Usually, Luca brings Alison a piece of internet culture to test her knowledge. This week, we switch it up: Alison brings the bait….the idea that younger men are increasingly seeking out older women. Are they looking for love, maturity, or just someone to manage their needs?

Listen to the full Episode 4 of Mud Season with Faiz Shakir here.

Background Reading

Why Young Men Want to Be With Older Women

Politics Between Us is created by Alison Beyea and Luca DeAngelis. Produced by Steven Jackson. Research by Jeff Sanders.

This Substack is a personal project. Alison and Luca are both employees of Colby College, but the views and opinions expressed here are entirely our own and do not represent those of Colby College or any other institutions with which we are affiliated. This publication is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by the College.

This week, Luca introduces Alison to the strange and disturbing online universe of looksmaxxing and they discuss what in might reveal about men, boys, and politics in this moment.

Listen to the full Episode 3 of Mud Season here.

Politics Between Us is created by Alison Beyea and Luca DeAngelis and produced by Steven Jackson.

This Substack is a personal project. Alison and Luca are both employees of Colby College, but the views and opinions expressed here are entirely our own and do not represent those of Colby College or any other institutions with which we are affiliated. This publication is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by the College.

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In round two, Luca showed Alison Polymarket and the betting odds for Maine’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

A week later, we returned to that conversation to reflect a little more deeply on what we were actually talking about. This is an edited transcript of our debrief.

You can listen to Agebait here, or find it as part of episode two of the Politics Between Us podcast.

Luca: Okay, it was fun showing you Polymarket. I’m glad you didn’t find it quite as alarming as AI Erika Kirk.

Alison: I still found it incredibly disturbing. I just can’t get over that you can bet on basically ~everything.

Luca: It’s pretty shocking. I actually just did a deeper dive and listened to a fascinating podcast with Derek Thompson and McKay Coppins about sports betting and gambling. They ended on this wild statistic that something like 98 percent of problem sports gamblers are men.

Alison: Yikes. So in Agebait I blamed the patriarchy and assumed this was just another way for men to enrich themselves. But it sounds like gambling is also a phenomenon that is really hurting men.

Luca: Yes, exactly.

Alison: Which I guess is not that surprising. It got me thinking: do boys who grow up gaming now just drift into online gambling? And does that point to something bigger, that we need more third spaces, especially for young men, to be together in person again?

Luca: I do not totally buy the broader cultural panic about video games. But I absolutely buy that our spaces to gather have atrophied. And that is not just a problem for men. That is a problem for everybody.

Alison: Exactly. And then what was the company that tried to open a bar where you gamble?

Luca: Ya, that was actually Polymarket! Literally Polymarket….they tried having a bar.

Alison: Which is just ridiculous. The idea was, what, let’s add alcohol to gambling?

Luca: Okay, so casinos have existed for a long time Alison….

Alison: Oh my god, you’re right.

Luca: But the thing about casinos, at least you have friction. It is sort of a community.

Alison: That is dark, but I see your point. Though to me it still sounds like one addiction piled on top of another. Why stop there? Polymarket should add porn to their bar and really maximize the revenue stream.

Luca: Awesome. But seriously, this is part of why I love bartending. A bar can actually be a valuable community space.

Alison: That is such a good point.

Luca: Which is why I always laugh a little when the wellness people are like, you need to stop drinking immediately. Okay, maybe. But if the price of total purity is giving up one of the few places where people still gather with strangers, that is a real loss. Bars are one of the last remaining spaces where people are casually in community. That matters.

Alison: It really does. As you know, I read a lot about longevity, and so much of that world is trying to sell you this vision of health that is weirdly isolating. But everything we know about longevity at this point is that community and social connection are the number one things.

Luca: Exactly. And it is not just about longevity. It is also about, um…democracy. We need places where people run into each other in real life!

Alison: Yes. So maybe bars are good for democracy and we’ll live longer! Win-win.

Luca: It all comes back to my hypothesis that people who ride the subway are more tolerant than people who drive. When you are in contact with strangers, those barriers come down, no?

Alison: I think so. Or I hope so. I should go to a bar tonight, but I can’t because I’m on a cleanse. I’m going to have some steamed vegetables and dahl.

Luca: Well, I’m getting a negroni tonight…for democracy :-)

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This Substack is a personal project. Alison and Luca are both employees of Colby College, but the views and opinions expressed here are entirely our own and do not represent those of Colby College or any other institutions with which we are affiliated. This publication is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by the College.

This week, we get into betting, billionaires, Polymarket, and the odds on Maine’s 2026 U.S. Senate Democratic primary.

Listen to the full Episode 2 of Mud Season here.

Politics Between Us is created by Alison Beyea and Luca DeAngelis and produced by Steven Jackson.

This Substack is a personal project. Alison and Luca are both employees of Colby College, but the views and opinions expressed here are entirely our own and do not represent those of Colby College or any other institutions with which we are affiliated. This publication is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by the College.

