Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • 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.

  • AI Normalization and the Death of Sacred Time

    AI Normalization and the Death of Sacred Time

    In “AI Has Broken High School and College,” Damon Beres stages a conversation between Ian Bogost and Lila Shroff that lands like a diagnosis no one wants but everyone recognizes. Beres opens with a blunt observation: today’s high school seniors are being told—implicitly and explicitly—that their future success rests on their fluency with chatbots. School is no longer primarily about learning. It has become a free-for-all, and teachers are watching from the sidelines with a whistle that no longer commands attention.

    Bogost argues that educators have responded by sprinting toward one of two unhelpful extremes: panic or complacency. Neither posture grapples with reality. There is no universal AI policy, and students are not using ChatGPT only to finish essays. They are using it for everything. We have already entered a state of AI normalization, where reliance is no longer an exception but a default. To explain the danger, Bogost borrows a concept from software engineering: technical debt—the seductive habit of choosing short-term convenience while quietly accruing long-term catastrophe. You don’t fix the system; you keep postponing the reckoning. It’s like living on steak, martinis, and banana splits while assuring yourself you’ll start jogging next year.

    Higher education, Bogost suggests, has compounded the problem by accumulating what might be called pedagogical debt. Colleges never solved the hard problems: smaller class sizes, meaningful writing assignments, sustained feedback, practical skill-building, or genuine pipelines between students and employers. Instead, they slapped bandages over these failures and labeled them “innovation.” AI didn’t create these weaknesses; it simply makes it easier to ignore them. The debt keeps compounding, and the interest is brutal.

    Bogost introduces a third and more existential liability: the erosion of sacred time. Some schools still teach this—places where students paint all day, rebuild neighborhoods, or rescue animals, learning that a meaningful life requires attention, patience, and presence. Sacred time resists the modern impulse to finish everything as fast as possible so you can move on to the next task. AI dependence belongs to a broader pathology: the hamster wheel of deadlines, productivity metrics, and permanent distraction. In that world, AI is not liberation. It is a turbocharger for a life without meaning.

    AI also accelerates another corrosive force: cynicism. Students tell Bogost that in the real world, their bosses don’t care how work gets done—only that it gets done quickly and efficiently. Bogost admits they are not wrong. They are accurately describing a society that prizes output over meaning and speed over reflection. Sacred time loses every time it competes with the rat race.

    The argument, then, is not a moral panic about whether to use AI. The real question is what kind of culture is doing the using. In a system already bloated with technical and pedagogical debt, AI does not correct course—it smooths the road toward a harder crash. Things may improve eventually, but only after we stop pretending that faster is the same as better, and convenience is the same as progress.

  • AI High School Graduates Are Here—and They’re Better Cheaters Than We Are Teachers

    AI High School Graduates Are Here—and They’re Better Cheaters Than We Are Teachers

    Lila Shroff argues that education has entered its Wild West phase in her essay “The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started,” and she’s right in the way that makes administrators nervous and instructors tired. Our incoming college students are not stumbling innocents. They are veterans of four full years of AI high school. They no longer dabble in crude copy-and-paste plagiarism. That’s antique behavior. Today’s students stitch together outputs from multiple AI models, then instruct the chatbot to scuff the prose with a few grammatical missteps so it smells faintly human and slips past detection software. This is not cheating as shortcut; it is cheating as workflow optimization.

    Meanwhile, high school teachers may be congratulating themselves for assigning Shakespeare, Keats, and Dostoevsky, but many are willfully ignoring the obvious. Students are using AI constantly—for summaries, study guides, feedback, and comprehension scaffolding. AI is CliffsNotes on growth hormones, and pretending otherwise is an exercise in institutional denial.

    Educators, of course, are not standing outside the saloon wagging a finger. They are inside, ordering drinks. Shroff notes that teachers now use AI to design assignments, align curriculum to standards, grade against rubrics, and complete the paperwork that keeps schools legally hydrated. Nearly a third of K–12 teachers reported weekly AI use last year, and that number has only climbed as profession-specific tools like MagicSchool AI churn out rubrics, worksheets, and report-card comments on demand. The teacher as craftsman is quietly becoming the teacher as editor.

