Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    After watching a documentary on microplastics—the kind that makes you feel like you’ve been chewing on a credit card your entire adult life—I purged my kitchen of polymer cutting boards with the zeal of a man burning cursed artifacts. In their place, I installed three bamboo boards: handsome, virtuous, and morally superior. They gleamed with the smugness of objects that require hand-washing. No dishwasher. No shortcuts. You don’t clean them; you tend to them. I accepted this as the price of purity.

    A month later, domestic reality intervened. We needed a larger board. Naturally, I upgraded—not to another bamboo slab, but to a teak charcuterie board thick enough to stop a bullet and elegant enough to host a minor European summit. When I opened the box, however, I discovered that teak is less a cutting surface and more a lifestyle commitment. It must be moisturized. Neglect it, and it dries, cracks, and becomes a microbial timeshare. The bamboo boards, I learned, share this delicate temperament. So much for rugged simplicity.

    Now, once a month, I conduct what can only be described as a ritual. I anoint each board—front and back—with a tablespoon of mineral oil, as if preparing it for a minor sacrament. They sit overnight, absorbing their glossy absolution while I contemplate the path that brought me here.

    The plot thickened when I discovered that plain mineral oil, while admirable, is apparently the beginner’s drug. The connoisseur graduates to a blend of mineral oil and beeswax—a two-in-one elixir promising water resistance, durability, and, one suspects, moral clarity. Another twenty dollars vanished. The boards, I was assured, would now repel moisture with aristocratic disdain.

    I like to think of myself as a man who values simplicity. Reality suggests otherwise. Without meaning to, I slid down the polished banister of the healthy lifestyle rabbit hole. It begins with a reasonable fear—microplastics—and ends with a cabinet of oils, waxes, and maintenance schedules that would make a museum curator nod in approval. There’s a name for obsessive food purity—orthorexia nervosa—but this feels broader, more ambitious. This is what I would call Total Purity Syndrome: the quiet transformation of daily habits into sacred rites, where deviation carries the faint odor of moral failure.

    To be clear, I haven’t sealed myself in a sterile dome, subsisting on filtered air and ethically sourced chia seeds. I’m not auditing my oxygen intake. I’ve simply spent about a hundred dollars on cutting boards and would prefer they not crack, warp, or harbor microscopic civilizations. That’s not pathology. That’s stewardship.

    Still, there is something revealing in the arc: a man who set out to eliminate plastic and ended up with a monthly oiling ceremony. Progress, it seems, has a way of recruiting you into its maintenance plan.

  • The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    My YouTube channel, now more than a decade old, has gathered over 11,000 subscribers and delivers anywhere from a polite 700 views to a respectable 5,000, depending on how shameless I’m willing to be. The high performers are predictable: watch reviews and those ceremonial “State of the Collection” videos—rituals of conspicuous enthusiasm that the algorithm devours like a starving dog. These are the videos where I feel myself performing, angling, posturing. I can practically see the hook in the water. I am not expressing myself; I am fishing. And the bait is always the same: dopamine, desire, envy, and that most reliable narcotic of all—FOMO. These are not just videos; they are small moral compromises dressed as content. They feed what the famous therapist Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel.”

    Then there are the other videos—the ones where I sit back and become a kind of rambling talk show host, reflecting on the week, my thoughts, my minor existential skirmishes. I sprinkle in a bit of watch talk as a courtesy to the faithful, but the real subject is the human condition, or at least my version of it. These videos are closer to the truth. Naturally, they struggle to crack a thousand views. Authenticity, it turns out, is not algorithm-friendly.

    This creates a tidy little crisis. Do I continue manufacturing these glossy, attention-seeking performances—feed the beast, play the game, become a caricature of myself? Or do I choose integrity and accept the role of a man speaking into an increasingly empty room? If the audience shrinks in proportion to my honesty, why not go all the way—abandon video altogether and disappear into a novel no one will read?

    The problem is, I’m not built for that kind of monastic focus. Eighty thousand words on a single idea feels less like a creative challenge and more like a prison sentence. I prefer miscellany. I like to ricochet between obsessions: watches, my adolescent bodybuilding fantasies, the enduring mystery of my own arrested development. I am, by any reasonable definition, a man-child with a specialty in distraction.

    Take food. Not just eating—how I eat. I am obsessed with meals that can be held in one hand: tacos, burritos, sandwiches, wraps—portable architecture. The ideal scenario involves standing over the kitchen sink, dispensing with plates, silverware, and any trace of ceremony. It is efficiency elevated to philosophy. Why sit down when you can hover? Why clean dishes when you can bypass them entirely? This is my idea of innovation: reducing life to its lowest possible friction. Call it optimization if you’re feeling generous. Call it laziness if you’re not.

