Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Weapons of Fear: Epistemic Collapse in Eddington and Weapons (college writing prompt)

    Weapons of Fear: Epistemic Collapse in Eddington and Weapons (college writing prompt)

    Over the last decade, American culture has undergone a profound crisis of shared reality—what scholars call an epistemic collapse. In the vacuum created by fractured institutions, algorithm-driven outrage, political opportunism, and a populace trained to distrust expertise, communities have turned inward, building their own private universes of truth. Two recent films—Ari Aster’s Eddington (2024) and Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025)—stand at the center of this cultural conversation. While their genres differ—Eddington as a neo-Western political drama and Weapons as a folk-horror anthology—both films dramatize the same underlying catastrophe: when people no longer agree on what is real, they become dangerously easy to manipulate, divide, and weaponize.

    In Eddington, the small New Mexico town is already fractured before the plot begins. The COVID-19 pandemic becomes the spark that exposes deep fault lines: anti-mask sheriff Joe Cross stokes resentment and paranoia, pro-mandate Mayor Ted Garcia attempts to preserve public health in a community that no longer trusts him, and the town’s institutions melt under the weight of political rage, conspiracy theories, and personal vendettas. Masks, lockdowns, land rights, and municipal policy become symbols of existential war. Citizens drift into echo chambers where identity outweighs truth and where “freedom” can be invoked to justify violence. Through these tensions, Eddington examines how tribal politics, misinformation, and fear transform ordinary people into agents of chaos—into what the film metaphorically frames as “weapons.”

    Weapons begins in a seemingly different register—a folk-horror narrative involving children, trauma, and community superstition—but it ultimately reveals itself as a story about the same phenomenon: collective panic filling the void left by failed institutions. When mysterious events shake the town, people reach not for evidence, reason, or communal deliberation, but for myths. Rumors calcify into “truth,” grief mutates into paranoia, and the community turns against itself in a desperate search for someone to blame. In this atmosphere, children, grief-stricken parents, and unstable townspeople all become susceptible to narratives that promise clarity and purpose, even at the price of cruelty. Like Eddington, Weapons suggests that the human need for certainty can be exploited, turning vulnerable people into instruments of violence.

    Both films take place in communities that feel abandoned—by government, by truth, by stability, by the social contract. In Eddington, the pandemic reveals a town already primed for collapse: neighbors distrust each other, public servants abuse their power, and media ecosystems churn conspiracies at a devastating pace. In Weapons, the terror centers on mysterious disappearances and supernatural dread, but the underlying cause is similar: when people feel unmoored, they grasp at stories—however irrational—that make sense of suffering. In both cases, the crisis is not just external; it is psychological, emotional, and cultural. These films argue that a society that no longer shares a framework of truth inevitably begins producing its own monsters.

    Your task is to write a comparative, argumentative essay that analyzes how both Eddington and Weapons depict the collapse of shared reality and the transformation of ordinary individuals into “weapons”—tools of fear, ideology, grief, or superstition. You will argue how each film uses different storytelling techniques to illuminate the same cultural trauma: a nation where trust in institutions has eroded, where truth is increasingly privatized, and where communities respond to uncertainty with tribalism, scapegoating, and paranoia.

    To frame your argument, consider the following thematic questions:

    1. Epistemic Crisis: What happens when communities no longer share the same reality?

    In Eddington, the pandemic becomes a catalyst for unraveling collective trust. Sheriff Joe Cross exploits the crisis for personal power, leveraging fear and resentment to undermine public-health directives. Misinformation spreads faster than illness, and political theater replaces governance. In Weapons, suspicion and folk belief dominate; characters construct supernatural explanations for grief they cannot otherwise process. How do these fictional communities illustrate the broader national struggle to maintain a shared understanding of truth?

    2. Scapegoating and Manufactured Monsters

    Both films show societies that create monsters when reality becomes intolerable. In Weapons, grief and superstition lead to scapegoating—outsiders, children, even supernatural entities become symbols of community anxiety. In Eddington, “the monster” is political: masks, mandates, immigrants, liberals, conservatives—whatever the tribe defines as the existential threat. Analyze how each film uses its respective genre (horror vs. political drama) to critique the human impulse toward blame when confronted with collective fear.

    3. The Weaponized Individual: When people become instruments of chaos

    Sheriff Cross turns himself into a political weapon; Vernon weaponizes conspiracy thinking; Brian transforms a viral video into a career. Meanwhile, characters in Weapons become pawns of rumor and superstition. How do the films examine the way individuals can be radicalized or repurposed by fear, trauma, or ideological narratives?