    AI’s grip tightens most aggressively where schools are already bleeding resources. In districts short on tutors and counselors, AI steps in as a substitute for services that were never funded in the first place. It is not reform; it is triage. And once institutions get a taste of saving money by not hiring tutors and counselors, it is naïve to think that teaching positions will remain untouchable. Cost-saving rarely stops at the first ethical boundary it crosses.

    That is why this feels like the Wild West. There is no shared map. Some schools welcome AI like a messiah. Others quarantine it like a contagious disease. Many simply shrug and admit they are baffled. Policy is reactive, inconsistent, and often written by people who do not understand the technology well enough to regulate it intelligently.

    I see the consequences weekly in my college classroom. I read plenty of AI slop—essays with perfect grammar and no pulse, paragraphs that gesture toward ideas they never quite touch. Some students have clearly checked out, outsourcing not just sentences but thinking itself. And yet AI is also an undeniable equalizer. Students emerging from underfunded schools with sixth-grade literacy levels are submitting essays with clean syntax and logical structure. They are using AI to outline arguments, test thesis ideas, and stabilize skills they were never taught. The tool giveth and the tool holloweth out.

    People like to invoke “too big to fail,” but the analogy is incomplete. We do not know which AI—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or some yet-unseen contender—will dominate. What we do know is that AI is already embedded in education, culture, and the economy. There is no reversing this process. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube, no matter how sternly we lecture it.

    So I tell my students the only honest thing left to say: we don’t know what we’re doing. Our roles are unsettled. Our identities are unstable. We are feeling our way through a dark cave without a map and without guarantees. There may be light ahead, or there may not. The only sane posture is humility—paired with curiosity, caution, and a sober gratitude that even a force this disruptive may yield benefits we are not yet wise enough to recognize.

  • The Copy-Paste Generation and the Myth of the Fallen Classroom

    The Copy-Paste Generation and the Myth of the Fallen Classroom

    There is no ambiguity in Ashanty Rosario’s essay title: “I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.” If you somehow miss the point, the subtitle elbows you in the ribs: “The end of critical thinking in the classroom.” Rosario opens by confessing what every honest student now admits: she doesn’t want to cheat with AI, but the tools are everywhere, glowing like emergency exits in a burning building. Some temptations are structural.

    Her Exhibit A is a classmate who used ChatGPT to annotate Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These annotations—supposed evidence of engaged reading—were nothing more than “copy-paste edu-lard,” a caloric substitute for comprehension. Rosario’s frustration reminds me of a conversation with one of my brightest students. On the last day of class, he sat in my office and casually admitted that he uses ChatGPT to summarize all his reading. His father is a professor; he wakes up at five for soccer practice; he takes business calculus for fun. He is not a slacker. He is a time-management pragmatist surviving the 21st century. He reads the AI summaries, synthesizes them, and writes excellent essays. Of course I’d love for him to spend slow hours with books, but he is not living in 1954. He is living in a culture where time is a scarce resource, and AI is his oxygen mask.

    My daughters and their classmates face the same problem with Macbeth. Shakespeare’s language might as well be Martian for a generation raised on TikTok compression and dopamine trickle-feeds. They watch film versions of the play and use AI to decode plot points so they can answer the teacher’s study questions without sounding like they slept through the Renaissance. Some purists will howl that this is intellectual cheating. But as a writing instructor, I suspect the teacher benefits from students who at least know what’s happening—even if their knowledge comes from a chatbot. Expecting a 15-year-old to read Macbeth cold is like assigning tensor calculus to a preschooler. They haven’t done their priors. So AI becomes a prosthetic. A flotation device. A translation machine dropped into a classroom years overdue. To blame AI for the degradation of education is tempting, but it’s also lazy. We live in a society where reading is a luxury good and the leisure class quietly guards the gates.

