Puritanism

Friday

Mary Wakefield

No sex please, we’re Gen Z

For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton briefs into the bin. But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: the Great Sex Recession.

Tuesday

Marcus Nevitt

How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

From our UK edition

One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn.’ That telling sadistic detail reveals much about both the writer and the addressee of the letter.

Thursday

Matt Purple

Our puritanical left-wing elect

Some cross-magazine skirmishing to contend with this week. Over at Commentary, Christine Rosen has written an essay in which she accuses the Atlantic of having a “nervous breakdown.” Per Rosen, one of America’s oldest and most trumpeted periodicals has turned into a ward of left-wing neurotics, quaking in fear over the pandemic, climate change, attractive color schemes, you name it. “The Higher Perspective of the Atlantic," she writes, “is an elite species of panic.” Call it the great Atlantic panic — it's kind of like the Satanic panic except instead of devil worshippers there’s just David Frum muttering as he checks his WiFi router for evidence of Kremlin interference. Anyone who’s read the Atlantic lately knows Rosen is exactly right.

spain atlantic