Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Eating in the Real World, Not the Ideal One

    Eating in the Real World, Not the Ideal One

    Using Olga Khazan’s “Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic” as a central text and at least three additional credible sources, write a 1,700-word essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that the only path to health is a diet built exclusively on whole foods—and that ultra-processed foods should be treated as the villain of modern nutrition.

    In your essay, define what counts as “whole,” “processed,” and “ultra-processed,” and analyze whether these categories are as clear—or as moral—as public discourse suggests. Examine the extent to which a modern eater can realistically avoid ultra-processed foods, and whether some of these foods can coexist with a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.

    Your argument should also address the larger forces shaping our dietary choices: economic constraints, systemic inequities, marketing, food deserts, the influence of GLP-1 medications, and the cultural narratives that determine which foods are celebrated and which are condemned. Include a counterargument-rebuttal section that engages opposing viewpoints in good faith, and conclude with an MLA-formatted Works Cited containing a minimum of four sources.

  • The Myth of the Self-Made Man

    The Myth of the Self-Made Man

    Essay Prompt

    Many commentators, institutions, and public narratives present Frederick Douglass as the quintessential “self-made man,” using his rise from slavery to argue that personal discipline and individual grit are enough to overcome oppression. Write an essay analyzing why Douglass is framed this way: What political, cultural, or ideological purposes does this simplified narrative serve, and what parts of Douglass’s life and writing does it erase?

    Then, drawing on one or more of the following—Get Out, Black Panther, The Evolution of the Black Quarterback, and ALLENIV3SON—argue how these works challenge the myth that individual effort alone is sufficient to escape a modern form of the “Sunken Place.” Use evidence from Douglass and your chosen texts, address at least one counterargument, and provide a reasoned rebuttal.

    8-Paragraph Outline

    Paragraph 1: Introduction

    Open with the cultural popularity of the “self-made man” myth and how Douglass is often drafted into that narrative. Introduce the contemporary film(s)/docuseries you will analyze. End with a thesis that presents your argument and mapping components.

    Paragraph 2: How Douglass Is Framed as the Self-Made Man

    Explain the most common public uses of Douglass—textbooks, political speeches, social media, corporate training, etc. Describe the appealing simplicity of the “rise by grit alone” narrative.

    Paragraph 3: Why This Framing Is Useful (to Whom and for What)

    Analyze the motives behind this selective portrayal. Discuss how the myth supports certain political or ideological agendas: minimizing systemic racism, shifting responsibility to individuals, or celebrating a sanitized American Dream.

    Paragraph 4: What This Narrative Omits

    Show what disappears when Douglass is turned into a solo hero: abolitionist networks, Anna Murray’s role, collective struggle, federal intervention, racial terror, psychological trauma, and Douglass’s critique of American power.

    Paragraph 5: Modern Text #1—How It Challenges the Self-Made Myth

    Explain how your first chosen film or docuseries exposes structural forces no individual can escape alone. For Get Out, this may be psychological colonization; for Evolution of the Black Quarterback, structural biases; for Black Panther, political histories; etc.

    Paragraph 6: Modern Text #2 (Optional if using more than one)

    If choosing a second text, show how it reinforces or expands the critique. If using only one film, broaden the analysis: zoom in on multiple scenes, characters, or arcs that dismantle the self-made myth.

    Paragraph 7: Counterargument and Rebuttal

    Present the strongest version of the opposing view: Douglass “proved” that grit is enough; modern examples of individual triumph exist; the Sunken Place metaphor is too pessimistic. Then rebut each point with evidence showing that exceptional individuals do not invalidate structural realities.

    Paragraph 8: Conclusion

    Show why reducing Douglass to a self-made hero is not only historically inaccurate but also misleading for understanding modern struggles. End by synthesizing your insights across Douglass and the contemporary works.

