Ryan Lizza (b. 1976) is an American political journalist whose career maps the transformation of Washington reporting across three decades. He came of age professionally in the era of prestige political magazines, and he arrived at the era of newsletters, podcasts, and direct-to-subscriber publishing. He has held positions at The New Republic, The New Yorker, Politico, Esquire, GQ, New York Magazine, and CNN, and he later founded an independent venture on Substack. The institutions changed around him. His central preoccupation held steady. He studies the internal operation of political power: the way ambitious people build coalitions, gather influence, move through institutions, and compete for standing within the American governing class.
Lizza grew up in New Jersey and studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His earliest work came at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and he contributed to the Emmy Award-winning PBS Frontline documentary Hot Guns. In 1998 he joined The New Republic. There he covered the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 presidential election, the Florida recount, the George W. Bush administration, and the political realignments of the post-Cold War decade. During these years he developed the reporting method that defined the rest of his career. He interviewed intensively, cultivated insider sources, and reconstructed political decision-making from the vantage point of the participants themselves.
He established a national reputation during his decade as Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, from 2007 to 2017. He became an influential political magazine writer of his generation. His reporting married narrative storytelling to unusual access, reaching into campaigns, congressional offices, and presidential administrations. He explained not merely what politicians believed but how they operated. His articles often read as compressed political biographies, tracing the formation of leaders through their ambitions, their alliances, and their strategic calculations.
His coverage of Barack Obama stands among his early contributions. Lizza recognized Obama’s political potential before many of his peers and produced influential reporting on Obama’s intellectual and political formation. His 2008 article “The Agitator” reconstructed Obama’s Chicago years, examining his work as a community organizer and his exposure to the pragmatic organizing traditions associated with Saul Alinsky. The article complicated simpler portraits of Obama as either a pure idealist or a conventional machine politician. Lizza presented a disciplined strategist who blended idealistic rhetoric with a sophisticated grasp of political organization and institutional power.
His reporting during the 2012 campaign deepened his standing. He obtained and analyzed a seventy-six-page strategic memorandum prepared by Obama campaign manager Jim Messina that laid out the campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes. The document exposed the data-driven character of modern campaigning and gave readers a rare look at the campaign’s internal assumptions. His reporting on Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan shaped elite perceptions of Ryan as both an intellectual leader of conservatism and a sign of where the party intended to go.
The most famous episode of his career came in July 2017, during the opening days of the Trump administration. Newly appointed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci telephoned Lizza to complain about a report concerning a White House dinner. During the call, which Lizza recorded, Scaramucci delivered a profanity-laced attack on senior administration figures, among them Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Lizza published the exchange in The New Yorker. The story became a national sensation overnight and fed the turmoil around Scaramucci’s tenure, which ended eleven days after it began. The episode shows Lizza’s method at its purest. He uncovered no hidden document and exposed no concealed wrongdoing. He created the conditions under which a powerful actor revealed himself.
The Scaramucci interview also drew out the strengths and the limits of access journalism. Admirers read the article as a triumph of reporting that laid bare the disorder of the Trump White House. Critics read it as evidence that political journalism had grown entangled with the personalities and dramas of the people it covered. Both readings have force, and the episode holds a permanent place in the history of Washington media.
Lizza belongs to a tradition that might be called elite-network journalism. He works in the lineage of Richard Ben Cramer, Mark Leibovich, and Evan Thomas. Like them, he treats politics as a social world organized by relationships, rivalries, ambitions, and informal hierarchies. His reporting resembles a form of elite anthropology. He does not approach institutions as abstract structures. He watches how individuals maneuver inside them and how personal ties shape outcomes.
His career also carries controversy. He left The New Yorker in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct, which he disputed. The dispute unfolded at the height of the #MeToo movement and reshaped his public reputation. Later public conflict with political journalist Olivia Nuzzi drew further legal and media attention. These episodes complicated public assessments of his work and entered the broader record of his career.
In 2019 Lizza joined Politico as chief Washington correspondent. The move coincided with a structural shift in his field. For much of the twentieth century, prestige and influence gathered in newspapers and magazines. By the 2020s, influence ran increasingly through newsletters, podcasts, and direct-to-consumer political media. Lizza crossed that divide with more success than most.
His most visible role at Politico came as co-author of Politico Playbook, an influential newsletter in American politics. He and Eugene Daniels inherited Playbook from Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, who had in turn succeeded the newsletter’s founder, Mike Allen. Lizza brought a magazine sensibility to the form, adding longer analytical essays and deeper studies of political personalities and institutions. At the same time he hosted the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, extending his work into long-form audio and adapting his method to a new medium.
The Playbook years show how Lizza bridged two eras of political journalism. He kept the narrative instincts and reporting depth of long-form magazine writing. He embraced the speed, immediacy, and audience engagement that digital media demand. Few journalists of his generation moved between these formats with comparable ease.
In 2025 he left Politico to launch Telos on Substack. The decision reflected another shift in the industry, the migration of established journalists away from institutional employers and toward direct relationships with their readers. Like many prominent reporters of his generation, Lizza sought wider editorial independence and ownership of his audience. The move placed him inside the growing ecosystem of independent political journalism that now competes with legacy organizations for influence and readership.
Across his career, Lizza has covered every presidential era from Bill Clinton through Donald Trump, and he has worked through each major phase of modern political media: print magazines, cable commentary, digital journalism, newsletters, podcasts, and subscription publishing. His reporting carries few fixed ideological commitments. It carries a sustained interest in the mechanics of power, in how institutions function, in the people who run them, and in the informal networks that shape outcomes away from public view.
Seen across its full length, the career of Ryan Lizza illustrates a particular kind of American political journalist who flourished in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: highly networked, embedded within elite institutions, drawn to political ambition, and committed to explaining how power operates from the inside. His body of work is a chronicle of the American governing class during a turbulent and transformative passage in the nation’s political history.
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Amy Wax (b. 1953) speaks the way a litigator argues. She trained as a neurologist before she trained as a lawyer, and both disciplines show in how she talks. She builds a case. She states a thesis, marshals evidence, anticipates the objection, then knocks it down. Listen to her on Glenn Loury’s program, or in her lectures, and the structure repeats. The argument moves forward in steps. She rarely wanders.
Her voice carries an educated East Coast cadence, level in pitch, dry in tone. She does not raise her volume to perform passion. The heat in her comes through word choice and pacing, not through shouting. She slows down before a provocative line and gives it weight, so the listener knows a blade is coming. She pauses. The pause does work that emphasis might do for a louder speaker.
Her diction sits high. She reaches for clinical and social-science vocabulary, words like empirical, outcomes, distribution, human capital, dysfunction, selection effects. The neurologist and the appellate advocate both favor precision, and she favors it too. Then, against that elevated register, she drops a blunt colloquialism for shock. She will name a hard claim in plain words right after a paragraph of careful qualification. The contrast is deliberate. The plainness reads as honesty against euphemism, and she wants it to.
Her central rhetorical posture is the truth-teller surrounded by cowards. She presents herself as willing to say aloud what others believe in private but lack the nerve to voice. She treats a taboo as a signal. The harder a claim is to say in polite company, the more she suspects it points at a suppressed truth. This gives her a ready frame for any hostile reaction: opposition confirms her thesis rather than refuting it. She rarely treats pushback as a reason to reconsider. She treats it as proof that the orthodoxy she attacks is real and enforced.
She leans hard on the average-versus-individual distinction. Of course not every member of a group, she will say, but on average the data show such and such. That move lets her state group generalizations while pre-empting the charge that she means every individual. She returns to it often. It is one of her favorite defenses.
She argues from data and from what she calls common sense, and she sets both against academic fashion. She cites studies. She invokes labor-force numbers, marriage rates, test-score gaps. Her 2017 op-ed with Larry Alexander on bourgeois norms gave her a recurring text, and she keeps returning to its themes: work, self-discipline, family formation, deference to authority, and the social cost when those erode. Her later comments on immigration and on the law-school performance of Black students drew the national attention and the Penn sanctions, and she has folded that whole fight into her self-presentation. The university disciplines her, so the university proves her point about how higher education polices inquiry.
Her manner is combative and unapologetic. She does not hedge the way most academics hedge in conversation. She projects certainty. She can be witty, mordant, sarcastic toward opponents, and she enjoys contempt for what she sees as cant. With a friendly host she relaxes into collegial frankness and lets the irony run. In a hostile setting she clips her sentences shorter, talks over softening questions, and refuses premises she dislikes. She resists the loaded question. She reframes it before answering, or she rejects it.
She performs a lack of warmth on purpose. She treats emotional appeal as the enemy of clear thought and presents herself as the hardheaded empiricist who follows the evidence where sentiment fears to go. The coldness is part of the argument. It signals that she has not been captured by the feelings she thinks cloud her colleagues.
A few verbal habits recur. She opens with “Look,” to signal she is about to cut through to the real matter. She uses rhetorical questions and then answers them herself. She speaks in long, clause-heavy sentences that hold together grammatically, the product of a mind trained to write briefs, and then she breaks the rhythm with a short flat declaration. That alternation of the elaborate and the curt is the closest she has to a signature.
What holds the whole performance together is the litigator’s conviction that she is right and that the burden lies on the other side. She does not explore. She presses. The interview, for her, is a venue to advance a case, not to think out loud, and she treats the host less as a partner than as a bench she must persuade.
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Sean Hannity (b. 1961) speaks fast and loud. His voice sits in a bright mid-range tenor, a little nasal, with the flattened vowels of Long Island still in it. On radio he runs hot and quick. On the television monologue he slows down, drops his pitch, and reads off the prompter with a practiced gravity he does not carry in plain conversation.
His diction stays plain and colloquial. He talks the way a contractor talks at a job site, which suits a man who hung wallpaper and tended bar before he found a microphone. He avoids the polysyllable. He reaches for short words and repeats them. “Liberty and freedom” closes his radio hour. “We the people” opens his appeals. He builds a stock of labels and uses them night after night until they harden into brand: “the radical left,” “the destroy-Trump media,” “the deep state.” The repetition does the heavy lifting. A listener hears a tag enough times and stops hearing it as a claim and starts hearing it as a fact about the world.
His rhetoric runs on contrast and enemies. He sorts the country into two camps and keeps them sorted. One side loves the place, works hard, prays, serves. The other side sneers at it and wants to tear it down. He seldom grants the other side a point. He seldom concedes a fact that cuts against him. A Hannity segment runs like a prosecution. Here is the charge, here is the tape, here is the verdict, and the jury knows how to vote before the lights come up.
He loves the rhetorical question and the list. He stacks grievances in quick sequence, each one a small hammer blow, and lets the pile stand in for an argument. He addresses the audience in the second person. He flatters them. He tells them they are the real America, the forgotten ones, the ones the elites look down on. He sets himself among them and against the people above them, though he is a rich man who flies private.
He performs certainty. Doubt does not appear on the air. When the facts shift under him he does not revise. He changes the subject or he attacks the man who brought the facts. He told an interviewer once that he is not a journalist, that he is a talk show host, and the line opens up the whole act. He owes nothing to the standards of the newsroom. He owes everything to the loyalty of the audience.
