustly suffers or the one who causes suffering for himself and others? In today’s progressive political jargon, is he the oppressed or the oppressor? Homer’s epic raises all of these questions and more, but it doesn’t answer them.

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Earlier this month, the Federal Court of Australia dismissed claims brought by the concert pianist Jayson Gillham against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra over its response to a recital he gave in August 2024. What caused the trouble was not his piano-playing but an oratorical prelude condemning Israel for (in his telling) the war crime of deliberately killing journalists in Gaza. In the cacophony that ensued, the MSO cancelled his next performance, telling subscribers that his remarks had been “an intrusion of personal political views”. Then some of its own musicians revolted, and the orchestra offered to reinstate the performance on the condition that there be no physical or verbal statement from the stage. Our virtuous virtuoso declined. The managing director left her role after the musicians passed a vote of “no confidence” in senior management, and the board announced an independent review.

In court, Gillham contended, in effect, that he had been discriminated against for expressing political views. Those attuned to it detected a familiar-sounding bassline in his lawyers’ arguments—the purported influence of Jewish board members and wealthy donors whom the MSO was allegedly trying to appease.

Rejecting Gillham’s claims, the court accepted that the MSO had acted on perceived business consequences, among them the reputational risk arising from the use of its stage for an unapproved political statement. The judgment effectively supports the proposition that an organisation may regulate how its platform is used in order to protect its business interests, provided its actions are directed at those interests rather than at suppressing the views expressed.

The case has attracted international attention, throwing light on the murky manoeuvring that arts and cultural institutions increasingly have to undertake to accommodate the competing interests of their stakeholders: donors, staff, artists, management and the public.

We are in the throes of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, as baby boomers die and pass their wealth to their spouses and ultimately to their children. In the United States alone, some US$124 trillion is expected to change hands by 2048, of which roughly US$18 trillion is expected to flow to philanthropy.

Charities are an integral part of civil society, both reflecting the societies they serve and helping to shape them. They are also engines of the economy, driving innovation, research, community engagement and policy reform.

The wealth that will flow to philanthropy, at a time of extraordinary social, political, technological and economic upheaval, is not merely a financial shift but a cultural one—a redrawing of the map of wealth and influence.

For some donors, charity is a gateway to soft power—a way to wield influence and shape policy and values while escaping oversight and accountability.

It is not surprising, then, that charities and not-for-profits find themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. Conflict arises not only over what these organisations do with their money but over where that money comes from. The identity and influence of donors have long been contested for human rights NGOs and educational institutions; increasingly it is contested for galleries, museums, literary festivals and theatre companies too.

It would be naïve to think that philanthropic donations are only ever made for altruistic reasons. For some donors, charity is a gateway to soft power—a way to wield influence and shape policy and values while escaping oversight and accountability. Large gifts attract publicity, yield social currency and help to entrench a benign legacy in the public mind. Hence the accusations of “reputation laundering”.

On one view, philanthropy perpetuates the very system of structural inequity that concentrated the wealth in the first place: the money remains tainted, and it taints the recipient. The counterargument is that the wealth already exists, so it may as well be put to public good. But at what cost? Is it a Faustian bargain?

When the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apologised for accepting donations from Jeffrey Epstein—whom the institute’s own records had already classified as a “disqualified donor”—he wrote: “With hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts.”

In deciding whether to accept a large donation, a charity must weigh whether acceptance is consistent with its purposes, how much control it is willing to cede, and the reputational risk of being associated with a donor—or the concentration risk of becoming dependent on one. It must consider everyone else in the ecosystem: employees and volunteers, other donors, and the people who benefit from its services or funding. Some organisations now have ethics committees and gift-acceptance policies, and publish them to give transparency to their processes.

The bigger the donation, the more likely it is that the donor’s relationship with the charity is, in essence, transactional, and that the terms of that relationship are negotiated like any other transaction. I give you $1 million: what are you prepared to give me for it? Invitations to elite conferences and dinners? A seat on the board? Naming rights? Consultation over policy direction?

None of this is new, and it is usually dealt with in gift agreements. What is newer is the “morals clause”, an increasingly common if contentious provision that allows a charity to terminate the relationship—including by “de-naming”—if a donor begins to bring it into disrepute.

The risk of being tarnished by a donor is nowhere more acute than where the donor holds naming rights, a centuries-old practice that exists precisely to perpetuate a positive legacy. After one of New Zealand’s most generous arts patrons was convicted of indecent assault and of attempting to pervert the course of justice, the charity he founded—the eponymous James Wallace Arts Trust—transferred its collection, worth several tens of millions of dollars, to a new trust bearing no trace of his name.

In exchange for US$200 million, the largest single gift the Smithsonian has ever received (the institution is itself named for its founding benefactor, the scientist James Smithson, who died almost two hundred years ago), Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos has naming rights on a new building at the National Air and Space Museum, and in several other places across the institution, for at least fifty years. The agreement contains no morals clause. Given the controversies over Amazon’s labour practices, that is a risk—but clearly one the Smithsonian decided was worth taking.

Harder to manage are the interventions and campaigns by artists and activist groups that pressure charities to divest or dissociate from their donors.

BP was once among the leading arts sponsors in the United Kingdom. After years of protests accusing it of “greenwashing”, Tate, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Scottish Ballet, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Opera House all ended their funding partnerships with it. The British Museum let its twenty-seven-year sponsorship lapse in 2023—and then, months later, accepted a £50 million donation from BP towards its ten-year redevelopment. The Science Museum retains a BP-funded education academy. Last year, internal BP memos were made public showing how the company had used cultural sponsorship to “secure public support and advocacy from partners to mitigate risks and advance business interests”.

In 2019, the Whitney’s vice-chairman and a significant donor, Warren B. Kanders, resigned after protests by staff and artists over his ownership of Safariland, a manufacturer of tear gas that had been used against migrants at the US–Mexico border. He later announced that he would sell the divisions responsible—a result the activists claimed as a victory, though subsequent reporting suggested he had rearranged his holdings rather than left the trade.

There is perhaps no greater scandal in arts funding than the Sacklers, both for the scale of their philanthropy and for the scale of their disgrace. The family owned Purdue Pharma, which developed OxyContin, the painkiller now synonymous with the opioid crisis. Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed Empire of Pain documents how the family’s philanthropic strategy laundered its reputation and won it a kind of sacrosanct status, especially in the art world.

That began to change when the American photographer Nan Goldin, herself once addicted to OxyContin, launched a campaign against the family. The Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’s National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the Louvre had all taken Sackler money and displayed the family name. One by one, they stopped. The Purdue Pharma settlement approved by a US bankruptcy court late last year gave beneficiary institutions the right to strip the Sackler name from galleries, buildings and scholarships without liability, provided the announcements were non-disparaging.

