Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • Pillar of Salt: Why I Turned My Back on Bulk

    Pillar of Salt: Why I Turned My Back on Bulk

    As I trudged through the cavernous aisles of Costco, I felt less like a shopper and more like an explorer hacking through a consumerist rainforest with a mental machete. Everywhere I turned, industrial towers of peanut butter jars loomed like ancient ruins, and battalions of quinoa-based snack items assaulted me with their deceptive health halos. I wasn’t shopping—I was spelunking into the subconscious of the American appetite.

    Then came the Free Sample Fairies—syrupy-smiling heralds of indulgence—beckoning me toward thimble-sized offerings of strawberry smoothies, sushi rolls, and the inevitable ostrich jerky. It was a fever dream: a child’s fantasy of Eden where all cravings are granted instantly and without consequence. Except the consequences were vast, and they waited for me at home like angry creditors—an overflowing fridge, a groaning freezer, cupboards stuffed like hoarders’ closets. To make room for the new bounty, I had to speed-eat the old. Thus began the glutton’s loop: buying, bingeing, repenting, repeating. Costco wasn’t a store. It was an engine of expansion—of appetite, of girth, of existential despair.

    And I wept. Not just for myself but for my people. I wept because we worshipped this oversized temple of abundance as if our very worth hinged on how many gallons of mayonnaise we could carry home. We treated the act of bulk-buying like a civic virtue, a weekly pilgrimage that proved we were living the American Dream. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a performance. A flex. A suburban smoke screen designed to conceal the quiet desperation of too much, too often, too fast.

    So I returned home, hollow-eyed and bloated, and declared to my family that I could no longer continue this pilgrimage. Costco, I announced, was my personal Sodom—dangerous, seductive, and destined for dietary doom. I would henceforth shop only at Trader Joe’s: the humble monastery of portion control, the temple of restraint. My salvation, I told them, would be lined with frozen cauliflower gnocchi and 8-ounce jars of almond butter.

    My family wept. Not out of joy or agreement, but out of grief for the Costco bounty they would no longer see. No more colossal trays of croissants or five-pound bags of trail mix. I watched them mourn the death of excess. I saw it in their faces: longing for the Costco of yore. But I warned them—look back, and you become like Lot’s wife: bloated and salty.

    And then a miracle: They adapted. Slowly, painfully, they embraced the modesty of Trader Joe’s, portioned their expectations, and learned to live with less. They traded abundance for love, proving their devotion not with words but with fewer carbs. In their sacrifice, I found my strength.

    As I penned these reflections, a single tear rolled down my cheek. Whether it was sorrow, gratitude, or sodium withdrawal, I couldn’t say.

  • The Stall Wars: A Faculty Restroom Horror Story

    The Stall Wars: A Faculty Restroom Horror Story


    There I was—distinguished professor of literature, credentialed purveyor of syntax and suffering—perched atop the porcelain throne in the sacred stillness of the faculty restroom, savoring the last vestiges of a sugarless lemon-honey lozenge and the sweet, unbroken silence that comes only from locking the world out, one stall door at a time. Beside me: Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Above me: fluorescent lighting dimmer than the future of American democracy. Around me: peace, solitude, and the faint illusion of control.

    Then came the talcum fog.

    That distinct olfactory offense, paired with the telltale wheeze of a Marlboro-ravaged trachea, shattered the silence. I didn’t have to peek between the stall doors. I knew. It was her. Scary Mary. The tenured temp. The mythological grievance machine. The student who had, for over a decade, haunted our campus like a poltergeist with an administrative appeal form.

    “Mary,” I barked from my vulnerable perch, “this is the men’s room. Leave now, or campus police will be called.”

    “But Professor,” came the whine, pitched somewhere between a toddler’s tantrum and a chainsmoker’s aria, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

    I tried reason. I tried logic. But Mary had the persistence of a nicotine-stained Terminator. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

    “I read your essay,” I sighed. “Your catering hustle was impressive. One hundred smoked salmon crostini in thirty minutes? Brava. But yes, it was larded with grammatical errors.”

    “You used the word larded,” she moaned. “Do you know how that hurts my self-esteem?”

    Self-esteem? I was pants-down in a toilet stall having a mid-thesis debate with a woman violating Title IX, and she wanted to discuss feelings?

    But Mary was just revving up. Her stubby fingers suddenly curled over the stall partition like something out of The Ring, and soon, her jaundiced head and magnified, frantic eyes emerged over the top. She looked like an unhinged librarian perched in a crow’s nest.

