Editorials

Mark Manson’s column “Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots” argues that academics build models of the world and stop checking them. Editorial No. 23 checks his evidence. The gym-study forecasts in Nature were not made by the scientists Manson names; no Harvard Business Review study supports his corporate-training figure; the DEI report he cites says the opposite of his summary; the therapy paper is a forty-year-old reply about paraprofessionals. Most of the errors the column lists were caught by the academics it mocks. Federico Malatesta, author of They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, reads this through Alasdair MacIntyre’s emotivism: self-help keeps the vocabulary of evidence and drops the constraint that made citations mean something. The piece also surveys the existing critique of the self-help industry, from Barbara Ehrenreich and Micki McGee to Eva Illouz, Will Storr and Oliver Burkeman.

Self-help has borrowed from every discipline it could reach, and physics came back the most damaged. In this excerpt from his new book They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, Federico Malatesta traces the Law of Attraction from Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006) back through the New Thought movement and forward into today’s instruction to “raise your vibration.” He sets out the three principles the doctrine rests on; the cognitive machinery that moved thirty million copies (social proof, illusory correlation, the illusion of potential, sequence-as-causation); and what physics means by vibration: a carbon–hydrogen bond oscillates at the same frequency whether you are meditating or furious. No instrument measures the frequency of an emotion. The full citations for this chapter are in the book, out now.

Sam Akbar’s The Odyssey Mindset reads Homer’s poem as a resilience manual: seven lessons for getting through a hard life. Akbar is a serious clinical psychologist with a Classics degree from Oxford, and she gets much of the poem right, which is exactly why the book is worth arguing with. Federico Malatesta examines how the book converts every contradiction Homer refuses to settle into a “resource for growth”; why the “resilient Odysseus” is a Stoic invention returned to us through the therapy the Stoics fathered, a paraphrase of a paraphrase; and why the prophecy of Tiresias undoes any lesson about coming home to yourself. The pattern, self-help borrowing the authority of the humanities and handing back a simplified version of reality, is the subject of his new book, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion.

Editorial · No. 20 Leave Aristotle Alone Happiness, Eudaimonia and the erasure of context. Modern happiness culture loves to cite Aristotle. This essay argues it has him backwards. When figures like Laurie Santos, Arthur Brooks, Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Gretchen Rubin invoke eudaimonia, they treat it as a richer feeling or a measurable, optimizable…

Editorial · No. 19 Numbers and Lies How Self-Development Cites What the Author Has Not Read They Are Lying to You The Self-Help Delusion Out Now They Are Lying to You. The Science is wrong.The Advice doesn’t work.That’s the business model. Out Fall 2026 There comes a moment, somewhere in the middle of a self-development…

Editorial · No. 18 The Professors and the Brain They Made Up The Meaning of Life and a Brain That Does Not Exist Arthur C. Brooks is back with a new book – The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness – and a relentless podcast circuit, telling millions of listeners…

Editorial · No. 17 The Horse Does Not Care About Your Story Equine Coaching Beyond Mirrors and Mysticism This essay examines equine coaching as a neuroscience-grounded developmental tool while dismantling the mystical interpretive frameworks that dominate the field. Federico Malatesta argues that horses are effective in coaching contexts because they detect somatic incongruence and bypass…

Editorial · No. 16 The January Illusion On Stories, Desire, and the Architecture of Change. The annual ritual of New Year’s resolutions rests on a flawed premise: that we can identify and execute “right decisions” independent of context and narrative. Most people approach January trying to fix a meaning problem with a purpose tool, expecting…

Editorial · No. 15 The Long Return On identity, home, and a considered holiday recommendation. In this piece, I reflect on identity as something unfinished, layered, and resistant to clean allegiance. Through a paired holiday recommendation, Julia Ioffe’s Motherland and the film An Englishman Abroad, I explore exile, return, and the persistence of what we…

Editorial · No. 14 Easy Wisdom The Circulation of Easy Wisdom and the Collapse of Leadership Thinking. This essay examines how contemporary culture confuses the appearance of wisdom with the practice of judgment. A short video of Slavoj Žižek, in which four contradictory statements all sound equally profound, was the spark for a reflection on…