Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The First Rule of Diet Club

    The First Rule of Diet Club

    The first rule of dieting is beautifully simple: don’t talk about dieting. The moment you begin enthusiastically recounting your Fourth of July bacchanal—how you mainlined salami, slabs of Muenster cheese, triple-fudge brownies, and vanilla bean ice cream until you were convinced you had one foot in the grave and the other in a podiatrist’s office diagnosing gout—you have already begun sabotaging yourself. Soon your audience will be treated to your target weight, your macros, your supplement stack, your Mediterranean meal plan, and your newly acquired expertise in insulin sensitivity, fibermaxxing, and protein optimization. You will sound like someone who completed an online doctorate in nutrition sometime between dessert and midnight. Unfortunately, the odds that you will still be following the plan by next weekend hover somewhere around the lifespan of a mayfly.

    The irony is that talking about dieting feels suspiciously like dieting. You receive the emotional reward before earning the physical result. Friends nod approvingly while you bask in the warm glow of your imminent transformation. The fantasy becomes so satisfying that the actual work begins to feel almost optional. Meanwhile, everyone else quietly wonders why they have become unwilling participants in your nutritional TED Talk. Like nearly every worthwhile endeavor, dieting rewards execution rather than narration. Calories are indifferent to speeches. Fat cells are unimpressed by declarations of intent. Biology has never once accepted enthusiasm as a substitute for consistency.

    Then comes the humbling realization that your revolutionary plan is neither revolutionary nor particularly new. You have saddled this horse before—roughly a hundred and twenty times. Your success rate for reaching your target weight, less than 5%, is discouraging enough; your success rate for keeping it there is indistinguishable from zero. 

    With this in mind, you briefly entertain the modern miracle of GLP-1 medications, only to discover that the price, potential side effects, and your physician’s reluctance to prescribe them leave you unconvinced. So, in the colorful language of the internet, you decide to raw-dog the process. 

    Beneath all these failed diets lies a more subtle addiction. You are not merely addicted to food. You are addicted to self-reinvention. Every new eating plan promises not simply a smaller waistline but a new identity—a wiser, leaner, more disciplined version of yourself who will finally silence the persistent suspicion that you have somehow fallen short of your own expectations. The tragedy is that this future self often functions less as a destination than as a mirage shimmering just beyond the horizon.

    And yet, abandoning the effort altogether is hardly an attractive alternative. Better to struggle toward health than surrender to gluttony with theatrical resignation. So make your plan. Count your calories. Work out with the kettlebells. Ride the bike. Eat the vegetables. Decline the brownies. But keep your mouth shut. Announce nothing. Promise nothing. Let your bathroom scale and your belt become your only press secretaries. The instant you begin proclaiming your impending metamorphosis, your words become dietary Kryptonite, knocking Superman out of the sky and sending him headfirst into a vat of vanilla bean ice cream. Silence, it turns out, may be the most underrated weight-loss supplement of all.

  • The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    Twenty-six years ago, while I was teaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills, one of my students was a man in his late thirties who worked as a probation officer. Before that, he had been a prison guard. Our conversations often drifted from freshman composition to crime, punishment, and the psychology of offenders. One observation has stayed with me ever since. The older gang members, he explained, were rarely the ones who frightened him most. The “Old Gs” had lived long enough to understand consequences. They could negotiate, calculate, and occasionally be reasoned with. The truly terrifying offenders were the teenagers. They were impulsive, reckless, and detached from reality. They committed acts so irrational that even hardened career criminals regarded them with apprehension. “The Old Gs are scared of them,” he told me. At the time, the comment struck me as paradoxical. Today it feels almost self-evident.

    I have found myself thinking about that conversation while watching nearly a hundred episodes of The First 48, the remarkable series that follows homicide detectives as they race to solve murders before the trail grows cold. Again and again, the interrogation room fills with teenage boys. Many slump defiantly in their chairs, radiating annoyance rather than remorse, as though the detectives have interrupted an otherwise pleasant afternoon. They insist they know nothing. They deny what surveillance footage plainly shows. They contradict eyewitnesses with astonishing confidence, even when the evidence leaves virtually no room for doubt. Much of the violence appears heartbreakingly trivial—a slight, an insult, a perceived challenge to someone’s reputation. Masculinity has been reduced to performance: proving toughness, defending street credibility, and refusing to appear weak, no matter how catastrophic the consequences.

