Cinemorphosis

Category: Education in the AI Age

  • Adolescent Vs. Adult Freedom: College Essay Prompt

    Adolescent Vs. Adult Freedom: College Essay Prompt

    Introduction

    I find myself embarrassingly smitten with It’s Florida, Man on HBO Max, a six-episode documentary romp that most critics dismiss with a shrug. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg summed it up with clinical indifference: “The premise is very straightforward. Each half-hour recounts a real-life mishap of the kind that helped Florida develop its national reputation as a meme in state form . . .”

    Fienberg is right about the meme, but he undersells the spectacle. Florida isn’t just weird—it’s a hallucinatory soup pot where the heat never turns down. A bubbling Bouillabaisse of runaways, con artists, half-baked dreamers, and humidity-pickled misfits; the broth gets richer, stranger, and more intoxicating by the hour. Novelists like Carl Hiaasen dip their ladles in and remind us with glee: “You couldn’t write this if you tried.” Comedian Marc Maron, who has roamed the continental madhouse, concurs: there is no asylum wing quite as deranged as the Sunshine State.

    The final episode, “Mugshot,” is my favorite. A wanted man from Pensacola turns into a social-media celebrity after his mugshot detonates across Instagram. The local police, suddenly auditioning for daytime television, turn their manhunt into a Jerry Springer-style circus, complete with suspect-shaming and moral squalor masquerading as civic duty. You couldn’t script it unless you were drunk, desperate, and willing to risk being fired by HBO for turning in satire disguised as reportage.

    As a college writing instructor, I confess I watch shows like this with an ulterior motive: I’m always looking for essay prompts hidden in the wreckage. It’s Florida, Man practically delivers one to my desk, gift-wrapped in neon: “Freedom and its Discontents.” Not the noble kind of freedom—what philosophers used to call “freedom for”—where self-discipline leads to self-agency, flourishing, and mastery, the Cal Newport variety of cultivated freedom. No, Florida, Man wallows in the basement: “freedom from.” Freedom from the Id, from restraint, from consequence, from sobriety. It’s Pleasure Island on a peninsula, and the longer you stay the faster your ears sprout into donkey ears, your voice degenerates into animal brays, and your dreams curdle into swamp gas.

    It’s Florida, Man isn’t just entertainment. It’s anthropology of the grotesque, a front-row ticket to America’s most unruly carnival, where freedom is mistaken for license and the monsters are very much real.

    With the background and this assignment’s origin story out of the way, let’s get to the writing prompt.

    The Assignment

    In a 1,700-word essay, your task is to address the following claim:  Cal Newport’s notion of “deep work” is an argument for adult freedom, which results in self-agency, happiness, and flourishing while It’s Florida, Man is a rebuke of adolescent freedom, showing the personal disintegration that results from living in a tropical fever dream where the unbridled Id reigns supreme. 

    Important Concepts to Understand for Your Essay:

    Adult Freedom in the Context of Deep Work

    In Deep Work, Cal Newport frames adult freedom as the disciplined ability to direct one’s attention toward meaningful, cognitively demanding tasks. For Newport, freedom isn’t the absence of restraint but the mastery of it: the deliberate cultivation of focus, the rejection of digital noise, and the channeling of energy into work that produces lasting value. This definition of freedom requires self-command, delayed gratification, and an acceptance that the mind must sometimes be trained against its immediate impulses. Adult freedom, then, is paradoxical: by constraining distraction and choosing rigor, one becomes more autonomous, more capable of shaping a life of purpose rather than drifting along on cultural currents.

    This vision stands in stark contrast to adolescent freedom, which is defined less by self-mastery than by the intoxication of doing whatever one pleases. It is the “freedom from” rather than “freedom for”: a pursuit of unbounded indulgence, of perpetual novelty, of a life with no guardrails. Adolescent freedom mistakes rebellion and impulse for liberation, when in reality it often leads to dependence, mediocrity, or even self-destruction. Where Newport’s adult freedom grows out of discipline and results in greater agency, adolescent freedom resists boundaries altogether, mistaking chaos for autonomy and mistaking license for liberation.

    Adolescent Freedom in the Context of It’s Florida, Man. 