    “I can’t afford to flunk this class again!” she gasped, dangling from her makeshift luggage tower like a cirque-de-sociopath act.

    I stood up—pants restored, dignity in tatters—and let it rip: “You want honesty? Your essay reads like it was written by a sleep-deprived raccoon using predictive text. It made me reconsider the entire purpose of education. It gave me a migraine and a minor crisis of faith.”

    Mary recoiled. “You’re a monster!” she shrieked. “The worst professor in higher education!”

    Then physics intervened.

    Mary, all 250 pounds of her, teetered from her wobbly platform and hit the floor with the grace of a collapsing filing cabinet. She screamed. Something about her shoulder.

    I emerged, washed my hands, and surveyed the carnage.

    “You’ll be fine,” I said flatly. “Ice it.”

    “Aren’t you going to help me?”

    Something cracked open in me—some cocktail of guilt, absurdism, and overcaffeinated bravado. “I can fix it,” I said. “My brother dislocated his shoulder in high school. I saw the coach pop it back in.”

    Before she could object, I grabbed her wrist and yanked like a man possessed. There was a meaty clunk and then—a miracle—relief.

    “You’re amazing,” she whispered.

    “I know.”

    She stood up, rubbing her newly aligned limb. “Now that I’m not your student… can we be friends?”

    “Absolutely not,” I said, “but I can offer career counseling.”

    “No hard feelings?”

    “None. Now kindly exit the men’s room.”

    I returned home expecting a hero’s welcome, only to find my family gathered around a platter of French Dip, their eyes glued to gravy-soaked baguettes.

    “Sit down and eat,” my wife ordered, shoveling horseradish onto a sandwich with military precision.

    And so I did.

    And let me tell you, that sandwich could have ended wars. The beef was so tender it practically recited poetry on your tongue. The bread straddled that holy line between crisp and pillowy. And the au jus? It was less of a sauce and more of a religious experience. As I dipped, the day’s trauma melted like Swiss cheese under a broiler.

    In that moment, I understood: some stories deserve to be told. Others should be swallowed with gravy.

  • There Is No Digital Kaffeeklatsch: The Lie of Social Media

    There Is No Digital Kaffeeklatsch: The Lie of Social Media

    For the last fifteen years, we’ve let the term social media slip into our lexicon like a charming grifter. It sounds benign, even wholesome—like we’re all gathered around a digital café table, sipping lattes and chatting about our lives in a warm, buzzing kaffeeklatsch. But that illusion is precisely the problem. The phrase “social media” is branding sleight-of-hand, a euphemism designed to lull us into thinking we’re having meaningful interactions when, in reality, we’re being drained like emotional batteries in a rigged arcade.

    This is not a friendly coffeehouse. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box where you tap and scroll like a lab rat hoping for one more pellet of validation. What we’re calling “social” is, in fact, algorithmic manipulation dressed in a hoodie. We are not exchanging ideas—we are bartering our attention for scraps of engagement while surrendering personal data to tech oligarchs who harvest our behavior like bloodless farmers fattening up their cattle.

    Richard Seymour calls this hellscape The Twittering Machine, and he’s not exaggerating. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism, a regime in which we perform our curated selves for likes while the real self, the vulnerable human beneath the filter, slowly atrophies. Anna Lembke describes our overstimulated descent in Dopamine Nation, while the concept of Algorithmic Capture suggests we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us.

    So let’s drop the charade. This isn’t “social media.” It’s addiction media, engineered to flatten nuance, hollow out identity, and leave us twitching in the glow of our screens like the last souls left in a flickering casino. Whatever this is, it’s not convivial, it’s not coffeehouse chatter, and it’s certainly not social. It’s the end of human discourse masquerading as connection.

  • The Great Rebrand: Why “Addiction Media” Tells the Truth

    The Great Rebrand: Why “Addiction Media” Tells the Truth

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like discovering that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s documentary. Seymour paints our current digital reality as a propaganda-laced fever swamp, one where we aren’t just participants but livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching tech-fueled sociopaths ascend to power begins to make sense once you realize that mass digital degradation is the new civic norm. We’re not on the cusp of dystopia; we’re marinating in it.

