My Favorites of 2024 (and 2023).

Check out my first attempt at a personal "best of" list. Then, subscribe free, recommend, post everywhere, and tell a friend!

As many of you know, I’ve only been at this writing thing for about two years. Well, I’ve been writing my whole adult life, actually. But most of those words were in college and graduate school essays and research papers no one read except (in some cases) an individual professor.

The notion that I could write in actual publications, both frequently and widely, seemed, as little as three years ago, something beyond a pipe dream. But once I quit my full-time university job and got my first writing fellowship in August of 2022, this onetime wild idea (being a stay-at-home mom and a writer—even now it sounds fantastical on all counts) took on a life of its own.

A little over two years later, I have four kids under my roof and 100+ publications under my byline. I’m hoping for and working toward many more and many better (publications, not kids) in 2025.

In any case, as this is my first year with somewhere to publish one of these “best of” lists I am enjoying reading from so many writers I admire and learn from on Substack, I’m going to include both 2023 and 2024 in my inaugural “favorites” post (below).

If you’ve read this far (and even if you haven’t): Thank you for reading my words. There is, maybe, one perk of coming to this writing thing late: For me, it will never be anything other than a source of active gratitude and ongoing bewilderment that I get to spend my time writing things, and that other people sometimes spend their time reading them.

Without further ado, read on for my 10 favorites to date (hyperlinked in reverse chronological order beginning with the most recent) and a brief synopsis of each:

The Well-Trained Boy at RealClearBooks (August 2024): What feminists call “toxic masculinity” is not the result of patriarchal socialization into various forms violence. On the contrary, antisocial male behavior is typically the result of a failure of disciplined, purposeful socialization into ordered, polite civilization. Many women and mothers today, who are uneasy in the company of boys and men they deem too stereotypically masculine, actually need a hearty dose of the traits associated with stereotypical masculinity (but really, inextricable from functional adulthood of either sex) themselves. After all, stereotypically feminine agreeableness unchecked by the discipline of truth is exactly like stereotypically masculine aggression unchecked by the discipline of order: It renders people unfit for adulthood (and parenthood).

Why Rosie Riveted at The Blaze (July 2024): The primary reality being denied in our mainstream culture today is that the unique physical and psychological strength that is the purview almost entirely of men remains indispensable to any functioning society. Paradoxically, women who acknowledge this are more than fit to lead. In fact, the renewed cultural leadership of such women is presently essential. Only strong women who accept reality in all its unsentimental cruelty (but cannot be so easily brushed aside with the accusations of “toxic masculinity” with which our mainstream elites tar strong men) can remake America for the modern era.

The “Infantile” Simone de Beauvoir at Law & Liberty (June 2024): In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argues that “womanhood” (i.e., traditional femininity) is synonymous with oppression due primarily not to biology but to socially constructed barriers to women’s advancement. One need barely glance through the work of fellow feminist, atheist, and non-mother, Camille Paglia, to recognize that Beauvoir’s thesis is so infantile because her view of human nature (and by extension, of maternity) is fundamentally flawed, while her conception of a common good is nonexistent.

Masculinity, Motherhood, and American Moxie in The Sopranos at Law & Liberty (February 2024): Can we help young American males find a path beholden to neither toxic masculinity nor aimless extended adolescence? Twenty-five years ago, The Sopranos offered some prescient insights that are profoundly unsparing toward America’s ethnic sons—and their mothers—and that are ever more accurate today. The old-world devouring mother tries to kill her son outright. The new world one kills her son on the installment plan, by ensuring through emotionally vampiric coddling that he is unfit to live a life worthy of the name.

Our institutions of higher education are waging a war on truth at The Hill (November 2023): The zeal for antisemitic terrorism among so many of today’s most elite college students surprises many of my fellow Democrats, but it does not surprise me because I spent a great deal of time within higher education. The nation’s best and brightest students are inculcated from infancy in the patronizing chicness of taking their own and others’ feelings (and relative privilege, or lack thereof) into consideration when making what should be dispassionate assessments of their own and others’ merit and behavior. In universities, they learn to deny all inconvenient facts (whether historical or scientific) and to accept all expedient oppression narratives (whether grounded in reality or not).

Thirty Years After The Morning After at Law & Liberty (November 2023): Three decades after The Morning After, Katie Roiphe’s seminal defense of women’s sexual agency remains relevant, controversial, and confounding. It also renders seemingly inextricable what are really two distinct arguments: The first, about women’s sexual indistinguishability from men, has proven too influential for our own good; witness the “what is a woman?” confusion. The second, about women’s intellectual parity with men, has been utterly ignored, much to our detriment; witness the rush to accuse mem of sexism when they treat women in the public square like the intellectual equals we are. Thirty years after The Morning After, it is long past time to offer women the unique physical protections we require and to withhold from us the infantilizing intellectual protections we don’t.

Gentle parenting: How it is connected to problems in schools at Deseret News (November 2023): Fixing American education means returning authority to teachers and to parents. “Gentle parenting” and “restorative justice” are reinforcers of chaos and disorder; both have to go, and quickly, if we intend to have a functional society some decades hence. Parents must bring back the presumption of “because I said so,” and discipline their young children into appropriate behavior in schools and in public. Schools must bring back actual justice and protect the vast majority of students, who are compliant and willing to learn, from those who act out and thereby make learning impossible. What our children need, in homes and in schools, is the restitution of adult authority.

The Case Against ‘Dead Poets Society’ at America Magazine (August 2023): In Dead Poets Society (1989), English teacher John Keating inspires his students to “seize the day.” But as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers (especially teenage boys) knows, their primary limitation is not an inability to live for the moment; it is an inability to plan for the future. Indeed, teens’ impulsive recklessness is best met with exactly the kind of regimentation, order and authority that the 1950s boarding school depicted in the film was attempting to provide (before Keating wrecked it). This is true of the privileged teens in Dead Poets Society, and it is triply true of underprivileged teens like those depicted in Lean on Me (also 1989), in which tough-love principal Joe Clark saves an inner-city school precisely by being an anti-Mr. Keating. We need a lot more Mr. Clarks, and a lot fewer Mr. Keatings; unfortunately, we have just the opposite.

I’m a conservative Catholic mom. ‘Trad wives’ promote unrealistic stereotypes at USA Today (July 2023): Women’s contribution to economic production is the historical rule, not an invention of 1960s feminism. Before the industrial revolution, all but the wealthiest women participated in the predominantly agricultural economy. The Puritan work ethic, which valorized labor as godly, reigned for men and women alike. So, to cast as “traditional,” women’s sole focus on domesticity and child-rearing is ahistorical. If practitioners and proponents of traditional family formation actually want to encourage and valorize younger marriage, married child-bearing and larger families in today’s world (which we should), we need to recognize that fluidity between the sexes with respect to primary breadwinning is the historical rule and is here to stay—and, crucially, that this in no way erases the biological or psychological differences between women and men, mothers and fathers.

Why I worry about my sons’ maturity, not their masculinity at The Hill (January 2023): Everyone is worried about American men’s masculinity. But masculinity is a neutral evolutionary fact referring to greater average aggression and risk-taking than most women possess, not a socially constructed virtue. Similarly, femininity is a neutral evolutionary fact referring to greater average agreeableness and conscientiousness than most men possess, not a socially constructed virtue. Men need maturity to channel their greater average aggression and risk-taking into strength and firmness; women need maturity to channel their greater average agreeableness and conscientiousness into the same. But strength and firmness themselves are the fruit of maturity, not of masculinity (and not of femininity either).