Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • How I Tricked Myself Into Reading Dostoevsky

    How I Tricked Myself Into Reading Dostoevsky

    The irony gnaws at me: I’ve been a college writing instructor for forty years, yet thanks to what I’ll politely call “Internet poisoning,” I can barely read anymore. In the ’80s, I devoured Nabokov the way bodybuilders slam protein shakes—voraciously, obsessively, as if prose itself were anabolic fuel. Now? Most books I start end up abandoned halfway through, like gym memberships in February.

    It’s not just the degraded Internet brain. There’s a physical component, too. Try cracking open a hard copy of Dostoevsky—his books are printed in fonts so microscopic they might as well be Morse code. But last night, I pulled a stunt: Crime and Punishment on my Kindle app, magnified in glorious large print across my 16-inch laptop. And I thought, “Hey, this isn’t half bad.” Almost breezy. Practically Dean Koontz with Russian orthodoxy.

    Sure, it’s lugubrious. A brooding, handsome nihilist—today we’d label him an Incel—is plotting a crime that amounts to little more than a cry for a hug. Why did Dostoevsky obsess over this guy? What subterranean morbidity haunted the man?

    So I play my mind a trick. I whisper: “This isn’t Russian gloom. This is metaphysical pop fiction. Dean Koontz with samovars.” That little spoonful of honey lets me swallow the medicine.

    Maybe next I’ll tackle Demons. Then The Brothers Karamazov. Then The Idiot. And who knows? I may one day become a Dostoevsky scholar—simply by convincing myself I’m binging airport thrillers.

  • Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    In Reflections on the Existence of God, Richard E. Simmons insists on a binary vision of reality: you either believe in God through the Judeo-Christian tradition, or you reject God altogether, joining the ranks of atheists in the mold of Freud or the New Atheists. A committed Christian, Simmons even agrees with atheist Sam Harris that “atheism and Christianity compete on the same playing field.” In this framing, the contest is nothing less than a duel for human souls, with consequences both temporal and eternal. As Simmons puts it: “The question of God’s existence, in my opinion, is the most significant issue in all of life.”

    Drawing on Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God, which stages a philosophical match between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, Simmons argues that if Lewis is wrong, then Freud must be right: the universe is empty, silent, and loveless. In that case, we are forced to embrace this “harsh reality,” stripping away “false hopes and unrealistic expectations.”

    But Simmons’ stark either/or feels more like caricature than clarity. Not all who reject Christianity are Freud’s disciples. Many non-Christian seekers believe in benevolent spiritual forces larger than themselves. Phil Stutz in The Tools and Steven Pressfield in The War of Art both describe transcendent realities—love, creativity, solace—that hardly resemble Freud’s existential bleakness.

    Even within Christianity, belief is hardly monolithic. The theology of a Calvinist and that of a Universalist are galaxies apart. To affirm substitutionary atonement is to worship a very different God than the believer who rejects it. The label “believer” is too blunt to capture these divergences. Hyam Maccoby, the Jewish scholar who wrote The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, is a believer in God, yet he spends his book dismantling Paul, another believer. Sometimes believers are harsher with each other than with atheists.

    Framing the world as a cosmic battlefield of believers versus unbelievers oversimplifies both camps. Reality is more complex, and spiritual life cannot be reduced to an either/or ultimatum.

  • The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    Last night I dreamed I had once written a masterpiece—a semi-autobiographical novel that would have crowned my life’s work—only to lose it for decades in the chaos of distractions. Out of nowhere, it was unearthed not by me, but by Bernard Lackey, a famous YouTuber with the kind of smug, slightly spoiled face that screams, “My inheritance bought me this jawline.”

    A global literary society—the self-appointed guardians of human genius—summoned me to Bernard’s lair to reclaim the book. His home was a McMansion with pretensions, and I descended a spiral staircase into his basement, where shelves groaned with knickknacks, toys, and tchotchkes. There, seated like a smirking gatekeeper of culture, Bernard admired my novel, which hovered inside a glowing, enchanted box on the table.

    The tribunal announced that Bernard was a fraud: he had no right to my work, and he was to hand it over immediately. Bernard, ever the brat, feigned obedience with a sly grin. Then, with some petty sorcery, he scrambled the manuscript—pages twisted, words mangled, paragraphs reduced to gibberish. My once-coherent novel became a ruined artifact, obliterated beyond repair.

    It was obvious he resented being forced to surrender the book. If he couldn’t keep it, he would vandalize it so no one else could glory in its brilliance. It was the sabotage of a small, envious man who would rather destroy beauty than admit his own mediocrity.

    And yet, instead of rage, I felt only pity. Bernard was less a villain than a case study in insecurity, a man hollowed out by his own poverty of imagination. My manuscript was gone forever, but what remained was the consolation of clarity: masterpieces can vanish, but pettiness never dies.

