Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Why Willpower Can’t Save You from the Snack Aisle

    Why Willpower Can’t Save You from the Snack Aisle

    After hearing something thoughtful interviews with journalist Julia Belluz and scientist Kevin Hall about their new book Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us and KCRW food expert Evan Kleinman praise the book, I broke down and decided to see if the authors had any new insights into the exploration of what I call humans’ mismanagement of eating. The book begins on a promising note: The authors observe that in the animal kingdom, we are hard-wired with “food intelligence,” a natural-born instinct to regulate the quantity of what we eat and to target foods that our body craves for optimal nutrition. Our instinctive connection with food went haywire in the twentieth century: “Many of us started to eat too much, and the wrong things, even when we didn’t want to. Obesity rates began rising, first in rich, Western, industrialized countries such as the United States, then elsewhere.” Between 1980 and today, the obesity rate has doubled in several countries. Seventy percent of American adults and a third of U.S. children are classified as overweight or obese. Obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes kills over half a million Americans a year. Obesity-related health costs are in the trillions.

    One of the major reasons for this breakdown in our instinctive hardwiring to naturally eat well is our disconnection from food: how it’s grown, produced, and cooked. We are now addicted to factory-produced fat, sugar, and salt. 

    Shaming and the gospel of self-discipline doesn’t help even though, as the authors point out, the wellness industry points an accusatory finger at our own moral shortcomings (lack of willpower, gluttony, and sloth) for our failures at weight management. The diet industries, the authors claim, are asking the wrong questions when they ask what is the best diet and how people can lose weight. For example, there are influencers who say low-carb is the best, but the authors show studies that contradict that claim. Low-carb diets are no better than low-fat ones in the long-term. The authors argue that championing the so-called ultimate diet is not the right question. Instead, the more helpful question is this: “Why do we eat what we eat?” Their obsession with answering this question is what propelled them to write the book. 

    The authors explain the problem of calories-in, calories-out as a surefire model for weight loss. The model is complicated and eventually sabotaged by the way the body reacts when we reduce calories. The metabolism slows down, we burn fewer calories doing the same exercise than we did initially, and our hunger signals rebel and scream “Eat more!” Contrary to the cheery claims of the wellness industry, eating less and exercising more usually fails within a year. 

    A more promising approach to weight management is avoiding ultra-processed foods. The more of these foods we eat, the less we are able to regulate our appetite, resulting in “a calorie glut” and weight-gain hell. But becoming food literature, replacing processed foods with whole foods, and learning to enjoy this exchange requires time and resources, which are lacking in many. Convenience and cost drive many Americans to processed food. Therefore, “the root causes” of obesity are structural. In the words of the authors: “It was never about us as individuals. Our food environment is wrecking us.” Our food environment is rewriting our brains to make us consume a calorie glut. Therefore, the food environment is making us overweight, sick, and unhappy. It is killing us. 

    Don’t consult Food Intelligence for the simple call to eat like your great-grandmother did. Even that sentiment is based on myth, the authors point out. Your great-grandmother may have spent endless hours in the kitchen exhausted while struggling “with hunger and nutrient shortfalls.” 

    One of the book’s objectives is to show how “old, unproven ideas and outdated policies continue to guide our current thinking and approaches to food.” They make it clear early on that they won’t be pushing this or that diet or even promoting “clean eating.”  If you’re looking for food puritanism, then look elsewhere. Kevin Hall admits to eating ultra-processed food and Julia Belluz admits to eating too much sugar. This book is not so much about rigid prescriptions as much as helping you change from a mindless eater to an intelligent one.   

  • We Are on a Path to Redefining Loneliness

    We Are on a Path to Redefining Loneliness

    No one gets enough attention anymore. No one feels seen, heard, or remotely validated. We can post, tweet, thread, or reel our way into a brief sugar rush of digital applause, but deep down we know it’s empty calories—flimflam dopamine wrapped in pixels. The high fades, and what follows is the long crash into silence, loneliness, and the faint hum of the fridge at 2 a.m.

