The New Gods of the Old World, Part One

Nnedi Okorafor, She Who Knows

Najeeba, daughter of Xabief, has never conformed to the standards of her people, the Okeke, who reside in a far-future African dreamland. When she receives The Call, which usually only summons boys, her family understands and accepts her urgent feelings, but the rest of her village doesn’t. Seriously, a girl following The Call into the wilderness to pursue her people’s highest mission, salt mining? But this is only the beginning of Najeeba’s journey beyond civilization.

Per her author’s note, Dr. Nnedi Okorafor originally intended this novella as a companion to her breakout novel, 2010’s Who Fears Death. It covers similar themes, including ethnic identity under conditions of persecution, and being female in male-dominated places and professions. But as in the other novel, this story’s protagonist discovers that, when you change the world, you can’t control all the changes you start. And you certainly can’t control others’ response to that change.

The Salt Roads lead Najeeba and her family to the Dead Lake, a relic of some apocalyptic event that transformed Africa centuries ago. We never learn exactly what happened. But we witness the aftereffects: a land where agrarian citizens use another society’s nigh-magic technology, without really understanding it. Physical relics like the Dead Lake dot the land, letting the Okeke survive amid the devastation. And the Okeke share the land with sorcerers and tormented spirits.

But once away from the safety of village, hearth, and comforting gender roles, Najeeba discovers that her Calling isn’t the only unique thing about her. She discovers untapped powers that change her family’s fortunes, bringing sudden wealth to her impoverished village. But her X-Men-like superpowers draw attention from forces that her traditional people would prefer to continue ignoring them. Soon, phantoms begin pursuing Najeeba across the desert, while very human enemies threaten her ancestral home.

Dr. Okorafor champions an art movement she calls “Africanfuturism.” Spelled exactly thus, don’t abbreviate it, she’ll catch you. Her theory, which she asserts is interdisciplinary, involves applying the same speculative eye to African peoples and places that science fiction authors have long dedicated to Western societies. It’s more than that, but that’s a useful precis. Here, Dr. Okorafor uses time-honored themes of human resilience, and matching human venality, in the face of distant apocalyptic devastation.

Nnedi Okorafor

The Okeke people live an ancestral lifestyle, organized around community, land, and ritual. But they’re also divided: the Nuru caste drive cars and pursue capitalism, while Najeeba’s Osu-nu villagers plow, keep herds, and mine salt. This hierarchy derives from the Great Book, a holy writ which Najeeba’s father studies relentlessly, but which Najeeba distrusts. Okeke religion involves gods and spirits which intervene directly in human affairs, but which doesn’t apparently involve what Westerners call “faith.”

If it feels like I’m excessively describing background, this isn’t coincidental. This novella covers three years of Najeeba’s adolescence, but besides her personally, it describes the world Najeeba rebels against. Her people have centuries of tradition that kept them alive following whatever pivotal devastation nearly destroyed their world, but those ancient traditions have become ossified. Now some people preserve tradition, even at great harm to themselves and others, because continuity has become its own destination.

This isn’t a freestanding story; it starts a trilogy of novellas within which Dr. Okorafor expands the story and setting of Who Fears Death. This expansion serves a purpose, not only for the story, but for the audience. Confession time: when Who Fears Death dropped, I initially gave it a disparaging review, because I didn’t understand Dr. Okorafor’s purpose. I read through White Euro-American eyes, and dropped the ball. I was so young and daft.

For readers who, like my younger self, need a broader context to understand Dr. Okorafor’s mission, this novella reveals a larger world of culture and experience. This setting feels lived in, occupied by people whose lives are defined by work, but whose choices are shaped by Sufficiently Advanced Technology. And it demonstrates why, in a world of male intransigence, female rebellion becomes the reasonable choice. Najeeba’s mostly quiet resistance isn’t merely personal, it’s also necessary.

Audiences who haven’t read Who Fears Death will probably enjoy this novella by itself. It’s barely 160 pages, and the events of the prior novel only receive mention in the final two pages. Dr. Okorafor creates a smart, subdued, and notably concise tale of the social forces that shape our lives. She investigates what her protagonist can control, and what slips beyond control. And she sets the stage for bigger, darker journeys yet to come.

