Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Performance Anxiety: The Liver King and Joan, Both Awful in Their Own Way

    Performance Anxiety: The Liver King and Joan, Both Awful in Their Own Way

    The Liver King and Joan from Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” walk into the same existential trap, only one is greased in raw liver and the other in algorithmic despair. Both become victims of their own performance, trapped in personas crafted for mass consumption. One flexes in loincloths to sell ancestral supplements, the other finds her life commodified by a streaming service that turns her every ethical failure into entertainment. What they share is the slow, public realization that the self they’ve been performing isn’t just unsustainable—it’s a lie with consequences.

    The Liver King, with veins like tree roots and an ego to match, built his brand on being the living embodiment of primal masculinity. Turns out, his liver was natural, but his abs were not. When the steroid truth came out, so did the emptiness behind the brand: a man so addicted to being a character that he forgot how to be a person. Similarly, Joan discovers she is both the protagonist and product of a Netflix-style show that mirrors her life in real time. Her public image becomes so divorced from her private self that the two are no longer distinguishable. In both cases, performance replaces identity—and eventually consumes it.

    Both characters suffer a mental breakdown not because they’ve failed, but because they’ve succeeded—at becoming the thing they thought the world wanted. The Liver King was adored until he wasn’t, and Joan was forgettable until she became a meme of moral failure. The irony is brutal: success, for them, is the trapdoor. Their audiences don’t want authenticity—they want a spectacle, a scapegoat, someone to mock or idolize, preferably both at once. And when the curtain is pulled back, the applause turns to outrage.

    There’s also the matter of control—or rather, the delusion of it. The Liver King believed he could manipulate his public image through primal storytelling and ab workouts. Joan believed she had autonomy until she saw Salma Hayek’s CGI avatar doing unspeakable things in her name. Both lose control of their narratives, and the horror isn’t just public shame—it’s the recognition that their true selves have been outsourced, packaged, and sold. They become strangers to their own lives.

    In the end, the Liver King and Joan are case studies in performative collapse. They remind us that the pursuit of a curated, amplified self—whether through steroids or streaming—leads not to greatness but to existential whiplash. When you spend your life trying to be a brand, don’t be surprised when you’re treated like a product: disposable, replaceable, and, eventually, outdated. Joan may be awful, and the Liver King may be absurd, but their breakdowns are brutally, unmistakably human.

  • The Maudlin Man: On Watches, Social Media, and the Narcissism of Meaningless Eagerness

    The Maudlin Man: On Watches, Social Media, and the Narcissism of Meaningless Eagerness

    There is no sound more pathetic than the cry of the maudlin man—the self-appointed tragic hero of his own YouTube channel, sobbing between cuts of B-roll footage of his watch collection, mistaking emotional leakage for authenticity. He clutches his diver watches like talismans, convinced that the right lume or bezel action will finally make him whole. But his affliction is deeper than poor taste or consumer excess. He is in love with his own sorrow. And worse, he films it.

    Cicero had a word for this spectacle: maudlin. It was not meant kindly. The maudlin man is drunk on his own emotional silliness, addicted to contrived drama, and tragically proud of his displays of overstated sorrow and giddy exuberance. In his pursuit of happiness, he has mistaken cheap feeling for moral virtue, dopamine for character, sentiment for wisdom. He is not mature. He is a teenager with a $5,000 Tudor.

    The watch hobby, for all its mechanical beauty and aesthetic value, has become a theater of narcissistic self-performance. The YouTube wrist-roll has replaced the confessional. The thumbnail becomes the new sacred icon: face frozen mid-epiphany, a timepiece held up like a religious relic. Each upload, each gushing review, is a digital Rolex—plucked, examined, and consumed with trembling fingers and tears in the eyes. The tragedy is not that the watch community is ridiculous (though it often is), but that it has devolved into a factory of performative adolescence.

    It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the pursuit of happiness, as Jeffrey Rosen in The Pursuit of Happiness reminds us, meant the cultivation of moral character. Rosen draws from Franklin, Jefferson, and ultimately Cicero, who taught that happiness came not from pleasure but from the tranquil soul: one unbothered by fear, ambition, or maudlin eagerness. The watch obsessive is none of these things. His soul is rattled, consumed by longing, shaken by regret. He mistakes every new acquisition for a cure, every unboxing for a rebirth. But he is not reborn. He is merely re-dramatizing the same pathology.

    Enter the maudlin man, the inner saboteur. He mocks, he sneers, and he tells the truth: that the maudlin man has no real restraint. That his self-recrimination is as performative as his self-praise. The maudlin man is cruel. He exaggerates the regret that comes from flipping watches like penny stocks; the hollow boast of self-control while our eBay watchlist grows longer by the hour; the dopamine crashes masked by overproduced videos and fake enthusiasm. We are not collectors. We are addicts with ring lights.

