The journalist Chris Hayes once said that theater kids joining the professional world is “like releasing an apex predator into an ecosystem.” Their empathy, charisma, and self-promotion give them an edge in a society where everyone is clamoring for attention. The New York Times ran a whole piece about how Ted Cruz starred in Oliver! and Ketanji Brown Jackson did improv with Matt Damon when they were at Harvard.

The headline was, “Grown-Up Theater Kids Run the World.”

Over the past three years, I’ve interviewed some accomplished hosts, including Nick Gray on throwing the perfect 2-hour cocktail party, on “building the Benedict Option,” and most recently, I got to talk with about her viral essay, “Loneliness is for Cowards.”

Speaking with Camp really crystallized how theater kids (broadly speaking) are the “apex predators” of hosting. Gray, Sargeant, and Camp all have a background in improv, theater, or debate, and on the one hand, that’s not surprising.

If you hated public speaking or being the center of attention, it would be hard to invite 50 people to your house. But it’s more than that. When Gray was launching his book, so many people told him that COVID interrupted parties they’d hosted for years, like a 4th of July cookout, and they never got restarted.

These events used to be part of the annual rhythm, but now the default is to stay in. It takes a brave host to overcome that inertia, someone who can plan something exciting, carry it off with enthusiasm, and is not afraid of getting called insane, weird, or cringe.

Enter the hero.

“Though this be madness, there is method in’t” - Polonius, Hamlet

Camp says hosting is like “directing a play.”

She pictures the blocking of the stage: “people are gonna sit over here, and I have this big island in my kitchen, they’re gonna be standing by the island, almost like I’m a bartender, and I’m gonna be serving the drinks to them this way, and I wanna have it in this glass…”

Her preparation is meticulous. For a recent July 4th reading at her NYC apartment, she prepared five different cocktails all themed around the holiday: A Freedom of Peach, Goodnight Mr. Jefferson, Air Force One, Gulf of America, and Philly Fish House Punch.

She sees these as her party’s selling point, her elevator pitch. People want a reason to show up, and she can tell someone new she meets, “I make amazing cocktails. You should come to my house and have them.” And she does not skimp on her craft.

The first ten minutes of our conversation covered everything from how she finally found a use for the pawpaws she’d harvested on Roosevelt Island last summer to how you make a Paper Plane cocktail into an “Air Force One” (swap the bourbon for “the very American spirit of apple brandy”). She concluded: “And then I clarified my lime and lemon juice [using agar agar] because I’m insane.”

Camp’s insanity doesn’t just lead to fanatical attention to detail with the drink menu, party theme, or reading sequencing. It gives Camp what she describes as her most important power: “I’ve stopped caring whether I come off as too eager or ‘too much’ when seeking new friendships.”

Or as she says later on, “You may think I’m weird and that’s okay.”

“I am not throwin’ away my shot” - Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton

, the author of Hannah’s Children, told me that if you want to know how many kids fit within our modern lifestyle, it’s 1.6. The mothers she interviewed who had 5 or more children broke with the status quo in one way or another, and that brought a certain amount of heckling from friends, family, or strangers. But they thought a big family was worth it.

A similar principle applies to friends. 22 percent of millennials say they have no friends. Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties in 2024 than they did in 2003. 24% of adults under 30 feel lonely all or most of the time. If you want a bigger social life than the average, you must be willing to go against the grain and face the consequences.

And just as birth rates are a problem some wish to fix through policy interventions, loneliness is often treated as a problem that will be solved through age-gating social media or banning smartphones during the school day or some other policy intervention.

As befits a WSJ Senior Newsletter Editor, Camp is skeptical of utopian visions—whether socialist communities of the Left or the Right magically restoring the traditional family values that led to people joining The Elks—and she hates the victim mentality it inculcates.

She thinks the individual solution is both attainable and the only feasible option: “You have agency. You don’t have to be sad forever. You are not doomed by fate to feel this way.” Here, Camp and Sargeant use the same line: You can just do things.

That’s a slogan associated with Silicon Valley, and while Camp imagines herself as a play director, there’s some LinkedIn hustle culture lurking in her approach:

[When I moved to New York], I quickly undertook a project of aggressive recruitment. I reached out to acquaintances, determined to turn them into friends. I said yes to every happy hour and offer to grab coffee. When I attended a friend-of-a-friend’s house party, I resolved to leave with at least three phone numbers. I ended up nabbing twice that. When I sent out the invite to my inaugural party as a New Yorker, I directed my new friends to bring plus ones and twos. In all, around 50 people showed up to my debut as a New York hostess last month.

It’s helpful to understand what drives Camp to this level of intensity. , a frequent guest at Camp’s parties, says that in addition to Camp’s “infinite patience, infinite generosity, and an inability to take offense,” what “makes her so successful is that she sees hosting and hospitality as a moral duty or a moral good.”

Camp sees plenty of people having one-on-one interactions or going to the club to dance “in a giant mass of anonymous bodies,” but parties where you make new friends and enjoy unexpected but wonderful conversations? She says those kinds of events are “nosediving.”

She’s trying to change that, and she’s not afraid of “being perceived as sort of cringe-worthy or weird,” unlike so many would-be hosts. If you browse her X feed, you’ll find plenty of people telling her she’s weird and far worse.

