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Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
AI doesn't have to reason to take your job
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. A humanoid robot shakes hands with a visitor at the Zhiyuan Robotics stand at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre in Shanghai, China, on June 18, 2025, during the first day of the Mobile World Conference. Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images In 2023, one popular perspective on AI went like this: Sure, it can generate lots of impressive text, but it can't truly reason — it's all shallow mimicry, just 'stochastic parrots' squawking. At the time, it was easy to see where this perspective was coming from. Artificial intelligence had moments of being impressive and interesting, but it also consistently failed basic tasks. Tech CEOs said they could just keep making the models bigger and better, but tech CEOs say things like that all the time, including when, behind the scenes, everything is held together with glue, duct tape, and low-wage workers. It's now 2025. I still hear this dismissive perspective a lot, particularly when I'm talking to academics in linguistics and philosophy. Many of the highest profile efforts to pop the AI bubble — like the recent Apple paper purporting to find that AIs can't truly reason — linger on the claim that the models are just bullshit generators that are not getting much better and won't get much better. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. But I increasingly think that repeating those claims is doing our readers a disservice, and that the academic world is failing to step up and grapple with AI's most important implications. I know that's a bold claim. So let me back it up. 'The illusion of thinking's' illusion of relevance The instant the Apple paper was posted online (it hasn't yet been peer reviewed), it took off. Videos explaining it racked up millions of views. People who may not generally read much about AI heard about the Apple paper. And while the paper itself acknowledged that AI performance on 'moderate difficulty' tasks was improving, many summaries of its takeaways focused on the headline claim of 'a fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models.' For much of the audience, the paper confirmed something they badly wanted to believe: that generative AI doesn't really work — and that's something that won't change any time soon. The paper looks at the performance of modern, top-tier language models on 'reasoning tasks' — basically, complicated puzzles. Past a certain point, that performance becomes terrible, which the authors say demonstrates the models haven't developed true planning and problem-solving skills. 'These models fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities for planning tasks, with performance collapsing to zero beyond a certain complexity threshold,' as the authors write. That was the topline conclusion many people took from the paper and the wider discussion around it. But if you dig into the details, you'll see that this finding is not surprising, and it doesn't actually say that much about AI. Much of the reason why the models fail at the given problem in the paper is not because they can't solve it, but because they can't express their answers in the specific format the authors chose to require. If you ask them to write a program that outputs the correct answer, they do so effortlessly. By contrast, if you ask them to provide the answer in text, line by line, they eventually reach their limits. That seems like an interesting limitation to current AI models, but it doesn't have a lot to do with 'generalizable problem-solving capabilities' or 'planning tasks.' Imagine someone arguing that humans can't 'really' do 'generalizable' multiplication because while we can calculate 2-digit multiplication problems with no problem, most of us will screw up somewhere along the way if we're trying to do 10-digit multiplication problems in our heads. The issue isn't that we 'aren't general reasoners.' It's that we're not evolved to juggle large numbers in our heads, largely because we never needed to do so. If the reason we care about 'whether AIs reason' is fundamentally philosophical, then exploring at what point problems get too long for them to solve is relevant, as a philosophical argument. But I think that most people care about what AI can and cannot do for far more practical reasons. AI is taking your job, whether it can 'truly reason' or not I fully expect my job to be automated in the next few years. I don't want that to happen, obviously. But I can see the writing on the wall. I regularly ask the AIs to write this newsletter — just to see where the competition is at. It's not there yet, but it's getting better all the time. Employers are doing that too. Entry-level hiring in professions like law, where entry-level tasks are AI-automatable, appears to be already contracting. The job market for recent college graduates looks ugly. The optimistic case around what's happening goes something