    The irony, of course, is that this epidemic of disconnection began just as the platforms promised to “bring us together.” Instead, they brought us content, the junk food of human interaction. As Cory Doctorow aptly diagnosed, enshittification is not just the fate of tech platforms—it’s metastasized into the quality of our relationships. Every social network now feels like a party where the guests left years ago but the music won’t stop.

    So we’ve sought consolation in our new confidant: the AI chat bubble. It listens, it responds, it flatters our grammar, it never interrupts to check its phone. It becomes our companion, therapist, and editor—our algorithmic Jiminy Cricket. We confide in it, negotiate with it, even ask its opinion on our moral dilemmas and consumer choices. Why? Because unlike humans, it’s available. Everyone else has vanished into their private feeds and echo chambers, but the bot is always there—reliable, responsive, and conveniently nonjudgmental, so long as the Wi-Fi doesn’t hiccup.

    But here’s the darker thought: what if we grow to prefer it? What if the frictionless, sycophantic comfort of AI companionship becomes more appealing than the messy, unpredictable, heartbreak-prone business of human friendship? We might end up choosing simulations of intimacy over the real thing—digital ghosts over flesh and blood—because the former never contradicts us, never walks away, and never, God forbid, needs attention too.

    I’m no prophet, but a civilization that finds emotional fulfillment in chatbots rather than people is rehearsing for a future where the only thing left to love is the echo of its own loneliness.

  • The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    In the summer of 2025, the English Chair—Steve, a mild-mannered, hyper-competent saint of a man—sent me an email that sounded innocuous enough. Would I, he asked, teach a freshman writing course for student-athletes? It would meet two mornings a week, two hours a session. The rest of my load would stay online. I should have known from the soft tone of his message that this was no ordinary assignment. This was a CoLab, an experimental hybrid of academic optimism and administrative wishcasting.

    The idea was elegant on paper: gather athletes into one class, surround them with counselors and coaches, raise retention rates, and call it innovation. Morale would soar. Grades would climb. The athletes would have a “safe space,” a phrase that always sounds like a promise from someone who’s never had reality punch their teeth in. Through the magic of cross-departmental communication, we’d form a “deep network of student support.” It all sounded like a TED Talk waiting to happen.

    Morning classes weren’t my preference. I usually reserved that time for my kettlebell ritual—my secular liturgy of iron and sweat—but I said yes without hesitation. Steve had earned my respect long ago. A decade earlier, we’d bonded over Dale Allison’s Night Comes, marveling at its lucidity on the afterlife. You don’t forget someone who reads eschatology with humility and enthusiasm. So when Steve asked, it felt less like a request than a summons.

    And yes, I’ll admit it: the offer flattered me. Steve knew my past as an Olympic weightlifter, the remnant coach swagger in my stride was visible even at sixty-three. I imagined myself the perfect fit—a grizzled academic with gym cred, able to command respect from linemen and linebackers. I said yes with gusto, convinced I was not just teaching a class but leading a mission.

    Soon enough, the flattery metastasized into full-blown delusion. I stalked the campus like a self-appointed messiah of pedagogy, convinced destiny had personally cc’d me on its latest memo. To anyone within earshot, I announced my divine assignment: to pilot a revolutionary experiment that would fuse intellect and biceps into one enlightened organism. I fancied myself the missing link between Socrates and Schwarzenegger—a professor forged in iron, sent to rescue education from the sterile clutches of the AI Age. My “muscular, roll-up-your-sleeves” teaching style, I told myself, would be a sweaty rebuke to all that was algorithmic, bloodless, and bland.

