Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show. On iHeartRadio, last episode, I talked about men cheating on their wives, throwing away their family, and how susceptible rich men are to the idea that they could get away with it. On this episode, I want to talk about divorce ideation I see from women. There was a story in New York Magazine by Emily Gould on how she had considered divorcing her husband. I mean she was also in the throes of a manic episode and ended up in a
mental hospital. But the crux of the piece was that she became obsessed with divorce. The piece is called Should.
I Leave My Husband? The Lore of Divorce.
She writes that she read a bunch of books by divorced women. Here's a quote in Nora Efren's Heartburn. As an aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wrongs party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Liz Len's polemic The American ex Wife out this month, marketed as a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage.
Bad and divorce actually pretty good. The book begins by detailing how Lens's husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn't like, for example, a mug that said right like a motherfucker in a box in the basement. I didn't want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup. Lens rights. What was compelling about my marriage wasn't its evils or its villains, but its commonplace
horror end quote. I see this a lot, especially in the writing world, divorce as this amazing thing that women simply must do. I mean, how could you waste your one wild and precious life with a man?
Right?
I mean, look, divorce happens, people fall out of love, people find they'd rather live alone. But this idea that divorce is exciting or divorce is freeing or whatever is a lie. And it's a lie aimed. I think more women than it meant. Gould writes, quote, I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso's Liars, marketed as a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist and how marriage makes liars of us.
All in it.
John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost fifteen years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious. This is a quote inside the quote. I tried to explain that ferocious hunger and couldn't it came from somewhere beyond reasoned end quote. But the opening of that book also contains a warning. Then I married a man, as
women do. My life became archtypical, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got en mesh to a story that had already been told ten billion times. I felt, perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the ten billion. It made it seem like it was less my fault. End quote. Marriage makes liars of us. I don't know about that. Marriage feels very truthful to me,
like I get to be really, really myself. And look, if you're in a marriage where you feel like it's a lie, I'm not saying stay in it and that's it and just suffer. But I should note at the end of that Emily Gold piece. She realizes that she had been in a crazy place, and she does stay in her marriage. Maybe if you're feeling like you're living a lie, it's not the marriage that's necessarily the problem. Last episode, I talked about men making mistakes, cheating on
their wives, leaving their families during time of change. I think for women, it's in times of extreme routine where nothing has changed for a long time, or maybe nothing exciting is going on, that they start to daydream of a single future where they're finally live their truth. My advice would be start now, start living truthfully now, and you'll find that marriage was not the problem. Coming up
next and interview with Glenn Reynolds. Join us after the break. Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. Guest today is Glenn Reynolds, Law professor, Instapundit, founder, fellow New York Post columnist and writer at instapundit dot subdeck dot com. Hi Glenn, so nice to talk to you.
Hi, great to be here, Great to see you.
I mean, just talking to the blog father is very exciting for me. You know, you had a huge influence in me becoming a writer.
And just your alarming news blog years ago or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I started it in two thousand and two. I think you when did you start instapundit.
Two thousand and one, right, I a month before nine to eleven.
Right, so I followed nine to eleven on your blog. I didn't have a TV. I mean, I just I didn't even have a desk. I was, you know, a to graduate school eventually, but I was just living a very meager existence. And I remember sitting on the floor of my apartment in New York and refreshing instapundit and you know, just getting all the news that way.
Do you miss those blog days?
I mean, certainly not nine to eleven.
No, No.
I just wrote a history. Actually, Michael Walsh has got a media book coming out, and I wrote a chapter on the early days of the blog is here for It? Which was fun because I really did sort of go back and revisit that and go back and read through my archives and read some of the articles people wrote
about it back then. And you know, the first couple of years, from basically two thousand and one before nine eleven to around the summer at two thousand and three, it was a real innocent and pleasant time in the blogger sphere. It was so new and that was exciting, and there was a camaraderie that I mean, it's hard to image and now in these polarized times, but between the left and the right, bloggers like it was more important that we were all doing this cool new thing
than that we disagreed about politics. And the remnants of nineties connecticuet were still around. So I remember Dave Copple and I actually were in the comments at the Daily Coast having a civil and intelligent discussion of assault weapons bands with Daily Coast readers, which you know, within a couple of years was unimaginable but was still a thing.
