Darkness Visible

by Christopher Horner 3 Quarks Daily

Port Sunlight was a model village constructed in Wirral, in the Liverpool area, by the Lever brothers, and especially under the inspiration of William Lever, later lord Leverhulme. Their fortune was based on the manufacture of soap, and the village was built next to the factory in the Victorian/Edwardian era, for the employees and their families. It’s certainly a remarkable place, with different houses designed by various architects, parks, allotments, everything an Edwardian working-class person might want. An enlightened employer, Lever was still a paternalist: he claimed his village was an exercise in profit sharing, because “It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation.” Overseers had the right to visit any house at any time to check for ‘cleanliness’ and that the rules about who could live in which house were observed (men and women could only share accommodation if they were in the same family). Still, by the stands of the day it was quite progressive – schools, art gallery, recreation of all sorts for the employees were important.

Near the center of the place is the Lady Lever Art gallery. In there is an enormous collection of art objects, much of it reflecting the taste, as one might expect, of the times – pre-Raphaelites art, heavy ‘historical paintings and more. There is also some art from other periods, including the 18th century. And it’s here I was startled when I visited the place. For one painting depicts a lady of that time, with a black slave. Now there were many people of African origin in England in the late 1700s, up to three percent of the total population of London (estimates vary a lot). And there are plenty of paintings of the noble and landed gentry and their ladies featuring a black boy or girl as a kind of accessory, signaling the status of the main subject of the portrait. But this image – of a French mistress and slave, the only one in the gallery to feature a person of colour, was particularly egregious. To quote the Liverpool museums website:

The oil painting, created in 1705 and attributed to Jean Baptiste Santerre (1658-1717), is the Gallery’s only work of art from the 18th century which depicts a person of colour. It shows an enslaved African boy, brought from a plantation to work as an unpaid house servant. His name is not known, and he wears a degrading metal collar around his neck which was used to mark enslaved people as property. Catherine-Marie Legendre (d.1749), was the wife of French nobleman, Claude Pecoil (1629-1722), Marquise de Septime.

At this time, it was not uncommon for wealthy white women to be painted with an enslaved Black servant in a way that signified her position in society. Often dressed in ornate outfits, they were depicted as trappings of wealth. Furthermore, their dark skin was often used in portraiture to highlight the paleness of the sitter’s skin, as pale skin was considered a sign of beauty. Here, the boy is offering a bowl of rare and exotic fruit, while Legendre’s hand rests on the boy’s head to signify her ownership.

On the website, and in the gallery itself, we read these words:

Does this portrait belong on the walls of the gallery today? Does it help us understand and tell the history of slavery or does it continue to honour someone who benefited from the slave trade?

Viewers are then invited to email their comments.

Yes: it does need to be shown. We need more awareness and discussion of the history of slavery, not less, for it still marks our world in many ways, and Liverpool was a major contributor to the slave trade of the 18th century. Fortunately, Liverpool museums seem to have worked with the local Black Lives Matter movement in coming to the design to show it. Alyson Pollard, Head of the Lady Lever Art Gallery writes (and this is on the wall in the gallery, as well):

The Lady Lever Art Gallery is seeking to display, more openly, the Black histories and stories linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its legacies which are not currently transparent in the collections. Displaying this disturbing painting prominently, and acknowledging its context is the beginning of a long-term project to ensure our collections are not seen and viewed through a single historic lens but instead reflect multiple histories. The painting was previously displayed high up on a wall in the William and Mary room and under reflective glass. Its depiction of life for the very wealthy and of the injustices suffered by people of colour at this time make this a very significant image and one which we felt needed to be in a more prominent location.