Harvard bucked the trend. In 2024 it announced that it would not rename the Arthur M. Sackler Museum or the Arthur M. Sackler Building, ending a long campaign by students. Arthur Sackler died nine years before OxyContin came to market, and after his death his wing of the family sold out its stake. “Arthur Sackler’s legacy is complex, ambiguous, and debatable,” the Harvard committee’s report stated. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways that may not have been foreseen originally.” It recommended that the university display explanations of Sackler’s life and legacy in the buildings themselves, so that “people will be allowed to form their own judgments about Arthur Sackler and the naming”.

Such nuance is rare. These interventions may begin with good intentions, but they tend to become blunt instruments with unclear and expansive parameters. That is especially so where activists subscribe to “intersectionality”—the analytical framework holding that all forms of injustice and oppression are interlinked—which inevitably admits the Palestinian cause to its menu of grievances, though not, apparently, abducted Ukrainian children, Afghan women, Iranian dissidents, or many another unworthy causes.

Mission creep of exactly this kind overtook the campaign against Baillie Gifford, the investment firm that sponsored a string of literary festivals and still sponsors the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction—which, ironically, Empire of Pain won in 2021. The activists, a collective calling itself Fossil Free Books, set out to use the firm’s relationship with the festivals as leverage to force it out of fossil fuels. They then added a demand that Baillie Gifford divest “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”, on the ground that “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”. In May 2024, more than 700 writers and publishing industry professionals signed an open letter calling on Baillie Gifford to divest from fossil fuels and cease its links to Israel.

Instead, Baillie Gifford divested itself of the literary festivals. Within weeks it had withdrawn from every book festival it sponsored in Britain.

Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Wales moved first, after a number of writers scheduled to appear at its 2024 event pulled out. Two days into the festival, Hay announced that it was suspending the sponsorship. “Our first priority is to our audience and our artists,” its chief executive said. “Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives”—without explaining how the sponsorship had precluded any of that.

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A review of A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women by Steve Stewart-Williams; 362 pages; Forum, London (June 2026)

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!”
—Gloria Steinem, 2019

In January 2005, at a private conference hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard President Lawrence Summers violated a central taboo of liberal discourse. In a discussion of why men were overrepresented in tenured science and engineering positions at top universities, he suggested that one possible cause was genetic differences between the sexes.

Summers offered this as one hypothesis among others, including bias against women, the different socialisation of the sexes, and women’s lesser willingness to trade off parental care for time-consuming jobs. His point was that we must understand the causes of unequal representation before trying to change it.

But Summers’s even-handed approach was ignored in the feeding frenzy that followed. The mere suggestion that sex differences in aptitude might be innate—based on genes—was a red line crossed: Summers had raised the spectre of “genetic determinism”. Innate sex differences in aptitude or preference, according to liberal logic, will inevitably produce bias, bigotry, and discrimination—in this case against women—finally yielding inequity: unequal representation of the sexes in valued jobs.

An academic firestorm ensued. As Steven Pinker wrote:

Nancy Hopkins, the eminent MIT biologist and advocate for women in science, stormed out of the room to avoid, she said, passing out from shock. An engineering dean called [Summers’s] remarks “an intellectual tsunami,” and, with equal tastelessness, a Boston Globe columnist compared him to people who utter racial epithets or wear swastikas. Alumnae threatened to withhold donations, and the National Organization of Women called for his resignation. Summers was raked in a letter signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members and shamed into issuing serial apologies.

Summers resigned as President of Harvard the following year, a prominent casualty in the culture wars surrounding sex differences. And there was a lesson in this tale for all of us: if you embrace a women-are-different-from-men perspective, be careful—maybe to the point of silence—about what you say. Liberal convention is sacrosanct.

But the questions he raised remain, and there are several. First, are there real differences in behaviour and aptitude between the sexes? Although the sexes have obvious physical differences, many “blank-slaters” think that things are roughly equal from the neck up, with no average sex differences in thoughts, preferences, or behaviours. Second, if there are such differences, where did they come from? Are they due to sociocultural influences, like patriarchy and socialisation, or are they largely innate—that is, based on genes? Finally, if some sex differences are inherited, did the genes involved arise by natural selection in our ancestors, with the differences enhancing reproduction? Answering “no” to all of these questions makes you a full-blown blank-slater, while answering “yes” makes you a genetic determinist—perhaps the most damaging label that can be stuck on a liberal thinker.

In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, Steve Stewart-Williams argues that it’s time to engage these questions with data. Summarising existing research, he comes down closer to genetic determinism than to blank-slatism. That is, he sees significant sex differences in thinking, behaviour, and preferences as having a substantial genetic basis, but he recognises too a role for sociocultural influences.

Stewart-Williams handles his hot potato gently. He is careful to admit when we lack good evidence for a purported sex difference; when we lack information about the genetic basis of a difference we can document; and when, as with homosexuality, we have that genetic information but remain ignorant about how the difference evolved. (Homosexuality is one such puzzle, since it has a partial genetic basis, but, under simple Darwinian logic, genes that reduce reproduction should be eliminated from populations.)

And he addresses at length—and counters—the view that inherited sex differences will lead to bigotry. Instead, he recommends that both sexes should have equal opportunities, with everyone free to choose their own path. In the end, it’s obvious that the more we understand the basis of sex differences, the better equipped we are to address them. This measured, timely, and informative book is essential reading at a time when many scholars not only insist that male–female differences are culturally generated but go further, denying that there are just two sexes.

The first notion Stewart-Williams dispels is the blank-slatist claim that there are no average differences between the sexes. In a useful appendix, he summarises research on the behaviours and personality traits that have shown large and repeated differences between males and females. Some of these are obvious but not often recognised as innate sex differences. One is the strong difference in sexual attraction: most—but not all—men seek women as sexual partners, and most women seek men.

Psychological research indicates that men and women also differ strongly in how they seek mates. On average, women prefer older partners with high status, while men are more drawn to youth and physical attractiveness. Men have a higher sex drive and are more willing to seek casual sex. And once in a relationship, men show far more sexual jealousy than women, being preoccupied with a partner’s sexual infidelity, while women’s jealousy is more emotional than sexual, focusing on a partner’s commitment to the relationship.

Another difference we know well: in every country surveyed, men commit vastly more crimes of violence than women, including roughly 90 percent of all homicides in America.

One of the largest and most repeatable differences between the sexes is the toy preferences of children. On average, young boys prefer male-typical toys like trucks, blocks, and toy soldiers, while young girls prefer dolls and kitchen equipment. This difference shows up very early in childhood and holds across societies worldwide.

