#polarization

Interference images obtained by using an apparatus sold in the catalog. Price list no. 50. Max Kohl A.G. 1909-11.

Helical liquid crystals can flip light's chirality under ultralow electric fields

The direction in which the electromagnetic field of circularly polarized light rotates can be easily reversed by applying a voltage, RIKEN researchers have demonstrated. This could enable a new generation of optical devices based on circularly polarized light. The work is published in two papers in the journal Advanced Materials. Why circular polarization matters Polarized sunglasses produce light that is polarized along a single direction. But some special devices can generate light with a polarization that rotates as the light propagates. Such circularly polarized light is useful for many applications, including spectroscopy, satellite communications, stereoscopy and microscopy.

"Frozen water is one of the most abundant substances on Earth. It is found in glaciers, on mountain peaks and in polar ice caps. Although it is a well-known material, studying its properties continues to yield fascinating results.

An international study involving ICN2, at the UAB campus, Xi'an Jiaotong University (Xi'an) and Stony Brook University (New York), has shown for the first time that ordinary ice is a flexoelectric material. In other words, it can generate electricity when subjected to mechanical deformation. This discovery could have significant implications for the development of future technological devices and help to explain natural phenomena such as the formation of lightning in thunderstorms.

The study, published in the journal Nature Physics, represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the electromechanical properties of ice. "We discovered that ice generates electric charge in response to mechanical stress at all temperatures. In addition, we identified a thin 'ferroelectric' layer at the surface at temperatures below -113ºC (160K). This means that the ice surface can develop a natural electric polarization, which can be reversed when an external electric field is applied -- similar to how the poles of a magnet can be flipped. The surface ferroelectricity is a cool discovery in its own right, as it means that ice may have not just one way to generate electricity but two: ferroelectricity at very low temperatures, and flexoelectricity at higher temperatures all the way to 0 °C " explains Dr Xin Wen, a member of the ICN2 Oxide Nanophysics Group and one of the study's lead researchers. This property places ice on a par with electroceramic materials such as titanium dioxide, which are currently used in advanced technologies like sensors and capacitors.

One of the most surprising aspects of this discovery is its connection to nature. The results of the study suggest that the flexoelectricity of ice could play a role in the electrification of clouds during thunderstorms, and therefore in the origin of lightning."

David Pakman:

It has become almost cliché to say that America is deeply divided. Politicians repeat it, cable news thrives on it, and most people will nod along to the idea without hesitation. That part is easy. The harder part is answering why. What is the actual fault line that cuts the country into two almost perfectly opposed camps? There are plenty of ideas, but most of them fall apart when you look closely.

So if none of these explanations quite add up, what does?

Here is what I want to propose: The real divide is not primarily about race, class, religion, or geography. It is about belonging versus threat.

One side looks at the country and says: change is progress. Expanding the circle of who belongs makes us stronger. The other side looks at those same changes and says: this is an invasion, a loss, a threat to our way of life. Seen through this lens, every major fight in American politics begins to make sense. Immigration is a perfect example. On one side, newcomers are part of the American story. We all belong. On the other, immigrants are “invaders” who are dangerous, criminals, or out to replace the people who were here first. Race fits the same pattern. One view says diversity strengthens democracy. The other casts diversity as synonymous with crime, decline, or societal collapse. Consider abortion. For those who support abortion rights, the issue is about women fully belonging as equal citizens, trusted to make their own medical and moral decisions. For opponents, abortion represents a threat to the traditional family, to religious values, even to demographic survival. Gender and sexuality line up in the same way. One perspective celebrates more people living openly as progress. The other frames LGBTQ rights as an attack on the family, on children, and on masculinity itself. Even religion divides along these lines. Belonging means pluralism, the freedom to believe or not believe. Threat means Christianity must dominate or else it will be under siege. Democracy itself is at stake. Belonging says that everyone gets a vote and even if your side loses, you still belong in the political community. Threat says that if the “wrong” people vote, then the system must be rigged and the rules must be broken. The same is true for economics. Belonging says we are in this together and everyone deserves a share. Threat says “they” are taking what belongs to “us,” whether it is jobs, healthcare, or government assistance.

