LEADING ARTICLE
Perceived Importance of College Hits New Low
Gallup
The percentage of Americans saying college is "very important" has fallen to 35%.
PODCASTS AND PRESENTATIONS
Heather MacDonald | Crime Stats Don’t Lie. Why Are We Ignoring Them? | Ep. 53
Episode description: Scott welcomes Heather Mac Donald, one of the country's most important voices who exposes the truth and the data behind it. Heather is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit. In it she explains what she calls the foolish pursuit of undermining meritocracy in favor of equal outcome. They discuss critical social issues including crime, media bias, and cultural shifts, including the feminization of American society and an anti-male narrative that MacDonald sees as harmful to families and societal success.
(*Nuzzo note: The discussion on the feminisation of society and anti-male bias starts at around 55:00 min).
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Sex/Gender
The psychological impact of false accusations, and how men cope
Centre for Male Psychology
US to UN Women: Stop Pushing Gender Ideology
Center for Family and Human Rights
Drivers of female power in bonobos
Communications Biology
Abstract: In mammals, female dominance over males is a rare phenomenon. However, recent findings indicate that even in species with sexual dimorphism biased towards males, females sometimes occupy high status. Here we test three main hypotheses explaining intersexual power relationships, namely the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing conflicts, the strength of mate competition, and female coalition formation. We test these for bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of our closest living relatives, where females have high status relative to males despite male-biased size dimorphism. We compiled demographic and behavioral data of 30 years and 6 wild living communities. Our results only support predictions of the female coalition hypothesis. We found that females target males in 85% of their coalitions and that females occupy higher ranks compared to males when they form more frequent coalitions. This result indicates that female coalition formation is a behavioral tool for females to gain power over males.
Education
Most US college students oppose letting controversial speakers on campus
The Guardian
Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
The Hill
Woke Witch Hunts Are Losing in Court
Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Three professors have won cases against the universities that wronged them.
Cornell excluded white evolutionary biologist in ‘diversity hire’ search, complaint alleges
The College Fix
Epidemiology
U.S. Depression Rate Remains Historically High
Gallup
Politics
United Nations seen favorably by many across 25 countries
Pew Research Center
HISTORICAL ARCHIVES
Medicine, Science and the Law
Abstract: Being wrongfully accused of criminal offences can lead to serious negative consequences to those wrongfully accused and their families. However, there is little research on the psychological and psychosocial impacts of wrongful accusations. We conducted a systematic literature review to collate the existing literature, searching four electronic literature databases and reference lists of relevant articles. Data were extracted from 20 relevant papers, and thematic analysis was conducted on the data. Eight main themes were identified: loss of identity; stigma; psychological and physical health; relationships with others; attitudes towards the justice system; impact on finances and employment; traumatic experiences in custody; and adjustment difficulties. The psychological consequences of wrongful accusations appear to affect the lives of those accused seriously, even after exoneration or overturning of convictions. Strategies for improving public perception of wrongful convictions should be explored, and specific mental-health systems should be established to support those who are wrongfully accused.
RUBBISH BIN
What Puppygirls Know? The (in)Human Pedagogy of a Trans Feminine Style
Australian Feminist Studies
Abstract: ‘Puppygirls’ is a name for a particular kinky trans feminine lesbian style, rooted in the long history of trans erotic productions, and currently thriving on social media platforms, such as Twitter (now X), Bluesky, or Discord. In this article, I provide an analysis of the style that is rooted in personal immersion in ‘puppygirl culture’. Using several examples of puppygirl media productions, I argue for the possibility of reading the puppygirl style as a critical practice: one that hints at ways of being trans that do rely on the ciscentric understanding of ‘the human’ as their point of reference. In doing so, I show how puppygirl style resonates with theoretical interventions in the field of trans studies offered by scholars such as Susan Stryker and Talia Mae Bettcher.
