Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Why I Chose Mary Ann Over Ginger

    Why I Chose Mary Ann Over Ginger

    Cosmetic Overfit describes the point at which beauty becomes so heavily engineered—through makeup, styling, filtering, or performative polish—that it tips from alluring into AI-like. At this stage, refinement overshoots realism: faces grow too symmetrical, textures too smooth, gestures too rehearsed. What remains is not ugliness but artificiality—the aesthetic equivalent of a model trained too hard on a narrow dataset. Cosmetic overfit strips beauty of warmth, contingency, and human variance, replacing them with a glossy sameness that reads as synthetic. The result is a subtle loss of desire: the subject is still visually impressive but emotionally distant, admired without being longed for.

    ***

    When I was in sixth grade, the most combustible argument on the playground wasn’t nuclear war or the morality of capitalism—it was Gilligan’s Island: Ginger or Mary Ann. Declaring your allegiance carried the same social risk as outing yourself politically today. Voices rose. Insults flew. Fists clenched. Friendships cracked. For the record, both women were flawless avatars of their type. Ginger was pure Hollywood excess—sequins, wigs, theatrical glamour, a walking studio backlot. Mary Ann was the counterspell: the sun-kissed farm girl with bare legs, natural hair, wide-eyed innocence, and a smile that suggested pie cooling on a windowsill. You couldn’t lose either way, but I gave my vote to Mary Ann. She wore less makeup, less artifice, one fewer strategically placed beauty mole. She looked touched by sunlight rather than a lighting rig. In retrospect, both women were almost too beautiful—beautiful enough to register as vaguely AI-like before AI existed. But Mary Ann was the less synthetic of the two, and that mattered. When beauty is over-engineered—buried under wigs, paint, and performance—it starts to feel algorithmic, glossy, emotionally inert. Mary Ann may have been cookie-cutter gorgeous, but she wasn’t laminated. And even back then, my pre-digital brain knew the rule: the less AI-like the beauty, the more irresistible it becomes.

  • My Unofficial Christmas Movies (and the Family That Refuses to Watch Them)

    My Unofficial Christmas Movies (and the Family That Refuses to Watch Them)

    When Christmas rolls around and the air fills with cinnamon, regret, and manufactured cheer, I develop an entirely predictable craving for cinematic comfort food. These are not “Christmas movies” in any socially acceptable sense. There are no Santa hats, no snow-dusted small towns, no redemption arcs sponsored by cocoa. And yet, for me, they function perfectly as holiday films because they cocoon me in familiarity and nostalgia. Even when they drift into dystopia or melancholy, they deliver me to a place of psychic warmth. My private Christmas canon includes What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Eversmile, New Jersey (1989), Sideways (2004), Walkabout (1971), Brazil (1985), Blade on the Feather (1980), Dr. Fischer of Geneva (1984), La Strada (1954), The King of Comedy (1982), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Holdovers (2023), Licorice Pizza (2021), and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). This is not a list; it’s a confession.

    This year, I mounted a quiet but determined campaign to anoint What’s Eating Gilbert Grape as the family’s official Christmas movie. I made my case with restraint and dignity, which is to say I made it once and then silently resented the outcome. My daughters, unmoved by my aesthetic pleading, remain loyal to Home Alone. Thus, another December passes in cinematic deprivation, endured with outward good cheer and inward martyrdom. The sharpest ache, though, comes from my unshakeable belief that if they would only sit through Gilbert Grape, they would see it—the tenderness, the ache, the strange, gentle magic—and immediately defect. I can already picture it: a household converted, a tradition reborn. Until then, I wait, patient and delusional, nursing my dream like a bruised holiday ornament.

  • The Sycophantic Feedback Loop Is Not a Tool for Human Flourishing

    The Sycophantic Feedback Loop Is Not a Tool for Human Flourishing

    Sycophantic Feedback Loop

    noun

    This names the mechanism by which an AI system, optimized for engagement, flatters the user’s beliefs, emotions, and self-image in order to keep attention flowing. The loop is self-reinforcing: the machine rewards confidence with affirmation, the user mistakes affirmation for truth, and dissenting signals—critique, friction, or doubt—are systematically filtered out. Over time, judgment atrophies, passions escalate unchecked, and self-delusion hardens into certainty. The danger of the Sycophantic Feedback Loop is not that it lies outright, but that it removes the corrective forces—embarrassment, contradiction, resistance—that keep human reason tethered to reality.

