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Our privileged classes, elite and haute bourgeois alike, don’t really need to produce men who are rapists, any more than they need to produce men who are good at soccer or football or lacrosse. What they need to produce are men who win contests, who modulate effortlessly between competing against t…

In her 1990 book Fraternity Gang Rape, the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday notes, “I did not use the word ‘fraternity’ in the title to refer to fraternities generally as an institution. The phrase ‘fraternity gang rape’ refers to bonding through sex. . . . I use the word ‘fraternity’ . . . to me…

Kavanaugh, to the GOP, is sort of like a collateralized debt obligation: an instrument no one really understands and no one really wants to understand. The more you think about a given CDO — the more closely you scrutinize its trash assets, the longer you contemplate the insane upside-down ziggur…

The way they sat — that too I recall quite vividly. They sprawled with weary abandon, feet on the rungs of their desks, knees apart, like women in birthing chairs. But there would be all this tension in their jaws — an inordinate amount, as if all their testosterone had bivouacked there to rest up …

Keynes’s second anxiety was that scarce capital produces a class of rentiers who invest in ownership rather than productivity. McDonnell uses this insight to argue for rent controls and tenants’ rights to dramatically alter the balance of power in housing; he seeks limits on the debt that credit ca…