Via Rafi, a peek into the world of Brooklyn hipsterdom, where the “unsung heroes of the new new left” – who are “culturally potent” and “extremely online” – gather at a loft party in search of love, and to announce how radical and fabulous they are:

The roster tonight is heavy on extremely online political-media types. The podcaster and performer Katie Halper tells me she’s a fourth-generation socialist from the Upper West Side who used to attend a summer camp once affiliated with a communist organisation called the International Workers Order… Nearby, Sarah Leonard, who, at 30, is a veteran of the lefty-journalism orbit, tells me she’s launching a Marxist-feminist glossy called Lux, named for Rosa Luxemburg.

We learn,

At least in Brooklyn, and the spiritual Brooklyns of America, calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there.

Yes, sexy socialism.

The guests of honour tonight are the creators of Red Yenta, a new DIY dating platform: Marissa Brostoff, 33, a grad student at CUNY, and Mindy Isser, 28, an organiser in Philly. “I was complaining about how socialist men don’t date socialist women and it really bothers me,” Isser says.

Now there’s a sentence. It seems that the ladies and gents who feel compelled to announce their revolutionary ambitions, and their pronouns, and various mental health issues, aren’t meeting quotas for finding each other attractive. Which is baffling, really, given the bait on offer:

Or, The Orange Man Wrecked My Marriage:

By now it’s a truism to point out that the election of Donald Trump… [has] prompted a wholesale realignment of American politics. But it’s also sent shock waves through heterosexual romance.

In the piously left-leaning New York magazine, Molly Langmuir invites us to sympathise with the inner turmoil of activist ladies who are blaming their unhappy marriages, their divorces and estrangements, and pretty much everything, on the continued existence of Donald Trump. There’s quite a bit of mental jungle to hack through, so bring a packed lunch:

29 percent of respondents to a May 2017 survey said their romantic relationship had been negatively affected by Trump’s presidency. And even people ostensibly on the same side of the issues as their partner have run into challenges, with the climate exacerbating or revealing new fault lines. 

Ms Langmuir introduces us to several pseudonymous couples and singletons – people for whom the merest deviation in thought has proved too much to bear. First up, we meet Kirsten:

Growing up, my parents were very liberal. My dad’s gay, he’s been with his husband now for over 40 years. That was my normal. My mom remarried a guy who’s very liberal.

Okay, then.

In high school, I also had a major drinking problem,

No. Don’t. We mustn’t rush to judge.

I was an art major at this big university…

Though, admittedly, she’s not making it easy.

I bring saucy celebrity news, which we don’t often cover. The catch is, it’s from the Guardian: 

The US magazine People has crowned Idris Elba the sexiest man alive,

A handsome chap, and popular, so not entirely surprising. Indeed, the author of the piece, Mr Caspar Salmon, refers to Mr Elba as “incontrovertibly loin-tugging.”

It’s heartening that Elba, long held to be a favourite to become the next James Bond, has cracked another predominantly white institution.

So far, so Guardian. But it could, I think, be a little more Guardian.

Elba fits squarely into an amusing pattern that People has been building up over the years, which sees them plump for decidedly masculine, established, patriarchal figures. The award, in other words, is relentlessly straight.

There we go.

The prize tells us a good deal about the cult of masculinity still prevalent in the world, which equates male looks with “sexiness” rather than beauty. This emphasis on sexual attraction brings power and dominance into consideration alongside mere aesthetic qualities.

“The cult of masculinity.” Now we’re cooking. And a trashy magazine that once a year ranks famous men by sex appeal tends to favour men who strike its readers as sexy, statusful, and manly. Shocking stuff. They even – brace yourselves – put “emphasis on sexual attraction.” Despite the aforementioned loin-tugging, I suspect this may prove problematic: 

[The magazine’s] museum-like display of strong, mostly white, straight-acting men does tell us something about the dominant culture, and is, let’s face it, funny.

What’s funny, apparently, is that the largely straight and female readers of People magazine – readers whose average age is 38 – often rate as sexy men of roughly similar age:

Elba is the fourth man in his 40s in a row to win the award… The average age of winners is 38.7 years old.

And which, it turns out, is also problematic: 

“I’ve had people saying to me, ‘You just want to fuck about!’” says 29-year-old Calum James, who identifies as a heteroflexible pansexual solo polyamorous relationship anarchist.

Tim Newman is reading the Guardian.

Matthew Blackwell on empathy, asymmetries and “woke” hostility: 

[Jonathan] Haidt and his colleagues… sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (i.e., progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse… Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives… and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

For further illustration, see this and this. Or poke through just about anything here tagged “academia.”

S A Dance on the horrors and hokum of grad school humanities: 

I had never read Althusser’s Reading Capital and I had never read Marx’s Capital, which, perhaps, guaranteed my floundering in grad school given the pervasiveness of Marxist thought in the humanities… I went to graduate school because I found studying literature exhilarating and fulfilling. In my undergraduate honours thesis I analysed the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick. I wanted to do more of that: studying and understanding the great works of literature. Instead I was asked to understand how “The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”

And Gad Saad on “toxic masculinity”: 

Think of the male archetype in romance novels, which is a literary form almost exclusively read by women. He is a tall prince and a neurosurgeon. He is a risk-taker who wrestles alligators and subdues them on his six-pack abs, and yet is sensitive enough to be tamed by the love of a good woman. This archetype is universally found in romance novels read by women in Egypt, Japan, and Bolivia… Most of the traits and behaviours that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate. This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity.

See also this short clip of Jordan Peterson discussing women’s preferences in pornography. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.