    The HBO series It’s Florida, Man is essentially a case study in adolescent freedom run amok. Each episode parades a cast of misfits whose choices reflect “freedom from” responsibility rather than “freedom for” growth or virtue. Characters pursue impulse, chaos, and notoriety as if these were badges of independence. In one episode, a fugitive becomes a minor celebrity when his mugshot goes viral, and the spectacle escalates into a carnival of bad decisions—police exploiting fame, communities laughing at ruin, and the fugitive himself reveling in his fifteen minutes. This is adolescent freedom in its rawest form: the unchecked Id let loose in the swamps, mistaking recklessness for liberation.

    Adult freedom, by contrast, would require self-command, reflection, and purposeful direction—the very qualities absent in the fever dream of It’s Florida, Man. Where adult freedom cultivates discipline to expand genuine autonomy, adolescent freedom collapses into spectacle, chaos, and eventual self-destruction. The show becomes a cautionary tale: when freedom is stripped of responsibility, it ceases to empower and instead devours, leaving its practitioners transformed into caricatures or, in Newport’s terms, “donkeys on Pleasure Island.” By staging these spectacles, HBO doesn’t just entertain—it inadvertently dramatizes the gulf between the hollow thrill of adolescent license and the deeper, harder-won autonomy of adult freedom.

    Required Sources for Your Essay

    To support your essay, you will use the following:

    1. At least 3 episodes from It’s Florida, Man.  
    2. Cal Newport’s YouTube video: “Core Idea: Deep Work”
    3. Escaping Ordinary (B.C. Marx) YouTube video: “How to Build a Brain That Doesn’t Get Distracted.”
    4. Huberman Lab Clips YouTube video: “Avoiding Distractions & Doing Deep Work.”

    Prescribed Outline for Your Essay

    Paragraphs 1 and 2: Profile people you know who embody adolescent and adult freedom with vivid details. Each paragraph should be about 300 words. 

    Paragraph 3, your thesis: Address the following claim:  Cal Newport’s notion of “deep work” is an argument for adult freedom, which results in self-agency, happiness, and flourishing while It’s Florida, Man is a rebuke of adolescent freedom, showing the personal disintegration that results from living in a tropical fever dream where the unbridled Id reigns supreme. 

    Paragraphs 4-6: Analyze adolescent freedom by breaking it down into 3 major characteristics with salient examples.

    Paragraphs 7-9: Analyze adult freedom by breaking it down into 3 major characteristics with salient examples. 

    Paragraph 10: Write a powerful conclusion that underscores that it is urgent to understand the difference between adolescent and adult freedom. 

    Sample Thesis Statements with Mapping Components

    1. Straightforward, Clear Thesis
     Cal Newport’s Deep Work defines adult freedom as the disciplined ability to channel one’s attention toward meaningful work, while It’s Florida, Man dramatizes the collapse of adolescent freedom into chaos. Adult freedom is marked by discipline, purpose, and flourishing, while adolescent freedom is characterized by impulsiveness, spectacle, and eventual self-destruction.

    Mapping components:

    1. Adolescent freedom, as shown in It’s Florida, Man, is impulsive and reckless.
    2. Adolescent freedom thrives on spectacle and fleeting notoriety.
    3. Adolescent freedom often ends in self-destruction rather than liberation.
    4. Adult freedom, as defined in Deep Work, begins with self-discipline.
    5. Adult freedom aims toward meaningful purpose rather than distraction.
    6. Adult freedom results in flourishing and autonomy.

    2. Analytical & Nuanced Thesis
     While adolescent freedom promises limitless possibilities, It’s Florida, Man shows it devolving into chaos and dehumanization. In contrast, Cal Newport’s Deep Work frames adult freedom as a paradox: by imposing constraints on distraction, individuals gain the autonomy to flourish. The contrast between these two models reveals that true freedom lies not in the absence of rules but in the deliberate embrace of structure.

    Mapping components:

    1. Adolescent freedom rejects boundaries, mistaking chaos for autonomy.
    2. Adolescent freedom feeds on distraction, notoriety, and spectacle.
    3. Adolescent freedom leaves individuals diminished rather than empowered.
    4. Adult freedom requires disciplined focus and deliberate boundaries.
    5. Adult freedom transforms attention into purpose and meaning.
    6. Adult freedom produces self-agency and long-term flourishing.

