Weekly Roundup
Jul 13 - 19, 2026
LEADING ARTICLE
FY25 Enrollment Data from NIH-Supported Clinical Research Now Available
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Excerpt: “As part of NIH’s continued efforts to increase the transparency of the NIH research portfolio, data on the sex, race, ethnicity, and age of participants in fiscal year (FY) 2025 NIH-supported clinical research are now available…Women continue to be strongly represented in NIH-supported clinical research. In FY25, 57.8% of participants were female, 35.3% were male, and 7.0% were unknown or not reported…”
(My brief comment on this press release is available on X here.)
WEEKLY VOICE
THE NUZZO LETTER IN THE NEWS
George Floyd in medical journals: Analysis documents rise of ‘woke terminology’ in research
The College Fix
Australia Witnesses Impressive Gender Equality Advances for Men
Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA)
The Women’s Health Narrative Meets the Data
Men Are Good
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Sex/Gender
Is it inevitable that men die younger than women? Looking at evidence and policy solutions
American Institute for Boys and Men
$20 Billion: Latest Scare-Tactic of the Women’s Health Lobby
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE)
A growing share of U.S. husbands and wives are roughly the same age
Pew Research Center
A life dedicated to understanding sex differences in cognition: Interview with Prof David Geary
Centre for Male Psychology
New numbers reveal the child sex-change mania is worse than we knew
New York Post
Biological Sex Is Binary and Rooted in Anisogamy
Ecology Letters
Abstract: The definition of biological sex has become a renewed focus of societal debate, fuelled by the conflation of biological principles with discussions of human gender diversity. Here, we argue that conceptual clarity critically depends on separating these domains. Drawing on evolutionary theory and empirical evidence, we maintain that biological sex is best defined as a binary classification of male and female reproductive strategies rooted in anisogamy, characterised by the production of two discrete gamete types of different sizes. We stress that gamete size constitutes the ultimate criterion for biological sex and that this definition applies consistently across sexual systems, from separate-sexed species to hermaphrodites, irrespective of variation in karyotype, hormonal profile, somatic phenotype, or behaviour. Further, we emphasise that evolutionary insights offer a coherent explanation for recurring, though not universal, associations between biological sex and patterns of sex-specific selection, sexual dimorphism and parental care. We conclude that the definition of biological sex as a binary classification based on gamete size is a powerful scientific framework compatible with the diversity of sexual phenotypes found in anisogamous organisms and distinct from the concept of human gender.
Romantic Love and Sexual Frequency
Current Sexual Health Reports
Abstract: The purpose of this review is to summarize the evidence about the association between romantic love and sexual frequency. We outline what has historically been thought about romantic love and sexual frequency as well as the latest theoretical and empirical contributions to this area of research. There have been three published articles that consider sexual frequency in a sample of participants experiencing romantic love. All are drawn from the same international sample: the Romantic Love Survey 2022. A number of publicly available studies not yet published also exist using this sample. It appears that young adults in love report having sex 3.5 times per week on average, but there was substantial variation in sexual frequency in this sample. This is meaningfully higher than sexual frequency found in the married American population.
Health Sciences
Frontiers in Public Health
Abstract: The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends performing muscle-strengthening activities at moderate or greater intensity, involving all major muscle groups, and on at least 2 days per week. However, estimates suggest only about 10–30% of the general population meet the guideline on muscle-strengthening activities, limiting overall (aerobic and muscle-strengthening) physical activity guideline adherence. Lack of time is a commonly cited barrier to being physically active and to performing muscle-strengthening activities specifically. To address this barrier, this Perspective describes evidence-based strategies, including exercise snacks, minimal-dose approaches, and time-saving programming (e.g., using supersets), that improve the time-efficiency of resistance training and may improve adherence to guidelines on muscle-strengthening activities. Upon introducing these strategies and the corresponding evidence, we describe how they could be applied in practice in various exemplary real-world scenarios differing in both time and equipment availability.
Education
America’s medical schools tiptoe away from DEI — for now
New York Post
Bella D'Abrera - Mindless: How the Education System is Destroying Our Civilisation
Nat Con Australia
Episode description: My guest today is Dr Bella D’Abrera a well-known Australian academic who was for many years Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs. Amongst other things she is on the Advisory Committee for the Australian National Archives and a regular contributor to The Spectator Australia, the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian, and appears regularly on Sky News. Today we discuss: How she describes the ideology which is being taught to our children and whether it is correct to describe it as Marxist; How exactly did this ideology come to seize the commanding heights of our education system; How to push back against the argument that modern education is simply being kind and tolerant? What solutions are there for parents looking to protect their kids?