In interviews his manner bends to the guest. With an ally he nods, feeds the line, clears the path. With an opponent he talks over the answer, springs the trap question, refuses the long reply. He does well in the short combative exchange and badly in the slow one. The format pays for heat, and he supplies it.
What holds the act together is repetition and the convincing show of sincerity. He believes, or sounds like he believes, and he says the same thing tomorrow that he said today. The audience comes back for the constancy more than for any single point.
The Set
The Hannity set lives in the conservative talk world that Roger Ailes (1940-2017) built and Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) fathered. Limbaugh set the form on radio. Ailes moved it to television and gave it Fox News. Hannity came up inside both. He rose under Ailes, shared the patriarch’s blessing with Limbaugh, and now stands as a senior man of the house.
They love the country and say so without irony. They love the flag, the soldier, the cop, the church, the family, the free market, the founding. They prize the self-made man who rises without the right schools or the right name. Hannity dropped out of college and swung a hammer, and he wears that as proof of standing. They prize plain speech and distrust the man who talks like a professor. They prize toughness, loyalty, and the will to fight. They hold work as the path to worth and treat the handout as rot.
The hero of the set is the fighter who never apologizes. He takes the blows from the press and the courts and the universities, and he stands back up and swings again. Trump fills the role now, the man who absorbs every charge and refuses to bend, and the set reads his refusal as courage rather than stubbornness. Limbaugh fills the role of the fallen patriarch, the martyr who took the abuse for decades and died at his post. The hero is also the ordinary man the set claims to speak for: the trucker, the rancher, the small-business owner, the Marine. He suffers contempt from his betters and wins in the end because the people love him.
Ratings settle rank among them. The man with the biggest audience sits highest. Access to Trump sits close behind, since a word from the President can lift a host or sink him. The attack from the enemy raises a man rather than lowers him. To draw the hatred of the New York Times or the ban of a network confers the badge of the martyr. Wealth counts as proof of merit, so the private jet and the beach house draw no shame even from men who speak for the working class. The sharpest game runs on combat. The host who lands the hardest blow on the left climbs.
They hold America good and exceptional, and to say otherwise marks a man as the enemy. Hard work earns its reward. The family and the church hold the country up. The border must hold. The soldier and the cop deserve honor. Patriotism is a duty. Merit beats charity. The free market sorts the worthy from the rest.
Their claims about human nature run sharp. There exists a real America and a false one, and the line runs by nature, not by choice. The ordinary citizen carries a common sense the credentialed elite has lost. The left hates the country in its character, not by accident of policy. The media lies by its nature. The elite holds the common man in contempt as a fixed trait of its kind. Men and women differ by nature, and the attempt to blur the line offends the order of things. Character runs deep and does not move. The fighter fights, the radical wrecks, the patriot loves.
Loyalty and betrayal form the master axis of the set. The cardinal virtue is loyalty to the tribe and its hero. The cardinal sin is the betrayal of going soft, apologizing to the enemy, or sneering at your own people. Strength stands as good and weakness as shame. The set forgives a fighter almost any fault so long as he keeps fighting and never bends a knee. It forgives a turncoat nothing. Carlson and Trump kept their standing through scandal because they kept attacking. A man who breaks ranks to side with the press or the prosecutors falls fast and far. Plain faith, plain speech, and a hard punch carry a man up. Doubt, nuance, and apology carry him down.
The tension runs through all of it, and the set does not resolve it. These men preach the dignity of the forgotten worker from the richest perch in American media, on a network owned by an Australian-born billionaire and his son. They sell anti-elitism while sitting at the top of an elite. They praise the self-made man while standing on platforms others built and fortunes others banked. The audience does not punish the gap. The audience wants the fight more than the consistency, and the set gives it the fight every night.
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Wikipedia says: “In ecology, contest competition refers to a situation where available resources, such as food and mates, are utilized only by one or a few individuals, thus preventing development or reproduction of other individuals. It refers to a hypothetical situation in which several individuals stage a contest for which one eventually emerges victorious. Contest competition is the opposite of scramble competition, a situation in which available resources are shared equally among individuals.”
Contest competition from biology gives one frame for how human groups fight over things. Two groups can compete for the same resource in two ways. They can crowd in and split it thin, or one group can seize it and lock the others out. The first way is scramble. The second is contest.
Most human group competition runs on contest rather than scramble whenever a resource can be held. A guild controls a trade and bars outsiders. An ethnic network corners a market niche and hires its own. A party takes a legislature and writes the rules to keep itself in. A cartel divides territory and kills rivals who cross the line. In each case a few win the whole prize and the rest get little or nothing.
The ecology predicts the shape this takes. Contest competition stabilizes the winner. A group that holds a monopoly secures its share first, so it survives lean years and shocks that wipe out groups with no protected claim. The medieval guild keeps its members fed when free laborers starve. The incumbent party keeps its patronage flowing when challengers go hungry for office. Stability rewards the holder, and the holder fights to keep it stable.
Scramble runs the opposite course. When a resource sits in the open and no group can fence it, everyone piles in. Returns rise with the first arrivals and then collapse as numbers climb. A gold rush. An open fishery. A profession that floods with graduates until wages fall. These produce boom and bust, the human version of the chaotic population swings the article describes for scramble species. The commons gets ruined because no group holds it long enough to ration it.
So the first question for any human contest is whether the resource can be held. A port, a capital, a fertile valley, a broadcast band, a single chokepoint in a supply chain. These clump, and groups form to seize and defend them. Dispersed resources resist monopoly and push competition toward scramble.
Rank inside the group follows the logic the primate studies show. Higher-ranked members take first and most. The gorilla finding carries a warning, though. Among mountain gorillas the top females breed more, yet their energy intake does not differ from the bottom. The fight for rank buys reproductive advantage without buying more food. Human status contests run this way often. Men fight hard for a position whose material payoff stays small, because the payoff comes in standing and in the next generation rather than in the lunch.
The butterfly result points at how these contests resolve. Male speckled wood butterflies hold territory with no size or strength tell to mark the winner. Motivation decides. The male who has spent more time with a female fights harder and tends to beat the holder. Human contests resolve the same way more than men like to admit. Raw merit often fails to predict the winner. Who wants it more wins. Who has sunk more into the fight wins. Who stands to lose more if he quits wins. The incumbent who has held the ground and built on it defends with a persistence the challenger cannot match, which is why entrenched groups outlast better-funded rivals.
One caution on the transfer. Animal contest competition assumes the prize feeds straight into survival and breeding. Human groups fight over prizes whose link to survival runs through long chains of money, law, and prestige. A faction can win the contest and gain nothing it can eat, the way the gorilla gains rank with no extra food. So when you watch a human group seize and hold a resource, the open question is what the win buys. Sometimes it buys the future. Sometimes it buys rank and nothing more.
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The podcast runs on a two-man comic structure, and the two men do not sound alike. The whole show works because their voices fit together without blurring. Michael Hobbes (b. 1982) talks fast and runs hot. He is the one who builds momentum, piling clause on clause until the sentence becomes a small avalanche. He came to the show from You’re Wrong About and Maintenance Phase, and he carries the journalist’s habit of narrating: he summarizes a book’s argument, then walks you through why it falls apart, step by step, with the rising irritation of a man who has read the whole thing so you don’t have to. His signature register is incredulous escalation. He starts at a normal pitch, finds something absurd in the text, and his voice climbs until he hits a kind of comic exasperation, often capped with profanity. He likes the sweeping verdict. He gave the show its founding line when he called airport books “the superspreader events of American stupidity.” That is pure Hobbes: a phrase built to be quoted, hyperbolic by design, contemptuous and funny at once. Peter Shamshiri (b. 1985) is the lawyer, and he sounds like one. He hosts 5-4, the Supreme Court show, and he brings the litigator’s manner to a book review. He is drier than Hobbes, slower, more deadpan. Where Hobbes erupts, Shamshiri lands the line flat and lets it sit. His move is the mock-concession: he grants the author a point, sets it up with lawyerly patience (“So yes, many people do choose unhappiness over instability. I agree with that. But that’s because…”), then pulls the rug. He builds an argument the way you build a case, premise by premise, and the joke arrives as the conclusion. He also handles the historical and structural material, the part where the show explains how a fraud actually operated or where an idea came from. His humor is wrier and colder than Hobbes’s. He smirks where Hobbes shouts.
The diction across both men is deliberately casual. They swear. They use “like” as a discourse marker, drop into Twitter cadence, reach for the internet’s stock of intensifiers and put-downs. This is a choice, not a limitation. The contrast between juvenile slang and the seriousness of the demolition is part of the comedy. They will dismantle a bestseller’s statistical method with real rigor and then describe the author as a clown. The register mixes graduate-seminar competence with group-chat snark, and the mix is the brand.
The performance is conversational, but it is staged conversation. They are not discovering the book’s flaws live. One host has done the deep reading and arrives loaded; the other plays the surrogate listener who reacts, prompts, and supplies the “wait, he said WHAT” beats that keep a monologue from going flat. They trade the lead role episode to episode, but the rhythm holds: setup, read-aloud of a damning passage, shared disbelief, escalation, verdict. The read-aloud carries a lot of weight. With a target like David Brooks, they have noticed that simply reading his prose in a flat voice does most of the damage. The performance there is restraint, letting the text hang itself.
Their rhetoric is takedown rhetoric, and it has a clear shape. They pick a target with money and status, never someone powerless. They establish the book’s mass influence, then argue that the influence is unearned. They attack on three fronts: the evidence is thin or misused, the reasoning is lazy, the effect on readers is harmful. The harm claim does heavy lifting, because it converts mockery into a moral case. They are not just laughing at a dumb book. They are arguing the book made people dumber, or poorer, or crueler. That framing gives the comedy a target it can feel righteous about.
The show has a known weakness, and the sharper critics name it. Hobbes and Shamshiri reinforce each other. They do not argue. The Irish Times reviewer called the show an almost textbook illustration of the audience-flattery the hosts themselves would mock in a lesser book, two smart men agreeing in front of an audience that already agrees with them. The pleasure is partly the pleasure of confirmation. Their politics run left, their marks run center-right or self-help-guru, and the listener who shares the priors gets to feel both entertained and correct. The hosts can be smug. They lean into snark. They know this about themselves and sometimes name it, which softens it without removing it.
So the two voices map onto two functions. Hobbes is heat, speed, narrative drive, the quotable insult. Shamshiri is cool, structure, the slow legal build, the deadpan kill. One escalates, the other lands. The show needs both. A whole hour of Hobbes would exhaust you; a whole hour of Shamshiri would go cold. Together they run a good-cop-bad-cop without the cop, alternating energy so the contempt never tires and the analysis never drags.
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Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behavior, typically conducted in natural environments. It focuses on understanding both innate instincts and learned behaviors, examining how heredity, evolution, and physiological mechanisms drive how animals interact with their environment.
Ethology is famously structured around Tinbergen’s four questions, proposed by pioneering ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. Researchers look at behavior through two main lenses: Proximate (how a behavior happens) and Ultimate (why the behavior evolved).
Causation (Mechanism): What specific internal and external stimuli (like hormones or nerve responses) trigger the behavior?