    3. Provocative Thesis (for stronger student voices)
     It’s Florida, Man is more than cheap entertainment—it is a grotesque anthropology of what happens when adolescent freedom dominates: people mistake license for liberty and collapse into parody versions of themselves. Cal Newport’s Deep Work, however, insists that adult freedom emerges only through focus and discipline. Together, these texts reveal that our culture must choose between two freedoms: adolescent chaos that consumes us, or adult discipline that liberates us.

    Mapping components:

    1. Adolescent freedom exalts the Id: reckless pleasure, chaos, and notoriety.
    2. Adolescent freedom mistakes rebellion for liberation but breeds collapse.
    3. Adolescent freedom, when unchecked, dehumanizes individuals.
    4. Adult freedom demands restraint and cultivated attention.
    5. Adult freedom transforms constraint into autonomy and purpose.
    6. Adult freedom builds lasting agency and flourishing.

  • Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    I find myself embarrassingly smitten with It’s Florida, Man on HBO Max, a six-episode documentary romp that most critics dismiss with a shrug. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg summed it up with clinical indifference: “The premise is very straightforward. Each half-hour recounts a real-life mishap of the kind that helped Florida develop its national reputation as a meme in state form . . .”

    Fienberg is right about the meme, but he undersells the spectacle. Florida isn’t just weird—it’s a hallucinatory soup pot where the heat never turns down. A bubbling Bouillabaisse of runaways, con artists, half-baked dreamers, and humidity-pickled misfits; the broth gets richer, stranger, and more intoxicating by the hour. Novelists like Carl Hiaasen dip their ladles in and remind us with glee: “You couldn’t write this if you tried.” Comedian Marc Maron, who has roamed the continental madhouse, concurs: there is no asylum wing quite as deranged as the Sunshine State.

    The final episode, “Mugshot,” is my favorite. A wanted man from Pensacola turns into a social-media celebrity after his mugshot detonates across Instagram. The local police, suddenly auditioning for daytime television, turn their manhunt into a Jerry Springer-style circus, complete with suspect-shaming and moral squalor masquerading as civic duty. You couldn’t script it unless you were drunk, desperate, and willing to risk being fired by HBO for turning in satire disguised as reportage.

    As a college writing instructor, I confess I watch shows like this with an ulterior motive: I’m always looking for essay prompts hidden in the wreckage. It’s Florida, Man practically delivers one to my desk, gift-wrapped in neon: “Freedom and its Discontents.” Not the noble kind of freedom—what philosophers used to call “freedom for”—where self-discipline leads to self-agency, flourishing, and mastery, the Cal Newport variety of cultivated freedom. No, Florida, Man wallows in the basement: “freedom from.” Freedom from the Id, from restraint, from consequence, from sobriety. It’s Pleasure Island on a peninsula, and the longer you stay the faster your ears sprout into donkey ears, your voice degenerates into animal brays, and your dreams curdle into swamp gas.

    It’s Florida, Man isn’t just entertainment. It’s anthropology of the grotesque, a front-row ticket to America’s most unruly carnival, where freedom is mistaken for license and the monsters are very much real.

  • College Essay Prompt: Hurricane Katrina—Man-Made Catastrophe

    College Essay Prompt: Hurricane Katrina—Man-Made Catastrophe

    The story of Hurricane Katrina is not simply one of wind and water but of betrayal. The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix), along with Clint Smith’s essay “Twenty Years After the Storm” and Nicholas Lemann’s “Why Hurricane Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster,” confront us with a grim truth: New Orleans, a city celebrated for its culture, music, and resilience, was devastated less by the storm itself than by the nation’s failure to protect its people.

    Through the voices of survivors, these works expose what might be called a fourfold sin: decades of red-lining that left poor Black neighborhoods especially vulnerable; government neglect that failed to strengthen levees or prepare for disaster; abandonment in the crucial days after the storm, when aid was sluggish and chaotic; and media defamation that painted survivors as looters rather than victims. Together, they suggest that Katrina was not just a natural disaster but a man-made catastrophe rooted in systemic racism, incompetence, and indifference.

    In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, take a clear position on the claim that Hurricane Katrina was less an act of nature than an act of national negligence. Your essay should:

    • Analyze how the films and essays portray the failures of government and institutions.
    • Consider how systemic issues (race, class, geography, and policy) compounded the disaster.
    • Explore how family, community, and cultural identity offered resilience when systems failed.
    • Use evidence from both documentaries and essays to develop your argument.

