Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Voyeurs of Violence: Media Spectacle and the Commodification of Crime

    Voyeurs of Violence: Media Spectacle and the Commodification of Crime

    Few crimes provoke stronger public outrage than the exploitation of children. In the digital age, however, the pursuit of justice has increasingly merged with the logic of entertainment, viral media, and online spectacle. Social media platforms, livestreams, YouTube channels, and reality-style investigations now allow audiences to consume criminal exposure as a form of emotional entertainment. While many of these productions claim to protect vulnerable victims and raise public awareness, they also raise troubling ethical questions about voyeurism, vigilantism, humiliation, and the commodification of suffering.

    The 2025 documentary Predators and the film Nightcrawler both explore societies increasingly addicted to turning pain, fear, scandal, and criminality into spectacle. Predators examines the culture surrounding online predator stings, public exposure, and internet vigilantism, asking whether these efforts genuinely serve justice or merely transform human tragedy into viral entertainment. Nightcrawler similarly critiques a media culture in which violence and suffering become profitable content consumed by emotionally detached audiences. Together, these works suggest that modern media systems often blur the line between public service and exploitation.

    Write a 1,200-word argumentative essay responding to the following claim:

    The transformation of crime, suffering, and public humiliation into entertainment ultimately corrupts justice by encouraging voyeurism, emotional exploitation, and spectacle-driven morality.

    In your essay, you may defend, challenge, or complicate this claim. As you develop your argument, consider questions such as: Does public exposure deter criminal behavior and raise legitimate awareness, or does it encourage reckless vigilantism and mob psychology? At what point does crime reporting become entertainment? Can media exposure serve justice responsibly, or does the pursuit of ratings, clicks, and viral attention inevitably distort moral judgment? Why are audiences drawn to spectacles involving humiliation, revenge, fear, and public punishment?

    You should also analyze how both works critique audience complicity. To what extent are viewers themselves participating in the commodification of suffering? How do modern media systems reward emotional extremity, outrage, and voyeuristic curiosity? Does the public consume these stories out of genuine concern for justice, or because tragedy and scandal have become emotionally addictive forms of entertainment?

    In addition to analyzing the themes of both works, examine the rhetorical and cinematic methods used by the filmmakers. Consider how tone, imagery, editing, suspense, emotional manipulation, interviews, satire, and spectacle shape the audience’s reaction. How does Nightcrawler especially critique the relationship between media consumers and those who profit from violence and tragedy?

    You must also include at least one counterargument and rebuttal. For example, some critics may argue that aggressive public exposure is necessary because traditional institutions and law enforcement often fail to protect vulnerable victims. Others may argue that disturbing media coverage serves an important social function by forcing society to confront uncomfortable realities. Respond to these objections by evaluating the ethical responsibilities of media creators and audiences alike.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger cultural implications of these works. What do Predators and Nightcrawler suggest about modern society’s relationship with violence, humiliation, revenge, and spectacle? What happens to a culture when entertainment and morality become increasingly inseparable?

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • Use evidence from both works
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific scenes, quotations, or examples rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about media spectacle, voyeurism, justice, and audience complicity

  • The Loneliness Crisis: Social Isolation and the Rise of American Hostility (college essay prompt)

    The Loneliness Crisis: Social Isolation and the Rise of American Hostility (college essay prompt)

    Read David Brooks’ essay “How America Got Mean” and Derek Thompson’ essay “The Anti-Social Century.” Then watch Roy Wood Jr.’s comedy special Lonely Flowers.

    In the comedy performance Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to rising anger, hostility, tribalism, and violence in American culture. Brooks and Thompson similarly describe a society that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, distrustful, and emotionally brittle. Together, these works raise an important question: What happens to individuals and societies when meaningful human connection begins to collapse?

    Write a 1,200-word argumentative essay analyzing the claim that social isolation is a major cause of America’s rising hostility, cruelty, and social dysfunction. Your essay may support, challenge, or complicate Roy Wood Jr.’s argument, but you must engage deeply with the ideas presented by Brooks and Thompson as you develop your position.