    Four Thesis Statements with Mapping Components

    Thesis 1

    Although many public narratives portray Frederick Douglass as the perfect “self-made man,” this framing ignores the collective networks that shaped his freedom, misrepresents his political message, and distorts the historical reality of slavery; by contrast, films like Get Out and The Evolution of the Black Quarterback reveal how structural forces—psychological control, institutional racism, and inherited power—make the self-made myth dangerously incomplete.

    Mapping Components:

    (1) collective networks,
    (2) misrepresented political message,
    (3) distorted historical reality,
    (4) structural forces in modern texts.

    Thesis 2

    The myth of Douglass as a solo architect of his destiny persists because it offers a convenient story about American meritocracy, but Black Panther and ALLENIV3SON expose the limits of individual effort in the face of systemic pressures, inherited trauma, and institutional barriers. Together, these works demonstrate that liberation requires community, history, and structural change—not just personal grit.

    Mapping Components:

    (1) meritocracy narrative,
    (2) systemic pressures,
    (3) inherited trauma,
    (4) institutional barriers.

    Thesis 3

    Frederick Douglass is often drafted into the self-made-man myth to support political arguments that blame individuals rather than systems, yet both Get Out and Black Panther challenge this myth by showing how racial surveillance, technological domination, and geopolitical history create Sunken Places no individual can escape alone.

    Mapping Components:

    (1) political uses of the myth,
    (2) racial surveillance,
    (3) technological domination,
    (4) geopolitical history.

    Thesis 4

    The popular image of Douglass as the ultimate self-starter survives because it offers a comforting fantasy about upward mobility, but documentaries like The Evolution of the Black Quarterback reveal that success stories are never purely individual—they emerge from networks, opportunities, and battles with deeply entrenched structures. Both the historical record and modern media refute the idea that grit alone can defeat the Sunken Place.

    Mapping Components:

    (1) fantasy of mobility,
    (2) networks and opportunity,
    (3) entrenched structures,
    (4) historical and modern refutation.

  • The Man of Rotation

    The Man of Rotation

    My family gave me a custom T-shirt last Christmas emblazoned with “Man of Rotation.” It wasn’t a compliment; it was a diagnosis. They were mocking the fact that I rotate everything like a monk tending sacred relics.

    I wear a different watch every day from my seven-piece Seiko harem. I rotate three kinds of medium-to-dark roasts as if the coffee beans need equal custody time. I alternate between my Gillette Fatboy and Slim razors with the solemnity of a Cold War arms treaty. Astra blades on Monday, Feather blades when I feel reckless. Even my soaps—triple-milled rose, triple-milled almond—take scheduled turns, like aristocrats queuing for a royal audience.

    It gets worse. Quilted and fleece sweatshirts take their laps. Knit caps cycle through the week as if they were a jury pool. My radios each get a “shift” in the garage during my kettlebell workouts, which is the closest they’ll ever get to military service. Even my podcasts rotate, governed by a sliding scale of how much political despair I can tolerate without bursting into flames. Hoka tennis shoes? They march in formation. My pairs of dark-washed boot-cut jeans—virtually indistinguishable to the human eye—are treated like unique Renaissance tapestries. Golf shirts and T-shirts are matched to the day of the week because my synesthesia demands order, not chaos. And breakfast? A solemn liturgy of alternation: buckwheat groats one day, steel-cut oats the next—my personal Eucharist of complex carbs.

    What is rotation, exactly? A philosophy? A pathology? Maybe it’s my attempt to mimic the cosmic cycles of life: moons, tides, seasons, me choosing a different razor. Maybe it’s a counterfeit sense of forward motion for a man who often feels marooned in his own stagnation. Maybe it’s ritual as a pressure valve, keeping the anxieties from boiling over.

    Or perhaps these rotations are my charm against the rising madness of the world—a tiny pocket of structure in a universe that increasingly behaves like it’s had too much caffeine and too little therapy. A way of keeping my Jungian Shadow from dragging me into the basement and locking the door behind me.