    Your goal is not just to summarize these sources but to engage critically with them, asking: What does it mean when a city is abandoned by its own country? What lessons does this catastrophe offer us about justice, resilience, and human dignity in the face of systemic failure?

    Sample Outline for Katrina Essay

    Thesis Statement:
     Hurricane Katrina was less a natural disaster than a man-made catastrophe, as decades of red-lining, government neglect, abandonment during the crisis, and media defamation amplified the storm’s destruction—yet amidst betrayal, the people of New Orleans revealed a code of resilience rooted in family, community, and cultural identity.

    Introduction (Paragraph 1)

    • Hook: vivid image of Katrina’s aftermath (rooftops, floodwaters, stranded families).
    • Background: films (Race Against Time, Come Hell and High Water) + essays (Clint Smith, Nicholas Lemann).
    • Transition: disaster reframed not as “natural” but as systemic failure.
    • Thesis (above).

    Body Paragraphs

    2. Historical Red-Lining and Vulnerability

    • Show how discriminatory housing policies left Black neighborhoods in flood-prone areas.
    • Use evidence from Lemann to explain how structural racism predetermined who would suffer most.

    3. Government Neglect Before the Storm

    • Weak levee systems and ignored warnings.
    • Films highlight repeated calls for reform that were dismissed.
    • Argue this negligence magnified the hurricane’s impact.

    4. Abandonment in the Storm’s Aftermath

    • FEMA’s failures and delayed military response.
    • Smith’s essay on families stranded without aid.
    • Link to systemic indifference toward vulnerable populations.

    5. Media Defamation and Public Perception

    • “Looters vs. survivors” narrative.
    • Racialized framing of desperation as criminality.
    • Analyze how defamation deepened the betrayal of victims.

    6. Katrina as Man-Made Catastrophe

    • Synthesize the “fourfold sin” into a coherent argument.
    • Emphasize how the storm was natural, but the disaster was political and systemic.

    7. Bonds of Family as Survival

    • Use Smith’s depictions of kinship.
    • Highlight family loyalty as a lifeboat of resilience.

    8. Community as Improvised Solidarity

    • Neighbors rescuing neighbors, churches as sanctuaries.
    • Films show grassroots resilience when official systems failed.

    9. Cultural Identity and Resilience

    • New Orleans’ unique culture—music, food, community pride—helped people endure.
    • Argue that culture is not superficial but a survival mechanism.

    10. Lessons for Justice and Human Dignity

    • What Katrina reveals about systemic racism, governmental accountability, and disaster response.
    • Extend argument: resilience is inspiring, but betrayal should never be normalized.

    Conclusion (Paragraph 11)

    • Restate thesis in fresh language.
    • Reflect on the paradox: beauty of resilience vs. shame of abandonment.
    • End with a call to remember New Orleans not as a drowned city but as proof of what solidarity and dignity look like when systems collapse.
  • Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    I’m fewer than four semesters away from retirement—June 2027, the final curtain—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. For nearly forty years I’ve worn the armor of a college classroom persona: bigger, bolder, more disciplined than the fragile, fumbling man who hides inside. Teaching gave me a stage and a referee’s whistle. Without it, who am I? Just the broken man-child without a supervisor, left to his own devices.

    During the pandemic, when colleagues were clawing to get out, I puffed out my chest and declared I was born ready for retirement. I pictured myself a disciplined Renaissance man: mornings at the piano, afternoons writing, evenings lifting kettlebells in the garage, book in hand before bed. A gilded schedule, as though I were independently wealthy. Now those boasts feel like hot air. Structure is one thing. The man animating that structure is another. In the classroom, the stakes were high: thirty pairs of eyes asking, Are you boring? Do you know what you’re talking about? The pressure kept me sharp, funny, and, occasionally, wise. No one lets you coast when you’re trapped under fluorescent lights for two hours with judgmental twenty-year-olds.

    Bitter irony: I’m leaving just as I finally got it right. It took me decades to balance theater with approachability, to drop the drill-sergeant persona that once scared students into silence, to actually build a classroom where people learned and laughed. Now I can scaffold essays like an architect and coax timid students into crafting arguments brick by brick. And just as the machinery is humming, I’m stepping offstage. Melancholy doesn’t begin to cover it.