    As you develop your argument, consider how these writers and performers describe the psychological and cultural effects of loneliness, alienation, and declining social trust. How do social isolation, digital life, political tribalism, economic pressure, social media, declining community institutions, and weakened friendships contribute to anger and resentment? To what extent do modern Americans increasingly experience one another not as neighbors or fellow citizens but as abstractions, enemies, audiences, or online avatars?

    You should also consider competing explanations for cultural hostility. Is loneliness truly the central problem, or are broader forces—economic inequality, political polarization, consumer culture, technological addiction, family breakdown, declining religion, or social media algorithms—more responsible for rising social tension? Does loneliness cause hostility, or does hostility itself drive people further into isolation?

    In addition to analyzing the ideas presented in these works, examine how each creator communicates their message. Consider the differences between Brooks’ social criticism, Thompson’s cultural analysis, and Roy Wood Jr.’s use of comedy, storytelling, exaggeration, and observational humor. Why might comedy be an especially effective way to address painful subjects such as loneliness, disconnection, and social fragmentation?

    You must include at least one counterargument and rebuttal. For example, some critics may argue that modern technology and online culture have actually expanded social connection rather than weakened it. Others may argue that Americans are not truly isolated but are instead forming new kinds of communities online. Respond to these objections by evaluating the quality and depth of modern social relationships.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger implications of these works. What do they suggest about the future of friendship, community, empathy, and civic life in America? If loneliness and social fragmentation continue to grow, what might happen to the culture, politics, and mental health of the nation?

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • Use evidence from all three works
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific examples, scenes, or passages rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about loneliness, social fragmentation, and cultural hostility
  • Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Using Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul, and Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? as your central texts, write a 1,200-word argumentative essay analyzing the claim that art, music, film, education, and literacy function as weapons against cultural erasure and oppression.

    As you develop your argument, examine how dominant cultures maintain power not only through physical oppression and economic inequality but also through controlling memory, representation, literacy, visibility, and storytelling itself. Consider how marginalized groups are often denied the power to narrate their own existence and how reclaiming narrative ownership becomes an act of resistance, survival, and humanization.

    In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, analyze how slavery denied enslaved people literacy, birthdates, ancestry, and historical identity in order to reduce them to property rather than persons. Consider how Douglass presents reading and writing as revolutionary acts that allow him to reclaim his humanity and resist a system designed to silence him. How does his memoir itself function as an act of historical recovery and resistance against cultural erasure?

    In “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” analyze how bell hooks describes education as both a pathway toward empowerment and a site of alienation, performance, and cultural conflict. How does hooks show that race and class shape access to power, belonging, and self-definition? Why do marginalized students often feel pressure to erase or reinvent parts of themselves in elite educational spaces? To what extent does education demand assimilation into dominant cultural codes?

    In Summer of Soul, analyze how the Harlem Cultural Festival celebrated Black artistry, spirituality, joy, and political consciousness during a period of racial upheaval. Why was this massive cultural event largely erased from mainstream historical memory while Woodstock became mythologized as the defining music festival of the era? How does Questlove use archival footage, music, interviews, and storytelling to recover a forgotten history and challenge the marginalization of Black cultural memory?

    In Is That Black Enough for You?!?, analyze how Elvis Mitchell critiques Hollywood’s long history of reducing Black identity to stereotypes while marginalizing Black filmmakers, actors, and stories. How did Black cinema in the 1960s and 1970s challenge Hollywood’s control over representation? How does Mitchell argue that recovering overlooked Black films and artists becomes an act of cultural restoration and resistance against historical erasure?

    As part of your argument, analyze not only the ideas presented in these works but also the rhetorical and artistic methods used by the creators themselves. Consider how autobiography, music, archival footage, imagery, storytelling, editing, voice, and film structure shape audience perception and resist cultural invisibility.

