i write because the the alternative forms of my obsessive insanity are either too destructive or decidedly less sexy.
sexscientists
The pivot happened because the data pointed at a door and the door led to money. Masters and Johnson had spent twelve years watching people have sex in a laboratory and mapping what the body does when sex works. They had accumulated thousands of observations of functional sexual response. They
sexscientists
The book was designed to be unreadable. William Masters made this decision with full awareness of what he was doing and why. Human Sexual Response, published in April 1966 by Little, Brown and Company, was written in the densest possible clinical prose, loaded with medical terminology, structured like a pathology
sexscientists
William Masters was not a rebel. He was a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis, a man whose professional life was organized around the careful accumulation of institutional respectability. He published in the right journals. He attended the right conferences. He wore the right ties. His
sexscientists
Kinsey has been dead since 1956. The attacks on him are healthier than ever. Every decade produces a new campaign to discredit his research, defund his institute, and retroactively erase his findings from the scientific record. The campaigns fail; the data survives; the institute continues; the findings hold. Then the
sexscientists
The third floor of the building that housed the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University contained a film studio. Kinsey had it built for the stated purpose of documenting human sexual behavior on camera. The documentation was part of the research program, officially. The subjects were recruited from the
sexscientists
In January 1948, a medical textbook publisher released an 804-page volume of statistical tables, cross-tabulations, and clinical prose so deliberately dry it could have been a report on soil composition. It sold two hundred thousand copies in two months. Bookstores couldn’t keep it on the shelves. Department
sexscientists
Everybody knows the Kinsey Scale. Almost nobody knows what it actually measures. The scale has become a cultural shorthand for sexual fluidity, a meme format, a personality quiz result people share on social media. “I’m a Kinsey 2” has entered the lexicon the way “I’m a Virgo” entered
sexscientists
Alfred Kinsey collected gall wasps the way other men collected stamps or grievances. Obsessively. Systematically. With a taxonomist’s conviction that if you gathered enough specimens the data would eventually tell you something true whether the truth was comfortable or not. He spent twenty years at it. Traveled tens of
sexscientists
Nobody elected them. Nobody asked for volunteers. The researchers who built the modern science of human sexuality were a bug taxonomist from Indiana, a gynecologist from Missouri, and a woman with no advanced degree who turned out to be the smartest person in the room. They broke every rule the
raydalio
He’s not asking you to be him. He’s asking you to build your own version. Here’s what that looks like when you strip away the $150 billion fund, the Westport estate, the staff that manages everything from investment analysis to what kind of tea shows up at
raydalio
The man who systematized objectivity made the most subjective macro bet of his career. This is the part of the Dalio story that makes his defenders uncomfortable and his critics gleeful. Everything about Bridgewater’s architecture is designed to remove personal bias from decision-making. The radical transparency. The algorithmic
raydalio
Most business books are airport filler. Ghostwritten, padded, structured around one insight stretched across three hundred pages so the publisher can justify the hardcover price. You read the introduction, get the gist, and leave the rest on the nightstand for six months before donating it to Goodwill. Principles is not