Yes, the headline question above is an intentionally sarcastic framing in response to this truly idiotic tweet by a garbage human. But apparently, this “men against fiction” phenomenon is a real problem according to recent data, such that Dazed Magazine felt compelled to extrapolate why.

It is a cultural hangover that persists. A “cult of productivity is still imposed more on men than women,” says Dr Alistair Brown, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Modern Literature at Durham University. “[Non-fiction] seems to have more immediate or meaningful returns on the investment of time.” Consequently, men buy more: in 2023, men accounted for 55 per cent of non-fiction book sales, Nielsen BookData tells Dazed.
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Could reading stories offer an alternative route through the masculinity crisis? By creating “a safe space for allowing oneself to feel, with no strings attached,” Professor Keen suggests that reading fiction is the diametric opposite of the stale stoicism of the manosphere.

Now, I’m sure entire research papers, books, college courses, self-help courses and more have been written by other professionals about the benefits of reading. Several are linked in the article above. But the way in which this New Toxic Caveman Masculinity sets itself against reading (and thereby, women, as in so many other ways) is so laughable as to be self-parody, which is why I couldn’t help screen shot that tweet above. Could this idiotic worldview, maybe, possibly, have something to do with men’s decreasing grades and college graduation rates? Hmm, maybe they’re macho-ing their way right out of the future all on their own!

So…
What makes men so afraid of being seen as bookish? What are they hiding from?

How do those of us men who do read books make the case to the men of the future that books are good, actually?

What is it about nonfiction books vs novels that better attracts those men who do read? What are men missing by choosing that reading diet?

As a rapidly aging fellow, of course I am naturally drawn to any shred of evidence that my best years are not, in fact, behind me. This thoughtful Atlantic article about late bloomers includes plenty of anecdotal evidence of people who peaked late, not early, which is some small comfort. However, after the initial dopamine hit of potentially not being washed wore off, there were even deeper insights to enjoy, like this great quote:

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

That gives hope to us olds, almost-olds, or seriously-olds! Because that means as long as there is an ounce of life left, that’s a scoop of effort left to put toward something worthwhile.

So…
What have pursuits or goals have you put the most effort toward in the last year? Or in your life as a whole?

If you could take back some of that effort and reassign it to something else, what would you choose? Why did you make that original choice, and why would you change it?

What would you love to spend more effort on in the future that you aren’t already?

I used to a) live in San Francisco, and b) have more disposable income, no kids, and a taste for dining out. In these, my irresponsible 30’s, I almost certainly overspent on dinners at fancy restaurants. But there’s nice, and then there’s excessive, as Pete Wells ponders in the NY Times, asking, “Are These Really the World’s 50 Best Restaurants?”

Today the list is dominated by tasting-menu restaurants, and every year those menus seem to get longer and more unforgiving. There are more courses than any rational person would choose to eat, and more tastes of more wines than anyone can possibly remember the next day. The spiraling, metastasizing length of these meals seems designed to convince you that there’s just no way a mere 10 or 15 courses could contain all the genius in the kitchen.

One well-traveled diner told me about a recent, four-hour meal at Disfrutar, in Barcelona — No. 1 this year. He said he was “blown away” and at the same time he never wants to go back. “It was an assault, and not fun,” he said.

I have eaten at a few of these, for prices in the high three-digits (I know! It was a wild time!), and some of them have featured dishes that will live forever in my memory. But making this a lifestyle to aspire to as an individual, I’ve come to realize, was a pretty irresponsible way to spend money – even when you have lots of it. And steering an industry’s highest ambitions toward competing over who can best cater to the privileged few who can afford (and endure!) these gastronomic trials seems… pretty nuts?

[Which is why, as an aside, I will also give a strong recommend to 2022’s underrated The Menu with Ralph Fiennes and Emma Stone – a hilarious and freaky thriller that examines this very argument, and would have received its own post had I been writing at the time!]

So…
What’s the worst thing about how we think of fine dining right now?

Is it even ethical or worthwhile to spend that kind of money chasing “experiences” like these?

If these restaurants are in fact kinda bullshit, what’s the right balance to strike between respecting food and people? Who’s doing it right, if not The World’s Best?

Part of my recent love affair with newsletters includes the discovery of Blackbird Spyplane, a weekly update on fashion, style, and living a beautiful life that includes the occasional interview with a stylish and cool person. And sometimes, they get pretty deep on what it means to be an ethical consumer, too, like in the recent post You Are Not A Commercial For Yourself. (You really should RTFA (read the full article), it’s super worthwhile.)

Using an Ozu film as a jumping off point (see? they’re cool folks), the post explores the tension between chasing trends and coolness versus the genuine pleasure and affirming qualities of dressing well and feeling confident.

Sure, sick clothes can be a superficial object of vacuous consumerism and ego-affirmation. But sick clothes also affirm the creative ingenuity and labor of the people who made the fly s**t, weaving us into a social relationship predicated, at bottom, on celebrating and sharing what’s best and most beautiful about human creativity.
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Where things get muddy is when our healthy desire for beautiful man-made things — intimately connected to our healthy desire for connectedness & community — gets hijacked and zombiefied by manipulative, profit-hungry, fundamentally anti-social souls…
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Remember that buying s**t is not the same as having swag … Remember that having cool interests beyond cool clothes, and doing good deeds besides putting together sick outfits (which, to be clear, is a good deed), will make your clothes look better on you… Remember that you don’t even need to own things to feast upon their beauty. “Sight is sensory, after all,” Rothfeld writes, “and voyeurism can be voluptuous.”

And remember that a ravenous desire for cool clothes is tight so long as you keep it “gourmand” mode and avoid slipping into “glutton” mode, where, in the throes of a boundless acquisitive frenzy, you keep shoving food down your face without even tasting it, without thinking about how it got on your plate — without ever stopping to consider whether you’re enjoying it or not.

Which puts me very much in the mind of how far I’ve come in terms of choosing clothes with intention to fill needs or color palettes I’m looking for in dressing like myself, versus trying to mimic trends. After all, the looser clothes I grew up with are very much back in style. Plus, I care much more about spending more on longer-lasting, higher-quality articles of clothing versus acquisition of any kind. So…

How has your “style” changed with age, for better or for worse?

Are you “cooler” or “less cool” now than you were when you were younger? In what ways?

How have these evolutions changed your relationship to the clothing you own, wear, and shop for?

Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker puts a name to something I’ve felt for many years while attempting to navigate the pervasive recommendation machines of the internet: algorithmic anxiety. As he relays in the article:

“I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.

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Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.

Personally, this means being afraid to ever ‘dislike’ anything on Netflix or YouTube, with the fear that anything remotely related will now be banished forever from reaching me, or hesitating to like even the most enjoyable clips only to be inundated with identical clones. I’ve begun listening to mid-tempo synth music as background while working, and though I still prefer energetic indie rock, Spotify has now almost completely shifted its picture of my tastes toward retro paradise vibes. It’s now become a side job simply to manage a computer-generated picture of who I am and what interests me.

What are your strategies for optimizing how the machine will predict your tastes?

Are you doing a good job managing them? Are they delivering as a result?

What are the best examples of the algorithm nailing it for you, or totally missing the mark?

What are your alternative discovery methods to get out from the yoke of a digitally dictated taste profile?