    You must also address at least one counterargument. For example, some critics may argue that art, music, and representation alone are insufficient forms of resistance because symbolic visibility does not necessarily produce economic equality, political power, or institutional change. Others may argue that mainstream culture eventually commodifies resistance movements and transforms them into profitable entertainment. Respond to these objections by evaluating the actual power and limitations of cultural expression.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger implications of narrative control. Why do oppressive systems repeatedly attempt to regulate literacy, storytelling, education, historical memory, and representation? What happens to individuals and societies when marginalized groups lose the power to preserve and narrate their own histories? Finally, consider how modern digital culture, social media, AI, and algorithm-driven entertainment continue to shape which voices are amplified, marginalized, archived, or forgotten.

    For your introductory paragraph, explain how the struggle for the dominant narrative is presented in the documentary We Beat the Dream Team and how the film shows that battles over narrative power extend far beyond race into many areas of culture. Analyze how individuals and groups compete to control public memory, define legitimacy, shape historical perception, and claim symbolic victory. Show how the documentary demonstrates that the fight for the dominant narrative is ultimately a struggle over identity, status, recognition, and cultural power.

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • MLA Works Cited page with 5 sources
    • Use evidence from all five texts
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific scenes, passages, quotations, or examples rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about the relationship between narrative ownership, cultural memory, identity, and power

  • The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    For Tyler Austin Harper, there is only one word that captures the gravity of dehumanization: sin. And to be clear, dehumanization is rampant—in the form of robot companions, digital girlfriends, and AI therapists. To call these developments merely wrong is an understatement. He writes, “They feel to me like something deeper and darker.” In his essay “There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI: It’s Sin,” Harper argues that to understand the depths of what is happening to us, we need Christian guides because Christianity provides a framework for understanding dehumanization. You cannot understand dehumanization unless you first understand what it means to be fully human. Harper turns to Christian critics of AI to trace this trajectory from human to subhuman through the misuse of technology.

    These misuses emerge when people overemphasize the business, pragmatic, and utilitarian uses of AI at the expense of humanity, a Faustian bargain as old as sin itself. To champion technology and “outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines” without considering the effects on the human soul is to threaten human dignity and meaning.

    Christianity frames us as fallen creatures who long to return to our Maker. The burden of being human is struggling with our fallen nature and seeking grace through God. When we look to machines for salvation, we outsource the burden of what it means to be human. In doing so, we forget that this burden entails suffering and that suffering itself can be a gift from God, pointing us toward humility and the true path. In Harper’s words, “Christianity has a clear ‘anthropological vision,’ asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.” To move toward this purpose is to become fully human. We conform to God and fulfill our humanity. Conforming ourselves to machines, by contrast, becomes a desecration of what it means to be human.

    Harper argues that outside the Christian framework, we become confused about what it means to be human in the first place. He writes, “Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is.” He points to Christian writer Carl Trueman, who observes that the term dehumanization loses its force if the secular definition of humanization remains an “empty cipher.” Secularists and techno-believers have reduced humanization to a narrow set of superficial behaviors that fail to capture what it truly means to carry the burden of having a soul.

    Harper describes himself as “a not especially observant Presbyterian” and is not arguing that we must embrace religious orthodoxy to “fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI.” However, he insists that we “must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment.”

    Harper’s article reminds me of the dangers of Liquid Modernity, a concept developed by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman describes a social condition in which stable institutions, identities, relationships, careers, moral frameworks, and communities dissolve into constant flux, instability, and adaptation. In the context of dehumanization and the rise of AI, Liquid Modernity refers to the transformation of human beings from rooted persons with durable social bonds into endlessly flexible, data-driven consumers and performers who must continuously reinvent themselves to survive technological and economic disruption.

    Societies that lack a tradition defining humanization may ultimately surrender to the doctrine that Liquid Modernity is both desirable and inevitable—a condition in which human beings outsource the burden of being human to machines.

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    There is something faintly dystopian about solitary people spending hours online watching other solitary people perform the microscopic rituals of daily life: tying shoelaces, cracking open cans of diet soda, pouring kibble into a cat’s bowl, unloading groceries with monk-like precision, folding laundry beneath soft lighting while melancholy piano music drifts through the background like emotional Febreze.

