Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • Blessed Are the Gluten-Free: America’s New Spiritual Elite

    Blessed Are the Gluten-Free: America’s New Spiritual Elite

    Reading Amy Larocca’s How to Be Well is like watching Gwyneth Paltrow’s ghost possess a Whole Foods employee mid-mushroom latte. Her book is equal parts riveting and scalpel-sharp, dissecting the strange mutation of fashionistas who’ve traded in Gucci for goop and now drape themselves in wellness jargon like it’s couture. These wellness evangelists don’t just eat clean—they chant it. They speak in tongues made of spirulina, lipospheric vitamin C, Cordyceps, Shilajit resin, and ho shou wu, stringing together syllables like they’re summoning the ghost of Hippocrates.

    What we’re witnessing isn’t self-care—it’s a personality cult with better lighting. The modern wellness priestess has crowned herself a demigod, armed with adaptogens instead of sacraments, waving her magic tincture dropper and pointing lesser mortals toward the True Path of purified, gluten-free, unpasteurized transcendence. It’s not just health—it’s high-performance sanctimony.

    Larocca nails the diagnosis with surgical precision: “I sometimes think of wellness as the project of buying your own body back for yourself.” Translation? Welcome to America’s chicest hostage situation, where the ransom is payable in collagen peptides and oat milk. The goal is to become the luxury-branded version of you—perfect skin, toxin-free bowels, and moral superiority radiating from every overpriced yoga mat. The side effect? It magnifies the gaping inequalities of modern life like a magnifying mirror you didn’t ask to look into.

    Because let’s be honest: none of this comes cheap. These rituals of wellness cost money—bucketloads of it. We’re not talking about a jog around the park and some tap water. We’re talking $12 green juices and $300 infrared saunas. The entire project is rigged to serve the few while gaslighting the many. The wellness priestess doesn’t just ignore that her lifestyle is unattainable for most—she markets that inaccessibility as part of the charm.

    This isn’t health—it’s spiritual cosplay for the affluent.

  • Wristwatches and Wastelands: How Fashion Can Hollow You Out

    Wristwatches and Wastelands: How Fashion Can Hollow You Out

    Amy Larocca, a fashion journalist with twenty years of runway reportage under her belt, understands the psychological scaffolding beneath a well-tailored sleeve. “Fashion,” she writes in How to Be Well, “is about beauty, of course, but it is also about the desire to elevate daily life from its more banal limitations, to consciously and actively share something about how you’d like to be perceived by the rest of the world.”

    And that, my friend, is exactly where the trouble starts.

    Take a stroll through the horological asylum known as the watch community. What starts as an appreciation for precision craftsmanship often spirals into a neurotic fixation. A dive watch isn’t just for telling time—it’s for announcing to the world that you’re rugged, refined, and possibly ready to harpoon something. The desire to “elevate daily life” with just the right wrist candy turns into a slow-motion personality collapse. It becomes a lifestyle audition for an identity you don’t actually inhabit.

    The trap is cunning. At first, fashion promises transformation: a sharper silhouette, a touch of mystique, a sense of control in a chaotic world. But when the performance replaces the person—when dressing well becomes a proxy for purpose—you’re not elevating your life. You’re embalming it in linen and leather.

    The real tragedy isn’t vanity. It’s the way compulsive self-curation smothers empathy. Narcissism isn’t just annoying—it’s lonely. It dislocates you from community, connection, and anything approaching transcendence. A meaningful life, if it’s worth living at all, doesn’t orbit around the mirror.

    To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with looking sharp. Be fit, be stylish, radiate confidence. But when your wardrobe becomes your worldview—when you dress not to express but to impress—you trade depth for dazzle. You don’t become interesting. You become exhausting.

  • Toxins, Teas, and the Tyranny of Self-Care

    Toxins, Teas, and the Tyranny of Self-Care

    In How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, Amy Larocca introduces us to the “Well Woman”—an aspirational specter of affluent spirituality who floats through Erewhon aisles like a priestess of turmeric. She is non-religious but deeply “spiritual,” an educated, upper-middle-class avatar of intentional living. Her diet? Whole, organic, plant-based. Her skincare? Sourced from the tears of ethically massaged avocados. Her wardrobe? Soft, breathable cottons dyed with herbs. Her soul? Allegedly pure.

    She’s the type who throws around words like “boundaries” and “holding space” while sipping adaptogenic mushroom tea. Fluent in therapy-speak and swaddled in the cozy lexicon of mindfulness, she’s not just living—she’s curating her life, building an identity out of emollients, detoxes, and artisanal spices. And all of it—every mindful, ethically sourced drop—feeds the $5.6 trillion wellness-industrial complex.