Development (Ontogeny): How does the behavior change over the animal’s lifetime?
Evolution (Phylogeny): How does the behavior compare to that of related species, and how did it evolve over time?
Function (Adaptation): How does the behavior improve the animal’s chances of survival and reproduction?
Historical Pioneers
Modern ethology emerged in the 1930s, heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories. The three founders of the discipline—who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—were:
Konrad Lorenz: Known for his work on “imprinting,” where young animals form an attachment to the first moving object or individual they see. Nikolaas Tinbergen: Famously studied fixed action patterns and animal instincts in the wild. Karl von Frisch: Decoded the intricate “waggle dance” used by honeybees to communicate food locations.
Ethology vs. Comparative Psychology
While both study behavior, ethology and comparative psychology take different approaches:
Ethology primarily observes animals in the wild, emphasizing hereditary and evolutionary traits that are unique to a specific species.
Comparative Psychology traditionally relies more on controlled laboratory environments, focusing on learned behaviors and applying general learning models across various species.
Ethology hands the study of man a method and a set of disciplines the social sciences often lack.
The first is Tinbergen’s four questions. When you watch a man act, you can ask four separate things and refuse to let them blur: what sets off the act right now, in his body and his surroundings; how the act grew over his life; how it looks across related species and how it came to exist over evolutionary time; and what the act does for survival and breeding. Most arguments about human behavior collapse these four into one and then fight over the rubble. A man hears that jealousy evolved and assumes this denies that he learned it from his father. Both hold at once. The four questions keep the explanations apart and let each carry its own weight.
The second is the comparative method and the hunt for universals. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1928-2018) carried a hidden camera across cultures and filmed people who had never met an outsider. He found the same eyebrow flash on greeting, the same smile, the same coy head-turn of a flirting woman, the same face of anger, and the same face of disgust. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had argued as much in 1872. The finding cuts against any account that treats all human conduct as local invention. Some of what we do, we do everywhere, and we do it without a teacher.
The third is the supernormal stimulus. Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988) showed that a herring gull pecks harder at a fake beak painted with exaggerated spots than at its own parent. Push the releaser past its natural range and it draws a stronger pull than the real thing. This runs straight into human life: sugar and fat in concentrations no ancestor ever met, pornography, cosmetics, and surgery that exaggerate youth and fertility cues, and cartoon faces with huge eyes and tiny chins that trip the baby-schema response Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) named. Our evolved responders sit waiting, and an industry learns to yank them.
The fourth is the demand to watch the animal in its own setting rather than the lab. Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) read the honeybee’s waggle dance by watching bees, not by quizzing them. Applied to man, this favors observed conduct over self-report. People say one thing on a questionnaire and do another in the street. The ethologist trusts the doing.
The fifth is phylogenetic continuity. Man is a primate. We carry the appeasement gestures, the dominance and submission displays, the grooming and reciprocity, the coalition behavior of other social mammals and above all the great apes. A raised chin, a lowered gaze, a nervous laugh that defuses a threat: these have cousins in a baboon troop.
The sixth, and the most bracing, is the split between the reason a man gives and the function his act serves. Ethology assumes the animal does not know why it does what it does. The function lies in the evolutionary past, not in the creature’s head. Turn that lens on man and it humbles him. He offers high reasons for his choice of mate, his loyalty to a group, his disgust at a stranger. The function may be older and cruder than the reason, and the reason may be a tale he tells after the fact.
Now the limits. Human ethology drew hard fire, and some of it landed. A species that teaches almost everything makes it hard to pull the evolved thread from the learned one. The field invited just-so stories, where a guess about ancient function dressed itself as a finding. The naturalistic fallacy waited at every door, ready to turn “this evolved” into “this is right.” And the work was bent to ugly political ends more than once. The careful ethologist treats an evolutionary account as a hypothesis to test against cross-cultural and comparative data, not as a verdict. Used that way, the field still gives more to the study of man than almost any rival in the human sciences.
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Clay Travis (b. 1979) and Buck Sexton (b. 1981) split the talk-radio job into two voices, and the contrast between those voices carries the show. They took Rush Limbaugh’s old slot in June 2021, and Limbaugh ran that slot alone for thirty years as a single sustained monologue. Travis and Sexton run it as a conversation. That choice shapes everything about how each man sounds.
Travis comes out of sports radio, and he kept the whole toolkit. He talks fast, loud, and forward, like a man who has thirty seconds to land a take before the segment turns. He loves the bold prediction and the scorecard that follows it. He will tell you what he called, when he called it, and how right he turned out. He frames politics as a contest with winners, losers, point spreads, and box scores. He went to Vanderbilt law school, and you hear the trial-lawyer reflex in how he stacks a case and goes for the close, but the surface stays brash and a little frat-house. He provokes on purpose. He picks fights with legacy media, names names, and treats outrage as fuel rather than risk. His diction runs plain and punchy, heavy on superlatives and round numbers, light on qualifiers. He sells confidence.
Sexton plays the cooler register. He spent years at the CIA and in NYPD counterterrorism, and that background sits under his speech the way Travis’s sports background sits under his. He talks slower. He clips his sentences shorter and lets pauses do work. He reaches for the analyst’s vocabulary, threat assessment, intelligence, sourcing, and he likes to walk a listener through a chain of reasoning step by step. Where Travis swings for the big emotional reaction, Sexton lowers the temperature and sounds like a man briefing a room. His humor runs dry and arrives late, almost as an aside. He carries the show’s claim to seriousness.
The pairing runs on that tempo gap. Travis pushes, Sexton settles. Travis throws the loud opening take, Sexton tests it or extends it with a flatter, more structured version, and the listener gets both the heat and the cool in one segment. They banter like two men who actually like each other, with running jokes and easy interruptions, and that rapport softens the edge of the politics. The ad reads fold into the talk so the sponsor pitch sounds like more conversation rather than a break from it. Limbaugh did this too, but he did it as a solo performer playing every part. Clay and Buck divide the labor.
Rhetorically both men work the populist outsider stance. They cast themselves against elites, against the press, against credentialed experts, and they flatter the audience as the people who see clearly. Travis does this with mockery and a grin. Sexton does it with the posture of the insider who knows how the machinery really runs and has decided to tell you. Travis appeals to common sense and the gut. Sexton appeals to evidence, or to the look of evidence, with figures and timelines and the language of analysis. The two appeals reinforce each other. One says trust your instincts, the other says here is the data that proves your instincts right.
If you want the single sharpest line of difference, it sits in pace and persona. Travis is the brash sports guy who talks in takes and bets and treats every story as a game with a scoreboard. Sexton is the quiet operative who talks in assessments and treats every story as a problem to be worked. The show lives in the space between them.
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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, the Declaration of Independence rests on a flawed picture of man, and its most famous sentence claims more than it can deliver.
Start with “self-evident.” Jefferson (1743-1826) calls the equality of men and their unalienable rights truths that any mind can see. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization. The truths feel self-evident because Jefferson and his readers share a Lockean, Protestant, Anglo inheritance. Reason has little to do with it. A Confucian scholar or a Bedouin chief would not find them obvious. “Self-evident” shrinks to “self-evident to men raised as we were raised.”
Then the universalism. All men created equal, each carrying the same inherent rights. Mearsheimer says we are tribal from birth, formed by a group before we can assert ourselves, ready to sacrifice for our own and to draw hard lines against outsiders. The Declaration’s universal claim describes an aspiration, not how men behave. The case sat in the room. The men who wrote that all men are equal held slaves and counted most of mankind outside the circle. The tribe showed through the creed at once.
Next the rights themselves. The Declaration treats the individual as primary, the bearer of rights before and against the state. Mearsheimer reverses the order. The group comes first. The individual arrives into a society that already exists and that made him. On that view rights are not natural facts lodged in lone men. A society grants them, recognizes them, enforces them. Strip away the society and the inalienable right has no one to honor it.
Jefferson does not say reason finds these rights. He says the Creator endows them. He hedges against pure rationalism by grounding rights in God. The appeal to the Creator is its own product of a particular religious formation. The theology does not escape the problem. It moves it.
Consent of the governed runs into the same wall. The Declaration pictures free men constituting a government by agreement. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says societies do not begin when atomistic individuals contract. The founders were already one people: English speakers, common-law heirs, Protestants, colonists with a thick shared past. The consent was the act of a people already made, not of bare men meeting to invent a nation.
A limit. The Declaration works as a political act, not only as a report on human nature. Even granting the false anthropology, the document does its job. The universal language bound thirteen quarrelsome colonies and claimed standing before the world.
A founding myth that unifies a people at home turns dangerous when a state reads it as a mandate to remake the world. The line runs from 1776 to liberal hegemony. All men hold the same rights, so every nation deserves liberal democracy, so we will help install it. Other peoples are tribal too. They resist the gift. The universalism that steadies the republic at home becomes the delusion that wrecks its statecraft abroad. If Mearsheimer is right about man, the Declaration is safest as Americans’ own creed and most ruinous as a blueprint for mankind.
Begin with the status game the colonists cannot win as subjects. A subject who refuses the tax and takes up arms against his king is a traitor. That is the only name the game allows him. Stated as interest, the colonial cause reads as theft. We keep our money. We keep our land. We govern ourselves and answer to no one across the sea. A candid world hears a propertied class guarding its property and calls the men criminals. The sacred value changes the name of the game. The colonist no longer refuses a duty. He defends a right the Creator gave him. Tyranny stands where the Crown stood. The traitor becomes a free man, and the king becomes the lawbreaker. David Pinsof argues that a sacred value is a cover story that keeps a status game from collapsing into its ugly truth. Name the dominance motive and the game ends in shame. So the colonists deny the motive. They do not seek power. They defend rights. They do not grab advantage. They answer to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The famous line about a decent respect to the opinions of mankind performs the move inside the sentence. It tells the world the colonists act for a principle any man can see, not for the gain any man can guess.
Turner supplies the half Pinsof leaves implicit. The cover story works because the men wearing it do not know it is a cover story. A convenient belief is sincere. Jefferson does not wink as he writes. He means every word. The belief that rights are natural and the king a usurper reaches him below the level of argument, absorbed from Locke, from Whig pamphlets, from dissenting pulpits, from a common-law training that treats liberty as the Englishman’s birthright. He does not reason his way to the creed. He inherits it as sight. It feels like perception, like naming a fact in front of him, and a man cannot see his own perception as a convenience. The hiding is built in. Strip the sincerity and the value dies. The mask only works on a face that takes itself for a face.
This is why the naked interest claim recruits no one. Men do not pledge their lives and fortunes to dodge a tax. They pledge to a sacred value, and other men join because they read the pledge as sincere. The sincerity travels where the interest stays home. France weighs the rebellion and finds a principle it can dress its own ambition in, which a tax revolt could never supply. The convenience depends on the blindness. A man who saw the whole transaction could not run it.
A sacred value also costs something, and the cost shows it is more than paint. Wide recruiting needs a wide claim. The colonists could not write that all propertied Englishmen are equal. The creed says all men. The statement overshoots the interest that prompts it, and the overshoot binds the men who sign. They commit in public to more than they hold in private. A value that only masked need not overreach. This one does, because the recruiting power lives in the breadth.
