Amy Alkon (b. 1964) fuses the confessional intimacy of the newspaper advice column with the explanatory ambitions of behavioral science. The public knows her as “The Advice Goddess” (a name she created on the spot after selling her first syndicated column circa 1998, she quickly regretted the choice). She emerged during the late decades of the metropolitan newspaper era and then remade herself inside the fragmented digital media world that replaced it. Her column ended in 2022.
Alkon’s career traces the passage from twentieth-century syndicated advice culture to a newer therapeutic and informational order built around neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, podcasting, and self-directed scientific literacy. Earlier columnists grounded their authority in maternal wisdom, etiquette, religion, or sentimental common sense. Alkon tried to build a scientifically framed theory of human relationships for a mass audience.
She grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan, during the late postwar suburbanization of American Jewish life. Upward mobility coincided with the fragmentation of older ethnic urban neighborhoods. She has described social isolation and anti-Semitic harassment in childhood, experiences that sharpened her skepticism toward social performance and drew her to analytical systems that could explain hidden motives and interpersonal conflict. That skepticism became central to her public persona. Traditional advice writers presented themselves as emotionally nurturing authorities. Alkon cultivated a voice built around confrontation, sarcasm, and behavioral realism. Her columns framed social interaction as a system of incentives, status negotiations, cognitive biases, signaling behavior, and evolved drives rather than a moral melodrama.
Her entrance into public life reflects the improvisational media culture of downtown Manhattan in the late twentieth century. Before national syndication, she took part in a SoHo street-corner project called “The Advice Ladies,” alongside two friends.
I met Alkon for lunch on May 28, 2003, and then wrote:
Amy wanted to go to graduate film school but her parents refused to fund her. So she took a job as a producer at the New York advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather.
“I had two friends at Ogilvy. One night we went to a diner We had a sad waiter. We asked him what his problem was. We talked to him and gave him advice. He said, ‘You guys are great. You should do this for a career.’
“So, for a joke, we got chairs from the Salvation Army, and we made a sign that said, ‘Free Advice From A Panel Of Experts.’ We set up on the street in Soho on the corner of West Broadway and Broome. It was to be a visual joke. We just wanted to make people laugh. It was New York. It was free. People lined up around the block. About five years after we started, Eric Messenger wrote a story [in 1992] about us in The New York Times. All of a sudden, we were on Maury Povich and NPR. I got us a TV deal with DeNiro and a book deal. We got a column in the New York Daily News.
“Then a month before we were to go on a ten-city book tour [in 1996], and we had this money to do a TV pilot, one of my partners [Caroline] thought that would be the right time for her to quit. Then the other one [Marlowe] eventually quit [Amy still talks to her]. So I was writing the column alone for the New York Daily News. Then I started a second column while we were in the breakup process. I wanted to have my own thing. I syndicated it myself, which is hard, and got myself in 70-papers. Now I have my own syndicator (Creators).
“We made a deal just before Ann Landers died. I was coming back from an Evolution Society Conference. I go to one every year. Even though my column looks like humor, it’s based in science. I’m a big fan of Albert Ellis and am influenced by his stuff. I was at Newark airport and I sign on to AOL and I see that Ann Landers died. I was going to France in a week. It was the worse time. I had people calling me every night. I was in Paris for a month. Every night at 8PM, I had to be home because it was nine hours difference from the West Coast. I had to be interviewed by somebody for a paper. ‘Are you the next Ann Landers?’ ‘Are you the next Ann Landers?’
“When somebody tells me something is impossible, I don’t accept that verdict.”
Amy: “I wanted to write about this in The Los Angeles Times. I was diagnosed with ADD. I don’t accept it as a disorder. I just think differently than most people. From my study of evolutionary psychology, I think I have the perfect evolutionary brain. If I was some woman millions of years ago sitting in a forest, I could get the salad, point out the bison and keep the child from falling off the cliff. My brain is many places at once, which makes it hard to write. Getting that diagnosis helped me because I was able to recognize that I do that, and managed it better.”
Luke: “Did you go on medication for that?”
Amy: “I take Ritalin. I call it my concentration vitamin. I pitched this to the LA Times. If you have diabetes, you are not embarrassed about it. You go to the doctor and you get some insulin. I sit at the computer to write and to have a brain that’s bouncing all over the place like a Ping-Pong ball is not conducive to me performing my employment. Ritalin has few side effects. When I first started taking it, I felt so strongly about that, to anti-stigmatize that, that I told everyone that I took Ritalin. I went to a newspaper conference with my friend David Wallis (featurewell.com, known Amy for 17-years) and he said to me, ‘Will you please not tell the editors that you have ADD?'”
Luke: “What things most frustrate you in your romantic relationships with men?”
Amy: “I’m not frustrated any more. I have a great boyfriend. What was most frustrating was to be too much. I talk really fast. I’m opinionated. There are things about me that aren’t for everybody. It was hard for me to find someone who was comfortable with me and comfortable with themselves.
“My boyfriend is stable and able to deal well with a crisis. I’m more high-strung and less tolerant than he is. He’s Elmore Leonard’s researcher. He goes out with the police in Detroit and gets color for the books. He’s methodical about his work. He will spend a long time making sure he gets things right.”
“One of the residuals effects of his work is that sometimes he talks like a mobster. Once we were on the phone and he said, ‘When Kennedy got whacked…’ It’s very entertaining to listen to him! “
The advice career exposed her to the tabloidization of emotional life in late twentieth-century America. During the 1980s and 1990s, call-in radio, daytime television, reality television, self-help publishing, and advice journalism all fed an expanding confessional economy that turned private dysfunction into public content. Alkon saw that audiences no longer wanted only etiquette instruction or moral reassurance. Readers demanded explanatory systems that could turn romantic failure and interpersonal confusion into intelligible patterns. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral science suited this market. They offered deterministic and quasi-scientific accounts of jealousy, mate selection, attraction, infidelity, risk-taking, and status competition.
