James Lindsay

James Stephen Lindsay (born June 8, 1979), known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician, and conspiracy theorist. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018. Lindsay has written several books, including Cynical Theories (2020), which he co-authored with Pluckrose.

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 Tech, where he obtained both his B.S. and M.S. in mathematics; he later earned 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. After completing his degree, Lindsay left academia and returned to his hometown, where he worked as a massage therapist.

Lindsay began using the middle initial "A." as a "thin veneer of pseudonyms" to write books about atheism and leftism in the predominantly conservative and Christian South. Lindsay, along with Peter Boghossian, is the co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, a nonfiction book released in 2019 and published by Lifelong Books. In 2020, Lindsay released the nonfiction 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. 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." Tim Smith-Laing charged it with "leaping from history to hysteria" in a Daily Telegraph review. Lindsay is the founder of the website New Discourses, which is owned by Christian nationalist commentator Michael O’Fallon.

Lindsay has also appeared three times on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. In August 2022, Lindsay was permanently suspended from Twitter. His account was reinstated in November 2022 after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. In 2017, Lindsay and Boghossian published a hoax paper titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." 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." After Norma rejected the paper, they later submitted it to Cogent Social Sciences, where it was accepted for publication. 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, a 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 questioned by investigative journalist Toni Airaksinen of Campus Reform, who realized the article wasn't really due to its lack of following academic journal publishes standards, which caused widespread interest and was covered by multiple journalists. 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.

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 the feminist social work journal Affilia, contained passages copied from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf with feminist language added. However, sociologist Mikko Lagerspetz has contended that the paper only contained similarities in structure and did not contain material "historically specific in Hitler's text (racism, references to the First World War, and so on)."

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."