    The most revealing moments arrive when the performance finally begins to crack. Even after hours of deception, many of these teenagers continue demanding to be released. “I just want to go home,” they protest, genuinely bewildered that anyone would keep them in custody. Then comes the moment detectives often recognize before the suspect does. Watching through a one-way mirror, an investigator quietly observes, “It’s starting to dawn on him. He’s realizing this isn’t a game anymore.” You can almost see reality entering the room. Sometimes the teenager collapses into uncontrollable sobbing. Sometimes he erupts in rage, screaming at officers, pounding walls, or thrashing against restraints. The emotional explosion is not simply fear of prison. It is the violent collision between fantasy and consequence. The imaginary world in which bravado guaranteed invincibility suddenly gives way to one governed by handcuffs, courtrooms, grieving families, and prison sentences measured in decades.

    That, to me, is the deepest tragedy. These young offenders often seem to inhabit a fever dream in which they are the untouchable protagonists of their own stories, convinced that swagger, intimidation, or reputation can somehow suspend the ordinary laws of cause and effect. Reality arrives only after irreversible damage has been done—to victims, to families, and ultimately to themselves. One cannot help wondering how many parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, or counselors warned them where this road would lead. Perhaps they all did. But adolescence possesses a peculiar arrogance: the conviction that every caution applies to someone else. The young man who believes he is the smartest person in the room often discovers otherwise only after the interrogation begins. Every time I watch that realization settle across a suspect’s face, I hear my former student’s voice from twenty-six years ago. The Old Gs, he said, feared the teenagers—not because the teenagers were stronger or smarter, but because they had not yet learned that reality is undefeated.

  • The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    My video production is on hold because I find myself interrogating my place in the watch world. I have little appetite for another “State of the Collection” video. That genre has become the YouTube equivalent of a sitcom reunion special: everyone knows the script before the opening credits roll. Likewise, I am convinced I have exhausted the lexicon of watch addiction. I have dissected acquisition syndrome, rationalization, buyer’s remorse, dopamine hits, grail watches, collection pruning, and every psychological contortion a watch enthusiast performs while pretending another purchase is somehow “different this time.” At some point, the commentary begins recycling itself, and I have no desire to become an echo of my former self.

    The irony is that none of this means I love watches any less. They remain as captivating—and as capable of hijacking my imagination—as they were twenty years ago. Two pieces continue to haunt me. The first is the Grand Seiko SBGP009, whose champagne-silver dial possesses the quiet authority of vintage elegance while its quartz movement drifts no more than ten seconds in an entire year. The second is the Orient Star M42 Diver 1964 Recreation (RE-AU0503N), a watch that somehow manages to look both nostalgic and purposeful without descending into retro cosplay. My greatest misfortune is that neither watch is outrageously expensive. The Grand Seiko costs only about three thousand dollars, and the Orient Star about one thousand. I almost wish they were twice as expensive. Overpriced luxury has an odd virtue: it occasionally protects us from ourselves.

    Meanwhile, most of my creative energy has migrated to my blog. There I can pursue ideas that would suffocate inside a fifteen-minute YouTube video. I can move from watches to literature, from moral philosophy to true crime, from AI to theology without asking whether the algorithm will punish me for changing lanes. The writing feels richer, stranger, and ultimately more meaningful. Unfortunately, blogs occupy the cultural equivalent of a deserted side street while YouTube resembles Times Square. One offers freedom without an audience; the other offers an audience that constantly demands the familiar. Whether I can remain content scribbling thoughtful essays into relative obscurity is a question I have not yet answered.

    One conclusion, however, no longer requires interrogation. I am an incurable watch enthusiast. There is no treatment, no twelve-step program, no miraculous cure. I have accepted that reality. My task is not to extinguish the fascination but to discipline it. I must keep reminding myself that admiring a watch is not the same thing as needing to own it. Beauty can be appreciated without becoming another possession. In fact, the older I become, the more I suspect that an overcrowded collection diminishes rather than enriches the experience, spreading affection so thinly that no single watch receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps the highest form of collecting is learning that appreciation sometimes reaches its fullest expression the moment you decide to walk away.