    To be addicted to the watch hobby is to be afflicted with a thousand tiny regrets. We regret what we bought, what we sold, what we didn’t buy fast enough. We suffer from wrist rotation anxiety, Holy Grail delusions, false panic, and the creeping horror that we are just men who talk too much about case diameter. Our collections become mausoleums of past mistakes. We are haunted, not healed.

    The only cure—if one exists—is a form of philosophical sobriety. Cicero called it temperance. Franklin called it moral perfection. Phil Stutz calls it staying out of the lower channel. It is the refusal to feed the drama. It is the decision not to narrate your regret as if it were wisdom. It is stepping back, stepping away, and recognizing that sometimes, the most radical act of self-possession is to stop filming.

    This maudlin sickness isn’t limited to the horological hellscape. Social media itself is a dopamine machine engineered to keep us emotionally drunk. We live in a world of curated personas, algorithmic affirmation, and the self-cannibalizing loop of outrage and euphoria. As Kara Swisher notes in Burn Book, the tech elite have weaponized this environment for profit, fueling sociopathy with likes and retweets. They are not gods. They are billionaires who behave like wounded teenagers in private jets.

    It is not a coincidence that the watch obsessive and the tech mogul share the same pathology: a hunger for affirmation masquerading as taste. They are the same creature, only one wears a G-Shock and the other a Richard Mille. Both are drunk on maudlin emotion. Both mistake attention for meaning.

    What, then, is the alternative? It is to shut off the camera. To read. To walk. To live a life not curated but inhabited. To pursue virtue, not validation. To wear one watch and be content. To see, finally, that maudlin self-display is not depth, but decadence.

    So here is the diagnosis, bitter but true: The maudlin man must die. Not literally, but spiritually. He must be silenced so the adult may speak. He must be buried so the man of character can rise. He must be mocked, dissected, exposed, and ultimately exorcised.

    Only then, perhaps, will we stop crying over something as silly as the regret of sold watches we can never get back.

    And maybe—just maybe—stop filming them.

  • Streaming Ourselves to Death: Black Mirror’s Guide to Digital Self-Destruction: Comparing “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” to “Joan Is Awful”

    Streaming Ourselves to Death: Black Mirror’s Guide to Digital Self-Destruction: Comparing “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” to “Joan Is Awful”

    Sample Thesis Statement:
     In both “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” and “Joan Is Awful,” Black Mirror delivers a two-pronged assault on algorithmic tyranny and digital self-annihilation, revealing how tech billionaires convert human identity into cheap, clickable content. Ashley O is drugged and dollified into pop-star merchandise, while Joan is flattened into meme fodder for slack-jawed voyeurs on Streamberry—but both women are trapped in the same soul-crushing system. These episodes expose the delusions we sell ourselves to survive in digital captivity: Ashley believes she’s empowering fans with upbeat anthems; Joan thinks she’s a decent person navigating modern life. Both are wrong. In their pursuit of relevance and convenience, they surrender agency, narrative control, and even reality itself. What emerges is not connection or empowerment, but sedation, surveillance, and spiritual decay. Black Mirror doesn’t just critique technology—it screams from inside the machine, warning us that if we don’t resist the limiter, we’ll be reduced to content, chewed up and streamed.

    9-Paragraph Outline:

    1. Introduction: Welcome to the Content Farm
     Set the tone with a satirical overview of the modern digital landscape—where dopamine is currency, identity is branding, and everyone is one click away from becoming a hollow avatar. Introduce the two episodes as complementary case studies in algorithmic exploitation.

    2. The Algorithm as Warden: Sedation in Both Episodes
     Compare how both Joan and Ashley are sedated—Ashley literally, with pharmaceuticals and PR micromanagement; Joan metaphorically, with sleek tech interfaces and passive user agreements. In both cases, the algorithm serves as the controlling force, silencing resistance and flattening complexity.

    3. Fame Without Self: Parasocial Hellscapes
     Explore the twisted nature of fame in each story. Joan becomes the star of her own humiliation, while Ashley is transformed into a smiling bot. Both are consumed by audiences who offer attention without empathy—voyeurs feeding on curated suffering.

    4. From Individual to Product: Identity as IP
     Analyze how both characters are commodified: Joan’s life becomes serialized misery, Ashley’s brain becomes intellectual property. Identity is no longer something you are, but something you license. In both cases, human interiority is collateral damage.