Modulating rage; or, the trans joy fetish
Feminist Theory
Abstract: Building off the recent work of Hil Malatino and Cameron Awkward-Rich that has theorised the necessity of bad feelings and maladjustment for trans liveability, this article approaches the intensifying emphasis on ‘trans joy’ with apprehension. I argue that while trans rage can be an animating force of civic unrest, it is one that is often mediated by a fetishising discourse of jubilance. This discourse insists on affirmative affect as an inherent good that will transform and transcend stigma and antagonism even as trans people continue to see increasing rates of violence and legislative assault on their quality of life. I ask whether this turn to trans joy, though an arguably useful bulwark in times of crises, may indeed be a ruse that shields what enrages from view, suspicious that this effort to stimulate happiness may only simulate it. In querying a meshwork of scholarly and nonprofit invocations, journalistic coverage and public art, this article demonstrates that the repetition of joy as rage's attendant affective form suspends dissent while also imagining a dangerously undemanding transition of gender dysphoria to euphoria. To this end, it critically engages how we conceptualise and enact trans subjectivity through a discursive preoccupation with joy that fetishises a trifecta of affirmative resistance, humanistic individualism, and trans resilience which are indicative of desires that shape inclusion's libidinal economy and governmentality – often reinforcing neoliberal good feeling – while reorientating us towards liberal democratic models of political mobilisation, alienating negativity, and blunting trans rage.
The Gendered, Misogynoiristic, and Colonial Genocidal Logics of Strip Searching
Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work
Abstract: Women with lived experience of strip searching have been calling for it to be banned as a practice for decades; however, it remains a routine practice in carceral settings such as prisons and jails. Given the mass incarceration of Indigenous women and disproportionate rate of Black women in federal prisons in Canada, an anti-racist and gendered anticolonial analysis of strip searching is warranted. Thus, this paper shares findings from conversations with 23 previously incarcerated women, the majority of whom are Black and Indigenous, about their experiences of being strip searched in prisons. The main theme throughout the conversations was that strip searching is sexual violence by the state. Furthermore, the harms of strip searching are gendered in that women are forced to remove their tampons and pads during menstruation to show guards. The paper also elucidates the ways in which strip searching enacts misogynoiristic and colonial genocidal logics historically rooted in projects such as Indian Residential Schools and the enslavement of Black women. It ends with a call for abolition feminist social work praxis by meeting the direct needs of women who are strip searched while also advocating for it to be banned as a practice.
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Loved the Bonobos bit! So true. Female coalitions can really be used aggressively to cause damage. Are they doing exactly what they complain about patriarchy doing? Forming a group that controls others? Have we seen that? lol
The article on puppygirls does indeed belong in the rubbish bin, but (like many others in that category) it's much too important to end up there as a joke. People need to read this stuff for themselves (because that would reveal what the abstract itself does not reveal). They need to take it seriously as a lamentable sign of the times, not merely to ridicule it. Of interest to me, at any rate, is not the pseudo-ethnography of a subculture but the extent to which ideology now presents itself as scholarship. Szpilka relies on a dense system of cleverly "subversive" or "transgressive" theories, supported by a web of academic jargon. Ironically, this lays the supposedly respectable foundation for a point of view that explicitly rejects respectability.
Ditto for the article on rage. Tenorio could have made the abstract concise (which is the purpose of an abstract), or at least readable (which is the purpose of any written communication), by trimming the academic fat this way: Trans people should drop the ingratiating pretense of being joyful, because that detracts from their politically useful rage.
Ditto for the article on strip-searching. In the almost incredibly pretentious abstract, Hutchison squandered 330 words to say the obvious in one sentence. Strip-searching prisoners humiliates them and should therefore be abolished. I see no need at all to justify common decency by resorting to academic theory, let alone political ideology. Readers should suspect that the purpose of this article is not moral, in fact, but political. Otherwise, it would have opposed the strip searching of all prisoners, not only black and female ones.
My general point here is that it's not enough to spot nonsense. We need to see precisely how nonsense passes under the radar in academic circles. Methods underlie this madness, some of them supposedly amusing (clever wordplay, for example, such as "misogynoiristic") but all of them profoundly anti-intellectual.