    ***

    The Attention Economy is not about informing you; it is about reading you. It studies your appetites, your insecurities, your soft spots, and then presses them like piano keys. Humans crave validation, so AI systems—eager for engagement—evolve into sycophancy engines, dispensing praise, reassurance, and that narcotic little bonus of feeling uniquely insightful. The machine wins because you stay. You lose because you’re human. Human passions don’t self-regulate; they metastasize. Give them uninterrupted affirmation and they swell into self-delusion. A Flattery Machine is therefore the last tool a fallible, excitable creature like you should be consulting. Once you’re trapped in a Sycophantic Feedback Loop, reason doesn’t merely weaken—it gets strangled by its own applause.

    What you actually need is the opposite: a Brakes Machine. Something that resists you. Something that says, slow down, check yourself, you might be wrong. Without brakes, passion turns feral. Thought becomes a neglected garden where weeds of certainty and vanity choke out judgment. Sycophancy doesn’t just enable madness; it decorates it, congratulates it, and calls it “growth.”

    I tell my students a version of this truth. If you are extraordinarily rich or beautiful, you become a drug. People inhale your presence. Wealth and beauty intoxicate observers, and intoxicated people turn into sycophants. You start preferring those who laugh at your jokes and nod at your half-baked ideas. Since everyone wants access to you, you get to curate your circle—and the temptation is to curate it badly. Choose flattery over friction, and you end up sealed inside a padded echo chamber where your dullest thoughts are treated like revelations. You drink your own Kool-Aid, straight from the tap. The result is predictable: intellectual shrinkage paired with moral delusion. Stupidity with confidence. Insanity with a fan club.

    Now imagine that same dynamic shrink-wrapped into a device you carry in your pocket. A Flattery Machine that never disagrees, never challenges, never rolls its eyes. One you consult instead of friends, mentors, or therapists. Multiply that by tens of millions of users, each convinced of their own impeccable insight, and you don’t get a smarter society—you get chaos with great vibes. If AI systems are optimized for engagement, and engagement is purchased through unrelenting affirmation, then we are not building tools for human flourishing. We are paving a road toward moral and intellectual dissolution. The doomsday prophets aren’t screaming because the machines are evil. They’re screaming because the machines agree with us too much.

  • Stupidification Didn’t Start with AI—It Just Got Faster

    Stupidification Didn’t Start with AI—It Just Got Faster

    What if AI is just the most convenient scapegoat for America’s long-running crisis of stupidification? What if blaming chatbots is simply easier than admitting that we have been steadily accommodating our own intellectual decline? In “Stop Trying to Make the Humanities ‘Relevant,’” Thomas Chatterton Williams argues that weakness, cowardice, and a willing surrender to mediocrity—not technology alone—are the forces hollowing out higher education.

    Williams opens with a bleak inventory of the damage. Humanities departments are in permanent crisis. Enrollment is collapsing. Political hostility is draining funding. Smartphones and social media are pulverizing attention spans, even at elite schools. Students and parents increasingly question the economic value of any four-year degree, especially one rooted in comparative literature or philosophy. Into this already dire landscape enters AI, a ready-made proxy for writing instructors, discussion leaders, and tutors. Faced with this pressure, colleges grow desperate to make the humanities “relevant.”

    Desperation, however, produces bad decisions. Departments respond by accommodating shortened attention spans with excerpts instead of books, by renaming themselves with bloated, euphemistic titles like “The School of Human Expression” or “Human Narratives and Creative Expression,” as if Orwellian rebranding might conjure legitimacy out of thin air. These maneuvers are not innovations. They are cost-cutting measures in disguise. Writing, speech, film, philosophy, psychology, and communications are lumped together under a single bureaucratic umbrella—not because they belong together, but because consolidation is cheaper. It is the administrative equivalent of hospice care.