    Larocca sees through the yoga-scented fog. The Well Woman, she argues, is just the latest installment in America’s ongoing franchise of unattainable feminine ideals: a new model to aspire to, envy, and—most importantly—buy into. Today’s purity isn’t moral; it’s material.

    Reading Larocca’s opening, I couldn’t help but think of Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece Safe, in which Carol White—a vapid housewife in the chemical-glazed sprawl of the San Fernando Valley—slowly dissolves into the cult of purity. After one too many trips to the dry cleaner, Carol spirals into an obsession with environmental toxins, abandons her friends and family, and ends up exiled to a pastel-drenched wellness commune. There she lives alone in a sterile dome, staring at herself in the mirror, parroting affirmations until there’s nothing left behind her eyes but empty devotion.

    Carol White is the ghost of the Well Woman’s future—a cautionary tale in Lululemon. She doesn’t find peace; she finds a purgatory curated by Goop. And as Larocca peels back the lavender-scented rhetoric of self-care, it’s clear she sees this modern cult of wellness not as healing but as hollowing—a $5.6 trillion seduction that promises salvation and delivers scented self-delusion.

  • Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    I’m typing this to the sound of Beethoven—1,868 MP3s of compressed genius streamed through the algorithmic convenience of a playlist. It’s a 41-hour-and-8-minute monument to compromise: a simulacrum of sonic excellence that can’t hold a candle to the warmth of an LP. But convenience wins. Always.

    I make Faustian bargains like this daily. Thirty-minute meals instead of slow-cooked transcendence. Athleisure instead of tailoring. A Honda instead of high horsepower. The good-enough over the sublime. Not because I’m lazy—because I’m functional. Efficient. Optimized.

    And now, writing.

    For a year, my students and I have been feeding prompts into ChatGPT like a pagan tribe tossing goats into the volcano—hoping for inspiration, maybe salvation. Sometimes it works. The AI outlines, brainstorms, even polishes. But the more we rely on it, the more I feel the need to write without it—just to remember what my own voice sounds like. Just as the vinyl snob craves the imperfections of real analog music or the home cook insists on peeling garlic by hand, I need to suffer through the process.

    We’re caught in a metaphysical tug-of-war. We crave convenience but revere authenticity. We binge AI-generated sludge by day, then go weep over a hand-made pie crust YouTube video at night. We want our lives frictionless, but our souls textured. It’s the new sacred vs. profane: What do we reserve for real, and what do we surrender to the machine?

    I can’t say where this goes. Maybe real food will be phased out, like Blockbuster or bookstores. Maybe we’ll subsist on GLP-1 drugs, AI-tailored nutrient paste, and the joyless certainty of perfect lab metrics.

    As for entertainment, I’m marginally more hopeful. Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman—these are voices, not products. AI can churn out sitcoms, but it can’t bleed. It can’t bomb. It can’t riff on childhood trauma with perfect timing. Humans know the difference between a story and a story-shaped thing.

    Still, writing is in trouble. Reading, too. AI erodes attention spans like waves on sandstone. Books? Optional. Original thought? Delegated. The more AI floods the language, the more we’ll acclimate to its sterile rhythm. And the more we acclimate, the less we’ll even remember what a real voice sounds like.

    Yes, there will always be the artisan holdouts—those who cook, write, read, and listen with intention. But they’ll be outliers. A boutique species. The rest of us will be lean, medicated, managed. Data-optimized units of productivity.

    And yet, there will be stories. There will always be stories. Because stories aren’t just culture—they’re our survival instinct dressed up as entertainment. When everything else is outsourced, commodified, and flattened, we’ll still need someone to stand up and tell us who we are.

  • Why I Don’t Read Happiness Essays (and Neither Should You)

    Why I Don’t Read Happiness Essays (and Neither Should You)

    Arthur Brooks is a best-selling author, a man of clear intellect, solid decency, and enough charm to disarm even a hardened cynic. I read one of his books, From Strength to Strength, which tackles the subject of happiness with insight, elegance, and more than a few glimmers of genuine wisdom. For a week or so, I even took his ideas seriously—pondering the slow fade of professional relevance, the shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence, and the noble art of growing old with grace.

    And then I moved on with my life.

    What I didn’t move on from, unfortunately, was the onslaught of Brooks’ happiness essays in The Atlantic. They appear like clockwork, regular as a multivitamin—each one another serving of cod liver oil ladled out with the same hopeful insistence: “Here, take this. It’s good for you.” The problem isn’t Arthur Brooks. It’s happiness itself. Or rather, happiness writing—that genre of glossy, over-smoothed, well-meaning counsel that now repels me like a therapy dog that won’t stop licking your face during a panic attack.