    Most of us are trapped in Seymour’s titular machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box, pecking for likes, retweets, or just one more dopamine hit. We scroll ourselves into a stupor, zombies hypnotized by grotesque clickbait and influencer gaucherie. And yet, a flicker of awareness remains. Some of us know our brains are rotting. We feel it in our foggy thoughts, our shortened attention spans, our craving to be “seen” by strangers.

    But Seymour offers no comfort. He cites a 2015 study where people tried to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most folded within 72 hours. Some switched to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter—addiction by another name. Only a rare few truly escaped, and they reported something wild: clarity, peace, a sudden freedom from the exhausting treadmill of performance. They had unplugged from what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “gamification capitalism,” a system where every social interaction is a metric and every self is a brand.

    Seymour’s takeaway? Let’s retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” It’s not social. It’s not media in the traditional sense. It’s engineered compulsion. It’s addiction media—and we’re the lab rats with no exit key.

  • From Gutenberg to Doomscroll: A Brief History of Our Narrative Decline

    From Gutenberg to Doomscroll: A Brief History of Our Narrative Decline

    Richard Seymour, in The Twittering Machine, reminds us that writing was once a sacred act—a cerebral pilgrimage and a cultural compass. It charted the peaks of human enlightenment and the valleys of our collective idiocy. But ever since Gutenberg’s movable type cranked out the first printed tantrum, writing has also been big business. Seymour calls this “print capitalism”—a factory of words that forged what Benedict Anderson dubbed “imagined communities,” and what Yuval Noah Harari might call humanity’s favorite pastime: building civilizations on beautifully told lies.

    But that was then. Enter the computer—a Pandora’s box with a backspace key. We haven’t just changed how we write; we’ve scrambled the very code of our narrative DNA. Seymour scoffs at the term “social media.” He prefers something more honest and unflinching: “shorthand propaganda.” After all, writing was always social—scrolls, letters, manifestos scrawled in exile. The novelty isn’t the connection; it’s the industrialization of thought. Now, we produce a firehose of content—sloppy, vapid, weaponized by ideology, and monetized by tech lords playing dopamine dealers.

    The term “social media” flatters what is more accurately a “social industry”—a Leviathan of data-harvesting, behavioral conditioning, and emotional slot machines dressed in UX sugar-coating. The so-called “friends” we collect are nothing more than pawns in a gamified economy of clout, their every click tracked, sold, and repurposed to make us addicts. Sherry Turkle wasn’t being cute when she warned that our connections were making us lonelier: she was diagnosing a slow psychological implosion.

    We aren’t writing anymore. We’re twitching. We’re chirping. We’re flapping like those emaciated birds in Paul Klee’s the Twittering Machine, spinning an axle we no longer control, bait for the next poor soul. This isn’t communication. It’s entrapment, dressed up in hashtags and dopamine hits.

  • The Twittering Machine Never Sleeps

    The Twittering Machine Never Sleeps

    Richard Seymour, in his searing dissection of our digital descent, The Twittering Machine, argues that our compulsive scribbling across social media isn’t a charming side effect of modern communication—it’s a horror story. He calls our affliction “scripturient,” which sounds like a medieval disease and feels like one too: the raging, unquenchable urge to write, tweet, post, blog, caption, and meme ourselves into validation. According to Seymour, we’re not sharing—we’re hemorrhaging content, possessed by the hope that someone, somewhere, will finally pay attention. The platforms lap it up, feeding on our existential howl like pigs at a trough.

    But here’s the twist: these platforms don’t just amplify our words—they mutate us. We contort into parodies of ourselves, honed for likes, sharpened for outrage. Seymour’s reference to Paul Klee’s painting the Twittering Machine isn’t just arty window dressing—it’s prophecy. In it, skeletal birds crank a machine with the desperate chirps of bait, luring the next batch of fools into the algorithmic abyss. Once captured, these chirpers become part of the machine: chirp, crank, scroll, repeat. It’s not connection—it’s servitude with emojis.

    And yet, here I am. Writing this blog. Voluntarily. On WordPress, that semi-respectable cul-de-sac just outside the main drag of Social Media Hell. It’s not Facebook, which is a digital Thunderdome of outrage, memes, and unsolicited opinions from high school classmates you forgot existed. No, WordPress lets me stretch out. I can write without worrying that my paragraph won’t survive the swipe-happy thumbs of the attention-deficient. It feels almost…literary.