But she is not fazed. She knows she is not “everybody’s cup of tea,” and she is okay with that. You may find Camp’s aggressive recruitment off-putting. You may not want her to hand you a “Goodnight Mr. Jefferson” and then stare expectantly as you take your first sip. You may just want to pop down to the bar to watch the world cup game.

And that’s okay.

But if you would be interested, Camp’s going to make sure you get invited.

“You risk nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” - Riggan Thomson, Birdman.

I think of hosts as falling along two axes: structure and effort. Effort is when Camp clarifies her lemon juice or Gray texts each invitee personally. It’s the front-end time investment.

Structure is the format of the event itself. So Sargeant might serve watermelon and popcorn (low effort) for a Dorothy Sayers reading (high structure). Camp’s 4th of July reading featured five signature cocktails (high effort) with a half hour of prepared readings from Audrey Horne et al. (high structure). On other nights, Camp serves her signature cocktails but just has 60 people over to mingle (high effort, low structure).

I’ve created an infographic for how I think about the options and the famous examples:

Gray admits that you have to be a little cringe to add structure and activities to your party—like wearing name tags and having ice-breakers to introduce the group—but he is told time and again, “That was different, but it actually was really helpful, and I met a lot of new people.”

In other words, a cringe hosts allows everyone else to be cool guests. When you put yourself out there a bit, you give people something to talk about, something to connect over, or maybe just a brief respite to enjoy a prepared reading.

Gray says that with all the hosts who gave up during COVID, a new generation needs to pick up the mantle. Camp fears young people’s risk-aversion will keep them shut in—breaking from the herd is intimidating—but theater kids, as always, point the way.

They are used to being told their core commitment is frivolous and unimportant, just like hosting a party isn’t a big deal in the world’s eyes. At the same time, they know that art and human connection offer some of the greatest joys in life. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.”

This dissonance can lead some hosts and theater kids to become a bit defensive about how what they’re doing MATTERS, and they end up acting like Michael Keaton in Birdman confronting the New York Times theater critic.

But the real artist understands that you must give yourself to the labor without demanding the fruits of it, and these hosts are no different.

If someone flakes on Sargeant, she asks how she can pray for them and finds there’s always something important going on. Camp admits that she gets ghosted plenty, but it’s still amazing to have 50 people come to your party. Gray asks prospective hosts to call him any time for impromptu coaching advice.

They have different reasons for hosting, different approaches to events, and different people they attract, but they all are motivated to bring people together and rage against the dying of the social life. The Times reported Grown-Up Theater Kids have run the world for some time now.

Perhaps they will save it too.

If you enjoyed this, you can find more of Camp’s work here:

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If you’ve got hosting takes, leave them below! I find this topic fascinating.

We know of at least one because it was a friend of Ryan Gosling’s. The friend took his fiancée to see The Notebook, and when they walked out of the theater, she said: “You wouldn’t build a house for me, would you?”

Just as a refresher, this is a movie where Noah (Ryan Gosling) writes 365 letters to a girl he barely knows and then builds a house for her and pretends they share it. As Gosling put it at the time, “In any other movie, this guy’s going to get locked up, but she thinks it’s romantic.”

Well apparently the fiancée thought so too, and she wanted to know whether her soon-to-be husband would build a house for her. In Gosling’s telling, the friend replied:

“No, but I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“It’s over.”

“Are you crazy? You’re breaking up with me because I wouldn’t build a house?”

“You wouldn’t even learn to build a house for me?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“It’s over.”

The first reported casualty.

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It’s summertime, and wedding season is in full swing for friends and celebrities alike. Zendaya and Tom Holland were secretly married, Dua Lipa and Callum Turner were just married, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are about to be married. It’s hard to know what impact this high status-marriage will have on rank-and-file romance, but I am reminded of something Ross Douthat wrote last year about life in the digital age: “the celebrity influencer half a world away takes the place in your mental space that friends and neighbors used to occupy.”

In the case of your friends and neighbors, you are able to see them when they are irritable or bored or strange, but through no fault of their own, celebrities are almost incapable of presenting a real relationship.

This is due to what I call the “Dirty Corners Paradox.”

When I was in college, a friend complained to me one day about how everyone’s Instagram is so fake. They post their vacation pics and their perfectly composed dinner plates and their beautiful white countertops. He wanted to inject some reality to the platform, so he said he was going to photograph the dirty corners of his house. He was going to present his life unfiltered.

While I admire his chutzpah, the trouble with this noble aspiration is that no one wants to see the genuinely dirty corners of your life. And you don’t want people to see them either. Instead, you’ll still want to choose something that is “honest” while still being funny or relatable or representative. You will have revealed something more personal, but you will be engaged in the same activity as the vacation poster. In trying to pull back the curtain, you will only have taken the performance one layer deeper.

It’s basically the difference between Travis Kelce saying he and Taylor Swift have “never once” argued and Kristen Bell posting: “Happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who, after an episode of Dateline, once said to me: ‘I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.’❤️”

While it feels like we are being let in on Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s life, we’re still seeing something that is calibrated to endear them to us. It is a dirty corner in name only.

