Answering what is apparently the most important question of our times. — I sometimes tell people I transitioned so I could stop having an opinion on Taylor Swift. This might not be a joke. Tons of people like Taylor Swift, and it’s fine if you like Taylor Swift, and basically every female friend I have adores Taylor Swift and I welcome them…

It’s been a year since the famous hate forum went down, and the Internet is more hostile than ever to marginalized groups. — This Sunday, September 3rd, the Washington Post reminded the world that it had been exactly one year since KiwiFarms — the Internet’s most notorious hate forum, which keeps a kill count of transgender people it has taunted to suicide — was dropped by its server, Cloudflare. At the time, this…

The media panic around “male loneliness” is driven by cherry-picked statistics and sexism. Now, that’s sad. — My partner is my best friend. This is because I am terrible at making friends, and I admit it. I tend to have two intimacy settings — either “you are my best friend and I will literally love you for the rest of my life and then die for you”…

Society is needlessly polarized. One simple compromise could put us back on track. — I’ll begin this week’s column with a number: We have fourteen months and one week left until November 2024. We have four months and one week left until the year 2023 is over. …

Bigots are able to crack the big time because we trust an aw-shucks white guy no matter what he’s actually saying. — What is left to say about Richard Hanania? The short version is that Hanania, an “enlightened centrist” pundit, was recently exposed by Christopher Mathias of the Huffington Post as a former white supremacist who had been a guiding voice in the formation of the alt-right under the pseudonym Richard Hoste…

What “Barbie” and “Succession” teach us about the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and NO WAIT DON’T CLOSE TAB — Another day, another think piece about men in crisis. Men are doing worse in school! Men are doing worse at work! Men can’t stop playing video games! (This was cited as a serious explanation for men’s struggles in the last article I read on the subject.) …

All my years of research have led to one inescapable conclusion. — These are the long days at the end of summer. The world slows down. The mind wanders. One is free to ask the questions that really matter. …

It’s easy to love a martyr once she’s gone — but Sinead O’Connor was a real person, and we weren’t kind. — I grieved Sinead O’Connor’s death by telling somebody with more power than me to get fucked. It was probably deserved. This person had been awful to me during a period when people were inundating me with abuse based largely around my then-current diagnosis of bipolar disorder; a bunch of people…

Greta Gerwig’s film has received massive hype and massive backlash. Both are beside the point. — There is probably no movie on the planet that could live up to the hype we gave Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. I’ve been hearing about the movie ever since those fateful first shots of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in Day-Glo roller skates. In the past few months, thanks to a…