Living on Planet Gout

My gout-infested left foot, photographed
in the ER on May 6th, 2026

In 19^th-Century literature, gout, the disease, signals seedy characters: cruel landlords, rapacious capitalists, maiden aunts judging your choice in men. Both Austen and Dickens used “gout” as shorthand to indicate that this character didn’t understand current mores, because this character couldn’t walk out of the house without excruciating pain. In 21^st-Century literature, gout barely exists. Like malaria, it’s become something Anglophone writers no longer mention.

That’s why, when I was diagnosed with gout last week, my first thought was: I’ve become an anachronism. Based on the Availability Heuristic, a logical fallacy, gout seems rare today because it’s mainly mentioned in older literature. But gout remains, indeed, remarkably common. It’s not that the disease doesn’t exist anymore, it’s that we’ve stopped talking about it. As I’ve needed to think about it recently, I’ve reached some conclusions.

Austen and Dickens used gout as a moralistic shorthand which their intended audiences simply understood. That context has drifted away. We can consider why this happened by what causes gout. Though the underlying cause is usually medical, like kidney disease or cancer, the proximate cause to symptom flares is usually lifestyle-related, and reflects the foods we eat. It’s common after consuming salt and sugar, but especially animal proteins and alcohol.

When Austen and Dickens wrote, meat agriculture and brewing were still labor-intensive processes that racked up costs which knocked onto consumers. Not that people didn’t eat meat or drink alcohol in older times; venerable traditions like Christmas hams and Saturday booze-ups preceded these authors. But they were less common indulgences. Only when automation streamlined production did most people consume red meat and liquor regularly.

Victorian authors wrote when most ordinary citizens subsisted on diets composed mainly of cheap carbohydrates. As Paul Graham writes, before the 20^th Century, most people’s diets consisted more than half of bread, not because it was highly nutritious, but because it left people feeling full. More nutritionally dense foods, like vegetables, protein, and seeds, kept humans alive, but weren’t very filling. Also, without salt and spices, they often tasted bland.

Humans evolved in conditions where vital nutrients like magnesium, calcium, and zinc were abundant, but sodium, protein, and sugar were rare. These latter three are necessary in appropriate quantities. However, because they’re rare in nature, our bodies retain them greedily, while our kidneys process away the more abundant nutrients in our urine. As Dr. Janet Bond Brill writes, modern diets after automated agriculture are backward to our bodies’ processing abilities.

A Victorian cartoon of the capitalist
hierarchy (click to enlarge)

The landlords, capitalists, and sexually repressed older relatives who populated Victorian moral fables, were therefore coded as having the resources to consume steak, wine, and dessert. In a time when these foods were uncommon and expensive, simply having gout meant these characters had enough money to spend it on themselves, not their families or communities. Marx would later shorthand such characters as “the bourgeoisie.”

But economic conditions have changed. Not only do more of us have more money, but a combination of extractive farming, automated production, and government subsidies have made once-expensive foods downright cheap, in constant dollar terms. Red meat and wine, once occasional indulgences, have become snacks we gobble without thinking. Convenience foods, the staple of poverty diets, are flush with sodium and protein that only the rich could once afford.

Gout is, therefore, no longer a moral judgement on individuals; it represents a consumer society. While not everyone has gout, we who do are more likely to have painful flares earlier and more often than our ancestors did. In Victorian times, switching to a gout-resistant diet meant eschewing self-indulgent goodies which most people couldn’t afford. Today it means pricier, unsubsidized fresh ingredients. Gout has become the default, not the exception.

Maybe that’s partly why the anti-bourgeoisie revolution Marx predicted never occurred. Not because we aren’t disfranchised like our ancestors during the Industrial Revolution, but because our society buys our loyalty with cheap treats. Marxist revolutionary art often specifically depicts the bourgeoisie class overeating and drinking. Nowadays, excessive rich food is a sign of poverty, not wealth. Time and capitalism have overturned Marx’s economic equilibrium.

If you’ve never had gout, I don’t wish it upon you. The excruciating pain is often poorly placed; I could barely walk for a week, as putting any weight on my left foot caused nearly the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. However, statistically, you’re more likely to have flaming gout flares than virtually any generation ever. And preventing that won’t be possible through good individual moral choices; it requires amending an indulgent economic system.