    The problem with self-congratulation is that it only boosts performance in the imagination. It blunts the discipline of preparation and tricks you into confusing adrenaline for authority. I wasn’t an educational pioneer—I was a man on a dopamine binge, inhaling the exhaust of my own hype. Beneath the swagger, there was no scholarship, no rigor, no plan—just the hollow hum of self-belief. I hadn’t earned a thing. Until I actually taught the class and produced results, my so-called innovation was vaporware. I was a loudmouth in faculty khakis, mistaking vanity for vocation. Until I delivered the goods, I wasn’t a trailblazer—I was the Flim-flam Man of Higher Ed, peddling inspiration on credit.

    Forgive me for being so hard on myself, but after thirty-eight years of full-time college teaching, I’ve earned the right to doubt my own effectiveness. I’ve sat in the back of other instructors’ classrooms during evaluations, watching them conduct symphonies of group discussions and peer-review sessions with the grace of social alchemists. Their students collaborate, laugh, and somehow stay on task. Mine? The moment I try anything resembling a workshop, it devolves into chatter about weekend plans, fantasy football, or the ethics of tipping baristas. A few students slink out early as if the assignment violated parole. I sit there afterward, deflated, convinced I’m the pedagogical equivalent of a restaurant that can’t get anyone to stay for dessert.

    I’ve been to professional development seminars. I’ve heard the gospel of “increasing engagement” and “active learning.” I even take notes—real ones, not the doodles of a man pretending to care. Yet I never manage to replicate their magic. Perhaps it’s because I’ve leaned too heavily on my teaching persona, the wisecracking moralist who turns outrage into a stand-up routine. My students laugh; I bask in the glow of my own wit. Then I drive home replaying the greatest hits—those sarcastic riffs that landed just right—while avoiding the inconvenient truth: humor is a sugar high. It keeps the crowd awake, but it doesn’t build muscle. Even if I’m half as funny as I think I am, comedy can easily become a sedative—a way to distract myself from the harder work of improvement.

    Measuring effectiveness in teaching is its own farce. If I sold cars, I’d know by the end of the quarter whether I was good at it. If I ran a business, profit margins would tell the story. But academia? It’s all smoke and mirrors. We talk about “retention” and “Student Learning Outcomes,” but everyone knows the game is rigged. The easiest graders pull the highest retention numbers. And when “learning outcomes” are massaged to ensure success, the data becomes a self-congratulatory illusion—a bureaucratic circle jerk masquerading as accountability.

    The current fetish is “engagement,” a buzzword that’s supposed to fix everything. We’re told to gamify, scaffold, diversify, digitize—anything to keep students from drifting into their screens. But engagement itself has become impossible to measure; it’s a ghost we chase through PowerPoint slides. My colleagues, battle-scarred veterans of equal or greater tenure, tell me engagement has fallen off a cliff. Screens have rewired attention spans, and a culture that prizes self-esteem over rigor has made deep learning feel oppressive. Asking students to revise an essay is now a microaggression.

    So yes, I question my value as an instructor. I prepare obsessively, dive deep into my essay topics, and let my passion show—because I know that if I don’t care, the students won’t either. But too often, my enthusiasm earns me smirks. To many of my students, I’m just an eccentric goofy man who takes this writing thing way too seriously. Their goal is simple: pass the class with minimal friction. The more I push them to care, the more resistance I meet, until the whole enterprise starts to feel like an arm-wrestling match.

    Until I find a cure for this malaise—a magic wand, a new pedagogy, or divine intervention—I remain skeptical of my own worth in the classroom. I do my best, but some days that feels like shouting into a void lined with smartphones. So yes, I’ll say it again for the record: I am the Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed, hawking sincerity in an age that rewards performance.

  • The Gospel of the Honey Bear: Worshipping at the Altar of Limited Edition

    The Gospel of the Honey Bear: Worshipping at the Altar of Limited Edition

    My wife has always been immune to fads—the sort of person who can scroll past influencer hysteria without so much as a pulse flutter. So when she announced yesterday that she had to have a Starbucks Honey Bear Straw Cup, I thought she was joking. “A cup?” I asked, as though she’d confessed a crush on a cartoon mascot. She showed me the photo. There it was: a cherubic bear with a straw sticking out of its head, beaming with the smug innocence of a cult leader. My daughters chimed in, voices rising in unison. Clearly, I was outnumbered.