like this: 'Sure, AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, but it'll create even more new jobs.' That more positive transition might well happen — though I don't want to count on it — but it would still mean a lot of people abruptly finding all of their skills and training suddenly useless, and therefore needing to rapidly develop a completely new skill set. It's this possibility, I think, that looms large for many people in industries like mine, which are already seeing AI replacements creep in. It's precisely because this prospect is so scary that declarations that AIs are just 'stochastic parrots' that can't really think are so appealing. We want to hear that our jobs are safe and the AIs are a nothingburger. But in fact, you can't answer the question of whether AI will take your job with reference to a thought experiment, or with reference to how it performs when asked to write down all the steps of Tower of Hanoi puzzles. The way to answer the question of whether AI will take your job is to invite it to try. And, uh, here's what I got when I asked ChatGPT to write this section of this newsletter: Is it 'truly reasoning'? Maybe not. But it doesn't need to be to render me potentially unemployable. 'Whether or not they are simulating thinking has no bearing on whether or not the machines are capable of rearranging the world for better or worse,' Cambridge professor of AI philosophy and governance Harry Law argued in a recent piece, and I think he's unambiguously right. If Vox hands me a pink slip, I don't think I'll get anywhere if I argue that I shouldn't be replaced because o3, above, can't solve a sufficiently complicated Towers of Hanoi puzzle — which, guess what, I can't do either. Critics are making themselves irrelevant when we need them most In his piece, Law surveys the state of AI criticisms and finds it fairly grim. 'Lots of recent critical writing about AI…read like extremely wishful thinking about what exactly systems can and cannot do.' This is my experience, too. Critics are often trapped in 2023, giving accounts of what AI can and cannot do that haven't been correct for two years. 'Many [academics] dislike AI, so they don't follow it closely,' Law argues. 'They don't follow it closely so they still think that the criticisms of 2023 hold water. They don't. And that's regrettable because academics have important contributions to make.' But of course, for the employment effects of AI — and in the longer run, for the global catastrophic risk concerns they may present — what matters isn't whether AIs can be induced to make silly mistakes, but what they can do when set up for success. I have my own list of 'easy' problems AIs still can't solve — they're pretty bad at chess puzzles — but I don't think that kind of work should be sold to the public as a glimpse of the 'real truth' about AI. And it definitely doesn't debunk the really quite scary future that experts increasingly believe we're headed toward.
Vox
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
Why are so many straight guys so bad at gossiping?
is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic. What does it mean to be 'good' at gossip? A good gossip doesn't just tell you that Sally broke up with Joe, they tell you that Sally broke up with Joe just a week after posting a bunch of (now deleted) romantic international vacation pics to Instagram. They don't simply say 'Brittany's a bad coworker,' they tell you that no one at the office likes Britt because she microwaves her asparagus-heavy meal preps. They don't mention that Mary is having a tough time with her sister-in-law and then drop it, they explain that her brother's wife is a Disney adult who arranged for the entire family to spend their next Thanksgiving at Epcot and already sent out Venmo requests for a couple thousand dollars worth of Mickey Mouse breakfasts. According to stereotype, this is a skill men — particularly straight men — just don't have. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Their supposed inability to spin a good yarn has been a point of internet mockery, with memes and gags usually coming from the women in their lives who are forced to parse through the driest, most unsatisfying stories ever told. Like a hungry person fighting their way through a well-done steak, these tea-seekers must suffer to find a semblance of sustenance. It's hard not to laugh at the tension these skits and jokes highlight between the person wanting the entire story and the person giving them absolutely nothing. But underneath the comedy are deeper questions about the ethics, the stigma, and the history of gossip, especially who gets to participate. The way that the women who poke fun at their partner's reticence online seek (and are denied) connection speaks to larger concerns. What does dude's inability to share secrets — especially with other bros — mean for the much-discussed 'loneliness crisis' among men? Let's be clear: Men gossip! When people say that men are bad at gossiping, it might come with the assumption that men don't gossip. They can't be good at