    4. Institutional Failure and the Vacuum It Creates

    In Eddington, institutions collapse under pressure: public health, municipal leadership, local law enforcement, media, and even basic civic trust. In Weapons, institutions either fail or play no meaningful role, leaving individuals to fill the void with folklore and violent improvisation. Compare how each film portrays the consequences of institutional breakdown—and how that vacuum shapes community behavior.

    5. The Loss of Humanity in a Post-COVID World

    Even though Weapons is not explicitly a pandemic film, its emotional landscape reflects post-COVID anxieties: loneliness, grief, mistrust, and the longing for clear explanations. Eddington addresses the pandemic head-on, depicting how fear strips people of empathy and connection. In both films, humanity erodes as people prioritize survival, identity, or belonging over compassion. Analyze how each story portrays this transformation.

    6. The Role of Media, Algorithmic Influence, and Storytelling

    Eddington explicitly critiques media spectacle and algorithmic manipulation; Weapons does so more subtly through mythmaking and rumor. Compare how each film reveals the power of narrative—factual or fictional—to shape belief, identity, and behavior. What does each film suggest about the modern American hunger for stories that confirm our fears, validate our tribal loyalties, or simplify our grief?

    7. The Nietzschean Last Man: A Society Without Higher Purpose

    For extra depth, you may choose to integrate the concept of Nietzsche’s “Last Man”—the individual who seeks comfort over purpose, safety over meaning, distraction over responsibility. Which characters in each film exemplify this drift toward nihilism? Does each film suggest that the Last Man is a symptom of cultural decay—or part of its cause?

    Write a comparative essay of 1,800–2,200 words that argues how Eddington and Weapons portray the following intertwined themes:

    • the breakdown of shared reality
    • the rise of tribalism and paranoia
    • the transformation of ordinary people into “weapons”
    • the creation of monsters—psychological, political, or supernatural—to fill the void left by institutional failure
    • the erosion of humanity in a culture defined by fear, spectacle, and algorithmic influence

    Your thesis must make a clear, debatable claim about what these films reveal about post-COVID American society. You must support your analysis with close reading of key scenes, comparison of cinematic techniques, and sustained argumentation.

    Your essay must also include:

    1. A Counterargument

    Acknowledge at least one opposing view—for example, the claim that Eddington is primarily about political extremism while Weapons is primarily about horror and grief, and therefore the comparison is forced. Then rebut that view by showing that genre differences sharpen, rather than undermine, the thematic parallels.

    2. A Rebuttal

    Explain why your central claim still holds. You may argue that both films are ultimately parables about epistemic breakdown and human vulnerability in the absence of trusted institutions.

    3. A Conclusion That Opens Outward

    Discuss what these films suggest about where American culture may be heading if fragmentation, mistrust, and weaponized narratives continue.

    Your writing should demonstrate:

    • analytical depth
    • clarity
    • engagement with cinematic detail
    • strong comparative structure
    • thoughtful paragraph organization
    • precise sentence-level control

    This essay invites you not only to compare two compelling films, but also to reflect on the cultural moment that shaped them—and the uncertain landscape we now inhabit.

  • Aura Farming in the Age of the Priority Pass

    Aura Farming in the Age of the Priority Pass

    Zach Helfand’s New Yorker piece “The Airport-Lounge Wars” reads like the natural sequel to John Seabrook’s “How the Sports Stadium Went Luxe.” Both writers chart America’s drift into a soft feudalism—an economy built on velvet ropes, curated vanity, and the tyranny of creature comforts. Exclusivity is our reigning civic religion. Helfand opens with a thesis as blunt as a boarding announcement: “Airport lounges are about who gets in and who does not.” In today’s America, you must cultivate an aura—what my teenage daughters call “aura farming,” the strategic cultivation of mystique, importance, and manufactured nonchalance. Airports have become the perfect stage for this theater of status. You either inhabit the drab terminal with its cracked vinyl seats and public coughing contests, or you ascend to the glowing Xanadu behind frosted glass. My own family acts out the class divide: my wife and daughters breeze through TSA with their PreCheck halos while I shuffle through the cattle chute, sacrificing my bottled water, removing my belt, and enduring laptop shaming before rejoining them, a humbler, poorer man.

