For many years now, the internet’s anti-feminist Right has been developing a creation myth about feminists. The story they tell themselves is that, prior to the sexual revolution, women were happy. They had husbands, they had children. Families stayed together. Everything was good and peaceful because this was the natural order of things.

Then, one day, some mean, ugly, jealous feminists came around and ruined everything and, as Pat Robertson put it, “encourage[d] women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” For some reason this was very easy to do, despite how very joyously happy everyone was.

It’s a narrative that, especially with the rise of the manosphere/ Redpill/incel nonsense, has become more or less the unquestioned “truth” in certain parts of the extremely online Right. It has led to a group of women who have made names for their own selves by promoting the “tradwife” lifestyle, tweeting about how glad they are to not have jobs and to take care of homes and children, to have rejected feminism, Instagramming pictures of themselves in 1950s-style clothing and TikToking themselves baking sourdough in heels with a baby on their hip.

It’s a newer subculture, but already there are those who have seen the dark side of this shit and realized it was not quite as idyllic as it seemed. One of those people, rather shockingly, is Lauren Southern.

You probably remember Southern from the early days of the alt-Right. She was a conventionally attractive blonde white woman talking about how icky feminists and immigrants were and making documentaries about the plight of white South African farmers and showing up at marches for sexual assault survivors carrying a sign that read “There is no rape culture in the West,” which briefly made her something of a star … until she dropped out in order to live the tradwife life that she had spent so much time telling other women to pursue.

Shockingly, this did not end well.

In fact, it ended very, very poorly, and with Southern realizing that the lifestyle she had spent so long promoting was actually a full-on nightmare, as was the sort of man who also wanted to live that kind of life. More specifically, he was an abusive piece of shit, which she explained in an interview with Unherd, a pretentiously “heterodox” online magazine.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

You see, as it turns out, feminists didn’t just want to destroy the family unit … they actually just didn’t want to live the way that Southern was living. As it turns out, neither did Lauren Southern.

Her husband got a job offer in his home country of Australia a few weeks after their baby was born and, of course, insisted she come with him. She wasn’t sure but he threatened her with divorce if she did not, as he apparently did every time they disagreed on anything.

This, also, did not go well.

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

It increasingly got worse until, ultimately, he did divorce her for failing to be the perfect submissive wife after she disobeyed him by taking a trip back to her home country of Canada following two deaths in her family. She begged him to take her back, he refused and said he didn’t even want shared custody. She lived with her family and then in “a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers.”

She soon found out that not only had the manosphere lied to her about marriage, they also lied to her about divorce.

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

Incredible, isn’t it? It’s almost as if feminists pushed for fair treatment in the workplace and equal access to education and other opportunities and encouraged women to have careers, not because they “looked down” on those who didn’t, but because they wanted us all to have options. Because sometimes those options are an actual safety issue.

It’s almost as if they fought for liberalized divorce laws not to ruin families and hurt men, but because they realized that sometimes you just really need to be able to get out of a bad situation.

One of the most oddly disturbing aspects of this article is the author’s insistence upon comparing her own experience with her former so-called “radical Left” beliefs to Southern’s experience with the tradwife lifestyle. Mary Harrington had previously written another article for Unherd about her experience realizing, after giving birth, that feminists were dead wrong and that she actually loved her baby and wanted to be around her — and that she ended up doing more housework and childcare than her husband instead of things being split equally.

Ms. Harrington appears to have gotten her education on “what feminists believe” from the same places where Lauren Southern got her understanding of how marriage and divorce work.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

First of all, who the hell is joining a commune these days? I mean, I’m sure it still happens in California or wherever, but it’s hardly praxis. I’m also pretty sure that embracing whatever she considers “niche sexual subcultures” is also purely optional (and not exclusively liberal, either).

As for “anti-capitalist demos” … you know what? Sure. Sure. Going to a couple protests is very similar to holding your baby while you’re locked out of your house in the rain. Clearly, these ideologies lead to the exact same place. Either that or one led someone to the point where they were able to choose for themselves what kind of life they wanted to lead after trying out a few things and finding out that they didn’t work for them, and the other led someone to a situation they described as “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave.”

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Southern is far from the only “tradwife” to have fucked around and found out that there are some very serious downsides to this sort of life and worldview. No one has to feel badly for her — after all, she is still a rather vicious racist — but I do think it’s important for people to be aware of what this nonsense leads to. Though I will say I don’t think it’s in me to get schadenfreude-y over anyone being in an abusive relationship.

Lots of these women have been coming forward lately to tell stories of how they thought this would bring them happiness but it instead put them into dangerous situations. Abusive situations. Situations where they ended up divorced and destitute (and in one woman’s case, living in her car) because the husbands they were so fabulously subservient to found a younger model. It’s the exact kind of situations that feminists have long told women to be wary of — not because we want to ruin anyone’s good time, but rather the opposite.