The list goes on, but I’ll end by mentioning differences in preference that seem to translate into professional inequities. On average, women have more interest in people than things, which partly explains why occupations like computer science and engineering are dominated by men while the health and social sciences harbour far more women. Related to this are observations that men are better than women at “systematising”, defined as “understanding and reasoning about systems, including natural systems like atoms and galaxies, abstract systems like logic and maths, and human-made system like machines and computer programs”. Women, in contrast, are better at “empathising”: putting themselves in other people’s shoes and understanding their feelings and motivations.

You can see this last difference in a compilation of sex differences among young American doctors in different branches of medicine. Fields involving less contact with patients regularly show higher proportions of men: anaesthesiology (62 percent), radiology (71 percent), neurological surgery (73 percent), and orthopaedic surgery (76 percent). Fields demanding more contact with patients, and presumably requiring more empathy, show a preponderance of women: hospice and palliative care (63 percent), dermatology (66 percent), and paediatrics (75 percent). Yet across all fields of medicine, the proportion of women among young doctors is precisely 50 percent, suggesting little bias against women entering medicine.

Stewart-Williams notes that such differences could reflect sociocultural pressures like socialisation or bias rather than innate preferences, but we have some data against purely social explanations. Two big meta-analyses, for instance, show little evidence for the differential socialisation of boys and girls—and, anecdotally, we all know of despairing parents who tried to give their children gender-neutral upbringings, only to see them revert to behaviours characteristic of their sex.

In some areas there is also evidence against systemic bigotry. A recent study of sex bias in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—examined six metrics of professional success: grant funding, papers accepted, strength of letters of recommendation, hiring, teaching ratings, and salaries. The data showed parity between the sexes in the first three areas, a preference for hiring women, and an advantage for men in teaching ratings and salaries. (The men’s salary advantage, at about four percent, was smaller than I would have predicted.) It is this kind of information, rather than assertions about what’s “obvious”, that we need when dealing with inequities.

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Note: the following review contains plot spoilers.

In the opening lines of his poem Ithaka, Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933), the second-most famous Greek poet to make his theme the perilous homecoming of the Trojan War hero Odysseus, wrote

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.

(The translation is from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s 1975 compilation, C.P. Cavafy, Selected Poems.) Christopher Nolan’s newly released blockbuster The Odyssey duly cinematises these comic-book fixtures of “adventure” in Homer’s epic: the cannibalistic giants called the Laestrygonians (the Latinate spelling of the word); the even more gigantic and cannibalistic Cyclops, Polyphemus; and the duly angry (if never seen) ocean-god Poseidon, who happens to be Polyphemus’s father and is not pleased when Odysseus drives a blinding stake through his son’s single eye.

What is missing from Nolan’s film is the “rare excitement” that “stirs your spirit and your body.” The Odyssey is, to put it bluntly, a three-hour downer. In Nolan’s screenplay, Odysseus (Matt Damon), is not “the man of many tropes”, as Homer described him (andra...polytropon)—the wily king of Ithaca who leads his men in and out of trouble as they sail around the Mediterranean for years after Troy’s fall. Rather, he is a man of only one trope: guilt.

Homer’s epic ends with Odysseus, back in Ithaca and disguised as a beggar, nearly single-handedly slaying—with some help from his son Telemachus and his faithful swineherd Eumaeus—every last one of the 108 freeloading suitors who’d been plotting to kill his son while eating his long-suffering wife, Penelope, out of palace and home (while also pestering her to marry one of them). He then falls into bed with the thrilled Penelope. Some of you may recoil at the sheer bloodiness of the mass slaughter (the victims of which included a gaggle of maidservants who’d been sleeping with the suitors when they should have been loyally serving Penelope). But others will think they all deserved it.

Nolan’s film, by contrast, ends with Odysseus, also in beggar’s rags, pouring out a monologue of self-loathing to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who has summoned him to her chambers. In this scene, the two are separated by a grille-like wooden screen, which will remind Catholic viewers of going to confession. This device is necessitated by the fact that Odysseus is still supposed to be incognito at this point. In Homer’s original, Odysseus had received miraculous help from the goddess Athena in perfecting his disguise. But as detailed at greater length below, Nolan pretty much eliminated the gods from his narrative (except as background props) in order to make the narrative more “accessible.”

Odysseus’s sin, we learn from his agonised peroration, was designing the Trojan Horse, the hollow sculpture stuffed with Greek warriors (including Odysseus himself) that the Trojans unwittingly dragged into their city, having been told it was a gift from the retreating Greeks, who were supposedly going home following a decade-long siege. Once inside the hitherto impregnable walls of Troy, the warriors open the gates to let in the rest of the Greek army—and they all burn Troy to the ground, plunder its treasures, rape, murder, and enslave its inhabitants, and desecrate its temples.

“What if the Odysseus we knew lost his way? What if, when he opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?” the beggar-in-disguise tells Penelope in a voice breaking with anguish. “We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their homes. We violated all that was sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt…What if Odysseus knew, as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebration that followed, what if he knew exactly what he had done?”

All this is spoken to the accompaniment of a horrifying flashback that is the visual and emotional centrepiece of Nolan’s film. The flames leap past Troy’s battlements into the night sky, with the pillaging soldiers in their plumed helmets back-lit like the silhouettes on Greek black-figure pottery, and the crimes filling up a smoking middle distance. Bronze gongs clang, and the aulos, a double flute dating to at least the sixth century B.C., wails hauntingly. For this, thank Ludwig Göransson, who also composed the score for Nolan’s Tenet (2020) and Oppenheimer (2023). It was the one tableau in the entire three hours of this movie that genuinely moved me.

After that confession, Odysseus’ rout of the suitors, drawn out and overproduced, feels like an anticlimax. We next see him abdicating his throne as a self-imposed punishment, leaving son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to rule over Ithaca while he sails off into mysterious exile with a veiled Penelope at his side. I had to ask: “What did she do to deserve this fate?”

In Homer’s epic, by contrast, the ever-helpful Athena, goddess of wisdom, prolongs the night and signals rosy-fingered Dawn to take her time arriving so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy hours of love-making and he can regale her with the tales of his adventures. Watching the couple’s decidedly un-erotic exit in Nolan’s movie, I wondered if Odysseus would ever forgive himself long enough to realise that Penelope might be in the same room (or boat).

This is not to say that The Odyssey doesn’t have admirable aspects, mostly in regard to its special effects. It is often visually beautiful. Shot entirely in 70-millimetre IMAX (a first for a feature-length film) on a US$250 million budget, it should be. (I was lucky to view the movie on a large IMAX screen at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) The burning-of-Troy episode is magnificent—as are the travails of Odysseus’ fleet amid storms, the whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis, and ultimately shipwreck and devastation as Odysseus loses his entire crew.

