Quillette is one of the publications to which we sometimes direct your attention. It publishes figures who, in many cases, shouldn’t be particularly controversial but are. Along comes Politico to oblige us with an explanation: An Australian atheist feminist and psychology dropout, Claire Lehmann, founded it because she realized that magazines are more fun when people who have studied things seriously are allowed to say what they think:
At times, it has drawn intense social media backlash, with contributors labeled everything from “clowns” to “cryptofascists” on Twitter. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychology professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, and columnists like David Brooks, Meghan Daum and Andrew Sullivan. “I continue to be impressed that Quillette publishes heterodox but intellectually serious and non-inflammatory pieces [about] ideas that have become near-taboo in academic and intellectual discourse,” Pinker wrote to me in an email, “including ones connected to heritability, sex and sex differences, race, culture, Islam, free speech and violence.” Haidt, co-author of the recent book The Coddling of the American Mind, called Quillette in an email “a gathering place for people who love to play with ideas and hate being told that there are ideas they are not supposed to play with.”
Curiously, the original group was largely evolutionary psychologists. But Lehman looked beyond the deep dive into the Stone Age to see that, in an academic world increasingly dominated by enraged biddies, male and female, it is tough to discuss any serious ideas. So then where?
Over a 30-day period this fall, Quillette received north of 2 million page views—more than the New York Review of Books, and more than Harper’s and Tablet combined, according to data Lehmann provided from the analytics service Alexa. Twitter, the forum of choice for contrarians, is the site’s biggest driver of traffic. Lehmann herself has more than 100,000 followers, and giants like Peterson and Pinker regularly tweet links to Quillette articles. In June, Peterson, who has encouraged his followers to donate to the site, tweeted, “Quillette gives me hope for the future of journalism.” Amelia Lester, “The Voice of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’” at Politico Magazine
Apart from publications like Quillette, journalism won’t have a future. The internet provides access to hundreds of same-old publications, free havens of Approved Thought. Only publications offering new or different ideas are worth taking any time to seek out.
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See also: At Quillette: Who will the Evergreen mob (targeted biology teacher recently) target next?
Transgender activism: The war on science is an equal opportunity field
Mortarboard mob “disappears” respected mathematician
and
Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen prof who got SJW-d? It’s partly the fault of creationists!