Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Before the Internet turned my brain into a beige slush of browser tabs and dopamine spikes, I used to read like a man possessed. In the early ’90s, I’d lounge by the pool of my Southern California apartment, sun-blasted and half-glossed with SPF 8, reading books with a kind of sacred monastic intensity. A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s rant against the therapy-industrial complex–We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Sometimes I’d interrupt the intellectual ecstasy to spritz my freshly tanned abs with water—because I was still vain, just literate.

    Reading back then was as natural as breathing. As Joshua Rothman points out in his New Yorker essay, “What’s Happening to Reading?”, there was a time when the written word was not merely consumed—it was inhaled. Books were companions. Anchors. Entire weekends were structured around chapters. But now? Reading is another tab, sandwiched between the news, a TikTok video of a dog on a skateboard, and an unopened Instacart order.

    Rothman nails the diagnosis. Reading used to be linear, immersive, and embodied—your hands on a book, your mind in a world. Now we shuttle between eBooks, PDFs, Reddit threads, and Kindle highlights like neurotic bees skimming data nectar. A “reading session” might include swiping through 200-word essays while eating a Hot Pocket and half-watching a documentary about narco penguins on Netflix. Our attention is fractured, our engagement ritualized but hollow. And yes, the statistics back it up: the percentage of Americans who read at least one book a year dropped from 55% to 48%. Not a cliff, but a slow, sad slide.

    Some argue it’s not worth panicking over—a mere 7% drop. I disagree. As a college instructor, I’ve seen the change up close. Students don’t read long-form books anymore. Assign Frederick Douglass and half the class will disappear into thin air—or worse, generate AI versions of Douglass quotes that never existed. Assign a “safe” book and they might skim the Wikipedia entry. We’ve entered an age where the bar for literacy is whether someone has read more than one captioned infographic per week.

    Rothman tries to be diplomatic. He argues that we’re not consuming less—we’re just consuming differently. Podcasts, YouTube explainers, TikTok essayists—this is the new literacy. And fine. I live in that world, too. I mainline political podcasts like they’re anti-anxiety meds. Most books, especially in the nonfiction space, do feel like padded TED Talks that should have stayed 4,000 words long. The first chapter dazzles; the next nine are a remix of the thesis until you feel gaslit into thinking you’re the problem.

    But now the reading apocalypse has a new beast in the basement: AI.

    We’ve entered the uncanny phase where the reader might be an algorithm, the author might be synthetic, and the glowing recommendation comes not from your friend but from a language model tuned to your neuroses. AI is now both the reader and the reviewer, compressing thousand-page tomes into bullet points so we can decide whether to fake-read them for a book club we no longer attend.

    Picture this: you’re a podcaster interviewing the author of a 600-page brick of a book. You’ve read the first 20 pages, tops. You ask your AI: “Give me a 5-page summary and 10 questions that make me sound like a tortured genius.” Boom—you’re suddenly a better interviewer than if you’d actually read the book. AI becomes your memory, your ghostwriter, your stand-in intelligence. And with every assist, your own reading muscles atrophy. You become fit only for blurbs and bar graphs.

    Or take this scenario: you’re a novelist. You’ve published 12 books. Eleven flopped. One became a cult hit. Your publisher, desperate for cash, wants six sequels. AI can generate them faster, better, and without your creative hand-wringing. You’re offered $5 million. Do you let the machine ghostwrite your legacy, or do you die on the sword of authenticity? Before you answer, consider how often we already outsource our thinking to tools. Consider how often you’ve read about a book rather than the book itself.

    Even the notion of a “writer” is dissolving. When I was in writing classes, names like Updike, Oates, Carver, and Roth loomed large—literary athletes who brawled on live television and feuded in magazines. Writers were gladiators of thought. Now they’re functionally obsolete in the eyes of the market, replaced by a system that values speed, virality, and AI-optimized titles.

    Soon, we won’t pick books. AI will pick them for us. It will scan our history, cross-reference our moods, and deliver pre-chewed summaries tailored to our emotional allergies. It will tell us what to read, what to think about it, and which hot takes to regurgitate over brunch. We’ll become readers in name only—participants in a kind of literary cosplay, where the act of reading is performed but never truly inhabited.

    Rothman’s essay is elegant, insightful, and wrong in one key respect: it shouldn’t be titled What’s Happening to Reading? It should be called What’s Happening to Reading, Writing, and the Human Mind? Because the page is still there—but the reader might not be.

