Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”
The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”
Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”
All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than women’s. It’s up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
‘Egypt’s gift to the world’, according to its website, the GEM is, among other things, an attempt to position Egypt as a beacon of peace and civilization in a volatile region. At the opening festivities, a promotional film titled ‘Journey of Peace in the Land of Peace’ presented a glossy survey of Egyptian architecture, from the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser in the 27th century BC, to the 10th-century Church of St George and Saladin’s 13th-century citadel, to the Dubai-esque Iconic Tower of Egypt’s fortress of The New Capital, the cornerstone of Sisi’s New Republic, a heavily securitized new capital housing the presidential palace, ministries and government embassies approximately 50 kilometres east of Cairo. The film’s inclusion of Coptic churches, a Sufi sheikh and a Nubian singer projected an image of a unified, non-sectarian nation – reassurance in a region of confessional fracture. The ceremony concluded with a choreographed light-and-laser projection across the Giza skyline.
Twenty years in the making, the GEM could hardly have opened at a better time for El-Sisi. The narrative of Pax Aegyptiaca, seven millennia of civilization culminating with his ‘New Republic’, is part of the country’s attempts to assert influence in the region, as it casts itself as a key political mediator and peacemaker. Briefly usurped by Qatar, Egypt’s diplomatic centrality was reaffirmed by Israel’s strike on the Hamas leadership in Doha last September. The ‘land of peace’ slogan was first unveiled at the so-called Gaza Peace Summit held the following month in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, adorning the hall where Trump, Erdoğan, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and El-Sisi gathered in another extravagant display. The ‘peace’ deal having been agreed, the state-owned press heralded Egypt as having ended the war on Gaza – and in October, no less, which is a month of victory in Egypt’s national calendar, marking the anniversary of Egyptian forces breached the Bar-Lev Line, crossed the Suez Canal and punctured the myth of Israeli military invincibility. October 1973,
don't take at face value the claim that the massive job lodd registered across the tech sector is due to AI directly replacing human roles. The main causes are disputed but some analysis believe AI has become a "silver bullet" to justify the cut of post-pandemic over-hiring, others read it as preventative cost cutting. The Spanish government put forward the explanation that companies are cutting jobs in sections that perform the worst or appear least attractive to investors. MIcfosoft suffered its worth month this June since the dotcom bubble because investors didn't perceive it was sufficiently committed to AI. LLMs have the capacity to reduce necessary labor time and take over human tasks, as has already been made clear, but all this job loss is likely not directly correlated to the proportion that AI can replace human jobs. viewing these hundreds of thousands of unemployed as all having been directly replaced by AI agents is also part of the investor's song.
what do you think of this paper? [https :// www . media . mit . edu / projects /your-brain-on-chatgpt / overview /] nearly all "serious" "relying on gen ai makes you dumber" posts or essays quote it despite the authors explicitly asking not to use phrases such as "impact negatively" "dumb" "brain damage" "harm" etc. when talking about the results and listing a lot of the study's limitations. However, the conclusion is still this: "EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling."
link
If you use a calculator rather than doing all calculations by hand, would you see a reduction in brain activity on an EEG? If someone uses Grammarly to correct every grammar mistake they make rather than reading over their entire essay/email/cover letter/etc manually, would you see a reduction in brain activity? If I use google maps to map out what route I need to take to get somewhere rather than plotting it out by hand using a paper map and asking multiple people for directions, would you see a reduction in brain activity? Or, to use an example of something I did today - if I asked the Google search AI to write out the excel formulas I need to use to conduct statistical analysis on my dataset, rather than reading the documentation pages on Microsoft’s website for ANOVA tests/t-tests/etc and manually trouble shooting every time I ran into an error, would you see a reduction in my brain activity? Furthermore, because the study mentions poorer content recall when writing an essay via LLM, if you were asked to recall the processes of each of these tasks (eg, calculations, grammar, travel route times and directions, formula syntax) after having them automated for you, could you do it?
Like, almost certainly there would be a reduction in brain activity and poorer recall, because you are offloading cognitive tasks to a machine to do that thinking work for you. But neurological activity is not the language we use when we talk about other forms of automation, because it would be absurd to claim that there is collective cognitive decline happening as a result of Google Maps telling you where to drive or what bus to take. And this is a good comparison imo, because you certainly can't make the argument that everyday travel is less important/foundational to the functioning of society than writing an essay.