    And yet, paradoxically, I am disciplined—ferociously so—when it comes to exercise. Olympic lifting in my youth, kettlebells and power yoga now. But even here, discipline is the wrong word. This is compulsion. I don’t train because I choose to; I train because I need to. The workout is less a virtue than a medication, a daily dose of relief for a mind that resists stillness.

    My days split cleanly in two. Morning brings optimism: coffee, steel-cut oats with protein powder, the illusion of infinite possibility. I feel like a serious person, a thinker, someone on the verge of producing meaningful work. By night, the illusion collapses. Fatigue sets in, mood darkens, and I retreat into a fog of lethargy and low-grade dread. The same man who greeted the day with ambition now negotiates with anxiety before sleep, wondering what small catastrophe might arrive in the dark. Will the dream render me so helpless I have a heart attack? Will I even wake up from this dream or succumb to eternal slumber? 

    Hovering over all of this is a private mythology, one I’ve borrowed—perhaps stolen—from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” I cast myself as the misunderstood artist, the outsider, the man quietly suffering for his craft. It’s a flattering fiction. In reality, I’m less tortured genius and more well-fed procrastinator—an enthusiast of shortcuts, a collector of appetites, a man who stands over the sink eating a breakfast burrito while postponing his lab work. The cholesterol test can wait. The scale will sort itself out. The fantasy persists.

    And that, I suppose, is the truth: I oscillate between aspiration and avoidance, between the higher and lower channels, between the man I imagine myself to be and the one holding a sandwich over the sink.

  • The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    There are moments when the temperature of a culture reveals itself in a single, unsettling proposition. One such moment arrives when a public figure calmly suggests that women should not have the right to vote—and is met not with universal condemnation, but with a shrug, a debate, or worse, applause. Douglas Wilson, a 72-year-old preacher, has made such arguments, presenting them as part of a broader theological vision in which women are cast in supporting roles to male authority. This is not fringe theater performed in a basement. It has bled into the mainstream. That Pete Hegseth is associated with Wilson’s denomination is less an isolated curiosity than a symptom. What should be aberrant now passes as another point on the menu.

    In her essay “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” Helen Lewis names the ideology underwriting this drift: masculinism. In this worldview, men are protagonists and women are props—non-player characters in a game whose rules were allegedly written by Saint Paul. The result is an ungainly mashup: scripture folded into the hustle economy, sermon braided with sports betting tips, theology seasoned with crypto schemes and supplement codes. It’s less a philosophy than a product line—an all-in-one kit for grievance, packaged for easy consumption.

    If this sounds marginal, Lewis argues otherwise. Masculinism, she writes, has become a unifying current, pulling together pastors and podcasters, politicians and online personalities into a loose but potent coalition. It thrives in a moment when many men feel displaced—watching women surpass them in education and professional advancement—and are hungry for a narrative that restores their primacy. Enter the influencer-preacher hybrid, eager to monetize that hunger.

    Wilson, by Lewis’s account, is willing to adopt tactics borrowed from professional wrestling—kayfabe—to amplify his reach. The persona is exaggerated, the provocations theatrical, the outrage intentional. The goal is not persuasion so much as provocation. Trauma becomes currency. The more offended the opposition, the more validated the performance. In this economy, cruelty isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

    The rhetoric does not remain confined to gender. Figures like Nick Fuentes demonstrate how misogyny can serve as a gateway—an entry point into a broader ecosystem of resentment and prejudice. Repetition does the rest. Shock becomes familiar, then tolerable, then unremarkable. The grotesque is normalized through sheer exposure.

    This is, in part, the byproduct of a media environment optimized for reaction rather than reflection. In a landscape dominated by short-form content and algorithmic amplification, complexity loses to caricature. Men and women are flattened into types—heroes or villains, victims or oppressors—with little room for the inconvenient details that real thinking requires. As Lewis puts it, the masculinist imagination reduces women to trivial professions and men to blunt archetypes, a world rendered in crude strokes for quick consumption.

    Even cultural barometers shift. Joe Rogan, once loosely aligned with progressive politics, has drifted in a direction that reflects this broader realignment. The movement is not accidental; it is structural, propelled by incentives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance.

    And yet, there is a limit to how far exaggeration can stretch before it snaps. Lewis suggests masculinism may be entering its phase of overreach—the point at which its claims become so inflated, so historically tone-deaf and morally coarse, that they begin to alienate even sympathetic audiences. When grievance is equated with atrocities, when rhetoric collapses into parody, the movement risks discrediting itself.

    Whether that correction arrives soon enough is another question. For now, we inhabit a culture where the abnormal has learned to pass as normal, and where the loudest voices often mistake performance for truth.