This contrast was brought home when I recently read a letter JRR Tolkien wrote his son Michael. Because they shared the mundane parts of life, Tolkien could credibly explain the importance of sacrifice within a marriage:

[T]he essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment…but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification…When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along…And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.

You may assume this is a case of Tolkien mounting a defense for his loveless marriage, but his own story was quite dramatic. He fell in love at age 18 to a woman who would inspire his story of Beren and Lúthien, a mortal man who fell in love with an immortal elf-maiden. He admits that his “own history is so exceptional, so wrong and imprudent in nearly every point that it makes it difficult to counsel prudence. Yet hard cases make bad law; and exceptional cases are not always good guides for others.”

On the one hand, you could say that this is just a case of an older figure instructing “do as I say not as I do.” On the other hand, Tolkien would know better than most when he speaks of the commitment necessary to sustain a Christian marriage. He had the fairy tale romance as a young man, yet he concludes that the real soul-mate is not the one you find but “the one you are actually married to,” the one you stick with when the glamor “works a bit thin.”

That’s a message that a celebrity is structurally incapable of transmitting. Even if they told you, “Great marriages are built not found,” how could you believe it? They are rich and powerful and had their pick of the litter. If you look at their spouse, could you really believe that, were you in their place, the glamor would ever wear off? And the quiet work of self-denial, even if a celebrity were to undergo it, is something that you cannot post. Outing your spouse’s bad habits or glorifying your own forbearance would ruin the whole thing.

It takes a normal couple to show what a soul-mate really is.

For all of The Notebook’s absurdity—a love story temporarily curing dementia, etc.—it has some solid principles. In a pivotal scene, Noah tells Allie, “It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be really hard. And we’re going to have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you.”

Even building her the house is a good analogy for marriage. On the face of it, it’s an outrageous act of love and devotion fit only for Hollywood. But on a symbolic level, it’s the sum of a million small efforts for the sake of their relationship with no guarantee of payoff or recognition. Just as a house is this separate thing Noah built, a marriage is something that is somehow separate yet reflective of the couple.

In other words, a “real soul-mate” may not build a house in the literal sense, but he certainly would in the figurative one. So maybe it was a fair question for the fiancée to ask after all. She’s not demanding a wedding at MSG. She just wants to know whether he’s willing to work at this every day, like Noah was.

I don’t know if breaking up was the right thing for them. Maybe their relationship was unsound, and a screening of The Notebook exposed the fault lines. But I can’t help but wonder if he’d spoken to the spirit of her question rather than the literal meaning, if he’d affirmed, “If you’re a bird, then I’m a bird,” rather than protested his lack of carpentry—things might have been different.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any marriage advice you’ve found helpful below, and if you haven’t already, consider joining the team.

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Jar-Jar is silly in precisely the way a father playing with his toddlers is silly. Even as a kid, I found Jar-Jar vaguely embarrassing but in a comforting way. Anakin’s iconic lines—from “Are you an angel” to “Now this is pod-racing” to the infamous “I don’t like sand”—don’t seem cringe to a child. In fact, I thought Anakin’s sand monologue was rather suave when I first heard it.

Through some mix of intuition, genius, and luck, Lucas managed to tell a story that cinematically and politically captured the mood of the next generation. When I recently rewatched the films, I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed them, and in my anecdotal research, my peers feel the same.

Part of that is obviously nostalgia, but the films feel strangely prescient as well.

Lucas said he wanted the prequels to explore the Republic in its final days and how it became the Empire. That comes through in the visual similarities between the Jedi starships and the Empire’s star destroyers or the difference between Padme’s elaborate costumes and Leia’s monochromatic ones. But there’s also a philosophical difference.

In the prequels, we see a society where science and technology reign while the originals show a return to spirituality and mysticism.

So even though Anakin and Luke are both skilled pilots and powerful in the force, their use of it is dramatically different. Luke turns off his targeting computer so that he can use The Force to fire his torpedo down the exhaust port. Anakin destroys the Trade Federation battleship through his knack for machines and seemingly dumb luck. Luke was taught the force like a catechism. Anakin was blood-tested surreptitiously by Qui-Gon, only to find that his Midi-chlorian counts were “off the chart.”

Consider which sounds more like our world today: doing handstands in the fog with Yoda or blood tests and frontier science granting God-like abilities?

Allow me to summarize the plot of the prequels using slightly more modern jargon. A young boy is recruited to fight for the Republic in a forever war. The goal of the war is unclear, and the only outcome appears to be consolidating power in the Chancellor. Upon returning home, the young man is torn between the democratically elected leader’s increasingly hegemonic power and a deep state of Jedi who seek to overthrow the executive and assume temporary control of the government. Deeply disillusioned, he ends up tearing everything down.

It’s not an allegory, but there’s plenty there for young people to connect with.

But Lucas is not a political filmmaker primarily, he’s concerned with the interpersonal drama and the choices of individuals. Despite Anakin’s many complaints about politicians, his breaking point comes when Mace Windu betrays the Jedi code.

At the start of Revenge of the Sith, Anakin and Obi-Wan rescue Chancellor Palpatine from Count Dooku. Obi-Wan is knocked unconscious in the battle, but Anakin disarms and subdues Dooku. At the Chancellor’s urging, Anakin executes Dooku, but he immediately feels shame for not acting in “The Jedi Way.” The Chancellor assures him that Dooku was too dangerous to be left alive.