Obsolete Men and Vanishing Adulthood

This essay is a follow-up to Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic and Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

Braden “Clavicular” Peters

I don’t like giving Braden “Clavicular” Peters free oxygen, largely because his philosophy is so dangerous that I fear it becoming airborne. His belief that life belongs to those who are good-looking enough is maybe not controversial, as we merely average-looking men can attest. But his desire to manipulate his physiognomy to become as absurdly handsome as possible, involves a regimen of intensive self-harm.

It was bad enough with men like Andrew Tate, whose abusive workout regimen has distorted his body as badly as his soul. Any psychologist can tell you that obsessive bodybuilding, to the point where your body becomes cartoonish, emerges from the same well of self-hatred that manifests in women as anorexia nervosa. Tate is loud and charismatic enough to make his insecurities everyone else’s problem, at great mutual cost.

Peters, though, doesn’t just distort himself. Bodybuilding is only part of a larger regimen, which includes injecting dangerous drugs, wolfing down questionable supplements, and self-flagellation. He became the public face of “looksmaxxing” in recent months as the most grotesque part of his regimen—self-administered facial beatings with a hammer—went viral. He believes that treating himself with violence will make him more conventionally handsome.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Recent photos show Peters looking like an exaggerated form of a mid-20^th Century matinee idol, with big shoulders, great hair, and a well-defined chin. Of course, as I write, Peters has recently turned twenty, so whether his good looks represent his abusive regimen, or simply graduating from awkward adolescence, is subject to debate. What we can’t debate, though, is: this man looks thirty.

Telling a twenty-year-old woman that she looks thirty would probably get you smacked. In American culture, female physical beauty correlates with outward markers of fertility, which means youth. Women use ointments, tinctures, injections, and surgery to stave off the appearance of age, though the results are questionable. Lauren Sanchéz Bezos’ recent appearance at the Met Gala resulted in laughter at her augmented appearance and questionable wardrobe.

Lauren Sanchéz Bezos

But for men, looking older is desirable. In interviews, Peters describes injecting himself with steroids at age fourteen to achieve the shredded look that normally requires years of dedication and effort. His famous, highly defined jaw, does indeed come to most men through years of small-scale trauma, sports injuries, and dangerous work. Like millions of adolescents, Peters wants to skip the dues-paying stage and be recognized as an adult.

Who can blame him? As entry-level professional jobs dwindle, men keep jobs into their twenties and thirties that formerly belonged to teenagers. Countless adults, of both biological sexes, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ houses. Student debt, once a ten-year commitment, has become a lifelong burden. The average age of first-home purchase is now forty. In such an environment, paying one’s dues in linear time is downright foolish.

In such an environment, Peters doesn’t want to merely look good. Placed in his social context, Peters wants to speed-run adulthood, or anyway the one aspect of adulthood which he can control. Savvy media manipulators can fake the personal characteristics that make older men attractive to women, including emotional regulation and economic stability. But only those willing to treat themselves violently can look old enough to enter the market.

However, let’s continue looking at that same broader context. The ways that men used to hasten rugged good looks, like playing sports or doing difficult physical labor, are all communitarian. There’s no such thing as solitaire football, and building a house requires a team. The ways men formerly organized themselves into communities, including labor unions, religious congregations, and even bowling leagues, look increasingly quaint, if they even still exist.

Peters has to speed-run adulthood alone because, otherwise, he has nowhere to go. Modern life has become mostly solitary and, unless you’re born to money, the chance of getting ahead through hard work and ingenuity alone is virtually nil. Peters has made himself a mass-media grotesque, but in doing so, he’s captured our attention, the one meaningful resource for cash-poor boys hoping to make themselves a life in American modernity.

Our solution must involve getting outside our own homes, and outside our own heads. Easier said than done. But even as churches and unions seem irrelevant, many communities still have adult sports leagues, maker spaces, and public libraries. Individuals and small groups can organize new networks, like community choirs, improv companies, and charitable volunteer organizations.

We must seek the trappings of adulthood, once hoarded in the workplace, out in the large rcommunity.