    And then retirement makes you pay with loads of endless paperwork. Work forms that warn you that you cannot rescind your decision. Medicare forms with their cryptic alphabet soup (A, B, C, D), switching to my wife’s insurance, navigating private plans that read like IKEA instructions translated from Martian. I’ve joked I’d rather do faculty assessment reports than wrestle with retirement forms, and I meant it.

    Meanwhile, time itself heckles me. I’ll be sixty-four in six weeks. At my cousin’s seventy-fifth birthday, the guests—all seventysomethings—mingled like ghosts of futures to come. One cousin, seventy-eight, told me that old age makes you invisible. You still occupy space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture. Old age is rude like that: the world resents you for hogging resources after your best years are spent. You should apologize for existing. Step aside, old man.

    So here I am, staring down a three-headed monster: paperwork, invisibility, and the slow evaporation of the job that kept me sane. What’s the plan? At six years old, I invented a companion—James, my imaginary friend. I’d knock on the apartment wall and tell my parents James wanted to play. They laughed, which only confirmed that James and I were onto something.

    Now, on the cusp of retirement, I feel his absence. Because when I think of retirement, I think of loneliness, and when I think of loneliness, I think of Gollum—squatting in the cave, muttering “precious” as he caresses the ring. Only for me, the ring isn’t a piece of jewelry. It’s youth. Precious, lost youth. I stroke it with nostalgia and curse it with bitterness. How dare people treat me like I’m invisible, when old age has taught me more than their Google searches ever will? And yet—I know this bitterness is the opposite of wisdom.

    So maybe I do need James back. But not the sweet, knock-on-the-wall James of childhood. I need James 2.0: a drill-sergeant life coach who will slap me across the face and bark: Stop whining. You’ve got love. You’ve got lights on in the house. You’re walking into retirement with more than most people ever dream of. Be grateful. And don’t you dare let this next chapter kick your ass.

  • When the Levees Broke, Love Held: Kinship and Trust as Survival Codes (A College Essay Prompt)

    When the Levees Broke, Love Held: Kinship and Trust as Survival Codes (A College Essay Prompt)

    Essay Prompt

    When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, it wasn’t only a natural disaster; it was a test of the nation’s moral infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) lay bare a grim truth: while government agencies stumbled, delayed, or failed outright, it was ordinary people—families, neighbors, church groups, and communities—who often became the real lifelines of survival.

    This paradox deserves attention. Katrina exposed systemic abandonment: broken levees, collapsed evacuation plans, and botched relief efforts. Yet amid this neglect, stories emerged of neighbors carrying the elderly through floodwaters, families sharing scarce food, and communities improvising codes of loyalty and solidarity to keep one another alive. These grassroots responses were not bureaucratic; they were visceral, rooted in bonds of kinship, shared suffering, and a deep sense of responsibility to one another.

    The films reveal a cultural alchemy unique to New Orleans—where music, food, faith, and kinship traditions already wove people together. During Katrina, those traditions became lifeboats, not metaphorically but literally. In the absence of functioning institutions, families and neighbors reinvented survival itself, showing that human dignity doesn’t only exist in comfort or prosperity but can be forged in the crucible of catastrophe.

    Your Task: Write a 1,700-word essay analyzing how bonds of kinship and community loyalty functioned as lifeboats of survival in post-Katrina New Orleans.

    Address the following questions in your essay:

    • How did family love and neighborhood trust create improvised survival systems when formal institutions failed?
    • In what ways did communities create a code of resilience, a shared moral contract, during the disaster?
    • What lessons can be drawn from this improvisational solidarity about human dignity, loyalty, and the meaning of community in times of collapse?

    Your essay should balance analysis of the documentaries with close attention to human stories of resilience. Use specific examples and consider how these lessons apply beyond Katrina: What do they teach us about disaster, community, and the fragile but essential bonds that keep us human?

    Sample 9-Paragraph Outline

    Introduction (1 paragraph)

    • Hook: Paint the scene—abandoned streets, flooded houses, helicopters circling, and yet neighbors wading through water with makeshift rafts.
    • Context: Briefly note government failures highlighted in both documentaries (FEMA delays, stranded citizens, broken levees).
    • Thesis: Argue that when institutions collapse, kinship and neighborhood bonds become codes of resilience—informal but powerful lifeboats—that preserve human dignity, improvise survival, and reveal enduring truths about community loyalty in catastrophe.