  • The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    I’ve had the G-Shock GW-S5600U-1JF on my wrist for about twenty hours. The initial impressions were encouraging. The carbon strap finally accommodates my 8-inch wrist without negotiation—I land comfortably on the third-to-last hole. The watch is astonishingly light, almost evasive, and every function behaves as advertised.

    Then my displeasure began.

    First, the presence—or lack of it. On the wrist, the watch reads smaller than its dimensions suggest. It doesn’t anchor itself; it hovers. At a glance, it recalls a Fitbit—more lozenge than instrument—an object that seems designed to be forgotten. Its small size is its first vanishing act.

    My second displeasure is reception. My other G-Shocks behave like disciplined students, checking in with Colorado every night without complaint. The S5600, by contrast, requires coaxing. Last night, lined up at the window with its larger siblings, it alone refused to sync. At one in the morning, I found myself manually initiating reception, a small ritual of disappointment.

    But the real issue revealed itself this morning: legibility. The watch sits so flat against my wrist that even a slight tilt sends the display into retreat. The digits don’t fade—they vanish. The viewing angle feels narrow, unforgiving, as if the watch demands a precise alignment before it agrees to be read. The vanishing numbers are a vanishing act I really don’t like.

    This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural flaw. A watch that requires negotiation at every glance begins to feel less like a tool and more like a chore.

    Which leaves me with an unappealing conclusion: I may have to sell it. Not because it fails outright, but because its virtues—lightness, subtlety, restraint—don’t compensate for its flaws.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.

  • Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse, congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to leave at sixty-five, after four decades of teaching. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.

  • Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    After nearly forty years teaching college writing, I can say this without ceremony: AI didn’t knock—it walked in and rearranged the furniture. We weren’t ready. Now we’re scrambling to answer basic questions we once took for granted: What is our role? What, exactly, is our job? How do we evaluate a student’s work when the student can outsource the thinking? And how do we defend the value of higher education—especially the Humanities—to a public that is already drifting away?

    The backdrop isn’t kind. We face a culture that reads less and skims more, chasing quick hits of stimulation instead of sustained thought. The cost of college keeps rising while the promise of stable, predictable employment grows less certain. In that context, debates about AI feel less like speculation and more like triage. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape higher education; it’s how deeply and how quickly.

    In that vein, I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay “Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans” with particular interest. Kang highlights the argument of Hollis Robbins, who offers a blunt standard for survival: universities justify their existence only if they provide access to faculty whose expertise exceeds what AI can deliver. Strip away the academic language, and the message is stark: prove you offer something AI cannot, or become obsolete.

    Robbins pushes the point further. In a classroom saturated with generative AI, she predicts a severe contraction—potentially eliminating a large share of faculty positions. Courses built around foundational, repeatable skills—the kind often taught in the first two years—are the most vulnerable. Specialized fields, particularly those grounded in rare knowledge or deep cultural expertise, are far less exposed. The more interchangeable the instruction, the easier it is to replace.

    That leaves instructors like me in an uneasy position. I’ve spent decades teaching literacy and critical thinking—the very skills that AI now performs with unnerving competence. If Robbins is right, those of us in broad, introductory disciplines face the sharpest edge of change. The specialists may endure. The rest of us may be folded into what she envisions as a rapid and unforgiving contraction.

    This isn’t a distant possibility. It’s a present demand. Adapt—or be edited out.

  • From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    A fad is a brief hallucination we agree to share. It arrives with a rush of hype, a whiff of urgency, and the faint threat that you’re already late. I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when the parade was loud and shameless: the Hula Hoop spinning on suburban hips, vinyl and spandex chasing the “wet look” like a costume department for perspiration, pukka shells clicking at the throat, CB radios chirping coded bravado, clackers smashing together with cheerful menace, 8-tracks thudding mid-song, streakers sprinting through polite society, bean bags swallowing spines, water beds sloshing like inland seas, lava lamps bubbling in slow hypnosis, and the Pet Rock—a joke that sold by the millions because everyone understood it was a joke.

    Two traits define a fad. First, it burns fast and dies young. Second, it requires distance to reveal how thin it was. Time is the solvent; it dissolves the glamour and leaves the residue of absurdity. We laugh because the stakes were low. No one built a moral code around a lava lamp.

    But something has shifted. The fad has learned to dress itself as a life. What used to be a passing amusement now arrives with a manifesto, a diet, a wardrobe, and a tone of sermon. A temporary preference hardens into a permanent identity. Call this Fad Apotheosis—the elevation of the trivial into the sacred, the conversion of a momentary craze into a governing philosophy. It is the difference between owning a thing and being owned by it.

    The present offers a crowded gallery of such conversions. Dietary choices expand into totalizing creeds; efficiency hacks become liturgies; aesthetic preferences acquire moral teeth. A person is no longer someone who eats a certain way or experiments with a regimen; he becomes the regimen, a walking billboard for it. The point is no longer practice but proclamation—signals sent to a tribe that rewards conformity with applause and dissent with exile.