it, because they don't or only rarely partake. But that train of thought is built on a fallacy. That fallacy begins with how we define gossip. For a long time, it's had a negative connotation, the act of talking poorly about someone behind their back. But more and more recently, researchers and social scientists like Megan Robbins have begun reassessing the term, broadening it to define all the ways we talk about other people, good, bad, and neutral. Related The surprising truth about loneliness in America Robbins and her team conducted a 2019 study that examined the rates at which men and women gossip and if men and women had any differences when it comes to positive (e.g., 'John bought a pair of nice shoes!'), negative ('John bought a pair of ugly shoes!') and neutral ('John bought a pair of shoes.'). They found that men and women gossip positively and negatively at similar rates, but that women gossip neutrally more than men. 'It really corresponds with past evidence that women talk more about social topics than men,' Robbins, an associate professor in psychology at the University of California Riverside, says. 'So there's this practice element to talking about social topics, talking about people, even just in a neutral way, and men are just not doing it as much in the evidence that we have.' Robbins's study helps explain a few things. It debunks the trope that women are more inclined to disparage someone, and, at the same time, explains why people may perceive that women are better at gossiping or sharing information — if they're gossiping neutrally at a higher rate, so they have more practice. The project also shows that despite the stereotypes, men do gossip, positively and negatively. Getty Images/iStockphoto More than that, men enjoy gossip, even (and especially) when they're at the center of it. A 2025 study from professor Andrew Hales and his research team found that men, more than women, 'were consistently more open' to being talked about. 'I mean it, maybe it's as simple as men just like attention,' Hales, who teaches at the University of Mississippi, tells me. Hales's study focused on the targets of gossip, setting up a theoretical scenario in which a person leaves a party and then is asked whether they want the people who stayed to talk about them. Hales and his team found that people who were male and/or narcissistic were the most likely to want to be spoken about, even if the gossip was going to be negative. 'If you were to control for narcissism, men still are more comfortable being talked about than women are — so it's not just that men are more narcissistic, although they are,' Hales says, noting that the findings contradicted the popular ideas about how men don't enjoy gossip nor particularly like being the targets of it. The population who have been thought to like gossip the least, actually enjoy its existence as much, if not more, than everyone else. But if that's the case, why are they notoriously awful at it? Why are men bad at gossiping Comedian and podcaster Jared Freid intuitively believes what Robbins's study proves: that uninspired male gossips just haven't put in the work, like weight lifters who regularly skip leg day. 'I just don't think there's as many reps for men hearing a crazy story, and there's a lot more reps for women,' Freid, a man, tells me. 'We're just not trained, you know?' Freid primarily attributes men's unskillful gossip to a lack of cultural opportunities to yap freely. He sees things like weekend brunches, group chats, and the ample discussion fodder provided by Bravo's various reality shows as opportunities that mostly women have to sharpen their storytelling tools and observe how drama works firsthand. These conversations teach a person how to gab and, perhaps more importantly, how to respond to spicy information. Gossip is a two-way street; a question or quip can enrich the entire tale. Straight men, he says, don't have an equivalent. While men do hang out, it never gets too chatty. Freid explains that gossip feels 'messy' and, even something as simple as being curious about a story or a rumor could be construed as stirring the pot (men, he says, do not want to be seen as pot-stirrers). It's not that straight men are inherently bad at gossip, it's that they won't allow themselves to openly partake in or enjoy it. 'I don't think guys are really allowed to be messy and still have social credibility,' Freid says. Kelsey McKinney, the author of You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip and the founding host of the Normal Gossip podcast, sees this fear from men, too. 'Straight men seem to have the perception that gossip isn't talking about other people,' McKinney says. 'Gossip, to them, is a tone of voice that they avoid at all costs.' Gossip Girl (starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester) was a TV show about popular teens terrorized by a secret, anonymous online gossip (who turned out to be a guy named Dan Humphries). The CW This attitude grows out from a misogynistic idea that gossip is a negative thing that women do, something Robbins, the social scientist, considered during her research. 