Then I remember the moment that I was like, Okay, this is all over, this camaraderie and all of that.
Because it was the same.
I mean in New York we'd have like blogger parties and it would be like cooking bloggers and travel bloggers and obviously all the political bloggers and whatever. But it was all like we were doing something together. But I remember that feminist site, Feminist Like.
I used to.
Comment there barely regularly, and then one time I commented that trans people should have to disclose at their trends, like they shouldn't trick you, and you know, kind of not just just be open about it. I thought it was barely pro trends, and I thought that that was a normal comment. I got blocked, and I was like, WHOA, something has changed here, Like, you know, I used to be like, you know, the quirky conservative in their comments section.
That quickly became unacceptable. And I think that that's you know, has translated to so many other spaces in our world.
Yeah, you really saw it. I mean, if I were going to pick a single dividing line for the blogsphere as a whole, it would probably be and again, summer of two thousand and three, about the time that Andrew Sullivan sort of took a few weeks off and then came back as a pro carry blogger. Careful not to just make a big deal about that until after he did his last big fundraising drive, but you know, I felt like that everybody suddenly was like, Okay, it's two
thousand and three. We pretended to be patriotic for a couple of years, but we got a gear up for the election. The gloves have to come on, which didn't even work out for him, as it turned out, but it definitely changed the tone of everything, and it's only gotten worse for the I mean, actually it's gotten better in a way. I mean, you know, blogs are now so old, they're like five or six media generations of revolution behind. So uh, you know, I'm kind of like
this quirky museum piece. Now I can do and what I want. The notion that anybody's going to get mad and go after a blogger, now I guess it could happen, but it just it's not like it was.
Yeah, how did you escape being canceled?
I feel like people tried on a number of occasions, but uh, you know, I'm pretty hard to cancel. I mean, I control my own platform, which is the most important thing, and I have a tenured job at a state school in a red state where I have a lot of friends on the legislature, so it's you know, I'm just pretty safe. But people have certainly tried on a number of occasions, and it generally hasn't worked out well for them.
But uh, you know, know they there's just a class of people who just are offended by the idea that somebody's even allowed to say stuff they don't.
How dare you? Yeah, so you don't use Twitter, which is interesting.
No, I mean I'm not. I have a Twitter account. I actually have a couple of them. I have a personal account I started once in the very earliest days of Twitter because I was doing some media panel and I needed to tweet from it as part of the setup. And it still exists, and then I have the instantpund the account. I actually deleted it. I really just you know, it was just I was writing this book on social media, the social media upheaval, and I was just researching all
the nasty stuff that Twitter does. Your mind, Yeah, and so I just honestly, they pissed me off about something and I just said, screw it, I'm out of here, and deleted it. And then I forget who it was. Somebody maybe it's Charles Glasser. Somebody said you really shouldn't delete your account. You really should just reopen it and not is it so nobody can pretend to be you? That makes sense? So I have it. I think I may have tweeted three or four times in the last several years, but you.
Just don't like it, or what's that.
I was a late adopter of Twitter ideal set up for me was when somebody and I didn't know who it was, had set up an Incipendent Twitter account that did nothing but tweet stuff from the RSS feed on my blog and that was great. I was happy with that, and somebody's like, shouldn't you, you know, have it taken down? And I was like, no, I love this, And then it quit working. I just broke I don't know why. And I had to actually get lawyers to get the handle turned over to me since I had the trademark
for Incipendent. And then once I got that, I started tweeting, which was a big mistake because it's just, I mean, it has its satisfaction. It's always fun to really administer a sick burden to somebody, but you can waste a lot of time administer burns. And it's the crystal math of social media and that it's the most addictive but the least satisfying, you know. And I was spending a
lot of time on it. I was in a bad mood a lot, and ultimately, you know, uh, after I quit, everybody's like, you'll be back in a few months, and I could be who knows, you know, but I I've never missed it once. They didn't drive any traffic to my site to speak of here.
That's a big part of like, it's a big negative for the site. I think people think that it's a driver of traffic, and it's just just not. I would rather go viral on Facebook any day of the week, like one of my columns, than on Twitter, because you know, I just don't I.
