Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

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Testing a foetus or an embryo for some medical conditions is now a routine part of the modern pregnancy experience. Prenatal Down’s Syndrome tests, for instance, are now so widespread that in some Scandinavian countries almost 100 per cent of women choose to abort a foetus diagnosed with the condition, or – if using IVF – not implant the affected embryo. The result is a visible change to these populations: there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.

New technology is now available – at a high price – for those who want to go further. So-called polygenic embryo screening can give a very full picture of the adult that the embryo could become, including his or her vulnerability to an enormous number of diseases – heart disease, diabetes, cancer – and also the physical and psychological traits that he or she would likely possess: height, hair colour, athletic ability, conscientiousness, altruism, intelligence.

Is this a good thing? Should we welcome a world in which parents are routinely selecting their embryos in this way?

I'm joined today by two guests who take a very different view.

Emma Waters is a policy analyst at the Center for Technology and the Human Person at the Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on family, biotechnology, and reproductive medicine.

Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher, author of the book 'Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement', and is also the director of scientific research and communication for Herasight, a genetics startup that offers polygenic embryo screening.

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In this bonus episode, I spoke with Mary Harrington about the latest tranche of Epstein files, and what the scandal reveals about politics, power, and men. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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On the cover of their new book, authors Dean Spears and Michael Geruso have a graph of the global population over time. The population is small and roughly stable for pretty much all of human history. It rises after the advent of agriculture, some ten thousand years ago, but that bump looks rather minor now.

It's only after the industrial revolution that we see this enormous spike, taking us from a world containing 1 billion people in 1800 to over 8 billion today. So far, so familiar.

But what Spears and Geruso are interested in is what happens next. Their book is titled 'After the Spike' because they foresee an imminent addition to the familiar population graph: a descent just as steep as the ascent. An exponential decline that might even take us back to a global population smaller than that of 1800.

I speak to Dean Spears today about what demographic research indicates is imminently in store for us as a species, and what might be on the horizon 'after the spike.'
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In this bonus episode, I spoke with Rod Dreher about what he describes as the 'Weimarisation of the West' – an increasingly atomised and economically precarious society that valorises transgression for its own sake. We also discussed whether World War II still has a central place in the cultural imagination, why the Online Right puts so much emphasis on humour, and the ongoing civil unrest in Minnesota.
Article in 'The Point' on heteropessimism
'The Harry Potter generation needs to grow up'
Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Fuentes
Fuentes on Red Scare
Rod's Substack post on nurses' comments on ICE agents
'The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons'
Ezra Klein on Trump

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Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

Teenage anxiety isn’t a new thing. Our mothers and grandmothers also worried about beauty, and friendships, and boys.
What is new, however, is the role of technology in teenage anxiety. We see an inflection point in the early 2010s: a sudden drop in mental wellbeing among teenagers, particularly girls. The beginning of that drop coincided with the arrival of image-based social media like Instagram.
My guest today argues that this was not a coincidence. Freya India is the author of the Substack GIRLS, where she writes about the challenges girls and young women face in the modern world. She’s also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter, After Babel.
Her new book is about the ways in which communication technology has given us a world in which teenage girls end up commodifying themselves – selling their lives on social media, advertising themselves on dating apps, and packaging themselves into personal brands. All at the cost of their own sanity.
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