    This inflation does not occur in a vacuum. A culture that reads less and scrolls more trades patience for immediacy and argument for alignment. Nuance is heavy; slogans are light. In that environment, a fad’s simplicity is not a bug but a feature. It offers clean edges, quick belonging, and the comfort of certainty. It replaces the slow work of thinking with the fast pleasure of declaring.

    The cost is not subtle. When identity is outsourced to trends, judgment atrophies. Public life begins to resemble a stage populated by performers fluent in lifestyle rhetoric and thin on competence. The same habits that turn a diet into a doctrine can turn a platform into a career and a persona into a credential. The result is a politics of surfaces—loud, confident, and frequently hollow.

    A society saturated with such performances doesn’t flourish; it frays. Attention splinters, conversation coarsens, and the serious tasks—those that require continuity, humility, and evidence—lose ground to spectacle. The nation doesn’t collapse in a single dramatic gesture; it erodes in a thousand small substitutions, trading substance for style until it can no longer tell the difference.

    The remedy is unfashionable. It requires recovering the ability to see a fad as a fad: a diversion, not a doctrine. It asks for a renewed appetite for depth—reading that resists skimming, arguments that resist slogans, and commitments that outlast the season. In practical terms, it means choosing people who do the work over people who perform it.

    Until then, we inhabit a curious landscape: a fever swamp of borrowed identities, where trends masquerade as truths and the trivial is worn like a creed. The exit is not complicated. It is simply difficult: step back, refuse the costume, and let the lava lamp return to being what it always was—pleasant, pointless light.

  • The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    When Tom Junod discussed his memoir with Andrew Sullivan, he described a decision that feels almost subversive now: no contemporary therapy-speak. No “toxic masculinity,” no diagnostic shorthand, no tidy labels to anesthetize the mess. A book set in the ’60s and ’70s would speak in the idiom of those years. The wager is simple and risky: if you refuse the crutch of modern jargon, the character has to carry the weight. By that measure, Junod wins. He builds a father who does what Dashiell Hammett demanded of fiction—gets up, steps off the page, and stands there, unavoidable.

    The book—In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man—borrows its title from the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times,” and the borrowing is apt. Junod’s father, Lou, is less a man than a doctrine delivered at high volume. He is a born pontificator with a salesman’s grin and a peacock’s vanity. He scents himself like a department store—colognes, sprays, balms layered into a cloud—and tans his body into a lacquered bronze that seems to announce itself before he enters a room. He sells handbags, favors turtlenecks, and at the beach reduces himself to a strip of fabric and a glare. He cleans his navel with a witch-hazel-dipped Q-tip and instructs his son to follow suit, as if hygiene were a moral philosophy.

    Compulsion runs through him like a live wire. If you prefer a term to describe his sexual compulsions, call it satyriasis and be done with it, but the word hardly captures the sprawl: gambling, philandering, bullying—habits that bloom into a personality. A man who cannot govern himself makes governance his obsession; he attempts to administer his household the way a tyrant administers a province—loudly, relentlessly, and with a curious conviction that control is the same thing as order. The result is a home pressurized to the point of fatigue, where even silence feels like a reprimand.

    Junod’s refusal to retrofit his childhood with modern language sharpens the pain rather than softening it. There’s a scene that lands like a held breath finally released: in Lou’s absence, the mother reappears as herself. Her face opens. Her voice steadies. When Tom reads her a poem, she brightens—really brightens—and offers the simplest, most generous counsel: read it aloud; the sound will teach you what the page cannot. It is a small moment, but it reveals the scale of what has been missing. When Lou is present, he occupies the air itself. He doesn’t just enter rooms; he consumes them, a man with a gift for turning oxygen into pressure.

    Listen to the audiobook—as Sullivan sensibly suggests—and Lou’s voice acquires a second life. You don’t merely read him; you hear the cadence, the certainty, the unearned authority. It is a performance you cannot switch off, which is precisely the point. The book’s power comes from that persistence. It is painful, yes, but the pain is disciplined into narrative momentum.

    If the experience feels familiar, it should. The era produced a certain model of man—postwar, unapologetic, loud as a virtue—who treated appetite as remedy and certainty as proof. He read “women’s magazines” out in the open, said things he couldn’t defend, and considered objection to his will a breach of etiquette. The code was simple: be emphatic, be unyielding, be right by volume. Junod doesn’t argue with that code; he incarnates it. He takes the template and gives it a name, a voice, a set of rituals so specific they become unforgettable.

    In doing so, he offers a quiet rebuke to our current habit of explanation. You don’t need a glossary to understand this man. You need a page, a room, and the patience to watch what happens when he walks in.