    These airport Xanadus have grown so seductive that some travelers go full pilgrim. One Malaysian businessman, drunk on his Priority Pass privileges, missed his flight to Kuala Lumpur and drifted through lounges for eighteen days, forging boarding passes like a monk copying sacred texts—until he was arrested and relocated to the Prison Lounge, where the amenities are famously lacking.

    Wanting a taste of this strange devotion, Helfand spent a week touring New York’s airport lounges with his own Priority Pass. At the HelloSky Lounge at JFK, he marinated in what historian Kevin James calls “an enhanced experience of stasis.” Translation: high-thread-count boredom. Even this, Helfand notes, is aspirational—CBS travel editor Peter Greenberg says lounges aim for nothing more noble than inspiring customers to murmur, “Well, it’s better than nothing.” Indeed, the holy trinity of “better than nothing” turns out to be fruit-infused water, padded leather walls, and chandeliers in the bathroom. Civilization marches on.

    Airports are designed to grind the soul down to a nub, so perhaps this “slightly better than nothing” aesthetic is our cultural Valium. A tranquilizer bubble for people waiting to be herded onto aluminum tubes. Pay the fee, flash the pass, and anesthetize the existential dread of a three-hour layover. As Helfand puts it, “Waiting can make one feel needy, like a baby.” Maybe that’s why lounges feel like nurseries for adults: dim lighting, soft chairs, snacks within arm’s reach. The more infantile we become, the grander the titles on the door—V.I.P., Admiral, Ambassador. It’s a fantasy nobility designed to distract us from the truth: we are tired, displaced, sleep-deprived, and longing for our beds, our routines, and—let’s be honest—our blankies.

  • Skyboxes for the Last Man

    Skyboxes for the Last Man

    There’s a primitive hunger in us to feel supersized—elevated, exalted, briefly spared from our mortal smallness. We chase that sensation in crowds: at concerts, festivals, theme parks, and megachurches, all promising communion without requiring introspection. The catch is the port-o-potty, that plastic temple of human despair, which can sour the entire pilgrim’s progress. People want collective rapture without the stench of the collective. Enter the “premium experience”—fast passes, VIP wristbands, and, at sports stadiums, full-blown oligarch cosplay. That’s John Seabrook’s target in “How the Sports Stadium Went Luxe,” an essay that quietly fillets America’s economic feudalism, vanity, and reliance on sugar-spun spectacle in place of anything resembling meaning.

    The roots of this gilded circus stretch back to the 1966 Houston Astrodome: AstroTurf, orange-suited groundskeepers in space helmets, and a scoreboard colossal enough to make Orwell’s telescreen look provincial. Roger Angell attended a game there and sensed rot beneath the novelty. As Seabrook notes, Angell was already wary of skyboxes—those proto-citadels of privilege that foretold today’s “arms race” among stadium owners hell-bent on turning a public ritual into a private entitlement. Half a century later, Angell’s suspicion reads like prophecy. The luxury fever he glimpsed has metastasized into a full-blown industry. As Seabrook puts it, “An entire economy of luxury fan experiences in sports and entertainment has grown out of the sad soft caves Angell spelunked in Houston, and I wanted to have one of those experiences, too.”

    To understand the psychology of elevated fandom, Seabrook consults Lance Evans, the architect behind SoFi Stadium—Inglewood’s cathedral of curated transcendence. There, patrons select from a menu of “premium experiences,” each priced to “align with their place in the world.” That genteel phrasing hides a darker truth: class isn’t simply an economic tier; it’s a personality trait. Your place in the world becomes a performance, and the show requires props—preferably props that remind you of the people beneath you. These pleasures are petty, but they endure. In the age of performative living, they flourish. As Seabrook notes, SoFi bristles with more than two hundred sixty speakers and fifty-six 5G antennas because it’s not enough to enjoy your rarefied moment; your followers must witness your transcendence in real time. Nietzsche’s Last Man hovers here like an unwanted mascot: a society drained of belief, numbing itself with spectacle and status.

    Seabrook also channels Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the great chronicle of our national loneliness. Stadiums, he argues, act as “secular megachurches”—sites where the spiritually unmoored gather to celebrate, lament, and play dress-up. I thought of his words when I dropped my wife and daughters at Camp Flog Gnaw, watching teens in eye-catching costumes that looked equal parts ritual attire and thirst-trap armor.