    Let me try to explain why.

    1. The Word “Happiness” Is Emotionally Bankrupt

    The term happiness is dead on arrival. It lands with the emotional resonance of a helium balloon tied to a mailbox. It evokes cotton candy, county fairs, and the faded joy of children playing cowboys and Indians—an aesthetic trapped in amber. It feels unserious, childish even. I can’t engage with it as a concept because it doesn’t belong in the adult vocabulary of meaning-making. It’s not that I reject the state of being happy—I’m just allergic to calling it that.

    2. It Feels Like Cod Liver Oil for the Soul

    Brooks’ essays show up with the regularity and charm of a concerned mother armed with a spoonful of something you didn’t ask for. I click through The Atlantic and there it is again: another gentle lecture on how to optimize my inner light. It’s no longer nourishment. It’s over-parenting via prose.

    3. Optimizing Happiness Is a Ridiculous Fantasy

    Some of Brooks’ formulas for increasing happiness start to feel like they were dreamed up by a retired actuary trying to convert existential dread into a spreadsheet. As if flourishing could be reduced to inputs and outputs. As if there’s a number on the dial you can crank up if you just follow the steps. It’s wellness-by-algorithm, joy-by-numbers. I’m not a stock portfolio. I’m a human being. And happiness doesn’t wear a Fitbit.

    4. Satire Has Already Broken the Spell

    Anthony Lane, in his New Yorker essay “Can Happiness Be Taught?,”
    dismantled this whole genre with surgical wit. Once you’ve read a masterful takedown of this kind of earnest life-coaching prose, it’s impossible to take it seriously again. Like seeing the zipper on a mascot costume, the magic disappears. You’re just watching a grown-up in a plush suit tell you to breathe and smile more.

    5. I Like Things That Exist in the World

    I’m interested in things with friction and form—things you can grip, build, question, deconstruct. Music. Technology. Communication tools. Exercise. Love. Psychological self-sabotage. You know, the good stuff. Happiness, as a subject, has all the density of vapor. It’s more slogan than substance, and when I see it trotted out as a destination, I start scanning for exits.

    6. It’s a Hot Tub Full of Bromides

    I have no interest in an adult ed class on happiness led by a relentlessly upbeat instructor talking about “mindfulness” and “centeredness” with the fixed grin of someone who has replaced coffee with optimism. I can already hear the buzzwords echoing off the whiteboard. These classes are group therapy in a coloring book—pastel platitudes spoon-fed to the emotionally dehydrated.

    7. It’s Not Self-Help. It’s Self-Surveillance

    Let’s be honest: a lot of happiness literature feels like a soft form of control. Smile more. Meditate. Adjust your attitude. If you’re not happy, it must be something you’re doing wrong. It’s capitalism’s way of gaslighting your suffering. Don’t look outward—don’t question the system, the politics, the institutions. Just recalibrate your “mindset.” In this sense, the language of happiness is more pacifier than pathfinder.

    So yes, Arthur Brooks writes well. He thinks clearly. He’s probably a better person than I am. But his essays on happiness make me recoil—not because they’re wrong, but because they speak a language I no longer trust. I don’t want to be managed, monitored, or optimized. I want to be awake. I want to be challenged. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get to experience the real stuff of life—anger, beauty, confusion, connection—not just a frictionless simulation of contentment.

    Happiness can keep smiling from the other side of the screen. I’ve got kettlebells to swing.

  • Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    For years, I counted The Bulwark and The Atlantic among the few media outlets that seemed to keep their heads above water. Thoughtful, principled, and often sharp in their critique, they offered a sense of clarity during a time when the political center felt like it was collapsing under the weight of tribalism. I read The Atlantic with the same reverence people once reserved for the Sunday paper. I tuned into The Bulwark’s podcasts with eagerness, particularly the sparring matches and tag-team lamentations of Sarah Longwell and JVL.

    But lately, something’s shifted.

    I’ve been struggling to name the feeling exactly—disenchantment, disconnection, even a touch of annoyance. It’s not that they’ve suddenly started publishing bad takes (though no one’s immune to that). It’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’m listening to the same looped monologue. Their arguments are often cogent, yes, but increasingly predictable—a chorus of like-minded voices rehearsing the same concerns, circling the same drain.

    Call it echo-chamber fatigue.

    The Bulwark, once a clarion voice of principled conservatism and a fierce watchdog against authoritarianism, now often feels like a room full of smart people endlessly rehashing the same grim diagnosis: American democracy is circling the drain. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong—it’s that I already see the collapse unfolding in real time. Listening to it dissected again and again isn’t cathartic anymore. It’s just salt in the wound.