Alkon developed the column “Ask the Advice Goddess,” distributed through Creators Syndicate to more than one hundred newspapers at its peak. Her later turn of the feature into “The Science Advice Goddess” marks the defining shift of her career. The change was not only a matter of style. It grew partly from the collapse of the newspaper industry during the 2000s. As metropolitan papers lost advertising and readers, many advice columns vanished or shrank. Alkon survived by setting herself apart from competitors such as Emily Yoffe and Amy Dickinson through a distinct offer: she folded scientific literature directly into short-form relationship counseling.
This shift altered the authority structure of the column. Traditional writers appealed to life experience, moral intuition, or emotional wisdom. Alkon inserted citations to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and cognitive science into the body of her responses. A reader complaining about infidelity might meet references to David Buss (b. 1953) on mate retention or Robert Trivers (b. 1943) on parental investment. A discussion of confidence might invoke Joseph LeDoux (b. 1949) on fear circuits and neuroplasticity. Alkon worked less as a moral authority than as a conduit, translating peer-reviewed research into practical recommendations.
Her framework grew out of the broader popularization of evolutionary psychology during the 1990s and 2000s. Public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker (b. 1954), David Buss, Geoffrey Miller (b. 1965), and Robert Trivers built a mass readership for biologically informed accounts of human social behavior. Alkon adapted these ideas into everyday guidance. Romantic conflict, in her view, is rarely a modern pathology. It reflects ancient reproductive pressures at work inside technologically modern societies. Men and women often misread one another because each sex evolved somewhat different reproductive incentives under ancestral conditions.
This made her a polarizing figure. Admirers saw her as unsentimental and empirically grounded. Critics charged her with reductionism, biological determinism, and an overreliance on evolutionary explanation. Alkon cultivated ties with researchers in behavioral science and evolutionary psychology and placed herself inside a wider ecosystem devoted to bringing scientific models of human behavior into public life. These alliances strengthened her claim that her advice rested on empirical frameworks rather than intuition or ideology.
Alkon combined tabloid bluntness, sarcasm, profanity, and punchline humor with compressed science journalism. Many columns followed a recognizable shape. She opened with a reader’s emotional complaint, reinterpreted it through scientific literature, and drew a behavioral strategy from that reinterpretation. The method reflected a larger shift in which scientific language displaced moral or religious vocabulary as a source of authority in ordinary talk about love, dating, manners, confidence, and conflict.
The publication of I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society in 2009 revealed another dimension of her worldview. The book was ostensibly about manners. Its deeper logic concerned collective-action problems and the upkeep of social cooperation in dense urban environments. Alkon argued that etiquette works as a decentralized technology for reducing friction among strangers. Public noise, cellphone abuse, uncontrolled children, aggressive entitlement, and everyday discourtesy impose costs on everyone else who shares the space.
This placed her within an American tradition of cultural criticism concerned with the erosion of public restraint and informal norms. Writers such as Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) and Neil Postman (1931-2003) worried that modern media culture rewarded narcissism and spectacle at the expense of civic discipline. Alkon translated similar anxieties into the language of behavioral science and libertarian social theory. Her account of manners resembled the libertarian idea of spontaneous order. Social norms, for her, enforce themselves through decentralized pressure more adaptive and flexible than bureaucratic regulation. Calling out rude behavior in public became a form of civic maintenance that protected shared spaces from decay.
This political streak explains her affinity for libertarian and heterodox circles. Alkon distrusted bureaucratic authority and emphasized individual responsibility and decentralized norm enforcement. Her critique of etiquette culture was not nostalgic aristocratic traditionalism. She argued that societies depend on countless small acts of voluntary self-restraint backed by social pressure rather than state coercion.
During the collapse of the print order, Alkon adapted better than many legacy newspaper personalities because she moved aggressively into digital media. Through AdviceGoddess.com, blogging, internet radio, podcasting, newsletters, and social media, she built an independent ecosystem that no longer depended on metropolitan newspaper monopolies. Her long-running internet radio show and podcast grew into a research platform centered on interviews with behavioral scientists, physicians, psychologists, and science writers. The format let her absorb new research directly from specialists and redistribute it through columns, books, interviews, and newsletters.
Alkon belonged to the new class of digitally networked public intellectuals who bypassed traditional gatekeepers. She appeared on programs hosted by Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla. She cultivated audiences skeptical of mainstream therapeutic culture, bureaucratic expertise, and academic jargon. Her authority came less from institutional prestige than from her skill at synthesizing scientific literature into practical language for general readers.
Her relationship to feminism stayed tense and complicated. Alkon rejected academic theories that minimized biological sex differences or treated romantic inequality as a pure social construction. She argued that many women harm themselves through unrealistic expectations about attraction, mate value, and emotional communication. She also criticized male irresponsibility, passivity, and avoidance. Her worldview reads as behavioral realism more than partisan ideology.
That realism carried into her later work on confidence, neuroscience, and self-directed behavioral change. In Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence, Alkon attacked the self-esteem movement and the motivational culture built around affirmations and emotional narration. Drawing on LeDoux’s work on fear conditioning and neuroplasticity, she argued that confidence comes from repeated action rather than internal reassurance. Behavioral change precedes emotional change. Individuals build resilience through exposure, repetition, and evidence-producing action rather than verbal positivity.