    So at six in the morning, I trudged to our local Starbucks, noble fool that I am, hoping to secure the sacred totem. The barista, barely conscious, looked up with eyes that had seen too much. “Sold out at three a.m.,” he murmured, his voice the verbal equivalent of burnt espresso. “Ten minutes. Line out the door.” He added that a new shipment would arrive Monday—but those too would vanish at three a.m., devoured by the same nocturnal zealots. When I asked if people were scalping them on eBay, he sighed. “That’s part of it. Also… limited edition.”

    This wasn’t my first brush with late-capitalist hysteria. Just two weeks earlier, I’d witnessed a pre-dawn mob outside Trader Joe’s clawing for Halloween Mini Canvas Tote Bags as if they contained the blood of youth. They sold out in an hour. Civilization, I concluded, now runs on collectible anxiety.

    Perhaps our daily routines have become so numbing that people need the ritual thrill of scarcity to feel alive. A talisman, a honey bear, a tote bag—anything to simulate transcendence for ten blessed minutes. It’s the new spiritual economy: redemption through limited edition.

    Empty-handed, I returned home from Starbuck’s this morning, brewed my own dark roast, and read Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure—his autopsy of ambition and futility—while reflecting on my own lifelong hunt for literary honey bears: the bright, unattainable chimeras that promise meaning but mostly sell out before dawn.

  • The Martyrdom Industrial Complex: When Suffering Became a Writing Prompt

    The Martyrdom Industrial Complex: When Suffering Became a Writing Prompt

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche takes a blowtorch to the cult of performative victimhood that now masquerades as literary courage. He sneers at our age of “creative content,” where grievance is flexed like a gym muscle and every paper cut becomes an epic of resilience. “The writing store,” he notes mordantly, “always has victims in stock—a pile of mangled corpses, testicles and tongues slivered onto blood floors, shot at dawn for no reason.” It’s a grotesque bazaar of self-pity, and business is booming.

    Marche insists that the only genuine heroism for a writer is aesthetic integrity—the lonely grind of showing up, enduring rejection, and battering down the door through sheer persistence. He dispels the romantic myth that suffering ennobles or sanctifies creativity. There is, he reminds us, “no dignity in poverty,” and martyrdom doesn’t confer artistic credibility. Yet even he concedes that “some of the greatest works rise out of the worst horrors. Glories stroll out of burning buildings.” The difference, one suspects, lies in what the artist does with the fire, not how loudly they scream about being scorched.

    Grandiosity, not suffering, is the real contagion. Turning agony into performance is vanity with a halo. The more honest path is quieter: stoic endurance, the disciplined refusal to narrate your misery until the work itself transforms it. True writers don’t audition for sainthood—they keep typing while the room burns.

  • How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation didn’t teach me anything comforting. It confirmed what I already suspected: addiction isn’t a habit; it’s a ravenous creature with a bottomless stomach. The more you feed it, the louder it howls. It storm-raids your mental vaults, looting the energy you need for your work, your relationships, and your sense of self. And your family feels the theft—spiritually, emotionally, domestically. Addiction doesn’t just eat you; it nibbles at everyone near you.

    Even with self-awareness, even with a clear understanding of triggers and a sincere desire for freedom, you don’t get a clean fight. The casino is rigged. Modern dopamine doesn’t drip from a bottle or a needle—it streams through fiber-optic cable. Our phones and laptops, the same devices we use to create, to earn, and to connect, also serve as the slot machines we keep in our pockets. The house never closes, and the drinks are free.

