Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Absence That Shapes Everything There is a category of wound that does not announce itself as a wound. It does not bleed. It does not leave a visible scar. It presents, instead, as a shape in the n...
Read article →The Costume and the Man Inside It Every man who has ever answered "I'm fine" when he was not is familiar with the performance. It is so practiced that it barely feels like a performance anymore. It fe...
Read article →The Feeling You Cannot Find Words For There is a particular kind of frustration that arrives when you know something is wrong — something is heavy, something is off, something has shifted — and you re...
Read article →What It Means to Hold Everyone Up There is a specific position that some men occupy in their social worlds — and it is a position that carries no formal title, no recognition, and no support structure...
Read article →When the Fire Has Another Source Anger is the emotion that men are given permission to have. In a culture that treats most emotional expression as weakness, anger gets a pass — it reads as strength, d...
Read article →The Numbers Behind the Crisis Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50 in most high-income countries. In the United States, men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women. In...
Read article →Men and the Midlife Crisis — It Is Actually a Midlife Reckoning The term midlife crisis was coined in 1965 by the Canadian psychologist Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the biographies of arti...
Read article →Why Men Need to Unlearn Competition Before They Can Have Friends Most men learned to relate to other men through competition before they learned to relate to them through anything else. The sports tea...
Read article →Men and Physical Touch — The Epidemic of Touch Starvation There is a form of deprivation that does not have the visibility of hunger or cold and that most men would not identify as deprivation even wh...
Read article →The Conversation That Started in Private There is a specific kind of man who would tell you, unprompted, that he is fine. He has been fine for years. He is so committed to being fine that he has stopp...
Read article →Brotherhood — What Men Actually Need and How to Build It Brotherhood is a word that gets used in contexts ranging from military service to fraternities to organized crime, and across all of them somet...
Read article →The Good Men Problem — Why "Be a Good Man" Gives No Actual Direction If you ask most people what they want from men, the answer tends to be some variation of "be a good man." Be responsible. Be kind....
Read article →Men and Attachment Styles — How Avoidant Attachment Looks Like Strength In couples therapy waiting rooms, in relationship advice columns, in the conversations women have with each other about the men...
Read article →Men in Therapy — What Actually Works and What Therapists Get Wrong Men are in therapy at roughly half the rate of women. This is widely documented. What gets less attention is the question of why — an...
Read article →Male Friendship and Homophobia — How Fear Disconnected an Entire Generation Something happened to male friendship in the twentieth century that has not fully been named or recovered from. Before rough...
Read article →Men and Loneliness After Retirement — The Identity Cliff Nobody Warns You About The retirement party is a celebration of arrival. Decades of work are behind him. Freedom is ahead. The speeches are war...
Read article →Male Trauma and Why It Goes Unacknowledged When people picture someone who has experienced trauma, they tend not to picture a man. The cultural image of the trauma survivor is coded female. The langua...
Read article →Men and Online Communities — When Forums Replace Friendships The internet did not create male loneliness. But it did create a new set of conditions in which male loneliness expresses itself, organizes...
Read article →Young Men and the Meaning Crisis — Why Nobody Is Talking to Them Something is wrong with how young men are doing, and the responses from most established institutions have been inadequate. The statist...
Read article →The Stoic Trap — How Stoicism Became an Excuse to Feel Nothing Stoicism is having a revival. Books on Marcus Aurelius top bestseller lists. Podcasts preach the Stoic virtues to millions. The ideas of...
Read article →Men and Grief — Why Loss Hits Differently When You've Never Learned to Feel Grief is not optional. Every man who lives long enough will lose people he loves, and at some point the loss will be profoun...
Read article →Men and Purpose — What Happens When Work Is No Longer Enough For most of recorded history, survival was purpose enough. A man who kept his family fed and safe through another winter had answered the q...
Read article →Male Depression Looks Different — That's Why It Goes Untreated The clinical picture of depression that most people carry — the inability to get out of bed, the persistent sadness, the visible misery —...
Read article →The Provider Trap — How Defining Men by Productivity Destroys Them There is a version of manhood that most men were handed without being asked whether they wanted it. It goes something like this: your...
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