New Interviews and British emigration

Meghan Daum, John Anderson, and my piece in the Spectator

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Hi everyone,

A few updates. Firstly (and with some trepidation), from next week I’ll go back to releasing two MMM episodes a week – I dropped down to one per week during maternity leave, but I think I’m back on top of the recording schedule. Upcoming guests include Lyman Stone, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Spencer Klavan, and lots more.

Here’s what else I’ve been up to, work-wise…

I wrote a column for the Spectator on why so many British people are moving to the Gulf (and why I don’t intend to join them):

If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular, and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to a dangerous frontier.

My money is still on the Pilgrim-types to lead the way, at least in the early waves. But I did wonder, while sitting in its airport last week, if interplanetary human civilisation might one day end up looking something like the city of Dubai.

Dubai operates rather like a space colony. It depends on desalinated sea water and imports almost all of its food. Temperatures can approach 50 degrees celsius in the Summer, with no rain to speak of, and construction workers frequently die of heat exhaustion. This is an environment exquisitely hostile to human life, hence the famously air conditioned sand on Dubai's most luxurious beaches. For the wealthy, life is lived indoors, under artificial lighting. Nevertheless, out of the desert has sprung a prosperous, high tech, cosmopolitan society that bright young chancers want to be a part of.

British chancers, above all…

I also went on Meghan Daum’s show to talk about tradwives, the 4B movement, and baby boomers.

And I spoke to John Anderson about the Supreme Court ruling on transgenderism, the core tenets of progressivism, and why the harms of dechristianisation provide good evidence for Christianity being true.

Also a shout out to Maria Baer, who wrote a piece on her impressions of the UVA debate I took part in last month.

From Maria’s piece:

Listen, I agree we have a video game problem in this country, and definitely a porn problem, and that a confluence of forces (the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one, the drug epidemic, the fatherlessness crisis, the ridiculous anti-masculinity of ‘therapy’ culture) have led to higher rates of men to whom I would not… be attracted, let’s say. But this cutesy I’m-a-real-feminist-because-I-hate-men stuff is becoming extremely tiresome, and it’s naïve to pretend that men - and marriage - do not also have a PR problem. During the academic panel earlier in this day, Erika Bachiochi said that the message of the sexual revolution, specifically that women needed “liberation,” required also building the perception that marriage and motherhood are “low-status.” This changed cultural norms. Getting married young is no longer “normal.” Wanting lots of children is not “normal.” Having lots of children (ie. more than one) is hardly “normal.”

More soon!

L x