    But this communal longing is now fully monetized. Every inch of the stadium belongs to capitalism’s mining operation. “Stadiums may be the most rigorously monetized spaces on earth,” Seabrook writes—and he understates the point. Once the Cowboys unveiled their high-end palace in 2009, the modern luxury-experience arms race took off. The model is simple: fewer fans, more premium fans. After all, more than 95 percent of football viewers remain home with their televisions. The 5 percent who attend spend half the game staring at their phones anyway, toggling through fantasy scores. The real revenue doesn’t come from seats; it comes from broadcasting rights and the ultra-wealthy patrons willing to pay for the illusion of insider status. With twenty-four million millionaires and nearly a thousand billionaires available as clientele, teams happily offer “ultimate fan experiences”—exclusive flights on replica team jets, photo ops with executives and legends, and other Gatsby-themed hallucinations of proximity to greatness.

    This fetish for elevation isn’t confined to stadiums. Seabrook argues we now inhabit a full “Age of the Premium Experience”: luxury shopping, chauffeured rides, curated airport lounges, tiered airplane cabins, hotels engineered for flawless self-regard. The stadium is simply the loudest expression of a 24/7 lifestyle meant to insulate the affluent from the ambient dread of being ordinary.

    But the heart of Seabrook’s essay is not abundance—it’s spiritual malnutrition. These luxury patrons, wealthy as they are, drift through life with the soul-flat affect of Nietzsche’s Last Man. They mistake gaudy comforts for transcendence. They mistake proximity for identity. They mistake curated envy for connection. They are, in Seabrook’s telling, extravagantly fleeced and blissfully unaware, convinced that sitting near the machinery of professional sports confers meaning by osmosis. They pay a fortune for the privilege of being expertly duped.

  • A Slow-Motion Collapse: Reading The Emergency

    A Slow-Motion Collapse: Reading The Emergency

    George Packer’s The Emergency has been marketed as a dystopian novel. I tried to resist reading it, but after hearing Packer discuss it with Andrew Sullivan—especially the idea that democracies die not from foreign invasion but from self-inflicted wounds—I felt compelled to give it a go. The book declares its thesis on page one: The Emergency is a fading empire that decays slowly at first and then all at once. The world people once recognized disintegrates into something unthinkable. A population that once shared a common reality through the Evening Verity now lives in fractured, dopamine-soaked silos dominated by tribal influencers. The country divides into two warring classes: the educated Burghers in the cities and their resentful counterparts, the Yeomen in the hinterlands.

    In the opening chapter, this polarization erupts into “street fighting,” looting, the disappearance of law enforcement, and the flight of the ruling elite from the capital. Dr. Rustin delivers this bleak news to his family over dinner. His daughter Selva’s first concern is whether the unrest will interrupt her academic trajectory. She has worked relentlessly to climb to the top of her class, and the thought of a civil conflict jeopardizing her college prospects strikes her as the height of unfairness. In a single scene, Packer exposes the insularity of the laptop class—how they can read about national collapse yet continue to focus unblinkingly on résumé-building.

    Rustin shares his daughter’s blind spot. He believes his rationality and status shield him from whatever chaos brews outside their comfortable home, so he heads to the Imperial College Hospital as if nothing has changed. But when he arrives, he finds a skeleton staff, no leadership, and a pack of teenage looters closing in on the building, shouting about reclaiming a city stolen from them by Burghers. Their anger echoes the real-world contempt for Boomers—our generation’s hoarding of wealth, property, and opportunity, and the young’s belief that the American Dream was stolen and the ladder kicked away. The looters are led by Iver, a young man who once sat beside Selva in school. Rustin learns Iver is desperate to get medicine for his mother, who can no longer access care in the collapsing system. The gang consists of young men who failed in school and have no future—Hoffer’s True Believers in the flesh, clinging to nihilism because it’s the only story left to them.

    Their attempted looting is half-hearted; they’re too exhausted to fully ransack the hospital. Rustin placates them by promising free medical care for Iver’s mother. The moment marks a turning point for him. He once believed Burghers and Yeomen could coexist if they simply treated each other with decency, a kind of soft humanism. But Chapter One hints that civility may be dead—that the Burghers have grown complacent, valuing comfort more than democracy, drifting toward Nietzsche’s Last Man: a class so lulled by ease that it failed to maintain the institutions holding the nation together.

    It’s a bruising first chapter. As Andrew Sullivan noted, the novel “hits too close to home.” The subject matter is painful, but its resonance is undeniable. Though I haven’t been a diligent novel reader for over a decade, this one has enough voltage to keep me turning pages.