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In our first round, Luca showed Alison an AI-generated video riffing on Erika Kirk. He thought it would be funny. Alison did not.

A week later, we’re returning to that conversation to reflect a little more and dig deeper into what we were actually arguing about. This is an edited transcript of our debrief.

The segment appears at minute 38:45 in our pilot episode of the Politics Between Us podcast.

Luca: When I played you that AI video of Erika Kirk on the podcast, I thought it was just going to be funny. Instead, you looked genuinely upset.

Alison: Because it wasn’t funny to me. A political figure dies, his widow becomes a public figure, and the internet immediately turns the whole thing into a joke. I kept thinking: does everything have to become a spectacle?

Luca: I know. You said “spectacle” about a hundred times. We had to edit some of them out.

Alison: That sounds right.

Luca: But what you’re calling spectacle is also just the language of the internet. In my defense, the clip did exactly what I hoped Agebait would do: it surfaced a real generational divide between us.

Alison: Fair enough. My point: I am uncomfortable with how quickly your generation makes everything into a joke online.

Luca: You’ve said that already. What actually bothers you about it?

Alison: In this case, you have Erika Kirk, a new widow, grieving in public, and people online immediately start policing that grief. Mocking it. Turning it into content. We have no idea what she feels, what that grief feels like, or how she is surviving any of this.

Luca: She literally turned his death into a press tour called “Make Heaven Crowded.” How am I supposed not to laugh at that?

Alison: Luca, we do not know how she feels. Maybe being in those rooms, seeing those crowds, feeling that community — maybe that is meaningful to her. Maybe that is how she is making sense of what happened.

Luca: That is a generous reading.

Alison: Maybe. But I worry that once everything gets flattened into irony, you lose the more important conversations underneath it. The conversation about grief. The conversation about women in politics. The conversation about Charlie Kirk and the kind of politics he represented. Someone dies, and within two weeks we’re all performing our reactions to the performance of grief. Where does the actual thing go?

Luca: But wasn’t Charlie Kirk’s entire political career built on performance and spectacle?

Alison: Yes, of course it was. But that doesn’t mean we have to answer that politics by becoming fully trapped inside its logic. One of the things that worries me most right now is how quickly we absorb the habits of the culture we claim to hate.

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Luca: But I think this is where the generational divide is real. Speaking for Gen Z, there is just a lot more cynicism and fatalism. Politics doesn’t feel like a stable institution we can appeal to. It feels like an endless, absurd content stream that also happens to determine whether we can afford rent or have rights.

Alison: See, and this is where I think age actually matters. I came up in a political culture where if you cared about something, you made a case. You wrote the op-ed. You organized the meeting. You called the member of congress. The tools were slower, the stakes felt high, and you couldn’t just make a joke and move on with your feed.

Luca: But it’s not instead of caring. It’s what caring looks like when you’re overwhelmed. My generation didn’t grow up with politics as this formal thing that happened on the evening news. We grew up with politics happening on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram. This is how we process. A meme can function the way a political cartoon used to — exaggeration that reveals something real.

Alison: Political cartoons had editors.

Luca: Ah, yes. Gatekeepers.

Alison: I mean it. They had editors, context, and at least some shared norms. The internet has algorithms, rage, and incentives to be cruel as quickly as possible.

Luca: Look, I don’t even think it’s good that this is where we are. But I also don’t think it makes sense to get most angry at the people making AI memes when they’re obviously reacting to something much bigger. Why aren’t we more angry at the tech companies racing ahead with no regulation? Or the far-right influencers who have turned politics into just outrage maxxing?

Sometimes the joke is just a way of saying: are we all seeing how insane this is?

Alison: That’s fair. And I know I’m stepping into territory where I don’t understand the rules. I am much less aware of what’s happening online than you are, so some of my reaction is probably coming from the outside.

But I still think the question is bigger than whether this particular meme was funny or cruel. Is this healthy for democracy?

Luca: Definitely not.

But I also think you should be mad at the systems more than the individuals. The humor is not the disease. It’s a symptom. People are making jokes because they are trying to get by in a political culture that feels twisted, bizarre, and emotionally impossible.

Alison: Maybe. But symptoms can still make things worse. When the culture becomes one long stream of irony, it’s harder to slow down long enough to actually feel grief, responsibility, even disagreement.

Luca: Wait a second. I’m usually the one telling you to slow down! Look, intellectually I agree with you. Internet political culture is not healthy. But I’m still online, I’m still going to see things, and occasionally I’m still going to think they’re funny.

Alison: I think you should be more like me and just get off social media.

Luca: And I think we should regulate tech companies so we can have social media that isn’t addictive and funded by outrage and dopamine.

Alison: Ah. See? It all comes back to dopamine politics.

Luca: One of your catchier ideas…

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