'There's a stereotype that women [negatively] gossip more than men, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence for that,' Robbins tells Vox. 'And I feel like having the stereotype that women gossip more than men, you know, serves to keep them in their place, right?' Robbins believes that social skills are valuable, and being able to discuss social topics is a necessary piece of that puzzle. Yet historically, those abilities haven't always been prized. Dismissing all social talk as gossip was a way to dismiss the women who possess those talents. Now, so many men see gossip as unbecoming as well as unmanly, they don't allow themselves to really relish the juicy morsels, nor do they tease out the savory bits. Curiously, Freid is the co-host of the Betches media-produced podcast U Up? It's a show devoted to decoding dating and relationships. His professional life revolves around piquing people's interests and recounting people's stories in hilarious ways. Does that mean the careers Freid's chosen are at odds with his manhood? 'I had to learn to be a better storyteller,' Freid tells me. To do that? He talked to women; friends, his co-host, his coworkers at Betches. A lot of women. Could gossip cure the male loneliness epidemic? Okay, so men might be less adept at gossip. Do they really need to be good at it? As Robbins indicated, continuing research shows that gossip can be a helpful social tool. Talking about other people isn't just 'not all bad,' it can be actively good. McKinney says that social scientists and psychologists have been reassessing the tropes, narratives, and stigma surrounding gossip and gossipers, and they've found that gossip brings people closer together. The idea is that the individual piece of gossip is less important than the bond that's forged when someone shares information with another person. Maybe the true measure of a friendship is the 'Can I be a bitch for a second?' texts we sent along the way. We share stories with people we think we are close to, and sharing things with other people creates intimacy. The gossip we share, arguably, is as much about our own values and beliefs and dislikes as it is about other people. At the same time, over the past half-decade or so, much has been made of what's known as the male loneliness epidemic — the idea that men are lonelier than ever and that their friendships are dwindling. If intimacy is defined, in part, by the idea of sharing stories with one another, it's not that difficult to see men who are bad at gossip hit with a lose-lose situation. They don't have the close friendships that facilitate gossip and the bond-building that comes with it, and they don't get good enough at gossip to initiate the bond-building. That's a problem, because men are disadvantaged when it comes to intimacy and communication from an early age. 'Research shows that by the time little boys are 3, we talk to them less and touch them less,' Alexandra Solomon, a relationship psychologist at Northwestern University, tells me. Solomon says that fewer conversations and less physical affection in childhood have long-lasting social effects. As boys grow up, many will tend to see communication as transactional, or directive, or a means to solving problems instead of an avenue that builds relationships. Those men see the sharing of gossip and storytelling in general as uncomfortable or a taboo, instead of intimately sharing and engaging with a story. 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself.' 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself,' Freid, the comedian and man, tells me. 'I don't hear someone telling me their story and go, Oh, good. I can tell them all my stories.' Freid says he sees male friendships and female friendships as fundamentally different, echoing Solomon's explanation of the divergent ideas about communication. Female friendships, he says, involves a give-and-go, a trading of shoulders to cry on. That 'trading' allows for deeper friendships among women — but, he suspects, also opens the door for potential rifts when someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Fried takes some comfort in the idea that he never has to worry about hypothetically disappointing his buddies. 'I just have no friends where I'd be like, I can't believe they haven't called recently,' he says. It's not too hard, though, to link not expecting anyone to check in with a larger, existential problem with loneliness. Is that lack of expectation worth the lack of support? If Saturdays are proverbially for the boys, why not mix in some yapping? If straight men (statistically) gossip anyway, is there real harm in openly enjoying it, seeking it out, using it to build connections? As easy as that seems, it's asking men to share things about themselves in ways that go against how they've been conditioned. 'I would actually be out of a job if men could do that,' Solomon, the psychologist at Northwestern, tells me. 'If the trade-off is not having a career, but men talked and shared more? I would do it.'