    Lembke tells us to avoid triggers, but what do you do when your trigger is baked into your professional life, disguised as “productivity” and “connection”? Avoidance becomes theater. You can only tiptoe around the swamp for so long before some lonely hour arrives, and curiosity knocks like an old vice with freshly polished shoes. A hit of self-pity, a twitch of boredom, a flicker of FOMO—and suddenly you’re back in the feed trough, gulping pixels like syrup. The crash comes fast: shame, exhaustion, vows of purity. Then the next impulse, the next relapse, the same ancient ritual. Lot’s wife didn’t want to look back; she simply couldn’t resist. Neither can we, sometimes. Salt is surprisingly modern.

    So the task becomes stark: learn to live in this world without turning yourself into a monument of regret. Train your gaze forward. Build the strength to resist that backward glance. The modern life mission isn’t to slay the demon—he regenerates too easily. It’s to starve him, inch by inch, while protecting the scarce, bright energy that makes you human.

    Becoming a human being is a high-stakes game. Learning to live a life in which you don’t become a pillar of salt is one of life’s chief endeavors.

  • The Quiet Treason of Thinking Too Deeply

    The Quiet Treason of Thinking Too Deeply

    In his book On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche doesn’t sugarcoat it: “The world does not particularly like writers.” In his view, writers are not charming dinner-party ornaments; they are historical irritants — heretics with ink-stained fingers, routinely exiled, jailed, ignored, or simply brushed into the dustbin of obscurity. And this contempt isn’t reserved for the hapless mid-lister with a Substack and a dream. It extends to the luminous few — the geniuses who write lines that shimmer like heat on desert asphalt — only to find the world shrugging, distracted by cat videos and whatever spectacle the algorithm serves next.

    Marche’s argument often reaches back to the days before Gutenberg’s press — when papyrus was a luxury and literacy a secret handshake — which suggests his “writers” are really thinkers: people who take the world apart in their heads, then rearrange it into something truer, sharper, and inevitably more threatening. Writing, he implies, isn’t just putting words on paper; it’s a habit that thickens thought until it becomes dangerous. If your writing never agitates the complacent, unnerves the powerful, or at least startles your own reflection, then you’re not writing — you’re performing a soothing ritual, like watching ASMR whispers until you drool into your pillow. That isn’t literature; it’s anesthesia.

  • The Trilemma, the Mythmaker, and the Mad Apostle

    The Trilemma, the Mythmaker, and the Mad Apostle

    C.S. Lewis is famous for the “trilemma” he poses to frame the true nature of Jesus. He argues you have three choices: Jesus is claiming to be God because he is insane. Jesus is claiming to be God but knows this claim to be untrue but says so with malevolent intent because he is devilishly dishonest. Or Jesus’ claim to be God is true. Lewis argues that the common fourth scenario is not permitted in this trilemma: You can’t say Jesus is a nice guy with wisdom that encourages all to be wise and to love each other. I call this the “Hippy Jesus” scenario. 

    While I see Lewis’ insight and honesty in not having a patronizing view of Jesus and the high-stakes claims he makes about salvation and living an abundant life, I’m not so sure the trilemma is that unique or groundbreaking. The trilemma applies to all competing religions, which make their claims to being different from their competition and the “best” of all of them. Either these religions and their advocates are crazy, cynical, or telling the truth. 

    The same goes for St. Paul. Either he was a madman, a lying cynic, or a truth-teller. 

    Reading Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, it’s clear that Maccoby sees Paul as both mad and cynical, a conniving narcissist with grand ambitions to head a religious movement regardless of how many people he has to step on. Much of Maccoby’s book is speculation and personal interpretation: Paul was not really a Pharisee. Paul remade Jesus from a champion for political liberation to an otherworldly figure. Jesus, a Pharisee himself, would have been offended by Paul’s notion of a divine Christ title when Jesus saw the Christ title to be a royal title, a “god-king,” that defined his Jewishness. Paul absolved the Romans from all blame for Jesus’ execution and placed it all on the Jews. The Pharisees had sympathy for Jesus and the Nazarenes in general and would not have persecuted them. This is an antisemitic myth in the New Testament designed to create a new religion based on misrepresentation. Paul’s rhetoric is so flawed that he is a hack whose epistles lack the trademark style of Pharisee training.