  • How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    Yesterday I filmed a 26-minute YouTube video on my main channel—ostensibly about watches. That was the bait. But somewhere between adjusting my camera and admiring my newly lean frame (twenty pounds down since April, thank you very much), I realized I wasn’t really talking about watches at all. I was talking about aging, restraint, identity, and how not to let your inner teenager run the damn show.

    The video was titled something like “My Four Watch Goals at Sixty-Four,” which sounds practical until you realize that my goals weren’t horological—they were existential. The first one? Stop being so maudlin. I actually said the word, spelled it out like a substitute teacher on a caffeine bender, and gave a definition. Maudlin: emotional excess masquerading as depth, the adolescent urge to turn life into performance art just so you can feel something.

    To illustrate, I offered up a formative trauma: being sixteen, watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, and weeping—actually weeping—when he transformed into Lou Ferrigno’s green rage monster. It wasn’t just TV. It was catharsis. I was an Olympic weightlifter-slash-bodybuilder-slash-piano prodigy who didn’t know what to do with all the emotion I’d stuffed under my pecs and sonatas. Watching Bixby morph into a snarling demigod gave me permission to feel. In my forties, I channeled that same melodrama into wearing oversized diver watches—big, bold, and absurdly heroic, as if my wrist were auditioning for a Marvel reboot. That, too, was maudlin cosplay. Now I’m trying something radical: maturity.

    Goal two? Quit being an enabler. I admitted that, like it or not, I’m an influencer. I don’t collect in a vacuum. Every time I flex a new piece, it’s like handing out free permission slips to fellow addicts. So I’ve decided to use my powers for good—or at least for moderation.

    Goal three: Stay fit, get bloodwork, be a warrior in plain clothes. The watch isn’t the main course. It’s the garnish. If I’m going to wear something worth noticing, I should have the body and the biomarkers to back it up. Otherwise, I’m just a gilded potato.

    And finally, goal four: Minimalist watch heroes. The quiet monks of the community who own one to three watches and seem perfectly content. They’re my North Stars. They aren’t buying watches out of panic, nostalgia, or identity crises—they’re grounded, self-possessed, wise. I envy them. I aspire to be one of them. I’m not there yet, but I’m squinting in their direction.

    Honestly, I assumed the video would tank. My viewers tend to want horological eye-candy, not existential reflection wrapped in fitness updates. But to my surprise, the response was overwhelming—close to a thousand views on day one, dozens of comments. People thanked me. Some said they were booking doctor appointments. Others said they were starting diets. I’m fourteen years into making YouTube videos, and this might be the one I’m proudest of.

    Because the truth is, most watch YouTubers are just dressing up emotional poverty in brushed stainless steel. They get maudlin about bezels and bracelets, desperate to out-hype each other in a gaudy attention economy. It’s exhausting. What people really want—what they’re starving for—is someone speaking like a human being. No curation. No affectation.

    I ended my video with a confession: I’m still that sixteen-year-old kid. And if you cue up The Lonely Man theme from The Incredible Hulk, the one where David Banner walks down the rainy sidewalk in soft focus, I will—without shame—start crying. Again. Because some emotions don’t age. They just find quieter places to hide.

  • Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Watching a David Attenborough documentary feels less like casual viewing and more like sliding into the pew for the Church of Planet Earth. The man’s diction alone could resurrect the dead—each syllable polished, each pause wielded like a scalpel—while he preaches an all-natural gospel: paradise isn’t some vaporous hereafter; it’s right here, pulsing under our sneakers. And we, the congregation of carbon footprints, are the sinners. We bulldoze forests, mainline fossil fuels, and still have the gall to call ourselves stewards. His sermons don’t merely entertain; they indict. Ten minutes in and I’m itching to mulch my own receipts and swear off cheeseburgers for life.

    I’ve basked in Attenborough’s velvet reprimands for decades, often drifting into a blissful half-sleep as he murmurs about the “delicate balance of nature” and the tender devotion of a mother panda—as soothing as chamomile tea and twice as guilt-inducing. His newest homily, Ocean on Hulu, finds the maestro wide-eyed as ever, a silver-haired Burl Ives guiding us through Rudolph’s wilderness—only this time the Abominable Snowman is industrial bottom trawling. Picture a gargantuan steel mouth dragging across the seabed, gulping everything in its path. Rays flutter, fish scatter, and then—slam—the net’s iron curtain drops. Most of the hapless catch is unceremoniously dumped, lifeless, back into the brine.

    The footage left me queasy, a queasiness only partly soothed by Attenborough’s grandfatherly timbre. I’ve already been flirting with a plant-forward diet; Ocean shoved me into a full-blown breakup with seafood. Good luck unseeing hundreds of doomed creatures funneled into a floating abattoir while an octogenarian sage explains—as gently as one can—that we’re devouring our own Eden.