Her later work on menopause and medicine in Going Menopostal extended the skeptical frame into institutional medicine. Drawing on her own experience with the medical system, Alkon criticized what she saw as outdated readings of the Women’s Health Initiative study and the persistence of defensive medicine in women’s health care. She argued that many physicians leaned on obsolete assumptions, weak scientific literacy, and institutional risk aversion rather than current endocrinological evidence. This stage pushed her past interpersonal advice into a broader critique of bureaucratic expertise and institutional inertia.
Her 2011 conflict with the Transportation Security Administration became a defining controversy of her later career. After she objected to a pat-down search at John F. Kennedy International Airport and described the procedure on her blog as a form of assault, she landed in a public dispute with a TSA employee who threatened legal action. Alkon turned the incident into a larger critique of bureaucratic overreach, post-9/11 security culture, and the normalization of invasive state procedures. The episode showed the consistency of her worldview. Her skepticism toward manipulative romantic behavior and weak social norms extended into skepticism toward expanding administrative power.
Her historical significance rests in the hybrid role she constructed. She worked at once as syndicated columnist, science popularizer, libertarian-leaning cultural critic, behavioral-science translator, and digitally networked media personality. Her career shows how scientific vocabulary migrated into the therapeutic industries and everyday discourse during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Earlier advice writers leaned on moral authority, etiquette traditions, or religious assumptions. Alkon replaced much of that with empirical claims, evolutionary narratives, incentive analysis, and behavioral models. Readers may find her conclusions illuminating or reductive. Either way, her work captured a major transformation in American public culture: the growing habit of explaining ordinary human life through scientific and quasi-scientific frameworks rather than moral philosophy or inherited convention.
Before she was the Science Advice Goddess she was a girl in Farmington Hills who could not read the room. Amy Alkon has told the story of the isolation and the harassment, the child set apart and made to feel the herd’s contempt without a map for why. A child learns one lesson from that fast. The social world runs on rules nobody handed her, and the price of not knowing the rules is exposure, shame, the pack closing in. She spent the rest of her life cracking the code. She built a decoder ring out of science and sold copies to anyone who had ever stood outside a room and wondered what everyone else could see.
That is the hero, the one who knows why people do what they do. Not the nurturer, not the moralist, not the woman with the soft word. The realist who has the herd figured out. Her terror is not the grave. It runs warmer and closer than that. It is the terror of the surprised outsider, the one who walks into the social ambush blind, who misreads the signals and pays for the mistake in humiliation. Against that she armed herself with evolutionary psychology and behavioral science, the study of the hidden drives under the courtship and the cruelty, and the arming worked the way armor works. Once she can see the strings, she is no longer the puppet who gets yanked and laughed at. She is the one standing over the stage naming the pulleys. The child who could not read the room grew into the woman who reads it better than anyone in it, and reading it became her safety.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) said a man holds off his own smallness by joining something that lets him feel of large use, and that the modern man, with the old religion thinned out, reaches for science and love and the mastery of hard truths to do the work the church once did. Alkon converted. She left the inherited scripts, the etiquette her mother’s generation trusted, the religion, the sentimental wisdom of the advice page, and she took science as the thing that would make her count and make the world cohere. Her column did not dispense comfort. It dispensed explanation. A reader wrote in bleeding about an affair and met Robert Trivers (b. 1943) on parental investment and the cold arithmetic of why the animal strays. The pain came in as melodrama and went out as system. That conversion, private grief into public pattern, is the work her hero performs, and the performing of it is how she earns her place above the herd that once shut her out.
Becker said the hero flees the body, denies he is the animal that mates and rots, builds his monument to stand clear of the worm. Alkon does the opposite on the surface. Her science is the science of the worm, the drives, the mating math, the carcass under the manners. She does not flee the creature. She names it, in detail, with relish. But the naming is the flight. The man who maps the strings stands above the puppet, and that standing-above is the escape Becker watches for. I am not merely the animal in heat and fear, says the posture. I am the one who sees why the animal acts, and the seeing lifts me clear. She rises over creatureliness by becoming its cartographer. Knowing the worm lifts her clear of the worm, and the lift goes deeper than the monument-builder’s, because it wears the face of the bravest possible reckoning with the truth while doing the same work the flight from the body always did.
Her creed is a subtraction story. Strip the religion, strip the etiquette-pieties, strip the sentimental advice and the self-esteem affirmations and the academic theory that calls sex difference a social fiction, and what stands when the illusions clear is the animal, the evolved drives, the incentives running under the talk. She offers the world with the comforting lies removed. The trouble is the one every subtraction story carries. What stands after the subtraction is not the bare world. It is a particular and contested account of it, the adaptationist story, the just-so reconstruction of the ancestral past, a school with its own faith and its own reaches past the evidence. She hands it over as the residue left when illusion burns off, and it is not residue. It is a frame, a chosen one, doing for her exactly what religion does for the believer, ordering the chaos and conferring the worth. The creed she sells as the absence of creed is a creed. She cannot see this, because the whole appeal of her faith is that it is not a faith but the facts, and a man cannot worship a thing he has defined as the end of worship.
Set her against the woman she replaced and the cost shows. The old advice writer, the moralist with the soft word, sold comfort and belonging and the assurance that the reader was more than her drives. Alkon calls that sentiment and sells the hard word instead, and the hard word is often true and is sometimes the wrong medicine. A man comes to her bleeding and leaves correctly diagnosed and unheld. There are wounds the accurate cold sentence deepens, and the realist who cannot tell those wounds from the others has mistaken her courage for a cure.