    Forgive me: I’m no oracle. I don’t have definitive answers. I have suspicions, hunches, and a working familiarity with amateur psychoanalysis.

    What I do know is this: it’s time to get up, get ready for work, and select today’s Hoka. The wheel must turn.

  • The Goldilocks Hybrid and Its Two Dysfunctional Siblings

    The Goldilocks Hybrid and Its Two Dysfunctional Siblings

    We offer three flavors of writing instruction at my college, each with its own personality disorder. First, there’s face-to-face: two hours, twice a week, the old-fashioned “sit in a room and pretend we’re a community” model. Then there’s hybrid: one in-person meeting supplemented by a sleek online spine. And finally, we have asynchronous online, which is technically a class but spiritually a self-guided pilgrimage through Canvas punctuated by optional Zoom sightings of your professor, like glimpsing a rare bird.

    Last place is easy: asynchronous. It’s not a class so much as a bureaucratic scavenger hunt akin to DMV traffic school. You spend your days inside Canvas like a minor character in a Russian novel, distributing grades, tracking submissions, and playing AI Police as if you’re guarding the border between Education and the Land of the Auto-Generated Essay. It’s less “learning” and more “completing modules to avoid moral decay.”

    Second place goes to face-to-face, which works fine—but let’s be honest, students do not need to see you twice a week. Once is enough to build rapport, offer real-time feedback, and remind them you’re a living mammal. Twice? Now you’re edging into overexposure. The ones who enjoy you on Tuesday will find you insufferable by Thursday.

    And then we reach the hybrid: the Goldilocks of pedagogy. One meeting a week—just enough humanity to feel legitimate, not enough to trigger claustrophobia. The college saves money on electricity and preserves precious classroom space. Students get to cosplay “the full college experience” once a week. And you, the professor, are consumed in manageable doses—like vitamin A. Beneficial in moderation. Toxic in bulk.

  • My Fifth-Decade Crisis in the Writing Classroom

    My Fifth-Decade Crisis in the Writing Classroom

    My students lean on AI the way past generations leaned on CliffsNotes and caffeine. They’re open about it, too. They send me their drafts: the human version and the AI-polished version, side by side, like before-and-after photos from a grammatical spa treatment. The upside? Their sentences are cleaner, the typos are nearly extinct, and dangling modifiers have been hunted to the brink. The downside? Engagement has flatlined. When students outsource their thinking to a bot, they sever the emotional thread to the material.

    It’s not that they’re getting dumber—they’re just developing a different flavor of intelligence, one optimized for our algorithmic future. And I know they’ll need that skill. But in the process, they grow numb to the very themes I’m trying to teach: how fashion brands and fitness influencers weaponize FOMO; how adolescent passion differs from mature purpose; how Frederick Douglass built a heroic code to claw his way out of the Sunken Place of slavery.

    This numbness shows up in the classroom. They’re present but elsewhere, half-submerged in the glow of their phones and laptops. Yesterday I screened The Evolution of the Black Quarterback—a powerful account of Black athletes who faced death threats and racist abuse to claim their place in the NFL. While these stories unfolded onscreen, my student-athletes were scrolling through sports highlights, barely glancing at the actual documentary in front of them.

    I’m not the kind of instructor who polices technology like a hall monitor. Still, I’m no longer convinced I have the power to pull students out of their world and into mine. I once believed I did. Perhaps this is my own educational Sunken Place: the realization that attention capture has shifted the center of gravity, and I’m now orbiting the edges.

    I’ve been teaching writing full-time since the 1980s. For decades, I believed I could craft lessons—and a persona—that made an impact. Now, in my fifth decade, I’m not sure I can say that with the same certainty. The ground has moved, and I’m still learning how to stand on it.