The man who writes that all men are created equal owns other men. The planter does not argue the slave out of manhood in the same room where he writes the creed. The categories that exclude the slave reach him absorbed, never examined, kept in a separate compartment the creed never visits. That separation is the convenience. The belief serves him by staying below the question. He need not reconcile the equality he proclaims with the bondage he profits from, because the two never meet in his mind.
The document wears its two layers on its face. The preamble is sacred value. The long charge sheet against the king is interest: the taxes, the troops quartered in homes, the trade strangled, the assemblies dissolved, the courts bent. The art lies in the join. The king does more than tax. He violates a right. Interest gets told as principle betrayed, grievance as sacrilege. The lower layer borrows the authority of the upper.
Last, the durability. The grievances died with the man they named. The sacred value outlived him because it became the convenient belief of the nation it founded. Each generation inherits the creed the way Jefferson inherited his, below argument, as sight. It serves the republic as it served the colonists. It turns American interest into American principle and hides the turning from the men who perform it. The value stays sincere because it stays tacit. That is the engine, and it still runs.
Alliance Theory makes one demand of the Declaration. Stop reading it for values and read it for alliances. The paper holds that belief systems grow out of alliance structures, not out of abstract principles, and that the line between camps marks whom men count as allies rather than what they claim to prize. Point that at 1776 and the document changes shape.
Start with the coalition, because the coalition comes first. The thirteen colonies make strange bedfellows. Massachusetts Congregationalists, Virginia Anglican planters who own men, Pennsylvania Quakers and merchants, Carolina rice growers, Scots-Irish debtors on the frontier. By the paper’s first cue, similarity, these men make poor allies. They differ in faith, in trade, in manners, in interest. Shared values pull nothing together. A shared rival does. The Crown and Parliament tax them, garrison them, and shut their courts, and the enemy of each colony’s enemy becomes each colony’s friend. Transitivity does the binding. Each colony’s quarrel with London turns every other colony’s quarrel into its own. Interdependence finishes the work. No colony can face the empire alone, and a man without allies stands at everyone’s mercy, so thirteen weak challengers pool into one. The Continental Congress is a super-alliance, a coalition of coalitions, held by a common rival and not a common creed.
Name the kind of alliance and the document clarifies. Against Britain the patriots run a revolutionary alliance, lower-ranked challengers against an established higher rank. Inside their own ranks they run a bridging alliance, high-rank planters and merchants yoked to low-rank farmers and artisans, each gaining what neither holds alone. The planter brings standing and money. The farmer brings numbers and muskets. The creed that binds them stays broad enough to cover both, which is why the document reaches for the widest claim in reach and says all men.
The coalition was not fated. A softer ministry, no Coercive Acts, no Quebec Act, and the alliance might never have set. The split ran through the population, not around it. Loyalists chose the Crown, and the sharp common knowledge the paper describes, the shared sense of who stands on which side, hardened through 1775 and 1776 until the line lay plain. The Declaration arrives to fix that line in words and to rationalize a realignment already underway. Elites narrate the shift as principle after the alliances have formed.
Read the preamble as patchwork. The document appeals to the rights of Englishmen, to natural and universal rights, to the consent of the governed, and to the providence of a Protestant God, principles that do not sit inside one philosophy and do not need to. Each draws a different bloc. The lawyer hears the rights of Englishmen. The dissenter hears providence. The radical hears nature and equality. The principles bend to the coalition. They recruit.
Now the function. The document names its audience in its own text, a candid world. Its work is to mobilize third parties and to embolden allies, and the paper names the move. Build common knowledge that your side is moral and the other side is not, and you draw the undecided and free your allies to strike the rival without shame. The Declaration manufactures that common knowledge in a page.
Watch the victim biases run. The grievance list is competitive victimhood in its purest colonial form. The colonists stress the king’s personal responsibility, deny him any mitigating circumstance, assign him a settled malevolent design, and embellish the harm. He does not respond to defiance. He pursues absolute Tyranny through a long train of abuses aimed at absolute Despotism. The costs of the late war with France, which the taxes were meant to defray, fall away. The colonies’ own provocations fall away. What remains is a wronged people and a tyrant, the victim’s account told from one chair.
The perpetrator biases cover the allies. The same men say nothing of their handling of Loyalists, nothing of the mobs and the seizures, nothing of the slaves they hold while they write that men are equal. Jefferson’s draft runs the cleaner version of the move. It charges the king with the slave trade, lifting the sin off the planter and setting it on the rival. Shift the blame to the enemy and your ally comes out clean. Congress struck the passage, and the impulse behind it is the textbook perpetrator bias turned on one’s own side.
The attributions sort by allegiance. The colonists’ virtues run internal and their rebellion runs external. They are a patient, freedom-loving people, good by disposition, forced to revolt by the king’s design rather than drawn to it by ambition. The king’s acts run the other way, internal and malevolent by nature. Their rivals’ allies draw the harshest read of all. Britain arms native nations on the frontier, and the document calls them merciless Indian savages, irrational malevolence assigned to the enemy’s friends while the colonists’ own seizure of native land stays off the page. Self-serving attribution, applied to the coalition.
The universal claim is the tell. All men are created equal reads, in this frame, the way egalitarian language reads across the paper, as a tool to mobilize support for the coalition and not an impartial rule that cuts through every group. The proof sits in who the principle leaves out. The signers do not extend it to the men they own, to the natives they drive west, or to the neighbors who keep faith with the Crown. Support for the universal stops where the coalition’s interest stops. Allegiance comes first and the professed value follows, the order the paper finds again and again.
Symmetry comes last. Alliance Theory expects both sides to run the same biases, and Britain obliges. The Crown’s writers cast the colonists as ungrateful smugglers and lawless mobs, virtue claimed and vice assigned from the opposite side. The frame crowns no winner on principle. Each side magnifies its own grievance and excuses its own transgressions because each side carries the same alliance psychology. France settles the point from outside. A Catholic absolute monarchy bankrolls a Protestant republic of rights, strange bedfellows by every measure of similarity, joined by the one thing that joins allies in this account, a shared rival across the Channel.
The Declaration, then, is the charter of a contingent coalition dressed as a statement of timeless right. Its principles map its alliances. Read it for values and it reads as philosophy. Read it for allies and rivals, as the paper insists, and it reads as a coalition’s brief to a candid world.
A sacred value works while one thing stays hidden, the gap between the value and the conduct. Pinsof’s definition holds that the value is a cover story built to keep a status game from collapsing. The cover holds while no one forces that gap into common knowledge. The trouble built into the form is that the maker says the value out loud, to a candid world, in universal words. Each of those three features makes the cover strong. Each arms the men it shuts out.
Take them in turn. The value is sincere. The makers believe it, which is what lets it recruit, and which is also what traps them. A man who states a value he privately scorns can drop it when it costs him and lose only a lie. A man who states a value he believes cannot drop it without confessing he was never the man he claimed. Sincerity locks the cage.
The value is public. The colonists put it on the record before the world. A claim on the record belongs to anyone who can read it. The slave reads all men are created equal as plainly as the planter does. Once the words are out, the maker stops controlling who picks them up.
The value is universal in form. All men. The form of the claim already holds the slave, the woman, the man without property. The exclusion lives in the conduct, not in the text. So the excluded party invents nothing. He reads the sentence aloud and points at the practice. The contradiction sits in the open and waits.
Now the move. Frederick Douglass runs it in 1852. He does not throw the Declaration away. He picks it up. He grants the value its full force, calls the founders’ principles saving principles, and then sets the slaveholding republic beside its own creed and lets the gap speak. He asks what the Fourth of July means to the slave and answers that the day measures the distance between the nation’s word and the nation’s deed. The speech works because he takes the sacred value as real and binding. Reject it and he holds no lever. Accept it and the republic stands convicted by its own founding sentence.
Lincoln runs the same move at Gettysburg. He turns the preamble into the nation’s founding proposition and the war into the labor of making the deed match the word. He holds the living to the stated value of the dead.
King calls in the note in 1963. He names the Declaration a promissory note, a written guarantee of unalienable rights to all men, and charges the republic with default. He comes to collect. Again he grants the value, again he shows the gap, again the creed indicts the men who failed it.
See what the three share. Each one takes the sacred value as sincere, public, and universal, the very features that made it a serviceable cover, and turns each feature into an edge. Sincerity means the nation cannot wave the creed off as mere talk without confessing fraud. Publicity means the words already sit on the record to be quoted back. Universality means the excluded man stands inside the sentence and has only to step forward. The cover story arms the very men it shut out.
This is the collapse Pinsof describes, aimed with care. Common knowledge of the gap threatens to expose the whole creed as a status play, the one outcome a sacred value exists to prevent. The maker’s heirs feel the threat and scramble. They try to keep the prestige of the value while ducking its demand. They say the creed covers some men only. They say the slave is not fully a man. They say equality means equality before God, not before the law. They say the principle names a distant hope, not a present rule. Each evasion is a scramble to a nearby game where the value still confers standing yet no longer binds. The abolitionist’s task is to shut those exits and hold common knowledge on the plain sense of the words.
The trap resets each generation. The value stays on the books, so the move runs again whenever a new group finds itself outside the circle. The women at Seneca Falls in 1848 rewrote the sentence to read that all men and women are created equal and held the republic to the amended line. The sacred value becomes a standing weapon, ready in the hand of whoever stands excluded at the time.
Here is why the cynical read alone misses it. Pure cynicism says the value covers an interest and stops there, which implies the value is decoration the makers could discard at will. They cannot discard it. A public, sincere, universal cover story is a hostage handed to the future. It binds the giver and arms his victims. The cynicism gets the birth right, a cover for a coalition’s interest. It misses the career, the cover gathering force of its own and turning on the men who built it. The yield comes from holding both at once. The men who wrote the creed meant it to guard their standing, and in other hands it convicted them, and both facts hold of the same sentence.
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Helen Lewis (b. 1983) is a British journalist, author, and broadcaster whose work circles a single question: how a society decides who deserves authority, and what happens when the old grants of trust come undone. She writes about politics and culture as a staff writer at The Atlantic, a post she has held since July 2019, and she remains based in London. Across reporting, two books, several podcasts, and frequent broadcast work, she studies legitimacy. She asks how institutions confer standing, how individuals acquire influence, and what follows when the channels that once carried public confidence begin to fail.
She was born Helen Alexandra Lewis on 30 September 1983 in Worcester, England. She read English Language and Literature at St Peter’s College, Oxford, from 2001 to 2004, and later earned an MA in English Literature from the Open University while working night shifts in her first job. She came up through the trade rather than the academy, and her prose keeps the reporter’s preference for the concrete fact over the abstract scheme. She entered journalism during a hard transition for British media, as print confronted digital publishing, social platforms, and a falling confidence in the old gatekeepers.
Her early career ran through national newspapers and then into the weekly press. She became assistant editor of the New Statesman in 2010 and its deputy editor in 2012. Her years at the magazine tracked a long sequence of British political shocks: the coalition government, the Scottish independence referendum, the Brexit vote, and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. Lewis reported these events and also stood back from them. She wrote about the cultural and institutional pressures reshaping democratic life, and she built a reputation as a commentator who watched the structure of a fight rather than only its slogans.