Nolan used next to no CGI. Polyphemus is an ingeniously constructed 59-foot puppet, Troy is a hilltop set containing about 60 structures, Odysseus’ ship is a real-life replica of a Viking longboat (ancient and early-medieval shipbuilding and techniques were surprisingly similar), and the famous transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs by the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton) is a camera-angle illusion. The effect is of a satisfyingly tangible reality that computer generation simply cannot produce.

Still, the sets are mostly dreary. The fall of Troy, if it occurred historically, took place around 1190 B.C., at the height of Greece’s Late Bronze Age civilisation. But the structures in Nolan’s movie, modelled after the Palace of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus and similar ruins, look already faded and decrepit. Nolan is notorious for his greyed-out cinematic palettes, and here the brilliantly sunny Mediterranean beach-scapes that enthral visitors to modern Greece and its islands look more like the fog-beset English Channel in his Dunkirk (2017). Odysseus and his men dress almost entirely in Batman black in this film, with dingy leather armour that has been criticised for bearing little resemblance to the colourful and brightly polished battle-wear of archaic Greeks. It’s supposed to be the Bronze Age, we’re told again and again, but where’s the bronze?

This brings us to the casting. Not the “DEI” controversy that has roiled conservative media and glazed over the eyeballs of everyone else—although the Greeks have a point in complaining that not a single Greek actor (nor, indeed, any actor of Mediterranean descent) was cast in a visible role in this dramatisation of an ur-Greek literary treasure. Still, there is something silly in kvetching about a black Helen of Troy in a film whose lead star looks about as authentically Greek as Johnny Appleseed.

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There is plenty to criticise about the pro-Palestine movement: its ahistorical myths, its abuse of definitions, its clownish purity tests, and its myopic Western lens on a layered and difficult Middle Eastern conflict.

But its most glaring flaw is a lack of strategic self-awareness so complete that it is no longer clear whom the movement’s rhetoric helps and whom it harms.

One of the great ironies of the period since 7 October is that the loudest voices claiming to advocate for Palestinian liberation have embraced arguments and tactics that make that liberation harder—perhaps impossible—to achieve.

After 1948, it was the Arab states that played on Palestinian grievance to cajole the Palestinians into violent resistance against the Zionist project. As those states have come around, in treaties and accords, to a Jewish state in their midst, the baton of Palestinian-goading has passed to the Western Left and to an international community that never tires of assembling justifications, an ever-illuminated green light, for the Palestinians to keep fighting.

If the nakba was the initiating catastrophe that wrested a state from the Palestinians, the idea laundered by the Left—that statehood is just around the corner so long as the Palestinians commit to more terrorism—is the perennial catastrophe that will ensure they never get one.

Israeli hasbara has long been lacklustre. But Israel’s failure to explain itself may ultimately matter far less than what a deeply unserious pro-Palestine movement has done for the argument made by Israel’s hardest-line voices: that there is no reliable partner for peace, and that territorial concessions would only invite further violence.

History repeatedly shows that successful political movements are not those that beat the public over the head with the righteousness of their cause. Nor are they those that treat terrorism as a legitimate means to an end. They are those that understand the fears of the people they need to persuade. So why does the pro-Palestine movement not understand this? Why does it so rarely promote strategies that produce the political outcomes it claims to want?

The American civil rights movement succeeded not only because it exposed injustice but because it built a coalition capable of altering the status quo. In South Africa, the ANC’s armed wing directed itself principally at government installations and infrastructure rather than at mass-casualty attacks on civilians—and where it strayed from that doctrine, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found the ANC responsible for gross violations of human rights. In the arena of civil rights, there are clear reasons why non-violence succeeded and violence generally failed.

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What follows is the thirtieth instalment of The Nations of Canada, a serialised Quillette project adapted from Greg Koabel’s ongoing podcast of the same name.

As we’ve seen, the 1630s were an eventful decade in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes region. To recap this period: Quebec was briefly occupied by the English, who took over management of the interior fur trade from the French (as detailed in our 24^th instalment); while, to the south, the Iroquois and other members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy turned away from the St. Lawrence and focused their attention on the Hudson River to the east, in what is now upstate New York.

In last month’s instalment, we examined the wrenching transformations in Indigenous life that took place along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, as communities reeled from the population loss caused by European-borne diseases and northbound Haudenosaunee raids. In particular, we looked at how some disrupted Indigenous communities began adapting Christianity to their own social and spiritual needs.

This was a story that played out in and around Quebec (modern Quebec City), Trois-Rivières, the newly created settlement on the island now known as Montreal, and the Indigenous communities upstream from Montreal along the Ottawa River. In this instalment, we will cover roughly the same period, but with a focus on the Wendat homeland of Wendake (which had served as France’s diplomatic lynchpin in the region), in an area of modern Ontario that lies between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay (the northeastern arm of Lake Huron).

Today, this region is known as cottage country to the wealthy inhabitants of Toronto. But when the French arrived in the seventeenth century, the Wendat were the economically dominant partner in a far-flung Indigenous alliance that included the Innu and the Algonquin communities that extended along the Ottawa River—an alliance that, once France joined, became known to historians as the Laurentian Coalition.

In part because of the elevated importance the Wendat enjoyed among their Indigenous allies, and their more geographically rooted village-based farming economy, Wendake became the early focus of French Christian missionaries. Here, much more so than in the new communities taking shape to the south, the priests still applied the same rigid top-down style of Catholic religious instruction they’d learned back at the Jesuit College of La Flèche.

Before diving into the (increasingly turbulent) religious and political dynamics of Wendake, however, let’s take stock of how the shifting geopolitics of the region had affected the Wendat—as it is impossible to understand the Wendat outlook without understanding the growing external threats they were now facing.

During the late 1630s, the primary goal of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was to consolidate their hold over the territory surrounding the Dutch trading post at Fort Orange (modern-day Albany, NY). Securing access to European goods, they (correctly) believed, would be necessary to keep pace with France’s Wendat and Algonquin allies to the north.

As the decade progressed, the Laurentian Coalition and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy gradually returned to active warfare on the St. Lawrence. Meanwhile, as described in our 25^th instalment, the protracted peace negotiations that followed the Anglo-French War of 1627-29 would result in Quebec and Acadia (in the area now known as Canada’s Maritimes) being returned to French control. The French immediately went back to work to rebuild their old networks.

