"Of the many recent failures of the American left, one of the greatest is making entry-level battle-of-the-sexes humor seem avant-garde."

"(Did you know that women often run relationship decisions past their female friends? Bitches be crazy! That sort of thing.) As Rogan himself says after he emerges in stonewashed jeans, clutching a glass of something amber on ice: 'Fox News called this an anti-woke comedy club. That’s just a comedy club!'... Rogan now lives in Austin, which has recently become known for its transformation from chilled-out live-music paradise to a miniature version of the Bay Area—similarly full of tech workers, but with fewer IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE… signs.... It is... the center of the Roganverse, an intellectual firmament of manosphere influencers, productivity optimizers, stand-ups, and male-wellness gurus. Austin is at the nexus of a Venn diagram of 'has culture,' 'has gun ranges,' 'has low taxes,' and 'has kombucha.'"

Writes Helen Lewis, in "How Joe Rogan Remade Austin/The podcaster and comedian has turned the city into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other 'free thinkers' who happen to all think alike" (The Atlantic).

That's a free-access link, because there's a lot going on in that article, beyond what I chose to excerpt.

"We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers/Questions about unfair advantage won’t just go away."

By Helen Lewis, in The Atlantic.

Please read the whole thing before commenting and restrict comments to the issue framed in the article, which I am not going to attempt to summarize. If you don't know what 5ARD is, please don't comment.

ADDED: If you have trouble accessing that article, try "What does science tell us about boxing’s gender row?" (BBC).

"Audiences fell in love with The Crown because its early seasons evoked a lost time and explored a single question."

"At only 25 years old, a woman born before the invention of television—a woman born into a dying empire, who never went to school, who grew up in a castle during wartime—became the ruler of a fractious kingdom, in a world that was just about to invent miniskirts, pop music, and the concept of the teenager. Would she, and the monarchy, survive? But as The Crown’s scope has drawn closer to the present, it has lost the useful distance of history as well as its grandeur, and its sense of permission...."

Writes Helen Lewis, in "The Crown Has Nothing Left to Say/The final season has swans, ghosts, and King Tony Blair, but it doesn’t have a message" (The Atlantic).

Phrase in the article that I thought no one would use anymore: "makes an honest woman of." (Context: "Prince Charles finally makes an honest woman of Camilla Parker Bowles.")

"For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance..."

"... largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of 'a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.'..."

Writes Helen Lewis in "The Feminists Insisting That Women Are Built Differently/An emerging strand of feminism zeroes in on the differences between male and female bodies" (The Atlantic).

Why aren't people talking about the new Jordan Peterson book? It came out 4 days ago, and I'm only just noticing it now.

Here's the book: "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." 

I only noticed it just now because I was having an in-person conversation that caused me to need to check the exact reason why Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "the first black President" and I landed on "It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton 'The First Black President.'" 

That was in The Atlantic. I hadn't stopped by The Atlantic in a long time, but while I was there, I noticed "What Happened to Jordan Peterson?/Adored guru and reviled provocateur, he dropped out of sight. Now the irresistible ordeal of modern cultural celebrity has brought him back." 

Reading that, I was surprised to see that Peterson was "back" in the sense that he'd published a new book. The publication date was March 2d. You'd think I'd have tripped across that information by now. 

I've put the book in my Kindle, and I'll get back to you about it.

For now, let's read a little of this Atlantic piece, which is — you can't tell from the headline — a book review. It's by Helen Lewis:

After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch....

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism.

That chapter concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order before trying to change the world. This is not only a rehash of one of the previous 12 rules—“Clean up your bedroom,” he writes, because fans love it when you play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab.

The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire?

Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies.

In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him? Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own....