  • Essay Prompt: Innovation, Identity, and the Meaning of “Authentic” Food

    Essay Prompt: Innovation, Identity, and the Meaning of “Authentic” Food

    In Chef’s Table: Pizza, Ann Kim rebuilds her life after a failed acting career by reinventing pizza through the lens of her Korean-American identity. Her dishes fold together memory, rebellion, shame, pride, and the complicated love between immigrant parents and their children. Yet the moment she alters traditional recipes or refuses rigid cultural expectations, she steps into a debate that surrounds many immigrant chefs:
    Does innovation honor one’s heritage—or distort it?

    In this 1,700-word argumentative essay, you will explore that tension by comparing Ann Kim’s story with the themes found in Ugly Delicious (Season 1, “Tacos”), selected episodes of The Taco Chronicles, Gustavo Arellano’s “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food,” and Kelley Kwok’s “‘Not Real Chinese’: Why American Chinese Food Deserves Our Respect.” Your goal is to craft an argument that responds to the following question:

    When immigrant chefs remix, adapt, or modernize traditional dishes, are they betraying cultural authenticity—or creating a new form of belonging that honors their past in a more personal way?

    To answer this question, analyze how each show or essay portrays the cultural meaning of food—its connection to heritage, shame, pride, memory, and the immigrant experience. Pay close attention to visual rhetoric (music, tone, pacing, imagery), and consider how these choices shape our sense of what counts as “authentic.”

    Include at least two scholarly secondary sources on food studies, cultural identity, or immigrant narratives to deepen your analysis. These sources should help you place the shows and essays within broader academic conversations about authenticity, assimilation, and innovation.

    Your essay must include a counterargument-rebuttal section. Address the view that innovation leads to “tourist food” or watered-down Americanization, and explain whether these cases justify a purist stance toward food traditions—or whether purity itself is an illusion shaped by nostalgia, nationalism, or fear of cultural loss.

    Ultimately, your task is to show how food becomes a form of storytelling—and to argue whether storytelling requires faithful preservation, bold revision, or something in between.

  • Dream Exam for a Retiring Professor in the Bedroom of Time

    Dream Exam for a Retiring Professor in the Bedroom of Time

    Last night I found myself back in the primary bedroom of my parents’ 1970s house—a room fossilized in memory but somehow updated to the present day. I was perched on their king-sized bed, the same monolithic slab of furniture that once seemed big enough to host the United Nations, scribbling notes about my long, bruised, oddly tender career as a college instructor. It was the kind of dream where the past and present shake hands awkwardly, unsure who invited whom.

    Outside, I heard the rumble of a moving truck. A couple had arrived next door, and before I could finish a sentence in my notebook, they had already unpacked their lives, established themselves as the new neighborhood aristocracy, and decided—God help me—to visit. Instead of knocking at the front door like terrestrial beings, they wandered from their backyard onto a dirt trail, crossed into my parents’ yard like friendly invaders, and slipped through the sliding glass doors behind the beige curtains as if they were stepping into a beachfront Airbnb.

    Their names were Dan and Deidre, early forties, both in education—the D & D Couple. I wrote their names down immediately because even in dreams I have the short-term memory of a concussed squirrel, and I didn’t want to fail the basic decency test of remembering the names of unexpected houseguests. They asked my age. I told them sixty-four. I told them I was still lifting weights, still teaching after thirty-eight years, still clinging to the last threads of my profession with a mix of pride, resignation, and the kind of melancholy that whispers, It’s almost time to go.

    They listened politely, heads tilted just enough to convey admiration without actually committing to it. Then Dan—the more mischievous half of the D & D Duo—decided to spring a quiz on me. “Do you remember our names?” he asked, as if I were auditioning for senior citizenship.

    For one horrifying second, my mind decided their names were Karl and Kathy—the K & K Couple. But before I committed social suicide, I dropped my gaze to my notebook, where my handwriting—half cryptic scrawl, half cry for help—reminded me: Dan and Deidre. D & D. Not K & K.

    I delivered the correct answer, and the couple beamed at me as if I had passed a cosmic entrance exam for the next stage of my life. Their smiles weren’t just approval; they were a benediction, assuring me that even as one chapter closed, another waited—stranger, softer, intruded upon, but somehow welcoming.