The Algonquin coalition members who lived along the Ottawa River used this opportunity to re-negotiate their position as middlemen between the French hub at Quebec and the Wendat. In this regard, part of the Algonquin diplomatic strategy was a threatened alliance with the Haudenosaunee. But, as we’ve seen, that gambit back-fired when a group of Algonquins tried to make good on the threat and trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange—an adventure that ended with them being killed by Mohawk warriors.

Another obstacle to the re-affirmation of the Laurentian Coalition came in the form of the aforementioned epidemics that swept through the region. This was the result of European pathogens, to which North America’s Indigenous population had no developed immunity. As described in our 26^th instalment, the Jesuit mission in Wendake had barely set down roots among the priests’ Wendat hosts when accusations of deadly witchcraft began swirling. How else to explain the sudden wave of disease?

In 1637, general warfare spread across the region. As described in our 28^th instalment, the violence was fuelled by the complex feedback loop between grief and violence that existed in the affected Indigenous societies. The one strategic silver lining for the French was that Haudenosaunee raids pushed members of the Laurentian Coalition closer together in a spirit of common self-defence.

When the spread of disease abated in the late 1630s, the Jesuits’ reputation among the Wendat rebounded somewhat. By now, the French had managed to learn to communicate with the Wendat in their own language, thanks in large part to a brilliant linguist named Jean de Brébeuf, who was now leading the Jesuit delegation (and who will continue to be a major protagonist in our story).

As France’s officially designated representatives within the Wendat world, the Jesuits were seen by Indigenous allies as assurance that France’s military and economic support for the alliance would continue. This alliance was a two-way street, however—just as it always had been. Yes, France’s Indigenous allies coveted European trade goods (metal objects, in particular, such as axes and knives). But the French demographic footprint in Quebec was still tiny. And it depended entirely on Indigenous allies to procure the fur that was the economic raison-d’être of the entire project. The viability of that project now rested precariously on the goodwill extended to a small group of Jesuits living as guests almost 1,000 km upriver from Quebec.

Among the French themselves, there were divided loyalties at play to some extent: For their part, the Jesuits’ main goal wasn’t to advance French diplomatic interests, but rather to convert their Indigenous hosts to Christianity. And at times, their religious mandate could interfere with the commercial and imperial projects being advanced by other Frenchmen.

The Wendat had received the Jesuit religious lessons politely, but initially saw these visitors more as diplomatic representatives than holy men. It was only after Brébeuf and his fellow missionaries became established figures within Wendat society that the initial barriers of language and culture fell away.

The Jesuits were frustrated to find that they had little control over their Christian message once it entered Indigenous communities. The Wendat had their own pre-existing spiritual beliefs, which affected how they understood Christianity. And the Jesuits generally weren’t interested in creating some new syncretic type of Indigenous Christianity.

Back in Europe, the Thirty Years’ War had been raging for two decades by this point. As in the French Wars of Religion that preceded it (a subject we examined much earlier in this series), millions of Europeans had died (in part) for the proposition that there was only one proper way to worship the Christian God. This was the mindset the Jesuits had brought with them as they’d sailed west across the Atlantic. Indeed, one of the main arguments their backers had used to attract funding and political support among the Dévots of Paris was that any French delay would given an opening for the British and Dutch to spread Protestant heresies to the Indigenous population.

That said, the Jesuits were willing to tolerate some degree of inter-cultural adaptation as a temporary means to get their message across. Unlike earlier missionary groups such as the Récollets (whom we encountered in our twentieth instalment), the Jesuits believed that a kernel of true religious truth (which, to them, naturally meant Christianity) existed within Indigenous spiritual life. They weren’t so much imparting new knowledge, they believed, so much as they were unlocking a pre-existing faith that had been obscured by generations of (as the Jesuits saw it) ignorance in this North American backwater.

Complicating matters logistically for the French was that communications in this region could be slow, even by the standards of the seventeenth century—especially during the winters, when there weren’t trading convoys bringing news up and down the major rivers.

In Spring 1638—which is where we now pick up the narrative afresh—the French hadn’t heard from the Jesuits for months. And the last they’d learned was that Brébeuf and his fellow Jesuits were under suspicion of witchcraft in the aftermath of the latest epidemic, and so might well be murdered. It was possible that the Jesuit mission needed a new leader, not because Brébeuf wasn’t up to the task, but because he was dead.

As it happened, Brébeuf was still very much alive. But the prospect of his death seems to have motivated the French to think about who might be fit to replace him. By this time, it was clear that what was needed in this evolving role wasn’t a linguist, but an able administrator.

The man chosen to take over from Brébeuf (or perhaps rebuild the mission atop Brébeuf’s martyred remains—no one in Paris knew at the time) was his fellow Jesuit, Jérôme Lalement, a 45-year-old newcomer to Quebec who’d spent the previous twenty years holding teaching and administrative posts at Jesuit colleges back in France. By reputation (both among historians and his contemporaries), Lalement was a by-the-book disciplinarian. His mandate in Canada was to turn the Jesuit mission into a structured and professionally run institution.

Brébeuf (if he was still alive) was not to be recalled. Rather, he was to continue spreading the gospel among the Wendat and focusing on his strengths—immersing himself in Wendat culture, mastering the language, and furthering the Christian cause on a day-to-day basis through positive social and spiritual interactions.

Upon his arrival in Summer 1638, Lalement got straight to work, organising a thorough survey of the Wendat Confederacy. He sent his fellow missionaries to every corner of Huronia (as the French called Wendake) and recorded their findings. By Jesuit accounting, the Confederacy had a population of about 12,000, spread out over 32 villages.

This represented a dramatic decrease in numbers. A mere five years earlier, before the ravages of disease arrived, there were probably more than twice as many people living in the same area. The crisis atmosphere of 1636 and 1637 had passed. But the demographic, economic, and psychological repercussions of the epidemics remained acute.

For Lalement, however, the survey wasn’t just about studying Wendat demographics. He wanted to map out the future of the Jesuit mission in a systematic way. This represented a contrast to the more personal style of the itinerant Brébeuf, who’d led the French operation from whatever village he happened to be preaching in at the time.

Lalement divided the Confederacy into four sub-divisions, each with its own centrally-located base in a Wendat village. Missionaries permanently anchored at these sites could then go on regular tours of the surrounding area, giving the Jesuits a national reach.

The centrepiece of Lalement’s system was the newly established settlement of Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons—anglicised as Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons—located on the Wye River, a few miles inland from the southern shore of Georgian Bay, near the modern Ontario town of Midland. (Sainte Marie is a French term referring, of course, to Mary, the mother of Jesus.)

This was to be the first of its kind in Wendake: a brand new settlement, operated by the Jesuits, and totally separate from any existing Wendat village.

