Curiosities: January 2025
Unhappy marriages, empathy, Scientology
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Happy 2025, kittens! Welcome to my monthly rundown of the most interesting, thoughtful, and mind-bending Substack articles I read over the past month.
I had originally started this series as “In The Stacks.” However, I discovered that the great Andrew Sullivan was already using that title for a similar series. I asked my readers to come up with some alternative titles for this series, and they didn’t disappoint. Some of their suggestions:
Post Reincarnation
Is That a Stack In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
Sex In The Stacks
Tension Rod
Stephen’s Huge Stack
The Bradford Long And the Short of It
The Sacred And the Propane
Alas, I have settled for boring over provocative, and I am recycling my long-running “Curiosities” series.
If you want your work to appear in this series, please feel free to DM me your articles on the Substack app. To understand what does and does not get included in this series, see this footnote:1
I strive to include a diversity of perspectives from both large and small creators. This is the obligatory reminder that a post featured here does not necessitate agreement. If something here rubs you the wrong way, that’s good! If the inclusion of an article here makes you slightly anxious about what I might think about a topic important to you, that’s ok! To know what I think, read my own writing or ask me directly.
My articles in December
Ryan Self: Divorce, double standards and debates on same-sex marriage
Shelly’s “Divorce and Remarriage” is filled with more than 20 real-life anecdotes of people navigating divorce, many taken from Shelly’s time in ministry. There’s the tragic story of “Michelle” whose husband was sent to jail for 12 to 15 years on drug charges, but who was counseled against divorce even though it might be the most prudent thing to do. Then there’s “Scot” whose marriage fell apart after his wife got an abortion, but he wonders if he could ever justifiably remarry. These heart-wrenching stories are used to “illustrate how challenging it is to relate the biblical information to the complex life situations of people in a sinful world.”1
This is not the approach taken in Shelly’s “Male and Female God Created Them.” In what B.T. Irwin of The Christian Chronicle describes as, “a very academic book,” Shelly provides 400-plus pages of biblical exegesis, historical-critical analysis and point-by-point rebuttals of major arguments for same-sex marriage.
For Shelly, the topic of divorce is messy and complex, impacting real people with real lives. Same-sex marriage is academic.
: Most Couples Just Can’t Be Happy
I have closely followed the recent discussion between reactionary feminists and a group that could be called common sense feminists. The reactionary feminists, notably Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, hold the superficially unintuitive position that the sexual revolution and efficient contraceptives did not free women as intended. The common sense feminists contradict them and say that it is obvious that sexual freedom and contraceptives benefit women. And they are both right. When Louise Perry says that the sexual revolution worsened the situation for women in some situations, she is right. When Stella Tsantekidou says that her mother and her friends are not very happy in their traditional lifestyles, she is most probably also right.
Both sides are right, for a simple reason: For humans, being together is really, really hard. There are many different ways of being unhappy together. Many people were genuinely unhappy together in the system before the sexual revolution. Many people are genuinely unhappy now.
: Chicken legs
I used to be skinny. Like a pole. Or maybe a javelin. Wrap your fingers all the way around me to form a ring. Lift me up. Feel the ease of my heft. Toss me away. Light as a feather, but I drop like a carcass.
Chicken legs, my childhood friend Danielle used to call me on the playground. Chicken legs chicken legs chicken legs. Like barbs under the skin, the more I resisted it, the more it got stuck until the moniker gained an impeachable foothold with my friends and family. My mom in the minivan calling me chicken legs. Danielle’s got a crush on me, this is why she torments my malnourishment. My grandpa on the lawn calling me chicken legs. He’s got legs just like mine, takes it like a joke and dishes it back out, boomerang me boomerang you.
Because it was funny. Funny when a boy is a little ugly, a little misshapen. Funny because boys don’t care about that kinda stuff anyway. Boys are fine anyway. Boys don’t care. I don’t care. I just remember.
: The Forbidden Fruit of Politically Volatile Dick
The conventional narrative goes like this: Right-wing men pursue left-wing women, drawn to what they perceive as emotional volatility (that is, the “BPD gf”), which, in both popular imagination and reality, promises sexual adventure.1 Meanwhile, left-wing women gravitate toward right-wing men for their “unrestrained masculinity” that progressive spaces have carefully contained. Rather than being simply a open-and-close case of transgressing taboos (though for the left, there’s certainly a very real “bad boy” element at play), it hinges on assumptions about who’s better in bed. As right maps onto male and left maps onto female, the sexual tension presumably rises. Or so the think pieces would have you believe.