    Happy Fourth, everyone.

  • The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

    The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

      The algorithms at Hulu and Netflix have learned one undeniable fact about me: I am powerless to resist true crime. Every evening they present another descent into human depravity, as if politely asking, Would you like to witness civilization unravel once more? More often than not, I oblige. Among the many stories they have served me, one from Netflix’s Worst Neighbor Ever has lingered in my mind. The episode, “Midwest Meltdown,” begins not with a monster but with a woman who once fit comfortably into her small-town community. Moncy Shirley was a respected nurse in Richmond Hill, Indiana, living what appeared to be an ordinary life. Then came divorce. Her husband left, and it was as though she resolved to reclaim a youth she believed had been stolen from her. She plunged into a whirlwind of dating, flaunted her sexual adventures with startling indiscretion, and cultivated an image built on expensive cars, cosmetic surgery, and perpetual reinvention. Her neighbors had admired the earlier Moncy—the dependable wife and community member whose values resembled their own. The new Moncy seemed intoxicated by exhibitionism. One neighbor, disturbed by Moncy’s increasingly explicit stories, decided she no longer wanted her daughter exposed to such influences. It was not merely the promiscuity that alienated people; it was the sense that Moncy had begun treating every social norm as an obstacle to be mocked.

      Then came Mark Leonard, a man whose appearance alone seemed to advertise bad decisions. With frosted blond hair, puka-shell necklaces, and the slick confidence of a carnival swindler, Leonard looked less like a trustworthy neighbor than someone who would sell counterfeit watches from the trunk of a car. The documentary patiently assembles his résumé of deception: woman after woman manipulated, savings siphoned away, trust converted into profit. Leonard did not simply enter the neighborhood; he infected it. Moncy, meanwhile, withdrew further from longtime friends while publicly displaying her romance with theatrical defiance. The couple’s conspicuous affection on the front porch felt less like love than a declaration that ordinary standards of decency no longer applied to them. Their message seemed unmistakable: our freedom is none of your business.

      That illusion exploded—literally—on the night of November 10, 2012. Moncy’s home became the epicenter of a blast so violent that it leveled neighboring houses and transformed a quiet subdivision into what aerial footage resembled after a military strike. Investigators from the ATF quickly concluded this was no accidental gas leak. Evidence pointed instead to meticulous planning: removed gas valves, a microwave modified as a delayed ignition device, and a conspiracy involving Moncy, Mark Leonard, and his brother to stage a fire for a $300,000 insurance payout. Their greed weaponized an entire neighborhood. Two innocent people died. Dozens suffered injuries. Families lost homes that had taken decades to build. One chilling detail captures the moral inversion at the heart of the crime: Moncy carefully arranged for someone to care for her cat before the explosion while displaying astonishing indifference toward the hundreds of human beings living just beyond her property line.

      Listening to the survivors, I was struck not only by their grief but by their bewilderment. They had welcomed Moncy into their community, befriended her, trusted her, and watched her transform into someone willing to sacrifice their lives for money and fantasy. Many eventually left Richmond Hill, unable to bear living among the memories of that night. Moncy received a fifty-year prison sentence. Mark Leonard was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2018. Yet the moral force of the story reaches beyond criminal justice. “Midwest Meltdown” is ultimately about what happens when freedom is severed from responsibility. Moncy came to believe that happiness meant satisfying every appetite, flaunting every impulse, and treating other people as incidental to her own self-expression. The residents of Richmond Hill understood freedom differently—as something inseparable from loyalty, trust, and mutual obligation. That contrast explains why the explosion feels larger than an insurance scam. It is the physical manifestation of a moral philosophy in which the self becomes the highest authority and the community is reduced to collateral damage. The lesson is difficult but indispensable: our lives are not private playgrounds. They are bound to the lives of others, and the choices we make inevitably either strengthen the communities that sustain us or, as in Richmond Hill, leave them in ruins.

    1. My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

      My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

      One of my deepest regrets is that I spent too much of my youth believing my life belonged entirely to me. My guiding assumption was simple: no one would tell me how to live. My purpose was to maximize my own pleasure, satisfy my own desires, and remain largely indifferent to everyone else’s concerns. It was the moral logic of consumer culture: pursue your happiness, avoid breaking the law, pay your bills, and you’ve fulfilled your obligations.