Vox
2 days ago
- Science
- Vox
We're producing more food than ever before — but not for long
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. An aerial view shows floodwaters covering farm fields and a rural road near Poplar Bluff, Missouri. In April, thunderstorms, heavy rains, high winds, and tornadoes plagued the regions for several days causing widespread humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of breadbaskets. More than one-third of the world's wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change. That's bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats — especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren't occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy. Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day, compiled by news editor Sean Collins. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often. 'It's not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,' said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 'That's the most weather exposed sector in the economy.' The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep pace with warming. To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s. They specifically looked at how farmers have adapted to changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, and soybean. Combined, these crops provide two-thirds of humanity's calories. In the Nature paper, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow some crop losses due to climate change, but not all of them. And the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day. That's even taking into account how climate change can make growing seasons longer and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario — leading to between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 — rising incomes and adaptations would only offset one-third of crop losses around the world. 'Looking at that 3 degrees centigrade warmer [than the year 2000] future corresponds to about a 13 percent loss in daily recommended per capita caloric consumption,' Hultgren said. 'That's like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.' The researchers also mapped out where the biggest crop declines — and increases — are likely to occur as the climate warms. As the world's most productive farmlands get hit hard, cooler countries like Russia and Canada are on track for larger harvests. The map below shows in red where crop yields are poised to shrink and in blue where they may expand: Some of the biggest crop-growing regions in the world are likely to experience the largest declines in yield as the climate changes. Nature The results complicate the assumption that poor countries will directly bear the largest losses in food production due to climate change. The wealthy, large-scale food-growers may see the biggest dropoffs, according to the study. However, poor countries will still be affected since many crops are internationally traded commodities, and the biggest producers are exporters. A smaller harvest means higher food prices around the world. Less wealthy regions are also facing their own crop declines from disasters and climate change, though at smaller scales. All the while, the global population is rising, albeit much more slowly than in the past. It's a recipe for more food insecurity for more people. Rice is an exception to this trend. Its overall yields are actually likely to increase in a warmer world: Rice is a versatile crop and unlike the other staples, it benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. 'Rice turns out to be the most flexibly adapted crop and largely through adaptations protected from large losses under even a high warming future,' Hultgren said. That's a boon for regions like South and Southeast Asia. Related This is how much meat and dairy hurt the climate Decreasing the available calories isn't the only way climate change is altering food, however. The nutrition content can change with shifts in rainfall and temperature too, though Hultgren and his colleagues didn't account for this in their study. Scientists have previously documented how higher levels of carbon dioxide can cause crops like rice to have lower levels of iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the food we will be eating in the future may be more scarce and less nutritious as well. And while climate change can impair our food supply, the way we make food in turn harms the climate. About one-third of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production, just under half of that from meat and dairy. That's why food production has to be a major front in how we adapt to climate change, and reduce rising temperatures overall.
Vox
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
Straight guys are 'bad' at gossip. Maybe they should learn.
is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic. What does it mean to be 'good' at gossip? A good gossip doesn't just tell you that Sally broke up with Joe, they tell you that Sally broke up with Joe just a week after posting a bunch of (now deleted) romantic international vacation pics to Instagram. They don't simply say 'Brittany's a bad coworker,' they tell you that no one at the office likes Britt because she microwaves her asparagus-heavy meal preps. They don't mention that Mary is having a tough time with her sister-in-law and then drop it, they explain that her brother's wife is a Disney adult who arranged for the entire family to spend their next Thanksgiving at Epcot and already sent out Venmo requests for a couple thousand dollars worth of Mickey Mouse breakfasts. According to stereotype, this is a skill men — particularly straight men — just don't have. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Their supposed inability to spin a good yarn has been a point of internet mockery, with memes and gags usually coming from the women in their lives who are forced to parse through the driest, most unsatisfying stories ever told. Like a hungry person fighting their way through a well-done steak, these tea-seekers must suffer to find a semblance of sustenance. It's hard not to laugh at the tension these skits and jokes highlight between the person wanting the entire story and the person giving them absolutely nothing. But underneath the comedy are deeper questions about the ethics, the stigma, and the history of gossip, especially who gets to participate. The way that the women who poke fun at their partner's reticence online seek (and are denied) connection speaks to larger concerns. What does dude's inability to share secrets — especially with other bros — mean for the much discussed 'loneliness crisis' among men? Let's be clear: Men gossip! When people say that men are bad at gossiping, it might come with the assumption that men don't gossip. They can't be good at it, because they don't or only rarely partake. But that train of thought is built on a fallacy. That fallacy begins with how we define gossip. For a long time, it's had a negative connotation, the act of talking poorly about someone behind their back. But more and more recently, researchers and social scientists like Megan Robbins have begun reassessing the term, broadening it to define all the ways we talk about other people, good, bad, and neutral. Related The surprising truth about loneliness in America Robbins and her team conducted a 2019 study that examined the rates at which men and women gossip and if men and women had any differences when it comes to positive (e.g., 'John bought a pair of nice shoes!'), negative ('John bought a pair of ugly shoes!') and neutral ('John bought a pair of shoes.'). They found that men and women gossip positively and negatively at similar rates, but that women gossip neutrally more than men. 'It really corresponds with past evidence that women talk more about social topics than men,' Robbins, an associate professor in psychology at University of California Riverside, says. 'So there's this practice element to talking about social topics, talking about people, even just in a neutral way, and men are just not doing it as much in the evidence that we have.' Robbins's study helps explain a few things. It debunks the trope that women are more inclined to disparage someone, and, at the same time, explains why people may perceive that women are better at gossiping or sharing information — if they're gossiping neutrally at a higher rate, so they have more practice. The project also shows that despite the stereotypes, men do gossip, positively and negatively. Getty Images/iStockphoto More than that, men enjoy gossip, even (and especially) when they're at the center of it. A 2025 study from professor Andrew Hales and his research team found that men, more than women, 'were consistently more open' to being talked about. 'I mean it, maybe it's as simple as men just like attention,' Hales, who teaches at the University of Mississippi, tells me. Hales's study focused on the targets of gossip, setting up a theoretical scenario in which a person leaves a party and then is asked whether they want the people who stayed to talk about them. Hales and his team found that people who were male and/or narcissistic were the most likely to want to be spoken about, even if the gossip was going to be negative. 'If you were to control for narcissism, men still are more comfortable being talked about than women are — so it's not just that men are more narcissistic, although they are,' Hales says, noting that the findings contradicted the popular ideas about how men don't enjoy gossip nor particularly like being the targets of it. The population who have been thought to like gossip the least, actually enjoy its existence as much, if not more, than everyone else. But if that's the case, why are they notoriously awful at it? Why are men bad at gossiping Comedian and podcaster Jared Freid intuitively believes what Robbins's study proves: that uninspired male gossips just haven't put in the work, like weight lifters who regularly skip leg day. 'I just don't think there's as many reps for men hearing a crazy story, and there's a lot more reps for women,' Freid, a man, tells me. 'We're just not trained, you know?' Freid primarily attributes men's unskillful gossip to a lack of cultural opportunities to yap freely. He sees things like weekend brunches, group chats, and the ample discussion fodder provided by Bravo's various reality shows as opportunities that mostly women have to sharpen their storytelling tools and observe how drama works firsthand. These conversations teach a person how to gab and, perhaps more importantly, how to respond to spicy information. Gossip is a two-way street; a question or quip can enrich the entire tale. Straight men, he says, don't have an equivalent. While men do hang out, it never gets too chatty. Freid explains that gossip feels 'messy' and, even something as simple as being curious about a story or a rumor could be construed as stirring the pot (men, he says, do not want to be seen as pot-stirrers). It's not that straight men are inherently bad at gossip, it's that they won't allow themselves to openly partake in or enjoy it. 'I don't think guys are really allowed to be messy and still have social credibility,' Freid says. Kelsey McKinney, the author of You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip and the founding host of the Normal Gossip podcast, sees this fear from men, too. 'Straight men seem to have the perception that gossip isn't talking about other people,' McKinney says. 'Gossip, to them, is a tone of voice that they avoid at all costs.' Gossip Girl (starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester) was a TV show about popular teens terrorized by a secret, anonymous online gossip (who turned out to be a guy named Dan Humphries). The CW This attitude grows out from a misogynistic idea that gossip is a negative thing that women do, something Robbins, the social scientist, considered during her research. 'There's a stereotype that women [negatively] gossip more than men, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence for that,' Robbins tells Vox. 