    But let’s not get smug. The moment I promote my posts on Twitter or check my analytics like a rat pressing a pellet bar, I’m caught in the same trap. I tell myself it’s different. That I’m writing for meaning, not metrics. But the line between writer and performer, between expression and spectacle, gets blurrier by the day. I’ve escaped the Twittering Machine before—unplugged, deleted, detoxed—but it still hums in the background, always ready to pull me back in with the promise of just one more click, one more like, one more little chirp of relevance.

  • Siri, Am I Losing My Mind? Asking for Jia Tolentino

    Siri, Am I Losing My Mind? Asking for Jia Tolentino

    In her essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino doesn’t so much confess a breakdown as she performs it—on the page, in real time, with all the elegance of a collapsing soufflé. She’s spiraling like a character in a Black Mirror episode who’s accidentally binge-watched the entire internet. Reality, for her, is now an unskippable TikTok ad mashed up with a conspiracy subreddit and narrated by a stoned Siri. She mistakes a marketing email from Hanna Andersson for “Hamas,” which is either a Freudian slip or a symptom of late-stage content poisoning.

    The essay is a dispatch from the front lines of postmodern psychosis. COVID brain fog, phone addiction, weed regret, and the unrelenting chaos of a “post-truth, post-shame” America have fused into one delicious cognitive stew. Her phone has become a weaponized hallucination device. Her mind, sloshing with influencer memes, QAnon-adjacent headlines, and DALL·E-generated nonsense, now processes information like a blender without a lid.

    She hasn’t even gotten to the fun part yet: the existential horror of not using ChatGPT. While others are letting this over-eager AI ghostwrite their résumés, soothe their insecurities, and pick their pad thai, Tolentino stares into the abyss, resisting. But she can’t help wondering—would she be more insane if she gave in and let a chatbot become her best friend, life coach, and menu whisperer? She cites Noor Al-Sibai’s unnerving article about heavy ChatGPT users developing dependency, loneliness, and depression, which sounds less like a tech trend and more like a new DSM entry.

    Her conclusion? Physical reality—the sweaty, glitchy, analog mess of it—isn’t just where we recover our sanity; it’s becoming a luxury few can afford. The digital realm, with its infinite scroll of half-baked horror and curated despair, is devouring us in real time. Tolentino isn’t predicting a Black Mirror future. She is the Black Mirror future, live and unfiltered, and her brain is the canary in the content mine.

  • How Fake Food Mirrors AI Writing

    How Fake Food Mirrors AI Writing

    Like most people, I have an unbreakable bond with food—a bond so primal that when the food industry dares to present me with a counterfeit, I might taste it out of politeness or morbid curiosity, but love it? Never. Inferior substitutes, especially those concoctions posing as “creative alternatives,” are my culinary kryptonite. My first encounter with such deceit came in 1970, courtesy of my stint in the YMCA’s Indian Guides (now rebranded as Adventure Guides). We were part of “tribes,” each made up of eight father-son pairs, with one dad dubbed “Chief” and the rest relegated to “Assistant Chiefs.” The real highlight, of course, was the weekly rotation to a different family’s home, where the moms—our unsung heroes—served dessert.

    But one evening, dessert took a turn for the worst. Our host mother, a vision of 70s flair with her blonde spun-sugar hair and white go-go boots, had stumbled upon what she must have thought was the recipe of the century. There it was, in plain sight on her kitchen counter: an open Ladies’ Home Journal or some equally menacing tome of domestic innovation. She cheerfully announced her culinary coup—a dessert she was calling “ice cream” but with no actual ice cream in it. Instead, the concoction was an unholy alliance of canned frosting and Cool Whip.

    She served it in cones with an enthusiasm that could have powered the disco lights at Studio 54. But when I took a bite, the illusion shattered. It wasn’t ice cream; it was a crime scene. The texture was gritty, like someone had blended sand with modeling clay. It was lukewarm—room temperature, for God’s sake—and tasted like the sugary sludge dentists use to polish your teeth before hitting you with the guilt trip about flossing. I glanced around and saw my fellow boys and their dads wearing identical expressions of barely-contained horror—the same grimace detectives on TV crime procedurals make when they have to pull out a hanky to block the stench of a decomposing corpse. One by one, we all quietly set our cones down as though handling evidence at a murder trial.

    The poor woman, sensing the full weight of her failure, blushed beet-red and stammered out a series of apologies, swearing on everything holy that she would never again darken a dessert table with this abomination. We forgave her, of course—some crimes are too absurd to punish. But to this day, whenever I see Cool Whip, I feel a pang of existential dread and hear the faint echo of tribal laughter masked by suppressed gagging.