      I eventually discovered that this philosophy is far less harmless than it appears.

      A life organized around self-indulgence inevitably spills over onto other people. It makes us impatient with inconvenience, dismissive of others’ needs, and blind to the quiet opportunities for generosity that present themselves every day. We become the center of our own private universe, with everyone else relegated to supporting characters. The damage is often subtle rather than spectacular, but it is damage nonetheless. A narcissistic life does not merely impoverish the self; it leaves everyone around it slightly diminished as well.

      Selfishness is easy because it is our default setting. Left to our own devices, we naturally drift toward comfort, appetite, vanity, and self-justification. That is one reason I find myself drawn to the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Both insist upon a profoundly counterintuitive claim: your life is not your possession. It is a gift entrusted to you for the benefit of others. Meaning is discovered not by gratifying every impulse but by cultivating goodness, practicing service, and accepting the humbling truth that fulfillment arrives only after the ego relinquishes its throne. Paradoxically, by surrendering yourself, you find yourself. By enthroning yourself, you begin the slow process I have elsewhere called Gollumification—the gradual shrinking of the soul under the weight of its own appetites.

      Yet I cannot persuade myself that religion is the only path to such a life.

      Over the years I have known people whose moral seriousness seems almost entirely independent of religious belief. One of my students, originally from Hungary, was raised by atheist parents. Nevertheless, they instilled in their daughter a remarkable sense of integrity, discipline, humility, and social responsibility. She carries herself with a maturity that cannot be reduced either to religious doctrine or to secular ideology. Her character suggests that moral formation can emerge from devoted parents who treat virtue not as theology but as a way of life.

      Then there is my friend Leo, whom I have known for twenty-five years. To my knowledge, he is not religious, yet he embodies many of the virtues that religious traditions hold up as ideals. He loves his wife deeply. He delights in his three children. He never misses one of their games or school events, not out of obligation but because he genuinely wants to be there. He works tirelessly, not to accumulate status or luxury, but to give his family security and opportunity. He does not complain. He does not seem enslaved by addiction or restless consumption. He possesses an enthusiasm for ordinary life that feels almost inexhaustible.

      What impresses me most is that Leo never performs his goodness. He does not advertise his virtues, lecture others about morality, or congratulate himself for living well. His life is his argument. Watching him, I often have the impression that decency is simply woven into the fabric of his character. He seems to have found the narrow road almost instinctively, without theology serving as his guide. That reality leaves me genuinely puzzled. If the narrow road can be discovered apart from religion, then the relationship between faith and virtue is more mysterious than I once believed. Leo remains one of the strongest arguments against any simplistic claim that morality depends entirely upon religious belief.

      I am not built the way Leo appears to be. My own temperament is far more susceptible to vanity, distraction, and what I call Gollumification. Left unexamined, I drift toward self-absorption with alarming ease. That is why spiritual questions continue to exert such power over me. They are not abstract philosophical puzzles but practical necessities. I need habits, disciplines, and ideas that continually pull me away from myself. Perhaps if my instincts naturally inclined toward generosity, as Leo’s seem to, religion would occupy far less space in my imagination. But because I know the creature I am capable of becoming, I cannot stop asking whether there exists a truer way to live than the one my default setting so eagerly proposes.

    2. Forty Years Later, I Finally Learned How to Teach Writing

      Forty Years Later, I Finally Learned How to Teach Writing

      This morning was bittersweet. Assuming I don’t substantially revise my curriculum for one final spring semester, I may have written my last syllabus after forty years of teaching college composition.

      My freshmen will spend the semester wrestling with subjects that would have been unimaginable when I began teaching in the 1980s. They will analyze the epidemic of sports betting in a culture of loneliness, examine how algorithmic platforms reshape identity and ambition, and challenge the mythology of the self-made man through the life and writings of Frederick Douglass.

      As I finished organizing my notes, an uncomfortable realization settled over me: I am retiring just as I feel I have finally learned how to do this job well.

      I have always been a slow learner. It took me four decades to discover how to design a writing course that feels intellectually coherent rather than merely competent. Only now do I feel that the readings, assignments, and classroom conversations reinforce one another with genuine purpose. Just as the picture has come into focus, I find myself stepping off the stage.