Set her against the believer and the cost runs deeper. Her best book, I See Rude People, defends manners as the decentralized upkeep of a shared world, the small voluntary restraints that keep strangers from preying on one another in the crowded street. She is right that the restraints hold civilization together. But she grounds them in incentive and spontaneous order, and the believer holds that manners grew in older soil, in the conviction that the stranger carries the image of God and is owed reverence and not mere friction-reduction. The believer’s charge lands hard. The voluntary self-restraint Alkon prizes was watered by the religion her science dissolves, and a people who learn from her that man is the carcass under the manners may not keep the manners long. She wants the fruit and saws at the root, and her decoder cannot read that contradiction, because the contradiction sits in the one place she never aims the instrument, her own ground.
Her crusade against the rude has an ancient impulse. Becker wrote in Escape from Evil that men find the rot outside themselves and cleanse the world by fighting the carrier of it. The rude man, loud, entitled, dragging his disorder into the shared space, is the figure she hunts, and the hunt restores order and restores her, the once-harassed child grown into the enforcer of the code that should have protected her. The civic argument is sound. The heat under it comes from somewhere older than the argument.
She sees a great deal, and the blind spot is the one her method exists to keep dark. She knows she is deflationary and chose it. She knows she splits a room. She built a confidence book, Unf*ckology, on the true and useful claim that courage comes from acting through the fear and not from talking yourself sweet, drawing on Joseph LeDoux (b. 1949) and the fear circuits, and the book is honest work. What she does not see is the single thing her whole method works to prevent her from seeing, that her realism is a hero system, that the toughness is its own soft comfort. The man who can bear what others cannot has found a consolation as warm as any affirmation, the consolation of standing above the herd that needs consoling. She sells the absence of comfort and draws the deepest comfort of all from selling it. The decoder reads everyone in the room and never the hand that holds the ring.
And the one good her method cannot reach is the thing the harassed girl wanted. Not to crack the code. To be inside the room without having to crack it. To be held by the herd and not have to map it first. Her system buys her legibility, mastery, the safety of the one who sees the ambush coming, and it cannot buy the good that has no incentive under it, the belonging that asks for no explanation, the warmth that survives no translation into drives. She can tell you why he strays and why she clings and why the rude man shoves. She cannot, from inside the frame, hand a reader the held hand the frame files under sentiment. She won the war against being fooled. The prize for winning it is a world with all the strings in view and none of the magic left, the safest room to stand in and the loneliest.
So the figure stands, the girl who could not read the room and made herself the woman who reads it best, who took science as her church and disillusion as her courage and the decoding of the animal as her rise above it. Her hero is the realist who is never surprised again. Her immortality is the code cracked and handed on, the readers who learned to see the strings. And the price she pays and cannot name is enchantment, the unearned grace she calls sentiment, the belonging that needs no key. She spent a life making the room legible. Legible is not the same as home.
Borrowed Authority: Amy Alkon Through Stephen Turner on Expertise
Alkon’s career is an argument about who gets to claim cognitive authority over love, sex, and manners. She holds no credential in psychology or biology. She built her standing by importing her understanding of David Buss, Robert Trivers, and Joseph LeDoux into a genre that ran on maternal intuition. Turner on second-hand knowledge, how laymen borrow and redistribute expert authority they cannot verify, describes what she does for a living. She brokers borrowed expertise and her friendships with scholars also results in a type of scholarly review. Turner on populist distrust of experts fits her anti-bureaucratic streak too: she attacks the therapeutic establishment, defensive medicine, and the TSA while leaning hard on a rival priesthood, the evolutionary psychologists. She distrusts credentialed authority and depends on it at the same time.
Turner divides experts by the kind of acceptance they command. Some hold authority no one disputes. A structural engineer’s competence does not turn on whether the public likes him. Others hold authority only over a following, an audience that grants them standing the wider world withholds. Alkon belongs to the second kind. No psychology department certifies her. No licensing board lists her. Her authority lives in her readers and listeners, and it lasts as long as they keep granting it. Turner names the problem of such experts the problem of how a claim becomes authoritative for people who cannot test it. That is the whole question of Alkon’s career.
Her readers will rarely check the evolutionary psychology she cites. Few have read Buss in the original. Fewer can judge whether his findings on mate retention survive replication. They take Alkon’s word that the science says what she reports. Alkon, in turn, takes the journals’ word. The authority runs down a chain of trust, reader to columnist to researcher to study, and almost no one in the chain tests the link above him. Modern men live on knowledge they cannot produce or audit. They trust the man who seems to stand closer to the source. Alkon’s craft is to seem to stand closer to the source.
The citation does the work. In an older advice column the writer earned trust through tone, sympathy, the sense of a wise woman who had lived. Alkon swapped that for the apparatus of science: the named researcher, the study, the term of art. The form of expertise replaced the substance of credential. A reader who sees “Robert Trivers showed” feels the pull of an authority he cannot question, and the feeling transfers to Alkon, who summoned the name. She manufactures cognitive authority out of the gestures of science without holding the membership that licenses scientists. Turner’s interest in how expertise gets recognized, rather than how it gets earned, opens this up. Recognition can run ahead of certification, or apart from it.
Advice needs judgment no study supplies. Buss might describe a pattern across thousands of mating decisions. He says nothing about the woman who wrote to Alkon last week. The move from the general finding to the particular counsel is discretion, and discretion is where Turner locates the deepest trouble with experts. The expert smuggles his own judgment into the space the data leaves open and presents the result as knowledge. Alkon’s columns run on this. The citation supplies the authority, the discretion supplies the advice, and the reader receives the second as if it carried the warrant of the first.
Alkon attacks the therapeutic establishment, defensive medicine, the self-esteem industry, the TSA. She also asks the public to trust her reading of LeDoux on fear conditioning. Turner shows why both sit in one person without strain. The modern argument is rarely expertise against ignorance. It is one body of experts against another, each calling the rival illegitimate and asking the public to choose. Alkon’s populism selects. She distrusts the guilds that bore her and trusts the guild that arms her. The evolutionary psychologists become the honest scientists, the clinicians and bureaucrats the self-serving priesthood. The public gets invited to shift its trust from one set of experts it cannot evaluate to another set it cannot evaluate.