  • The Cruel Irony in Tatiana Schlossberg’s Fight to Live

    The Cruel Irony in Tatiana Schlossberg’s Fight to Live

    A few nights ago, I was tired of screens from setting up my Mac Mini desktop all day, so in bed, I put my laptop aside, reached for a print copy of The New Yorker, and read Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay “A Battle with My Blood.” On May 25, 2024, she gave birth to her daughter; on that same day she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, complicated by an especially cruel mutation called Inversion 3. She had to take in her newborn and her mortality in the same breath. Since then she has endured chemo, transfusions, and CAR-T-cell therapy—the same therapy that saved my brother from Burkitt lymphoma—while living under a prognosis that predicts she has a single year left at age thirty-four. The essay lodged itself in me, and I can’t let it go.

    Before reading her piece, I knew nothing about Schlossberg, except now I know she is the cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services. It would be high satire if it weren’t real: she fights for her life while her cousin, a former heroin addict and tireless distributor of vaccine misinformation, dismantles the very funding streams that support leukemia research. Her mother even wrote to the Senate to block his confirmation, pointing out that he has never worked in medicine, public health, or government. It didn’t matter. He was confirmed anyway, as if spite were a qualification.

    Schlossberg wants to live long enough for her children to remember her. Her cousin’s policies seem engineered to ensure the opposite—not just for her, but for countless patients who depend on the research he’s busy defunding. Her fight is intimate; his carelessness is national. And it’s impossible not to feel the cruelty of that collision.

  • The Word of the Year Points to the Collective Loss of Our Minds

    The Word of the Year Points to the Collective Loss of Our Minds

    The Word of the Year is supposed to capture the moment we’re living in—our collective mood, our shared madness. As Amogh Dimri explains in “Rage Bait Is a Brilliant Word of the Year,” we’re no longer defined by reason or restraint but by whatever emotion the attention economy yanks out of us. Dimri reminds us that 2023 gave us rizz and 2024 bestowed brain rot. In other words, when our brains aren’t decomposing from endless scrolling, we’re wide awake and quivering with unhinged outrage. This may explain why I now hate driving more than folding laundry or going to the dentist. The roads are filled with people whose minds seem equal parts rotted and enraged—and the algorithms aren’t helping.

    Dimri cites the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of rage bait as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger” in order to goose traffic and juice engagement. An elegant description for something as crude as poking humanity’s collective bruise.

    Critics complain that Oxford’s online voting process indulges the very brain rot it warns us about, but I’m with Dimri. Oxford is right to acknowledge how digital speech shapes culture. Ignoring these terms would be like pretending smog doesn’t count as weather. Rage bait is influential because it packs the whole human condition—weakness, manipulation, and political dysfunction—into two syllables. And, as I’d add, it also produces drivers who treat the road like a demolition derby.

    As for predecessors, rage bait didn’t appear out of thin air. Vince McMahon practically drafted its blueprint decades ago. His wrestling empire ran on kayfabe, where performers wore the mask of rage so long they eventually believed it. Something similar has infected our online discourse. The performance swallowed the performer, and here we are—furious, fragmented, and algorithmically herded into traffic.

  • 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. 

  • Five Comedians and One Saint: A Comedy of Eternal Stakes

    Five Comedians and One Saint: A Comedy of Eternal Stakes

    Today on Press Play, Madeleine Brand interviewed Lorraine Ali about her book No Lessons Learned: The Making of Curb Your Enthusiasm as Told by Larry David and the Cast and Crew. As I listened, I realized how strange it is that Larry David belongs to a small circle of people I’ve felt connected to for decades. When I made the mental list—David, Richard Lewis, Fran Lebowitz, Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield—it was obvious they were all Jewish, secular, and uncompromisingly themselves. They taught me to laugh at the absurdity of existence, and to find humor in the bruised places most people hide. 

    That realization sent me down a darker corridor: Paul the Apostle and Christianity, both of which have shadowed me with sermons about sin, salvation, and the terror of eternity. The comedians insist life is a spectacle of flaws; Paul insists life is a judgment. 

    I sometimes imagine the five humorists sitting with Paul on Andy Cohen’s set, trading insults, jokes, and aphorisms while Paul urges repentance. Would he recognize their brilliance or just try to convert them? I don’t know. I only know that part of my soul reaches for laughter and part of me reaches for salvation, and the tension between them has left me unsettled and heavy-hearted.

