December 13, 2024

Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Photo: Getty Images

In May, the Guardian published a profile of Malcolm and Simone Collins, a married couple who have become the public faces of the pronatalist movement, which promotes high birth rates as a bulwark against population decline. The Collinses are white, transposing the bookish aesthetic of a Wes Anderson movie onto their frontiers-y corner of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They also hit their kids. At one point, reporter Jenny Kleeman observed Malcolm slapping his 2-year-old son’s face “with the palm of his hand.”

Criticism of this casual display of corporal punishment dominated the response to the article on social media, which in turn produced a remarkable rebuttal from the Collinses. “We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy,” Simone wrote in an email to Business Insider. “It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups.”

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

ADVERTISER CONTENT

Every product is independently selected by editors. If you buy something through our links, New York may earn an affiliate commission. For more shopping advice, sign up to get the Cut Shop newsletter every Friday.

Biden commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 prisoners and pardoned 39 nonviolent offenders yesterday, the largest single-day act of clemency by a U.S. president. Here are some of their stories. On the other side of the aisle, conservatives are eyeing cutbacks to federal programs that help tens of millions of women pay for healthcare, food, housing, and transportation. The best science images of the year, according to Nature magazine. Swifties are good tippers. Ever wonder what it's like to have your own attack turned into a case of the week on Law and Order? And we're rooting for these crazy kids.

ADVERTISER CONTENT

A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.