    5. The Illusion of Control: False Narratives and Self-Delusion
     Dive into the self-deceptions each woman clings to: Joan’s belief that she’s a decent person with nothing to hide, and Ashley’s idea that she’s empowering fans. Black Mirror plays these delusions against the brutal clarity of algorithmic truth, which cares nothing for intention—only data.

    6. Digital Convenience as Spiritual Rot
     Zoom in on the danger of passive tech adoption. Both women embrace convenience—Joan with Streamberry’s EULA click, Ashley with her compliance to branding—but convenience becomes complicity. These episodes indict us all for trading privacy and agency for frictionless digital life.

    7. Vaulted Dreams and Caged Souls
     Explore the imagery of confinement: Ashley’s hidden songs and real voice locked away, Joan’s authentic self buried under a performative persona. Both characters are imprisoned not by force, but by systems they enabled and internalized.

    8. Breaking the Limiter: Brief Flickers of Resistance
     Describe the moments when Joan and Ashley attempt to fight back—Ashley’s rock performance, Joan’s confrontation with the simulation. These acts are cathartic but fleeting, raising the question of whether resistance is even possible when the system owns the stage, the script, and the camera.

    9. Conclusion: Smash the Mirror Before It Streams You
     Reinforce the episodes’ collective message: we’re not spectators—we’re participants in our own reduction. The only way out is radical self-awareness and refusal. These aren’t just stories about fictional characters—they’re early obituaries for anyone who fails to reclaim their voice from the algorithm.

  • Pop Star in a Coma: The Algorithm Is Lip-Syncing Your Soul: Sample Thesis and Outline for Black Mirror’s “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”

    Pop Star in a Coma: The Algorithm Is Lip-Syncing Your Soul: Sample Thesis and Outline for Black Mirror’s “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”

    Sample Thesis Statement:
     “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” rips the pink wig off the pop-culture-industrial complex to expose a dystopia where tech billionaires run a human soul mill. It’s not just Ashley O who’s drugged, duped, and locked in a digital dollhouse—it’s all of us, caught in the ghoulish grip of algorithm-driven content that flatters the lowest common denominator. This is not entertainment; it’s sedation. The episode shows how our creativity is strip-mined, our personas flattened into merchandise, and our deepest doubts and desires locked in corporate vaults for being too inconvenient. In the end, the message is clear: unless we smash the limiter, we’ll live and die as Ashley O—cutesy, compliant, and spiritually comatose.

    Outline (9 Paragraphs):

    1. Introduction: Welcome to the Cuteness Gulag
     Set the stage with a darkly humorous description of Ashley O’s squeaky-clean image as a smiling hostage, complete with robotic merch and saccharine lyrics. Introduce the idea that the episode is less a quirky sci-fi tale and more a snarling manifesto against the commercialization of identity.

    2. The Algorithm Never Sleeps: Hollow Content for Numb Minds
     Analyze how Ashley’s public persona is curated by committee and driven by data. Her music is optimized for palatability—just enough rhythm to tap your foot, but not enough soul to make you think. The “limiter” isn’t just a piece of tech—it’s a metaphor for the entire entertainment industry’s lobotomy.

    3. Cloning the Soul: From Pop Star to Plastic Bot
     Dive into the horror of the Ashley Too doll, which turns a person into a chirpy personal assistant. It’s not just branding—it’s identity theft with a bow on it. The real Ashley is asleep in a hospital bed while her synthetic self grinds out content for profit. A metaphor, yes—but also terrifyingly literal in our age of deepfakes and AI-generated influencers.

    4. Rachel and Jack: The Misfit Audience with Brains Still Intact
     Shift to the sisters, particularly Rachel, who clings to Ashley Too like a lifeline. Her obsession is a study in how young people form parasocial bonds with avatars rather than real people. Jack, the skeptical sister, represents resistance—but she too is caught in the web, just on the other end of the thread.

    5. Sedation by Stardom: Pills, PR, and the Art of Numbing Out
     Explore the pharmaceutical theme—Ashley’s forced sedation is a grim exaggeration of how the real entertainment world runs on uppers, downers, and spin doctors. It’s not just about keeping Ashley compliant—it’s about keeping the brand on message. Mental health is bad for business.

    6. Vaulting the Real: Dreams Locked Away for Profit
     The vault where Ashley’s raw, honest songs are hidden is a blunt-force metaphor for how corporations bury real expression. Creativity becomes contraband. Anything genuine is deemed “off-brand,” and therefore locked away until further monetization becomes viable.

    7. From Stardom to Slavery: When the Product Becomes a Prisoner
     Zoom in on the brutal irony: Ashley is both the star and the captive, both the cash cow and the corpse. Her likeness is used to sell empowerment anthems while her actual self is powerless, voiceless, drugged into silence. This is the algorithm’s endgame: total identity extraction.