In the film’s climax, this same decision faces Mace Windu. Windu defeats Chancellor Palpatine, and Anakin runs in as Windu holds his lightsaber above the unarmed man. Windu says Palpatine is too dangerous to be left alive, and as he winds up to kill Palpatine, Anakin intervenes, ultimately leading to Windu’s death.

Anakin isn’t brought to the dark side because the Chancellor deceives him, as Obi-Wan says, but because the Chancellor tells him the whole thing’s rotten. And he’s right.

Mace Windu and the Jedi are planning to overthrow the democratically elected Chancellor and take control of the Senate. They are sending Anakin to spy on the Chancellor. And ultimately, they are willing to execute Palpatine without trial. So Anakin chooses cynicism over naivete and sides with the Sith, hoping to gain enough power to save Padmé.

His faith is broken by Windu, and from there he quickly moves to killing younglings and declaring, “I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire.” But it’s clear his political philosophy is driven by hatred for the Jedi and their betrayal rather than any positive vision of change.

In the same way, the politics of many young people are driven by out-group hatred and a sense that their elders, the ones who were supposed to be looking out for them, betrayed them. The New Yorker ran a piece about Groypers, and this paragraph has stuck with me:

For a successful young professional attending a political conference, G. said things like “We have literally nothing to live for—we’re ready to die” a lot. His life, he claimed, was hopelessly compromised by the indignities of the modern world. “You watch these videos of Europe or America in the eighteen-hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “Everyone’s well dressed. There’s, like, a tenderness and an innocence to it, and I feel like we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we ever had our first kiss. Why the f— did that happen? Do our G.O.P. leaders care?”

This seemingly successful man has dedicated a huge portion of his life to destroying the GOP for spiritual rather than political reasons. The loss of innocence he mentions is the same thing that drove Anakin over the edge.

If you think Revenge of the Sith is the best film of the three, it is only because The Phantom Menace is the “worst.” Its over-the-top silliness and childlike innocence prove to be the last gasp of a decadent society, and it makes the darkness that follows all the more disturbing.

The boy who greeted his future wife with “Are you an angel?” ended up choking her and leaving her to die in childbirth. The kid who Obi-Wan raised to be “The Chosen One” ended up telling him, “I hate you” and leaving The Force in darkness. The boy whose Midi-chlorian counts were off the charts, who had the world before him, ended up destroying his friends, family, and legacy. It’s a tragedy that struck me harder this time than any past viewing.

I don’t believe we live in the Empire, but I do think the prequels were strangely prophetic in capturing the zeitgeist, and they’re worth re-watching if you haven’t recently.

Because political and cultural analysis aside, Geonosis still goes incredibly hard.

This past week, we saw how little has changed in the past 30 years. Headlines reported, “AI takes over Cannes as agents privately seek big money deals” and “Pedro Pascal’s ‘The Mandalorian And Grogu’ Bombs At Box Office.” The big follow-up coming out of this weekend will be whether The Mandalorian and Grogu bounced back due to positive word-of-mouth or whether it cratered. I am predicting and praying it will be the former.

Critics are complaining that The Mandalorian and Grogu feels too episodic. There’s no singular villain the entire film builds toward, and there’s no set-up for a bigger conflict in the future. They say Jon Favreau wrote a script for season four of The Mandalorian, and then kinda reworked it to be a movie, but it’s really an abridged TV show.

My reply is, “Thank God.”

The Mandalorian is a show that’s always opted for self-contained episodes over sprawling narratives, and Favreau is staying true to what got them here. It’s refreshing to have a film that isn’t just a set-up for a sequel. You walk out of the theater with a sense of closure instead of a sinking feeling that your $15 ticket is now a sunk cost toward some sequel.

But it’s not just that.

When George Lucas was working on The Phantom Menace, he infamously said, “Jar-Jar is the key to all of this, if we get Jar-Jar working. Cause he’s a funnier character then we’ve ever had in any of the movies before.” And he was correct. Jar-Jar proved to be a lightning rod for critics, exemplifying the overreliance on CGI, tonal imbalances, and bizarre character choices in the film. He did not get Jar-Jar working.

In the case of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Grogu (or “Baby Yoda”) is the key to all of this because we’ve never had a character this cute before. We’ve never had a child this helpless, and that’s shaped the storytelling as well. Favreau has focused more on the Mando-Grogu relationship to propel the story than on the baddies.

There’s plenty of action, but at root, it’s a story about fathers, sons, and family. The key inciting incident for the original series is that Mando is asked to capture Baby Yoda and deliver him to Imperial forces. He fulfills his contract, but stricken by his conscience, he goes back and saves the child—sacrificing his credibility as a bounty hunter but finding an unexpected new life training Grogu and eventually joining The New Republic.

Of course, family stories are not new to Star Wars. George Lucas has called the sprawling story of the Skywalkers a “family soap opera,” but Baby Yoda is something new.

Watching as a father of young kids, I couldn’t help but be reminded of them. There’s the obvious stuff like the way Baby Yoda clings to Mando or crawls up under his arm to sleep. There’s his disobedience flipping switches on the ship or sneaking food. But there’s also the mutual dependence that develops.