I suspect that one reason why the authors are asking people not to use these conclusions to call people stupid is because a reduction in brain activity is not an indication of stupidity (although they are incredibly bad at explaining this, which is very irresponsible imo). The assumption that a reduction in neurological activity when doing a specific task is a causal indicator of intellectual decline, which is what people are claiming, is asinine
Today, August 5, 2026, Ukraine is witnessing the first mass hunger strike in modern history by political prisoners against torture and murder in Vinnytsia Prison No. 86.
The hunger strike is being carried out by Vinnytsia Correctional Colony No. 86: Alexander Melnik, Yagoda, Vilchenko, Lomakin, Samir Bedrashko, Mikhail Sazonov, Dzyuba, Nikolai Pyatachenko, Kotenko, Shapran, Vitaly Kigilchenko, Batarev, Kelyukin, Yarodar Vitlinets. Another 17 people supported the hunger strike.
Pyatikhatka penal colony No. 122, Dnipropetrovsk region: Yuri Petrovsky. 12 people supported the hunger strike.
Nikolaev pre-trial detention center: Igor Savitsky, Anatoly Nikolaev. Another 7 people supported the hunger strike.
Lviv pretrial detention center: Svetlana Novitskaya, Inna Ivanochko Inna. Four people supported the hunger strike.
Lukyanivske pre-trial detention center, Kyiv: Mikhail Vasiliev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Konstantin Kukstel, Ilya Druga, Alexander Burgun, Vasily Yudakov. Another 23 people supported the hunger strike.
Kyiv, political prisoners under house arrest: Mikhail Kononovich, Alexander Kononovich, Georgy Buiko, Anatoly Miruta.
There are 92 political prisoners in total.
Also, 50 communists and anti-fascists and another 20 relatives of political prisoners are conducting a one-day hunger strike in freedom.
That Wired article about "ghosting" long term partners is such a mess ofc. I guess using misogyny + gender dynamics to explain things just isn't chic anymore.
Literally all the examples of ghosting a long term relationships used in the article are men ghosting their girlfriend (that they sometimes lived with), never the other way around, and the article never analyses that specific dynamic once lol. Instead of talking about misogyny they'd rather talk about gen z and how social media normalizes blabla... And the article compares men leaving their years-long heterosexual relationship without a word to the "trend" of gen z "cutting ties with family members" lmfao yeah for sure family is dying due to society and technology. Yeah you're right we're in a true epidemic of people who stop talking to their families for no reason except uhhh "dating apps" and "digital communication". I fucking wish people were massively cutting ties with their families lol. Btw "Gen Z are more likely to sever contact with a family member or loved one—60 percent—compared to older generations." Ghosting and severing contact doesn't mean the same thing so this is basically useless and irrelevant.
Oh and for the bingo of useless explanations, the last one brought up is of course attachment patterns. "Ghosters are often people with avoidant or disorganized attachment patterns" wow that is so fucking enlightening thank you so much Los Angeles-based therapist.
And the final example used is the only one where it's a woman leaving her boyfriend and she literally says it's because the relationship was abusive and she was fearing his reaction to the break up, so she deleted all her social media accounts so that he wouldn't be able to find her anymore well. That's not called ghosting that's called fleeing. For the love of god what does that have to do with gen z and dating apps. Journalists kill yourselves challenge if you can't manage to pull the word misogyny out for this one.
The question of the railways had been acute since the October Revolution. From the very first day, the Vikjel ("All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers") deliberately exerted political and trade-union pressure on the Soviet government, forcing it to include non-Bolshevik ministers after the insurrection. This organisation brought together workers, employees and technicians, something exceptional in Russia at the time. The Mensheviks held a majority in its leadership.
At the start of 1918, the disorganisation of the railways was extreme. Each station functioned as a small independent republic, deciding for itself whether or not to stop a given train. A report of the period states:
"The current regulations guarantee workers' wages. A worker turns up for work, does his job or does not as he pleases: no one can control him, because the shop committees are powerless. If a shop committee attempts to exercise control, it is immediately dissolved and another one elected."