Don't know why Facebook drives traffic. I think it drives a lot less that it used to. Yeah, Facebook drive has always driven more traffic than Twitter, and everybody knows that, but I've never heard anybody explain why. My theory is just that people on Twitter are at such a superficial level they just don't ever click on a link, so right, Yeah.
They see the headline and that's it, Whereas on Facebook, I think, like, you know, your grandma share it with her friend, and like they're they're actually reading it and clicking it and sharing it and talking about it, which is you're right, it's not the same kind of reach on Facebook that it used to be. But I always just preferred sort of the real people on Facebook versus the media people on Twitter to like my stuff.
It just meant so much more to me.
So yeah, the appeal of Twitter is it was very useful for journalists who had time to kill, you know. I mean I remember somebody saying Twitter exists because people like me being or waiting in line for congressional hearings have nothing to do but play with our phone for five or ten minutes, you know. And I think there's something to that, but that doesn't waiting on any line really.
But I also agree with you completely that it's the crystal meth. It's the one that I am absolutely most addicted to. It's the one that I take breaks from. It's the one that I like, I feel like I need to get clean from occasionally.
I don't feel like that about Instagram.
Like Instagram, I see like home to core tips and like fashion and like some Taylor Swift news, I don't feel like I'm getting you know, the negative side of the world on.
Instagram Instagram is how I keep up with Taylor too.
That's my Tay sorts among us, you know.
Right well, it is funny. And I don't do TikTok. I actually I have. I have a former student that I call my contributing TikTok editor. Because she sends me tiktoks and I post on the blog from time to time. But I don't want the app on my phone because I know what it's doing to me, right, and I really don't want to spend any more time on the Internet or on any screen. I'm kind of trying to. I mean, for me to talk about reducing my Internet exposure.
It's kind of a joke, but I hear that, you know the whole what is it called the new Apple glasses, the Provision?
Yet no, like that looks like a nightmare to me. Why would I want that?
And it's you know, and the thinking that people are like, oh when I say that, like, oh, you know, in a few years, you'll see you're going to want that.
I'm like, I'm never going to want that.
I was. It was the Foresight Vision conference. It was in the nineties. It was probably like ninety seven ninety eight. Jarre Lanier, who was with the original VR pioneers, had had his display with the same kind of goggles and you can look at it and the shark would swim by you and stuff, and everybody was like, this is going to be the next big thing in two or three years, and I was on it and I was like,
you know, this just seems really lame to me. I mean, you know, I know they have those three D movies in the fifties where you wore the glasses, and that's kind of what it seems like to me. It's like a gimmick that. Yeah, I can see how for some stuff a truly immersive experience would really be worth it,
but not that much. And I'm not going to be the first one to adopt it because I'm honestly, I am trying to spend more time outdoors, Yeah, and actually looking at the real world, not outdoors wearing goggles.
Right, I think that's the way to go.
Really, we're going to take a quick break and be right back on the car Marco Witch Show. So you're, you know, a very well known law professor. You're the father of many, many writer children on the internet, the blog father.
That's my favorite thing is that I have all these blog children out there.
You do, they're like scattered through the world. Do you feel like you've made it?
Made it? You know? My ambitions were ever super huge?
So yeah, just so, and you have a beautiful wife.
I have to also say, Helen is like every time you post a picture of her, I'm like, I don't know, she's brilliant too, but she is stunning, Like she is literally one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.
She's very beautiful. And that we have a lovely daughter who is now married. We have a lovely, delightful son in law who's a great guy. So yeah, in that's sense, I've definitely made it. And career wise, you know, I'm my law professor's standards. I'm successful, and that's all I really ever aim for. So I mean, I it's not quite When I was in college, I wanted to be a pundit and write newspaper columns, and I do that. So yeah, that's.
What you wanted to do. Well, But what's the like if that wasn't your career?
If this, if you weren't a law professor and you weren't a pundit, what would be plan B.
I'd probably be a lawyer. I like practicing law fine. I don't miss it except on payday. But honestly, I didn't mind practicing law at all. I like what I do now a lot better. Which are there some people who become law professors because they hate practicing law. I didn't. It was interesting. I liked my clients for the most part.
What kind of law did you practice?