At one point in the film, Mando is mortally wounded, but he tells Grogu to save himself and leave the planet. Instead, Grogu risks his life to stay and heal Mando. This is the only time Mando uses one of the show’s most famous lines: “The old protect the young. Then the young protect the old. This is the way.”

I imagine someone who has cared for an elderly parent would relate to that line literally, but I found it spiritually resonant as well. At first your newborn is dependent and you are caring for him. You need to watch out for his safety and explain how the world works. Over time though, you realize he is really the one helping you. He is shaving off your selfish edges, reminding you how amazing lawn mowers and motorcycles and airplanes are, expanding your heart in ways you did not realize were possible. This is the way.

Because The Mandalorian and Grogu leans into these family relationships—including Rotta the Hutt, the son of Jabba the Hutt—the action doesn’t need to carry the whole film. It gets to just be entertainment. And it delivers.

You’ve got Rotta as a muscular Hutt fighting in a gladiator match. Then you’ve got Mando and Rotta facing off against a slew of monsters in a death match. (My friend noted that these are the same monsters from the board game in A New Hope). There was much ado about putting the stunt performers in the title card, but they deserve it. I enjoy watching Mando walk almost as much as I enjoy watching Tom Cruise run.

I recognize that I am the target audience of this flick many times over. It draws on Clone Wars lore, the most popular Star Wars show among Gen Z. I’m a parent of young children. I also am enough of a Star Wars geek to ponder how Boba Fett being a clone of Jango Fett impacts the father-son dynamic of the Fetts vis-à-vis Mando and Baby Yoda.

But I hope it can break out to a larger audience. I don’t want to live in a world where loving children is niche. I don’t want all the summer blockbusters to be meaningless action sequences setting up even bigger mindless crossover action sequences at a later date. I don’t want this to be the last I see of Mando and Grogu. But I know the money will ultimately do the talking.

Let’s see what it says this weekend.

Something shorter this week in case you want to catch the film over the weekend. Leave a comment if you’ve seen it and have opinions. More soon!

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Whatever it is, it’s bad.

The documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere demonstrated how cynical many of these manosphere influencers are about engagement farm…

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That’s how The Times of London describes the author in an interview about her new book, Girls®.

It’s a clever bit of framing: it sets India up as a victor over her fellow influencers, and the photo to cap the paragraph has India modeling in designer clothes with a caption, “We don’t talk about the constant marketing of yourself. Here’s my face and body; rank and review it like a product.” In the space of three grafs, the reader is made to understand that India is a climber, a hypocrite, and is brazen to boot. She is not a serious person.

I’ve followed India since she began writing on Jonathan Haidt’s Substack about the plight of Gen Z girls. If Haidt offers the statistics about how girls, particularly liberal girls, are struggling, India delivers the firsthand stories. She has a knack for naming the strangeness of life online and the empathy to explain how Gen Z ended up so materially comfortable yet psychologically maladjusted.

Her popular Substack “Girls” has over 50,000 subscribers, and she earns praise from diverse quarters of the commentariat, including , , , and Rusty Reno. For a time, she seemed capable of no wrong.

But that time has passed.

Now that she’s reached a certain level of success, she’s become a target for take-downs from all sides. Leftist critics calls her a “trojan horse” for alt-right conspiracies, a “pick me” desperate for male approval, and a conservative Christian lecturing her secular peers. From the opposite side, she’s called a liberal feminist for “pathologising male heterosexuality” and ignoring the problems facing men today.

I got lunch with her last week and found the person described in the press far different than the one sitting across from me. India is a charming, self-deprecating Brit, and far from an attention-seeking wannabe influencer, she is very cautious to not appear too ambitious. In America, striving to build a public profile is celebrated, but in Britain, people are told to stay in their place.

So despite her success, India remains modest, and Girls® reflects that intellectual restraint.

In the introduction, India clarifies what Girls® is not. It’s not meant to speak for all Gen Z girls. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list. It’s not meant to put girls’ struggles above boys’ struggles. She writes that she focuses on girls because it’s the one topic where “I feel I can speak with what little authority I have. I am not an expert or an academic. I am a woman in her twenties.”

The book makes no policy recommendations and few prescriptions of any kind. Instead, it walks through six chapters on different areas of life where girls are struggling: Filtered (appearance), Diagnosed (mental health), Documented (posting their lives), Disconnected (friendship), Detached (relationships), “Empowered” (career). She gives her thesis right up front: “Modern digital technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt.”

For instance, India admits women have always cared about their appearance and felt self-conscious through puberty. But through social media and body filters like Facetune, they are now acutely aware of the gap between their real body and their idealized body. When they come in for cosmetic surgery, instead of bringing a photo of a celebrity, they bring a printout of their Facetune.

But in her typically gracious way, India doesn’t condemn these women. She just says this sort of commodification is what they were trained to do. Even OnlyFans is really just a continuation of the behavior begun when a 12-year-old posts a sexualized selfie.

If that sounds hysterical or off-base, consider that Shannon Elizabeth of American Pie recently justified joining OnlyFans by saying she wants to be closer to her fans: “OnlyFans gives me the opportunity to offer something more—a behind-the-scenes, unfiltered look at my life and a genuine connection that no other platform allows.” The same logic as Instagram just carried to its extreme.