Critics often file her under feminism, and the label fits only in part. Her work reads better as an inquiry into social and political conflict. That reading shaped her first book, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, published in February 2020 and named a book of the year by the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times. The book refuses the tidy story of a single movement marching toward progress. Instead it reconstructs a run of internal quarrels over suffrage, labor, sexuality, pornography, race, family, and strategy. Lewis argues that many of feminism’s gains came through conflict, not consensus. The argument carries her wider skepticism toward any account that treats a movement as ideologically whole or its victories as fated.
Through the 2010s she turned toward the effect of digital media on public life. She examined how the platforms reset incentives, reward outrage, and pay out status for performance. She kept asking why some people gather influence online and how those spaces change the way expertise gets made and sold. The thread led her to intellectual celebrity and the culture of the modern guru.
A defining episode came in 2018, when she interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ. The conversation drew tens of millions of views and became one of the era’s most discussed encounters between a trained journalist and a direct-to-audience intellectual. It staged the themes she would keep working: the decline of the institutional gatekeeper, the rise of figures who reach an audience without a newsroom between them, and the widening gap between legacy media and the alternative networks of influence.
Those concerns reached their fullest statement in her second book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. The work follows the idea of genius from the Enlightenment to the technology industry and asks why societies lift certain men and women into objects of exceptional deference. Lewis argues that the cult of the genius hides the collaborative nature of most achievement while supplying a cultural license for inequality, misconduct, and concentrated power. She studies how a reputation gets built and kept, and how prestige hardens into authority. Read in full, the book is a study of status.
Her broadcasting runs alongside the writing and now matches it in reach. She hosts The Spark, a longform interview series on BBC Radio 4, and she created The New Gurus, a BBC series on the rise of online influencers, self-help entrepreneurs, and the communities that form around a charismatic voice. She also hosts the BBC podcast Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat, and co-hosts Radio 4’s Kafka vs Orwell and Strong Message Here. She appears often as a panellist on The News Quiz and Have I Got News for You. These projects watch authority migrate from settled institutions toward loose networks built on personal brand and audience loyalty.
Lewis claims the feminist tradition and doubts many of its working assumptions. In the British argument over gender identity and sex-based rights, she has held that biological sex keeps legal and social weight in areas such as sport, prisons, and single-sex services. Her detractors say the position slights transgender people. Her defenders read her as guarding long-standing feminist claims about sex-based protection. The dispute fits her habit. She presses on the orthodoxies of her own coalition as readily as on those of her opponents.
In temper she belongs to a secular British liberalism shaped by Enlightenment confidence, empirical inquiry, and a steady distrust of institutional self-regard. She defends open debate, free expression, and reasoning from evidence against ideological certainty and technocratic certainty alike. She reads social life through material conditions, incentives, institutions, and historical accident rather than through discourse or symbol. The buried structure interests her more than the surface vocabulary.
Writing from both British and American ground, she traces how concepts born in the United States cross into European argument. She holds that these imports can light up a real problem at home and can also distort it once they lose the context that produced them. The interest makes her a sharp observer of the slow convergence, and the occasional split, between British and American political life. Her review of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto in The Atlantic dismissed the book as a tell-nothing memoir and a portrait of losing one’s soul, a judgment that shows her appetite for the question of how a public figure manages a reputation under strain.
Her reporting on Brexit, the pandemic, online radicalization, expertise, and elite institutions returns each time to the same preoccupation. Whether the subject is a scientific authority, a party, a movement, a media organization, or a technology founder, Lewis cares less about the content of the belief than about how a claim to authority gets made, contested, and held. The institutions have taken note. She served as the 2018/19 Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford, and since 2019 she has sat on the steering committee of the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford, where she delivered a lecture on the failures of political journalism that later ran as a New Statesman cover story. In 2024 she won the Kukula Award for excellence in nonfiction book reviewing. She married the journalist Jonathan Haynes in 2015.
Seen whole, her career places her among a generation of writers trying to make sense of the breakdown of inherited trust across the liberal democracies. Her work carries historical depth, a feel for institutions, and a willingness to fault allies and opponents on the same terms. The culture-war controversies and the free-speech quarrels draw the headlines. The deeper continuity is an inquiry into status, expertise, and social power. She is a scholar of legitimacy who works in the medium of journalism, and her abiding subject is how a society chooses whom to believe and what comes after that choice grows unstable.
Lewis presents herself as the exception to coalition. She follows the evidence. She reads material conditions rather than symbols. She faults her own side as readily as her opponents. The bio calls her a scholar of legitimacy, a writer who asks who deserves authority and who watches the tribes from a seat above them. Alliance Theory has a name for that seat. It does not exist. The paper shows that partisans on every side claim impartiality, honesty, and altruism for themselves while charging their rivals with bias and hatred, and that both descriptions work as propaganda. The claim to stand above the tribe is among the steadiest tribal moves there is. So the first thing the theory does to Lewis is take away her vantage. She does not see the alliance structure from outside it. She occupies a position in it, and her trained eye for legitimacy is the eye of one coalition trained on the authority claims of its rivals.
Name the coalition and her work snaps into focus. Intellectual elites, the highly educated knowledge workers, journalists and academics, fall into rivalry with business elites, the wealthy corporate and now technology class. Lewis is intellectual elite by every marker. Oxford, The Atlantic, the fellowships, the bylines that hand out standing. Her second book, The Genius Myth, takes aim at the cult of the lone genius, and the genius cult lives in the rival camp. It is the founder myth of Silicon Valley and the corner office. So the book reads, under Alliance Theory, less as a neutral history of an idea and more as a salvo in the status war the paper names, the educated professional class attacking the self-justifying story of the moneyed class. The target is not random. It is the rival faction’s hero.
Well-off people attribute their success to internal causes, talent and effort, while worse-off people attribute their position to external causes, luck and circumstance, and partisans extend each attribution to their allies and their rivals. The Genius Myth argues that great achievement is collaborative, contingent, and lucky, and that the story of singular brilliance hides the labor and chance behind it. That is the external attribution. Lewis aims it at the rivals’ champions, the founders and the celebrated men of the business elite, stripping their internal credit and handing it back to circumstance. Alliance Theory then sets a test she has to pass to count as the impartial analyst she claims to be. Does she run the same external attribution on the heroes of her own coalition, the prize-winning journalist, the Oxford don, the literary novelist she admires? Or do those figures keep their internal credit, their talent and their craft, while only the rivals’ stars get reduced to luck and theft? The theory predicts the asymmetry. The honest answer is that the book supplies the prediction, not the audit, and the audit is where the claim lives or dies.
Lewis built The New Gurus around the charismatic figure who reaches an audience without an institution between them, the online ideologue and the self-help entrepreneur. The word guru does work here. It is not a neutral label. It marks a rival mode of authority, the direct-to-audience figure who competes with the credentialed press for the public’s trust, and to call that figure a guru is to deny the legitimacy of his standing while protecting the standing of the newsroom. The 2018 Jordan Peterson interview is the clean case. Peterson is a rival because he is allied with her rivals and reaches the audience her coalition is losing. Transitivity, in the paper’s terms, the rival of my allies. The encounter became a set piece because it staged a border skirmish between two authority structures, and Lewis fought it as a member of one of them, not as a referee.
Lewis holds that biological sex keeps weight in sport, prisons, and single-sex services. She has moved into a different super-alliance, the heterodox-liberal set, the gender-critical feminists and the free-speech liberals and the anti-woke wing of the legacy press, and that set has its own allies and its own rivals. Her heterodoxy buys her status inside it. The defense of sex as a category signals allegiance to women as a sex class against the trans-rights coalition, and the principle, material reality over self-identification, arrives to dress the allegiance.
So Alliance Theory calls Lewis a coalition member who has built a brand on the denial of coalition, and it predicts that her materialism, her evidence-talk, and her even-handed scrutiny of authority further her alliance. The legitimacy she studies is, under this reading, the legitimacy of rival authority structures she has reason to doubt and her own she has reason to defend. Ask whom she counts as her allies, and you will see that her values follow every time.
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 is right, Lewis has misdescribed herself, and she has misdescribed the people she reports on.
Start with the self. The Great Delusion ranks the three sources of what a person wants. Innate sentiment first, socialization second, reason a distant third. Lewis builds her public identity on the third. She follows the evidence. She reasons her way to a position and revises it when the facts change. She prizes the open argument and the empirical check. Mearsheimer says the part of her she trusts most does the least work. The value infusion arrived first, in a British secular-liberal home and at Oxford and inside a metropolitan professional class that loaded her with its commitments before she could reason for herself. Reason came later and took the job of ratifying what the milieu had already installed. On this account the reasoning does little of the driving. The formation did that, and the argument followed to justify it.
Now turn to her material. The New Gurus, the online tribes, the charismatic figure who gathers a following through belonging rather than through argument, the collapse of the institutions that once filtered authority through reasoned procedure. Lewis reports all of it as a problem to be explained and, where she can, corrected. Mearsheimer reads the same scene as the baseline returning. The social and the tribal are what we are from start to finish. Liberalism suppressed them for a few decades behind strong institutions and a story about the reasoning individual, and the internet broke the institutions. So Lewis keeps finding his thesis in her own reporting and shelving it under what went wrong. The guru is not a malfunction of liberal man. The guru is man, with the liberal supports removed. The Genius Myth attacks the lone genius and insists that achievement is collaborative, embedded, dependent on others and on luck. That is his anthropology pointed at the top of the hierarchy. We are social from the first, and the solitary great man is a fiction. But she runs the argument inside a liberal and egalitarian project, the genius myth as a license for inequality, and she stops at the genius. Mearsheimer takes the same anti-individualism down to the foundation, where it dissolves the rights-bearing individual her politics rests on. She debunks the exceptional man and keeps the ordinary one, the sovereign chooser with his inalienable rights. He says there is no such creature.
Political liberalism privileges the sovereign self and his right to define what he is. Self-identification is the liberal move, the individual naming his own category against the group’s claim on him. Lewis refuses it. She appeals to a shared bodily reality and to women as a class, a kind you are born into rather than a status you elect. Read through Mearsheimer, her feminism is the most anti-individualist thing about her, an innate intuition about bodies and kind, reinforced by an older feminist socialization, asserting the group over the self-defining atom.
So, what then for Helen, if John is right? She is not the reasoning liberal she takes herself to be. She is a well-socialized member of a particular class whose deepest commitments came in early and dressed themselves as conclusions, and her sharpest reporting is an unwitting argument for the anthropology that denies her own creed.
Lewis looks like like she stands outside the scramble for status. She follows the evidence. She faults her own side. She keeps the unbothered empirical calm of a writer too serious for tribe. Pinsof’s point is that the refusal to play is a way of playing, and that the audience pays in status for the look of not wanting any. Breaking with the progressive left on gender reads, to her readers, as courage and independence, and courage and independence are status. The posture that says I am above the game is the strongest seat at the table.