  • Blogging in the Belly of the Whale Has Its Perils

    Blogging in the Belly of the Whale Has Its Perils

    For those of us who can’t shell out $150 a week for therapy—and who would rather confess our shadow selves to strangers on the Internet than to a licensed professional—blogging becomes a kind of bargain-bin psychoanalysis. We know it’s not perfect, but it’s cheap, available, and gives us the illusion that we’re sorting out the world’s madness and our own with nothing more than sentences on a glowing screen.

    But there’s a catch. When we talk only to ourselves long enough, the echo becomes comforting. Too comforting. We stop listening to other voices and drift into a form of digital solipsism, a state where we’re the sole inhabitant of our private universe. It’s Jonah in the whale—except the whale has Wi-Fi and ergonomic seating. We settle into the warm bath of a frictionless existence, the kind of life where nothing challenges us, nothing interrupts us, and nothing demands that we grow.

    My students write about this same seduction when discussing AI and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” where the promise of absolute control mutates into the loss of identity. The frictionless life—everything tailored, curated, predictable—slowly erodes our individuality until we’re no longer people but users. And blogging can slip into that same trap: so cozy, so insulated, that we begin sipping our own Kool-Aid and calling it intellectual hydration.

    So what’s the antidote? Certainly not brawling on social media. Those aren’t arguments; they’re moral-outrage bacchanals dressed up as discourse. Trading the frictionless void of a blog for the poisoned well of tribal rage is not an upgrade—it’s simply chaos with a comment section.

    There is a kind of healthy friction, though—the ordinary back-and-forth you get between two friends arguing about life over coffee. The Internet can mimic that if we’re deliberate. My YouTube channel has taught me as much. For over a decade, I’ve posted videos about watch obsession, addiction, identity, and everything connected to them. Making those videos demands more from me than a blog ever could. I have to generate compelling content, communicate clearly, keep people engaged, and then face their responses—praise, critique, confusion, all of it. It forces rigor. It forces presence. It won’t let me get lazy.

    That’s why I’m reluctant to quit. Yes, I’m 64. Yes, mental health matters. Yes, I worry that staying in the YouTube world might stir up my watch addiction and pressure me to flip watches just to feed the algorithm. But abandoning the channel completely in favor of the blog feels like retreating into the frictionless void I’m trying to escape.

    So I’ll keep experimenting with “video essays,” starting with a brief nod to my watch collection before pivoting into whatever topic is actually on my mind. Fortunately, viewers seem willing to follow me into this new territory. And for now, that’s enough. Because I’m tired of the soft trap of writing into silence. I need the friction. I need the challenge. I need the reminder that I’m not alone in the whale.

  • Fiona Hill and the Art of Clear Seeing

    Fiona Hill and the Art of Clear Seeing

    Fiona Hill stunned me on Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast—not with theatrics or self-branding, but with something rarer: unvarnished intelligence. She spoke for more than an hour, weaving global politics, history, and sober analysis together without even a hint of schtick. No sales pitch. No influencer glow. Just clarity and competence. Listening to her felt like opening a window in a stale room. I’m now on track to read both of her books, if only to spend more time in the presence of a mind that refuses mediocrity.

    A few moments hit me squarely. She explained that she has never been drawn to social media, which she sees as a global time sink—an interactive void where people argue about nothing as if it were everything. Then she broadened the frame: we are living through a massive transition in politics, work, education, and culture, and we’d be naïve to pretend we understand it. She argued for humility—an acknowledgment that we can’t yet grasp the scale or direction of the upheaval we’re living through. We are, she suggested, walking into the unknown whether we like it or not.

    Sullivan agreed, calling this moment a “liminal” period in history. I hadn’t heard that word in years and had to remind myself that it means transitional—the uneasy space between what was and what will be. Hill embraced the term. She and Sullivan compared our moment to the Hundred Years’ War. No one living through the 14th century knew they were participants in a century-long conflict. They only knew that the ground was shifting.