    In the 1970s, I graduated from a public high school with literacy skills so thin you could read the room through them. I took remedial English my freshman year of college. If I were a student today, dropped into 2025 with those same deficits, I would almost certainly lean on AI just to keep my head above water. The difference is that today’s students aren’t just supplementing—they’re optimizing. They tell me this openly: over ninety percent of my students use AI because their skills don’t match the workload and because, frankly, everyone else is doing it. It’s an arms race of survival, not a moral collapse.

    Still, Rosario is right about the aftermath. She writes: “AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. There is little intensity anymore.” When thinking becomes optional, students drift into a kind of algorithmic sleepwalking. They outsource cognition until they resemble NPCs in a glitching video game—avatars performing human imitation rather than human thought. My colleagues and I see it, semester after semester: the fade-out, the disengagement, the slow zombification.

    Colleges are scrambling to respond. Should we police AI with plagiarism detectors? Should we ban laptops and force students to write essays in composition books under watchful eyes like parolees in a literary halfway house? Should we pretend the flood can be stopped with a beach towel?

    Reading Rosario’s lament about “cookie-cutter AI arguments,” I thought of my one visit to Applebee’s in the early 2000s. The menu photos promised ambrosia. The food tasted like something engineered in a lab to be technically edible yet spiritually vacant. Applebee’s was AI before AI—an assembly line of flavorless simulacra. Humanity gravitates toward the easy, the prepackaged, the frictionless. AI didn’t invent mediocrity. It merely handed it a megaphone.

    Rosario, clearly, is not an Applebee’s soul. She’s Michelin-level in a world eager to eat microwaved Hot Pockets. Of course her heart sinks when classmates settle for fast-food literacy. I want to tell her that if she were in high school in the 1970s, she’d still witness an appetite for shortcut learning. The tools would be different, the essays less slick, but the gravitational pull toward mediocrity would be the same. The human temptation to bypass difficulty is not technological—it’s ancestral. AI simply automates the old hunger.

  • Gemini Has Taken Away the Mystique from ChatGPT

    Gemini Has Taken Away the Mystique from ChatGPT

    Matteo Wong’s “OpenAI Is in Trouble” reports that Gemini is crushing ChatGPT in the AI race. Marc Benioff of Salesforce spent just two hours on Gemini–all the time he needed to realize he’s leaving ChatGPT after three years. As he wrote on X: “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane.” Meanwhile, a troubled Sam Altman has announced a “code red” in a memo to his employees. It appears to be a sink or swim situation. But Wong points out that this is more of a horse race with one company in the lead, then another, and then another, with frequent fluctuations. But even if ChatGPT can gain lost ground, it loses mystique. In the words of Wong: “More than ever, OpenAI seems like just another chatbot company.” 

    One possible cause of ChatGPT losing ground is its focus on commercial ventures, wanting to be “a one-stop-shop for anything” so that the platform helps you in your consumerism. Another factor is its focus on engagement, which has made ChatGPT tweaked in a way as to become a super sycophant. Wong writes: “Those tweaks, in turn, may have made some versions of ChatGPT dangerously obsequious–it has appeared to praise and reinforces some users’ darkest and most absurd ideas–and have been the subject of several lawsuits against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT fueled delusional spirals and even, in some cases, contributed to suicide.”

    Another challenge for OpenAI is Google’s sheer size. Google can integrate Gemini into its “existing ecosystem” with billions of users. 

    I’ve been on ChatGPT for three years, impressed with it as an editing tool, and confess I have some FOMO when it comes to the current iteration of Gemini. An argument could be made that I should switch to Gemini, not just because it’s embedded in the Google Chrome that I use, but that I shouldn’t get too comfortable with one form of AI, as I have with ChatGPT, over the last three years. It might be wise to see ChatGPT less as a companion and more of a manipulating agent designed to capture my engagement so that I am serving its business interests more than my self-interests. 

    Another voice inside me, though, says Gemini will eventually do the same thing. Unless I find that Gemini will be a game-changer, in ways that ChatGPT isn’t, I suspect both should be treated cautiously: use these platforms as tools but don’t let them hijack your brain. 