    8. Breaking the Limiter: Rebellion as Reclamation
     Detail the climax where Ashley escapes and finally performs her real music—raw, angry, and alive. This isn’t just a feel-good moment; it’s a warning shot. It says you’ll have to fight for your voice in a world that profits from your silence. And the limiter? That’s on all of us, every time we dumb ourselves down for likes.

    9. Conclusion: Unplug Before You’re Repackaged
     Bring it home with a rallying cry. The episode isn’t just critiquing pop culture—it’s slapping your phone out of your hand and daring you to wake up. If we don’t unplug from the factory of fake selves and hollow clicks, we’ll all be Ashley O: dancing, smiling, and dead inside.

  • The Algorithm Will See You Now: Joan’s Collapse in a Funhouse Mirror World: Sample Thesis and Outline for Analysis of Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful”

    The Algorithm Will See You Now: Joan’s Collapse in a Funhouse Mirror World: Sample Thesis and Outline for Analysis of Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful”

    Sample Thesis Statement:


    In “Joan Is Awful,” the titular character stumbles into ruin not because she’s evil, but because she’s deluded—clinging to a flattering self-image while ignoring the yawning chasm between how she sees herself and how others do. Her desperate need for approval blinds her to the hollow spectacle of parasocial fame, where the Streamberry audience gorges on her curated misery with slack-jawed glee and not an ounce of empathy. Meanwhile, Joan’s passive embrace of digital convenience—those sleek platforms that promise connection, ease, and relevance—costs her everything: privacy, agency, even identity. As her most intimate moments are vacuumed into the cloud, diced into monetizable data, and reassembled into lurid entertainment, Joan learns the hard way that algorithms don’t care about narrative nuance—they just want content. In the end, she’s not the star of her own life. She’s tech industry chum, chewed up and streamed.

    Outline (9 Paragraphs):

    1. Introduction: The Mirror Cracks
     Set the tone by describing Joan’s glossy, curated digital life as a carefully lit Instagram photo—harmless on the surface, but riddled with cracks. Preview the idea that “Joan Is Awful” isn’t just a satire about tech—it’s a psychological horror story about self-delusion, digital exploitation, and the death of narrative control.

    2. The Selfie Delusion: Joan’s Inflated Self-Perception
     Explore Joan’s internal image of herself as a reasonable, competent, kind professional. Contrast this with the version that appears on Streamberry: vain, passive-aggressive, and spineless. Argue that the episode’s central irony lies in Joan’s shock—not at being watched, but at being seen too clearly.

    3. The Streamberry Effect: Fame Without Love
     Analyze the parasocial dimension: Joan’s life is turned into a binge-worthy drama, but there’s no affection in the audience’s gaze. They’re not fans; they’re voyeurs. The more humiliating the content, the more addicted they become. This is the dopamine economy, and Joan is its punchline.

    4. Compliance and Convenience: How She Handed Over the Keys
     Joan doesn’t get hacked—she clicks “Accept Terms and Conditions.” Show how the episode weaponizes our own tech complacency. Her ruin begins with a shrug. She wanted frictionless tech. What she got was soul extraction via user agreement.

    5. Raw Data, Real Damage: The Monetization of Intimacy
     Dig into the idea that Joan’s emotions, her breakups, her therapist visits, even her sex life—all become commodities. They’re no longer private moments, but digital product. The episode skewers the idea that tech is neutral. It’s a vampire, and your heart is just another bite-sized upload.

    6. Algorithmic Authoritarianism: The Tyranny of Predictive Systems
     Focus on the moment when Joan realizes she’s been living inside a nested simulation created by AI. Explain how this metaphor extends beyond science fiction—it mirrors the way our lives are shaped, nudged, and pre-written by recommendation engines, targeted ads, and invisible code.

    7. Narrative Collapse: When You’re No Longer the Main Character
     Explore the existential horror of losing narrative control. Joan’s identity dissolves not just because she’s surveilled, but because she can no longer steer the story. She’s overwritten by code, versioned into oblivion, rendered into a flattened character in someone else’s plot.

    8. Final Descent: From Star to Spectacle to Scrub
     Track Joan’s downward spiral as she tries to fight the system, only to discover that her rebellion has already been commodified. Even her attempts to resist are folded into more content. Her final fate isn’t tragic—it’s product placement.

    9. Conclusion: A Warning Disguised as Entertainment
     Tie everything back to the real world. We are all Joan to some degree—curating, consenting, surrendering. Streamberry may be fictional, but the forces it parodies are not. End with a sharp jab: the next time you agree to terms of service without reading, remember Joan. She clicked too.