Creating a Marketplace for Reliable Guessing

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Why are professional prognosticators so consistently bad at predicting the future? We know this phenomenon most clearly from basic cable news, where credentialed experts prognosticate about how good, bad, or volatile the near future will be, usually in ways that support their ideology. But it manifests in other environments: business professionals who fail to forecast economic trends. Legislators who let lush opportunities slip away. Inventors pushing questionable technology.

Canadian-American psychologist Philip Tetlock, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, asked himself this question immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mass-media oracles predicted either swift, easy victory, or else nigh-apocalypse. The reality reflected neither partisan extreme, but instead descended into the same quotidian brutality that has characterized American intervention since WWII. Why, Tetlock asks, were both sides so wrong, and why has nobody paid for their overconfidence?

He favors the metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs, which he pinches from Isaiah Berlin, though it’s far older. Foxes know many things, Tetlock writes; hedgehogs know one big thing. Mass-media operators love highly credentialed experts, especially on economics and world affairs. But those experts’ predictions are often only marginally better than committed dilettantes who read newspapers daily and remains informed. Further, the more advanced one’s credentials, the more marginal the gains.

So far, so good. Tetlock’s description essentially accords with our recent experiences of camera-friendly experts reliably whiffing their predictions. My problem arises when Tetlock transitions from describing to explaining. A consummate scholar, Tetlock is reluctant to say anything which he cannot support strictly from quantifiable evidence. And holy moly, does Tetlock have extensive and thoroughly documented evidence to deploy.

Let’s make something clear: despite his praise (often muted) for well-informed dilettantes, he writes for scholarly audiences motivated by deep research. He fortifies his prose with histograms, p-values, and confidence intervals. He spends several column inches breaking down the mathematical modeling which supports his conclusions, and he seldom goes beyond the evidence. He dedicates an entire chapter to anticipating and transcribing his critics’ likely counterarguments.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Tetlock briefly acknowledges, but doesn’t expand much upon, the reality of who receives attention. TV pundits, hero CEOs, civil rights activists, and tech bros all broadly favor certainty, volume, and swagger. Reliable predictors, working from diversified backgrounds and intellectual caution, can look timid on Sunday talk shows or corporate board meetings. Put another way, saying wrong things confidently looks more telegenic than trading in likelihoods, conditionals, and caution.

Unfortunately, Tetlock himself demonstrates this. He refuses to offer opinions without sourced evidence, and he refuses to offer evidence without lengthy discursions on mathematical variance. Because his status relies on measurable outcomes—what he terms “reputational bets”—he refuses to place everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. The product he thus creates is more likely to be accurate, but less compelling in a media-saturated “attention economy.”

He also omits something I consider vitally important. The principle of homophily means we’re more likely to spend time around people like ourselves. Scholars congregate with other scholars; journalists chill with media professionals; lawmakers drink with lawyers. We see this particularly in economics, the scholarly field least likely to cite sources from other disciplines: our environment discourages seeking differing influences, disconfirming evidence, or even a diverse friend network.

Invested dilettantes make reliable predictions, perhaps, because they see how hypothetical outcomes postulated in scholarly journals actually unfold in daily life. Unfortunately, to calculate his confidence intervals on reliable predictions, Tetlock generates a core sample of prognosticators who are, like himself, flush with academic credentials. If military historians predict one outcome for war, and generals predict another, maybe consult the enlisted men carrying weapons, not more historians and generals.

Rereading what I’ve written, I feel I’ve misrepresented Tetlock’s product. I like his thesis, that intellectual diversity trumps depth in creating reliable forecasts. Later chapters on public accountability are particularly promising, if underwritten. Especially in subsequent years (Tetlock’s first edition appeared in 2005), we’ve seen public experts become increasingly hostile to criticism or disconfirming sources. Doubt has become, not the precursor to better thinking, but a sign of disloyalty. Unsurprisingly, experts have become more likely to be wrong.

Considering my doubts, and new evidence since 2005, we could perhaps read this volume as a prolegomenon to further research. Tetlock himself co-wrote a subsequent volume, which I’ve already purposed to read. But I feel it actually serves Tetlock’s thesis to suggest that future research should come from an interdisciplinary source, perhaps a public-private partnership. The future of the forecasting business is too valuable to entrust only to other forecasters.

Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

This essay is a follow-up to my previous essay Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

Sabrina Carpenter

If, as I stated previously, modern masculinity means rejecting anything feminine in the self, what then is modern femininity? This matters as women’s appearances have come in for renewed criticism. Louis Theroux, in Inside the Manosphere, followed several men whose male reinforcement routines involve obsessive exercise and bodybuilding, making their bodies huge and brawny. Simultaneously, we’ve witnessed the recent rise in demand for feminine smallness.

Smarter critics than me have commented upon the rise in Ozempic bodies. Celebrity women who once tied their public personas to their larger frames, like Amy Schumer and Adele, recently lost weight so rapidly that it’s essentially impossible without synthetic pharmaceuticals. Large women gaining small bodies requires expensive drugs and full-time exercise routines, so it’s obviously impractical for most women. Yet it’s widespread enough recently to appear normative.

Some time ago, I read an essay—now lost—critiquing gender roles in “romantasy” fiction. The author noted a recurrent theme she called “size gaps,” presented as almost equally reprehensible as age gaps. Many romantasy novels feature hulking, muscular leading men, basically walking slabs of uncooked steak. Their leading women are dainty flowers, maybe skilled swordswomen, but usually small enough to ride piggyback on their lovers’ shoulders.

This underlines part of my problem: we define gender in our society oppositionally. Men are large, tall, and muscular; women are small, slight, and shouldn’t have muscles. Standards of feminine beauty have changed little since 1925, when Lewis & Young praised a woman for being “five foot two, eyes of blue.” A century later, feminine beauty icon Sabrina Carpenter (five foot zero) omitted trousers from a custom Louis Vuitton suit, specifically because of her height.

Not to criticize Carpenter personally; she had no more control over her height than I had over becoming exceptionally tall. But her social icon role, beautiful and sexy but not necessarily for men, includes her body type: short, buxom, with large facial features. We see similar behavior from other women who sway cultural standards. Lizzo, Melissa McCarthy, and Kathy Bates, all celebrated large women, recently lost weight with GLP-1 drugs.

Criticizing Hollywood bodies is nothing new. Women on camera have long been expected to maintain teenage proportions well into adulthood, a standard only possible for those who can afford personal assistants and pricy gym regimens. But the recent rise in waif-like women, coupled with the concomitant visibility of ox-like men, reflects a brutal reality: men must not look like women. And women must not look like men.

Braden Peters

Such attitudes have very real consequences. One of the best actors I ever shared the stage with, a beautiful woman with dynamic range and powerful singing chops, also stood over six feet tall. This made her too tall to gaze up soulfully into most men’s eyes, which precluded her from substantial roles. She bounced through some insulting comic relief roles that reduced her to a function of her unusual height, before leaving the industry altogether.

Switching genders, I see the culmination of this trend in the male “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, stage name Clavicular. Peters put himself through grotesque paces to achieve his appearance goals: drug injections, day-long bodybuilding runs, even beating himself with a hammer to maximize his jawline. The regimen has arguably worked, because he looks like an exaggerated caricature of a midcentury Hollywood leading man.

But he’s achieved his goals at a catastrophic price. By his own admission, Peters began injecting himself with synthetic testosterone supplements at age 14 to hasten adult characteristics. Within five years, he’d consumed so much fake testosterone that his body stopped producing the natural stuff. In essence, Clavicular chemically castrated himself. He maintains the external appearance of a sexy man, but his (ahem) primary sexual characteristic no longer works.

Sabrina Carpenter and Braden Peters are opposite sides of the same coin, and I do mean opposite. If women are shorter than men, then Carpenter’s exceptionally slight height becomes aspirational. If men are harder-featured then women, then Peters literally beating his face with a hammer to maximize his jawline becomes an acceptable price. Influencers define both binary genders by looking as little as possible like the other.

I’m using external appearance, like height and build, as metaphors here. The problem is much more pervasive. As American society generally becomes more accepting of alternate gender presentations, our cultural gatekeepers have become even more rigid and restrictive. This is still currently a fringe issue, mercifully. But then, so was the alt-right, until it conquered the government. Left untended, these positions risk becoming mainstream.