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

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

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

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

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

Note: Reminder that I’ll be live streaming on X tonight, and every Thursday from now on starting at 9PM ET. I’ll go over some news of the day and also answer your questions. Submit anything you would like to ask here. I’ve previously had Walt Bismarck on the podcast, which served as a kind of announcement of his return to (anonymous) public life. T…