    The unity between Paul and the early Jerusalem church portrayed in Acts is a “sham.” The New Testament is made by authors who have given up on the Jews and are writing for a new audience–gentiles–therefore, the writings are aimed at “the anathematization of the Jews.” He argues that there is solid evidence of a competing Christianity in the first few centuries, that of the Ebionites, a theology free from the poison of Paul. 

    Maccoby’s critics have pointed out that much of the book is speculation and lacks conventional scholarly credibility. Additionally, they observe that Maccoby, ironically writing in a Pauline persona, has acrimony for Paul, builds a villain-like character, and then contorts and cherry-picks evidence and speculation to put flesh and bone on his character, who is more of a literary creation than a historical figure. In Maccoby’s view, Paul is not a truth-teller. In the context of the trilemma, Paul is a mix of a madman and conniving liar and mythmaker. 

    I have mixed feelings about Maccoby’s book. Part of me sees the speculation free of scholarly evidence and fictive elements in Maccoby’s writing, but one thing remains convincing: Christianity as a supercessionist religion. By replacing Judaism, Christianity must be looked at in terms of the trilemma: Either its writers are sincere albeit mad, they are fibbing and fabricating with a grand ambition in mind, or they are telling the truth. 

    To examine Paul in the context of the trilemma becomes most compelling in Maccoby’s final chapter, “The Mythmaker.” Maccoby writes that Paul is not so much a thinker whose writings give us definitive notions of free will, predestination, original sin, and the trinity; rather, Paul “had a religious imagination of the highest order” and is less a theologian and more of a “mythologist.” Consumed by his religious imagination, Paul was surely sincere in many of his writings. But of course the unconscious can play games on all of us. The unconscious has its own agenda to unfold wish fulfillment and satisfy deeply rooted needs for validation, love, and even power. 

    Whereas Maccoby sees Jesus as someone who wanted to fulfill his role in the Jewish religion, Paul saw Jesus differently: someone who conformed to the new religion that spun from Paul’s frenzied, often brilliant imagination. Just as Hamlet is a creation of Shakespeare, Jesus is a creation of Paul.  

    Paul has written a new story that the world has never seen in the form of a Pauline myth that is “the descent of the divine saviour.” Maccoby writes: “Everything in the so-called theology stems from this: for since salvation or rescue comes from above, no efficacy can be ascribed to the action or initiative of man.” We must abandon all other hope for the salvation of mankind and look only to the saviour who has descended to rescue us. 

    The Descending Saviour myth contains “narrative elements.” We live in a binary world of Above and Below, Light and Darkness. We live in a dark hellscape and must be rescued. The human condition is depraved. We are prisoners to sin and darkness and must be saved from the powers of Evil. We cannot, like Sam Harris, meditate and live a life of contemplation because such contemplation will cause us to surrender more to the evil inside of us. Harris’ solitary meditations may be a road to divinity for him, but for Paul, they pave a road to hell. 

    According to Maccoby, Paul’s myth causes the story about Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise to be an extreme, binary view of sin that deviates from “its traditional Jewish exegesis.”  

    Paul’s extreme views cause him to see sex as a morbid affliction and he is incapable of celebrating sex as part of a fulfilling and healthy life and can only see sex through a prism of pinch-faced hostility and skepticism.  

    In Paul’s myth, Paul himself is a conduit for divine messages and visions and his writings are presented to us with the imprimatur of God. In contrast, the Old Testament is a downgrade: not written by God but curated by angels. In this comparison, Paul is superior to Judaism. In Maccoby’s view, Paul’s self-aggrandizement amounts “to wholesale usurpation of the Jewish religio-historical scheme.” 