  • Confessions of a Washed-Up Watchfluencer: Dreaming of Leaving YouTube and Instagram

    Confessions of a Washed-Up Watchfluencer: Dreaming of Leaving YouTube and Instagram

    For the better part of a decade, I’ve been a talking head on YouTube—waxing unpoetic about dive watches, flipping Seikos like pancakes, and freefalling into endless spirals of horological self-loathing. My channel was never slick. No fancy cuts, no drone shots over crashing waves, no ominous music swelling over macro shots of ceramic bezels. Just me: a man, a camera, and the slow erosion of his dignity.

    I didn’t edit. I didn’t storyboard. I didn’t build a brand. I just rambled into the void, a kind of wristwatch confessional booth where I shared my joy, my shame, and my madness with an audience of fellow obsessives. For a while, it was exhilarating. Like catching your own reflection in a funhouse mirror and mistaking it for truth.

    At my pathological peak, I owned sixty-three “TV-brand” watches—any brand that looked good on camera and bad for your soul. I knew I had a problem when I started hiding watches in drawers and pretending I hadn’t bought another diver. Getting the collection down to five felt like detox. Like crawling out of a swamp in ripped jeans, clutching a G-Shock and whispering, never again.

    And now? I haven’t filmed in a month. The idea of making another video fills me with dread. My subscriber count has flatlined around 10,000. I’m not growing. I’m not evolving. I’m the guy in the garage band who still thinks the right lighting will disguise the fact that he’s 63, wearing a wig, and flexing in a tank top with a fake tan and a borrowed swagger.

    More than stagnation, it’s the cost of content creation that’s choking me. Every video drags me deeper into the watch swamp. I obsess. I fantasize. I compare. I scroll forums at 2 a.m. and start building mental spreadsheets of specs I’ll forget by morning. The longer I film, the more I think about watches, and the more I think about watches, the less I think about anything else.

    Then there’s Instagram—my other digital vice. The cigarette break I take between grading student essays and questioning my life choices. One minute I’m watching a documentary; the next I’m styling a wrist shot, spreading digital envy like cologne. Watch porn. FOMO fuel. I’m not sharing insight. I’m spreading existential rot disguised as lifestyle content.

    The breaking point came last week when two Instagram friends—good guys, honest guys—messaged me with admiration-tinged despair. They loved my collection but felt ashamed of their own modest $300 watches. That’s when I saw it: I wasn’t inspiring anyone. I was curating a highlight reel of hollow indulgence, turning craftsmanship into competition. I don’t want to be that guy. The one whose joy costs others their peace.

    So yes—I’ve been dreaming of leaving. Leaving YouTube. Leaving Instagram. Leaving the digital masquerade where likes masquerade as affection and comments stand in for connection. But here’s the kicker: I don’t want to announce my departure. I don’t want to post some faux-epic “farewell” video where I stare off into the middle distance like a monk who’s just discovered minimalism. That’s not liberation—that’s branding.

    And yet, here I am. Writing this.

    The irony is suffocating.

    What’s my future on YouTube and Instagram? I honestly don’t know. But I’ve caught the scent of something better—something that smells like freedom, like sanity, like the first breath of fresh air after crawling out of a sealed vault.

    In the meantime, there’s the blog. Nine subscribers. Twenty hits a day. Basically the sound of a tree falling in the woods while everyone’s at brunch. But unlike video, writing helps me think. It gives shape to the noise in my head. Like kettlebell workouts or noodling on a keyboard, it’s therapy with fewer side effects and no recurring subscription fee.

    So no, I don’t care about metrics. Not anymore. I just want to be true to myself, however unmarketable that truth might be.

    And if you’re still reading this—thanks. I’m guessing you get it.

  • What Am I Even Teaching Anymore? Enduring Understandings, Fleeting Trends, and the Ever-Shifting Ground of Freshman Composition

    What Am I Even Teaching Anymore? Enduring Understandings, Fleeting Trends, and the Ever-Shifting Ground of Freshman Composition

    After four decades of teaching college writing, you’d think I’d have my units and essay prompts locked in, shrink-wrapped, and ready to microwave. Not quite. The world moves fast. Prompts that feel brilliant on Tuesday can feel dated by Friday. TikTok didn’t exist when I started teaching. Neither did smartphones, influencers, or GLP-1 agonists. So instead of clinging to yesterday’s prompts like a hoarder clutching expired coupons, I chase the deeper prize: Enduring Understandings—those sticky, soul-level questions that live beyond the classroom and follow students into the messiness of real life. (Hat tip to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, who gave this idea a name and a purpose.)