    At some point loneliness ceased being merely a condition to endure and became a genre of entertainment.

    You are not simply alone anymore. You are curating aloneness, aestheticizing it, monetizing it, and binge-watching it as though isolation itself were a luxury lifestyle brand. The modern internet increasingly resembles a vast digital aquarium filled with emotionally sedated people observing one another through glass while reassuring themselves that this counts as connection.

    I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon functions as a form of emotional jiu-jitsu. Instead of confronting the pain of alienation directly, people transform it into a consumer product. The loneliness does not disappear; it merely changes costume. By packaging solitude into soothing, carefully curated content, the sharp edge of disconnection becomes dulled. The ache remains, but now it arrives with ambient lighting, artisanal tea preparation, and a Scandinavian throw blanket.

    We now inhabit a condition I would call Consumptive Solitude: the state in which loneliness evolves from a painful human experience into a consumable form of entertainment. Isolated individuals compulsively watch other isolated individuals perform the mundane choreography of domestic life in order to simulate companionship without assuming the emotional risks, obligations, friction, compromise, or unpredictability of genuine human intimacy.

    This pathology is explored in Faith Hill’s essay “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” in which she examines the rise of what she calls “solitude influencers” and what their popularity reveals about contemporary society. These influencers present carefully curated lives of performative isolation: beautiful apartments, immaculate routines, quiet mornings, tasteful meals, dim lighting, tasteful melancholy, and endless scenes of one person existing in exquisitely controlled seclusion.

    The performance contains all the machinery of attention addiction without the inconvenience of actual friendship. There are no difficult conversations, no emotional demands, no conflicting schedules, no awkward silences, no disappointments, and no compromise. The viewer receives the emotional atmosphere of companionship without having to endure another person’s needs or complexity. It is intimacy stripped of reciprocity.

    Naturally, narcissism plays some role in this ecosystem. But narcissism alone does not explain the appeal. Control may be the deeper force at work. Real life is chaotic, humiliating, exhausting, and unpredictable. The solitude influencer offers the fantasy of total environmental management. Everything is calm. Everything is clean. Everything is curated. Nothing intrudes.

    For burned-out viewers, the effect can become psychologically narcotic, almost ASMR-like in its soothing predictability. After spending the day navigating economic stress, social tension, workplace absurdity, family obligations, and digital overload, people retreat into videos of someone silently pouring a glass of chablis while a Haydn sonata drifts through a minimalist apartment that appears untouched by conflict, debt, sickness, or despair.

    As I read Hill’s essay, I kept thinking about the word infantilization.

    The solitude influencer increasingly functions like a pacifier for emotionally exhausted adults. Millions of viewers recalibrate their nervous systems through these carefully controlled simulations of peace and containment. Some no longer wish to engage fully with the real world. Others feel incapable of doing so. Still others may have quietly surrendered altogether.

    And this is where the phenomenon begins to feel genuinely troubling.

    I suspect there is something psychologically regressive about spending one’s days and nights watching solitary performers enact sanitized domestic rituals for passive spectators. At some point, watching people “play house” begins replacing the harder work of building a life oneself. The performance of adulthood slowly replaces adulthood itself.

    Because you can only simulate intimacy, routine, domesticity, and emotional safety for so long before you begin forgetting what genuine growth requires: risk, struggle, awkwardness, responsibility, sacrifice, and contact with real people whose existence cannot be muted, paused, skipped, unsubscribed from, or optimized into aesthetic tranquility.

    The solitude influencer offers peace without vulnerability, companionship without obligation, and emotional atmosphere without genuine human entanglement.

    And that may be precisely why so many people find it irresistible.

  • The Warrior Waiting Outside My Classroom

    The Warrior Waiting Outside My Classroom

    You can begin with the proposition that helping others is one of the few reliable antidotes to the degrading swamp of self-pity. Human beings are not designed to sit motionless inside their own grievances indefinitely. If you possess intelligence, talent, strength, or charisma, those gifts demand meaningful expression. They are not decorative features. They are forms of energy.