    My second traumatic encounter with fake food came years later, sometime in the early 90s. I was living alone in the barren expanse of the California desert, surrounded by nothing but dust, lizards, and my questionable life choices. Thanksgiving rolled around, and rather than go full Norman Rockwell with a solo turkey feast, I decided to spare myself the hassle and opted for something “easy.” Enter the boxed abomination known as tofurkey—a vegetarian horror show complete with a pouch of dubious “gravy.”

    The first bite was a betrayal of taste and texture. My jaw slowed in protest, grinding against the dense, rubbery mass like I was chewing on a tire patch. The spongy gluten monstrosity refused to yield, as if daring my teeth to break first. The flavor? Imagine licking a salted yoga mat that’s been marinated in vague artificial regret. I eyed another slice, its pallid, lifeless complexion daring me to continue. With the enthusiasm of a condemned man, I stabbed the fork into it, hoping for some hidden culinary salvation. Nope. The taste was as bland and soul-crushing as the first bite—less “holiday cheer,” more “processed despair.”

    Finally, I’d had enough. With a sigh that could’ve put out a candle, I carried my plate to the trash and scraped the entire crime scene into the garbage, where it belonged. Dignity had to be reclaimed. I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios, sliced a banana over the top, and drizzled on some honey. As I savored each crunchy, sweet spoonful, I felt a small but vital spark of culinary joy return. It wasn’t just a meal—it was a rescue mission for my self-respect. And let me tell you, a bowl of cereal has never tasted so victorious.

    The self-abasement and insult to others from eating and serving fake food was captured brilliantly in the early 1980s when comedian Bob Sarlatte took aim at the pièce de résistance of culinary chicanery: the Ritz Crackers recipe for Mock Apple Pie. Sarlatte was on a mission to uncover the absurdity behind Ritz’s audacious claim of making apple pie with, wait for it, crackers instead of apples. He was incredulous, practically frothing at the mouth as he dissected this travesty. “Why on earth,” he demanded, “would Ritz, in all their cracker-clad glory, boast about a recipe that doesn’t even remotely involve apples?” According to Sarlatte, this so-called “apple pie” was like calling a desert a beach because it had sand—except the sand was made of crushed Ritz crackers, and the beach was a figment of your imagination. The comedian was in no mood for Ritz’s grandstanding. To him, this wasn’t a culinary innovation; it was a culinary catastrophe. He took Ritz to task for attempting to pass off a cracker conglomeration as apple pie, as if the lack of fruit was a feature, not a flaw. “Who,” Sarlatte railed, “are you going to serve this Mock Apple Pie to? Your mock friends? People who enjoy mockery served with a side of disappointment?” Sarlatte’s razor-sharp wit wasn’t just about lampooning a recipe—it was about exposing a greater travesty: the shameless elevation of a subpar substitute as a triumph of creativity. This wasn’t a clever culinary trick; it was an insult wrapped in a cracker crust. Bob Sarlatte laid bare the staggering lack of self-awareness and the brazen audacity required to serve such an ersatz “apple” pie with a smug smile. It was a masterclass in how to serve up an insult with a cherry on top, minus the apple, of course.

    Sarlatte’s takedown resonates because food is sacred territory. Our connection to it is primal. Unlike AI-generated text, fake food assaults the senses in ways you can’t ignore. And while AI hasn’t (yet) encroached on the culinary world with soulless meal simulations, the market’s rejection of fake meat shows just how little tolerance we have for edible counterfeits. Sales of plant-based protein substitutes have tanked, a clear signal that consumers aren’t ready to trade their ribeye for a rubbery simulacrum. Simply put, there’s only so much culinary mockery we’re willing to stomach—literally.

    Fake foods fail 90% of the time with 90% of the people, but in the realm of writing, AI-generated prose seems to enjoy the opposite fate: it’s “good enough” 90% of the time for 90% of situations. So perhaps fake food isn’t the right comparison. When it comes to our slow surrender to mediocrity in writing, convenience food may be a more apt metaphor. Sure, a Hot Pocket isn’t a Russian piroshki, but its ham and cheese filling is technically real. The danger isn’t the outright fakery of fake food—it’s the insidious appeal of convenience that gradually numbs our taste for anything better. The same flattening effect occurs in writing, where AI churns out serviceable but soulless content, lowering our appetite for higher-level craftsmanship.

