| Inside a monthly New York City hangout, where fired university professors and controversial TikTokers get together to have discussions they feel they can’t have anywhere else.  Illustration by Daniel Zender To get an invitation to the Gathering of Thought Criminals, you have to win the favor of the organizer, a fifty-six-year-old psychologist and former actress named Pamela Paresky, who has written about the dynamics of social ostracization, and whom one regular partygoer has dubbed the Mother Hen of the Cancelled. Also, as Emma Green writes in a new reported story about the informal group’s monthly parties, it probably helps if you yourself have been ostracized, or feel that you have been, or at least agree with those attendees who are “exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.” One attendee talks about experiencing a feeling of “political homelessness” living among leftist New Yorkers; another felt as though she had to hide the books she was reading under her mattress in college. Yet Green finds few true outcasts among the group, and discovers its utility as a social network, as in the case of a provocative TikTok comic named Tyler Fischer, who landed regular gigs onstage in the city, with help from Paresky. “Like several of the Thought Criminals I spoke with,” Green notes, “Fischer is someone whose career seems to have thrived from the aura of cancellation, helping him define his brand among a certain audience.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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