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From the moment visitors enter the garden of Joaquín Sorolla's house, they are drawn into the artist's inner world.

Joaquín Sorolla was a renowned Spanish painter known for his luminous, vibrant depictions of landscapes, seascapes, and scenes of Spanish life. Influenced by Impressionism and Realism, Sorolla's works often showcased the play of light and shadow, capturing the essence of his subjects with remarkable skill and emotion. His mastery of color and brushwork earned him international acclaim during his lifetime, and his legacy continues to inspire artists today.

The Joaquín Sorolla Museum in Madrid offers a captivating journey through the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Home to a vast collection of his paintings, sketches, and personal belongings, the museum provides a comprehensive insight into Sorolla's artistic evolution and creative process.

Visitors can immerse themselves in his captivating world, experiencing firsthand the beauty and brilliance of his masterpieces. From stunning landscapes to intimate portraits, Sorolla's works come to life within the museum's walls, offering a profound appreciation for his enduring legacy and contribution to art.

Just outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas, lies an extraordinary botanical garden. Built on a peninsula on Lake Hamilton, it has everything one expects in a garden of its size—large rose bushes, perfectly manicured tulip beds, a Japanese koi pond, an area dedicated to local flora, and so on. What sets this garden apart is that a large section is left in its natural state. As it is a "woodland garden," much of the peninsula has been set aside as a nature preserve. It also features numerous architectural features—several beautiful bridges, a unique bell tower, a vibrant fairy village, and a strange treehouse. 

While it may seem that this area has always been dedicated to natural and artistic beauty, it was originally purchased in the 1920s by Arthur Cook for timber harvesting. It was quickly transformed into a peninsula by the damming of the Ouachita River and the creation of Lake Hamilton. When Cook died in 1934, his wife Verna took possession of both the land and his other businesses. She successfully managed her companies with her new husband, Patrick Garvan, and decided to use her tract of natural land to create a personal garden.

Even after 30 years of work, Verna realized that she alone could not build the expansive botanical garden that she envisioned. In 1985, she signed a trust agreement with the University of Arkansas, whose landscape architecture program would operate the garden in perpetuity. Verna died in 1993, and in 2000 the site was named Garvan Woodland Gardens in her honor.  

Today, the small peninsula is covered with miles of trails, exploring both manicured gardens and natural woodlands. The University of Arkansas has also built beautiful structures here, including the iconic Anthony Chapel. Known for its soaring vaulted ceiling and predominantly glass design, this architectural gem serves as a highly sought-after wedding venue. Whether you're seeking beauty, inspiration, or simply a moment of tranquility, this botanical wonderland offers an unforgettable experience for all who visit. 

There is nowhere Aubrey “Drake” Graham can hide from the ongoing rap battle between himself and Kendrick Lamar, including the map of his own neighborhood. On Google Maps, people are tagging his Toronto mansion with location names like “Kenrick’s Dog” and “CertifiedKidLover,” and reviewing the fake locations with more references to the rappers’ ongoing beef and Kendrick’s accusations that Drake sexually pursues minors.

It’s easy for anyone to make a new place on Google Maps by right-clicking a spot on the map and selecting “add a new place” or “add your business.” From there users can name the place and also give it a category; Drake’s trolls have tagged spots all around his homestead with references to Kendrick’s diss tracks, like “A pdf house” which is listed as a playground, “CertifiedKidLover” as a public restroom in the middle of Drake’s house, and “Money trees,” listed as a national forest. 

The feud between Drake, Kendrick, and a growing ensemble of artists started in March, when Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar released “Like That,” which disses Drake. This set off a rapid-fire back and forth of diss tracks between Kendrick and Drake; there’s no shortage of explainers on the internet at this point so I’m not summing it up here, but for the purposes of the Google Maps mess, Kendrick’s latest, “Not Like Us,” accuses Drake of being a pedophile. Drake responded on Sunday with a defensive track called “The Heart Part 6,” in which he says, “Only fuckkin' with Whitney's, not Millie Bobby Brown's, I'd never look twice at no teenager.” (Drake was texting with Brown when she was 15 years old.)

The trolling doesn’t stop with place names. People are reviewing the fake places with reviews referencing Kendrick’s lyrics. “beautiful area with lots of trees and nature. keep yall's kids away from the huge 20ft snake tho, it likes children,” one reviewer wrote for “A pdf house.” “I saw Kendrick walking Drake here! It was awesome,” someone wrote in the reviews for “Dog’s park,” located in Drake’s backyard.