Because her standing comes from an audience rather than an institution, it stays contestable in a way a licensed expert’s does not. A board-certified physician keeps his authority when patients dislike him. Alkon keeps hers only while the audience keeps granting it. This explains the shape of her career better than any account of her ideas. When the newspapers collapsed, her authority did not rest on the papers, so it survived the move to the blog, the podcast, the newsletter. She carried her following with her because the following, not the institution, was the source. Turner’s point that some experts are made by their audiences predicts both her durability and her exposure. She cannot lose a credential she never held. She can be abandoned by readers who stop granting the trust.
The TSA fight gathers all of this. She objects to a search, names the procedure assault on her blog, and turns a private grievance into a public case against administrative power. The episode reads as a citizen against the state. In Turner’s terms it is also one claimant to authority refusing the authority of another. The screener acts on delegated expertise, the security apparatus, the post-9/11 risk calculus, the official judgment about what keeps a plane safe. Alkon refuses to grant it and offers her own judgment in its place. She does to the security expert what she does to the clinician and the academic. She declines the borrowed authority she cannot check and substitutes the borrowed authority she prefers.
Turner’s frame leaves Alkon as a figure of the age. She is the expert with no credential, the authority made of citation and audience, the populist who fights one priesthood in the name of another. Her readers trust her because she seems to stand near the science. She stands as near as a skilled redistributor can, and no nearer. The structure holds on trust that runs in one direction and verification that almost never runs back.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) says every man needs a way to feel he counts beyond his own death. Culture hands him the script. Religion is the old one. Science, romantic love, money, art, and nation are the secular replacements. Alkon converts from the inherited scripts, etiquette and religion and sentimental wisdom, to science. Science becomes the thing that confers worth on her and order on the world. Her mission is to carry it to a herd that lives on comforting illusion. That is a hero system. She is the truth-bringer.
Then the twist. Becker says the hero flees the body. He denies that he is an animal that defecates and dies. Alkon’s science is evolutionary psychology, the study of the animal, the drives, the mating, the carcass under the manners. She does not flee the creature. She names it. But naming it is its own escape. The man who maps the strings stands above the puppet. I am not only the animal in heat; I am the one who sees why the animal acts. Mastery becomes the transcendence. She rises above creatureliness by explaining creatureliness. Becker would know the move. Knowing the worm is a way of not being the worm.
Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence is the hero system. The title promises guts. The book tells the reader to walk through fear by acting, to build a self through brave repetition against the alarm in LeDoux’s circuits. Becker says heroism is the central problem of a human life, the need to feel of cosmic use. Her self-help is a manual for it. Face the fear, act, become someone. Strip the cosmic scale off it and the shape remains: courage against dread, worth earned by the act.
Her enemies fit the frame. The self-esteem movement sells immortality on the cheap, worth without the act, significance through affirmation. Sentimental advice and defensive medicine sell comfort over truth. Alkon strips the illusions. Here Becker sharpens the read. The man who claims to see through every comforting lie has made a hero out of disillusion. He is the brave one who looks at the hard thing and does not flinch. Her behavioral realism is this heroism. The reward is significance. I can bear what you cannot.
I See Rude People extends it. Manners hold the symbolic world together against decay. The rude man carries disorder into the shared space. Becker’s Escape from Evil describes how we find the rot in others and purify the world by fighting them. Her crusade against discourtesy reads as the hero defending the human order against the disorder that creatureliness keeps pushing up.
Becker pays best where death-anxiety runs hot, the artist, the zealot, the man building a monument against oblivion. Alkon runs cool. She is practical, funny, deflationary. She rarely speaks of death or legacy or cosmic meaning. So you supply most of the dread the frame needs. The hero system is real, but it sits under the surface, and you build it out rather than read it off the page.
Alkon’s hero system is science used as disillusion, and a hero system built on seeing through every hero system is still a hero system. She escapes the animal by knowing it. She escapes death by being the one brave enough to name it.
The Voice
Amy Alkon told one interviewer that a reader who wants a lie should write to Dear Abby, who will be nice, while she herself tells people how it is. She frames the kindness of the older columnists as dishonesty and her own bluntness as respect. The persona follows from that stance. Brassy, combative, allergic to comfort.
The diction collides two registers. She reaches for the vocabulary of behavioral science, then drops it next to slang and profanity in the same breath. In one column she names female intrasexual competition, the clinical term, and a sentence later writes “de-hotify” and tells women to put on a pair of pants. She pairs the technical language of competition between women with a strip-club reductio aimed at the logic she rejects. The collision is the style. A Latinate research term sits beside “lemme,” and the gap between them carries the wit. Her book titles work the same seam, the profanity printed as a dare, manners and obscenity yoked in a single phrase.
Her rhetoric rests on a single authority move. Where the older columnists grounded their counsel in moral tradition or religion, Alkon grounds hers in data. The recurring gesture is “here’s what the science says,” the study cited as the thing that ends the argument. Evolutionary psychology supplies most of the material, and she treats biology as the trump card against wishful thinking and ideology. She likes the counterintuitive finding, the result that offends the reader’s politics, and she presents the offense as proof of honesty. The argument runs: you will not like this, which is how you know it is true.
The speaking manner carries the same charge. In interviews and on her podcast she talks fast, opinionated, and willing to turn the edge on herself. She catches herself acting like a jerk and says so. She told another interviewer she dislikes regulation and prefers shaming people into better behavior, and that line captures the libertarian streak that runs under the science. Order through ridicule rather than rules. Her crusade against rude strangers in I See Rude People works the same way, the cell-phone talker and the bad driver shamed in print, the column as enforcement.
