In this bonus episode, Rob Henderson and I discussed the legacy of Aaron Sorkin, and the end of the political era that his work represented.

Discussed in the episode:

• Sorkin interviewed on the BBC.
• Rob’s NYT piece on The West Wing.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

We are all descended from thousands of generations of parents who successfully raised their children to adulthood. But, unlike those parents, we all have access to plentiful food, indoor plumbing, effective medicine, and all of the other technologies that make modern life so comfortable. You might expect, therefore, that the modern experience of parenthood would feel easy. Why doesn't it?  

My guest today first started thinking about the unnaturalness of modern parenting when she became the mother of two little kids, born close together in age. She was spending much of her time alone with them and feeling acutely stressed. It set her thinking about the evolutionary mismatch between this very isolated existence, and the way in which our ancient ancestors raised their children. 

Elena Bridgers is a science writer and author of the substack 'Motherhood Until Yesterday.' Today we spoke about the many ways in which modern parenting is historically strange – from co-sleeping to alloparenting to birth spacing. What can hunter gatherers teach us about how to make parenting easier? 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

MMM is sponsored by 321 - a new online introduction to Christianity, presented by former MMM guest Glen Scrivener. Check it out for free at 321course.com/MMM. Just enter your email, choose a password and you’re in — there’s no spam and no fees. 

Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

Testing a foetus or an embryo for some medical conditions is now a routine part of the modern pregnancy experience. Prenatal Down’s Syndrome tests, for instance, are now so widespread that in some Scandinavian countries almost 100 per cent of women choose to abort a foetus diagnosed with the condition, or – if using IVF – not implant the affected embryo. The result is a visible change to these populations: there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.

New technology is now available – at a high price – for those who want to go further. So-called polygenic embryo screening can give a very full picture of the adult that the embryo could become, including his or her vulnerability to an enormous number of diseases – heart disease, diabetes, cancer – and also the physical and psychological traits that he or she would likely possess: height, hair colour, athletic ability, conscientiousness, altruism, intelligence. 

Is this a good thing? Should we welcome a world in which parents are routinely selecting their embryos in this way? 

I'm joined today by two guests who take a very different view. 

Emma Waters is a policy analyst at the Center for Technology and the Human Person at the Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on family, biotechnology, and reproductive medicine.

Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher, author of the book 'Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement', and is also the director of scientific research and communication for Herasight, a genetics startup that offers polygenic embryo screening.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

On the cover of their new book, authors Dean Spears and Michael Geruso have a graph of the global population over time. The population is small and roughly stable for pretty much all of human history. It rises after the advent of agriculture, some ten thousand years ago, but that bump looks rather minor now. 

It's only after the industrial revolution that we see this enormous spike, taking us from a world containing 1 billion people in 1800 to over 8 billion today. So far, so familiar. 

But what Spears and Geruso are interested in is what happens next. Their book is titled 'After the Spike' because they foresee an imminent addition to the familiar population graph: a descent just as steep as the ascent. An exponential decline that might even take us back to a global population smaller than that of 1800. 

I speak to Dean Spears today about what demographic research indicates is imminently in store for us as a species, and what might be on the horizon 'after the spike.'  

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this bonus episode, I spoke with Rod Dreher about what he describes as the 'Weimarisation of the West' – an increasingly atomised and economically precarious society that valorises transgression for its own sake. We also discussed whether World War II still has a central place in the cultural imagination, why the Online Right puts so much emphasis on humour, and the ongoing civil unrest in Minnesota. 

• Article in 'The Point' on heteropessimism
• 'The Harry Potter generation needs to grow up'
• Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Fuentes
• Fuentes on Red Scare
• Rod's Substack post on nurses' comments on ICE agents
• 'The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons'
• Ezra Klein on Trump

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

Teenage anxiety isn’t a new thing. Our mothers and grandmothers also worried about beauty, and friendships, and boys.

What is new, however, is the role of technology in teenage anxiety. We see an inflection point in the early 2010s: a sudden drop in mental wellbeing among teenagers, particularly girls. The beginning of that drop coincided with the arrival of image-based social media like Instagram.

My guest today argues that this was not a coincidence. Freya India is the author of the Substack GIRLS, where she writes about the challenges girls and young women face in the modern world. She’s also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter, After Babel.

Her new book is about the ways in which communication technology has given us a world in which teenage girls end up commodifying themselves – selling their lives on social media, advertising themselves on dating apps, and packaging themselves into personal brands. All at the cost of their own sanity.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this bonus episode, I spoke with Stone Age Herbalist about an essay he recently published on Victorian attitudes towards death. 

We discussed the cultural impact of Jack the Ripper, the terror of body snatching, the practice of postmortem photography, and the Spiritualist movement's preoccupation with electricity.  

Discussed in the episode:

• 'How The Victorians Eroticised Death, From Ophelia To Salome'
• More on the anatomical venus 
• More on body snatching and Georgia Medical College

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

The word 'meritocracy' was originally intended as a pejorative. It was coined in a 1958 novel written by the British social scientist Michael Young. In the dystopia that Young imagined, the old order has been overthrown and replaced with a tyrannical system obsessed with merit. 

Today's guest not only joins Young in his critique of meritocracy, he also takes a further bold step in endorsing some extremely old fashioned ideas about wealth, family, and legacy. 

In an age when celebrities routinely boast about their plans to disinherit their children and leave them to fend for themselves financially, Johann Kurtz makes a counter-cultural argument for nepotism. Do not give your money to charity, he says. Do not encourage your children to launch themselves into the meritocratic rat race. Learn, instead, from the ancient practices of aristocrats who had very different ideas about how to cultivate virtue in their descendants. 

Kurtz is the author of the 'Becoming Noble' Substack. His new book is titled 'Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.'

Discussed in the show: 

• 'Leaving a Legacy'
• Stress induced by downward social mobility
• 'Good Money' podcast series
• Survey on attitudes towards grandchildren
• 'Toxic Charity'
• 'Revolt of the Elites'

MMM is sponsored by 321 - a new online introduction to Christianity, presented by former MMM guest Glen Scrivener. Check it out for free at 321course.com/MMM. Just enter your email, choose a password and you’re in — there’s no spam and no fees. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.