The ease with which anyone can add to Google Maps is a catch-22 for moderating the platform, which relies heavily on crowdsourcing but is also the target of trolling or review-bombing campaigns. In March 2022, after Russian president Vladimir Putin blocked access to foreign news coverage of the war in Ukraine, Google Maps users uploaded photos of injured civilians and captured Russian soldiers to the Google Maps listings of popular locations in Russia’s major cities. Google said in the past that it uses AI to combat review bombing, and machine learning algorithms get rid of the "vast majority of fake and fraudulent content" before users see it. 

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

No, it’s from Tiberias.

For the past millennium or so, the entire Jewish world has made use of the text of the Hebrew Bible as vocalized by the Tiberian Masoretes. Two great recent (Open Access!) books on the Tiberian tradition are Khan (2020) on the Tiberian pronunciation tradition as a whole and Hornkohl (2023) on the date when the forerunner of the Tiberian reading tradition was fixed. Current thinking is that once the reading tradition took a firm shape in the Second Temple Period, it was orally transmitted during the centuries before it was fixed in writing.

But where was it transmitted?

I think everyone’s implicit assumption, mine included, is that the Tiberian tradition was transmitted, well, in Tiberias, or somewhere in Galilee at least. Tiberias was a major centre of Jewish learning in the late Roman period, it was a major centre of Jewish learning in the early Middle Ages… just connect the dots. But recently, I’ve started to wonder how plausible that is.

Under the Eastern Roman Empire, with Nicene Christianity as its state religion, things weren’t so great for the Galilean Jews. A reliable-looking Wikipedia page with sources I haven’t checked informs me that besides earlier legal restrictions, the greatest Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian I (527–565), ordered the conversion of all synagogues in the empire to churches and forbade the reading of the Torah in Hebrew. While these laws may not have been followed in practice, this does not seem like a very conducive atmosphere for meticulously preserving the pronunciation of every word of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. A failed revolt against Heraclius in the early seventh century is also said to have devastated the Jewish communities of Palestine. All this after a law by Theodosius I at the beginning of the Eastern Roman period that (once again as per Wikipedia) harshly outlawed the consecration of rabbis, which might explain why Palestine sees basically no rabbinic activity at all during the fifth century (Cohen 2022, paywalled).

The Jews of Babylonia, meanwhile, were doing pretty OK, admittedly with some disturbances in the late sixth century. And we know that a precursor of the Babylonian reading tradition, which is very similar to the Tiberian one, was already in place at that time because of the way Bible quotations are spelled in Late Antique magic bowls (Molin 2023). As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in this evidence that precludes the tradition reflected here from being an ancestor of the Tiberian tradition.

After the “missing” fifth century, contacts between the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia are restored, and we practically always find influence going from Babylonia to Palestine, especially in the form of scions of important Babylonian families gaining positions of power in the Palestinian community (Mar Zutra as ‘Head of the Convocation’; others as Gaon of the Palestinian Yeshiva, once that gets established). I don’t think we see that kind of influence in the other direction at any point later than the third century.¹

Like I said, the Tiberian and Babylonian reading traditions are very similar. Kantor (2023) classifies these two traditions together, separate from every other Jewish reading tradition from Antiquity:

While Kantor thinks this may reflect a “Proto-Masoretic” vs. “vulgar” social distinction, it is interesting that the “vulgar” traditions are all from Palestine, while the Babylonian magic bowls show no sign of vulgarity. We could also explain the data by saying that Tiberian and Babylonian just share a more recent ancestor than the one they share with the (other) Palestinian traditions. Given the usual direction of transfer, I think it’s more likely that someone took this ancestor from Babylonia to Tiberias than vice versa. The Palestinian pronunciation tradition (especially evidenced in the very Palestinian and non-Babylonian genre of piyyut!) would then be more indigenous than the Tiberian one and have been given up over time in favour of the prestigious new import.

A Babylonian pedigree for Tiberian Biblical Hebrew can also be marginally supported by a comparison to Rabbinic Hebrew. While we find Rabbinic Hebrew in both Palestinian and Babylonian sources, there’s some linguistic differences between these two corpora. Many don’t apply to Biblical Hebrew, but one I can think of involves the plural of nouns in –ūṯ, like malḵūṯ ‘kingdom’: Palestinian Rabbinic Hebrew has forms like malḵiyyōṯ, Babylonian has malḵūyōṯ. The Babylonian form is what we find in Tiberian Biblical Hebrew (Dan 8:22).

The Tiberian tradition probably shows some influence from Greek, both in the consonants (Kantor & Khan 2022, paywalled) and in the vowels (Suchard 2021). That can hardly have happened in Babylonia, and sure enough, the Babylonian tradition doesn’t show these contact effects. If the Tiberian tradition was imported from Babylonia, it would be nice for that to have happened during the Eastern Roman period, when Greek was still the official language, but that brings us right back to the problem of the hostile environment. I guess Greek stayed around long enough in the early Islamic period that it could have happened then. It weakens the argument, but I think it still works.