    That energy animates your being like electrical current running through a machine. It must move outward toward purpose, discipline, service, creation, or struggle. If it cannot find meaningful release, it turns inward and begins poisoning the person who contains it. The result is psychic rot: floundering, festering, curdling resentment, compulsive behavior, addiction, rage, nihilism, and self-consumption. The gifted person without purpose often becomes a danger to himself. He drinks greedily from the trough of self-pity until he sinks into a stagnant emotional mire.

    I have been thinking about this principle of repressed talent for the last month or so.

    When I walk to teach my classes at the college, I often pass a group of four young men gathered outside the classroom next to mine, waiting for their instructor to arrive. Among them is a young man I will call Lance. Even standing still, Lance commands attention with the gravitational pull of someone built for collision rather than passivity.

    He is in his mid-twenties, about six foot four, perhaps 230 pounds, heavily muscled and covered in tattoos. His blond hair is shaved close against his skull, emphasizing a sculpted jaw that looks almost mythic in proportion. Behind thick black-rimmed glasses are serious eyes carrying the alertness of a man who has spent years expecting conflict. Lance possesses the unmistakable physical presence of someone who could either lead men into battle or get thrown out of a casino at three in the morning for fighting three bouncers simultaneously.

    He told me he moved to California from Michigan after years of self-destruction that resulted in several felony convictions. He admitted openly that he struggles with aggression and anger. He appears to possess almost no tolerance for stupidity, dishonesty, or weakness. Yet despite the volatility simmering beneath the surface, he also projects unusual charisma and intelligence. He is studying business now and trying, in his own words, to “get his life together.”

    From my limited conversations with him, I suspect Lance possesses what I would call a Warrior Personality.

    Some people are psychologically constructed for intensity. They thrive on challenge, competition, danger, pressure, confrontation, and high-stakes environments that demand disciplined aggression. These individuals often deteriorate in passive, stagnant, emotionally neutered settings. They require struggle the way racehorses require motion. If they fail to find meaningful outlets for their intensity, the energy mutates into self-destruction.

    I can easily imagine Lance succeeding as an athlete, coach, entrepreneur, counselor, firefighter, or leader in some other high-pressure field requiring resilience and force of will. But I can equally imagine him drifting toward destruction if that energy remains undirected.

    What concerns me is what I would call Warrior Displacement Syndrome: a condition in which highly aggressive, competitive, high-intensity individuals fail to discover purposeful outlets for their temperament and therefore redirect those impulses toward addiction, criminality, rage, compulsive behavior, or nihilism. The warrior instinct, denied honorable expression, mutates into chaos.

    Modern society often misunderstands such people. We frequently pathologize intensity itself rather than helping channel it constructively. But strength without direction becomes volatile. A powerful temperament deprived of purpose becomes psychologically radioactive.

    Lance still has rough edges that he will likely need to soften as he adapts to adult life. Yet I suspect much of his struggle comes not from an excess of strength but from the absence of a worthy battlefield upon which to deploy it.

    There are two weeks left in the semester. If I see Lance outside my classroom again, I may tell him some version of what I have written here. Perhaps the idea of the Warrior Personality will resonate with him. Perhaps not.

    But increasingly I suspect that in another version of my life, I would not have become a college writing instructor at all.

    I would have become a counselor for lost men trying to redirect the dangerous energy burning inside them before it consumed them whole.

  • Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Since the COVID lockdown, most of my teaching has migrated online. Even now, roughly three-fourths of my courses remain in the digital realm, where students encounter me less as a flesh-and-blood professor pacing beneath fluorescent lights and more as a disembodied presence living inside Canvas announcements, discussion boards, and video lectures recorded in my home office.

    To my surprise, retention rates remain strong. That fact alone suggests online learning serves a real need for many students whose lives resemble logistical hostage situations involving jobs, childcare, commutes, aging parents, unstable work schedules, and economic exhaustion. For these students, online education is not a luxury. It is the only doorway left open.

    Still, online learning clearly is not for everyone.

    Today’s Los Angeles Times article, “‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education” by Adam Echelman, highlights several genuine problems now reshaping higher education.