    Let’s be real: when you bite into a Big Mac, you’re not searching for the subtle interplay of flavors or the delicate dance of textures. You’re there for the holy trinity of fat, protein, and salt—instant gratification, hold the sophistication. Likewise, when you fire up ChatGPT, you’re not chasing literary immortality. You’re after a fast, serviceable product so you can free up time to hit the drive-thru. Convenience becomes king, and both your palate and prose pay the price. Before you know it, you’ve traded filet mignon for fast food and Shakespeare for shallow clickbait. Standards? Those eroded long ago, somewhere between the special sauce and the soulless syntax.

    We’ve already seen this erosion over the last fifteen years. Smartphones have replaced thoughtful correspondence with texts full of abbreviations and emojis. My students now submit essays littered with “LOL” and lowercase “i” like punctuation’s gone on permanent strike. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this linguistic infantilization is the new standard, and business communication will one day be indistinguishable from TikTok captions. Still, I don’t entirely despair. Higher-level writing—like Joan Didion’s piercing cultural reportage—exists in a category of its own and doesn’t compete with the memos and press releases AI is destined to take over.

    What worries me more is that fewer people will seek out writers like Didion, Zadie Smith, or Hunter S. Thompson. Without readers, the appetite for great writing—and with it, deep thinking—shrinks. The flattening of taste becomes a flattening of consciousness, a slow bleed of our shared humanity. Look at our growing dependence on technology: GLP-1 drugs manage our weight, AI shapes our communication, streaming algorithms filter our music, and nutrition powders substitute for food. The result is a bland middle ground, a life devoid of both high peaks and deep valleys. We stop noticing the dehumanization because we’ve acclimated to it.

    But not all hope is lost. I remember hearing an interview on Fresh Air with Tiffany Haddish. Early in her career, Haddish struggled to find her comedic voice—until Eddie Murphy gave her a piece of advice that changed everything. He told her to have fun on stage, to genuinely enjoy herself. If she was having fun, the audience would feel it and respond. That human moment of mentorship transformed her career.

    This story reassured me for two reasons. First, Tiffany Haddish wasn’t mentored by ChatGPT—she was guided by Eddie Murphy, a living legend. Second, comedy itself is proof that people will always crave voices that cut through the emotional numbness of modern life. Great comedians, like great writers, are the axes that Kafka said could break the frozen sea within us. They shatter our tech-induced monotony and return us to the raw, messy experience of being human. As long as there are voices like Haddish and Murphy to remind us of that, there’s still hope that humanity won’t flatline into a dull, digital abyss.

    We may live in a world where powdered meal replacements pose as dinner and AI-generated text poses as thought, but the human appetite—whether for flavor or for meaning—can’t be faked for long. Just as we spit out Cool Whip cones and tofurkey slabs with a shudder, our souls eventually revolt against the flattening effects of machine-made language. We remember what real texture feels like, in food and in prose. We remember what it means to laugh at a story that stings because it’s true. And even if convenience wins most days, there will always be those who crave the messy, glorious excess of a banana split or the searing honesty of a well-told tale. As long as people continue to gag on mediocrity—be it edible or literary—there’s hope that the hunger for something real, soulful, and defiantly human will keep coming back.

  • Uncanny Valley Prose: Why Everything You Read Now Sounds Slightly Dead

    Uncanny Valley Prose: Why Everything You Read Now Sounds Slightly Dead

    Yesterday, I asked my students how AI is shaping their lives. The answer? They’re not just using it—they’re mainlining it. One student, a full-time accountant, told me she relies on ChatGPT Plus not only to crank out vendor emails and fine-tune her accounting homework but also to soothe her existential dread. She even introduced me to her AI therapist, a calm, reassuring voice named Charles. Right there in class, she pulled out her phone and said, “Charles, I’m nervous about McMahon’s writing class. What do I do?” Charles—an oracle in a smartphone—whispered affirmations back at her like a velvet-voiced life coach. She smiled. I shuddered. The age of emotional outsourcing is here, and Charles is just the beginning.

    Victoria Turk’s “The Great Language Flattening” captures this moment with unnerving clarity: AI has seized the global keyboard. It’s not just drafting high school essays or greasing the wheels of college plagiarism—it’s composing résumés, memos, love letters, apology emails, vision statements, divorce petitions, and maybe the occasional haiku. Thanks to AI’s knack for generating prose in bulk, the world is now awash in what I call The Bloated Effect: overcooked, overwritten, and dripping with unnecessary flair. If verbosity were currency, we’d all be trillionaires of fluff.