It was this concrete situation that led Lenin, in March-April 1918, to advocate for piece-work pay (or pay proportional to output), strict discipline, and the personal responsibility of directors appointed by the State, who represented the interests of the whole community in this particular sector.
The autonomisation of the railways — and secondarily of other sectors of transport and locomotion — pushed the fragmentation of economic activity to breaking point. Strictly speaking, there is no specific production here (apart from the repair of locomotives and wagons, or the maintenance of equipment and track, which may be equated with production). Like other workers, railwaymen cannot bargain over a limited range of products: textiles, footwear, steel, etc. — but the virtual monopoly of transport they enjoy allows them to set their own conditions for the manufacture and sale of these products. This "control" extends to agricultural products in circulation. Thus, any attempt at self-management in this sector immediately and spectacularly takes on the absurd appearance of economic blackmail exercised by a small minority over the great mass. The same holds, though less crucially, for all the other components of the system of flows and communications: it is the very excess of their power that condemns self-management in this case.
The railway directors could, and sometimes did, seize Petrograd by the throat by halting grain convoys. In times of famine, as occurred in the spring of 1918, the situation thus created was intolerable.
In fact, from the moment it began issuing its ultimatums and functioning as the collective owner of the Russian railways, the Vikjel confiscated a state function for its own benefit. It is in the name and in the interest of the other components of the proletariat and of the popular masses that Soviet power attacks this monopoly. The Bolsheviks, relying on the rank-and-file railway workers, among whom they had more supporters, first created a rival organisation to the Vikjel, the Vikjedor. But this was not enough. The anarchy continued. The breathing space afforded by the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement allowed the Vikjedor to concentrate on the most urgent internal tasks: fighting famine and restoring production and vital economic activities. Transport was key to achieving these goals. Lenin understood what was at stake and placed himself at the head of an offensive of proletarian dictatorship against the resistance of this faction of workers and technicians who, in his eyes, were effectively pursuing the politics of a labour aristocracy or bourgeoisie. He was determined to break the "resistance" in the railways.
How to achieve this? By subjecting the entire labour process to a unifying direction. And for this direction to be real rather than merely formal, it would have to establish a rigorous analysis and control of tasks. It would have to set norms and keep a strict record of the work performed and of remuneration.
We find here once again, assumed by a proletarian power, the functions that Taylor defined, in his offensive on behalf of capitalism, against what he called the "worker brake." It is no coincidence that precisely during this period, in the spring of 1918, Lenin spoke systematically of the Taylor system and advocated its adaptation. The battle over the exploitation of the railways was the first sign of "Soviet Taylorism".
Breaking the remnant of worker autonomy still present in the capitalist labour process, Taylor had set out to expropriate the monopolies and worker fiefdoms based on trade. In Leninist logic, the proletariat expropriates in a partially analogous manner, subjecting to strict direction a fraction of itself that has become so autonomous that it contradicts the vital interests of the class as a whole.
On 26 March 1918, a Sovnarkom decree granted the People's Commissariat for Communications "dictatorial powers" over everything relating to the railways.
This decree immediately provoked fierce criticism from the "left communists," led by Bukharin, who accused Lenin of breaking worker initiative in production by introducing labour discipline, personal direction, and piece-work wages. Naturally, the decree was also attacked by the Mensheviks, for whom it struck at one of their strongholds within the working class.
The ensuing debate gave Lenin the opportunity to explain the logic of his policy of "labour discipline" in all its rigorous nakedness.
At the meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 29 April 1918, he summed up the situation with an observation as clear as it was intoxicating: "[…] The masses are dying of hunger in central Russia, even though there is wheat, but its transport is hampered by disorder."
The arguments of the opposition collapse at this evident point: concrete solutions must be found immediately to combat hunger and get transport moving again; the opponents fight on the basis of "principles" and propose no concrete solution for the immediate term:
"Comrades Bukharin and Martov have taken up their pastime again: the decree on the railways, and they have made a field day of it. They speak of the dictatorship of Napoleon III, of Julius Caesar, etc. Without railways, it is not merely that there will be no socialism, there will be no socialism at all, but that we shall starve to death like dogs, even with wheat nearby. What can be built without railways?".
Lenin, los campesinos y Taylor, by R. Linhart (1976) Ed. Dos Cuadrados
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