Essays
Selected pieces from Malory’s Substack — on the male reading decline, the craft of fiction, and the genre. Mirrored here for the archive. Subscribe for new pieces as they go up. My short fiction reviews for Tangent Online live on their own page.
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Research·21 August 2026·4 min read
The Wee County Experiment
Or: the one place on Earth where boys out-read girls, and why it didn't fix anything.
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Research·14 August 2026·4 min read
The Megalosaurus Test
The first paragraph of Bleak House, and a fair question about who could read it now.
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Commentary·7 August 2026·4 min read
Worried Your Son Might Be… a Reader?
There is a real psychological instrument for measuring how manly your son is. Reading is on it.
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Commentary·30 July 2026·4 min read
The Loneliest Hobby
Or: why nobody took Ian McEwan’s free novels.
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Commentary·23 July 2026·5 min read
Everyone’s a Homer Expert Now
Or: the film's more faithful to the spirit of the poem than you'd think.
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Research·17 July 2026·4 min read
The One-Word Experiment
Test. Game. One noun swapped for another — and the reading gap flipped.
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Commentary·10 July 2026·7 min read
The Age of Reading Isn’t Over. It’s Just Not Happening to Everyone.
The Atlantic’s cover essay, and the one word it leaves out: men.
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Commentary·9 July 2026·4 min read
The Oldest Sneer in Publishing
Not real reading — three words that keep turning up at the edge of every argument.
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Commentary·2 July 2026·3 min read
The Bookshop That Was Never There
It isn’t phones or willpower. Most of the time it is supply.
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Commentary·26 June 2026·3 min read
The Compound Interest of Reading
Reading for pleasure beats parental education as a predictor of maths at sixteen.
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Research·23 June 2026·3 min read
A Chilean Experiment and an Australian Classroom
Two studies on how reading got filed on the wrong side of the line marked manly.
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Research·14 June 2026·9 min read
Men's and Boys' Reading Statistics
A sourced, myth-checked roundup of where men and boys stand with reading, and where the audited data runs out.
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Commentary·12 June 2026·7 min read
A Field Guide to the Performative Male Reader
We catalogue our rarest animals. A full taxonomy — including the species nobody photographs.
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Commentary·5 June 2026·6 min read
Mudie’s Did This to Us
Or: how a Bloomsbury library talked men out of fiction.
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Commentary·29 May 2026·7 min read
The Manosphere's Best Customer
Or: the judgement isn’t real. The man selling it to you is.
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Commentary·21 May 2026·5 min read
Dad Books Aren’t Dying. The 700-Page Hardcover Is.
Or: it's not pining for the fjords. It's just on Audible.
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Research·16 May 2026·6 min read
How to Manufacture a Man Who Doesn’t Read
Or: it isn’t the phones.
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