    So yes, I’ll skip the shrimp cocktail, thanks. My conscience already has acid reflux.

  • A Missed Opportunity for Nicolas Cage in The Surfer

    A Missed Opportunity for Nicolas Cage in The Surfer

    Yesterday, I subjected myself to The Surfer (2025), a cinematic hallucination starring Nicolas Cage, filmed somewhere in a fictional Luna Bay, Australia—or at least in a version of coastal Australia designed to feel like a fever dream. Cage plays a middle-aged man who seems to believe he lives inside a Lexus commercial and is some kind of real estate baron returning to reclaim the beachfront childhood home that slipped through his fingers decades ago. A house that, in his mind, will grant him redemption, absolution, and perhaps a complimentary cappuccino.

    Here’s the twist: he’s almost certainly homeless and entirely unhinged.

    The local surfing gang—shirtless nihilists who act like they’re in a meth-fueled remake of Lord of the Flies—perform what can only be described as satanic hazing rituals and torment Cage’s character with such sadistic flair that one wonders if they were cast straight from a skate park exorcism.

    The whole production gave me flashbacks to the art house theaters I frequented in Berkeley in the early ’80s. It has the self-important weirdness of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (a film I admired in theory and loathed in practice), but desperately wishes it had the quiet transcendence of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, a true masterpiece. Alas, The Surfer is neither.

    Once it becomes clear—about twenty minutes in—that Cage’s character is a delusional man harassing beachgoers, the rest of the film becomes a masochistic ritual for the viewer: 80 long minutes of escalating humiliations. He’s mocked by surfers, snubbed by a barista, rejected by a dog-walking woman, and disdained by a real estate agent with the warmth of a lizard in escrow. Each scene checks off another indignity in a cinematic punishment parade.

    And yet, somewhere in this wreckage is the seed of a decent story. Imagine this: Cage plays a sane, if eccentric, man with a legitimate past beef with the local surf gang. The setting becomes a character in itself. The plot thickens into a psychological turf war. Give it ten episodes and some competent writers, and you’d have a fascinating limited series. But no—The Surfer opts for a half-baked film that commits the worst artistic sin: not provocation, but tedium.

    This movie didn’t just reaffirm my bias against most modern films—it fortified it. This is why I stick to television. At least TV has the decency to pretend it respects my time.

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.

  • I Don’t Want the Safest Seat—I Want Off the Plane

    I Don’t Want the Safest Seat—I Want Off the Plane

    This morning, The New York Times ran an article titled: “Is There a Safest Seat in a Plane Crash? We Asked Experts.” I didn’t read it. Why? Because if I’m contemplating crash logistics before boarding, I’m not flying—I’m staying home and Googling Amtrak timetables like a rational coward.

    I have a strict policy: I don’t waste cognitive energy calculating the least horrific outcome in a scenario that is, by definition, a screaming plunge into chaos. I don’t want the “least bad” seat on a falling aircraft. I want not to be on the damn aircraft.

    Apply this logic elsewhere: If there’s a tropical fruit called the Toxo-Berry, whose flavor profile is “forbidden Skittles laced with liver failure,” I’m not reading “Which Toxo-Berry Is Least Likely to Kill You? We Asked Experts.” I’m steering clear of the entire genus.

    Same goes for towns with names like Podunk, which sound like the setting of a Stephen King novella and have crime rates that make war zones look stable. No, I will not be reading “Is There a Relatively Safe Neighborhood in Podunk?” The answer is always no. The safest place in Podunk is the exit.

    These articles aren’t journalism—they’re anxiety bait. Click-candy wrapped in pseudoscientific wrappings, meant to stoke your adrenal glands until you’re too twitchy to remember that real journalism is supposed to illuminate, not induce heart palpitations. I read newspapers to think better, not to panic dumber.

  • The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    Last night, I dreamed I worked at a surreal hybrid of a college campus and an amusement park—the kind of place where tenured professors could file paperwork in one building and ride a log flume in another. Picture syllabus deadlines and cotton candy coexisting. Naturally, I was late for both.

    Meanwhile, several miles away in my old neighborhood, Marcus, a childhood friend, decided he’d had enough of modern civilization. His exit wasn’t dramatic—no manifesto, no angry blog post—just a quiet pilgrimage beginning in front of my house. The weather was unreasonably perfect. Sunlight filtered through air that smelled like rose petals and eternal spring. Think Garden of Eden meets Orange County real estate brochure.