Lalement’s chosen site featured well-drained arable land on either side of the river, which would eventually allow the Jesuits to support themselves with corn cultivation. The goal was to create a self-sufficient community whose inhabitants would no longer be dependent for life and limb on the mercy of Wendat neighbours.

Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons was also well-positioned strategically. Inland waterways provided easy access to the rest of the Wendat Confederacy. And the Wye River emptied into Georgian Bay, which in turn allowed access to the Ottawa River route that linked Huronia to the St. Lawrence and Quebec (albeit with portages). The village was ideally placed to both protect the Jesuits’ link to the east, and help rally the Wendat Confederacy should it be threatened by Haudenosaunee invasion.

Aiding the Jesuits in the construction of Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons was a new category of colonial subject—the donné, a kind of lay Jesuit assistant. It was intended that these recruits would replace the contract workmen whom Brébeuf and other missionaries had hired to build structures and perform other specialised trades.

For the Jesuits, this was an important step, as they sought, whenever possible, to isolate their Indigenous converts from the secular French world—which they saw as populated by imperfect examples of proper Christian behaviour, especially when it came to exploiting the comparatively liberal sexual attitudes in Indigenous societies.

Though they weren’t formally ordained Jesuits or even clergy, donnés were seen as reliable and controllable adjuncts. They took a vow of celibacy for the duration of their service to the Jesuits, and were barred from enriching themselves in the fur trade.

(This doesn’t men that men volunteered to be donnés purely out of devotion to the Jesuit mission, it should be said. In a colonial world where the Jesuits wielded tremendous influence, forging a relationship with the Order could eventually set you on the fast track to social advancement.)

The first prominent donné, Robert Le Coq, had originally accompanied Brébeuf to Huronia as a contract worker back in 1634. Since then, however, he’d become a trusted quartermaster for the Jesuit mission, and gone on regular supply runs from Huronia back to the St. Lawrence. By the time Lalement arrived, Le Coq was firmly established as an informal member of the mission.

Lalement repaid Le Coq’s loyalty by putting him in charge of the construction of Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons. Over the summers of 1638 and 1639, he and other newly recruited donnés worked quickly to make the new site liveable. (Importantly for Lalement, they used European rather than Indigenous construction techniques.) By the end of 1639, enough work had been done for the Jesuits to make it their main base of operations, which they relocated from the Wendat village of Ossossone.

While the construction project was a success, a group of Lalement’s subordinates raised concerns about the removal from Indigenous society that life in Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons would entail. Prominent among these, not surprisingly, was Brébeuf himself.

Brébeuf worried that the missionaries sent to tour Wendat villages would be spread too thin. In his experience, progress could be achieved only by building personal relationships within a community over an extended period of time. If missionaries were forced to become itinerant, popping into a village once every few weeks or months and then leaving shortly thereafter, they would never be able to build trust or social capital. More importantly, they would never be able to understand the communities they worked in.

And this wasn’t the only complaint directed at Lalement. As his critics saw things, the newly arrived boss simply didn’t respect the methods that Brébeuf and his colleagues had developed through trial and error. The new boss had built his career back in France, and this was the first time he’d crossed the Atlantic. Much like a modern MBA-trained consultant who arrives at a client’s business and immediately starts ordering veteran workers to change the way they do their jobs, Lalement traced his knowledge about missionary work to theory, not practice.

Lalement was offering no apologies, however. In his view, he was bringing much needed coherence and discipline to what had been (to this point) a haphazard operation on the edge of the civilised world. Brébeuf had made significant progress, of course—he acknowledged that. But to become truly successful, what the Wendat mission needed now was some patented top-down Jesuit organisational development.

One of the starkest contrasts between Lalement’s academic world back in Paris and the rustic Wendat Confederacy involved the concept of time management. Since he’d been a teenager, Lalement had inhabited the strictly regimented milieu of Jesuit Colleges—as a student, teacher, and then administrator. It was taken for granted that success (both for individuals and society as a whole) required that one submit to a rigorous schedule of work and contemplation. In keeping with this view, Lalement laid out strict guidelines for missionaries that determined when they would teach and minister to the Wendat, and when they would retire to their private chambers for spiritual contemplation.

Lalement rarely entered Wendat longhouses, and refused to attend important Indigenous community events. This was especially damaging when it came to the periodic hospitality feasts that were intended to create bonds between the Jesuits and their hosts.

This approach made sense in France, but was completely unsuitable for life in Huronia. Brébeuf and the other veteran missionaries had learned through experience that the idea of privacy was problematic in the Indigenous world. The longhouses in which Iroquoian peoples lived weren’t just living quarters: they were communal spaces where the day-to-day civic life of the community played out. When the earliest arriving Jesuits in Huronia had constructed small purpose-built structures for private prayer, the local Indigenous population regarded them with suspicion.

There was no precedent for this sort of architecture in their villages. When Jesuits disappeared into these buildings, some assumed that they were engaged in sinister practices such as witchcraft. At best, the practice signalled eccentric or anti-social tendencies.

Lalement himself rarely entered Wendat longhouses, and refused to attend community events that Brébeuf and the others knew to be important. This was especially damaging when it came to the periodic hospitality feasts that were intended to create bonds between the Jesuits and their hosts.

Technically, Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons was open to Indigenous visitors: Curious Wendat neighbours could travel there to learn about Christianity if they wished. But while the chapel was accessible to all, the settlement also contained an inner sanctum, restricted to Christians. Barriers would now be separating believers from non-believers—something Lalement saw as a plus.

Brébeuf, on the other hand, had learned that the Jesuits were unlikely to make headway if they didn’t engage in proactive outreach within Indigenous communities themselves. He’d come to realise that these Indigenous peoples already had their own complex, fully realised spiritual lives (a fact that most European observers missed due to the absence of any kind of organised religious hierarchy)—and so it was unrealistic to expect that they would be drawn to Jesuit sermons out of some unrealised hunger to nourish their souls.

The Jesuits of the Wendat mission had learned other lessons, too—including the confounding (to Europeans) nature of Indigenous politics.

In Europe, power was understood hierarchically: Both the Catholic Church and the French nobility were structured around rigid and (typically) unquestioned lines of authority. The Wendat, by contrast, relied on moral suasion and consensus. As one of Brébeuf’s colleagues noted, “the chiefs have no authority; if they should use threats, far from making themselves feared, they would find themselves abandoned by the very men who chose them for chiefs.”

This had been a valuable lesson for the missionaries. Following the European adage of cuius regio, eius religio, some had focused their efforts on converting chiefs, in the hopes that they would then bring their entire communities with them. In practice, this was a counter-productive strategy. The political and spiritual functions of chiefs were intertwined. And so the moment the Jesuits convinced a chief to turn his back on traditional beliefs and ceremonies, he stopped being useful as an influential voice within his community.