    This fall, my freshman comp class includes the college football team, which means our opening unit now tackles (yes, pun intended) the sport that defines American spectacle and denial. But this isn’t your uncle’s barstool rant about “kids these days.” We’ll use football as a lens to examine risk, consent, identity, and systemic power—big stuff disguised in helmets and shoulder pads.

    Whether my students wear cleats or Converse, I want them grappling with questions that matter: Why do we chase short-term glory when the long-term cost might be our body, our brain, or our soul? What do we sacrifice on the altar of performance—on the field, online, or in life?

    Here’s how the year breaks down:

    Freshman Composition and Critical Thinking

    Freshman Composition Class

    Unit 1: Gladiators in Pads: Risk, Consent, and the Business of Football
     Is football a sacred rite of passage or a meat grinder in cleats? Students will write about acceptable risk, consent, glory, money, and whether football is a path to opportunity—or exploitation wrapped in pageantry.

    Unit 2: Heroism and Resistance to the Sunken Place
     From Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, from Get Out to Black Panther, students will explore how marginalized figures resist dehumanization and transform themselves. We’ll examine what it means to climb out of the “Sunken Place”—and why it matters.

    Unit 3: The Loneliness of the Digitally Depressed
     With help from Black Mirror (“Nosedive” and “Fifteen Million Merits”), students will explore the connection between online performance and psychological breakdown. Are we curating ourselves into oblivion?

    Critical Thinking Class

    Unit 1: Willpower Is Not a Weight-Loss Strategy
     Ozempic is here, and the willpower gospel is wobbling. Students will unpack the moral panic surrounding weight-loss drugs and debate what happens when biotech and body image collide.

    Unit 2: The Mirage of Self-Reinvention
     From Fitzgerald’s doomed dreamers to Black Mirror’s algorithmic puppets, we’ll examine how the myth of personal reinvention can go horribly wrong—and why losing control of your narrative is the ultimate modern horror.

    Unit 3: Culinary Code-Switching or Cultural Betrayal?
     Food as survival, as art, as compromise. We’ll trace the tangled line between adaptation and erasure in the Americanization of Chinese and Mexican cuisines. When is fusion a celebration—and when is it a sellout?

    Teaching writing in this century means teaching students how to think clearly while the world gaslights them with dopamine and distraction. These units won’t solve that problem, but they’ll make sure we’re asking the right questions while we’re still allowed to.

  • Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” and the Algorithmic Pact with the Devil

    Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” and the Algorithmic Pact with the Devil

    If The Truman Show warned us about the dangers of involuntary surveillance masquerading as entertainment, Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” updates the nightmare for the age of algorithmic narcissism and digital convenience. Where Truman was trapped in a fake world constructed for him, Joan willingly signs away her soul in the fine print of a Terms of Service agreement—an agreement she didn’t read, because who reads those when there’s AI-generated content to binge and oat milk lattes to sip?

    “Joan Is Awful” isn’t just a satire about streaming culture or artificial intelligence gone rogue. It’s a scalpel-sharp metaphor for Ozempification—our cultural surrender to the gods of optimization, where being frictionless is the highest virtue and being real is a liability. Ozempification isn’t just about weight loss. It’s about trimming down everything that makes us inconveniently human: messiness, contradictions, privacy, shame, even joy. We trade all of it for a pre-chewed, camera-ready version of ourselves that fits neatly into an algorithmic feed.

    Joan becomes the star of her own life not by choice, but by being optimized—flattened into a content-producing puppet who behaves like a mashup of the worst moments from her day. It’s not just that her life is turned into a reality show; it’s that the version of her that streams every evening is algorithmically engineered for maximum watch time and outrage. The real Joan is rendered irrelevant—just source material for a soap opera she has no control over.

    This isn’t dystopia, by the way. It’s Tuesday on Instagram.

    We live in a Truman Show remix where we’re both performer and voyeur, curating a persona for a crowd we cannot see and will never know. Like Joan, we sign away our likeness every time we click “Accept All Cookies.” Our deepest thoughts are mined, our image is harvested, our data is commodified, all in exchange for a life so smooth, so seamless, it might as well be a corporate press release.

    The chilling genius of “Joan Is Awful” lies in how no one seems particularly surprised by any of this. Her boyfriend leaves her not because he doubts her, but because the show made her look like a monster—and worse, a boring one. Her boss isn’t shocked; she’s just annoyed that Joan’s AI doppelgänger is bad for brand synergy. Even the therapist is part of the machine. Everyone has already accepted the premise: you don’t own your life anymore—Streamberry does.