    So why would Marcus leave paradise? We didn’t know. But my neighbors and I were offended by the sheer moral audacity of it. His journey felt like a judgment—like he’d stared into the hollow eyes of our HOA and whispered, “You people are dead inside.” Naturally, we chased him. Not to stop him, but to prove we were decent people too. We jogged after him, waving metaphysical CVs and shouting, “We recycle! We make our own salad dressing!”

    But Marcus was too far ahead. By the time I arrived at the college-amusement park, he was gone. I retreated to my professor’s office to catch up on what dreams insist professors do: paperwork. That’s when Mike arrived—a former student, Navy SEAL, and time-traveling spirit guide from the 1990s. He led me to a house in Buena Park, once his father’s, now transfigured by dream logic into a mansion of staggering beauty, where I apparently lived a life of joy and ease in another dimension. It was, quite simply, the life I never knew I had but now mourned like a phantom limb. I was flooded with regret. Why did I leave that parallel mansion where I was whole, radiant, and probably never had to grade a single freshman essay?

    Then the sun set, and—as dreams do—I stopped being a professor and morphed into some kind of blue-collar rig worker, one of four men hauling cargo across the freeways of this theme park universe. At breakneck speed, we clung to the roof of a truck, flying over the 5 freeway like a band of deluded daredevils. I alone had the courage (or sanity) to question this arrangement. “You know,” I said, wind slapping my face, “we don’t have to die tonight. There’s an interior cabin. With seats.”

    At first, they mocked me—because apparently, dreamland logic still includes workplace hazing—but eventually, they gave in. We climbed down into the safety of the rig, like cowards, or people who enjoy not being flung across asphalt.

    As I relaxed, I thought once more about that mansion in Buena Park, that shadow life where I wasn’t trying to prove my worth or cling to cargo. A life of belonging, not striving. Then I woke up, ate a bowl of buckwheat groats, drank my Sumatra coffee, and wondered what it all meant.

  • Muhammad Ali and the Rent We Pay for Heaven

    Muhammad Ali and the Rent We Pay for Heaven

    During the chaos of finals week—when my inbox floods with apologetic, last-ditch emails from students begging for an extended deadline—I found solace in something far removed from academia: Antoine Fuqua’s What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali. It’s a two-part documentary, but it feels more like a sermon and a love letter rolled into one. Like Fuqua, I’ve always had a boundless reverence for Ali—the most charismatic athlete to ever live—and watching him slowly succumb to Parkinson’s at just forty-two broke something in me.

    There’s a word for the dark thrill we sometimes feel when others suffer: schadenfreude. But what’s the opposite of that word–the anguish we feel when our heroes fall? When they suffer with such dignity and pride that they won’t accept our sympathy, even though they deserve every ounce of it? We don’t just mourn them—we mourn the version of ourselves that believed they were untouchable. Seeing Ali’s mind remain sharp, his wit flickering through that neurological prison, was unbearable and beautiful all at once.

    In his prime, Ali wasn’t just a boxer—he was a superhero, a shapeshifter, a one-man Broadway show in a heavyweight’s body. He was a sharp observer of American racism, yet never a scold. He wielded humor like a blade—cutting through injustice with charm and rhythm. His facial expressions alone could dismantle a room. And above all, he had soul. He was a poet, an actor, a preacher, and a provocateur.

    His conversion to Islam was not cosmetic. It reshaped him. He carried a sense of divine accountability, speaking of God not as abstraction but as a constant, watchful presence. He lived with the weight of eternity in mind, casually discussing the soul as if he’d already made peace with his fate. One of the final moments in the documentary captures this perfectly: Ali scribbles a note to a fan asking for an autograph—“Service to others is the rent we pay for our room in HEAVEN.” The line made me stop in my tracks and pray that I could live such a life rather than momentarily be inspired by it or tell others about it, because I know from experience that “talk is cheap.”

    The film doesn’t critique Ali—and truthfully, I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want the version of him that stayed too long in the ring. I didn’t want to watch his brilliance dimmed by punches that should’ve stopped years earlier. I found myself irrationally angry with him. I wanted him to become an actor, a comedian, a talk show philosopher—anything but a late-career boxer whose brilliance was traded for one more round. But of course, I’m lying to myself.

    We place athletes like Ali in the realm of myth. They are our Achilles, our Hercules. His greatness was inseparable from the ring. The same inner fire that made him a champion refused to let him leave the stage quietly. That fire gave us the epic—and, inevitably, the tragedy. I only wish that the spiritual clarity that shaped his faith could have overruled the gladiator in him. But maybe that’s the final paradox of Ali: he lived as both prophet and warrior, and the cost of greatness was always going to be high.