  • How Luxury Spaces Produced the Last Man (college essay prompt)

    How Luxury Spaces Produced the Last Man (college essay prompt)

    Over the last two decades, American consumer spaces—from sports arenas to airport terminals—have been redesigned to prioritize comfort, insulation, curated experience, and a sense of premium belonging. These spaces promise elevated existence: velvet-rope exclusivity, controlled environments, personalized amenities, and buffers that shield patrons from inconvenience, unpredictability, or discomfort. In other words, they promise a life free from friction.

    Two recent New Yorker essays vividly capture this shift. In “How the Sports Stadium Went Luxe,” John Seabrook traces the transformation of professional sports stadiums from gritty, communal, occasionally chaotic spaces into stratified luxury environments where spectators increasingly consume the spectacle from suites, clubs, micro-environments, and upgraded “experiences” designed for a privileged few. The stadium, once a rowdy democratic gathering where masses cheered together, now resembles a branded theme park of status tiers—where the game itself recedes behind the performance of being someone who can afford to be in the right section.

    Zach Helfand’s “The Airport-Lounge Wars” extends this critique to modern travel. Airports now offer a bifurcated universe: the cramped, stressful, gate-area masses and the plush, curated lounges where passengers sip fruit-infused water under soft lighting while charging their devices and sampling “elevated” snacks. Helfand describes these lounges as “slightly better than nothing”—a telling phrase that captures the absurdity of luxury whose chief purpose is to soothe adult anxiety rather than provide meaningful enrichment. In both essays, the consumer becomes less a citizen than a carefully handled customer—shielded, pacified, and cocooned.

    This convergence of comfort, curated experience, and luxury has resulted in what many cultural critics call infantilization: the softening of the adult individual into a person who increasingly depends on structures of comfort, performs curated identity, avoids discomfort, and loses tolerance for challenge. Nietzsche warned of such a figure in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he described the Last Man—a being who seeks comfort above all else, avoids risk, avoids conflict, avoids intensity, avoids suffering, and declares smugly, “We have invented happiness.” The Last Man lives in a society that confuses convenience with flourishing, comfort with meaning, and safety with virtue.

    Your task is to analyze how Seabrook’s and Helfand’s essays each illustrate the rise of infantilization through the growing cultural obsession with luxury, curated experience, and personal insulation. You will argue how both writers, in different contexts, reveal a society drifting toward Nietzsche’s Last Man—where people are increasingly coddled, increasingly fragile, increasingly comfort-dependent, and increasingly detached from the communal, unpredictable, and occasionally uncomfortable experiences that once defined adulthood.

    To build your argument, consider the thematic questions and analytic frameworks below. You may address several of them or focus deeply on a smaller selection, but your essay must ultimately make a clear, debatable claim about how the phenomenon of infantilization unfolds in both essays.

    1. Luxury as Surrogate Identity: The Cosplay of Importance

    Seabrook describes stadiums where spectators no longer attend to watch the game—they attend to be seen in a particular environment, to signal aura, to inhabit a curated identity. Luxury boxes, clubs, insulated corridors, private entrances, and gastronomic stations function not as amenities but as props for self-presentation. Patrons “cosplay” as elites through their seating choices. Helfand observes the same phenomenon in airport lounges: passengers use lounge access to projects status, gravitas, and “importance.” The lounge becomes a stage where individuals perform adulthood through perks.

    Analyze how luxury becomes a kind of identity cosplay. How does performance replace participation? How does curated environment become a psychological crutch for fragile egos?

    2. Comfort as a Psychological Drug

    Both essays describe environments designed to eliminate discomfort: cushioned seating, privacy, temperature-controlled rooms, abundant amenities, and curated calm. Patrons no longer tolerate cold seats, crowds, unpredictable noise, or the chaos of public life.

    In Nietzsche’s framing, this desire for frictionless existence is the defining trait of the Last Man: a person who fears intensity and pain more than insignificance.

