Rob Henderson's Newsletter

I recently spoke with Franziska Sittig, co-author of the 2025 bookIntellectual Self-Destruction: How the West Gambles Away Its Future. Sittig completed her master’s degree in International Affairs/European Politics at Columbia University in New York City and regularly publishes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was a Collegiate Associate at the Manhattan Institute in New York and a Research Intern at United Against Nuclear Iran. In 2016, she won the ZEIT Young Talent Award.

I’ll be speaking at the University of Austin (UATX) tomorrow (Tuesday, April 28) at 5:30pm. If you’d like to attend, please register here. Louise Perry and I dissect the recent New York Times podcast that has set off a firestorm online. Two of the most fashionable voices on the left, Jia Tolentino (writer for The New Yorker) and Hasan Piker (popular Twitch and YouTube personality), were asked simple questions about stealing. Their answers were worse than you think. They glorify shoplifting.

I find the weird taboo around discussing money in upper middle class circles to be obnoxious. The higher you go, the blurrier the rules get. At a wage job, everyone knows you make $17.25/hr. In white-collar roles, pay is a moving target. You’re expected to negotiate, which quietly screens for social fluency. Others don’t know what you’re earning and there is a stigma around speaking about it. There’s a reason this rule exists, and it’s not about politeness.

Louise Perry and I discuss the recent Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix, “Inside the Manosphere.” Check out my review of the documentary here.

I recently spoke with Richard Hanania about Part 2 of Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Dostoevsky was published in 1872. We discuss a ghastly crime perpetrated by the character Nikolay Stavrogin, as well as Dostoevsky’s portrayal of women and their role in society.

Illustration from an early Russian edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (c. late 19th–early 20th century), artist unknown. An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder. A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.

I recently spoke with Richard Hanania about Part 1 of Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Dostoevsky was published in 1872. Devils follows a cluster of older intellectuals and younger radicals in a provincial Russian town. They debate big ideas—freedom, equality, revolution. Dostoevsky depicts what happens when people absorb ideas from the previous generation and take them further than their elders intended.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov, c. 1872 The most important chapter in Dostoevsky’s Devils was originally censored. When you read it, you immediately understand why. It is darker and far more disturbing than you expect. Buried inside it is one of the most unsettling observations about human behavior ever put into a novel. Published in 1872, Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a novel divided into 3 parts.

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Class Wars Come for Fertility.” Check it out here. Alternate link here. Some topics covered: The work I find most satisfying is often the work that attracts the least attention. My discussions on Dostoevsky’s novels take a long time to write and are far from my most read posts.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote: “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn.” Sigmund Freud claimed that Dostoevsky’s place in literature is “not far behind Shakespeare.” But what originally interested me in Dostoevsky was this description from the twentieth-century Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “The complex of strange characteristics which forms the popular Western conception of the Russian national character largely owes its origin to the...