Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Professor @USC studying transition to parenthood as a window for neurobiological adaptation & writing Dad Brain, forthcoming from Flatiron Books.
I'm VERY excited to announce that I'm writing a book for @Flatironbooks! It'll be about the neurobiology of fatherhood & how fatherhood transforms men's lives. Thanks to stellar @WMEBooks agents @alexanderjkane & @RossGail. Reach out if you have dad stories or research to share!
My new Substack is about the paradox of the partisan happiness gap: conservatives are happier than liberals, but left-wing societies produce happier people. open.substack.com/pub/darbysaxbe…
My new op-ed in the @nytimes. I argue that Iranians are caught in a state of “moral paralysis,” a psychological trap set by the Islamic Republic itself. It pits two of our most sacred values against each other: liberation vs. self-determination. (1/2) nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opi…
Just posted a new essay about why left-wingers are miserable and how the Democrats should use the insights of clinical psychology to build a happier movement. darbysaxbe.substack.com/p/how-the-left…
Our federal government is currently spending more money on jailing and deporting childcare workers than on fixing our broken, patchy childcare system. 19thnews.org/2025/07/child-…
Want men to do more housework? Encourage them to take paternity leave! In a new paper with @DanielCarlson_1 and Chris Knoester, we find that fathers do more housework when they take leave. doi.org/10.1017/S00472…
My lab’s 5-year NIH R01 grant, awarded to study gene therapy for hearing loss, was abruptly terminated. I want to share how this action has been incredibly harmful and disruptive, not just to my lab, but to the scientific process itself. 1/15
This is true. Also, the NIH uses a definition of diversity that includes veterans, people from rural areas, and people whose parents did not go to college. Many Trump voters would be eligible for Diversity Supplements from NIH!
College enrollment DEI has always mostly benefited white applicants. For example, admissions policies that give preference to athletes and legacy applicants disproportionately benefit white students. Admissions policies that explicitly considered racial diversity used to…
A few months ago I posted about cuts to medical research & got many comments here about how the deficit was too big + we needed to spend less. Now we're prepared to spend billions on ICE + a potential war. Money flows when we are terrorizing people at home or bombing them abroad.
The Iraq War cost over a TRILLION dollars and it was built on a lie. Imagine if - 20 years ago - we had invested that money into early childhood education, or climate mitigation, or scientific and medical research, or building housing? Where would our country be now?
The NYT has an article today about an openly antisemitic, white nationalist law student given an award at the University of Florida. Wasn't the Trump admin cutting funding to universities that tolerate antisemitism? Will they punish Florida? Unlikely... nytimes.com/2025/06/21/us/…
My new Slate article is about the link between birth rates and male contributions to domestic labor.
What dads can do to help fix the birth rate. slate.trib.al/ynnkv8Q