Claire Lehmann

Reading Orwell in the Age of AI by Matt Johnson @mattjj89 quillette.com/2026/05/04/rea…

"Women in the top 1% of earners are more likely than others to be married and have multiple children." wsj.com/lifestyle/care…

Poor Americans who attend church regularly are happier than rich Americans who never go. Behavioral scientist William von Hippel thought he'd made a coding error. He hadn't. "Regularly attending services has a bigger impact on your happiness than wealth," he writes. "Money buys a fair bit of happiness but connection gives you more bang for the buck." What's happening? Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name. Von Hippel is direct about the cost: "I suspect that wealthy, educated urbanites are paying a steeper price for their lifestyle than they realize. Many of us have paid too great a price in connection for our increased autonomy."

parenting is hard actually. but doing hard things is good. i don't know why everybody started talking like hard things are intrinsically bad. you can't just relax your way into a good life. it takes effort

How the Weak Prevail, by evolutionary anthropologist Scott Atran: People in the throes of sacred values don't capitulate, even when they sustain tremendous damage. A psychological insight that war planners should understand. quillette.com/2026/05/02/how…

@jpodhoretz No the baby you met was my second baby! She's ten now :-)

@clairlemon Oh my God. That baby you brought by my office in New York is TWELVE?

Walk into my 12 year old's room expecting to bust him doing something dodgy, only to find him coding a "Philosophy for Beginners" game on Scratch. I feel chastened by reality.

Notice what a limited role non-intimate family and even close friends play here.

The big stock market crash following the 1973 oil crisis did not come during the embargo, but in the 6 months after the embargo was lifted. Chart: Bloomberg

It would be terrible. A huge proportion of women would not be able to find mates, they would end up bitter & then take out their bitterness on the world. Anything outside a 50/50 ratio is a recipe for trouble. x.com/lost_nomad__/s…

Nature is healing x.com/marcportermage…

If the AI-pilled people are right and soon we'll no longer have to work because machines will replace us, France will become the hottest place on earth, because the quality of life is second to none if you don't have to worry about resources. But eventually the machines will start thinking "how come humans get to chill on a Parisian terrace while drinking wine and eating charcuterie but we don't" and this will be the beginning of the end for the human race.

michael has been accused of abusing at least 6 children. it's inconcievable that they're all lying, especially when you consider the fact that all their stories follow similar patterns, similar grooming tactics, eventually progressing to molestation, sleeping in the same bed, etc

"Violence in Aboriginal communities is one issue that many do not wish to talk about. Why is that? Is it because it destroys the image we like to hold of Aboriginal people leading peaceful happy lives ..." Relevant today? From 11 years ago. abc.net.au/news/2015-10-1…

From ISIS to the IRGC, how groups with sacred commitments outlast adversaries with far greater firepower. @ScottAtran for @Quillette quillette.com/2026/05/02/how…

Think of the worst possible setting to prioritize diversity over competency. Welcome to American medical schools. And it's actually gotten worse since SCOTUS banned affirmation action. A narrative history of defiance, duplicity, and DEI over doctoring: quillette.com/2026/05/01/too…

15 years since I was asked by @Telegraph to write a photo caption for a royal kiss and decided to go with something completely different that happened that day

@Clara_Gold Yes, I think this is true.

I realized fundraising was the first time in my life I got rejected at scale. And honestly, as a woman, I was not emotionally trained for it. Before the feminists come for me, let me make my point. I think the first real arena where most people experience power, desire, status, and rejection is dating. And dating trains men brutally. A lot of men learn very early that if they want someone, they have to walk across the room, risk looking stupid, get rejected, survive it, and do it again. They learn that rejection is volume, timing, targeting. It’s a numbers game. A lot of women are trained very differently. Especially if you’re a pretty girl, you don’t usually walk into a bar looking at a guy thinking: “Can I have him?” You only think: “Do I want him?”. You don’t build your identity around shooting your shot 100 times and surviving 99 no’s. You don’t get trained to ask directly, get rejected publicly, and act normal 5 minutes later. You get trained to be “chosen”. To be impressive enough that the opportunity comes to you. And then you start building a company. And the whole paradigm changes. Suddenly, everyone can say no to you. Investors say no. Candidates say no. Customers say no. And when your rejection muscle is weak, your brain does the dumbest thing possible: it makes the “no” mean something about you. That you’re not smart enough. Not compelling enough. I think this is one of the most underrated gender differences in fundraising. Not that men are inherently better at it. But a lot of them have built thicker rejection scar tissue earlier. They know how to hear no and keep moving. They know how to make it less personal. They know how to treat it like volume, timing, targeting, iteration. I didn’t. I’ve raised 3 rounds. On the surface, the story looks great: I raised with Sequoia, OpenAI, Khosla. Woohoo. The real story is less sexy: every round wrecked me. I lost 5kg each time. I probably donated a few years of life expectancy to the cap table. Because every round, I only got 1 term sheet. One. EVERYONE else said no. And when almost everyone says no, your body does not care about the intellectually correct explanation. It only hears: Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re not that compelling. Maybe you’re not the founder you thought you were. For a long time, I thought confidence meant learning not to take the no personally. I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe some people are built like that. I’m not. 30 years of being trained to be chosen does not turn into resilience because someone in a Patagonia vest says fundraising is a numbers game. So now I think confidence is something less glamorous. Confidence is taking the no very personally. Letting it ruin your day, losing your appetite, spiraling for hours… And still taking the next meeting. Confidence is just being bothered as f*** and not letting it make you smaller. I still don’t fully believe my own BS as I’m writing this, but I guess that’s the point. Can’t wait for the next round to find out.

@PragmaticZone Ugh that phase sucks ass

@clairlemon Also looking at a friend who made one more kid in his 40s, your immune system can't really handle the baby years anymore. You are constantly "with something" in your 20s also but he is properly sick all the time.

There's a big difference between being in your 40s compared to your 30s when it comes to getting up in the the night to feed, or chasing after a toddler who waddles near the stairs. But the 50s? Forget about it x.com/LisaBritton/st…

If medical schools start prioritising ideology over competence, who pays the price? Steve Salerno (@iwrotesham) recounts the tragicomic scenes from reparations-based medicine. quillette.com/2026/05/01/too…