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Connection — On togetherness

• [audio] You Can Catch Madness — 13 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em> isn’t a rare clinical curiosity. It’s one misleading face of social isolation—intimacy plus loneliness, the same machinery running in all of us. The spectacular cases are selection bias. You can catch it.
• [article] Successful Prophets — 5 Jun 2026
  We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 4 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em>, or the ‘madness of two’, is the kind of psychological phenomenon that occasionally captures the imagination of the media. Two people, otherwise normal, suddenly go insane. It’s a premise that we can ghoulishly enjoy from afar because it seems like it could never happen to us. But I’m not so sure. From intra-family murder to Theranos to our own odder moments, I think shared madness is something that is much more common than you’d think. ideology: | <em>Folie</em> à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [article] Useful Men — 4 Apr 2026
  It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetence. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.
• [marginalium] AI simulates conversations — 24 Feb 2026
• [audio] Hydraulic Despotism — 21 Feb 2026
  You’re not coerced by malice. You’re coerced by convenience. Control the flow, control the people: the most discredited theory in political science describes social media, energy and compute perfectly. The alternatives exist. We just don’t use them.
• [audio] Atavism Isn't the Answer — 7 Feb 2026
  Seed oils, raw milk, cold plunges, tradwives—one template runs them all: name a modern ill, invent an ancestral past, sell the return as cure. It’s built on a fantasy we can’t verify.
• [article] Gesticism — 26 Jan 2026
  Lots of things are happening, but anything <em>can</em> matter, and whatever gives meaning will eventually demand sacrifice. The agony of attention. I’m not going to spend more time trying to reduce the core idea than that.
• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [audio] Mundane Cults — 29 Nov 2025
  Cults aren’t the fringe. They’re the architecture of ordinary community, and not being in one usually means something’s gone wrong. The question is whether yours is one you chose.
• [audio] Men Aren't From Mars — 15 Nov 2025
  Men and women aren’t wired differently. We read the same behaviour as reasonable in him and unreasonable in her—normalising troubled men while pathologising women’s ordinary needs.
• [marginalium] Digital Personhood — 1 Jul 2025
• [marginalium] Is culture socially costly — 30 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] God without god — 26 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Love is about betterment — 24 Jun 2025