Rob Henderson
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The Troubled Upbringing Trend January 17, 2025
It is fitting that Vice President-Elect J. D. Vance, having overcome a difficult upbringing himself, helped Rob Henderson with his drafts of Troubled, a memoir about Henderson’s improbable path from a troubled childhood in California to recently comp...
Luxury Beliefs are Real July 26, 2024
In his excellent memoir, Troubled, the psychologist Rob Henderson recounts the alienating experiences he had as a mature student from a poor background at Yale University. One classmate told him that it was hopelessly outmoded for people who want to ...
Friendship and Social Fitness July 22, 2024
A while back I spoke with one of my best friends from childhood. Tom and I met when I was 8 years old, shortly after I’d been adopted from foster care. Back then, all of my worldly possessions were regularly stuffed into a single garbage bag as I pre...
The Hidden Marriage Market July 15, 2024
“Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.”This is a quote from Bryan Cap...
A Troubling Tale May 06, 2024
At 10 years old, Rob Henderson reached the following conclusion: "As far as I was concerned, adults were unreliable liars. With each new family, new parent and new rejection, grief, anger and loneliness accrued within me."...
What Our Elites Get Wrong about Class April 24, 2024
Frederick Douglass described in his famous memoir how, when his master discovered his wife teaching their young slave Frederick to read, he chided her: “If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be ru...
No Haven April 19, 2024
Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled, describes his journey from foster care in rural California to military service in the U.S. Air Force to public intellectual. With degrees from Yale and Cambridge University, he writes a weekly newsletter on psych...
Rob Henderson on Reliving His Traumatic Childhood April 11, 2024
When the American writer Rob Henderson was a baby, his mother would tie him to a chair so that she could get high uninterrupted. He was taken into foster care in Los Angeles at the age of three. His mother, who was South Korean, was deported and he l...
Finding Their Own Way Out April 09, 2024
A 3-year-old is strapped to a chair, his piercing cries enduring for hours while his mother does drugs in the next room. A young girl grimaces as her father stitches her open head wound without anesthetic. Determined not to deprive her siblings of Ch...
The ‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Harm Vulnerable Children April 05, 2024
Now that everyone insists that the oppressed must be lifted up – or platformed, if you’re that way inclined: why does no one in the West give a second thought to the most obviously powerless group: kids in care – children who’ve been abandoned by or ...
Daniel Kahneman’s Final Exploration of Human Error April 01, 2024
Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input...
From Foster Care to Yale and Cambridge March 15, 2024
The American writer Rob Henderson defied steep odds to “succeed” in the world, but his thoughtful memoir is less concerned with that familiar narrative than with the idea that our values need to be recalibrated: family stability, in his eyes, matters...
Light From Darkness March 12, 2024
Rob Henderson is a rare young example of a dying breed: Cambridge scholar, public intellectual and unsentimental writer. These qualities radiate from his new memoir, Troubled, which recounts his “miraculous trajectory” through family dysfunction, fos...
A Conversation With Rob Henderson March 08, 2024
When Rob Henderson arrived at Yale as an undergraduate, one of his then classmates told him “monogamy is kind of outdated.”This classmate said she planned to get married, and for it to be a monogamous relationship — but still, she said, society needs...
Misery Loves Company March 07, 2024
When I was still in single digits, I read The Murder of Robbie Wayne, Age Six. It appeared in condensed form, in Reader’s Digest, on the magazine racks in my primary school library. I probably shouldn’t have read it, realistically, but I’d become—une...
Our ‘Troubled’ Underclass March 04, 2024
Imagine someone whose childhood ranks at the very bottom in every dimension—neglect, foster homes, adoption into a family that breaks up—but who, unbeknown to any of the people around him, has an intellect at the very top. As an adult, he brings his ...
From a Broken Home to a Broken Institution February 26, 2024
When someone emerges from a challenging childhood to become a successful adult and writes a memoir about the experience, one of two narratives usually emerges: The first, and most lucrative in today’s market, is what might be called the "wallowing" n...
How Luxury Beliefs of an Educated Elite Erode Society February 26, 2024
Born in Los Angeles into what many would consider the American lower class, I entered the foster system aged three after my drug-addicted birth mother, originally from Seoul, was unable to care for me. Over the next five years, I moved through seven ...
What Shocked Me About the Culture at Yale February 22, 2024
There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the ...
Why Luxury Beliefs Should Trouble Us All February 19, 2024
Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is a difficult read. For the first four chapters of the book, you want to reach through the pages, back in time, hug a small abandoned boy, and tell him everything is going t...
The Making of an American Conservative February 16, 2024
In January Rob Henderson posted a newsletter to his Substack: “Book Stores Refuse to Host an Event for My Book”. No major bookshop in New York City or San Francisco would host an event for his new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and...
On Writing February 16, 2024
The method for how you write is not that important. What’s important is having a point of view and doing the work.I sit down every day, whether I’m feeling it or not, and write something down.I see people talk about the apps they use to track their n...
An Orphan at Yale February 09, 2024
In Rob Henderson’s first recounted memory in his new memoir, Troubled, he is three years old, screaming in terror and clinging to his mother as two policemen wrestle handcuffs onto her wrists. He had no idea why this was happening, of course; the scu...
Stability Above All January 18, 2024
Among the first signs that Troubled is not a typical memoir of foster care and adoption is the author’s announcement on page 4 that he has never tried to locate his birth parents. “Why try to find someone who did not want you in their life?” writes R...
I’m an Unwelcome Author January 15, 2024
I’ve always loved bookstores.In the rural California town where I moved after leaving the foster homes in Los Angeles, there was no real bookstore. No Barnes & Noble or Borders (those still existed in the early 2000s).Across the street from the boxin...