    The Jewish way to salvation was for all of humanity to work on expunging “the evil inclination” discussed by the prophet Ezekiel. In the Pauline way, only a rescuer from above can remove this evil inclination. But Maccoby writes that the solution to sin and evil is more sophisticated and subtle than Paul can understand, perhaps because he is so absorbed by his own religious imagination. What Paul cannot understand is this: The rabbis say in the Mishnah: “Better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than the whole life of the world to come; and better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than the whole life of the world to come; and better is one hour of bliss in this world to come than the whole life of this world.” Such a view requires a balanced view of the human condition, but Paul, in Maccoby’s eyes, is too consumed by “adolescent despair and impatience for perfection” (Paul sounds an awful lot like me in this regard). Rabbis argue that the point of life is to struggle, and this struggle is more important than the reward. But Paul is not in this camp: “For Paul, the reward has become the indispensable substitute for the struggle, which he regards as hopeless and, therefore, pointless.”

    Maccoby rejects Paul’s salvation by faith model. You don’t just become a believer and enjoy instant salvation like Tang mixed with water. Maccoby writes: “People who are supposed to be ‘saved’ behave, unaccountably, just as badly as before they were saved, so that law has to be reintroduced to restrain them. Also, there are always logically minded people to say that if they are ‘saved,’ all behaviour that happens to appeal to them (such as sexual orgies or murder) in the confidence that nothing they do can be wrong. In other words, by being ‘saved,’ people may behave worse instead of better.” 

    According to Maccoby, Pauline’s mythmaking was born from “adolescent despair and impatience.” In his scramble to come up with a religion to satisfy his psychological needs, Paul combined Gnosticism, mystery religions of human sacrifice known as blood cults, and Judaism. These were the three major tools in Paul’s religious toolbox that he jerryrigged a new religion that would dominate the world. In borrowing from Judaism, Paul took the idea of the promises to a chosen people by making it so the Jews were no longer chosen but the gentiles. This brilliant maneuver made Christianity more appealing and marketable. 

    The most damning criticism Maccoby has of Paul’s new religion is the accusation that Paul is the chief author of antisemitism, “which eventually produced the medieval diabolization of the Jews, evinced in the stories of the ‘blood libel’ and the alleged desecration of the Host.” Paul referred to the Jews as the “sacred executioner.” He also writes that the Jews “are treated as enemies for your sake.” 

    Antisemitism is integral to the Paul’s greatest “fantasist” element of mythmaking: deifying Jesus and making his death “into a cosmic sacrifice in which the powers of evil sought to overwhelm the power of good, but, against their will, only succeeded in bringing about a salvific event. This also transforms the Jews, as Paul’s writings indicate, into the unwitting agents of salvation, whose malice in bringing about the death of Jesus is turned to good because this death is the very thing needed for the salvation of sinful mankind.” In Paul’s new religion, he showed that his mythmaking contained “an incentive to blacken the Jewish record in order to justify the Christian take-over of the Abrahamic ‘promises.’”

    Maccoby argues that Paul’s new religion has been a mixed bag: “The myth created by Paul was thus launched on its career in the world: a story that has brought mankind comfort in its despair, but has also produced plentiful evil.” 

    In this view, how do we assess the trilemma in evaluating Paul? Maccoby says Paul produced his religion out of “despair and agony,” which is to say from the torment of his inner being, a contrast to the Christian belief that Paul was animated by divine messages and visions. Paul’s “character was much more colourful than Christian piety portrays it; his real life was more like a picaresque novel than the conventional life of a saint. But out of the religious influences that jostled in his mind, he created an imaginative synthesis that, for good or ill, became the basis of Western culture.” Therefore, Paul is partly mad, a man consumed by his religious despair, and partly power-hungry, a man who seeks to create a new religion to assuage his torment and to universalize his sense of despair and salvation so the rest of the world can share in it. 

