Helen Lewis

@Tyler_A_Harper Have you got to the kicker yet?

If I have this right, West’s husband says West is racist for not letting him cheat, West says her critics are racist for being mean to her husband’s Iranian girlfriend on Persian New Year, and now the Iranian girlfriend says the Slate writer is racist for noticing Aham sucks?

@benryanwriter Is this the bit where I claim she’s stalking me?

@helenlewis Caraballo says no.

I’ve never thought about it like this before, but the TERF wars of the late 2010s were as radicalising for a cohort of feminists as the Salman Rushdie fatwa was for the liberals of a generation earlier. People that you assumed cared about free speech just … backed away.

This @mckaycoppins story on his quest to uncover the truth about a Mexican athlete who claimed he was kidnapped by a cartel and forced to compete in a life-or-death sports tournament is bonkers in about 10 different ways. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

Jenni Murray was both absolutely terrifying and extremely brave, both excellent qualities for a journalist.

This whole video is like a Chappelle’s Show skit. What a country.

@WillardFoxton You know I don’t step on Man History on main (too much grief) but this intersects strongly with proper decorous lady history (Mitfords and posh suffragettes) so I feel qualified to say: what are you vaping, Tucker?

@helenlewis That is absolutely BONKERS as a take on Moseley!

He’s talking about Oswald Mosley, of the British Union of Fascists. The Mosleys so obviously wanted Hitler to win the war that Nancy Mitford informed on his wife—her own sister. The actual wartime opposition leader was Fred Pethick-Lawrence (widower of suffragette Emmeline).

@MauriceMaus Certainly a bold choice — and one gambling on Americans’ lack of interest in European history — to make an argument premised on “I am the Oswald Mosley of today”. Apart from anything else, he achieved none of his aims and died in exile.

@helenlewis "We fascists should be on guard"

@Noahpinion How do you justify making that illegal and not, say, an LLM hallucinating quotes and attributing them to me (or any other named writer)? Both situations raise the same ethical and reputational questions.

I think fabricating an interview with a public figure, even if you disclose that it's fabricated somewhere in the text, should be illegal.

@EdwardoBankio Hmm, I think it’s useful to differentiate between suicide (and other) bombers, and other terrorists, and shooters with this particular profile.

@helenlewis When did ‘murderers’ become ‘shooters’?

It is very strange to publish an article on the gender dynamics of mass shooters and not mention that the two "female" shooters used as flagship examples here were biologically male. Males commit more than 90% of violent crimes.

@John_Stepek @JohannLamont Yes, although some of the stuff mentioned (eg gore forums) isn’t strictly social media in the way we’d think of it now. And in any case, has been around since at least the 90s, cf rotten dot com

@helenlewis @JohannLamont This is because (I'm guessing, I haven't read the piece and I apologise in advance if I'm clearly wrong) the aim is not to highlight male violence but instead to advance an argument to control social media, or specific groups thereon

@CathyYoung63 This feels like a correction to a point I didn’t make? If the authors wanted to write about a recent female mass shooter, Audrey Hale was right there. (Hale was FTM.)

@helenlewis Female mass shooters do exist, though - I recall that when a woman shot up YouTube headquarters, some people kept trying to claim she was transgender even when there was extensive information to the contrary.

"My minor report on a missile striking an open area was now in the middle of a betting war, with those who had bet “No” on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 demanding I change my article to ensure they would win big."

@PubIicReIation @herandrews You've misunderstood my target -- I was referring to the use of Martin Scriblerus to satirise their literary contemporaries (which Pope then further developed under his own name in The Dunciad).

How exactly did the Scriblerus Club trash their old side? Tories satirising Whigs doesn't strike me as to having much to do with honour codes; the Scriblerus Club was open about who was in it, just not attributing who the exact author was. Very loose and desperate comparison - really weak stuff.

Mostly this piece is boring and predictable but I will say that “Don’t publicly trash your old side unless you’re willing to put your name next to it” is one of those honor-based rules of open conflict that feminized societies just don’t get, so thanks for illustrating the point.

@CostelloWilliam I've listened to a fair bit of Call Her Daddy, and I didn't hear anything that registered to me as misandry -- could you give me an example of what you're thinking of?

There’s a strange asymmetry where relatively niche manosphere slop content is treated like a major cultural threat, while massively popular female-oriented content (e.g., Call Her Daddy) whose popularity builds on misandry and sowing conflict between the sexes rarely receives any scrutiny. Meanwhile, the male-oriented podcasts that actually dominate the charts (@hubermanlab and Modern Wisdom) are about healthy physical and intellectual self-improvement. That tells you far more about what most young men actually find aspirational. The kids are alright!

@PlinthBotherer5 Yes, the piece makes a good case that a weekend in Vegas with your mates every once in a while is very different to having three million betting opportunities 24/7 through your smartphone, which you use at home, alone.

@helenlewis In Britain between 1961 and the advent of the smartphone(ish) we enjoyed an exceptionally orderly and well regulated gambling industry, so punters could generally find their level. The US went in almost completely cold, socially naive, with no antibodies to the weirder stuff

"Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?"