  • French Kiss and the Death of Romance: When Below Deck Became a Funeral

    French Kiss and the Death of Romance: When Below Deck Became a Funeral

    Lionel Richie’s memoir Truly apparently shocked a reviewer who couldn’t fathom how a man who wrote love ballads for The Commodores and crooned “Hello” into the hearts of millions might secretly doubt the existence of love. If the critic wants evidence, there’s no need to psychoanalyze Lionel; just watch the single most soul-evaporating hour of television I’ve ever endured: Below Deck Mediterranean, Season 10, Episode 8—“French Kiss.”

    Normally I treat Below Deck like a sushi boat of human dysfunction: the ostentation, the vanity, the moral anemia. It’s a circus, and I laugh at the performers. But this episode wasn’t a circus. It was a funeral for romance. The premise is already laughable: a 47-year-old bachelor named Joe “auditions” several women to be his wife. He speaks to them like he’s onboarding interns at a failing startup. He uses phrases like “I need your input” and “I’m sorry you find this challenging,” as though he’s gently disciplining HR for mishandling toner orders.

    The beloved stewardess Aesha started off as the show’s only beacon of naive hope. She snacks on popcorn and chirps, “Watching people find love before my eyes—how could I be anything but happy?” By midpoint, that optimism has withered. She, like the viewer, recognizes the obvious: there is no love—only a clumsy negotiation between bored women and a man who reeks of conditional stock options.

    The contestants have the haunted eyes of veterans who’ve survived multiple seasons of “influencer courtship.” They aren’t seeking affection; they’re calculating ROI. Joe himself looks twenty years older than his claimed 47. He carries the aesthetic of a divorced CFO who hasn’t smiled sincerely since the recession. He is oily without passion, exhausted without wisdom—exactly the kind of man who believes communication is a spreadsheet. Instead of a heartbeat, he has a lexicon of “deliverables.”

    His problem, though, isn’t age or looks—it’s the dead chill of someone who sold his soul years ago and is now smug about the deal. He assumes that murmuring corporate jargon at the women like an AI trained on LinkedIn posts will hypnotize them into matrimony. It doesn’t. They recoil. They see a man who mistakes “calm negotiation” for charisma, and professionalism for intimacy.

    Bravo should have buried this episode in a vault. It is the franchise’s Everest of bad judgment. Aesha says as much near the end, visibly deflated, calling the whole experiment depressing. And then comes the exit: Joe limps away from the yacht, placing an arm around one contestant who tolerates him the way one tolerates a damp dog during a neighborhood walk. The moment the cameras cut, you know she’ll ghost him with the velocity of a SpaceX launch.

    If you adore Lionel Richie but want to taste the sour, loveless void that haunts his darker thoughts, skip the therapy and watch “French Kiss.” Romance will die before your eyes, and you’ll understand exactly why a man who wrote “Endless Love” now wonders whether love exists at all.

  • The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    Life has a way of mocking our plans. You stride in with a neat blueprint, and the universe responds by flinging marbles under your feet. My shoulder rehab, for instance, was supposed to be a disciplined, daily ritual: the holy grail of recovering from a torn rotator cuff. Instead, after one enthusiastic session, both shoulders flared with the kind of throbbing soreness reserved for muscles resurrected from the dead (though after walking home from Honda, it occurred to me that my right shoulder soreness is probably the result of a tetanus shot). So much for the doctor’s handouts of broomstick rotations and wall flexions. Today, the new fitness plan is modest: drop off the Honda for service, walk two miles home, and declare that my workout. Tomorrow: to be determined by the whims of my tendons and sore muscles.

    Teaching is no different. I’ve written my entire Spring 2026 curriculum, but then I read about humanities professor Alan Jacobs—our pedagogical monk—who has ditched computers entirely. Students handwrite every assignment in composition books; they read photocopied essays with wide margins, scribbling annotations in ink. According to Jacobs, with screens removed and the “LLM demons” exorcised, students rediscover themselves as human beings. They think again. They care again. I can see the appeal. They’re no longer NPCs feeding essays into the AI maw.

    But then I remembered who I am. I’m not a parchment-and-fountain-pen professor any more than I’m a pure vegan. I am a creature of convenience, pragmatism, and modern constraints. My students live in a world of laptops, apps, and algorithms; teaching them only quills and notebooks would be like handing a medieval knight a lightsaber and insisting he fight with a broomstick. I will honor authenticity another way—through the power of my prompts, the relevance of my themes, and the personal narratives that force students to confront their own thoughts rather than outsource them. My job is to balance the human soul with the tools of the age, not to bury myself—and my students—in nostalgia cosplay.