So I was in DC and we had what was called a Washington policy practice, which basically means lobbying and administrative law. And I did work telecommunications in aerospace, mostly a little bit of food and drugs. Sometimes represented McDonald's on a few things. Wow, So you know it was it was fine. I liked it fine, And you know, I could have stayed and done that. And the nice thing about the firm I work at is the DC Office had a big international trade practice. They had economists
on staff. They actually encourage people to write and publish, and that's kind of how I started writing lot of ther articles and books even before I became the law professor. How long have you been in Tennessee thirty plus years? Now?
Oh wow?
How the last few years of all the new people moving in, how has that been mostly great?
I was really concerned that it was going to be like Colorado or something and bringing a bunch of people who turned the state blue, and the local Democrats still hope for that. But everybody we meet who's moving here is in some ways I think more conservative than people here are, or at least more aware they've been in a state that went down, whereas people here, I think are kind of complacent. So I've noticed that some of them are becoming more politically active than most of the locals.
Interesting.
Yeah, I think that the last few years that this recent migration has been, you know, people with a purpose moving. It's like nobody's moving to Florida now for the low taxes or the weather. I mean, look, those are all side benefits obviously, but it's.
For a reason.
You're you're wanting something different, You're wanting something better, and I think Tennessee and Florida and Texas are obviously at the forefront of that. I don't I don't I see the same thing. I don't think that this is a blue migration.
Of course.
The concern is that once this wave of people comes in and kind of settles down, that the next wave will be like, wait, they've built something really good there, let's go there and change it.
And yeah, well we'll see how that goes.
But when I think somebody said, which is a good observation, is the people who move from a blue state to a red state because they were employed warrior moves typically bring their blue state attitudes with them. The people who pick up stakes and do it themselves typically don't. And so I think that's right. The one thing I do think sort of funny is, you know, and it's kind of like everybody who moves here immediately like learns to shoot if they don't already know how.
Oh yeah, that's definitely true. For us, we you know, had never shot a gun or even touched a gun or anything, and now we enjoy the shooting very very much.
It's benefit.
It's like, why wouldn't you take advantage of your rights and why wouldn't you learn how to do something like that when you can?
I love it. Now. Do you know Hadas Levy who's down there in your neck of the woods. She does a lot of tactical training for women.
I know the name.
I feel like somebody might have mentioned her to me and maybe I'll look her up after this, but.
Yeah, maybe interview her. I'll bet she'd be a good interview.
Oh yeah, I mean, I'll have her on.
So one of the things we've talked about on this show is, you know, cultural problems and society problems.
And so's the what's your take.
On what our biggest cultural problem is and whether it's solvable.
The biggest cultural problem we face is that the people running our society, the ruling class, if you want to call them that, don't like the society or the people they rule very much. And that's true throughout most of the West. It's certainly true in the United States and Canada and the UK, and in most of Europe especially, but not exclusively, in the anglophone countries, which seem to have the worst dose of it for some reason. And you know, you can't be a very good ruling class
of a country you don't like. And it's much more divisive. I mean, if you look at things like the collapse in military recruitment. Now, the collapse of military recruitment comes because the pool of potential recruits looks at the people running things and says, I can't trust these people. You know, they'd screw me over in a heartbeat, not even for their little gain, just to look good for their friends for fifteen minutes. And why should I go and take
a bullet for that? And I don't believe him. I mean, I've got a nephew who's in the army now and it's been good for him, but you know, he'll be out in the year and he has no intention to stay. And honestly, it's been good for him in a lot of ways, but not because they've treated him especially well,
if that makes sense. There's all these stories of you know, you go to a base and there's no food and no toilet paper, and I mean, yeah, you know, it's just like they're they're not spending all that money on taking care of their people, right, So.
How do we solve that? What's the I don't know.
I mean, you know, you.
Have to know you're the blog father.
Well, I don't know. Sometimes to get angry, I'm just like, let the purges begin. But you know, you really, sweeping out your ruling class and sweeping in a new one is something that never works very well and usually is worse. The good news about our ruling class, honestly, is because they're very shallow and driven by fads. If you just get a fad that involved them being patriotic and trying to do the job, they do it. So I think that's got to be where we go.
