Year Zero with Wesley Yang

We do not know if, when, or how the lemming-like rush to propagate the experimental and non-evidence based practice of pediatric sex trait modification will be brought to heel. But if the United States eventually follows the lead of the Social Democratic nations of northern Europe toward reason and reality — acknowledging that the practice never had a strong evidence base to support it before it w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wesleyyang.substack.com Today's bonus podcast for paid subscribers is the first 40 minutes of my marathon  conversation with Corinna Cohn. Toward the end of that podcast, I referred to the beginning of our conversation as "tense." I don't mean that we were in any way hostile, just that it took a little while for us to fully establish ou...

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is the audio version of a video interview published earlier. Here is the second in a series of three interviews with Anna Slatz, the founder of Reduxx Magazine. The first hour of this marathon interview told the story of that online publication’s founding for pai...

Corinna Cohn is a software developer living in Indiana who was among the very first teenagers to go on cross-sex hormones in adolescence, at the age of 15 in 1993. He was inducted into a cross-sex identity on the very first transsexual-interest Internet Relay Chat groups in the early 1990’s and underwent vaginoplasty at the age of 19. After decades of attempting to live as a woman, he reached an a...

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leor Sapir is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who has become a leading figure in the ongoing effort to bring accountability to a medical field that has run off the rails. In this episode of the Year Zero podcast, which was recorded in July, we discuss the fast ev...

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Michael Biggs is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oxford University and the author of a series of important studies of pediatric gender medicine in the UK. The studies created much of the evidentiary foundation now on the academic record about the still very young...

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Back in 2018, Adam Mortara repeatedly told Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison Burroughs that the case he was arguing sought to prove that Harvard had discriminated against Asian Americans, not to end the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Last we...

Joseph Burgo is a psychoanalyst and author and a co-director of Genspect, an organization representing thousands of parents of children caught up in the ongoing transgender social contagion. The organizatioin now seeks to supplant the World Professional Association of Transgender Health as an authoritative source of guidance for how to deal with gender dysphoric youth. Burgo gave a talk at the Gen...

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A small group of writers attended two conferences on gender held concurrently in Killarney, Ireland in April. One was the annual meeting of the European affiliate of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, known as EPATH. The other was the first gath...

This is an abridged, 15-minute excerpt of my conversation with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode, read the transcript, and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions. This is the fourth episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject w...

"…it’s just as easily going to encroach on any other categorization that we've ever recognized in law as needed to help particular groups with defined characteristics - people with disabilities, people of certain ages - need different things in law. Race, color and national origin - every single category that we've ever identified and distinguished among people for the purpose of providing accommo...

“So the basic claim is that, okay, there may have been this need, contingently, one time, for the court to act; but if you create a super weapon , it's something that whoever gets control of it, will find a tempting, non-democratic way of getting their policy done. That's what the Lochner era had been about. That's what the liberals used it for, instead of taking civil rights, gender equality to t...

This is an abridged, 20-minute excerpt of the interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions. This is the third episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with an academic expert. R...

Early adopters of the Yang Extended Universe as it moves into the audio realm are familiar with my scripted podcast, that you can listen to here on Substack , but I also have another weekly show, Conversations in Year Zero , conducted on the app Callin, in which I get to interact with my audience. I’ve noticed in the past few sessions that the size of those participating has begun to grow, and I h...

In today’s episode of The Road to Year Zero we pick up right where we left off in our conversation with Jonathan Chait. At the time of our interview, Chait was working on a piece exploring the current state of the culture, since, as he put it “a wave of illiberal norms around the discussion of race and gender began to hit an expanding array of progressive institutions” seven or eight years ago, an...

"I think it's different because it's fundamentally a sort of liberal Civil War, in which both parties, that is to say, pro-choice activists and pro-life activists, really think of themselves in an actually remarkably similar way. Both sides think of themselves as human rights Crusaders, who are charged with expanding the frontiers of human freedom, human equality. And so they really think of thems...

This is an abridged, 30-minute excerpt of the interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted yesterday for paid subscribers only. It is the second episode of the subscriber-only Syllabus series. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions. This is the second episode in the Syllabu...

Today’s episode of the Road to Year Zero Podcast looks back at the publication of Jonathan Chait’s February 2015 New York Magazine cover story, NOT A VERY P.C. THING TO SAY , which both registered the recrudescence of political correctness and summoned up a response illustrative of a new balance of forces within media and affiliated institutions. I talk with Chait about that curious inflection poi...

This is an abridged, 20-minute excerpt of the original, one hour and twenty-five minute interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted yesterday for paid subscribers only. It is the first episode of the subscriber-only Syllabus series. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions....

Still evoking the mood and atmospherics of the early days of the ideological succession. A reflection on the following piece, and a dramatic recitation, by me of my own work: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/we-out-here/ Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS . A full transcript is available for those paid subscribers reluctant to take in...

As promised, I am expanding my own nano-Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus into another medium: a podcast, or rather a series of podcasts organized under three different rubrics. * The Road to Year Zero: A micro-documentary series revisiting the great and petty episodes on the path to ideological succession from the recent and distant American past * Syllabus, for paid subscribers only, in...