    The Atlantic, long celebrated for its intellectual breadth, increasingly feels like it’s scanning for moral alignment before publishing an idea. There’s little friction. Little surprise. Just a gentle stroking of reader confirmation bias.

    Meanwhile, I find myself gravitating to media that feels more alive—podcasts like The Gist with Mike Pesca, Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, The Fifth Column, Ink-Stained Wretches, and even The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. These shows don’t always align with my politics—and that’s exactly the point. They’re not trying to usher me into ideological safety. They’re wrestling with absurdities across the spectrum. They’re skeptical. Curious. Sometimes contrarian. Always human.

    And that, I think, is the deeper issue: emotional resonance. The Bulwark and The Atlantic haven’t necessarily changed. I have. Or perhaps the times have. I need more than agreement—I need tension, exploration, contradiction. The intellectual monoculture, no matter how principled, starts to feel like a sedative after a while.

    I’ve even considered canceling my subscriptions. But there’s friction there, too: The Atlantic remains a useful classroom resource, and every now and then, The Bulwark sparks a genuinely engaging dialogue that reminds me why I once admired it so much.

    So I stay, for now. But I’ve moved my ears—and increasingly, my attention—toward media that still surprises me. That still thinks out loud, rather than reading from a polished script.

    I’m not rejecting thoughtful media. I’m just bored of watching it slowly turn into liturgy.

  • WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    I launched my WordPress blog on March 12, evicting myself from Typepad after it was sold to a company that treats blogs the way landlords treat rent-controlled tenants: with bored disdain. Typepad became a ghost town in a bad neighborhood, so I packed up and moved to the gated community of WordPress—cleaner streets, better lighting, and fewer trolls.

    For the past ten weeks, I’ve treated WordPress like a public journal—a digital sweat lodge where I sweat out my thoughts, confessions, and pedagogical war stories from the frontlines of college teaching. I like the routine, the scaffolding, and the habits of self-control. Blogging gives me something I never got from social media or committee meetings: a sense of order in a culture that’s spun off its axis.

    But let’s not kid ourselves. WordPress isn’t some utopian agora where meaningful discourse flourishes in the shade of civility. It’s still wired into the dopamine economy. The minute I start checking likes, follows, and view counts, I’m no longer a writer—I’m a lab rat pressing the pellet button. Metrics are the new morality. And brother, I’m not immune.

    Case in point: I can craft a thoughtful post, click “Publish,” and watch it sink into the abyss like a message in a bottle tossed into a septic tank. One view. Maybe. Post the same thing on Reddit, and suddenly I’m performing for an arena full of dopamine-addled gladiators. They’ll upvote, sure—but only after the professional insulters have had their turn at bat. Reddit is where clever sociopaths go to sharpen their knives and call it discourse.

    WordPress, by contrast, is a chill café with decent lighting and no one live-tweeting your every existential sigh. It’s a refuge from the snarling hordes of hot-take hustlers and ideological bloodsport. A place where I can escape not only digital toxicity, but the wider derangement of our post-shame, post-truth society—where influencers and elected officials are often the same con artist in two different blazers.

    Instead of doomscrolling or screaming into the algorithmic void, I’ve taken to reading biographies—public intellectuals, athletes who aged with dignity, tech pioneers who are obsessed with taking over the world. Or I’ll go spelunking into gadget rabbit holes to distract myself from the spiritual hangover that comes from living in a country where charisma triumphs over character and truth is whatever sells ad space.

    In therapy-speak, my job on WordPress is to “use the tools,” as Phil Stutz says: to strengthen my relationship with myself, with others, and with the crumbling world around me. It’s a discipline, not a dopamine drip. Writing here won’t make me famous, won’t make me rich, and sure as hell won’t turn me into some cardigan-clad oracle for the digital age.

    What it will do is give me structure. WordPress is where I wrestle with my thoughts the way I wrestle kettlebells in my garage: imperfectly, regularly, and with just enough sweat to keep the madness at bay.

  • If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    No ChatGPT or AI of any kind was used in the following:

    For close to 2 years, I’ve been editing and collaborating with ChatGPT for my personal and professional writing. I teach my college writing students how to engage with it, giving it instructions to avoid its default setting for bland, anodyne prose and teaching it how to adopt various writing personas. 

    For my own writing, ChatGPT has boosted my prose and imagery, making my writing more stunning, dramatic, and vivid.