Anti-status is still status. Lewis has not left the contest. She runs a quieter and harder lap of it. The writer who chases presthead-on looks vain, and the vain writer loses, so the winning play is to chase while appearing to disdain the chase. Lewis plays it at a high level. The calm, the sourcing, the willingness to disappoint her own flank all read as the marks of someone who answers to the evidence and not to the crowd, and that reading is the prize. She does not collect status the way a partisan does, by cheering loudest for the team. She collects it the way the cool head in the room does, by seeming to need none of it.
Pinsof notes that we win anti-status by calling other people vain, insecure, and self-absorbed. Name a man a status-seeker and you bank standing on his account. Lewis has built two projects on exactly this. The Genius Myth anatomizes the hunger for heroes, the way a culture inflates a man into an object of worship and borrows significance from him. The New Gurus names the charismatic figure who farms a following. Both put her in the role of the one who sees the wanting in others and shows none herself. She is the namer, not the named. To write the book against the prestige economy, from a desk inside the prestige economy, is the most efficient anti-status trade available, because the critique reads as proof that she is not in it for the worship she describes.
Anti-status pays best when the thing given up looks expensive. Lewis surrenders standing with the progressive readership that once counted her an ally, and the surrender is visible, and the visible loss is the sincerity the play requires. A renunciation that costs nothing convinces no one. Hers costs something in plain sight, which is why a second and larger readership pays her back in the currency she gains most from, the courage premium. The break nets positive even as it bleeds. Read through this concept, the gender stance is not a departure from her status game. It is the move the game rewards highest, the one that looks like principle defeating tribe and pays like principle defeating tribe.
Status-seeking that shows strain loses. The writer who tries hard looks like he needs the win, and need is low. Lewis works in the opposite register, the dry, unimpressed, faintly ironic British calm that disclaims effort. The Jordan Peterson interview ran on this contrast. He arrived earnest, hungry, openly building a following, and she sat across from him cool and amused, the journalist too composed to be sold. The encounter handed her anti-status by the bushel because the camera staged the difference between a man who wants it and a woman who appears not to. The composure is the asset. It says the standing came to her unbidden.
Anti-status holds only while the audience believes the indifference is real. The moment readers decide the calm is a performance and the heterodoxy a brand, the whole thing falls back into ordinary vanity, and the verdict turns to she is contrarian for the clicks. To keep the seat she has to keep the bid invisible, which means the work has to be good enough that the standing looks earned rather than sought. The reporting, the sourcing, the arguments do that job. They let the prestige arrive as a byproduct of seriousness, which is the only way anti-status survives contact with a suspicious reader.
The Genius Myth explains why other people need to believe in lone geniuses, a need rooted in psychology and the hunger for heroes. The New Gurus explains why other people fall for charismatic frauds. Both put Lewis in the same chair, the clear-eyed observer who has diagnosed the frailty that fools everyone else. The unstated third premise is that she is exempt from it. She sees the myth you fall for. She names the guru you follow. The vantage she writes from is the one Pinsof says does not exist, the human who has climbed out of human nature to grade it.
The third premise stays silent, and the silence is what makes it a fallacy rather than a boast. Lewis never writes the sentence and I am immune. She does not have to. The architecture does it for her. To explain why a man falls for a guru is to sit in the chair of the man who does not fall, and the chair comes free with the explanation. The exemption is not a claim she defends. It is a position the work seats her in the moment she starts to diagnose, and a position no one has to argue for is the hardest one to dislodge.
Turn the genius argument back on the author and it bites. If the appetite for heroes is human nature, Lewis carries it like everyone else. She has heroes. She writes from a canon, esteems certain essayists and thinkers, draws her standards from people she admires. The concept predicts she will file her own admirations under a kinder heading than the one she hangs on the tech worshippers. Theirs is projection and need. Hers is judgment. One appetite, two labels, and the label depends on whose hero is under the lens.
The guru argument turns the same way. The New Gurus studies the charismatic figure who gathers a following without an institution standing between him and the crowd. Lewis gathers a following. She hosts The Spark and a run of podcasts, she carries a byline readers recognize, she has built a brand on her own name and voice. By the tests she applies when she names a guru, audience capture, the cult of personality, authority that skips the gatekeeper, what sets her apart from the figures she anatomizes? On the page, the silent premise and little else. She is a person with an audience explaining why audiences are foolish to follow persons.
The trouble runs past the two books. It is the occupational hazard of the debunker. Any writer whose trade is here is why people believe things stands, by the shape of the job, outside the believing. The critic of credulity claims a perch above credulity. Call Lewis a scholar of legitimacy and you have named the hazard as a career. She studies how everyone else confers authority and gets taken in, and she does the weighing from a seat where she alone, by implication, weighs straight. The identity that the bio treats as her great strength is the superhuman fallacy worn as a profession.
This is why the concept outscores the persona read on her published work. Anti-status describes how readers receive her. The superhuman fallacy describes the logical shape of what she puts on the page. Every debunking she publishes carries the hidden exemption with it, whether or not a single reader catches the rider. The persona can change with the audience. The structure travels with the argument.
Lewis’s work seldom turns the lens around. It seldom says here is the hero I need, the guru I would follow, the myth I cannot work without.
A status game collapses when the players see it as a status game, and a sacred value prevents that by renaming the pursuit. Lewis’s sacred values are truth, evidence, free expression, open debate. They are real commitments, and they are also the story that keeps her own game from looking like one. As long as the contest runs in the name of following the evidence, no one has to notice it is a contest over who counts as serious and who counts as fair.
What makes a value sacred is that no one can question it without looking bad. That is the whole of its use. The cover has to be a good so high that the man who challenges it indicts himself in the act. Truth, evidence, and free speech sit near the top of the liberal order, which makes them ideal armor. Tell a reader that Lewis is wrong to appeal to the evidence and you sound like a man who prefers ideology. Question her stand for open debate and you sound like a censor. The value protects her not because she shouts it but because attacking it is suicide for the attacker. The armor is the function.
The cover does a second job. When Lewis frames a fight as truth against dogma, or evidence against ideology, she has handed out the parts before the argument starts. She holds the sacred good. Her opponent holds the profane thing. He cannot contest the framing without confirming the role he has been assigned, because to argue against the woman who stands for truth is to take the stage as the enemy of truth. So the sacred value hides her own game and recasts the other side as the threat to the sacred at the same time. That is the strongest ground in any contest, the ground where your rival loses by showing up.
Her choice of values is shrewd, and it reads as shrewd once you see which game she left. Pinsof’s list of sacred values includes equality, morality, and the betterment of humankind, the cover stories of the progressive coalition Lewis broke from. To leave that coalition without bleeding status she needed a higher card, and in the liberal order truth and free speech outrank compassion and equality. You can always recast compassion that defies the facts as sentimentality, and equality that ignores the evidence as wishful thinking. She picked the sacred values that beat the ones her former allies hold. A writer who left the same coalition flying equality would have nowhere to stand. Flying truth, she stands above them.
The gender fight is two sacred values in collision, and the concept reads it cleanly. Lewis runs under biological reality and follow the evidence. The other side runs under dignity and protection of the vulnerable. Each cover story guards its own game from collapse. Each side denies it seeks dominance and claims it seeks honor. Among her readers Lewis wins the framing because in their hierarchy truth tops mercy, and whoever holds the higher sacred value holds the field. The argument over sex and gender is, on this reading, a fight over which sacred value gets to sit on top, conducted by two camps that each refuse to call their own position a bid for status.
Free expression works the same way and shows the selective edge. Stated at full height, open debate never has to come down to the hard case, the question of which debates, on whose platform, at what cost to whom. The value lets Lewis decline the adjudication. She is for open debate, full stop, and the abstraction spares her the messy business of saying when speech should and should not be carried. A sacred value flown high enough never has to land.
The Voice
Helen Lewis writes and talks in the register of the clever British generalist who has read the academic literature, watched it get weaponized online, and decided the weaponizing is the more interesting story. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic now, after years as deputy editor of the New Statesman, and she carries the house manners of both worlds: the Atlantic’s long, evidence-stacked essay and the New Statesman’s quicker, more knowing column.
On the page her diction sits a notch above conversational and well below academic. She likes the plain Anglo-Saxon verb. She reaches for a sociological term when she needs one, then translates it in the next clause so the reader never feels left behind. Her control of register is the thing to notice first. She moves from a citation to a joke inside a single paragraph and the joke usually carries the argument rather than decorating it. The opening of her Taylor Swift piece runs on this trick: she names the engagement as obvious, dates the cultural moment by saying a podcast appearance now counts as a diamond ring, then lands a comparison to the old married couples in When Harry Met Sally. The reader laughs and absorbs the claim in the same beat.
Her core rhetorical move is the concession that turns into a knife. She grants the other side its strongest point, restates it more fairly than its own partisans manage, then shows where it breaks. This is the structure of most of her gender-debate writing and it explains why people across the spectrum claim her and resent her in turn. She built Difficult Women on the same frame: feminism told as a series of fights among flawed women rather than a march of saints. The book refuses the hagiography its genre invites. The Genius Myth does the parallel job on the lone-genius story, pulling the rule-breaking great man down to size and asking who pays for the myth.
She has a weakness for the list and the anecdote-as-evidence, which is the Atlantic style more than a personal tic. She also trusts the reader’s intelligence, so she rarely over-explains a punchline or flags her own cleverness. Irony does the load that a lesser writer would hand to adjectives. She avoids the throat-clearing thesis sentence. You often reach the end of a paragraph before you notice she has made an argument.
She has built a second career in audio: The New Gurus on Radio 4, where she worked through Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson and the rest of the charisma economy; Strong Message Here with Armando Iannucci on political language; Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat; and her interview series The Spark. Radio rewards exactly her gifts. She speaks in finished sentences. Her timing is a comedian’s more than a pundit’s, with the pause set just before the turn so the listener leans in.
Her speaking voice is dry, mid-pitched, fast but never rushed, with the clipped consonants of educated southern English. She underplays. Where a cable-news guest pushes volume, she drops it, and the drop reads as confidence. In debate and on panels she lets an opponent finish, repeats his case back to him in stronger form, then dismantles it without raising her tone. This frustrates people who want a fight, because she declines to perform the heat while still winning the point. She handles a hostile interviewer by treating the hostility as a fact about the room rather than a wound, and that detachment tends to defuse him.
As an interviewer she does the opposite of the gotcha. She asks the open question and then waits. The silence does the work. She knows when a guest is reaching for the safe answer and she will gently hold him there until he gives the real one. Her training as a reporter shows in how she follows up on the specific word a subject chose rather than the topic in general.
Two through-lines join the written and the spoken. First, the contrarian temperament aimed at her own side more than the other. She wrote and lectured on the failures of political journalism for the Reuters Institute, and she turns the same skeptical eye on progressive orthodoxy that she turns on the gurus. Second, the comic instinct as a tool of analysis. The joke is how she tests a claim. If an idea cannot survive being teased, she suspects it was status display rather than thought, and she says so, on the page and into the microphone, in the same level voice.
The greatest mathematicians, scientists, and writers in history have been unusually smart and creative people. But do great intellectual achievements depend on unusual mental abilities alone? For instance, would Jane Austen still have written the same novels if she had been born in an illiterate society? Well, no – obviously not.