'And I feel like having the stereotype that women gossip more than men, you know, serves to keep them in their place, right?' Robbins believes that social skills are valuable, and being able to discuss social topics is a necessary piece of that puzzle. Yet historically, those abilities haven't always been prized. Dismissing all social talk as gossip was a way to dismiss the women who possess those talents. Now, so many men see gossip as unbecoming as well as unmanly, they don't allow themselves to really relish the juicy morsels, nor do they tease out the savory bits. Curiously, Freid is the co-host of the Betches media-produced podcast U Up? It's a show devoted to decoding dating and relationships. His professional life revolves around piquing people's interests and recounting people's stories in hilarious ways. Does that mean the careers Freid's chosen are at odds with his manhood? 'I had to learn to be a better storyteller,' Freid tells me. To do that? He talked to women; friends, his co-host, his coworkers at Betches. A lot of women. Could gossip cure the male loneliness epidemic? Okay, so men might be less adept at gossip. Do they really need to be good at it? As Robbins indicated, continuing research shows that gossip can be a helpful social tool. Talking about other people isn't just 'not all bad,' it can be actively good. McKinney says that social scientists and psychologists have been reassessing the tropes, narratives, and stigma surrounding gossip and gossipers, and they've found that gossip brings people closer together. The idea is that the individual piece of gossip is less important than the bond that's forged when someone shares information with another person. Maybe the true measure of a friendship is the 'Can I be a bitch for a second?' texts we sent along the way. We share stories with people we think we are close to, and sharing things with other people creates intimacy. The gossip we share, arguably, is as much about our own values and beliefs and dislikes as it is about other people. At the same time, over the past half-decade or so, much has been made of what's known as the male loneliness epidemic — the idea that men are lonelier than ever and that their friendships are dwindling. If intimacy is defined, in part, by the idea of sharing stories with one another, it's not that difficult to see men who are bad at gossip hit with a lose-lose situation. They don't have the close friendships that facilitate gossip and the bond-building that comes with it, and they don't get good enough at gossip to initiate the bond-building. That's a problem, because men are disadvantaged when it comes to intimacy and communication from an early age. 'Research shows that by the time little boys are 3, we talk to them less and touch them less,' Alexandra Solomon, a relationship psychologist at Northwestern University, tells me. Solomon says that fewer conversations and less physical affection in childhood have long-lasting social effects. As boys grow up, many will tend to see communication as transactional, or directive, or a means to solving problems instead of an avenue that builds relationships. Those men see the sharing of gossip and storytelling in general as uncomfortable or a taboo, instead of intimately sharing and engaging with a story. 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself.' 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself,' Freid, the comedian and man, tells me. 'I don't hear someone telling me their story and go, Oh, good. I can tell them all my stories.' Freid says he sees male friendships and female friendships as fundamentally different, echoing Solomon's explanation of the divergent ideas about communication. Female friendships, he says, involves a give-and-go, a trading of shoulders to cry on. That 'trading' allows for deeper friendships among women — but, he suspects, also opens the door for potential rifts when someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Fried takes some comfort in the idea that he never has to worry about hypothetically disappointing his buddies. 'I just have no friends where I'd be like, I can't believe they haven't called recently,' he says. It's not too hard, though, to link not expecting anyone to check in with a larger, existential problem with loneliness. Is that lack of expectation worth the lack of support? If Saturdays are proverbially for the boys, why not mix in some yapping? If straight men (statistically) gossip anyway, is there real harm in openly enjoying it, seeking it out, using it to build connections? As easy as that seems, it's asking men to share things about themselves in ways that go against how they've been conditioned. 'I would actually be out of a job if men could do that,' Solomon, the psychologist at Northwestern, tells me. 'If the trade-off is not having a career, but men talked and shared more? I would do it.'
Express Tribune
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
RaKai banned from Twitch after viral reckless driving livestream
Twitch streamer 2xRaKai, a known associate of Kai Cenat, has been banned from the platform following backlash over a viral video showing him texting while driving during a livestream. The clip, shared widely on June 15, 2025, shows the 16-year-old briefly removing his hands from the wheel, causing his vehicle to swerve—a moment that drew sharp criticism across social media. RaKai has been banned on Twitch after streaming himself recklessly driving. — FearBuck (@FearedBuck) June 16, 2025 Just a day later, on June 16, the automated account @StreamerBans confirmed RaKai's second suspension from the Amazon-owned platform. Attempts to access his channel now display a message citing violations of Twitch's Terms of Service or community guidelines. The circulating clip has intensified scrutiny over Twitch's enforcement of real-life conduct during streams. RaKai acknowledged the situation during a Just Chatting broadcast hours before the ban was made official. He explained he couldn't go live because Twitch had launched an investigation. In the clip, he remarked: 'I thought I was over… I wasn't able to stream yesterday because they needed to do an investigation or some bulls**t.' Public reaction on platforms like Reddit and X has been swift. One user on r/LivestreamFail questioned the platform's delay in taking action, while others criticized RaKai's behavior. Meanwhile, some speculated whether Kai Cenat might intervene on his friend's behalf. As of writing, RaKai has not issued a formal statement regarding his suspension. His Twitch channel remains suspended, and the platform has not commented on the duration of the ban.
