Robert Lynch

New chapter from my book: What Is Funny? It’s Funny Because It’s True On laughter, self-deception, Bill Burr, Evolution, farting in a dog’s face, and why jokes reveal what we recognize before we admit it. open.substack.com/pub/robertc12/…

Why Soccer Is Boring quillette.com/2026/07/08/why…

I spent years studying status as a biological anthropologist—and then lost my own. My third essay on status is out today in Quillette. It’s about theory, humiliation, teaching, and an eighth grader who drew a penis on a 510-million-year-old fossil. quillette.com/2026/07/06/wha…

My new article on Substack about why soccer is so boring: robertc12.substack.com/p/why-soccer-i…

The 3rd in a series on downward social mobility and status. open.substack.com/pub/robertc12/…

This is the second in a series I wrote about downward mobility for the credentialed class — a story that is likely to become much more common as AI eats white-collar work. open.substack.com/pub/robertc12/…

Here is an essay I wrote called "I Was Wearing a Tutu When I Started Bragging About My PhD." It's an essay about status and downward social mobility. Maybe some of you can relate. robertc12.substack.com/p/i-was-wearin…

Here is an essay I wrote for Quillette about substitute teaching, status, humiliation, doing the Macarena at a school assembly, and spending the day name-dropping my credentials to people who couldn't possibly care. quillette.substack.com/p/teacher-in-a…

My PhD advisor, Robert Trivers — one of the most important evolutionary biologists since Darwin — died in March. The only major media outlet that noticed was the NY Times but they mischaracterized most of his contributions to science. Here is a quote from a memorial from my Substack memorial that was republished by Skeptic: "He was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits — why we invest in our children, why we are nice to our friends, why we lie to ourselves."robertc12.substack.com/p/remembering-…

An article I wrote explaining some of my research on how religion helps preserve social connections amongst relatives. open.substack.com/pub/robertc12/…

A new article on how America lost its sense of humor originally published in the Chicago Tribune now on my substack robertc12.substack.com/p/how-america-…

@compactmag @ryan_zickgraf Great article. Thanks for writing. This stuff cannot be said enough. What a wasted opportunity

“Despite all the efforts to make it go away, class reasserted itself.” Read @ryan_zickgraf’s piece in COMPACT: compactmag.com/article/how-th…

Excellent article in Compact about the left’s turn to embrace race at the expense of class. Here’s a quote: “The more you emphasize the disproportionate suffering of particular groups … the more you end up with a politics that accepts inequality as long as it is properly distributed… In a society where the top 10 percent includes people of every background, anti-racism becomes compatible with, even useful to, the concentration of wealth. Class, meanwhile, disappears.” compactmag.com/article/how-th…

On Becoming Less Left-Wing (Part 3) open.substack.com/pub/conspicuou…

Here is my latest article on AI and the comfort trap. AI rhetoric swings between utopia and apocalypse. The likeliest outcome, though, may be far less spectacular: AI will give us exactly what we want, turning us into pampered infants living emptier lives, for whom effort itself becomes a kind of torture — a future less like Star Trek or The Terminator and more like WALL-E. Here is the article: spectator.org/when-effort-be…

How Technology Re-Tribalized Us compactmag.com/article/how-te…

My article on my PhD advisor Robert Trivers, the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin, who died last week. open.substack.com/pub/robertc12/…