So, was the Tiberian reading tradition imported from Babylonia? For now, I think the evidence leans towards כֵּן/כ̈ן. I’m still reading up on a lot of the historical background, so if you have any arguments pro or con, please do let me know in the comments.

1. R. Saadia Gaon also imports a lot of Palestinian traditions to Babylonia, but that’s far too late to explain the similarities between the Tiberian and Babylonian reading traditions. ︎

I don’t think that Erik is quite wrong in his assertion that Hamas is winning this fight, but Palestinians as a whole are definitely losing. Hamas’ attack was designed to forestall normalization between Israel and the Gulf monarchies by triggering a massive Israeli counter-response, to further establish the credit of the organization with the Palestinian people, and to mobilize international opinion against Israel. In this it has largely succeeded… but at extraordinary cost. The Gaza Strip has been governed by Palestinians since 2005, but it is no longer so governed, and it is not obvious when it will be returned in part or in whole to Palestinian control. Whoever controls Gaza in the future, its infrastructure has been effectively destroyed (this includes extensive damage to the military infrastructure that Hamas has built since 2006). In the West Bank, settler violence has become endemic and Palestinians have lost both territory and autonomy. And while I hesitate to cite the numbers that both Hamas and Israel have every incentive to cook, it’s clear at this point that the Israeli counter-offensive has killed more Palestinians than the First and Second Intifadas combined, and likely by a factor of five or more. Moreover, as Erik mentions, while Israeli society is hardly united behind Bibi it absolutely does strongly support the continuation of the war.

The international reaction has been significant in some ways but muted in others. Colombia’s decision to cut ties with Israel is consequential (Colombia has been a major Israeli partner for decades) but it’s obviously not enough. Israel has cultivated extensive trade and technological ties with the Indo-Pacific both as a growth strategy and as a means of warding off international pressure (presumed to be coming from Europe and North America), and this strategy has largely worked. The trade relationship with India is important (although perhaps not as important as Modi’s raw hatred of Muslims). China has made more pro-Palestinian noises than India, but I regret to report to you that China does not conduct its trade relations with much (or any) consideration for the human rights of Muslim minority populations. Russia is too fixated on Ukraine to be helpful (and also has a series of long-term trade and social connections with Israel), while the Europeans are also too fixated on Ukraine to worry overmuch about sanctioning Israel.

Locally the story isn’t much better for the Palestinians. Again, the Gulf monarchies have made pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel noises, but that’s about as far as it’s gone. Houthi and Iranian intervention in the war have NOT, as you might imagine, made Riyadh less interested in long-term rapprochement with Jerusalem. Jordan’s military cooperation with Israel and the United States during the Iranian missile barrage is probably the most consequential security collaboration between Israel and an Arab state since… well, possibly ever. It seems very possible to me that this war will represent a delay rather than a termination of the long-term process of solidification of Saudi-Israeli military and political ties.

All of this makes debates about what pro-Palestinian protestors mean when they chant “From the river to the sea, etc.” quite academic. Whether they mean the ethnic cleansing of Jews, or the establishment of a binational democratic state, or the establishment of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state within current borders… all of these are farther away than they were on October 6. Hamas cannot destroy Israel or seriously weaken it; Hamas cannot convince Israelis to abandon apartheid; Hamas cannot establish and defend either borders or an extensive governing authority; it cannot convince Israel to allow refugees of the Nakba to return. Palestinians are less capable of doing any of these things than at any point since 2005 and possibly since 1967. Moreover, it is extremely difficult for me to develop a scenario where the Palestinian situation with respect to any of these objectives improves appreciably over the next few months and years.

I think it’s important for folks to appreciate that when one protestor holds up a sign “Immediate Ceasefire!” and a second protestor holds up a sign that says “Free Palestine,” they are calling for much different things. We will eventually get a ceasefire of some sort in Gaza, although how long it will last and the nature of its terms are hard to predict. But when we get that ceasefire the Palestinian cause will be in far, far worse shape than it was before Hamas broke the ceasefire that had held for several years with Israel. Moreover, the road back to even the “normal” that held before this was began is deeply unclear. The most consequential effect of 10/7 and the Israeli counter-attack could, quite bluntly, be the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, and I am sorry to report to you that the re-ascension of Trump to the White House would be INCREDIBLY BAD for Palestinian national aspirations and for the daily health and security of the Palestinian people.

So yes… maybe Hamas is winning, and it’s even possible that Israel is in some sense losing. But the Palestinians are absolutely losing from this war in every way that a people can be losing; economically, socially, politically, and territorially.

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