A short walk from the Lady Lever Art Gallery takes you to the Port Sunlight Museum, where there is more to learn about the economy of empire. Here we learn that the ‘enlightened’ Lever drew on forced labour in the Belgian Congo to supply the palm oil for his soap. And he was an enthusiastic liberal imperialist: the resources for his manufacture lay in the places he wanted to see the empire expanded into. The website adds:

This re-display is one of several actions which the Lady Lever Art Gallery is taking in response to Black Lives Matter and the death of George Floyd. This includes openly acknowledging Lord Lever’s activities in West Africa during the period 1911 to 1925 and beginning the process of reinterpreting its collection.

Some people will argue that ‘the past cannot be judged by todays standards’. I disagree. Firstly, ‘todays standards’ where shared by many people in the time of slavery: it was denounced and fought against at the time. That is one of the reasons it doesn’t exist now. It’s also the case that the racism of slavery continues to have its long afterlife. The killing of black men and women by the law enforcement agencies in the USA, UK, France and beyond tell us something about where we are, or aren’t, when it comes to race and justice.

The BLM movement, and others like it, have forced a discussion about that past, and what it means. BLM is not ‘identity politics’: it is a universalistic demand for justice for all: black lives clearly have not, do not, matter to too many of those with the power of life and death. BLM is the latest example of the way in which what we do now helps change the meaning of the past. The aim, that of justice, surely casts a light back on to the numberless others who were used and crushed by chattel slavery – among whom that boy in the picture was one. Let them come from the shadows. Let him be seen.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” and the Santerre painting can surely stand as an example of that. But there is another insight that occurs to me in this context: that the meaning of the past, including identity of the winners and losers of past struggles, is not settled. What we do now changes the meaning of what went before:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. [1]

Who Is the Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband?

Who Is the Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband?

Those who have known the suspect describe an individual who seemed to fall into isolation and deeply troubling thoughts.

By Kellen Browning, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Eliza Fawcett

SAN FRANCISCO — A trail of strained relationships. An itinerant life that included a stint living in a storage unit. A personality that was “consumed by darkness.”

Accounts from people who know the man accused of the break-in and violent attack Friday on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, described indications of a troubled individual and growing signs of politically fueled hate.

That man, David DePape, 42, remains in custody and will likely face several charges, including attempted homicide and assault with a deadly weapon, as early as Monday, with an arraignment expected Tuesday, the authorities said. The San Francisco district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, said on Saturday that Mr. DePape had given a statement to the San Francisco Police Department, though she declined to elaborate.

According to law enforcement officials, Mr. DePape broke into the Pelosis’ San Francisco home in the early morning hours on Friday through a back entrance. He was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington, the authorities have said, and yelled, “Where is Nancy?” In a struggle with Mr. Pelosi, 82, over a hammer, Mr. DePape struck Mr. Pelosi with it at least once as the police arrived and apprehended him, the police said. At the house, Mr. DePape had zip ties and also possessed a bag of supplies, according to the authorities, someone with knowledge of the investigation said on Sunday.

On Saturday, Ms. Pelosi said in a letter to colleagues that her husband’s condition was continuing to improve and that she thanked them for their support. “Our children, our grandchildren and I are heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack on our Pop,” she wrote. “We are grateful for the quick response of law enforcement and emergency services, and for the life-saving medical care he is receiving.”

Ms. Jenkins said that Mr. DePape had sustained “minor injuries” and had been treated at a hospital, but it was uncertain on Saturday evening whether he was still receiving medical care.

A precise sequence of the break-in is still emerging, and a portrait of Mr. DePape is only beginning to take shape. People who have known him at various points in his life reveal a shy person who sought to improve the world, but also as someone whose life seemed to drift and whose behavior seemed strange at times, even unhinged.

When Linda Schneider, 65, knew Mr. DePape for a couple of years starting in 2009, she was running an urban farm for low-income communities in the East Bay area. Mr. DePape would help her with her chickens and occasionally house-sit for her, she said.

At the time, Mr. DePape was living out of a storage unit in Berkeley and making hemp bracelets, said Ms. Schneider, who still lives in California. He had been using hard drugs but was trying to straighten his life, she said. She recalled him as being reliable, easygoing and painfully shy.