      I also have mixed feelings about OpenAI platforms. On one hand, they have created an endless stream of grading headaches. Every semester brings hundreds of essays that bear the unmistakable fingerprints of AI splatter—competent-looking prose that collapses under scrutiny because no real mind seems to inhabit it. I return many of these papers with one instruction: start over.

      Yet these same tools have also made teaching writing more intellectually exciting than it has been in years. I have used them to sharpen essay prompts, generate competing arguments, refine classroom activities, and demonstrate to students how AI can become an editorial collaborator rather than an intellectual substitute. I realize that sounds almost sacrilegious coming from a writing professor, but adapting to these technologies has rekindled my curiosity about cognition, literacy, learning, and composition. We do not yet know where this technological revolution is taking us, and I doubt anyone can fully control its direction. But the questions it raises are among the most fascinating of my career.

      My greatest concern is not artificial intelligence itself. It is the widening gap between students who possess deep literacy and those who do not. Students who have spent years reading demanding books can interrogate AI, challenge its assumptions, recognize its mistakes, and use it to strengthen their own thinking. Students raised primarily on TikTok and algorithmically curated snippets often lack that foundation. For them, AI becomes less a tool than a surrogate mind—a magical genie that produces respectable-looking mediocrity while quietly encouraging them to outsource their judgment, curiosity, and intellectual will. The danger is not that AI will make students less intelligent. The danger is that it will make them comfortable never developing the habits of mind that intelligence requires.

      Teaching students to acquire the literacy necessary to use these tools wisely may become the defining challenge of higher education over the next generation. That is one reason retirement feels bittersweet. Just as this frontier is opening, I am leaving the profession.

      Looking back over forty years, however, gratitude overwhelms regret. I was fortunate to spend my working life in a profession that demanded perpetual intellectual growth. Every semester required me to become a slightly better reader, writer, and thinker. I never tired of teaching argumentation, counterarguments, rebuttals, rhetorical strategy, or the mysterious alchemy that transforms an elephantine sentence into something lean, graceful, and memorable.

      Writing has always fascinated me because most of it disappears the moment it is read. Nearly everything we encounter is competent enough, clear enough, forgettable enough. Then, every so often, a sentence possesses that rare quality I call salience. It arrests your attention. It feels inevitable, as though no other arrangement of words could possibly exist. Discovering how writers achieve that effect—how they impose order, precision, and beauty upon the chaos of language—has remained one of the enduring pleasures of my life.

      Perhaps my final lecture should not be about grammar, thesis statements, or MLA format. Perhaps I should gather these reflections into a Google Slides presentation and offer my students a panoramic view of why writing classes matter more today than at any other moment in my career. Artificial intelligence has not diminished the value of literacy. It has elevated it. In an age when machines can imitate competent prose, the truly educated writer will not be the one who produces the most words. It will be the one who possesses enough judgment, imagination, and intellectual character to know which words are worth writing in the first place.

    3. Why Cape Fear Left Me Cold

      Why Cape Fear Left Me Cold

      Apple TV’s Cape Fear boasts an embarrassment of riches. Javier Bardem is mesmerizing as the sly, unhinged Max Cady, a man who transforms grievance into an art form and revenge into a religious vocation. Amy Adams brings intelligence and emotional complexity to Anna, the defense attorney whose perceived betrayal becomes the object of Cady’s meticulously orchestrated vengeance. The direction is assured, the cinematography elegant, the score thrums with menace, and every frame announces that this is Prestige Television.

      And yet, by the fifth episode, my wife and I had gone numb.

      Halfway through the episode, I paused the television and tried to explain why the series wasn’t working. I finally arrived at a diagnosis: the show has no meaningful stakes because everyone already despises everyone else.

      Drama depends on the possibility of loss. Someone must have something precious worth protecting—a marriage, a friendship, a family, a moral center, a fragile hope. Cape Fear begins after those treasures have already been pawned off. Alienation saturates every relationship. Resentment hangs over every conversation like mildew creeping across a damp wall. The characters don’t merely dislike one another; they seem exhausted by one another’s existence.

      So what, exactly, is Max Cady threatening?