India felt the story of digital harms had been told by Jonathan Haidt and others, but there was a gap for a firsthand narrative. She tells me, “it was all charts and graphs and I don’t think that’s as compelling as maybe having both, which is the statistics, but also the emotional story.”

Girls® isn’t meant to replace Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. It rounds it out.

India’s approach necessarily opens her up to a certain amount of criticism. She’s not arguing as a brain on a stick but very much as an embodied young woman trying to explain the psychic distress of growing up online. Her age, gender, and biography are inextricably bound up with her writing.

Even so, the scrutiny she receives seems more varied and spirited than you might expect. There are three primary lines of attack.

India as Bimbo

A few weeks back, a popular British writer wrote a 7,000 word Substack article “At War with Freya India,” which included some substantive critiques but was filled with ad hominem and implication. For instance, she points out that one of India’s chapters includes a subheader titled “Consume” and a sentence, “Coming of age with only consumerism as our guide, girls my age had no road map.” From there, she concludes India must have been influenced by the Reddit page r/ConsumeProduct, which was a cesspool of antisemitism and conspiracism. You, wise reader, can connect the dots.

After 6,000 words of that, she writes, “I’d received tipoffs about a managerial boyfriend figure.” (Tipoffs?) She then proceeds to out India’s now-fiancé, castigating him for being a “pro-growth startup guy” who shamelessly reposts India’s articles and speaking engagements. His “preoccupation with Western female fertility” is revealed when he says that women who postpone family life because of single-minded careerism may end up regretting it.

This personal attack is meant to prove that India is a young, attractive, naive woman who is being used by the far right: “The point of Girls® is to gather mainstream consensus for the hard-right’s ideas about working women, birth rates, and civilisational collapse. And its author is a perfect Trojan horse.”

And India’s either too stupid or too fame-hungry to realize what she’s doing.

India as Schoolmarm

The Daily Mail published an excerpt of her book, and the headline restates India’s thesis with one small addition: “and makes men rich.” And just like that, India’s passage about Kim Kardashian and other female influencers sounds tone-deaf and man-hating:

When writing about relationships, India often comes back to the destruction of pornography. If you’ve watched hardcore pornography before you’ve had your first kiss, that will inevitably damage your ability to form healthy, lasting relationships. She struggled to arrive at that position from her secular upbringing.

If a woman merely says, “my boyfriend watching porn makes me feel bad,” she will inevitably be told, “That sounds like a ‘you problem.’” Only after hearing from countless other women did she conclude that her disgust with pornography was not a personal shortcoming.

In her recent interview for the European Conservative, she spoke about this with who wrote:

Many right-wing influencers have taken to arguing online that modern women have unrealistically high standards. The reality is that women and girls struggle to find men that meet one very basic standard: He does not look at pornography online and will not cheat on them by watching porn. Many women accept this. As India points out, a key problem in the dating culture today is that many young women have standards that are too low rather than too high.

When Van Maren posted that excerpt on X, his comments were flooded with outrage that this liberal feminist was “pathologising male sexuality.” To be clear, India tells me her point was that women tend to have low standards on moral character and then unreasonably high standards on height, income, political views, etc. She was merely advocating for high moral standards for both men and women.

But even so, the response Van Maren got—the defense of porn platforms and how “normal” watching porn is—made India think these men (with a few women as well) were responding to the guilt they felt more than anything.

To paraphrase her fellow countryman, the anons doth protest too much, methinks.

India as Conservative Christian

Unlike other popular female writers such as or , India’s book doesn’t give much away with the title. If you pick up The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or even Feminism Against Progress, you have an idea of what you’re getting. India says Girls® is causing “jump scares” in some readers who are expecting an anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy book and are instead finding…something else.

If there is a political influence, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is the one that stuck out to me. When I ask her about it, India tells me she “really enjoyed” that book because it treated where we’d ended up as a culmination of prior trends rather than some deviation from our intended course. Deneen argued that liberalism’s emphasis on emancipation from social obligations combined with its free market economics led to the commodification of our societal breakdown.

But India follows Deneen only as far as Why Liberalism Failed, a book that drew praise from localists, postliberals, and even President Obama. India doesn’t follow Deneen on to Regime Change, telling me, “I don’t really talk about policy because I don’t know much about it or the consequences.” She says she likes the idea of age verification for porn sites for instance, but she also fears a government database of IDs and the potential for surveillance.

Here again, like a good Brit, she stays in her lane.

As far as Christianity, while India spoke with Justin Brierly about how Christianity seems to offer answers for a lost, hopeless generation of young people, she’s not Jesus-maxxing either. She mentions in passing how her friend is an Orthodox Christian who offered her some counsel, but she is not posting her baptism set to worship music.

In fact, India hardly ever posts a photo of herself, a tweet about her life, and she’s never done a direct-to-camera video. That reticence about turning her life into content keeps her relatively private about her religious exploration.

For now, she’ll point to the inadequacies of therapy-speak as a substitute for God, but you won’t catch her endorsing the new Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope. You might take issue with that for being namby-pamby, but it seems to be the same tack Ross Douthat took with his book Believe.