This crushing insight is one of several intertwined morals conveyed in Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth. Others are that good publicity is useful for cultivating a lasting reputation, that individuals who know a lot about one subject can fail to know a lot about another, that men in positions of authority sometimes abuse their power, and that being talented is not an all-purpose licence to behave like an arsehole. Whole chapters are dedicated to elaborating these, and further, equally profound lessons for the reader’s edification. In illustration, there are some arbitrarily chosen case studies. For instance, one chapter explains at length that the niche theatre director Chris Goode, whose avant-garde plays featured naked young men touching each other, turned out to have engaged in disreputable sexual activities. A concluding chapter develops the startling thesis that Elon Musk is erratic and self-aggrandising. Who knew?
If it sounds like we are being uncharitable to Lewis, let us explain. The Genius Myth, as its title suggests, is an exercise in demythologizing the category genius. Yet it pursues this demythologization while doing nothing to specify the reality that is misrepresented by the myths. Indeed, one of the first things that Lewis says about “genius” is that “its meaning is hard to pin down”. (The first thing she says is that the word “makes [her] uncomfortable”.) The result is a haphazard and disorganized approach, which oscillates unstably between insisting on contemporary platitudes and insinuating fashionable falsehoods.
Now, it is no doubt true that the term “genius” is somewhat vague and subject to shifting standards of application. But it is not so hard to understand as all that. For a working definition of “genius”, one could do worse than consult the OED, which defines it as “an exceptionally talented or intelligent person”. (Lewis herself repeatedly finds ways to do worse, like by explaining “genius” as “the transcendent, the extraordinary, the feathers of the phoenix”, or “the demigod, the super-hero, the shaman”.) Indeed, the OED definition doesn’t seem to be so far from Lewis’s own implicit understanding of “genius” – she explains that at one point she intended to call her book Special People. But if a genius is just an exceptionally talented or brilliant person, then to prevaricate about whether there are geniuses is to prevaricate about whether there are exceptionally talented or intelligent people. Is that a smart thing to do?
Examples may help at this point. Consider: When the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy paid a visit to his ailing colleague Ramanujan in London, he is said to have mentioned offhand that the departing taxi’s registration had been a rather dull number: 1729. “No Hardy”, Ramanujan replied on the spot. “It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Or again, of John von Neumann, widely thought by his peers to have the quickest mind of his generation (surpassing Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein), Enrico Fermi is said to have told his physicist colleague: “You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!” Other obviously exceptionally brilliant figures, past and present, include Plato, Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Mozart, Frank Ramsay, Kurt Gödel, Terence Tao, and Peter Scholze.
It is useful to keep such paradigms of extreme intelligence in mind when reading The Genius Myth, because Lewis herself never confronts them openly. She spends considerably longer discussing visual artists like Jackson Pollock and Picasso than mathematicians. In fact, she makes frequent reference to intellectual flyweights, like actors and pop stars, and several times excuses herself for not discussing more athletes. The omission of mathematics could have a variety of explanations – Lewis says in passing that she uses her iPhone calculator to multiply seven by eight – but a simple one is that in the case of the best mathematicians, the awesome, occasionally preternatural, intelligence they possess is simply too hard to deny.
Of course, it is not as if “exceptionally intelligent or talented” is a fully precise description. What exactly does “intelligent” or “talented” mean? Where exactly is the cut-off for being “exceptionally” intelligent or talented? But one does not always, or even often, need a background theory of a phenomenon in order to recognise cases of it. Consider an analogy: a young child may be good at recognising individual dogs without being able to explain what all dogs uniquely have in common. That combination of a recognitional capacity and a theoretical incapacity is typical when it comes to ordinary terms like “genius” and “dog” in natural languages like English. Naturally, people can be wrong about which people are geniuses, just like they can be wrong about which animals are dogs. In neither case does the mere possibility of error suggest the underlying phenomenon is mythical in any interesting way.
One question to which it would be helpful to know Helen Lewis’s answer is whether she holds other words of holistic cognitive assessment in the same low regard that she holds “genius”. Words like “moron”, “idiot” and “imbecile” spring to mind, as do ubiquitous terms like “stupid” and “clever”. It is possible to recognise that someone is an idiot, and correctly call them an “idiot”, without having a fully fleshed out, or perfectly precise, theory of idiocy. But if that’s right, then it remains unclear what is so specially defective about the category genius, or the word “genius”, according to Lewis. In particular, if the problem with genius is, as Lewis puts it, that it is “immune to […] scientific precision”, then countless English words besides “genius” will come out as similarly defective following consistent application of the very same criterion. But such pervasively sceptical conclusions are clearly unwarranted…
Lewis’s characteristic unclarity saves her from outright committing herself to the claim that intelligence has mythical status. Instead, in the least-unstructured first part of the book, she pursues a campaign of guilt by association against the study of genius in particular and the study of intelligence in general. Academics (Francis Galton, Lewis Terman, William Shockley), and by insinuation the academic questions that interested them, are treated as crankish, “obsessive”, “oblivious”, “odd”. Galton, for instance, is disparaged as a man who expected “the world to be orderly and comprehensible – not messy like humans, whom he had trouble understanding”. Though one may feel the temptation to mock historical scientists and researchers, whose theoretical ambitions so far outstripped their means and methods of inquiry, to indulge it too often, as Lewis does, is to risk lapsing into philistinism. For instance, the disciplines of contemporary psychology and cognitive science, barely acknowledged in the book, are clearly committed to rendering “comprehensible”, and imposing some degree of theoretical “order” on, the “messy” data of the human mind. Does Lewis think these modern disciplines are no replacement for the impressionistic discursions of a jobbing journalist?
One irony of Lewis’s refusal to engage seriously with the scientific study of intelligence is that it provides by far the best framework for assimilating exceptional cases to normal ones. Indeed, in the preface to the 2nd edition of his discipline-founding book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton himself insisted that he intended nothing special by the term “genius”: “There was not the slightest intention on my part to use the word genius in any technical sense, but merely as expressing an ability that was exceptionally high … There is much that is indefinite in the application of the word genius. It is applied to many a youth by his contemporaries, but more rarely by biographers, who do not always agree among themselves.”
A further irony is that in attempting to discredit an entire field of research by the underpowered method of ad hominem attack on the eccentric political agendas and methodological laziness of a handful of academics within it, Lewis enacts exactly the vices she critiques.
The best move is the dictionary point. If genius means an exceptionally talented or intelligent man, then to wonder aloud whether genius exists is to wonder whether exceptional talent exists. That question answers itself. John von Neumann (1903-1957) existed. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) existed. The 1729 story and Enrico Fermi’s quip about Johnny doing sums ten times faster do the work, because the great mathematicians are the cases no social account can dissolve. Lewis spends her pages on Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and pop stars and skips the mathematicians, and Kodsi and Maier catch her at it. The omission is the tell, and they press it hard.
The dog analogy lands too. A child sorts dogs from cats long before he can say what a dog is. You can know a genius on sight without a theory of genius, and the chance of error does not turn the category into a myth.
Where the review weakens is the place it refuses to look. Lewis runs two claims together, and the reviewers attack the weaker. One claim: exceptional intelligence is real. A second claim: the social label “genius” tracks that trait, and tracks it without bias toward the White, male, and badly behaved. Lewis can grant the first and hammer the second, and her better material does that. The Austen case shows it. The reference books of her day left Jane Austen (1775-1817) out because her life stayed quiet, while the talent sat there on every page. That gap between who gets anointed and who has the gift is Lewis’s firmest ground. Kodsi and Maier flip it. We recognize Austen anyway, they say, so we have independent access to talent. True. But the flip concedes her point. The label and the trait come apart, and the label carries baggage. The publisher’s own summary makes her real thesis plain: the lone gifted man, exempt from the rules, has run his course. That is a claim about a cultural script and the bad behavior it licenses, and the review mostly steps around it.
There is an agenda under the surface. The two authors want to shield the study of intelligence from guilt by association, and a stake in hereditarian psychometrics shapes the whole piece. Their complaint stands on its own terms. Mocking Francis Galton’s (1822-1911) oddities does not refute the field he started. Then they run their own version of the same tactic against Lewis and admit as much at the close while claiming the high ground.
The tone says something. “Who knew?” and “Well duh?” read fast and write easy. Contempt this thick tends to mean the writer stopped hunting for the strongest form of the other side. Some of Lewis’s targets earn it. The cult of genius does excuse cruelty, and she is right about that, which the reviewers grant in one line and drop.
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Jack London (1876-1916) was a literary craftsman and a public celebrity. He worked as a novelist, a journalist, a war correspondent, a socialist organizer, a sailor, a rancher, and a self-styled adventurer. His fiction drew on naturalism, evolutionary theory, social criticism, and a romantic faith in the individual will. Readers know him first for The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), yet the larger body of his work reaches into class conflict, industrial capitalism, imperial expansion, race, technology, and the long quarrel between civilization and the natural world.
He was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, into the economic disorder of the post-Gold Rush West. His mother, Flora Wellman (1843-1922), taught music and practiced spiritualism. The identity of his biological father has never been settled, though the astrologer and journalist William Henry Chaney (1821-1903) remains the likeliest candidate. When Flora married the Civil War veteran John London (1828-1897), the boy took his stepfather’s surname and became Jack London.
Formal schooling reached him only in fragments. He educated himself in the public libraries of Oakland, and he later said the library was his true university. He read Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). From these men he assembled a worldview that held evolutionary struggle, admiration for endurance, a hope for social reform, and a fascination with the human animal under pressure. The combination never resolved into a single doctrine, and that tension runs through everything he wrote.
His early labor supplied the raw material for the fiction that followed. As a boy he joined the oyster pirates who raided the shellfish beds of San Francisco Bay, then crossed over to the fish patrol that hunted the same men. He shipped out on a sealing voyage in the North Pacific. He worked in canneries and mills. He rode the rails across the country with the army of unemployed thrown up by the depression of the 1890s, and in 1894 the authorities jailed him for vagrancy. The cell hardened his contempt for inequality and pushed him toward socialism.
The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 turned his life. He found little gold, but the Yukon gave him a country of the imagination. In his hands the frozen North became a proving ground where the comforts of society fell away and the older laws of survival reasserted themselves over man and beast alike.
The breakthrough came in 1903 with The Call of the Wild. Buck, a domesticated dog stolen and shipped north, sheds the habits of the hearth and recovers the instincts of the wolf. London fused adventure with a Darwinian argument about reversion and instinct, and the book sold across the world. White Fang runs the line in reverse, carrying a wolf-dog out of the wilderness and into the household of men. The two novels made London one of the best-selling authors alive.
His ambitions reached far past the dog stories. The most personal of his books, Martin Eden (1909), follows a self-taught workingman who claws his way to literary fame and then finds himself stranded between the polite society he has entered and the laboring world he has left. The novel remains a hard, clear study of ambition and the loneliness of the class defector, and it reads as a warning London wrote against himself.