      He isn’t shattering an intact family. He’s tormenting people who already appear spiritually bankrupt, emotionally estranged, and halfway to divorce lawyers, therapists, and antidepressants. His campaign of terror feels less like an invasion than a remodeling project. When every room in the house is already on fire, the arsonist loses much of his dramatic power.

      That is the paradox of the series. It mistakes relentless darkness for dramatic intensity. But darkness has no force unless it threatens to extinguish something luminous. Evil matters only when goodness stands in danger of being destroyed. Without love, trust, or decency to defend, suspense dissolves into mere endurance. Episode after episode becomes an exercise in watching damaged people become incrementally more damaged.

      None of this is Bardem’s fault. He remains one of the finest actors of his generation, capable of turning the smallest gesture into something simultaneously magnetic and terrifying. I would gladly watch him read a phone book if he found one inhabited by demons. But even an actor of his stature cannot manufacture stakes that the story itself refuses to supply. I’m no longer sure I’ll finish the series.

      After putting Cape Fear on hold, my wife and I sampled the first two episodes of Alice and Steve. The show is unabashedly awkward, funny, and deeply human. Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker are a delight together, and their chemistry gives every misunderstanding and emotional misstep genuine consequence. Unlike Cape Fear, watching Alice and Steve doesn’t feel like fulfilling an obligation to the gods of prestige television. It feels like spending time with people whose happiness actually matters.

      One show demands that I admire it. The other quietly invites me to care. In the end, caring is infinitely more compelling than admiration.

    4. Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

      Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

      For more than a decade, Mike Pesca built one of the most respected podcasts in the business. His conversations were thoughtful rather than performative, his interviews nuanced rather than sensational, and his political analysis resisted the tribal certainty that dominates so much online discourse. By conventional standards, he had already succeeded.

      Yet success in today’s media ecosystem is no longer enough. To keep growing, creators must increasingly submit themselves to the demands of opaque algorithms that reward relentless engagement, perpetual self-promotion, and an endless stream of optimized content. Pesca looked at that landscape and concluded that the price of further growth was too high.

      It was not that he lacked the ability to master the algorithm. Rather, he had no desire to become the sort of person whose professional life revolved around pleasing it. The daily rituals required to stimulate engagement struck him as alienating. They demanded a temperament and set of priorities that no longer resembled the person he wanted to be.

      Standing at this fork in the road, Pesca faced two paths. One led toward greater scale by embracing whatever the algorithm demanded. The other required walking away from a successful enterprise he had spent years building. He chose the latter, entering what might be called algorithmic exile: the voluntary withdrawal from a profession or platform because its algorithmic incentives have become incompatible with one’s identity, values, or conception of meaningful work.

      In doing so, Pesca honored what might be called the Identity Preservation Threshold Principle: the point at which further professional success requires so much adaptation to external incentives that a person refuses to proceed in order to preserve a coherent sense of self. His departure was therefore not an admission of defeat. It was a declaration that there are forms of success not worth pursuing because they demand the slow erosion of the very character that made the work worth doing in the first place.

    5. The End of Mike Pesca’s The Gist Reminds Us of the Tyranny of the Algorithm

      The End of Mike Pesca’s The Gist Reminds Us of the Tyranny of the Algorithm

      On his June 30 podcast, Mike Pesca announced that The Gist is coming to an end.

      To paraphrase his explanation, the current algorithmic media environment has become increasingly hostile to the kind of show he produces. The Gist never occupied a clearly defined ideological lane. It wasn’t relentlessly anti-this or unapologetically pro-that. It wasn’t built to serve a tribe or reinforce an audience’s existing worldview. Instead, it thrived on curiosity, unpredictability, and the freedom to roam across politics, culture, sports, history, language, and whatever else happened to interest Pesca that day.

      Those qualities, however, have become liabilities.

      Today’s attention economy rewards strong brands, reliable outrage, short video clips, and highly shareable moments. Successful podcasts are expected to generate a constant stream of excerpts designed to circulate across social media, pulling new listeners into an ever-expanding algorithmic ecosystem. Pesca acknowledged that he neither built his show for that world nor particularly wished to. After years of producing a daily podcast with a small staff, he concluded that they simply were not getting enough juice for the squeeze.