Being a linguist, Brébeuf also had learned that much gets lost in translation, and so just directly translating the Word of God from French into Iroquoian tongues wasn’t enough—no matter how fluent the priests had become. Brébeuf understood that words do not exist in a vacuum, but are shaped by the associated culture.

For instance, referring to God as “the Lord” was straightforward enough in French (Notre Seigneur Dieu)—a language whose speakers understood the political authority of earthly lords as an accessible metaphor for divine power. (Indeed, since the time of Theodosius I, European rulers and Church officials had worked hard to link God and King in the minds of their subjects.) And so many missionaries assumed they could adopt a similar approach in Canada. Borrowing from local political structures, “chief” was often substituted for “Lord.” But as noted above, Indigenous chiefs aren’t European princes. And so, unbeknownst to many missionaries, they weren’t presenting God as an all-powerful being to whom mortals owed absolute submission, but rather a figure of limited authority, with whom people shared reciprocal obligations.

Brébeuf recognised that even the basic European concept of “belief” didn’t map directly onto the Wendat worldview. Back in France, what an individual believed was crucial to his or her identity (not to mention the fate of his or her soul). Yet Brébeuf discovered that his Wendat hosts almost never expressed things in terms of belief—which is to say, an inner sense of what was true. Wendat conversation was much more focused on outward action. What behaviour was appropriate? How should rituals be conducted? Most of all, they were interested in the relationships that bound an individual to the society around him.

This language barrier presented a problem when it came to the key Christian rite of baptism. Missionaries were frustrated with potential converts who seemed to focus exclusively on the physical ritual. For the Jesuits, the key feature of the ceremony was that it signified the true belief of the baptised. In the Indigenous worldview, however, meaning was contained within the actions themselves—which could be combined with other (non-Christian) actions. And when converts continued to participate in traditional Wendat ceremonies after baptism, the Jesuits saw this as a sign of dishonesty.

In keeping with Lalement’s rigid style more generally, the Jesuits landed on a strict policy regarding baptisms. Those interested would have to undergo a long probationary period of at least a year, during which time their behaviour would be closely monitored. Candidates had to attend regular lessons, and demonstrate a willingness to turn their backs on certain aspects of the Wendat lifestyle that the Jesuits deemed incompatible with Christianity. Once the missionaries were convinced a candidate’s devotion was genuine, he or she would appear at Sainte-Marie to undergo a rigorous examination. Only following the successful completion of this regimen would a baptism be performed, and the candidate would be accepted as a full member of the Christian Church.

That said, the Jesuits were not above holding out earthly inducements for conversion. Baptised Wendat traders were given better prices for their furs. They were also given places of honour at the hospitality feasts that were part of the trade cycle—even if, by Indigenous custom, these were not particularly high-status men. Most importantly, converts were looked to as leaders in councils held with the French.

Indigenous allies had always seen baptism as a kind of social ritual, strengthening their personal connection to the French. Official French policy seemed to be confirming that understanding. And rumours circulated to the effect that, in time, baptism would become a requirement for anyone looking to trade in the region.

Eventually, the French would take things one step further, by allowing Christian traders to buy guns—the one European item they’d always refused to offer, despite persistent requests.

All this raises an important question: Just how successful were these Jesuits in securing conversions?

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A curious paradox sits at the heart of many advanced economies. Employers complain constantly about labour shortages. Governments respond by importing record numbers of migrants to fill vacancies. Yet at the same time, a growing number of men have quietly withdrawn from work altogether.

These men are not showing up in unemployment queues or appearing in dramatic economic statistics. In many cases, they are not even looking for jobs. Instead, they exist in a liminal space between participation and withdrawal, cycling through gig work, periods of welfare dependence, disability payments, online entertainment and increasingly isolated lives.

The phenomenon is most pronounced in the United States, where male labour-force participation has been declining for decades, particularly among men without university degrees.

Recent US Labor Department figures show that 69.5 per cent of men aged 20 and over were participating in the workforce in May, down from 76 per cent two decades earlier. In other words, a growing share of men are neither employed nor actively seeking work.

This forms part of a much longer trend. Male workforce participation reached a high of 86.4 per cent in 1950 before falling to 79.7 per cent by 1970 and 76.4 per cent by 1990. Women’s participation followed a very different trajectory, rising steadily throughout the second half of the twentieth century, peaking around 2000 and remaining relatively stable since.

Australia has so far avoided the worst of these trends thanks to a resilient labour market, strong demand for trades and immigration-fuelled growth. Yet those working in lower-income communities, mental health services and regional Australia will recognise many of the same warning signs.

A growing number of men no longer see work as a pathway towards respect, social standing, adulthood or purpose.

Young men are falling behind educationally. Increasing numbers remain in the family home well into adulthood. Rates of disability support payments continue to rise. Mental health diagnoses have proliferated. The traditional milestones that once marked the transition into adult life—steady employment, home ownership, marriage and family formation—have become more elusive for large sections of the population.

The conventional explanations are familiar enough.

Globalisation hollowed out manufacturing. Automation displaced routine labour. Universities increasingly favour women. The modern economy generates more opportunities in healthcare, education and professional services than in the industries that once absorbed large numbers of men. All of these explanations contain important truths. Yet they do not quite capture the emotional texture of what is occurring.

The deeper story concerns not simply economics but meaning—and, ultimately, dignity.

A growing number of men no longer see work as a pathway towards respect, social standing, adulthood or purpose. What appears at first glance to be a labour-market problem increasingly resembles a cultural and psychological one. The men withdrawing from work are often not simply unemployed; they are demoralised.

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This week marks a special occasion for me because my guest is the person who helped me start my career in podcasting almost a decade ago.

I’m guessing a lot of you don’t know this, but before I came to Quillette, I spent a few years co-hosting a Canadian show called WrongSpeak, which turned out to be a sort of early training ground for the kind of classically liberal and science-based material I ended up covering here at Quillette.

That podcast was put together by a Montreal-based producer named Dan Delmar, who paired me up with a then up-and-coming Toronto-based PhD neuroscientist and sex researcher named Debra Soh.

Following those early podcast adventures, I went on to join Quillette, and Debra went on to journalistic fame as a columnist and author.

Just a few months ago, Simon & Schuster published her second book, titled, Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, which is the subject of today’s episode.

As you’ll hear, Debra isn’t arguing that our society has become too sex-negative. Just the opposite: We are now bombarded with sexualised messages and services on the internet, and propagandised with so called “sex-positive” messaging from kink-obsessed academics and activists.

