Where you grow up matters enormously. Some places function as escalators. Others are holding patterns.

open.substack.com/pub/conrad… The Texas Senate race has turned from inflation and gasoline prices to the question of whether James Talarico, a 37-year-old seminarian, is sufficiently manly. Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Stephen Miller have all questioned his masculinity. An anthropologist examines this strategy, gives it a name, weenie politics, and asks: who is more feminine, the man who drinks soy milk or the man who wants a ballroom?

The Media Figures We Lose open.substack.com/pub/conrad… Check out my new Substack post. Subscriptions remain free, and sharing is appreciated. What happens when media figures who once accompanied our daily lives disappear? Beginning with Walt Disney and moving through Alex Trebek, Dr. Joy Browne, and Stephen Colbert, this essay explores the changing relationship between Americans and the personalities who shaped our shared culture. Some belonged to a mass national audience. Others spoke to smaller publics. Together, they reveal the movement from shared media rituals toward the fragmented and politically segmented media world we inhabit today

A Book Called Bizarroland open.substack.com/pub/conrad… After nearly a year of weekly essays, I'm announcing that Bizarroland: An Anthropologist Looks at American Culture is a real book. I explain how it grew organically from my Substack, and describe what an anthropologist's attempt at objectivity looks like when turned on one's own culture. I'm looking for a publisher.

George Lucas at 82: Remembering When Star Wars Was New open.substack.com/pub/conrad…

Check out my new Substack post! Subscriptions remain free and reposting is encouraged. George Lucas turned 82 on May 14. That fact sent me back to the America of 1977, when the original Star Wars arrived like nothing audiences had seen before. Drawing on an article I published in Psychology Today the following year, I compare the film’s mythic structure to The Wizard of Oz and ask a harder question: what does it mean that nearly all of America once entered the same cultural galaxy together and almost certainly never will again? George Lucas at 82: Remembering When Star Wars Was New open.substack.com/pub/conrad…

Margaret Mead was more than a pioneering anthropologist. For much of the twentieth century, she was the public face of the field, bringing cultural analysis into everyday conversation. Drawing on her writings and my own encounters with her at Columbia, I reflect on her arguments about culture, gender, and adolescence, the controversies they sparked, and the enduring challenge she set for anthropologists: to speak clearly and meaningfully to a broad public. open.substack.com/pub/conrad…

Tchaikovsky at Christmas Check out my new Substack post! Feel free to share and to subscribe FREE! What do Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud, and Sir James George Frazer have in common? Reflecting on Christmas music, childhood memories, pilgrimage to composers’ and thinkers’ homes, and the enduring appeal of The Nutcracker, I explore how nineteenth-century symbolic systems still shape modern emotional life. Ritual, nostalgia, magical thinking, and seasonal tradition remain far more powerful than modern societies often admit. open.substack.com/pub/conrad…

Check out my newest Substack post.  Subscriptions remain free, and sharing is much appreciated. Margaret Mead was more than a pioneering anthropologist. For much of the twentieth century, she was the public face of the field, bringing cultural analysis into everyday conversation. Drawing on her writings and my own encounters with her at Columbia, I reflect on her arguments about culture, gender, and adolescence, the controversies they sparked, and the enduring challenge she set for anthropologists: to speak clearly and meaningfully to a broad public open.substack.com/pub/conrad…

open.substack.com/pub/conrad… share.google/jXnCy8M465PCwey…

One thing I didn’t mention: language differences often operate subtly, but their effects accumulate over time.