    That’s where we are now. Nations wrestling for dominance, AI upending national security and labor markets, globalization rewiring identity and culture, political leaders who behave like pranksters with nuclear codes—this is our chaos. And like medieval villagers, we have no idea how long this period will last. Are these volatile leaders a temporary fever, or will they define an entire era? Are we living through a Hundred-Year Grifter Period? No one knows.

    Strangely, the conversation felt therapeutic. Hearing two sharp, grounded people speak honestly about uncertainty made me feel less panicked and less isolated. My anxiety and existential dread aren’t signs of unraveling—they’re signs of being alert during a liminal age that refuses easy explanations.

  • Self-Pity Is Its Own Sunken Place

    Self-Pity Is Its Own Sunken Place

    I’d been teaching Jordan Peele’s Get Out to my college students for six years—long enough to map every dark corner of the Sunken Place, that abyss where shame, paralysis, and despair fuse into one mute scream. It’s the emotional equivalent of being duct-taped to a chair while your soul tries—and fails—to clear its throat.

    The film, of course, locates the Sunken Place in a specific American ecosystem: those well-meaning liberals who talk like allies but behave like landlords of Black pain. They distribute microaggressions with the confidence of people handing out hors d’oeuvres at a garden party, all while enjoying the fruits of a system engineered to elevate them and drain everyone else. But Peele has insisted, in interviews and on stages, that the Sunken Place isn’t confined to racial oppression. For him, the first Sunken Place arrived in childhood, sitting slack-jawed in front of the TV. He felt like an NPC long before that acronym took over the internet—passive, programmed, invisible—while the creators on the screen radiated life, wit, and agency. He wanted to join them, and he did: stand-up, sketch comedy, screenwriting, filmmaking, cultural canonization. The man refused to stay sunken.

    After half a decade of teaching Peele’s masterpiece, a disquieting thought dawned on me: I wasn’t immune to the Sunken Place either. I had my own trapdoors. Too much internet bickering left me feeling hollow. My appetite—always several sizes larger than my actual caloric needs—dragged me downward. My talent for being obnoxious, selfish, and occasionally unbearable didn’t help. Neither did the small carousel of addictions and compulsions I’ve wrestled like a part-time zookeeper tending unruly beasts. Some days the labor of managing myself left me feeling like a broken machine, grinding out self-pity by the pound.

    Then I noticed something worse: self-pity is its own Sunken Place. It feeds on the original misery and creates a second pit under the first. And if you’re not careful, a third pit opens beneath that one. Before long, you’re living like a subterranean nesting doll of despair—each layer a reaction to the last—buried so deep you need spelunking gear just to find your own pulse.

    One morning, while playing piano, I drifted into one of my indulgent daydreams. I imagined myself back in the early 1980s, performing a private recital at the Berkeley wine shop where I used to work. In my fantasy, the customers lounged around me, gently swirling their glasses as my music washed over them. When I finished, they begged for encores—one, then another—until their brains were so marinated in endorphins that they thanked me for resurrecting their spirits from the doldrums. It was a pleasing vision, a warm hand pulling me briefly out of the Sunken Place.

    But after the fantasy evaporated, something clearer emerged: the way out—my way out, and maybe everyone’s—has nothing to do with grand performances or imaginary applause. The escape hatch begins with rejecting the velvet-lined coffin of self-pity and recognizing that everyone else is fighting their own Sunken Place too. And if I could help lift someone else out of their emotional quicksand, I might just rescue myself in the process.

    The final irony? I realized it wouldn’t be the piano that helped me do this. It would be humor. I could expose my flaws like specimens under bright light—my misfires, my vanities, my slapstick disasters—and let people laugh at them. Not cruelly, but with the relief that comes from recognizing themselves in another person’s foolishness. If my folly made someone else ease up on their own self-condemnation and offer themselves a small measure of grace, then maybe that, at long last, would be my encore.