    Body Paragraph 1: Government Collapse vs. Community Response

    • Detail FEMA delays, local government paralysis, and the abandonment felt by residents.
    • Contrast with ordinary people organizing rescues, distributing food, and opening their homes.
    • Set up the theme: resilience grows where systems fail.

    Body Paragraph 2: Families as First Responders

    • Show how families stayed together, sharing resources, protecting elders and children.
    • Examples from the films: families wading together through water, refusing to abandon one another.
    • Argue that love in the family unit became the most reliable “infrastructure” of survival.

    Body Paragraph 3: Neighbors as Kin

    • Explore how neighbors expanded the definition of family.
    • Community members who had never spoken before suddenly acted as protectors and caregivers.
    • This shows the elasticity of kinship: disaster stretches the definition of who counts as “family.”

    Body Paragraph 4: The Code of Resilience

    • Define the unwritten rules that emerged: share what you have, protect the vulnerable, don’t abandon your people.
    • These codes operated faster and more effectively than bureaucratic policies.
    • Examples: strangers pooling resources, neighborhood patrols against looters, churches as shelters.

    Body Paragraph 5: Improvisation as Survival Strategy

    • Show how ordinary people became engineers, medics, and rescuers.
    • Example: makeshift boats, rafts, and supply lines.
    • Connect to the broader point: resilience is not planned in a manual; it is improvised under pressure.

    Body Paragraph 6: Dignity Amid Despair

    • Explore how solidarity preserved dignity in dehumanizing conditions (Superdome chaos, flooded homes).
    • Argue that dignity comes not from institutions but from mutual recognition—neighbors affirming each other’s worth when society seems to have abandoned them.

    Body Paragraph 7: Lessons Beyond Katrina

    • Broaden the lens: how does this apply to future disasters (pandemics, climate change, social unrest)?
    • Argue that resilience depends less on bureaucracies than on the cultural strength of communities.
    • Point: family and community loyalty may be the last firewall against collapse.

    Body Paragraph 8: Counterargument & Rebuttal

    • Acknowledge critics: some argue neighbor-to-neighbor efforts were insufficient or uneven, that only systemic reform can prevent tragedy.
    • Rebuttal: While systemic change is essential, Katrina shows that human dignity cannot wait for bureaucratic rescue—it depends on immediate solidarity.

    Conclusion (1 paragraph)

    • Restate thesis: Katrina revealed abandonment but also exposed the cultural wealth of kinship and loyalty as lifeboats of survival.
    • End with a powerful image: in the floodwaters, where the state faltered, the human heart did not.
    • Call to action: value, protect, and invest in community bonds before the next disaster arrives.
  • The University as Hospice, the Gym as Cathedral

    The University as Hospice, the Gym as Cathedral

    In Jordan Castro’s scabrous novel Muscle Man, the protagonist, English professor Harold, concludes that the American university is dead. It’s only alive in a creepy, sad sort of way–zombification–manifest in online posts for events that no one goes to. These events are announced in emails as “exciting,” “excited,” and “please join.” No one joins. Other emails announce “calls to action,” and no one acts. They just remain lizard-eyed and stolid. These events are exercises in soul-crushing banality. Rather than a place to nurture young minds, the American university is so encumbered by bureaucratic speak and irrelevant, esoteric academic theories, it is an impotent institution and a graveyard where people go to die. 

    Perhaps Harold just needs a hug. Or perhaps he has cracked the code. He sees in the constant flood of college email announcements a desperate plea to be heard and to be irrelevant while being buried by its own fecklessness.

    The state of the college, especially the humanities, seems especially imperiled and moribund in the A.I. Age where students outsource writing, creativity, and “critical thinking” to machines and instructors are too feeble to stop the tsunami of these disrupting, revolutionary information and language tools.  

    As higher education looks more and more like a forlorn dinosaur and clings to stale identitarian platitudes and “progressive pedagogies” to cling to relevance, Harold surely must fret his own irrelevance and seek sanctuary in his bodybuilding dreams–curling iron as the cathedral of meaning and protein shakes as sacrament. In a world where the humanities have become the walking dead, at least the pump feels alive.