“He wouldn’t even have a bank account because he was terrified of talking to a teller,” she said.

By 2012, Ms. Schneider said she began receiving “very bizarre” emails from Mr. DePape in which he equated himself with Jesus Christ. She felt the messages were “somewhat dangerous,” she said, and she stopped communicating with him.

“This was a guy who didn’t have a lot of internal strength,” she said. “He’d follow anything a little abnormal in front of him.”

Teresa DePape, who is married to Gene DePape, Mr. DePape’s stepfather, first met David DePape when he was in high school in Powell River, British Columbia. Ms. DePape remembered him as a funny teenager who liked to joke and laugh and play computer games. He had some friends, she said, but not a lot. “He was a good kid,” she said.

Mr. DePape finished high school in Armstrong, another city in British Columbia, but the family had little contact with him after that point, she said.

“We tried to at first,” she said. “But he never responded, so we stopped.”

Mr. DePape left Canada about 20 years ago, in pursuit of a relationship that brought him to California, as reported by CNN.

Law enforcement officials over the weekend were examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, though they declined to comment publicly on his online accounts.

But a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” contains an array of angry and paranoid postings. The blog’s domain was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident of that town said that Mr. DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured a flurry of antisemitic sentiments and concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.

One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Ms. Gabbard left the Democratic Party this month and then made several high-profile campaign appearances with Republicans running for office.

“Trump you NEEEEEEEED to make Tulsi your VP in 2024,” the user wrote. “Of the ENTIRE democrat presidential candidates in 2020. She was the only democrat candidate who WASN’T running on a platform of being an insane mentally unwell demagogue.”

But mixed in with those posts were others about religion, the occult and images of fairies that the user said he had produced using an artificial intelligence imaging system.

Several other posts were consumed with culture war issues and seemed to closely track with current events. One post was about the nearly $1 billion defamation judgment entered this month against Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory-driven media outlet Infowars.

Still, Ms. Schneider said that she was stunned and angered when she learned that the police had identified Mr. DePape as Mr. Pelosi’s attacker.

“Who attacks people in their 80s?” she said. “That’s just the epitome of cruelty.”

Inti Gonzalez, who said she considered Mr. DePape a father figure because her mother had a relationship with him when she was growing up, said in a blog post on her website and on her Facebook page that Mr. DePape was someone who wanted to have his voice heard, “but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”

On her blog, Ms. Gonzalez said that her mother, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, met Mr. DePape when she was pregnant with Ms. Gonzalez. Their romantic relationship lasted only a few years, but Mr. DePape stayed around longer to take care of Ms. Gonzalez and her two younger brothers, until leaving eight years ago, when she was 13, Ms. Gonzalez said.

“There is some part of him that is a good person even though he has been very consumed by darkness,” she wrote.

Ms. Taub garnered public attention in 2012 when she spoke out against a ban on nudity proposed by Scott Wiener, the San Francisco supervisor, culminating in a 2013 nude wedding at San Francisco City Hall. Mr. DePape, a fatherly influence on Ms. Taub’s three children, planned to serve as a best man at the wedding, SFGate reported at the time.

A 2015 SF Weekly profile of Ms. Taub described her as “a seasoned 9/11 truther, aficionado of psychedelics, and sexual free spirit.” In 2021, Ms. Taub, 53, was found guilty by a jury of charges including stalking and attempted child abduction. She is incarcerated at the California Institution for Women.

On Friday, Ms. Taub’s home in Berkeley, a large Victorian-style duplex, appeared run-down, with abandoned cars in the driveway and stuffed animals hanging in the trees in the front yard. Two teenage boys appeared to live there, one of whom spoke with F.B.I. officials as a crowd of reporters looked on.

A neighbor, Ryan La Coste, 35, said that Mr. DePape had been a semi-frequent visitor to the house and continued to stop by after Ms. Taub was incarcerated.

Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong

Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence

JON HAMILTON NPR Science

A dish of living brain cells has learned to play the 1970s arcade game Pong.

About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the game's electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

The novel achievement is part of an effort to understand how the brain learns, and how to make computers more intelligent.

"We've made huge strides with silicon computing, but they're still rigid and inflexible," says Brett Kagan, an author of the study and chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. "That's something we don't see with biology."

For example, both computers and people can learn to make a cup of tea, Kagan says. But people are able to generalize what they've learned in a way a computer can't.

"You might have never been to someone else's house, but with a bit of rummaging and searching you can probably make a decent cup of tea as long as I've got the ingredients," he says. But even a very powerful computer would struggle to carry out that task in an unfamiliar environment.

So Cortical Labs has been trying to understand how living brain cells acquire this sort of intelligence. And Kagan says the Pong experiment was a way for the company to answer a key question about how a network of brain cells learns to change its behavior:

"If we allow these cells to know the outcome of their actions, will they actually be able to change in some sort of goal-directed way," Kagan says.

To find out, the scientists used a system they've developed called DishBrain. 

This scanning electron microscope image shows a neural culture growing on a high-density multi-electrode array. This system allowed researchers to train neurons to play the video game Pong.

Cortical Labs

A layer of living neurons is grown on a special silicon chip at the bottom of a thumb-size dish filled with nutrients. The chip, which is linked to a computer, can both detect electrical signals produced by the neurons, and deliver electrical signals to them.

To test the learning ability of the cells, the computer generated a game of Pong, a two-dimensional version of table tennis that gained a cult following as one of the first and most basic video games.

Pong is played on a video screen. A black rectangle defines the table, and a white cursor represents each player's paddle, which can be moved up or down to intercept a white ball.

In the simplified version used in the experiment, there was a single paddle on the left side of the virtual table, and the ball would carom off the other sides until it evaded the paddle.

To allow the brain cells to play the game, the computer sent signals to them indicating where the bouncing ball was. At the same time, it began monitoring information coming from the cells in the form of electrical pulses.

"We took that information and we allowed it to influence this Pong game that they were playing," Kagan says. "So they could move the paddle around."

At first, the cells didn't understand the signals coming from the computer, or know what signals to send the other direction. They also had no reason to play the game.

So the scientists tried to motivate the cells using electrical stimulation: a nicely organized burst of electrical activity if they got it right. When they got it wrong, the result was a chaotic stream of white noise.

"If they hit the ball, we gave them something predictable," Kagan says. "When they missed it, they got something that was totally unpredictable."

The strategy was based on the Free Energy Principle, which states that brain cells want to be able to predict what's going on in their environment. So they would choose predictable stimulation over unpredictable stimulation.

The approach worked. Cells began to learn to generate patterns of electrical activity that would move the paddle in front of the ball, and gradually rallies got longer.

The brain cells never got that good at Pong. But interestingly, human brain cells seemed to achieve a slightly higher level of play than mouse brain cells, Kagan says.

And the level of play was remarkable, considering that each network contained fewer cells than the brain of a cockroach, Kagan says.

"If you could see a cockroach playing a game of Pong and it was able to hit the ball twice as often as it was missing it, you would be pretty impressed with that cockroach," he says.

The results hint at a future in which biology helps computers become more intelligent by changing the way that they learn, Kagan says.

But that future is probably still a long way off, says Steve M. Potter, an adjunct associate professor at Georgia Tech.

"The idea of a computer that has some living components is exciting and it's starting to become a reality," he says. "However, the kinds of learning that these things can accomplish is quite rudimentary right now."

Even so, Potter says the system that allowed cells to learn Pong could be a great tool for doing research.

"This is sort of a semi-living animal model that one can use to study all sorts of mechanisms in the nervous system, not just learning," he says.