Rather than making an explicit case for Christianity, he made a case for religion to the agnostic and the skeptic. He may not have led the reader through the sinner’s prayer, but he also will attract readers who wouldn’t be caught dead reading The Case for Christ.

Likewise, Girls will “jump scare” some readers expecting a boilerplate anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy book, and that may prove a first step toward a better future for girls all around. India says she’s “hopeful and optimistic about culture actually changing.” She thinks Haidt and others have shifted the Overton window. The children born today have parents much more aware of the relative dangers of life online versus life offline.

Nevertheless, she fears that conversation around the problems facing young girls will be cut off. If India—who I would describe as relatively tame, highly empathetic, and a young woman herself—can be dismissed as too political or demographically disqualified, then who can talk about these issues? Her reception and reputation is a proxy war for the bounds of acceptable discourse.

She may well have to go full Quentin Tarantino before too long.

While her work draws a fair amount of praise and some hostility, it’s not uncommon for India to be met with genuine confusion. How can women be so miserable when they are such professional successes? Aren’t they winning in modern society? To this, she replies:

[Women have] everything that we want and nothing we actually need. And so I don’t think the material successes that women have achieved will make them happy. I would say the same for men, which is that our deep human needs: belonging, to feel like we’re part of something bigger and part of community, and that we can love and accept love from people. All these things that, as you say, they’re matters of the heart, I feel like young women don’t have that and young men don’t have that either.

This is classic India. Instead of reaching for St. Paul (if I have not love, I have nothing) or for Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone saw this coming 25 years ago!), she lets it stay in the moment, in first person, in the pain without reaching for a pat answer.

So you can call her emotional for speaking to the heart and speaking from her own experience. You can call her unfocused for publishing a nonfiction book that’s graph-free, neuroscience-lite, and policy-agnostic. You can call her a pick-me, a trojan horse, a misogynist, a man-hater, a teen messiah or any other slur you like (though that may say more about you than her).

Just don’t call her ambitious. Brits hate that sort of thing.

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At the same time, breathless media coverage presents Orthodox Church pews “overflowing with converts,” a “surprising rebirth” of belief in God, and Christianity suddenly becoming cool.

So which is it?

As is often the case, C.S. Lewis had the explanation back in 1946:

Plenty of evidence can be produced to show that religion is in its last decline among [today’s youth], or that a revival of interest in religion is one of their most noticeable characteristics. And in fact something that may be called “a decline” and something that may be called “a revival” are both going on. It will be perhaps more useful to attempt to understand both than to try our luck at “spotting the winner.”

The reasons for decline and deconstruction among today’s youth have been discussed ad nauseum, so I’d like to focus on the “revival” side of things today. And rather than quoting statistics and running through my graphs, I’d like to tell the stories of four archetypal young Christians today. Here, I am following the example of Pastor Rick Warren with Saddleback Sam:

Saddleback Sam was the result of hundreds of conversations Warren had with California locals, trying to understand their motivations for going to church. By distilling his target parishioner into a simple image, Warren was able to focus his initial church planting efforts and tailor his outreach.

While I am not trying to create a church growth guide, the characters I have developed — Double-Down Dave, Community Chris, Well-Researched Richard, and Convert Constantine — were, like Warren, inspired by hundreds of conversations I’ve had with peers and their parents over the years.

I don’t pretend to speak for all people in all places, and I am not attempting to be exhaustive. I am merely offering some personal reflections alongside some tasteful infographics. If this jives with your experience or if there’s a character I’ve missed, please leave a comment below.

Without further ado, I give you “The Four Types of Young Christians I Know”

Double-Down Dave:

Like Juni Cortez, Double Down Dave is carrying on the family business. Dave was raised in a Christian household and environment, and while he may have strayed away for a time, he now realizes his parents made one mistake: they didn’t go far enough.

When he compares his childhood to the culture his kids will be growing up in, it’s apparent to Dave that everything has gotten worse. His parents were concerned about Harry Potter and Twilight. Now we have Icebreaker and A Court of Thorns and Roses. His parents hated “American Idiot” by Green Day and “Numb” by Linkin Park. Now we have “WAP” by Cardi B and “Juno” by Sabrina Carpenter. He begged permission to watch The Dark Knight and How I Met Your Mother. Now we have Anora and Euphoria.

He may have chafed at his parent’s strictness, but now he realizes they were directionally accurate, just a bit ahead of the curve. Because the cultural output of Dave’s youth still retained some Christian morality. Bella saving herself for marriage is a key plot point of Twilight. Linkin Park was loud, but their lyrics could be a praise-and-worship song: “I want to heal / I want to feel / like I’m close to something real / I want to find something I’ve wanted all along / Somewhere I belong.” Even How I Met Your Mother, despite its many flaws, is centered around someone trying to find a wife and start a family.

By contrast, Dave thinks today’s cultural output revels in its ugliness and perversity. There is no redemptive message lurking below the surface. It is aesthetically and morally nihilistic. To make sense of it all, Dave remembers a quote from Alfred in The Dark Knight: “some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Dave understands that this post-Christian culture is crumbling, and he has accepted that barring a national revival, he and his family will be part of the remnant.

