Ziho Park is a professor of economics at Taiwan National University. He grew up in Korea and received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. Ziho joins me to talk about the strange world of Korean feminism, and the backlash to it. The last time this came to my attention was when Korean feminists recently got a “sex festival” shut down…

Since last week, antiwar protests have broken out on college campuses across the country. What’s notable to me is the combination of a complete lack of violence along with the hysterical accusations of such and hyperbole going back and forth between the two sides. Everyone deep down knows that no one is going to get hurt, not by the police and not …

Rob joins me to talk about the film Civil War. We both have already posted (spoiler-filled) reviews. I really didn’t like it, while he gives the movie a kind of lukewarm endorsement. The greatest weakness is clearly its lack of explanation of how the US got to the point where Americans were killing each other. The movie doesn’t simply ignore the qu…

I cover two topics this week. First of all, there is Mike Johnson finally deciding to bring to the House floor bills on providing aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. As things stand, the texts of the bills have been released, and votes are expected to happen as early as Saturday. I’m fascinated by the role Trump has played in all this, and argue th…

I first discovered Farha Khalidi, who has 1.8 million followers on TikTok, through seeing clips of her shutting down red pill and manosphere type influencers on something called the @whatever podcast, which a friend described to me as material from the lowest level of content hell. I was impressed, as before this the women in these kinds of debates…

The Sydney Sweeney saga continues. Rob joins me on the podcast to talk about her new film Immaculate, which I reviewed on X here. The conversation begins by Rob informing me that he thinks Sydney Sweeney is mid, and this leads to a heated debate about her appeal, which involves ranking various actresses and models over the years. We come to the con…

My friend Brian Chau joins the podcast to talk about how life in DC is going. A few weeks ago we chatted on the CSPI podcast, and this can be seen as a followup to that discussion. Our last conversation focused on the specifics of AI doomerism and why he’s not worried about the technology killing us all. This time, we go into detail about how thing…

Walt Bismarck (follow on X) became internet famous in 2015 for his Disney parody videos in support of Alt Right ideas and causes. Recently, he remerged on a new Substack called Alt Right 2.0, where he writes about how his political views have changed and the kind of movement he’d like to help build in the future. I found two essays he wrote, “Why I…

Yes, we’re going to keep milking this thing for what it’s worth. To follow up on my article on Sydney Sweeney’s breasts and their implications for the culture war, here I do some gender theory. The more I think about it, the more I realize that her not apologizing for coming from a family of MAGAs is probably a bigger sign of cultural change than h…