Here’s Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter

By Michelle Goldberg NY TIMES

I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst party's end.

Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hell site.”

So I have mixed feelings about what might be the impending takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, whose neural network seems perpetually plugged into the platform. Musk first made an ill-advised move to buy Twitter in the spring. After signing papers with little due diligence, he tried to back out. Twitter sued, and on the cusp of the trial Musk reversed course again, agreeing to go forward with the sale.

It’s far from a done deal — the financing is still uncertain — but Musk appears to recognize that the alternative is potentially embarrassing litigation that he is likely to lose. (Already, the lawsuit has resulted in the release of a bunch of Musk’s text messages, showing many of his sycophantic associates channeling Kendall Roy.)

That means a Musk-owned Twitter is, at the very least, a distinct possibility. I understand why this is, for many on the left, deeply chilling. Musk’s politics are shaped by a fondness for trolling and a hatred of wokeness, and he’s likely to make the site a more congenial place for racist demagogues and conspiracy theorists. Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.

I have a shred of hope, however, that if Musk makes Twitter awful enough, users will flee, and it will become less relevant. I’m usually wary of arguments that declining conditions are a catalyst to progress — contrary to the formulation often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, “the worse, the better,” worse is usually just worse. I’m going to make an exception for Twitter, though. The best thing it could do for society would be to implode.

An obvious question — one my kids ask me all the time — is why I use Twitter if I detest it so much. The easy part of the answer is that it’s useful for my job. It’s a font of breaking news, a way to quickly survey what lots of different people are saying, a tool for promoting my writing, and sometimes a vehicle for contacting sources. It was on Twitter that I learned that Musk had finally agreed, again, to buy Twitter. As soon as this column is published, I’ll post it there.

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

Twitter is not, obviously, the only social media platform with addictive qualities. But with its constant promise of breaking news, it feeds the hunger of people who work in journalism and politics, giving it a disproportionate, and largely negative, impact on those fields, and hence on our national life.

It’s true that Twitter can be good for drawing attention to injustice and galvanizing demonstrations, as it did after the killing of George Floyd. But as my colleague Zeynep Tufekci showed in her book “Twitter and Tear Gas,” while social media helps leaderless movements coalesce quickly, the absence of a real-world organizing infrastructure can fatally undermine them. That’s one reason, as The New York Times recently reported, mass protest movements “are today more likely to fail than they were at any other point since at least the 1930s.”

Twitter is much better at stoking tribalism than promoting progress. According to a 2021 study, content expressing “out-group animosity” — negative feelings toward disfavored groups — is a major driver of social-media engagement. That builds on earlier research showing that on Twitter, false information, especially about politics, spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.” Trump was almost certainly right when he said that without Twitter, he wouldn’t have become president.

The company’s internal research has shown that Twitter’s algorithm amplifies right-wing accounts and news sources over left-wing ones. This dynamic will probably intensify quite a bit if Musk takes over. Musk has said that Twitter has “a strong left bias,” and that he wants to undo permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly call for violence. That suggests figures like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene will be welcomed back.

But as one of the people who texted Musk pointed out, returning banned right-wingers to Twitter will be a “delicate game.” After all, the reason Twitter introduced stricter moderation in the first place was that its toxicity was bad for business. Back in 2016, Disney came close to buying Twitter, but was ultimately put off in large part by the harassment rampant on the platform. “Disney’s discomfort with abuse on the site indicates that it’s a larger problem for Twitter’s business prospects than its executives imagined,” reported Bloomberg.

If Musk moves Twitter in the direction of right-wing sites like Gab, Parler and Truth Social, he might attract some new users, but at the price of repelling others. Already, Twitter user growth has slowed, and as Musk pointed out when he was trying to get out of the deal, many of its top accounts don’t post much. For A-list entertainers, The Washington Post reports, Twitter “is viewed as a high-risk, low-reward platform.” Plenty of non-celebrities feel the same way; I can’t count the number of interesting people who were once active on the site but aren’t anymore.