Community Chris:

In our anti-social century, we have left behind “bowling alone” in favor of “bed rotting.” Loneliness is now an epidemic. Young people in particular are seeing friends less, having sex less, and are just generally depressed.

If you ask Community Chris about it though, he might give you a puzzled look. He’s in a community group, a men’s group, and a small group. His friend group is a tangle of love triangles and unrequited affection. His calendar is overbooked.

Chris might admit that the substance of his church service is not great (just like Troy from HSM wouldn’t say he loves high school because of chemistry class). But Chris loves his church because he loves the people. He would rather go to a subpar service with his friends than the perfect service without them.

When Chris goes to church, he feels comfortable. These people dress well, they vote for the right candidate, and they have decent, if not impressive, jobs. Chris doesn’t need to cordon off his “church friends” from the majority of his life. His church friends are his life, and he feels comfortable talking about his work, the news, and his weekend plans with them.

He is aware of various critiques of the faith — academic and otherwise — but he doesn’t give them much thought. Not because he’s examined and dispatched them but because they just don’t seem relevant to his life. His friends are all on the same page, so why bother with what some egghead says?

Chris is generally optimistic about his future. He’s got girls, he’s got friends, and he’s got a good job. Alright, alright, alright.

Well-Researched Richard:

When I interviewed Ross Douthat for Believe, he offered a theory for the secularization that accompanied the rise of the internet: apologetic naivete. Suddenly a kid in Naperville was hearing for the first time that the Pentateuch wasn’t written by Moses, that Isaiah wasn’t written by “Isaiah,” and that the gospels are internally inconsistent. This wasn’t new to the Christian intelligentsia, but for a generation of bright-eyed youths, it was devastating.

Thus, the rise of New Atheism wasn’t merely a function of techo-optimism and the impending triumph of science. It was a story of information dissemination made possible by the internet. Even as New Atheism has waned in influence, many young people still retain a vague sense that Christianity has been disproven and that its only contribution to history was war and superstition.

In the face of this ambient disdain, some abandoned the faith, some retreated to platitudes, but some — like Well-Researched Richard — stepped up to the plate.

Richard’s favorite verse is 1 Peter 3:15, “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you,” and whether it is an online argument, a family dinner, or a co-worker’s innocent question, Richard is always champing at the bit to explain how he has finally found the Truth.

Richard watches theological debates in his free time as blood sport. It is apparent to him that all other religions and Christian sects are illogical, and thus he can only conclude that these people are either unaware or unconcerned that their house is built on sand. At every opportunity, he tries to turn them from their folly.

He is skeptical of squishes and a keyboard apologist with a hair trigger. Like Gandalf, he feels he is plagued by foolish companions that he must counsel. His “church leadership” is always at risk of compromising their theological rigor and integrity. No matter what church Richard attends, he must maintain a critical distance, always monitoring whether he agrees with what’s being taught. If he doesn’t, they’ll be hearing about it.

Aesthetically, Richard may smoke a pipe or enjoy a fine bourbon, or he may do neither, but he will always seek to comport himself in a way that is slightly more refined, old-fashioned, and well-considered than the hoi polloi.

Convert Constantine:

Though the name “Constantine” might imply a Roman Catholic, Convert Constantine could be any young person who is deeply, perhaps unreasonably, proud of their tradition. David Bentley Hart told a story from when his brother went on a tour in Constantinople. As they were riding on the bus, a recent Orthodox convert burst out in a deep Southern drawl, “these Latins simply cannot understand what the sack of Constantinople in 1204 still means to us.”

While this sort of Catholic-on-Orthodox fighting will occur occasionally, Constantine’s most telling trait is his four word motto: Always Dunk On Protestants. This can take many forms. The unrelenting soft pressure campaign: “You’re going to convert. It’s just a matter of time.” The not-so-subtle dig, “Wouldn’t you say Protestantism’s ‘deep history and tradition’ is a bit of a stretch?” The pwn with facts and logic: “If sola scriptura is true, then why couldn’t the Reformers agree on the meaning of communion?”

It’s worth noting that this zeal for tradition is not the same as zeal for church hierarchy. Constantine would see no contradiction between praising the Catholic Church one moment and bashing Pope Leo the next. In fact, criticizing Leo can signal his exceptional piety. But he likes having something to push back against. In an ever-shifting and increasingly virtual world, the stability, physicality, and mysticism of liturgical worship appeal to Constantine.

As he looks around, Constantine feels he is in good company. The best and brightest converts are leaving secularism in favor of the liturgical. (Anglican), Shia LaBeouf (Catholic), (Anglican), (Anglican), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Anglican), (Eastern Orthodox), (Anglican), (Anglican), (Catholic), Tammy Peterson (Catholic), (Eastern Orthodox), and (Eastern Orthodox).

Now Constantine just has to get the apostates and the Chreasters out of his church à la Friar Tuck, and he should be all set.

In the same essay where Lewis observed a simultaneous decline and revival, he mused on the future of Christianity for Britain. While he admitted that a certain public, cultural Christianity would be lost, he didn’t believe confessional Christianity would necessarily suffer. The secularizing forces would merely force a decision: “When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone.”

The middle things are gone, the lukewarm Christians have drifted away, and now the church has an opportunity to be a compelling, countercultural witness to the world. All we have to do is deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

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