    First, nearly 40 percent of community college classes are online, leaving many campuses eerily underpopulated. I see this myself every time I walk across campus beneath giant stretches of empty concrete where student traffic once resembled an airport terminal. Some days the college feels less like a thriving institution of learning and more like the abandoned set of a post-apocalyptic indie film where only the squirrels still believe enrollment is healthy.

    Second, online education is highly vulnerable to AI-assisted academic dishonesty. Entire assignments can now be outsourced to machines with frightening ease. Students who once copied homework from friends can now summon instant essays, summaries, reflections, and discussion-board responses generated in seconds by software that never sleeps and never complains about deadlines. Academic rigor has unquestionably been destabilized.

    Third, many students experience profound disorientation in online courses. They sit alone at glowing screens trying to decode unfamiliar interfaces, navigate modules, interpret assignment instructions, and manage deadlines without the immediate human structure of a physical classroom. Some students thrive in this environment. Others feel psychologically untethered, as though they have been dropped into an educational escape room with no map and unreliable Wi-Fi.

    All of these criticisms contain truth.

    But I still feel compelled to defend online education because face-to-face instruction creates its own formidable barriers that critics often romanticize away.

    Many students simply do not possess the time, transportation, money, childcare, emotional bandwidth, or scheduling flexibility necessary to attend traditional classes several times a week. Others suffer from social anxiety so severe that walking into a crowded classroom feels less like entering a learning environment and more like arriving for public execution. Some students experience the same confusion staring at a printed syllabus that others experience navigating Canvas. Confusion is not unique to online learning; it is part of learning itself.

    And AI has disrupted all education, not merely online education.

    The fantasy that we can restore some pristine pre-pandemic classroom paradise by dragging everyone back into physical seats ignores reality entirely. Face-to-face classes are also saturated with AI. Students use it in dorm rooms, libraries, cafeterias, parking lots, and sometimes while sitting directly in front of us pretending to take notes. The disruption is universal.

    We are living through a historical transition in which educators are desperately trying to preserve critical thinking, reading, writing, and job preparation while technological conditions mutate faster than institutional bureaucracy can respond. No one possesses perfect answers. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling nostalgia disguised as certainty.

    But I remain optimistic.

    Online teaching continues improving. Faculty are becoming more sophisticated in course design, communication, engagement strategies, video instruction, accessibility, and platform navigation. We are learning how to create clearer modules, more interactive coursework, better communication systems, and stronger student support structures. In many cases, students now receive the best aspects of both worlds: the flexibility of online access combined with increasingly refined teaching methods.

    And flexibility matters enormously.

    For many community college students, education is squeezed into the margins of adult survival. They complete assignments after ten-hour shifts, during lunch breaks, inside parked cars, while supervising children, or late at night after the household finally quiets down. Critics who romanticize the traditional campus experience often imagine eighteen-year-olds strolling across ivy-covered quads discussing philosophy beneath oak trees. Community college reality is far less cinematic. It involves exhaustion, economic pressure, and scheduling warfare.

    All of higher education is undergoing massive disruption simultaneously:

    • AI is transforming intellectual labor.
    • Student attention spans are changing.
    • Economic pressures are intensifying.
    • Online teaching technologies are improving.
    • Work and family demands are growing more brutal.

    Under these conditions, demanding a wholesale return to “the old ways” feels less like wisdom and more like denial.

    The old world is not coming back.

    That does not mean standards should collapse or that online learning is automatically superior. It means education must evolve alongside the lives students actually live rather than the lives institutions nostalgically wish they still lived.

    Online education will continue improving because necessity drives innovation with ruthless efficiency. Likewise, our understanding of how to create meaningful, rigorous, and humane education in the AI Age will continue evolving. We are not witnessing the death of learning. We are witnessing the painful reconstruction of it.

    The task now is not retreat. It is adaptation.

    It is time to move forward rather than cling romantically to a vanished academic world that technology, economics, and history have already left behind.

  • Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

    At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

    To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

    The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

    I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

    But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

    I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

    And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

    They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

    But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

    I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

    Except reality rarely behaves this way.

    Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

    Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

    As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

    But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

    That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

    Career.
    Status.
    Achievement.
    Recognition.
    Fame.
    Productivity.

    We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

    What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

    Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

    Perhaps that has to be enough.

  • Learning to Speak Rich

    Learning to Speak Rich

    Known publicly as bell hooks in honor of her grandmother, hooks explores in her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” a deeply conflicted relationship with education, class mobility, race, and selfhood. Her story is not a simple celebration of academic success. It is the story of a woman who discovers that entering elite educational spaces often demands a painful reshaping—even partial erasure—of the self.

    hooks describes growing up in a deeply religious working-class black family defined by economic scarcity and moral restraint. Her parents taught her not to expect luxury, comfort, or indulgence. Desire itself carried a faint odor of danger and shame. Material appetites were viewed not as healthy ambitions but as temptations capable of corrupting the soul. As a result, hooks explains that she learned “the art of sublimation and repression,” training herself to suppress wants, ambitions, and emotional needs in the name of survival and moral discipline.

    When she entered college close to home, she found herself stranded in an overwhelmingly white social environment populated by affluent young women whose values seemed completely foreign to her own. Many of these students treated her with ridicule, cruelty, and casual contempt. hooks describes them almost as alien life forms—young women so economically secure and psychologically entitled that they moved through the world with complete confidence in their own importance. They expressed their desires openly and unapologetically, behaving as though comfort, pleasure, beauty, and success were their birthrights.

    To the young hooks, raised in a culture of modesty and self-denial, this behavior was shocking. She associated upper-class aspiration with vanity, ostentation, envy, and cruelty. Yet she also recognized that these women possessed a kind of social confidence unavailable to her own world of repression and apology. Their existence revealed how class shapes not only material conditions but body language, speech, appetite, ambition, and assumptions about one’s place in the world.

    Not all of the white students fit this mold. hooks found friendship with several women from modest economic backgrounds who shared her skepticism toward vanity and excess. These relationships gave her temporary relief from the alienation surrounding her.

    Still miserable at the college, hooks encountered an English professor educated at Stanford University who encouraged her to leave and attend Stanford instead. Her parents reacted with terror. To them, California represented a modern Babylon where humility dissolved into narcissism, vanity, materialism, and sinful desire. Yet hooks could not imagine remaining at the all-white college. Stanford at least offered the possibility of intellectual and racial community, so she persuaded her parents to let her go west.

    Stanford overwhelmed her senses immediately. The campus radiated wealth, ambition, appetite, and institutional power. The architecture itself seemed to proclaim that greatness—especially economic greatness—was the natural destiny of those who studied there. hooks realized quickly that elite universities do not merely educate students academically; they train them socially and psychologically for membership within elite classes. Networking, status management, and the performance of confidence were woven into the institution’s culture as thoroughly as lectures and exams.

    The message Stanford communicated was unmistakable: if you were already wealthy, your job was to become even wealthier and more powerful. If you were poor, your task was to abandon the habits, assumptions, insecurities, and cultural signals associated with poverty and remake yourself in the image of the elite.

    Although hooks found less overt racism at Stanford, she encountered something she found equally disturbing: unapologetic class contempt. Wealthy students and professors openly mocked and dismissed working-class people. She recalls hearing students speak about poorer Americans with startling derision, as though poverty itself reflected stupidity, vulgarity, or moral failure.

    Most shocking to hooks was discovering that this elitism extended into segments of the black intellectual community as well. She describes encountering members of the “black diaspora” who displayed the same contempt toward the poor and working class that she had seen among affluent whites. Poverty was treated not merely as an economic condition but as a psychological defect requiring correction and purification. hooks realized that race alone did not guarantee solidarity; class divisions fractured black communities from within.

    Over time, hooks came to believe that academic success for poor students often requires a painful form of self-renunciation. To become educated within elite institutions meant learning new codes of speech, dress, posture, behavior, and intellectual performance. One had to absorb the language and cultural signals of the privileged classes while distancing oneself from working-class origins. In effect, students from poorer backgrounds often succeed only by engaging in a kind of controlled self-erasure.