      What remains unclear is what comes next.

      Pesca hinted that another venture is in the works, but he offered few specifics. As a subscriber, I’m left wondering what happens now. Will paying subscribers receive ad-free content through a different program? Will his other podcasts continue? Are those shows better suited to the current media landscape while The Gist is not? For now, those questions remain unanswered.

      I’m genuinely sorry to see The Gist disappear.

      Ironically, the very qualities that limited its growth are the qualities I admired most. Pesca never sounded like someone trying to satisfy an algorithm. He sounded like an intelligent, curious person thinking out loud in real time. He was willing to wander, to surprise, to change subjects, and occasionally to change his mind. That kind of intellectual range has become increasingly rare in a media culture that rewards specialization, ideological certainty, and perpetual performance.

      Whatever Pesca does next, I hope he remains a prominent voice. He would make an outstanding regular guest on Blocked and Reported, The Fifth Column, The Remnant, Making Sense, Uncomfortable Conversations, and The Unspeakeasy Podcast. His gift has never been hot takes or tribal affirmation. It has been thoughtful conversation.

      Pesca said he expects to provide more details as The Gist winds down over the coming week. I’ll be listening.

      Update:

      After I emailed Pesca about his other podcasts, he replied to say that they are all being discontinued, so clearly he is making room for a new path.

    6. The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

      The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

      In late August of 2025, I tore my left rotator cuff.

      It wasn’t my first encounter with the injury. I had damaged the same shoulder in the 1990s and again in the early 2000s while chasing bigger bench presses. Those injuries announced themselves with unmistakable violence. I felt the shoulder give way beneath the weight, and in that instant I knew exactly what I had done.

      This time was different.

      During my kettlebell workout, nothing seemed wrong. No sharp pain. No alarming pop. No dramatic warning that I had crossed a line.

      The verdict arrived the following morning.

      I woke to a shoulder that had quietly mutinied overnight.

      The culprit wasn’t one reckless repetition but accumulated stupidity. At sixty-three, I had somehow convinced myself that five heavy kettlebell workouts every week was a sensible training program. My rotator cuff politely disagreed.

      I saw an orthopedic specialist, received the diagnosis, and was offered surgery.

      I declined.

      Instead, I committed myself to physical therapy. Resistance bands replaced heavy iron. Tiny, almost laughably simple exercises became my daily ritual. Progress came not in dramatic breakthroughs but in stubborn millimeters. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I climbed out of rotator cuff purgatory.

      Ten months later, the pain is gone.

      My range of motion has returned.

      I wake without the familiar ache that once greeted me every morning.

      Most importantly, I never needed surgery.

      At sixty-four, I consider that outcome a gift.

      Even so, I no longer pretend the injury never happened.

      It changed me.

      First, I accept that my shoulder probably isn’t what it once was. I no longer possess the same explosive confidence during overhead presses and kettlebell thrusters. Rather than arguing with reality, I simply reach for lighter weights.

      Second, I train less often and recover more. Three kettlebell workouts each week are enough. I insist on at least twenty-four hours between resistance sessions, particularly those involving my upper body. On the days in between, I happily climb aboard my exercise bike for an hour of steady cardio.

      Third, I have abandoned my fascination with heavier numbers. Rows, swings, goblet squats—everything has become lighter. Instead of chasing personal records, I chase rhythm, consistency, and smooth movement. My joints have become more valuable to me than my ego.

      Finally, I’ve learned to exercise with gratitude.

      For decades I treated workouts as obligations or competitions. Now they feel more like privileges. Every pain-free session reminds me that movement is something to appreciate rather than assume. Respect has replaced bravado. Caution has replaced impatience.

      Looking back, I feel as though I dodged a bullet.

      The outcome wasn’t perfect. My shoulder carries its history with it, and so do I.

      But I also can’t ignore the alternative futures that never arrived. Surgery never came. Chronic pain never settled in. Permanent disability never took hold.

      Instead, I recovered about as well as a man could reasonably hope after fifty-two years of asking his body to lift heavy things and three months before his sixty-fifth birthday.

      That realization has changed my definition of strength.

      Strength is no longer measured by the amount of weight hanging from a kettlebell.

      It is measured by the wisdom to keep showing up tomorrow.