Three Must Reads!

Kakistocracy; A Billion Years of Sex Differences; The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby

I've been on a brutal, sleep-depriving research jag over the last few months—and I've been conquering books and papers like Coriolanus sliced through Volscians.

I should be posting on the new finds soon.

Unfortunately, because of the workload, my normal twice-a-week Substack output has been slightly slower. Worse, I haven’t been able to finish reading three important new books that have been recently released:

Three Books I Will Soon Finish—but Can Recommend Now

I have no fear in recommending them because I am very familiar with the writings of all three authors, have read many excerpts, and have even had the privilege of meeting two of them. I also believe the authors all share the same important and distinctive qualities: they are brave, truth-seeking, feather-rufflers with integrity.

Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, by Richard Hanania

Richard Hanania is one of the sharpest and most fearless political writers working today. In Kakistocracy, he takes on right-wing populism and explains why movements dedicated to overthrowing corrupt elites so often place the least competent and least scrupulous people in power. Hanania’s past allows him an inside view of MAGA-land, and he knows what oils their Hemis. This is an important book at precisely the right time—and it is by precisely the right independent thinker. Buy it here.

The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation, by Michael Blanding

Michael Blanding, the New York Times bestselling author of The Map Thief (and, ahem, the author of In Shakespeare’s Shadow: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World’s Greatest Plays) has now turned his considerable investigative talents upon the billionaire Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, and their campaign to reshape American politics and culture according to their religious convictions. Blanding is a meticulous researcher and absorbing storyteller, and the collision of Big Christianity with business, archaeology, and politics gives him fertile soil. I promise you will be surprised by how much of the political landscape today—from controversial legislative agendas to the make-up of the Supreme Court—can be traced back to the religious background of this one little-known family.

Moroever—and I’ve seen this up close—Blanding’s ability to assimilate information is uncanny to the point of spooky. Learn more here.

A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women, by Steve Stewart-Williams

Steve Stewart-Williams writes with unusual clarity about the rapidly growing body of research illuminating the evolutionary origins of differences between males and females. Like his Substack posts, his book overflows with fascinating findings and important facts, all marshaled toward explaining how and why the sexes differ.

Consider, for example, aggression. Stewart-Williams shows that men’s bodies are not only more effectively built to perpetrate and counter acts of violence—greater upper-body strength, longer arms, stronger bones, more powerful and accurate throwing, and so on—but that their minds are correspondingly adapted as well. This makes evolutionary sense: a weaponized physique is of limited use if its possessor is never motivated to use it. As Stewart-Williams summarizes in a related post:

1. The sex difference in aggression appears early in life - long before children even know that they’re boys or girls.

2. It persists even when social pressure pushes in the opposite direction.

3. It’s associated with prenatal testosterone exposure.

4. It’s found in every culture without exception.

5. It’s found in other species subject to similar selection pressures to us.

Stewart-Williams is remarkably patient with those who resist research like his—the politically-minded blank-slate holdovers determined to preserve the notion that behavioral sex differences are entirely products of nurture. I confess to having much less patience. I find it difficult to take seriously any account of male-female behavioral differences that assigns no meaningful role to evolution. The pure-nurture position is not merely difficult to reconcile with everything we know about the organic world; it is contradicted, in one form or another, by ordinary human experience multiple times a day.

Here, Stewart-Williams explains why we should be interested in this topic:

As well as being an inherently fascinating topic, the science of sex differences has great potential to elevate human wellbeing. Among other things, it can help us establish appropriate doses of medicines for men vs. women; help us identify and treat medical and psychological disorders that present differently in one sex than the other; and help us navigate our dating lives, family lives, and work lives.

To buy the book, click here.

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I hope to finish all three books when work finally loosens its grip. Until then, consider this an honest recommendation based not on having read each one cover to cover, but on knowing the intelligence, integrity, and previous work of the people who wrote them.