He also helped invent the modern dystopia. The Iron Heel (1908) imagines an oligarchy that breaks organized labor and dismantles democratic life. He wrote it years before the rise of European fascism, and George Orwell (1903-1950) later named it a forerunner of the political dystopias of his own century. In The Scarlet Plague (1912) London emptied California with a global pandemic that pulls down civilization itself. In Before Adam (1907) he reached back through evolutionary theory and the idea of racial memory to tell the story of a prehistoric hominid. These books show a writer willing to range across deep time and across futures no one else had yet pictured.
Beside the fiction he built a second career in journalism and social reportage. In 1902 he lived among the poor of London’s East End and produced The People of the Abyss (1903), an early American experiment in immersive social journalism. He recorded the hunger, the overcrowding, and the unemployment of the slum from inside it, and he matched observation with argument. The book carries his conviction that industrial capitalism manufactures human misery on a vast scale and demands reform at the root.
His socialism held for life. He joined the Socialist Party of America, stumped for its candidates, and twice ran for mayor of Oakland and lost. He believed modern industry gathered wealth and power into a few hands while leaving the worker exposed. His politics, though, ran into open contradiction. He preached economic equality and at the same time carried the racial hierarchies that many White intellectuals of his day took as common sense.
That contradiction surfaces most plainly in his boxing writing. London loved the sport and covered the great championship fights as a reporter. In 1908 he watched Jack Johnson (1878-1946) take the heavyweight title and become the first Black champion of the world. Johnson’s command over his White challengers alarmed him, and London called on the retired champion James J. Jeffries (1875-1953) to return and put him down. The 1910 bout that followed earned the name the Fight of the Century. Johnson won it decisively, and the result laid bare the racial fear behind the hunt for a so-called Great White Hope.
He carried his reporting abroad as well, covering the Russo-Japanese War, the Mexican Revolution, and the labor conflicts of the age. Through that work he fixed the figure of the adventuring correspondent who tells the news as narrative and writes from the middle of the event.
By the middle of the decade London had become one of the highest-paid writers in the country, and the money funded grander projects. The grandest was the Snark. In 1907 London and his second wife, Charmian Kittredge London (1871-1955), set out to sail around the world over seven years aboard a ketch built to his own design. The voyage gathered together everything he wanted his life to be at once: literature, exploration, and risk.
It failed as a circumnavigation. Mechanical breakdowns, runaway costs, and his own collapsing health cut it short. Even so the Snark carried the couple through Hawaii, French Polynesia, Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, and Australia, and it yielded a body of travel writing that includes The Cruise of the Snark (11911) along with the South Pacific stories. In Hawaii London took up surfing, and his essay “A Royal Sport” carried the practice to a wide American readership and helped seed its later popularity.
Charmian stood at the center of these years. London married her in 1905 after the end of his first marriage to Bessie Maddern, and she served as his companion, his editor, his partner on the water, and later the keeper of his name. Where other literary wives of the period stayed home, she sailed and rode and climbed beside him, and after his death she held the papers together, ran the estate, and wrote the memoirs that shaped how the next generation read him.
His private life mirrored both his success and his hunger. On his ranch near Glen Ellen, California, he tried to raise a model farm on scientific principles, pouring money into new methods, breeding stock, and land. At the heart of the scheme he raised Wolf House, a great stone mansion meant to shelter him and Charmian for the rest of their lives. In August 1913, weeks before they planned to move in, fire took it. The cause has never been established. The loss broke him in spirit and in purse, and the charred stone shell that remains has become a fitting emblem of the man, a monument to enormous ambition and to the frailty of even his largest works.
His body gave out under the weight of all of it. Years of hard labor, the tropical diseases he picked up at sea, heavy drinking, chronic pain, and failing kidneys piled up against a writer who refused to slow down. He kept a furious pace through the worst of it, turning out dozens of books, hundreds of stories, and a flood of articles, often with creditors at the door.
The volume of that output drew fire. Critics charged him with leaning too hard on newspaper accounts, travel narratives, and the published work of others. He answered that fact was the legitimate stuff of fiction, and he treated writing as a trade. He folded research, records, and firsthand testimony into his stories without apology, and he bought plot ideas from younger men, among them the future novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). For London the writer’s task lay in turning experience and information into narrative force rather than in spinning everything from nothing.
He died on November 22, 1916, at the age of forty. Rumors of suicide spread at once, but most scholars now trace his death to kidney failure and its attendant disorders. His early end closed one of the most productive careers in the history of American letters.
His legacy resists easy filing. He was a socialist and an individualist, a scourge of capitalism and a master of the literary market, a champion of the worker and a believer in racial rank, a naturalist and a romantic at the same hour. No single tradition holds him.
More than a century on, London remains an American author the rest of the world keeps reading, and the translations keep coming. His books still feed the arguments over wilderness, masculinity, class, empire, evolution, and the limits of human endurance. Few writers have carried so much of their country inside them: the restless drive, the appetite, the optimism, and the contradictions of the United States as it rose into an industrial power. His own life became the best story he ever told, the story of the library-taught laborer who turned his experience into literature and climbed out of poverty into worldwide fame while he tested, to the end, how far a man could push adventure, endurance, and the imagination.
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 is right, Jack switches sides. The lone wolf turns out to be the chief witness for the prosecution against his own legend.
Start with the brand. London the man and London the product both sell the self-made individual: the library-taught laborer, the figure alone against the frozen North, the will that bends the world to itself. The country bought it and still buys it. Read the work under the slogan, though, and you find Mearsheimer’s thesis acted out in nearly every book London wrote.
Take the most famous case. Readers treat The Call of the Wild as a hymn to the individual who throws off society and stands free. Buck does no such thing. Buck answers a call back into a society. He joins the pack. The wild he returns to holds its own order, its own rank, its own cooperation. London’s parable of reversion runs as a parable of re-socialization. The dog does not become an atom. He becomes a member, and then a master of members. Mearsheimer could rest much of his case on that one book.
Then Martin Eden, the cruelest test. Eden does what the individualist creed commands. He teaches himself, rises by his own force, and wins fame on his own terms. The reward is death. He has cut himself loose from the working class that made him and from the polite class that will never hold him, and a man with no group has nowhere to stand. He drowns himself. London wrote the refutation of his own myth and signed his name to it. Mearsheimer’s claim that survival runs through embeddedness gets its grim illustration. Lose the society and you lose the man.
London’s life follows the same grain. The self-made legend hides a social formation. The Oakland waterfront, the oyster-pirate crews, the fish patrol, the tramp army on the rails, the sealing ship, the Klondike parties with their dog teams: London came up inside groups and crews and classes long before he read a word of Spencer or Nietzsche. By the time his critical faculties caught up, poverty and the docks had already laid down the value infusion Mearsheimer describes. The reading came on top of a man the waterfront had already built.
London’s individualism is itself a socialized product. The rugged American individual is a type, a teaching, a piece of post-frontier doctrine that a poor boy absorbs young and mistakes for his own discovery. London took in Spencer’s social Darwinism and Nietzsche’s superman while half-formed, in the window Mearsheimer marks as the one where the group does its work and the child cannot yet think for himself. London’s cult of the individual stands as evidence for socialization, not against it. He preached the lesson he had been taught.
The contradictions in the bio now read as confirmation rather than puzzle. The great individualist was also a socialist who ran twice for mayor and a racial tribalist who begged Jeffries to come back and beat Johnson for the White race. Pure individualism never held him for long. The social animal kept breaking through, now as class solidarity, now as racial fear. A man who cannot stay an individual is Mearsheimer’s man.
Some of London resists the reduction. “To Build a Fire” sets a single body against forty below and lets the cold kill it. No group fails the man. Physics and biology fail him. London’s strongest pages come from the meeting of the lone body and an indifferent nature, and that meeting sits outside society. Mearsheimer accounts for the social animal. He has less to say about the man dying alone on the trail, and London never lets you look away from him.
London might also reject the binary. Buck is pack member and pack master at once. The hero is not the man who flees the tribe but the man who climbs through it and rules it. That marks a third position, and it owes more to Nietzsche than to liberalism: greatness shown through the group and over it. Mearsheimer aims his argument at political liberalism and its rights-bearing atom. London was never that liberal. He was a Darwinian and a socialist who already granted the social premise.
Dark idealism is the conviction of one’s own purity that blinds a man to his bias and turns those outside his ideal into something evil or subhuman. David Pinsof pairs it with dark morality, the heartfelt righteousness that powers the tribalism and the bullying. Idealism brings the blindness. A man sure of his own goodness cannot see his own cruelty, because the goodness accounts for all he does, the cruelty included, as service to a higher cause. Hold this against Jack London (1876-1916) and the contradiction that has puzzled his readers for a century stops being one.
London gave his name and his money to the Socialist Party. He ran twice for mayor of Oakland on the workers’ ticket, lost twice, and kept the faith. He lived among the poor of the East End and wrote The People of the Abyss (1903) out of plain pity, recording the hunger and the rot of the slum with the eye of a man who had known want himself. He believed the worker deserved better than the market gave him. He believed wealth gathered in too few hands.
In 1910 London published “The Unparalleled Invasion,” a story set in a near future where the Western powers solve what he called the Chinese problem by exterminating the whole population of China. Airships rain glass tubes of plague and fever across the country. The sick who run for the borders meet a wall of rifles. When the land lies empty the Western nations move in and parcel it among themselves, and London writes the ending as a triumph, a sanitary advance, the forward march of mankind. He had rehearsed the fear in his 1904 essay “The Yellow Peril,” filed as a war correspondent in the East. He played it again at ringside, when Johnson’s (1878-1946) command over his White challengers drove him to beg Jeffries (1875-1953) back into the ring for the race. His Northland tales carry the same blood logic in quieter dress, the Anglo-Saxon as the dominant breed who masters the frozen country because the strong are born to rule the weak.
Dark idealism holds him. The benevolence and the genocide fantasy grow from one root, and the root is his faith in progress and in his own place at its leading edge. London read Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) young and took the survival of the fittest as the law of life and the engine of improvement. History climbs. The fit supersede the unfit, and the climb is good. Inside that creed his socialism and his race hatred do not war with each other. They are the same hope aimed at two targets. The White worker is his pack, his fit, the man who carries the future, and so he deserves the wealth the market steals from him. The peoples outside the ideal become a drag on the climb, a mass to clear so the future can arrive. London does not picture their deaths as murder. He pictures them as hygiene. That is the signature of dark idealism. The cruelty arrives in the robes of the good, and the man who does it feels clean.
London could see the suffering of the East End because the poor of London were his own, fit men held down by a bad arrangement.
The most lethal race-thought of his century did not march under a black flag. It marched under the banner of science and progress and uplift, and it was sincere, and the sincerity is what made it deadly. London’s pity for the poor and his dream of a cleansed China are not two men in one skin. They are one man and one faith.
His idealism did not check his race hatred. It fed it.
Pursuing the good of humanity confers no evolutionary advantage for the individual. We evolved to look out for our own. Therefore, when you hear calls for helping humanity, something else is going on with those voices, such as the pursuit of status.
On May 21, 2025, Pinsof wrote:
A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:
I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.
If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.
I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”
I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.
I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.
The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they. Whenever people do reflect on their evolutionary origins, they usually aren’t very reflective about it.
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