There is deserved satisfaction in ridiculing bros.

Firing off bro-mots at the brodeo is not only great fun, it’s therapeutic — a helpful coping mechanism for professional or social environments in which the boyish and brutish dominate. When it’s not stifling or annoying, intellectual machismo feels, at the very least, comically anachronistic in our modern, enlightened circles. Like men who still wear wristwatches or take overly rustic vacations, these affectations hardly warrant female attention, let alone the respect they’re designed to command.

And so I perked up upon catching wind of a bro-themed micro-jab from the talented writer Aaron Bady directed towards journalist Doug Henwood and economist Thomas Piketty. Never above a bit of gossip, I immediately began scanning the Internet for hints of any masculinist bitchery between Henwood and Piketty.