But in the process, the very idea of sex has become commoditised and stripped of its connection to real human intimacy. Which is what most people really want—even if they don’t think that’s what they want when they’re swiping mindlessly through dating profiles on hook-up apps.

In many ways, in fact, Sextinction isn’t really a book about sex. It’s a book about the sense of alienation caused by the mismatch between our brain’s sexual wiring and the nature of modern society. The fact that many people aren’t having sex—or at least, aren’t having emotionally satisfying sex lives—can be seen as a symptom of that larger issue.

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For instance, it’s great that women are now earning more money and dominating university campuses. But as a result of their skyrocketing fortunes, many women have fewer opportunities to date men who match them in earning power.

This is a tendency that grates against the natural female preference for what’s known as “hypergamy”—i.e. the evolutionarily learned female preference for mates who have superior earning power, which in turn, can be invested in resources for any potential offspring.

So when Debra looks around downtown Toronto, she sees lots of women with great jobs and nice apartments, but very limited dating prospects.

Meanwhile, the few men who do have the steady job and sex appeal that women tend to be looking for are enjoying what’s essentially a seller’s market, playing the field in a world of perpetual adolescence. There’s no “sextinction” for that small group of people, but they’re in the minority.

Along the way, we’ll also talk about the perils of BDSM, sex dolls, politicised quote-unquote “sex-positive” research, something called “phubbing,” and polyamory.

And on that latter score, I’ve got to apologise for an error I made in the interview you’re about to hear.

At one point, about halfway in, you’re going to hear me talk about quote-unquote “longhorning,” which I describe as the practice whereby a woman in a polyamorous relationship uses clever tactics to push out all the other women hooking up with her man—so that she ends up in what is essentially a monogamous relationship with her formerly polygamous mate.

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In other words, it means getting rid of the competition.

Which is a real thing in the polyam community, apparently—except it’s not called “longhorning.” I don’t know where my brain got that term, but apparently, I made it up.

The real term in polyam culture for this kind of practice is “cowgirling”—the metaphor being that the successful woman is a kind of rodeo star who uses a lasso to incapacitate all her rivals, and get the guy all to herself.

Again, it’s called cowgirling, not longhorning.

In fairness to me, I guess both words have a kind of rodeo-cowboy-culture connotation, so maybe my confusion has some reasonable basis. But still, I hate getting things wrong in these interviews.

And so on behalf of Quillette, let me say that I deeply regret the error. And I would like to extend my sincere apologies to both cowgirls and to their haplessly dumped victims.

With that out of the way, please enjoy my interview with my former WrongSpeak co-host Debra Soh, author of the 2026 Simon & Schuster book, Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy.

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A review of Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America by Noah Rothman; 368 pages; Center Street (May 2026)

The assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and insurance executive Brian Thompson, the murder of a Jewish couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the latest (as of this writing) attempt on the life of Donald Trump—these are some recent examples of serious violence in the name of left-wing causes. Others include the spate of bombing and shooting attacks against ICE facilities, and, going further back, the deadly and destructive riots of 2020.

Noah Rothman’s Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America aims to “confront its readers” with “the quickening tempo of left-led attacks and their political motives,” as well as with the ways in which such violence is often forgotten or justified.

Rothman opens the book with recent examples like the Kirk assassination, then goes back in time to consider waves of leftist violence since the early 20^th century. It thus proceeds from the anarchists of the 1910s to the Marxian terrorists of the 1970s, on up through violent offshoots of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and pro-Palestinian movements. Highlights include:

• At the turn of the 20th century, anarchists declared war on capitalism and government, believing themselves just a few killings away from Utopia. The result was a wave of arson and bombing, including a blast on Wall Street that killed 38 and wounded hundreds more. There was also the mass poisoning of hundreds of people at the Chicago University Club—an attack that very nearly wiped out most of America’s industrial leadership at a time when the country was just becoming an industrial power.

• The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a proliferation of Marxist terrorism. Radical groups included the Black Liberation Army, which funded its ambush killing of police officers with bank robberies. Weatherman also aimed to kill police with its bombing attacks, though after several failures it settled on blowing up empty rooms. FALN, a group of Marxist Puerto Rican separatists, were prolific bombers whose most deadly attack killed four and maimed many more.

• If Occupy Wall Street goes down in history as a mostly peaceful movement—aside from the looting and vandalism—it is because the authorities managed to stop attempts to burn down a port in Oakland and blow up a bridge in Ohio.

• Four years before BLM and Trump, we see the emergence of antiracism as a Schelling point for violent radicals in a bizarre 2012 incident where eighteen masked assailants assaulted diners and patrons at an Illinois restaurant because they thought that a group with white supremacist ties planned to meet there.

• But BLM and opposition to Trump were accelerants: Hence the assassination of five Dallas police officers at a BLM event in 2016 and the shooting of Republican congressman Steve Scalise and others at a congressional baseball practice in 2017. Then came 2020’s Summer of Love, which included the burning of businesses and police stations, and the strange spectacle of Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” in which protesters established a breakaway republic free of police violence, only for it to quickly descend into a chaos of beating, shooting, and attempted rule by a local strongman.

• The radical left’s dramatic swing towards anti-Zionism and antisemitism following the October 7 Massacre in Israel. Activists celebrated the mass killing of Israeli civilians and smashed the windows of Jewish-owned businesses. An assailant attempted to burn down the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor. The assassin who killed a Jewish couple in Washington, D.C., received legal charity from a group describing itself as the vanguard of the “Hamas Marxist Army.”

Along the way, Rothman detours for a chapter to discuss how the left constructs heroes and martyrs. Former terrorists like Bill Ayers become respectable professionals, and even convicted murderers like Assata Shakur are celebrated as good-hearted activists.

Also strewn throughout the book, most heavily in the opening chapter, is the observation that mainstream politicians, academics, and pundits downplay or even justify left-wing violence. “Even if you believe violence isn’t the answer, it is a solution,” wrote one academic in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, an event that in some quarters produced more strenuous condemnation of the victim than the killer. Similarly, Rothman quotes several politicians who seemed unable to condemn the Thompson assassination without adding a “but” that sympathised with the killer’s motives. And 2020’s BLM riots gave us open defences of burning and looting—the latter described by an author in an NPR interview as “a powerful tool to bring real, lasting change in society.”

Rothman’s final chapter turns to right-wing violence, from 1980s abortion clinic bombers to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6 riots at the Capitol. Liberals and leftists tell an incomplete story when they focus solely on violence from the right, but they’re certainly not making up the threat. The chapter’s title, “Contagion,” hints at Rothman’s view of extremism as a self-reinforcing phenomenon, with each side’s crazies inspiring one another.

So how are we to judge this book?

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