An influx of Trumpists is not going to improve the vibe. Twitter can’t be saved. If we’re lucky, it can be destroyed.

 

Boys and Men Are in Crisis

Boys and Men Are in Crisis Because Society Is.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG The NY Times

Many years ago, I went to a nail salon at an upscale mall in Kampala, Uganda, and was surprised that almost everyone working there was male. When I asked one of the employees why this was, he explained that doing nails was men’s work because it paid well. The salon wasn’t unique; as one local newspaper put it, “There is no visitor that comes to Uganda and won’t notice and comment about the young men carrying a basket in their hand with a manicure set.”

I thought of those male manicurists while reading Richard V. Reeves’s much-discussed new book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” Reeves writes about the myriad ways boys and men, particularly in America, are flailing: Many are falling behind in school, disconnected from family, vulnerable to opioid abuse and to deaths of despair. He believes, I think rightly, that it is important to recruit more men into fast-growing industries now dominated by women, particularly health and education.

But though Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, recognizes material causes of men’s suffering, he’s hesitant to offer redistributive solutions. He emphasizes clever technocratic interventions, like having boys start school later than girls in order to account for their slower development, over far-reaching reforms, like increasing unionization and ending public subsidies for job-displacing automation.

The result is a book that, while often useful and interesting, also reveals the limits of wonky moderation. (I wasn’t surprised to learn that Reeves once served as director of strategy for the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat and self-described “radical” centrist.) Dismissive of partisanship, Reeves elides the political and economic decisions that have made American life brutal, in different but overlapping ways, for women and men both.

In his preface, Reeves says that he was reluctant to write “Of Boys and Men,” and that many people advised him against it because of the “current political climate.” He needn’t have worried. There’s been little left-wing backlash to the book, which is good, because the issues it raises are important.

Like many parents, I’ve seen how school is harder for my son than my daughter. “Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading and science,” writes Reeves. Things don’t get easier when boys grow up. Men’s rates of work force participation have fallen and their suicide rates have risen. It’s possible to believe that sexism remains a major impediment to women’s flourishing and also believe that for many boys and men life is much harder than it should be.

Even if you’re not inclined to care much about men’s welfare, their growing anomie and resentment is everyone’s problem, fueling right-wing populist movements around the world. People who feel unmoored and demeaned are going to be receptive to the idea that the natural order of things has been upended, the core claim of reactionary politics.

Some of men’s dislocation is an inevitable product of modernization, which, by making physical brawn less economically important, blurs men and women’s social roles. It is not just America, after all, where more women than men earn college degrees. There are also more female than male college students in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, which suggests, at least to me, that girls may be more innately disposed to academic life.

But male problems can be either exacerbated or ameliorated by political choices. Reeves makes the case that girls are more resilient than boys, writing that “economic and social disadvantage hurts boys more than girls.” Presumably, it would follow that disinvestment in public schools — including growing class sizes and the reduction of recess and gym in favor of test prep — is also hitting boys particularly hard. Yet Reeves spends more time bemoaning the left’s use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” than discussing how schools are funded or, for that matter, the school-to-prison pipeline.

Similarly, Reeves makes a convincing case that boys benefit from male teachers, and that Black boys benefit from Black male teachers. He calls for a “massive, urgent recruitment effort,” which is a fine idea, but one that’s likely to be futile unless we stop demonizing teachers and start paying them fairly. Old-fashioned sexism means that lower-paid and lower-status jobs are dominated by women. Reeves is in favor of raising teaching salaries, but it’s something he mentions in an almost offhand way. He spends more time discussing the need for marketing campaigns to sell men on traditionally female jobs.

Reeves has his own marketing to do, so his emphases make sense: Demanding more money for schools is boring; his plan to give boys an extra year of preschool is novel and provocative. But as he writes, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.” If that’s true, we also need deep structural changes to heal it.