    But bloat is just the appetizer. The main course is The Homogenization Effect—our collective descent into stylistic conformity. AI-generated writing has a tone, and it’s everywhere: politely upbeat, noncommittally wise, and as flavorful as a rice cake dipped in lukewarm chamomile. Linguist Philip Seargeant calls it the Uncanny Valley of Prose—writing that looks human until you actually read it. It’s not offensive, it’s just eerily bloodless. You can feel the algorithm trying to sound like someone who’s read too many airport self-help books and never had a real conversation.

    Naturally, there will be a backlash. A rebellion of ink-stained fingers and dog-eared yellow legal pads. Safety away from computers, we’ll smuggle our prose past the algorithmic overlords, draft manifestos in cafés, and post screenshots of AI-free writing like badges of authenticity. Maybe we’ll become cult heroes for writing with our own brains. I admit, I fantasize about this. Because when I think of the flattening of language, I think of “Joan Is Awful”—that Black Mirror gem where Salma Hayek licenses her face to a streaming platform that deepfakes her into oblivion. If everyone looks like Salma, then no one is beautiful. AI is the Salma Clone Generator of language: it replicates what once had soul, until all that’s left is polished sameness. Welcome to the hellscape of Uncanny Valley—brought to you by WordCount™, optimized for mass consumption.

  • If we’re looking for a role model in the art of the blog, look no further than Blaise Pascal

    If we’re looking for a role model in the art of the blog, look no further than Blaise Pascal

    Walter Mosley, like many literary heavyweights, delivers the old warhorse of writing advice: write every damn day. Rain or shine, joy or existential despair, sit down and put words on the page. It’s less about inspiration than it is about keeping the creative battery from corroding in the garage while your ambitions collect dust. Steven Pressfield echoed this doctrine in The War of Art, a self-help sermon for writers who need a firm kick in the discipline.

    But daily writing in the digital age isn’t what it used to be. Now it comes with a side of existential nausea. The modern writer doesn’t just write—they publish. Immediately. Publicly. Desperately. A blog here, a TikTok monologue there, and boom—you’re not creating, you’re performing. You’re not nurturing your authentic voice; you’re pumping caffeine into your avatar and hoping the algorithm throws you a bone. And let’s be clear: the algorithm rewards extremity, outrage, and theater. The bigger the spectacle, the better the reach. Welcome to the Faustian Bargain of digital authorship.

    In this deal with the devil, we don’t trade our souls for knowledge—we trade nuance for engagement. We sculpt our “brand” to fit the machine. Our subject matter isn’t what haunts us—it’s what trends. Our tone isn’t our voice—it’s caffeinated shouting with a faux-therapist smile. We might monetize. We might even go viral. But then what? We’ve spent our creative life howling into a dopamine feedback loop. Is this writing? Or is it a slow, glittery death of the self?

    To be clear, branding isn’t inherently evil. Mark Leyner is a brand. So is Annie Dillard, Toni Morrison, and T.C. Boyle. Their work pulses with personality—yes—but also rigor, substance, and voice. They didn’t let style drown out content. They didn’t slap their face on a thumbnail and shout into the void about “7 Ways to Hack Your Purpose.” Influencers, on the other hand, are often pure surface: style with no skeleton, affect with no architecture.

    So what happens if you’re writing online without chasing likes, shares, or ad revenue? Are you just journaling in public? Writing as catharsis masquerading as productivity? Possibly. But that’s not inherently shameful. Writing as therapy is fine—as long as it’s therapy with syntax. Catharsis isn’t the enemy; incoherence is. Even in the trenches of personal expression, we owe our readers (and ourselves) clarity, pace, and craft.

    If we’re looking for a role model in the art of the blog, look no further than Blaise Pascal. His Pensées—a blog centuries ahead of its time—is a fragmented, pithy, and piercing meditation on the human condition. Each entry was brisk, barbed, and brimming with insight. He didn’t need an algorithm. He had a point of view.

    In this sense, blogging today can be a return to Pascal, not a descent into performance art. A blog can be a sketchbook of thought, a lab for style, a home for unfinished beauty. But only if we resist the pull of artificial relevance and write for something—anything—more enduring than a trending sound clip.