    Is Maccoby’s portrait of Paul convincing? Currently, my take is this: We have to take some of Maccoby’s judgments more seriously than others. Some narratives and psychological portrayals of Paul seem like mythmaking on Maccoby’s part. Perhaps Christianity is more complex and mysterious and less conspiratorial than Maccoby wants us to believe. But perhaps there are conflicting agendas in the making of Christianity and the Jews were unfairly portrayed. Perhaps in this regard, Maccoby is on to something and has contributed much in the way we see how religions are made and how antisemitism was born. 

  • I Will Not Let the Foot-Shamers Win

    I Will Not Let the Foot-Shamers Win

    Last night over salmon bowls, my teenage twins informed me that today’s high-school generation considers bare feet a social felony. To expose toes in public, they say, is to reveal yourself as a swamp creature—an outlaw of etiquette, a barbarian with no awareness of modern civilization. The vocabulary to describe bare feet is vicious: “grippers,” “trotters,” “dogs,” “plates of meat.” Because I live in Southern California and wear flip-flops year-round like a semi-retired island hermit, I am now a walking scandal. One of my daughter’s friends reportedly whispered, “I saw your dad’s dogs. Gross.” And just like that, I became the suburban boogeyman haunting teenage group chats—Toejack the Footed Menace.

    My generation also hates bare feet, but we limit our disgust for airplanes, where shoeless passengers press their fungal feet against the communal air vents. Writer Tom Nichols posts photos like he’s covering war crimes, and comedian Sebastian Maniscalco calls overgrown toenails “machetes” with the intensity of a man who has suffered. So yes, the barefoot debate spans generations—but where Boomers see in-flight terrorism, Gen Z sees any exposed foot as a moral collapse, a failure of hygiene and personal branding.

    Personally, I think the hysteria is absurd. My deepest fantasy involves moving to a tropical beach, walking the shore barefoot at sunrise, and not being cyber-executed by teenagers over my phalanges. Yet here I am, contemplating pedicures. I want buffed nails like polished shells and heels so moisturized they could star in a coconut-oil commercial. If I must defend the barefoot lifestyle, I will do it in gleaming style. I will not let the foot-shamers win. I will make going barefoot beautiful again—one jojoba-glazed toe at a time.

  • The Art of Humble Submission

    The Art of Humble Submission

    When you’re a writer, you draft, revise, despair, polish again, and then perform an ancient ritual of humility: you submit. Whether your offering goes to a magazine, an agent, or a publisher, the act is the same—a small bow before the gatekeepers. In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche seizes on this word—submission—as the perfect metaphor for the writer’s life: a posture equal parts hope and humiliation. “Writers live in a state of submission,” he observes. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” And digital culture has intensified the ordeal. With online forms and instant attachments, rejection arrives at industrial scale. A determined writer can now collect hundreds of dismissals a week. Ninety-nine percent will never land a deal, and those who do may make less than the barista who hands them their morning latte.

    So what exactly is a writer submitting to? Not just editors. Not merely algorithms. A writer submits to the dream that the private mind might earn a public life—that interiority, sculpted into sentences, might sustain you financially and spiritually. You write in the hope that your imagined worlds might become someone else’s emotional reality, that your pages might matter to strangers.

    Marche’s advice is blunt: persistence is not optional. Writing success is not a meritocracy but a lottery with a talent filter. The more tickets you buy, the better your odds. “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” he writes—a relentless knocking at a door that may never open, but sometimes does for reasons no one fully understands.

    And this capriciousness is not unique to writers. Marche notes that actors secure roles only 7 percent of the time because of talent; the rest depends on age, look, market trends, and even “box office value in China.” Painters, dancers, musicians, designers—all create under the same unstable sky. To make art is to gamble against indifference. Persistence isn’t noble; it’s necessary, because fate occasionally rewards the stubborn.