The address is always second person and always direct. She names the writer’s problem, supplies the behavioral account of why people behave that way, then hands over a prescription for action. The structure is diagnosis, mechanism, marching orders. Tough love, and the love arrives mostly as the toughness. She favors fairly traditional conclusions about men and women even while writing for alternative weeklies that lean left, and the friction between her venue and her verdicts gives the column some of its heat.
The cost of the method is the cost of any voice built on a single authority. When the science she cites is sound, the bluntness reads as bracing. When the evolutionary story is thinner than she lets on, the same confidence reads as a sales pitch dressed in citations, and the reader cannot tell from her tone which one he is getting. The persona never signals doubt. That is the trade she made. She gained a brand and a sharp instrument and gave up the register of uncertainty, which means the writing tells the truth and overstates its own certainty at the same time.
The Set
Amy Alkon sits at the center of a Los Angeles set that runs on a single conviction: human nature is real, evolution built it, and the brave thing is to say so. She lives in Venice and hosts a salon there, a recurring gathering of science writers, evolutionary psychologists, skeptics, libertarian-leaning journalists, and a few comedians. The room admires David Buss, Steven Pinker, Robert Trivers, and Robert Wright. The podcast circuit that carries the set’s voice runs through Michael Shermer (b. 1954), Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, and Scott Barry Kaufman. Alkon presides as President of the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society, which gives the social world an institutional spine and a flag.
What they value is evidence, plain talk, and nerve. They prize the man or woman who reads the journal article, cites the study, and then says the unwelcome thing the study implies. They like profanity in the service of rigor. They distrust euphemism, sentimentality, and the soft pieties of the therapeutic culture. They think most people flinch from biology, and they take pride in not flinching. Manners they treat as a duty owed to strangers, and Alkon built two books on the idea that rudeness is a small theft from the commons and that science can tell us how to repair it. Action over feeling runs through her self-help work too. The message of Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence is that you change by doing, not by waiting to feel ready.
Their hero is the fearless empiricist. He follows the data off the cliff if the data point that way. He defends free speech against the mob. He holds the line on innate sex differences while colleagues at the universities lose their nerve. Courage plus citations equals virtue. The villain is the blank-slater, the wishful thinker, the censorious moralist, and the narcissist who treats the public square as his living room. Alkon’s long campaign against rude people gives the set a recurring antagonist: the man who lets his car alarm scream, who talks loud in the cafe, who feels no obligation to anyone he cannot see. The hero opposes him with science and spine.
Status in this world comes from proximity to the real scientists and from performance at the table. Knowing Buss, having Pinker answer your email, getting the nod from Shermer, landing the Rogan or Carolla spot, giving the TED talk, holding the syndication across a hundred papers as the industry collapsed around you. These are the rank markers. Inside the salon the currency is wit and fearlessness. The person who can make the room laugh while delivering an uncomfortable finding wins the evening. Alkon’s own rise tells the set’s story about itself. She survived the death of the newspaper advice column by branding herself the one columnist whose counsel rests on research rather than a wise woman’s intuition. The set reads that as the triumph of evidence over folk authority, which flatters everyone in the room.
Their normative claims are firm and few. Be honest. Be civil to strangers. Follow the evidence. Defend open inquiry and open speech. Take responsibility for your own conduct rather than blaming feelings or circumstance. Do not lie to people to spare them, and do not lie to yourself. Civility here carries moral weight, and so does intellectual honesty, and the two fuse into a single picture of the decent person: brave, considerate, and unsentimental about facts.
Their essentialist claims sit underneath all of it. Men and women differ by nature, shaped over deep time by different reproductive pressures. Mate preferences, jealousy, attraction, status striving, and risk-taking are wired, not learned from a magazine. Human nature exists, it is roughly the same across the species, and culture decorates it more than it makes it. The set treats this as settled science and treats denial of it as the central intellectual cowardice of the age. Alkon’s column applies the claim a thousand times over, telling a heartbroken reader that his ex behaved the way Darwinian theory predicts. The science says so, and saying so is the whole point.
The strain in the set is the one its own commitments invite. A circle that prizes following evidence wherever it leads also has a house view it rarely turns the same skepticism against, and the readers who trust Alkon’s citations seldom read the papers behind them. The authority she sells as evidence still arrives, for most of her audience, as her word.
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) treats essentialism as a recurring error in social explanation. The error works like this. You start with a word that picks out a rough class of behavior. You then decide the word names a real thing, a single hidden essence shared across every case, internally uniform, sitting beneath the surface and causing what you see. The naming feels like an explanation. Turner says it is not one. You have inferred the essence from the behavior and then turned around and explained the behavior by the essence. The circle closes and no causal work gets done.
Amy Alkon runs on essences. Her column names female intrasexual competition and treats it as a property women carry, the same in each of them, an evolved feature of the female mind that explains why women police other women’s sexiness. Turner’s question is the one she never answers. Where is this thing, and how did it get into each woman in the identical form the explanation requires? She points to natural selection, to the species, to deep time. That is a story about origins. It is not an account of why this woman, in this marriage, on this Tuesday, does what she does. The essence gets posited, not traced. She sees the behavior, infers the underlying nature, then presents the nature as the cause of the behavior she started from.
Turner’s complaint sharpens around her favorite phrase, the claim that science reveals how we think and behave. The “we” does the damage. It converts a statistical tendency across a sample into a fixed interior object owned by everyone. Turner is a nominalist about these collective nouns. He thinks what you have in front of you is a spread of individuals, each with his own history and his own habits, and that the average is a number, not a thing living inside anyone. Alkon takes the average and installs it in every skull as an essence. The differences among women, which on Turner’s view are the actual phenomena, become noise around a type that exists nowhere except in her explanation.