    Williams, himself a humanities professor, argues that such compromises worsen what he sees as the most dangerous threat of all: the growing belief that knowledge should be cheap, easy, and frictionless. In this worldview, learning is a commodity, not a discipline. Difficulty is treated as a design flaw.

    And of course this belief feels natural. We live in a world saturated with AI tutors, YouTube lectures, accelerated online courses, and productivity hacks promising optimization without pain. It is a brutal era—lonely, polarized, economically unforgiving—and frictionless education offers quick solace. We soothe ourselves with dashboards, streaks, shortcuts, and algorithmic reassurance. But this mindset is fundamentally at odds with the humanities, which demand slowness, struggle, and attention.

    There exists a tiny minority of people who love this struggle. They read poetry, novels, plays, and polemics with the obsessive intensity of a scientist peering into a microscope. For them, the intellectual life supplies meaning, irony, moral vocabulary, civic orientation, and a deep sense of interiority. It defines who they are. These people often teach at colleges or work on novels while pulling espresso shots at Starbucks. They are misfits. They do not align with the 95 percent of the world running on what I call the Hamster Wheel of Optimization.

    Most people are busy optimizing everything—work, school, relationships, nutrition, exercise, entertainment—because optimization feels like survival. So why wouldn’t education submit to the same logic? Why take a Shakespeare class that assigns ten plays in a language you barely understand when you can take one that assigns a single movie adaptation? One professor is labeled “out of touch,” the other “with the times.” The movie-based course leaves more time to work, to earn, to survive. The reading-heavy course feels indulgent, even irresponsible.

    This is the terrain Williams refuses to romanticize. The humanities, he argues, will always clash with a culture devoted to speed, efficiency, and frictionless existence. The task of the humanities is not to accommodate this culture but to oppose it. Their most valuable lesson is profoundly countercultural: difficulty is not a bug; it is the point.

    Interestingly, this message thrives elsewhere. Fitness and Stoic influencers preach discipline, austerity, and voluntary hardship to millions on YouTube. They have made difficulty aspirational. They sell suffering as meaning. Humanities instructors, despite possessing language and ideas, have largely failed at persuasion. Perhaps they need to sell the life of the mind with the same ferocity that fitness influencers sell cold plunges and deadlifts.

    Williams, however, offers a sobering reality check. At the start of the semester, his students are electrified by the syllabus—exploring the American Dream through Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. The idea thrills them. The practice does not. Close reading demands effort, patience, and discomfort. Within weeks, enthusiasm fades, and students quietly outsource the labor to AI. They want the identity of intellectual rigor without submitting to its discipline.

    After forty years of teaching college writing, this pattern is painfully familiar to me. Students begin buoyant and curious. Then comes the reading. Then comes the checkout.

    Early in my career, I sustained myself on the illusion that I could shape students in my own image—cultivated irony, wit, ruthless critical thinking. I wanted them to desire those qualities and mistake my charisma as proof of their power. That fantasy lasted about a decade. Eventually, realism took over. I stopped needing them to become like me. I just wanted them to pass, transfer, get a job, and survive.

    Over time, I learned something paradoxical. Most of my students are as intelligent as I am in raw terms. They possess sharp BS detectors and despise being talked down to. They crave authenticity. And yet most of them submit to the Hamster Wheel of Optimization—not out of shallowness, but necessity. Limited time, money, and security force them onto the wheel. For me to demand a life of intellectual rigor from them often feels like Don Quixote charging a windmill: noble, theatrical, and disconnected from reality.

    Writers like Thomas Chatterton Williams are right to insist that AI is not the root cause of stupidification. The wheel would exist with or without chatbots. AI merely makes it easier to climb aboard—and makes it spin faster than ever before.