    Education, then, becomes morally complicated. It is not simply enlightenment or liberation. It is also performance. Mimicry. Adaptation. Sycophancy. Reinvention.

    By the time hooks earned her doctorate and became a professor herself, she felt not uncomplicated pride but deep ambivalence. She had entered the world of privilege while remaining emotionally loyal to the working-class culture that shaped her identity. She occupied elite academic spaces while refusing to sever her connection to the people and values from which she came.

    I have had the privilege of teaching hooks’ essays to college students since the 1980s—across five different decades of teaching. Of all her works, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” remains my favorite because it exposes the emotional and psychological costs hidden beneath the mythology of higher education.

    Next semester, I plan to assign an essay asking students to evaluate the claim that hooks ultimately portrays higher education as a process requiring painful self-transformation. According to this interpretation, success in college often demands that students distance themselves from their past, imitate the language and cultural behaviors of professors and elites, and absorb the social signals associated with wealth and status. Education therefore becomes not merely intellectual growth, but a complicated mixture of genuine learning, shame, performance, ambition, self-betrayal, and social reinvention.

    Here is the 1,000-word argumentative essay prompt:

    In her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” bell hooks presents higher education not simply as a path toward knowledge and liberation, but as a psychologically painful process of social transformation. As a working-class black woman moving through predominantly white and elite educational spaces, hooks experiences education as both empowering and alienating. She discovers that academic success often requires students from poorer or marginalized backgrounds to adopt new forms of speech, dress, behavior, ambition, and self-presentation associated with wealth and class privilege. At times, this transformation feels less like intellectual growth and more like self-erasure.

    hooks argues that elite colleges and universities do more than teach information. They also train students to perform class identity. Students learn not only what to think, but how to speak, dress, network, express ambition, suppress insecurity, and project confidence in ways that signal belonging within elite professional culture. For hooks, the process becomes morally complicated because upward mobility often demands distance from one’s family, working-class roots, cultural identity, or former self. Success may require what hooks describes as forms of repression, performance, mimicry, and reinvention.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you evaluate the following claim:

    To become successful and “educated” within elite academic culture, students from working-class or marginalized backgrounds often feel pressure to reinvent themselves by adopting the language, behaviors, attitudes, and social codes of the privileged classes, even when doing so creates feelings of shame, alienation, self-betrayal, or disconnection from their past.

    In your essay, analyze how hooks portrays education as both liberating and psychologically costly. To what extent do you agree with her argument? Does higher education genuinely expand human freedom and opportunity, or does it pressure students into performing a new identity in order to gain acceptance and success? Is adapting to elite academic culture a necessary form of growth and professional development, or does it require students to abandon important parts of themselves?

    As you develop your argument, you may consider some of the following questions:

    • How do class, race, and economic background shape a student’s experience in college?
    • What social “codes” do elite universities teach beyond academics?
    • Is there a difference between education and social performance?
    • Does professional success require conformity?
    • Can students remain loyal to their working-class roots while entering elite institutions?
    • Does higher education reward authenticity or performance?
    • Is self-reinvention a healthy form of growth or a form of self-betrayal?
    • How do speech, clothing, confidence, networking, and cultural tastes function as markers of class?
    • Are elite universities spaces of liberation, assimilation, or both?

    You may use personal observations, contemporary examples, films, books, interviews, or other sources to support your argument. Possible connections could include social media culture, networking culture, corporate professionalism, influencer culture, first-generation college experiences, code-switching, or the pressure to cultivate a “successful” personal brand.

    Requirements:

    • Clear argumentative thesis
    • At least three mapping components in the thesis
    • Counterargument and rebuttal
    • Specific references to hooks’ essay
    • MLA format
    • Approximately 1,000 words

    Your goal is not merely to summarize hooks’ experiences, but to evaluate the larger argument her essay makes about education, class mobility, identity, and the hidden emotional costs of social advancement.