The reality becomes even more complex when we consider how social media surfaces and rewards extremes, turning the dominant sides of the gender war into fun-house mirror versions of themselves. The “Gender Wars,” at least on X (though, I’ve observed, not so much on TikTok, Instagram and Bluesky) have devolved into an endless escalation of mutual antipathy.
: No, you are not on Indigenous land
But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.
: Having Ridiculous Ideas Doesn’t Make You a Bad Person
It’s okay for people to have ridiculous ideas! Why should that bother us so much? One of my past relationships was with someone who was very woke. I remember on our first date she referred to the police as a “terrorist organization.” I thought this was absurd, but I also didn’t think that it made her a bad person. You can love someone who has 1 to 3 terrible opinions, as I argued here. I think she’s a wonderful person. She’s animated by a strong moral impulse, she just expressed them in ways that were foreign to me.
Presumably, it’s something we could have debated. And we did. But she wasn’t as willing to give me grace as I was for her. There was an imbalance. Because I thought that having a police presence during a DC crime wave was, on balance, a good thing, she thought I was morally suspect. Because I supported a two-state rather than a one-state solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she questioned whether I was in some sense morally corrupted. This was an unfortunate situation, and our relationship ended at least in part because of our very different conceptions of moral culpability.
: Nothing Makes Me Feel Like a Wuss Like Being Around Homeless People
Meanwhile, I spent the rest of that night and the next day haunted, as though I’d seen my own ghost — it was something about knowing that, if I had not made that decision, if I were a more officious and rule-bound type of person, that man could have died. I do not like realizing after the fact that I have had the direct power of life and death over another human being. I hate that feeling, it turns out. I do not want that power, ever, even if its exercise is totally easy and frictionless, even if there are no disincentives to doing the right thing, as was certainly the case here. I hate it. I hate being potentially that consequential. Whoever this man is, he has surely done nothing that would merit having his right not to freeze to death placed in my hands — and the hands of the guy who told me he was out there. Obviously, if you think inclusively enough, long-term enough, about all the chains of causation that extend around you, I suppose you have something like that power most of the time, and that others have it over you. It’s one of those unavoidable facts that you can’t live with being reminded of too often. Like looking at the sun.
: Finding the divine: growing up in a (Hindu) cult in America
I see many of my peers forming alternative communities that are said to fill the hole left by religious practice. Having tried some of them, I can report that they’re not the same, at least for me. They certainly didn’t help me construct or reinforce a moral code.
Returning to a coherent moral code is essential in this age of fractured individuals, communities, and countries. Unlike the vogue among the professional-managerial class, universal moral mandates exist in philosophical and religious traditions across the globe. The four cardinal virtues of justice, fortitude, temperance, and prudence are thematic in much of my reading. Organizations may misbehave, but the teachings still have worth.
: How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Irrational
In 1977, the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Norman Mailer was awestruck by the writing ability of the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, and, convinced he was reformed, called for his release. The wish was granted, and Abbott used his newfound freedom to stab a waiter to death.
A few years later, Nobel Prize-winning novelists Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek, touched by the writings of rapist and murderer Jack Unterweger, petitioned for his freedom, and when he was released he celebrated by raping and murdering nine more women.
The award-winning authors who misplaced their trust in murderers may have been deluded, but they can’t be accused of being particularly stupid. Instead, their delusions were born of a more surprising weakness: empathy, or the tendency to try to feel what others feel.
: On Being the Strained Bridge Between Red and Blue America
Sometimes, I don't want to be the bridge — the person being stepped on. I don't want to be the level-headed, grounded perspective. There is no space where I can feel understood and let my emotional guard down without being interrogated over my beliefs or analyzed like an exotic animal just because I'm not attached to an ideology.
The price of being a minority within a minority is I will always have to explain myself. I love helping people better understand the world, but sometimes I no longer care if they understand the world — I just want them to understand me.