By: vittorio

Published: Jan 17, 2026

Bill Ackman quote tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

Good question. Most answers I've seen are either tribal ("women are emotional") or surface-level ("social media bad"). Neither traces the actual mechanism.

Let me try.

First, notice what Wanye pointed out:

We've been told for a decade that men are "radicalizing to the right" and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

The story we are told is exactly inverted from reality. And when female leftward movement does get discussed, it's framed as progress: "women becoming more educated, more independent, more enlightened"

They'll tell you the graph shows enlightenment and progress. Wrong.

The graph shows is capture.

This Isn't Just America

Before getting into mechanism, something important: this pattern isn't only American. It's global.

The Financial Times documented it last year The gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

This matters because it rules out explanations specific to American politics. It's not Title IX policy. It's not #MeToo. It's not the specific culture war of US campuses. Something bigger is happening, something that rolled out globally at roughly the same time.

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.

Whatever is causing this, it's not American. The machine is global.

The Substrate

Start with the biological hardware.

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as serious threat.

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

(Male status still mattered enormously for reproduction, low-status men had it rough. But men could recover from temporary exclusion in ways that were harder for pregnant or nursing women.)

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt's work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren't huge but they're consistent across every culture studied.

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

The Machine

Now look at what we built.

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it's everyone you've ever met plus a world of strangers watching.

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone launched June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Look at the graph again. Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008. The curve steepens through the 2010s as smartphones became universal and platforms became more sophisticated. Women are by nature more liberal, but the radicalization coincides with the rise in smartphones adoption.

The machine turned on and the capture began.

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

This machine wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

Add a feedback loop: women complain more than men. Scroll any platform and it looks like women are suffering more. Institutions respond to this because visible distress creates liability, PR risk and regulatory pressure. In addition, women are weaker and inevitably seen as the victim in most scenarios. The institutional response is to make environments "safer". Which means removing conflict. Which means censoring disagreement. Which means the consensus strengthens.

The counterarguments get removed or deplatformed and the loop closes.

The Institutions

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it's socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

Then they graduate into female-dominated fields: HR, media, education, healthcare, non-profits, where the monoculture continues. From 18 to 35, many women never encounter sustained disagreement from people they respect. The feedback loop never breaks.

Men took different paths. Trades. Engineering. Finance. Military. Fields where results matter more than consensus. Fields where disagreement is tolerated or even rewarded. The monoculture didn't capture them because they weren't in the institutions being captured. (mostly because they were kicked out of them, but that's a different piece)

The Economics

Marriage collapsed. This probably matters more than people think.

Single women vote more left than married women. This is consistent across decades of exit polls. Part of this is likely economic: single women interact with government more as provider of services, married women interact with government more as taker of taxes. The incentives point different directions.

The marriage gap in voting is one of the most consistent predictors. And marriage rates have collapsed precisely during the period of divergence.

Men saw marriage collapse differently. Family courts. Child support. Alimony. The rational response was skepticism of expanding state power.

Same phenomenon, different positions in it, different political responses.

The Algorithms

Algorithms optimize for engagement. Engagement means emotional response. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Comments.

Women respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and "victims".

Men got different feeds because they responded to different triggers. The algorithm doesn't really have a gender agenda. It has an engagement agenda. But engagement looks different by demographic, so the feeds diverged.

Women ended up in information environments optimized for emotional activation. Men found alternatives: podcasts, forums, cars, wars, manosphere etc.

The Ideology

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous. You'd have to admit you wasted your fertile years on a lie. That the women who ignored the ideology and married young were right. That your mother was right.

I think this is why you see so little defection. Not because the ideology is true, but because the psychological cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying. Easier to double down. Easier to believe the problem is that society hasn't changed enough yet.

The Other Capture

I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

The male line on that graph staying flat through 2020 isn't necessarily health. It might just be a different kind of sickness, men checking out instead of being pulled in. Or it may be that everyone and everything moved more left and women moved lefter.

The Line Is Moving Now

Here's the update: the male line isn't flat anymore.

Post-2024 data shows young men shifting right. Recent surveys all show the same thing. Young men are now actively moving more conservative.