  • How I Bribed My Students Into Talking on Canvas Discussion Boards

    How I Bribed My Students Into Talking on Canvas Discussion Boards

    Yesterday’s meeting featured the usual bureaucratic chestnut: making sure our online writing classes don’t devolve into glorified correspondence courses. The mandate was clear—students must get quick feedback from us, know how to contact us, have a tech-support lifeline, understand what materials to buy (not a $3,000 MacBook Pro?), and, above all, know the bare minimum of interaction they’ll have with their online peers.

    That interaction lives on the Canvas Discussion Board, which we’re told is the beating heart of digital education. From hard experience, I know this: if I don’t attach points, those boards become ghost towns. Students treat “attendance only” discussions like spam mail. The secret motivator is points—no matter how meager. Even the stingiest point values light up student survival instincts. They’d rather wrestle with a tedious prompt than lose three points.

    So here’s my new math for online classes:

    • Three 1,700-word essays: 220 points each.
    • Six building blocks (a.k.a. formative assignments): 50 points each.
    • Eight Discussion Board prompts: 5 points each.

    That’s the full enchilada: 1,000 points. Students stay engaged, the boards don’t wither, and I can claim my class is more than digital pen pals swapping files in the void.han digital pen pals swapping files in the void.

  • The Tabloid Mind Vs. The Thoughtful Mind

    The Tabloid Mind Vs. The Thoughtful Mind

    The verdict is in: after fifteen years of running their experiment on us, social media has mangled the human psyche. It has sandblasted away nuance, turned civility into snarling, and left us performing as shrill tribal mascots. The trouble begins with its essence: an Attention Machine. Every scroll is a sugar hit for the brain—quick spike, hard crash. We learn the trick ourselves, spitting out content like human Pez dispensers, packaging our thoughts as candy for the feed.

    Belonging is rationed out in likes and retweets, and the cost is subtlety. To win attention, you don’t weigh both sides—you crank the volume, you caricature, you inflame. What begins as a hook metastasizes into belief. We develop the Tabloid Mind: the reflex to turn every notion into a screaming headline. And once we inhabit the Tabloid Mind, we degrade, becoming not better humans but better performers for the algorithm.

    The Thoughtful Mind never stood a chance. A Tabloid platform attracts tens of millions; the Thoughtful Mind, if lucky, limps along with scraps. Yet the difference is stark. The Thoughtful Mind asks, listens, considers contradictions, and cools the room so clarity can thrive. The Tabloid Mind, by contrast, thrives on panic and rage, reducing discourse to a lizard-brain cage match where opponents are demons and the fire must never go out.

    A culture enthroned by the Tabloid Mind breeds paranoia, extremism, conspiracy, and violence. And violence doesn’t need to be shouted—it can be winked into existence by the constant drip of toxic adrenaline.

    I know the alternative exists because I live it daily in the classroom. When my students wrestle with bro culture, influencer fakery, or the cultural fallout of GLP-1 drugs, they do so with humor, nuance, and critical thought. The Thoughtful Mind lives there, in the room, face to face. No one is frothing at the dopamine mouth. No one is shitposting for clout. We disagree, we wrestle, we laugh—but we think.

    The Tabloid Mind is not sustainable. It’s a toxin, and unchecked, it will kill us. Our survival depends on choosing the Thoughtful Mind instead. The fight between them—clickbait versus clarity, heat versus light—is not just cultural noise. It’s the defining battle of our age.

  • Naked, Unshy, Beautiful: What Happens When the Killjoy Leaves

    Naked, Unshy, Beautiful: What Happens When the Killjoy Leaves

    I screened The Game Changers for my student-athletes, pausing every few minutes like a referee blowing the whistle on another bogus call. The film is a carnival of half-baked studies and overcooked claims about the superiority of a plant-based diet, and I wasn’t about to let it slide. Still, I tried to be generous: a well-planned plant-based diet can be a heart’s best friend. But then we hit my favorite scene, the one I couldn’t resist rewinding. Derrick Morgan, the former Tennessee Titans linebacker, is feasting with teammates on a vegan spread prepared by his wife, Charity. The science was questionable, but the spectacle of love, respect, and camaraderie at that table was undeniable. I told my students, “This—right here—is what eating is about. Not macros, not calculators, not the cold math of nutrition. It’s love.” A volleyball player nodded so hard in agreement, I swear I almost heard her whisper “Amen.”

