James A. Lindsay

James Stephen Lindsay was born in Ogdensburg, New York. He moved to Maryville, Tennessee, at the age of five, later graduating from Maryville High School in 1997. Lindsay attended Tennessee Technological University, where he obtained both his B.S. and M.S. in mathematics; he later obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Tennessee in 2010. His doctoral thesis is titled "Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-Like Arrays", and his advisor was Carl G. Wagner.[3]

Lindsay began using the middle initial "A." in order to pseudonymously write books about atheism and leftism in the predominantly conservative and Christian South.[2]

Lindsay, along with Peter Boghossian, is the co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, a non-fiction book released in 2019 and published by Lifelong Books.[4] In 2020, Lindsay released the non-fiction book Cynical Theories, co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and published by Pitchstone Publishing. The book became a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller upon release[5][6][7] and a #1 bestseller in Philosophy on Amazon.[5] Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker praised the book for exposing "the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture".[8]

Lindsay has also appeared twice on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.[9]

He is registered as a director of New Discourses LLC.[10]

In 2017, Lindsay and Boghossian published a hoax paper titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct".[11] In writing the paper, Lindsay and Boghossian intended to imitate the style of "poststructuralist discursive gender theory". The paper argued that the penis should be seen "not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity".[11][12] After the paper was rejected by Norma, they later submitted it to Cogent Social Sciences, an open access journal that has been criticized as a pay-to-publish operation, where it was accepted for publication.[11][13][14]

Beginning in August 2017, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose wrote 20 hoax papers, which they submitted to peer-reviewed journals using several pseudonyms as well as the name of Richard Baldwin, friend of Boghossian and professor emeritus of history at Florida’s Gulf Coast State College. The project ended early after one of the papers, published in the feminist geography journal Gender, Place and Culture, was criticized on social media, and then questioned in its authenticity by Campus Reform.[15]

The trio subsequently revealed the full scope of their work in a YouTube video created and released by documentary filmmaker Mike Nayna, which was accompanied by an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.[16][17] By the time of this revelation, seven of their twenty papers had been accepted, seven were still under review, and six had been rejected. One paper, accepted by feminist social work journal Affilia, was a rewrite of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in feminist language.[11]

Tom Whipple of The Times wrote that academic reviewers had praised the hoax studies of Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose as "a rich and exciting contribution to the study of ... the intersection between masculinity and anality", "excellent and very timely", and "important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars".[18]

Lindsay is a critic of wokeness, which he analogizes to religious belief.[19] Columnist Cathy Young described Lindsay as "an author with a large 'anti-woke' online following" in 2020.[20] He announced his intention to vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, citing illiberalism on the left as the reason.[21][22][23]