October 15, 2026
Anxious and Hairy, by Judy Wearing
What a wild ride is Judy Wearing’s new book, Anxious and Hairy, a study through evolution and culture of human hair and the reasons why it makes us so anxious when it grows where it shouldn’t or doesn’t where it should. The scope here is huge, the approach so comprehensive (80 pages of notes and references!), and Wearing compellingly combines her own research with reporting from the front lines, ie accounts of her stylish Parisian hair cutting session, her experience attending a beard convention, or the time she submitted to a Brazilian wax.
If you’ve ever wondered why we have eyebrows—or what pubic hair is for, why we evolved to be (mostly) hairless apes, what evolutionary benefits are provided by Black hair, why beards might be useful to have in a bar fight, what alopecia has to do with foxes, what your hair and your nipples have in common, and why my eyebrows never grew back after they were sacrificed to the early ’00s style gods—this book will prove an absolute delight.
Wearing posits that hair makes us so, well, hairy, because our hair brings the reality of our animal selves to the surface. But our animal selves are also, she reminds us, what makes us human and—in our age of the robot overlord onslaught—this has never been more important to remember.