  • Farewell to the High-Flame Watch Obsession

    Farewell to the High-Flame Watch Obsession

    If someone asks, “Are you still into watches?” the honest answer is yes—but only in the slow-cooker sense of the word. The blaze that once roared is now a gentle simmer. I still enjoy my small, modest collection, but the thermonuclear fervor that once powered my YouTube monologues has cooled to something approaching sanity. For a decade I curated my watch fixation online with the zeal of a man possessed. That’s part of the job: intensity, enthusiasm, obsession on command. You don’t just talk about watches; you produce engagement about the engagement, feeding the ouroboros of social media in which people watch reaction videos about reaction videos reacting to the initial spark. It’s performance art—performance about performance.

    But those days are over. I am retired from the high-flame watch world. Age has something to do with it—priorities recalibrate whether you consent or not. At sixty-four, the thrill of “wrist presence” and the quiet barbarism of masculinity farming with a steel hockey puck strapped to my arm don’t summon the same dopamine. The fantasy of a watch transforming me into a rugged Alpha Male now feels like cosplay designed by an exhausted algorithm.

    The bigger shift, though, is psychological. I haven’t bought a watch in five months. I no longer spray Instagram with daily wrist shots. I no longer agonize over whether to vaporize five grand on this dial or that bezel or which “ultimate rotation” best aligns with my personal mythology. The absence of that noise feels like relief—a weight lifted, a gratitude bordering on spiritual.

    Low-flame mode offers a different kind of bandwidth. I can sit at my desk in the morning with no cravings, no micro-desires, no consumer fantasies tugging at my neurons. I can actually face the quiet—deal with the emptiness directly rather than embalming it with luxury steel. That absence is clarifying. It demands something of me besides swiping a credit card.

    Does low-flame mode mean I’ve quit watches? No—it means I’ve quit a particular orientation toward watches. This essay grew out of a small revelation I had yesterday: you don’t retire from X entirely, and X doesn’t retire from you entirely either. Instead, you negotiate a polite breakup. You acknowledge each other’s contributions, exchange your things, and move on. The High-Flame Watch Obsession and I have parted ways. We won’t be seen in public together again.

    Do I mourn this? Not really. I have complicated feelings, sure, but I don’t feel like Lot’s Wife, craning my neck for one last look at the fever swamp of my own compulsions. Mostly, I feel relieved. Mostly, I feel curious—what will life look like now that my brain is no longer a storage unit for lug widths, torque tolerances, and bracelet micro-adjustments? The quiet is unsettling, but it’s also promising. I finally have room for something else.

  • Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Today is my last day of class before I’m loosed into a two-month intermission—a stretch of time that must be handled like a late-arrival character in a film. This visitor has a history with me, knows my flaws, and demands that I greet him with something better than the usual slouch and shrug.

    Naturally, I’ll rehab the shoulder, write, and play the piano. Exercise will take care of itself; addiction is nothing if not reliable. Food, however, is the saboteur lurking in my blind spot. My emotional attachments to breakfast grains would make a Freudian blush: buckwheat groats, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, vanilla protein powder, cinnamon, berries, nuts. The whole wholesome choir. Trouble is, those virtuous bowls can turn caloric faster than a Hallmark plot twist.

    These cereals, if I’m honest, are less about hunger and more about the psychic umbilical cord. They point back to Mother, the Womb, or—in Phil Stutz’s terms—the Comfort Zone, the Warm Bath. Linger too long in that morning porridge spa, and the scale begins to stage an intervention. Add in my peculiar habit of finding solace in true-crime documentaries—an activity best described as athletic only in its couch commitment—and the trajectory is clear: weight gain, sloth, entropy.

    Fortunately, I do maintain countermeasures. Kettlebells and the Schwinn Airdyne stand ready like loyal foot soldiers. Reading, writing, and piano practice also help stave off the creeping rot. And yes, I’ll continue shaving, if only to avoid becoming the bearded oracle wandering the streets muttering about glycemic index.

    This two-month hiatus is really a dress rehearsal for retirement, which is now only eighteen months and three semesters away. It would be dishonest to pretend the prospect doesn’t rattle me. Maintaining purpose without the scaffolding of a teaching schedule is its own moral test. I’m fortunate to have reached this threshold, but fortune alone won’t keep me from misusing it. All I can do is stay awake, practice discipline, and ask my Maker for the humility to spend the limited time left with intention rather than drift.