RUBBISH BIN
Stronger standards for university governance and tackling racism
Australia’s Minister for Education
(My brief comment on this press release is available on X here.)
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education
Abstract: Male supremacism and related fascist influences threaten women and nonbinary college students’ well-being and safety. We conducted semistructured interviews with 16 women and nonbinary college students ages 18–23 who acted as key informants on male supremacism within their college contexts. All participants attended different colleges, with four participants each from the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. More than 50% of participants held marginalized racial/ethnic identities, and more than 50% held marginalized sexual orientation identities. We used antifascist praxis and ecological systems theory to consider how students experienced male supremacist influences in college contexts and what aspects of their college contexts were relevant to preventing and responding to male supremacist threats. We identified three needs. College leaders need to (a) respond to male supremacist influences within men’s athletic teams, fraternities, student engagement in U.S. politics, and sexual violence prevention events or discussions; (b) resist how male supremacist influences may be perpetuated through regional contexts (e.g., the U.S. South) and institutional histories (e.g., religious or military origins) and find antioppressive commitments through which to oppose male supremacism; and (c) actively oppose male supremacist influences on campuses through supporting students who resist male supremacism and engaging communities in response to fascist threats. Based on these findings, we call for college leaders to identify male supremacist influences within specific aspects of their college contexts, reshape college cultural identities to resist male supremacism, and oppose male supremacist threats to women and nonbinary students.
(My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Far-right fossil fuel ignorance: the nostalgia of national-industrial modernity
Environmental Politics
Abstract: Far-right climate change obstruction has been widely noticed in the scholarly literature, and both material and ideational factors have been recognised as playing a part in climate policy backlash. By revisiting and adjusting Ulrich Beck’s description of first modernity, and theories of anti-reflexivity used in early work on climate change obstruction, I argue that far-right climate obstruction can be understood as an attempt to create widespread fossil fuel ignorance through a restorative nostalgic vision of a patriarchal, homogenous, and industrially successful national society. A society upheld by firm dualities and where unlimited industrial progress is taken for granted, but which demand ignorance of climate change and the global inequality and oppressional structures sustaining it. Hence, far-right refusal of reflexivity is not just pitted against environmentalism, but against feminist and antiracist movements as well.
Reviewing educational conceptualisations of transnational settler ignorance
Educational Review
Abstract: This paper investigates how majority societies’ common ignorance about Indigenous peoples and ongoing settler-colonial reality (“settler ignorance”) has been negotiated in the educational sciences literature. Understanding settler ignorance not as a simple “lack of knowledge” but a powerful issue undermining Indigenous rights and decolonial aspirations, this review sets out to gain new understanding of its dimensions in educational settings. The reviewed literature covers 51 peer-reviewed qualitative records from six settler-colonial contexts – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The emerging conceptualisations of the phenomenon of settler ignorance and ways of addressing it were explored through thematic synthesis. The findings suggest that settler ignorance has many faces: it is conceptualised as emotionally and ideologically contested knowledge-making, as wilful avoidance and resistance, and as a structural mechanism that transcends the question of individual cognition. Similarly, the proposed approaches to dismantling ignorance are diverse, emphasising the potential of educational content, building relationality, and critical reflection. Discussing the findings’ implications, the article suggests how harnessing both context-based and transnational understandings about settler ignorance and its many dimensions could benefit reconciliatory processes between settler and Indigenous populations and signpost one approach to decolonising education.
We have never not been fascist: Infrastructures of state violence as technofascist laboratories
Dialogues on Digital Society
Abstract: This commentary critiques narratives of Silicon Valley exceptionalism in current efforts to diagnose technofascism. The rapid global spread of fascism has not been initiated by the current American Right, nor does the technological character of this iteration of fascism present a rupture: fascist conditions have continuously existed for peoples colonized, enslaved, indentured, exterminated, or otherwise oppressed by Western imperialism since the beginning of modernity/colonialism. Likewise, surveillance and calculative technologies-from paper to digital-have always been central in inflicting violence on these peoples because they solve issues of scale in necropolitical population control: from biometrics to track fugitive slaves, over census technologies to control and eradicate colonized peoples, to surveillance infrastructures of apartheid, to now algorithmic war machines. Now more than ever, it is urgent that we recognize that the structural conditions of this iteration of fascism have been created by modernity/coloniality and racial capitalism, and that the potential of technofascism lies in the bureaucratic-legal and calculative nature of the modern state.
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That's a great image at the top! Says it all. Great stuff as usual Jim. thanks.
Thank you, James, great work as always.