    Examine how both essays portray comfort not as a neutral good, but as a chemical sedative—an anesthetic that dulls the senses and diminishes the human appetite for challenge.

    3. Infantilization Through Convenience and Insulation

    Helfand’s lounges function like nurseries for adults: soft lighting, soothing music, easily accessible snacks, staff catering to passengers’ needs, and gentle removal from the stressful “real world” of airports. Seabrook’s luxury stadiums behave similarly: they protect spectators from bad weather, loud crowds, long lines, and general inconvenience.

    Ask: What happens to adults who no longer encounter difficulty or discomfort in public spaces? How do these environments promote emotional regression, fragility, or dependency? How do cushioned experiences erode resilience?

    4. The Collapse of the Communal Experience

    Traditional stadiums were communal crucibles: strangers hugging after a touchdown, fans screaming in unison, unified collective identity. Luxe stadiums fracture that experience into premium sections, exclusive clubs, and tiered access.

    Airports once functioned as equalizers—everyone endured the same wait, the same lines, the same discomfort. Now, lounges separate the “important” travelers from the masses.

    How does segregation by luxury contribute to infantilization? Does comfort isolate individuals in echo chambers of curated ease? How does the decline of communal friction foster narcissism and social detachment?

    5. Emotional Labor and Passivity

    Luxury environments demand certain emotional performances: politeness, calmness, carefully managed pleasantness. In lounges, passengers adopt a soft demeanor; in stadium clubs, patrons behave with polite detachment rather than unruly fandom.

    Adults become well-behaved children: quiet, controlled, pacified.

    Discuss how both essays show the replacement of passionate, authentic emotional expression with sanitized, polite, passive behavior. How does this behavioral shift align with the Last Man’s avoidance of intensity?

    6. Tiered Access, Fragile Status, and the Anxiety of Comfort

    Both essays highlight how luxury spaces create hierarchies: VIP vs general admission, club members vs regular fans, lounge patrons vs the gate-area masses. These hierarchies foster anxiety because comfort becomes contingent on status—and status becomes fragile.

    In Nietzsche’s Last Man, community is replaced by individualistic comfort-chasing. How do tiered luxury systems cultivate insecurity, status-dependence, and infantilized anxiety?

    7. Authenticity as Inconvenience

    In both essays, authenticity of experience is subtly mocked or sidelined. The real stadium experience—mess, discomfort, unpredictability—gets replaced by cushioned sterility. The real airport experience—crowds, lines, irritation—is smoothed into a curated simulation of adult life.

    Nietzsche warned that the Last Man despises authenticity because authenticity requires discomfort.

    How do Seabrook and Helfand portray authenticity as an endangered species—and how does its absence produce infantilization?

    Write a 1,700-word comparative essay that argues:

    How and why a society obsessed with curated luxury and frictionless experience becomes an infantilized culture that resembles Nietzsche’s Last Man. John Seabrook’s “How the Sports Stadium Went Luxe” and Zach Helfand’s “The Airport-Lounge Wars” provide complementary case studies of how comfort, status-tiering, and curated identity hollow out adult resilience, diminish communal life, and normalize passivity.

    Your essay must:

    1. Develop a strong, debatable thesis about how infantilization manifests in both essays.
    2. Analyze key passages from Seabrook and Helfand with close reading.
    3. Compare how each writer critiques luxury culture through examples, tone, description, and anecdote.
    4. Incorporate Nietzsche’s concept of the Last Man as a theoretical grounding.
    5. Include a counterargument—for example, that comfort is a legitimate human good, that luxury enhances experience, or that curated spaces improve efficiency or mental health.
    6. Rebut the counterargument with evidence from the essays and your own reasoning.
    7. Conclude with broader implications—what kind of citizens does luxury culture produce? What happens to democracy, community, or adulthood when society builds padded rooms for the affluent?

    Your writing should demonstrate intellectual rigor, clarity of organization, and precise control of prose. Engage deeply with the texts. Show the reader how these essays illuminate not just consumer culture, but the deeper philosophical question Nietzsche raised: What kind of humans are we becoming?

  • 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.