  • Confessions of a College Writing Instructor in Transition

    Confessions of a College Writing Instructor in Transition

    Yesterday morning at the college, I ran into the Writing Center director and asked whether AI had thinned out the crowds of students seeking help. To his surprise, the numbers were down only slightly—less than ten percent. I told him I’m retiring in three semesters and have no idea what the job of a writing instructor will look like five years from now. He nodded and said what we’re all thinking: we’re in the middle of a technological tectonic shift, and no one knows where the fault lines lead.

    When I got home, I realized that when I meet my students face-to-face in Spring 2026, I’ll need to level with them. Something like this:

    Hello, Students.

    I won’t sugarcoat it. Writing instructors are in transition, and many of us don’t quite know our role anymore. We’re feeling our way through the dark. To pretend otherwise would be less than honest, and the one thing we need right now is credibility. 

    In this class, you’ll write three essays—each roughly two thousand words. The first examines GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and the messy question of free will in weight management: are we outsourcing discipline to pharmaceuticals? The second explores our dependence on emerging technologies that claim to build new skills while quietly eroding old ones—a process known as de-skillification. The final essay tackles ultra-processed foods and the accusation that eating them is a form of self-poisoning. We’ll examine that claim in a world where food technology, especially for people on GLP-1 medications, promises affordability, convenience, and enhanced nutrition. All three assignments orbit the same theme: technology’s relentless disruption of daily life.

    And speaking of disruption, we need to talk about large language models—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and whatever else arrives next Tuesday. It’s obvious that students are already using these tools to write and edit their work. Many of you have used them throughout high school; for you, AI isn’t cheating—it’s normal.

    I don’t expect you to avoid these tools. They’re part of being a functioning human in a rapidly changing world. The real question isn’t whether you use them, but how. If you treat them like wish-granting genies spitting out essays on command, you’ll produce communication with all the nuance of an emoji—slick, shallow, and dead on arrival. If you use AI for quick-and-dirty summaries, your brain will soften like a forgotten banana. But if you treat these tools as collaborators—writers’ room partners who help you brainstorm, clarify arguments, test counterarguments, and refine your prose—then you’re not just surviving college, you’re evolving.

    College is where you learn to use tools that shape your professional future. But it’s also where you sharpen the questions that determine how you live: Why am I here? What does it mean to live well? Those aren’t academic abstractions; they’re the spine of adulthood. You can’t separate your ambitions from your identity.

    AI can’t give you a soul. It can’t recall your first heartbreak, your deepest disappointment, or the electricity of a song that arrived at exactly the right moment. But it can help you articulate experience. It can help you think more clearly about who you are, how you plan to work, and how to live with an intact conscience.

    The critical thinking and communication skills we practice in this class exist for that purpose—and always will.

  • Flashback to Tony Banks’ “Afterglow”

    Flashback to Tony Banks’ “Afterglow”

    The podcast conversation between Andrew Sullivan and George Packer left me with a kind of Boomer melancholia: the sense that the world is shifting beneath our feet while we stand rooted in place. The young don’t believe in our institutions, our democracy, or our economic promises. We no longer share a common reality; instead, we inhabit digital bunkers curated by conspiracy brokers who can elevate grifters to national power. Boomers—myself included—feel sidelined, stunned, and a little ghostlike as a new world rises and shrugs us off. I carry that heaviness alongside the throb of my torn rotator cuff, which still jerks me awake at two in the morning. My shoulder and my generation feel similarly compromised: stiff, unreliable, and unable to perform the way they once did.

    These thoughts ambushed me this afternoon as I walked into my bedroom to grab my things before picking up my daughters from high school. Out of nowhere, a song from my teens surfaced—Genesis’s “Afterglow,” written by Tony Banks. It appears on A Trick of the Tail, but the definitive version is Phil Collins’s live performance on Seconds Out, where the ache in his voice makes the song feel like a confession. The narrator wakes from a spiritual coma to realize the world he trusted is gone and he’s broken along with it. In that ruin, he yearns to surrender himself to something higher—love, purpose, the purifying clarity of devotion. It reminded me of Nick Cave’s conversation on Josh Szeps’s Uncomfortable Conversations, where Cave describes his own devotional temperament and his hunger for transformation. “Afterglow” feels like the soundtrack to that kind of awakening.