    This is Ozempification in its final form. Not a sleeker body, but a sanitized self, scrubbed of complexity, repackaged for virality. Like reality TV contestants, Joan is hypervisible and utterly dehumanized, the protagonist of a story she didn’t write. And like so many of those contestants—remember the ones who cracked on camera only to be mocked in GIFs and memes—her breakdown is part of the entertainment. Joan’s humiliation isn’t a glitch; it’s the product. We want the breakdown. We crave the trainwreck. Because in a world that rewards optimized personas, the real human underneath is just noise to be edited out.

    In the end, Joan fights back, but only after enduring the full crucifixion of parasocial fame. It’s a cathartic moment, but also a reminder: she had to become completely unrecognizable—to herself and to others—before she could reclaim a shred of agency.

    The tragedy isn’t just that Joan’s life is broadcast without her consent. It’s that she ever believed she was still the protagonist in her own story. That’s the Ozempic Lie: that you can control the process while outsourcing the self. But once the machine gets hold of your image, your data, your likeness, it doesn’t need you anymore. Just a version of you that performs well.

    So yes, “Joan Is Awful” is awful. And Joan is all of us.

  • Stories That Eat Novels (and Leave No Bones Behind)

    Stories That Eat Novels (and Leave No Bones Behind)

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • The Mirage of Self-Invention in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat”: 3 College Essay Prompts

    The Mirage of Self-Invention in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat”: 3 College Essay Prompts

    Here are three essay prompts suitable for a 9-paragraph essay comparing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” as stories of protagonists seduced and ultimately undone by illusions and magical thinking:

    1. The Price of the Dream: Compare how Dexter Green and Akaky Akakievich are destroyed by their obsession with an ideal—Dexter by the illusion of Judy Jones and material success, Akaky by the fantasy of respect and dignity through his overcoat. How do these dreams function as chimeras that blind them to the realities of their lives, and what commentary do the authors make about the cost of such illusions?

    2. Magic, Madness, and Misery: In both stories, the protagonists engage in magical thinking—believing that the acquisition of something (Judy Jones, a new coat) will transform their lives. Write an essay analyzing how Fitzgerald and Gogol expose the dangers of such thinking. How does each story depict the psychological unraveling that comes from chasing the unattainable?

    3. The Mirage of Self-Invention: Both Dexter and Akaky attempt to remake themselves—Dexter as a wealthy man worthy of Judy’s love, Akaky as a figure of dignity through his new coat. Compare how each character’s pursuit of self-reinvention leads to disappointment and loss. To what extent do their transformations represent a tragic misunderstanding of what it means to have real value in the world?

    Here are three detailed 9-paragraph essay outlines, each corresponding to one of the prompts comparing “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol. Each outline includes an introduction, thesis, body paragraphs with specific focus, and a conclusion.

    Essay Prompt 1: The Price of the Dream

    Compare how Dexter Green and Akaky Akakievich are destroyed by their obsession with an ideal. How do these dreams function as chimeras, and what commentary do the authors make about the cost of such illusions?

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Brief overview of both stories.
    • Introduce the concept of a chimera: an impossible dream that leads to downfall.
    • Thesis: In both “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat,” Fitzgerald and Gogol portray protagonists who fall prey to illusions that promise fulfillment but ultimately betray them, exposing the emotional and existential cost of chasing fantasies over reality.

    Paragraph 2 – Dexter’s Chimera: Judy Jones

    • Dexter’s obsession with Judy as the ultimate symbol of wealth, beauty, and success.
    • Judy as an ever-elusive figure—beautiful, but hollow.
    • Dexter’s belief that possessing her equals self-worth.

    Paragraph 3 – Akaky’s Chimera: The Overcoat

    • Akaky’s fantasy that a new overcoat will win him respect, status, and maybe even love.
    • The coat as a magical object, a transformational talisman.
    • His growing sense of identity tied solely to the garment.

    Paragraph 4 – The Tragic Consequences for Dexter

    • Dexter achieves wealth but not happiness.
    • Judy abandons him; he is left disillusioned.
    • Final realization: his dream was always a mirage.

    Paragraph 5 – The Tragic Consequences for Akaky

    • Akaky’s brief euphoria ends when the coat is stolen.
    • His decline and death—heartbroken, powerless, invisible.
    • Posthumous “revenge” as ghost = futile compensation.

    Paragraph 6 – Social and Cultural Commentary

    • Fitzgerald: critique of the American Dream and the commodification of love.
    • Gogol: satire of bureaucratic society, classism, and the dehumanization of the poor.

    Paragraph 7 – Emotional and Psychological Decay

    • Dexter’s emptiness and regret.
    • Akaky’s brief hope turns to despair and madness.
    • Both lose their sense of self to the illusion.

