A Sociological Eye

  We live in the era of the GigaChad. Of U.F.C. cage matches on the White House lawn. Of teenaged looksmaxxers progressing from mewing to bone smashing to hardmaxxing with chin implants and buccal fat excision, in pursuit of the prominent jaw and high cheekbones of their chiseled masculine paragon. They claim it is the eternal, evolutionarily-compelled ideal that all men have always hoped to embody.   It isn’t! Consider Cesare Lombroso, the 19th century eugenicist and pioneering criminologist who invented the photographic mug shot. He was a misogynist and a racist, and a big believer in the glory of Rome and Western civilization. So you’d imagine he’d be a fan of GigaChad faces. But the truth is absolutely the opposite! The eugenically-inferior physiognomy that proved a man was born to criminality and evil acts, he claimed, were the “animalistic” features of “enormous jaws” and “high cheekbones.” Superior men of innate good character had “refined” features, wrote Lombroso...

  This is the “Monkey Gland,” a cocktail invented in the 1920s. It is made of equal parts gin and fresh orange juice, with a bar spoon full of grenadine and another of absinthe.  OK, that sounds interesting if a bit odd (orange and absinthe?). But what’s with that name ?  “Monkey glands” were kind of a 1920s meme. The glands in question were testes. And the reason they were all the rage back then? Because a French doctor of Russian origin named Serge Voronoff was removing the testes from chimpanzees and transplanting slices of them into human men’s scrotums. Okaaaay. Why, exactly? Because Dr. Voronoff claimed that this would extend the men’s lives. It would give them added mental and physical vigor, allowing them to work longer hours with greater concentration! It would reverse signs of aging, improve muscle tone, perhaps even cure the need for glasses! In other words, this was an opening salvo of the techbro era of “biohacking.” Long before wearable fitness trackers and...