My read: women got captured first because they were more susceptible to consensus pressure. The capture was fast (2007-2020). Men resisted longer because they were less susceptible and less embedded in captured institutions. But as the gap became visible and culturally salient, as "men are the problem" became explicit mainstream messaging, as men started being excluded from society because of lies, as masculinity, or the very thing that makes men men became toxic, men had to start counter-aligning.

The passivity is converting into opposition. The withdrawal is becoming active rejection.

This doesn't mean men are now "correct" or "free". It might just mean they're being captured by a different machine, one optimized for male grievance instead of female consensus. Andrew Tate didn't emerge from nowhere. Neither did the manosphere. Those are capture systems too, just targeting different psychological vulnerabilities.

The graph is now two lines diverging in opposite directions. Two different machines pulling two different demographics toward two different failure modes.

Some people will say this is just education: women go to college more, college makes you liberal, simple as that. There's something to this. But it doesn't explain why the gap widened so sharply post-2007, or why it's happening in countries with very different education systems.

Some will say it's economic: young men are struggling, resentment makes you conservative. Also partially true. But male economic struggles predate the recent rightward shift, and the female leftward move happened during a period of rising female economic success.

Some will point to cultural figures: Tate for men, Taylor Swift for women. But these are symptoms, not causes. They filled niches the machines created. They didn't create the machines.

The multi-causal model fits better: biological substrate (differential sensitivity to consensus) + technological trigger (smartphones, algorithmic feeds) + institutional amplification (captured universities, female-dominated fields) + economic incentives (marriage collapse, state dependency) + ideological lock-in (sunk costs, social punishment for defection).

No single cause. A system of interlocking causes that happened to affect one gender faster and harder than the other.

So What

If this model is right, some predictions follow.

The gap should be smaller in countries with later smartphone adoption or lower social media penetration. (This seems true: the divergence is less extreme in parts of Eastern Europe and much of Africa, though South Korea is a major exception due to other factors.)

The gap should narrow among women who have children, since parenthood breaks the institutional feedback loop and introduces competing priorities. (Exit polls consistently show this: mothers vote more conservative than childless women.)

The gap should continue widening until the machines are disrupted or the generations age out of them.

Here's the part I don't know how to solve: these systems are self-reinforcing. The institutions aren't going to reform themselves. The algorithms aren't going to stop optimizing. The ideology isn't going to admit failure. The male counter-capture isn't going to produce healthy outcomes either.

Some women will escape. The ones who have children often do since reality is a powerful solvent for ideology. The ones who build lives outside institutional capture sometimes do.

Some men will stop withdrawing or stop rage-scrolling. The ones who find something worth building. The ones who get tired of the simulation.

But the systems will keep running on everyone else.

The Question

Bill asked why.

The answer isn't "women are emotional" and it isn't "social media bad." The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We're watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

I don't know how this ends. I don't think anyone does. I don't think it will.

[So, I actually wrote this not long after the whole assassination thing happened, buuut it’s December and I feel like posting more poetry this month while I work on some upcoming posts, so that’s what you get!] They held a rally for the fascist who died there were pyrotechnics at his funeral he said people like me “should be dealt with like they did in the 50s and 60s” And I’m still being scolded for not mourning Their small-featured martyr apparently a calm white man with a baritone deserves canonization for being killed by the same words he used as weapons But when people demand grace and patience without showing any then say you deserve no quarter in the same breath that’s just abuse in a cheap red ballcap the tolerant have left and if we’re using words as weapons then catch the sharp end of my self defense I will not be quiet I will not perform sadness For a monster, a scam artist, or a grifter I will not gracefully excuse the fact that my member of Parliament, Rachel Harder, called for a standing ovation for a man who said he’d make his daughter bear a child of a rape to term because forcing people to give birth matters more than our pain or our choices I will not sit down and bite my tongue For the potential of a career in politics Because pinching our noses and making nice Is how we got here And if this poem makes you uncomfortable and you want me to shut up or be kinder then look me in the eye and tell me why I should care about your feelings more than my own or those of my communities We will not be cowed by your cowardice or fumbling snatches for power we said “this pussy grabs back” and now it’s got teeth If this poem makes you uncomfortable you do not have the right to tell me to be nicer and you can’t fucking make me. ***