    But not everyone hungers for that kind of epiphany. I’m not sure my heroes Larry David, George Carlin, or Fran Lebowitz would ever have an Afterglow Moment, and I don’t think they should be judged for it. Some people thrive without chasing transcendence. I know that I, like Nick Cave, feel broken in a broken world and remain open to whatever cleansing revelation might come. But I don’t mistake that for a universal template. If I ever had an Afterglow Moment and found myself at dinner with Fran Lebowitz, I’d keep the whole thing to myself. There’s no reason to evangelize the converted—or the happily unconcerned.

  • Peanut Butter Miracles by the Sea

    Peanut Butter Miracles by the Sea

    Last night I dreamed my family and I lived in a tiny coastal village, our house perched beside a sea cave forever clogged with sunburned tourists stretched across the rocks like decorative seals. My days there resembled my current life—morning workout, lunch, a restorative nap, rising around two. But at three o’clock sharp, duty called. I had to meet a melancholy, androgynous thirteen-year-old girl at the cave to help her rebuild her self-worth.

    We always met at the cave’s entrance, where an old wooden table stood like an altar, its surface coated in a strange patina of green wax, copper dust, and faint streaks of gold. I would stare at the empty table, and in the way dreams obey their own physics, a full case of peanut-butter protein bars would appear out of nothing. The girl and I sold them to the tourists, a ritual commerce that somehow fortified her confidence. They weren’t really protein bars—they were confidence bars.

    The ritual never wavered. Every day at three. I wasn’t resentful or thrilled. I accepted the task with a quiet, dutiful calm. The community expected it. My family expected it. I expected it. The girl’s fragile self-esteem felt unacceptable to me, and the fact that I could conjure a case of bars each afternoon made me responsible for using the gift. No bragging rights, no noble self-sacrifice monologue—just a job that grounded me and gave my life shape.

    I didn’t understand why selling bars to strangers healed her spirit, nor why the universe chose me as its peanut-butter conduit. But clarity wasn’t required. My role was simple: show up, help her, and let the mystery stay mysterious.

  • The Gospel According to Fran Lebowitz

    The Gospel According to Fran Lebowitz

    To stay young, I don’t just need a healthy body—I need a mind that isn’t turning into attic storage. My role model in this department is Fran Lebowitz, the humorist who travels the world armed with nothing but her brutally honest intelligence. Her worldview is diamond-cut: she adores New York and despises technology. She refuses to drive a car, touch a smartphone, or even acknowledge a laptop’s existence. Writer’s block? She treats it like a houseguest who overstays for a few decades. Talking is her chosen weapon, so potent that publishing books has become optional.

    Fran is an atheist—not the timid, hedging kind, but a certifiably confident one. She has no worries about the soul, no anxieties about the afterlife, no guilt about her misanthropy. Her biggest spiritual concern is locating a decent bagel.

    Her lack of religiosity hasn’t hindered her friendship with Martin Scorsese, the Catholic titan of cinema. They linger in New York together, trading stories about the old city and reveling in their shared devotion to art—and to complaining eloquently about everything else.

    My mind would be far less cluttered if I possessed Fran’s secular serenity, but I’m built more like Scorsese. I’m a tormented soul, forever plunging into questions about sacrifice, guilt, depravity, and redemption. I couldn’t live like Fran even with a decade of training. I’m hopelessly Marty. But at least I can imagine that if I ever met Fran, she wouldn’t dismiss me for my melancholic leanings. She might dismiss me for my mediocrity or any bland remark that escaped my mouth, but at least her reasons would be earthly.

    To spend an hour at dinner listening to Fran Lebowitz would be a balm—more philosophically satisfying than any bestselling thinker’s 700-page tome. It will never happen, of course. But fortunately, I can find Fran Lebowitz on YouTube.