The depth move is where the two collide hardest. Alkon trades on a picture where the evolved nature is the truth and the social surface is the costume, and her whole pose as truth-teller depends on it. She gets to say she shows you what you are under the manners. Turner distrusts that picture at the root. He resists the positing of a hidden real essence beneath the appearances, because the essence is built out of the appearances and adds nothing to them but a feeling of having reached bedrock. When Alkon says the counterintuitive finding exposes our real nature, Turner hears a category dressed as a discovery.
She would answer that she has the science, that selection pressures gave the species a common architecture, and that her essences are not metaphysics but biology. The honest reply marks where the frame bites and where it strains. Turner’s anti-essentialism, pushed hard, can slide toward denying any stable human regularity at all, and that is its own excess. The careful evolutionary psychologists Alkon draws on often speak in distributions, reaction norms, conditional strategies, and probabilities, and that language survives Turner’s objection better than she does. Her trouble is that she does not speak that way. She speaks in essences. Women compete. We behave thus. The finding shows what you are. She takes claims her sources hedge and hardens them into fixed natures, and the hardening is the move Turner built the critique to catch. The frame lands hard on her rhetoric. It lands on the underlying research only where the research forgets to keep counting individuals and starts naming a soul for the species.
Turner wrote a book called Explaining the Normative, and its target is the belief that there exists a separate normative order, a realm of binding oughts and shared standards, that explains why people behave as they do and holds them to account. The theorists he attacks watch people act in regular ways and judge each other right or wrong, then posit a norm behind the regularity, a standard everyone is committed to, a force that obligates. Turner says the posited thing does no work. Trace the binding force of any norm and it dissolves into facts about individuals: habits, training, expected sanctions, feelings of obligation, what people do and what they fear others will do if they stop. The “ought” never floats free. It always cashes out as an “is,” and the normative order added on top explains nothing the facts did not already explain.
Amy Alkon presents herself as the woman who escaped all that. Dear Abby ran on shoulds, on manners and morality and sentiment. Alkon swapped them for science. She gives you the facts of human nature and lets the facts speak. No preaching, no etiquette, no moralism. The data says, and that ends it.
Turner shows the should never left. It only changed costume. Advice trades in oughts. Every time Alkon tells a reader what to do, she issues a prescription, and a prescription is a normative claim. The science gives her an is. The reader wrote in for an ought. Between the finding about how women compete and the instruction to go act on it sits a gap that no quantity of research crosses, and Alkon hops the gap without noticing she has done it. She says the data says, as if that answered the question, when the question was never what is true but what to do about it. Turner’s point is that her “the data says” terminates one inquiry and pretends to terminate a second one it never touched.
Press her on where the authority of her advice comes from and the regress Turner describes opens up. Why should the reader heed her? Because the advice fits his evolved nature. Why should he care about that? Because following nature works better, gets him the mate, lowers the conflict. Why should he pursue what works? At some point the chain stops, and it stops not at a normative fact glowing in the dark but at a brute desire the reader happens to have, or a habit, or the sting of failing if he ignores her. That is exactly where Turner says it always stops. Alkon never walks the chain down, because she treats the first link, the finding, as if it were the whole staircase.
I See Rude People is where the hidden normativity shows. There she enforces. She shames the loud cell-phone talker, the bad driver, the man who reclines into your lap, and she treats their conduct as a violation of a standard that exists and binds them. Turner asks what standard, located where, binding by what force. His answer is that nothing is out there being violated. What exists is Alkon’s trained revulsion at discourtesy, her preference for quiet and consideration, and her wish to run a system of sanctions against people who breach it. She dresses that preference as a norm everyone already owes allegiance to. This is the move Turner names most often, the laundering of a personal standard into a binding obligation that others have somehow signed. Later she backs the courtesy with evolutionary talk about reputation and cooperation, which only relocates the laundering from manners to biology. The should still rides on her habit and her appetite to punish, not on any order in the world.
Her “we” carries the same freight. She writes about how we think, what we want, the way we behave, and she treats departure from the evolved pattern as error, as getting reality wrong. Error against what? The pattern is a count, a tendency across a population. Calling deviation a mistake imports a standard of correctness the count cannot supply. Her contempt for people who reject inconvenient findings works the same way. She runs an epistemic norm, follow the evidence, and presents it as self-evidently binding on all. Turner deflates even that. The grip of “follow the evidence” comes from her training and from communities that sanction the non-compliant, not from a normative fact suspended above the practice. She mistakes the force of her own discipline for the force of the cosmos.
A limit. Many philosophers think Turner clears the room too fast, that he discards real normative phenomena along with the inflated metaphysics, and if there are genuine prudential or moral truths then some of Alkon’s shoulds might carry force his account denies them. And Alkon has a clean defense available, one that survives the frame. She can say she never issues moral oughts at all, only hypothetical ones. If you want a partner, then given how attraction works, do this. The force of that advice reduces to the reader’s own desire plus the facts, which is precisely the deflationary picture Turner accepts. When she stays inside the conditional, when she says if you want X then the evidence points to Y, she is clean. No normative order needed, no empty appeal, just a want and a fact. She breaks the frame when she leaves the conditional and starts telling you how things should be, sneering at those who see reality wrong, enforcing courtesy as a debt the rude owe the world. There the free-floating ought returns, and there Turner’s emptied hand closes on nothing.
Pinsof gives advice two conditions for being anything other than bullshit. The advisor needs expertise about your situation and a stake in your success. Amy Alkon meets neither, and the column form guarantees she cannot.