    Because I have been a bodybuilder since 1974, I will use a bodybuilding analogy: Writing with ChatGPT is like bodybuilding with PEDS. I get addicted to the boost, the extra pump, and the extra muscle. Just as a bodybuilder can get body dysmorphia, ChatGPT can give writers a sort of writer’s dysmorphia. 

    But posting a few articles on Reddit recently in which a few readers were put off by what they saw as “fake writing,” I stopped in my tracks to question my use of ChatGPT. Part of me thinks that the hunger for authenticity is such that I should be writing content that is more like the natural bodybuilder, the guy who ventures forth in his endeavor with no PEDS. What you see is what you get, all human, no steroids, no AI.

    While I like the way ChatGPT pushes me in new directions that I would not explore on my own and makes the writing process engaging in new ways, I acknowledge that AI-fueled writer’s dysmorphia is real. We can get addicted to the juiced-up prose and the razzle-dazzle.

    Secondly, we can outsource too much thinking to AI and get lazy rather than do the work ourselves. In the process, our critical thinking skills begin to atrophy.

    Third, I think we can fill our heads with too much ChatGPT and live inside a hazy AI fever swamp. I recall going to middle school and on the outskirts of the campus, you could see the “burn-outs,” pot-addicted kids staring into the distance with their lizard eyes. One afternoon a friend joked, “They’re high so often, not being high must be a trip for them.” What if we become like these lizard-eyed burnouts and wander this world on a constant ChatGPT high that is so debilitating that we need to sober up in the natural world upon which we find the non-AI existence is its own form of healthy pleasure? In other words, we should be careful not to let ChatGPT live rent-free in our brains.

    Finally, people hunger for authentic, all-human writing, so moving forward on this blog, I want to continue to push myself with some ChatGPT-edited writing, but I also want to present all-natural, all-human writing, as is the case with this post. 

  • Manuscripnosis: A Vexing Tale of Self-Sabotage

    Manuscripnosis: A Vexing Tale of Self-Sabotage

    I suffer from a humiliating literary affliction: when I’m not trying to write a book—when I’m simply crafting loose, witty blog posts—my prose sings. It breathes. It struts across the page like it owns the place. In those moments, I’m not an “author,” I’m just a clever diarist with decent rhythm and a nose for irony.

    But then comes the fatal whiff—that intoxicating scent of a book deal drifting in from the distance like a mouth-watering freshly-baked coconut macaroon. Suddenly, I begin to try. I sit up straighter. I structure. I strategize. I lean into “craft.” And that’s when my prose, once alive and sinewy, collapses like a soufflé that sensed it was being watched. Gone is the energy, the voice, the mischievous verve. What remains is a flaccid husk of what could have been—something that reads less like a potential bestseller and more like a workshop handout no one asked for.

    This, dear reader, is the vicious, looping paradox I call Unintended Book Syndrome. The moment I stop writing and start authorshipping, my words die on the vine.

    The clinical term, I believe, is Manuscripnosis: a trance-like state in which blog-worthy brilliance is transfigured into joyless literary taxidermy the moment the idea of a “real book” enters the room. I have lived with this disorder for decades. I’ve tried everything—lowering expectations, denying ambition, even faking indifference. Nothing works. The moment I think this could be a book, the prose curls up and dies like a Victorian heroine too delicate for publication.

    Sometimes I fantasize about quitting writing altogether. But abstinence only makes it worse. The despair of not writing eclipses even the misery of writing badly. Which means I am doomed to live forever in this creative purgatory—hovering between genius and garbage, blog post and book, dopamine and dread.

  • The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    If technology can make us all look like Salma Hayek, then congratulations—we’ve successfully killed beauty by cloning it into oblivion. Perfection loses its punch when everyone has it on tap. The same goes for writing: if every bored intern with a Wi-Fi connection can crank out Nabokovian prose with the help of ChatGPT, then those dazzling turns of phrase lose their mystique. What once shimmered now just… scrolls.

    Yes, technology improves us—but it also sandblasts the edges off everything, leaving behind a polished sameness. The danger isn’t just in becoming artificial; it’s in becoming indistinguishable. The real challenge in this age of frictionless upgrades is to retain your signature glitch—that weird, unruly fingerprint of a soul that no algorithm can replicate without screwing it up in glorious, human ways.

    If technology can make us all look like Brad Pitt and Selma Hayak, then none of us will be beautiful. In this hellscape, we all suffer inside the Beautocalypse–the collapse of beauty through overproduction: When everyone’s flawless, no one is.

    Likewise, if we can all use ChatGPT to write like Vladimir Nabokov, then florid prose will no longer have the wow factor. Technology improves us, yes, but it also makes everything the same. Retaining your individual fingerprint of a soul is the challenge in this new age.