: Self-Respect
Our materialistic societies are so focused on superficial notions of justice or respect that they have forgotten what it means to be truly human, and how we cultivate true respect for self and others. It’s not by demanding that others respect us—plenty of tyrants throughout history have tried that, but it never makes anyone truly respect them—and it’s not by getting offended whenever someone slights us in some way. Quite the opposite. It’s maintaining your own sense of self-respect and humaneness in the face of insults or challenging circumstances. It is, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, refusing to be like your enemy, refusing to lower your own standards of behavior even when everyone around you is doing it.
: Who’s More Likely to Say Yes To an Offer of Sex From a Stranger, Men or Women?
I sometimes hear that we’re in the middle of a gender revolution, and that the new generation is rethinking and overturning the old ways. What people seem to forget is that this isn’t the first time this has happened; we’ve had attempted gender revolutions every decade or so since at least the 1960s. Yet some things never change.
From time to time, students ask me whether I think sex differences like this one will eventually disappear or even reverse. Will women in ten years or twenty years be just as open to casual sex with strangers as men are, if not more so? I generally tell them that, although it’s possible in principle, it seems very unlikely to me given the current evidence. My gut reaction to the question, though, isn’t so measured. My gut reaction is the answer your grandmother might have given: “Of course not!”
: The Absurd Way I accidentally Cured my PTSD
I've been trying to figure out why I've been so suicidal the last 20 years. I've been trying to find a way to get better. And it's been years of one pill after another; one therapist after another. It's all just been Band-Aids, never a real solution.
And now, here it finally is, with one of the most obscure, bizarre, seemingly archaic tools imaginable.
Ceremonial magick?
Really?
You expect me to come out here and explain to people that the way to cure PTSD is by jumping around in a circle, waving a magic wand, trying to invoke Jesus Christ in order to experience what it was like when the Roman soldiers tortured and raped him before the crucifixion?
Well, it worked for me.
: Scientology’s Rogue Gallery Leaked
I would even say that I recognize in Scientologists something I understand well: the cognitive rigidity that makes expertise possible, but also can trap disempowered people in oppressive conditions until they snap. Those conditions became more obvious to me, the more I reported on Scientology over the course of a decade. I became certain that Scientology was a cult, harming its own members. But I also became unafraid of Scientology harming me. They didn’t see me as a real threat; only a way to keep the lower members in line with the shadow of one.It
became obvious that we were never going to use reason alone to talk many Scientologists out of their exploitative religion. As I learned while reporting on property tax records in grad school in 2015, the L.A. branch of Scientology might best be thought of as a group of people guarding empty buildings. Religious rent-a-cops with fliers.
: They Were Just Following Orders
I wonder if Abraham ever apologized to Isaac. I mean, he was convinced God told him to offer him as a sacrifice. Why should anyone apologize for what their God tells them to do? And yeah, Abraham may have misunderstood what God meant, but still, it came from a good place, a faithful place, right? And if God only wanted Abraham to go through with it until the blade was against Isaac’s throat, he still stopped it from happening. Isaac still lived, still went on to be the ancestor of nations. No harm, no foul, right? And as for the church, all the countless people it has persecuted—from the Albigensians and all non-Christians to every hue of the queer rainbow—over the centuries was to protect the faith, ensure its survival, at least, that’s what the clerics and the kings and the zealous laypeople said was what Scripture, the Word of God, compelled them to do.
That’s all for now. Happy New Year!
Posts must be well-written with a minimum of grammatical and spelling errors. Most of us don’t have professional editors so a few mistakes are inevitable, but the piece needs to be readable.
I must find the article moving or interesting, which is completely subjective. Just because a piece doesn’t ring my bell doesn’t mean it’s bad.
No authors will be featured two months in a row. So, if you were featured in last month’s post, you will by default not be included in this month’s post.
Sometimes I run out of space, time, or energy, and your piece just gets left on the cutting room floor as a result. Don’t despair! You might be Shapespare, I just work too many jobs and I’m too overwhelmed and your piece fell through the cracks. Feel free to remind me of your article again, and I will make time to read it!
Thank you for the share, Stephen! I’m glad to get some recs for new authors I wouldn’t have otherwise found.
Great list! Thank you good sir!