Yeah, it's wild to me that like American flags have become right wing. I just I try to imagine the opposite, like, oh, the left wing has now decided that every house that is a left wing person, they would put an American flag outside. And would I be like, oh, well that I'm not putting the American flag outside because that's a left wing thing. I would never surrender it. I would
never let them just have it. And the idea of that that patriotism has become something only one side of the political aisle is into is it's just really crazy to me, especially again looking back at those early blog days.
It was sort of everybody realized.
That America was worth fighting for and worth salvaging, and those post nine to eleven days were really something.
Yeah, you saw American flags everywhere there for a while, Yeah, and then and then not yeah, I mean I mean going to fans again, Rainbow flags everywhere. Now. I was just I was at a political lunch and and we're coming out in sort of a hipster area of Nxville, and that, you know, some flower shop with a huge rainbow flag that said, hey, does not abide here. And my wife was like, I bet if I would ever mentioned Donald Trump or something, there'd be plenty of hate
that would abide there, so, you know, but that's a fad. Yeah, and you know we've seen those in this house signs in people's yards and stuff and so, but it literally is a fad, mostly shallowly held by shallow people. So the good news for us is it's not like you have to change the mind of the vaffen s s or something like that. Mostly people don't even know why they believe what they believe half the time. It's just because that's what has status in their community at the moment, right.
So that just concerns me that if we do have another tragedy, if we do have something bad happen, I just I can't see us uniting in quite the same ways. It's it was sort of the great example of that we completely did not unite. You know, my neighbors tell each other in for having too many people over.
COVID was a good example of how bad our ruling class is and how much of what went on during COVID seemed to be mostly just sort of kicking around the public because you could, you know, from the privilege of feeling like a powerful big shop. And of course the emails and stuff that have come out since the show that the people who are telling us to follow the science, even the scientists didn't believe it themselves, indicate that it was just a shocking breach of faith with
the public. And you can't have a cohesive, united, patriotic country where the leading leadership has broken faith with the public and the public knows it. And that's definitely where we are right now. Yeah, how's that for cheerful.
Yeah, that's not very optimistic, Glenn. I you know, I was hoping for more. Uh.
I mean honestly, you know, there's a school of thought of which you say, everything's really terrible now and the government is much more illegitimate and dishonest. If you actually look at the history of say the fifties and the sixties, it's not at all clear that's true. But the difference is the public didn't know it, so the country felt more united and more patriotic because people just didn't know what was being done to them in a lot of ways. Now they do, And you know, I'm in favor of that.
I like transparency. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's better off of everybody's but whatever word has gotten out, and all the efforts to censor things and keep it in only make it look worse. I think people are just gonna have to do it. I mean, I hate to just say, you know, the solution is for the people running things to do a better job. But we do actually really need that.
Right, So societally we might be in trouble. But a question that I ask all of my guests is end here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their individual lives.
Oh, well, that's actually easier. It's a amazing Actually, there's a very funny little video that's bouncing around on social media and some of you may have seen it where this woman is saying I just feel sort of down now. I really don't know why, and her friend says, well, you're getting enough sleep? No, have you exercised? No? Have you been outside? No? You know, it's just like, honestly,
do all that stuff and you'll feel a lot better. Exercise, get outside, stay away from the computer and the news, and drink.
Yeah, eat and drink. The part of her thing was like, did you eat today? Did you drink enough water?
Yeah?
Exactly? Yeah. I mean all of that honestly makes an amazing difference to me. People talk about how I seem pretty cheerful, and I mean, you do, but I do it. And part of the reason is I, you know, I left weights, and I do yoga several times a week, and I eat a reasonably healthy diet, and I get out and move around, and you know, I read a novel or two every week, and that keeps me pretty cheerful.
Although I'm reading Kurg Schlickter's new novel The Attack, which is basically like the October seventh attacks, if they happened on a big scale in the United States. That sounds super cheerful.
I'm planning to read that next. It's on my list.
It's depressingly realistic and believable. And in fact, I was at this political luncheon and the Speaker of the House was there and there was just a lot of security around it, and I was really good.
Well, thank you so much for coming on, Glenn. This has been great. Really love talking to you. I love reliving the blogger days.
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Markowitz Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.