She answers a letter. She has changed a detail or two, by her own account, to protect the writer, which means she does not know the writer at all. She has the page, not the person. Her expertise runs to populations, studies, the average case in evolutionary psychology, and Pinsof’s point is that population knowledge is not situational knowledge. Knowing how women compete on average tells her nothing about whether this woman, in this marriage, with this history, should do the thing the data suggests. And the stake fails worse. She gains nothing if the writer’s life improves and loses nothing if it falls apart. The incentive runs toward advice that sounds good in print, not advice that works in a kitchen in Ohio. By the frame, the whole enterprise is structurally bullshit before she writes a word.
The science is where Alkon would object, and it is where Pinsof closes the door hardest. He says the rigor does not matter. A status thief with citations is still a status thief. Worse, the citation sharpens the status move rather than softening it. “Here is what the data says” carries the subtext Pinsof names: I know things you do not, I am better informed, I won the right to instruct you. The “Advice Goddess” title makes the claim and laughs at itself in the same breath, but the claim still stands. Goddess. She won the status game, the syndication and the awards and the television, and the winnings convert into the right to dispense, exactly as the frame predicts.
Look at the reader’s side and the picture holds. Writing to a syndicated columnist is the polite ambush Pinsof describes. The writer submits to a higher-status stranger without looking submissive, because asking for advice launders the submission. The anonymous letter is the cleanest version of the move. And the column flatters both ways. The writer is presumed to have good goals and the capacity to change, the critics are dismissed as fools, and the advisor confirms her own standing each week by having something to give.
Then rationalization, which cuts at Alkon’s central boast. She sells herself as the one who refuses comfort, who tells you how it is while Dear Abby tells you a lie. Pinsof would read the bluntness as a different flavor of the same product. Most advice justifies what the person already wanted, and “here is what the data says” makes excellent cover, because a scientific finding gives the reader a respectable story for a decision he had half made. Her evolutionary accounts often land on fairly traditional conclusions about men and women. A reader already inclined that way gets permission stamped with a study. The bluntness is not the opposite of flattery. It flatters the reader who wants to think of himself as too tough for flattery.
The loyalty function fits her almost too well. She runs in alternative weeklies and takes positions that offend their politics, and she presents the offense as proof of honesty. Pinsof would call that tribal aid. The counterintuitive finding that annoys the progressive reader is a flag, a way of signaling which side she plays for, and the strip-club jab is the salute. The science is the uniform.
One-size-fits-all, the frame’s plainest complaint, is built into syndication. The same words print in a hundred papers for a hundred thousand different lives. And nobody audits the result. The column never reports whether last year’s advice worked for anyone like the writer. The authority is the footnote, not the track record. Pinsof’s whole indictment, that we care about who gives advice and not whether it works, describes the advice column as a form.
Where she ends is where Pinsof refuses to go. He withholds the takeaway and calls the hollow call to action the writer’s way of grooming the reader. Alkon always closes with marching orders, the prescription, the thing to go do. By the frame, that closing gesture is the grooming itself, the pat on the fur that says we are allies now.
A limit. Aggregated findings sometimes beat individual intuition even when the advisor knows nothing about the individual, because base rates outperform gut feeling in many domains, and a person reasoning from his own case is the worst-placed judge of it. Alkon’s defense is not crazy. The trouble is that she rarely marks the line between a finding strong enough to override your instinct and a just-so story dressed as one, and her tone never signals which she is selling.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, Amy Alkon has a problem at the foundation of her enterprise, and the problem is sharper because half of her already agrees with him.
Start with where they overlap. Alkon built her brand on evolutionary psychology. She tells readers their brains evolved for small bands, that modern anonymity creates mismatch, that we are tribal animals wearing business casual. That is Mearsheimer’s anthropology. She accepts the premise that humans are social creatures shaped by forces older and deeper than reason.
Then look at her prescriptions. They run the other way. Write the boundary-setting script. Confront the loud cell phone talker. Rewire your fear response through behavior. Read the studies and act on them. Every remedy assumes an atomistic actor who can reason her way out of conditioning. Mearsheimer ranks reason as the weakest of the three sources of our preferences, below innate sentiment and far below socialization. If he is right, Alkon diagnoses like a Mearsheimerian and prescribes like the liberal he is attacking. She sells reason as the cure to readers whose problems, on her own account of human nature, came from socialization that reason can barely touch.
The genre sits on the same fault line. The advice column exists because the thick social world Mearsheimer describes has thinned. A reader embedded in the kind of society he thinks humans need might ask her mother, her priest, her neighbor of thirty years. The person who writes to a syndicated stranger has lost those channels. So Alkon’s business model depends on the atomization her science says damages people. She profits from the condition she documents. A doctor can do that honorably. It gets awkward when the doctor’s politics celebrate the disease, and Alkon’s libertarian individualism does celebrate it. Her rights-talk, her insistence on the sovereign individual managing his own life through evidence, is the ideology Mearsheimer calls a delusion when exported abroad and a half-truth at home.
Her manners crusade shows the bind in miniature. She treats rudeness as individual failure, correctable one confronted boor at a time. Mearsheimer might say rudeness is what you get when strangers replace members, when no group reputation constrains anyone. You cannot script your way back to a village. The fix is communal or it is nothing, and she has no communal program because her individualism forbids one.
If socialization beats reason, her readers do not change because she argues well. They read her because reading her marks membership in a tribe, the tribe of the science-minded and the unsentimental, the people who roll their eyes together at therapeutic culture. The column works as ritual, not instruction. Her audience is a coalition that thinks of itself as a collection of individuals. Which means that if Mearsheimer is right, Alkon’s career does not refute him. It is one more data point for him, a rationalist congregation gathered around a preacher who tells them they need no congregation.