    Because what is food without community? Nothing but calorie slop shoveled into our mouths like feral beasts at the trough. Food made with love is alchemy: it transforms ingredients into joy, health, and communion. Yet here we are, obsessed with mimicking the hollow thinness of the GLP-1 crowd, mistaking the absence of appetite for virtue. We’ve lost the plot. Food isn’t just fuel; it’s the oldest social technology we have, a medium for bonding, story-telling, and remembering why we bother to sit at a table together in the first place. Strip away the love, and you might as well be gnawing protein paste in solitary confinement.

    Someone with a strong sense of love and bonding is the unnamed Pommeroy brother who narrates the John Cheever short story “Goodbye, My Brother.” He explains that their father was drowned in a sailing accident, which accounts for the family being “very close in spirit.” Their widowed mother taught them that “familial relationships have a kind of permanence” that must be treasured. And so, when the clan gathers at a stately beach house in Laud’s Head, they long for a reunion soaked in sea air and camaraderie. Instead, they get Lawrence—the Puritan gargoyle in their garden party.

    Lawrence is the sort of malcontent who makes wallpaper peel just by standing in a room. He sneers, scolds, and sours the air with his joyless rectitude. A family feast must be stripped of flavor for fear of offending his ascetic palate; a laugh must be stifled, lest he glare with Calvinist disgust. He walks through the beach house like an undertaker taking notes. Even his children, described as thin and timid, seem malnourished by his anti-life, as if he has siphoned out their childhood and replaced it with dour lectures. He is not merely unpleasant—he is a contagion, a slow cancer metastasizing through the family’s shared spirit.

    Cheever’s brilliance is to render Lawrence as the Apollonian impulse run rancid: all order, no play; all restraint, no abandon. The rest of the Pommeroys, by contrast, embody the Dionysian: eager for pleasure, indulgence, the salty joy of swimming naked in the Atlantic. Lawrence cannot let go, cannot laugh, cannot live—and so the family cannot breathe in his presence. Only when the narrator, finally fed up, smacks his brother with a seawater-heavy root, drawing blood, does relief arrive. Lawrence slinks away with his joyless brood, leaving the others to rediscover pleasure, freedom, and even grace. The final image is unforgettable: the narrator’s wife and sister, unencumbered and unclothed, walking out of the ocean like radiant sea-goddesses. It’s as if Lawrence’s exile returned them to the very pulse of life.

    Cheever reminds us that one malcontent can poison the banquet, but also that expelling the killjoy—by violence if necessary—can restore the fragile ecstasy of family. The message is clear: the Dionysian will not be denied, not even by a Puritan scold with a permanent scowl.

  • Food as Storytelling, Not Spreadsheet

    Food as Storytelling, Not Spreadsheet

    I screened The Game Changers for my student-athletes, pausing every few minutes like a referee blowing the whistle on another bogus call. The film is a carnival of half-baked studies and overcooked claims about the superiority of a plant-based diet, and I wasn’t about to let it slide. Still, I tried to be generous: a well-planned plant-based diet can be a heart’s best friend. But then we hit my favorite scene, the one I couldn’t resist rewinding. Derrick Morgan, the former Tennessee Titans linebacker, is feasting with teammates on a vegan spread prepared by his wife, Charity. The science was questionable, but the spectacle of love, respect, and camaraderie at that table was undeniable. I told my students, “This—right here—is what eating is about. Not macros, not calculators, not the cold math of nutrition. It’s love.” A volleyball player nodded so hard in agreement, I swear I almost heard her whisper “Amen.”

    Because what is food without community? Nothing but calorie slop shoveled into our mouths like feral beasts at the trough. Food made with love is alchemy: it transforms ingredients into joy, health, and communion. Yet here we are, obsessed with mimicking the hollow thinness of the GLP-1 crowd, mistaking the absence of appetite for virtue. We’ve lost the plot. Food isn’t just fuel; it’s the oldest social technology we have, a medium for bonding, story-telling, and remembering why we bother to sit at a table together in the first place. Strip away the love, and you might as well be gnawing protein paste in solitary confinement.