Reintroduction

I Also Wrote A Cover Story

I first launched this page five years ago. It was May 2020, Substack was all the rage, and I wanted to write dispatch from the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. I wrote a story, published it here, and in the spirit of the times, vowed to strike out on my own and cover the growing protests as a righteously independent journalist. Soon, I realized that my journalistic ambition was a few paces ahead of my journalistic ability. I put the Substack on ice and kept freelancing for more established outlets, so I could learn how to actually execute the stories I saw myself writing one day. One of those outlets was The Nation. They published my first feature story in a major national magazine in June 2020, about an emerging style of right wing food politics (more on that at a later date).

Roughly five years later, today, I was lucky enough to write the cover story for the new issue of The Nation. It’s a profile of a Richard V. Reeves, the author of Of Boys and Men, and the President of the American Institute of Boys and Men. As I write in the story, if you have ingested any content in the last three or so years, on the so-called “Crisis of Masculinity” or the phenomenon/meme of “Male Loneliness” Reeves was likely involved in some form or another. I became familiar with his work when I was writing an article for Mother Jones in the summer of 2023. My story was about the troubling rise of misogynist masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate, the so-called “manosphere,” and how that whole scene had gone from a relatively fringe community who could be laughed away to an incredibly popular community whose influence had to be contended with.

Reeves ended up becoming one of the foremost public intellectuals addressing the phenomenon. He did not start to focus on men’s issues solely to combat the rise of alpha-male influencers. But his book was published just as the Andrew Tate popularity crested, and he was often called on to explain what was happening. These days he’s being called on to talk about what happened with young men’s dramatic swing to Trump 2024, and The Gender Election. More broadly, in his book and articles, Reeves brings together sociological data to support his argument that American men are suffering in specifically gendered ways, and thus need gender-specific solutions. As you might imagine, not everyone agrees with him.

You can read my Richard V. Reeves profile at The Nation today, and on newsstands sometime soon.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, you can find a nearly comprehensive list of clips on my website.

Follow me on Twitter and Bluesky.

In the coming weeks and months I plan to post more on Substack. I can’t quite say what shape or form that may take, but I’ll likely write more musings, rants and experiments that I can’t or won’t publish elsewhere.