Notes on Being a Man draws its intellectual scaffolding from two contemporary scholars whose work informs Galloway's central arguments. The first is Richard V. Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (2022). Reeves documents how boys lag behind girls academically and proposes structural fixes, including “redshirting” boys by delaying their school enrollment a year to account for slower brain maturation. Galloway adopts both the diagnosis and the remedy, citing Reeves directly on the inconclusive evidence regarding male teachers and endorsing the redshirting proposal. Most significantly, Galloway borrows Reeves's concept of “surplus value” as the unifying measure of masculine success, calling Reeves his “Yoda on this subject” (9). The phrase recurs throughout the book as its ethical center.

The second influence is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Galloway's NYU colleague and author of The Anxious Generation (2024), which links rising youth mental illness to smartphones and the decline of play-based childhood. Galloway explicitly credits Haidt for the observation that children today are “overprotected in the real world and underprotected online” (34). This framework underpins Galloway's critique of how digital platforms exploit young men's underdeveloped impulse control, substituting screen-based imitations for genuine social experience.



By naming these sources, Galloway positions his memoir within a broader, research-driven conversation. Recognizing this lineage helps readers distinguish his data-backed claims from his personal anecdotes and situates the book alongside the wider scholarly movement examining the modern struggles of boys and men.