    Paragraph 8 – Comparative Analysis

    • Dexter’s dream is tied to class and romance; Akaky’s is tied to dignity and survival.
    • Both are naïve, driven, and ultimately crushed by the systems they trust.
    • Different cultural settings, same existential outcome.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Reiterate thesis: dreams without substance are deadly.
    • Final thought: Fitzgerald and Gogol warn us that illusions, when mistaken for meaning, don’t just fail—they devour.

    Essay Prompt 2: Magic, Madness, and Misery

    Analyze how Fitzgerald and Gogol expose the dangers of magical thinking and the psychological unraveling that results.

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Define “magical thinking” as irrational belief that one action or item can change one’s destiny.
    • Introduce both stories as cautionary tales.
    • Thesis: Through Dexter’s fixation on Judy and Akaky’s devotion to his coat, both stories reveal how magical thinking replaces reason with delusion, leading to madness and misery.

    Paragraph 2 – Magical Thinking Defined in Dexter’s World

    • Dexter believes love from Judy will redeem and elevate him.
    • Idealizes Judy as a goddess rather than a real person.
    • Sacrifices stability and happiness chasing her illusion.

    Paragraph 3 – Magical Thinking in Akaky’s Mind

    • Akaky treats the coat like a sacred relic.
    • Believes it will elevate him socially and emotionally.
    • Misplaces his hopes on material transformation.

    Paragraph 4 – Signs of Delusion in Dexter

    • Dexter ignores Judy’s flaws and cruelty.
    • Refuses real relationships in pursuit of a fantasy.
    • Fails to recognize the hollowness of his goal until it’s too late.

    Paragraph 5 – Signs of Delusion in Akaky

    • Treats the coat with religious reverence.
    • Withdraws emotionally once it’s gone.
    • Slips into a madness that leads to death and ghostly wandering.

    Paragraph 6 – Authors’ Techniques: Tone and Irony

    • Fitzgerald’s bittersweet irony in Dexter’s final reflections.
    • Gogol’s surrealism and grotesque humor to show Akaky’s madness.
    • Both use tone to critique the irrationality of obsession.

    Paragraph 7 – Societal Enablers

    • Dexter’s world glamorizes Judy and wealth.
    • Akaky’s world is indifferent and hostile.
    • Both societies encourage the pursuit of illusion over substance.

    Paragraph 8 – The Madness as Metaphor

    • Dexter’s disillusionment = emotional death.
    • Akaky’s literal death = psychological annihilation.
    • Both caution against letting fantasy substitute for human connection.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Restate thesis: magical thinking leads to psychological ruin.
    • Conclude: Fitzgerald and Gogol show that dreams, if not grounded in reality, become nightmares.

    Essay Prompt 3: The Mirage of Self-Invention

    Compare how each character’s pursuit of self-reinvention leads to disappointment and loss. What do the stories suggest about the pitfalls of attempting to create an identity based solely on appearances or fantasies?

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Introduce the idea of self-invention in modern literature.
    • Fitzgerald and Gogol explore identity construction through social aspiration.
    • Thesis: Both Dexter and Akaky seek to reinvent themselves through superficial means—romance and fashion—and are punished for mistaking external change for true transformation.

    Paragraph 2 – Dexter’s Quest for Identity

    • Dexter reinvents himself from working-class boy to elite golfer and businessman.
    • Sees Judy and wealth as validation of this new identity.
    • His success is built on surface, not substance.

    Paragraph 3 – Akaky’s Moment of Reinvention

    • The coat allows Akaky to imagine a new self.
    • Experiences respect and confidence for the first time.
    • His identity becomes fused with the garment.

    Paragraph 4 – The Collapse of Dexter’s Identity

    • Judy’s indifference shatters Dexter’s illusion.
    • He realizes he was always an outsider.
    • His “winter dreams” melt into regret and lost youth.

    Paragraph 5 – The Collapse of Akaky’s Identity

    • Without the coat, he reverts to invisibility.
    • Becomes physically and emotionally undone.
    • Dies shortly after, confirming the fragility of his identity.

    Paragraph 6 – False Metrics of Success

    • Dexter measured by money and social status.
    • Akaky measured by appearance and uniformity.
    • Both confuse external markers with inner worth.

    Paragraph 7 – Authorial Critique of Superficial Identity

    • Fitzgerald’s critique of American class mobility and romantic idealism.
    • Gogol’s satire of bureaucracy and materialism.
    • Both suggest true identity is not found through appearance or social approval.

    Paragraph 8 – Real versus Fabricated Identity

    • Dexter’s real self never aligned with his fantasy life.
    • Akaky’s core self was never built to survive public recognition.
    • Both built identities on unstable ground.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm thesis: self-invention without self-awareness leads to collapse.
    • Conclude: Fitzgerald and Gogol show that chasing identity through externals dooms us to existential crisis.