  • Self-Interest with Sauce: Why Your Finger Isn’t Worth a Million Lives

    Self-Interest with Sauce: Why Your Finger Isn’t Worth a Million Lives

    In How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, Russ Roberts quotes the Talmudic sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?” Roberts riffs on this by pointing out Smith’s hard edge: if you would sacrifice millions of lives to save a single finger, you are “a monster of inhuman proportions.”

    Which, of course, made me think of chicken tenders. A few nights ago I had the Sweet Thai Glazed chicken at Starbird—fast food so transcendent it felt like a religious conversion, crispy shallots and herb aioli included. I wanted to go back the next day. And the next. My self-interest is crystal clear: eat more Starbird. The problem? My pursuit of gustatory bliss comes at the expense of chickens. Just as my hunt for bioavailable whey protein powders comes at the expense of cows.

    So—am I a monster? If I turned vegan, would that absolve me, or would I just uncover a longer list of moral failings still clinging to my name tag? Because the world isn’t eating less meat. It’s eating more, mostly factory-farmed, while pretending not to notice the conveyor-belt cruelty behind the menu. Ignore it long enough and moral numbness sets in, the kind that doesn’t just ruin animals but corrodes us too, spreading in ripples like bird flu, mad cow, or the next “mystery wet market disease.”

    And cruelty isn’t the only place where “self-interest” mutates into its evil twin. Consider America’s sacred cow: gun freedom. Other nations see mass shootings, change laws, and reduce tragedies. America, however, doubles down—choosing an idea of freedom that keeps killing us. Here, “self-interest” looks less like wisdom and more like suicide with better branding.

    That’s the trouble with self-interest. It’s a slippery little devil with at least two sharp horns. First: it lets us rationalize immoral behavior until we become monsters congratulating ourselves for our appetites. Second: it convinces us that policies which maim us—like endless guns, endless meat—are somehow in our “best interest.”

    In reality, self-interest is a hornet’s nest: buzzing passions, compulsive hungers, warped myths, and counterfeit happiness. To live in true self-interest means sorting out the destructive impulses from the behaviors that actually make us moral and happy. But most people never attempt the sorting, because the road to ruin is wide, comfortable, and paved with chicken tenders, while the road to virtue is narrow, steep, and has terrible Yelp reviews.

  • How Selfishness Accidentally Invented Kindness

    How Selfishness Accidentally Invented Kindness

    Morality is one of those words that makes people recoil. It has the stale odor of an HR training video, the medicinal burn of cod liver oil, the joyless bulk of broccoli shoveled onto your plate, or the dead-eyed banality of inspirational refrigerator magnets. Nothing about the word screams adventure—it screams paperwork.

    The topic itself feels penitential and airless, full of clichés, and as lively as a Soviet staff meeting in the Kremlin basement. Take Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The title alone could euthanize a graduate seminar.

    And yet economist Russ Roberts opened this dusty tome and found himself not nodding off, but utterly hooked. So hooked that he wrote How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. Roberts argues that Smith’s insight—that even our selfishness requires us to make others happy—isn’t boring at all. On the contrary, it’s deliciously counterintuitive: the truly selfish person learns that generosity is the best form of selfishness. The helper outpaces the sloth.

    This paradox gives Smith’s argument fizz. What looks like a grim penal code of moral duty turns out to be startlingly original and surprisingly human. For Roberts, the book became a companion, a talisman. He lugged it everywhere, scribbled notes in the margins, and evangelized to anyone who would listen. The book stopped being just a book and became, as Kafka once demanded, an axe for the frozen ocean of the soul.

    I admit, I almost left Roberts’ book untouched. The title had the whiff of self-help, and I vowed long ago to steer clear of the genre’s swamp of clichés. But Nabokov was right: it’s not the what but the how. A book brimming with insight and originality can transcend its category. Roberts’ take on Smith is philosophy dressed as self-help, but in the best sense: witty, sharp, and unafraid to wrestle with misery, selfishness, and the false idol of money.

    Good philosophers, like good teachers, are also salesmen. Roberts sells Smith not as piety in a powdered wig, but as a guide for how to live with honesty, courage, and—yes—even happiness. Against all odds, I’m sold.

  • The Gospel of Broccoli

    The Gospel of Broccoli

    For the last two decades, I’ve gorged myself on a certain genre of book: part self-help, part pop psychology, part personal confession, and part armchair sociology. They’re all cut from the same cloth. Sometimes the title is blunt and monosyllabic—Grit, Flow, Blink. The kind of title that slaps you with FOMO and whispers: you’re missing out on the one great discovery of our age.

    The author inevitably casts themselves as an intellectual Indiana Jones, unearthing some dark corner of human frailty—our laziness, our compulsions, our doomscrolling brains—and holding it aloft like a cursed artifact. But don’t worry: they’ll swap your vice for a virtue. Where once was sloth, you’ll now install grit. Replace despair with tenacity, chaos with routine, cowardice with courage. Each quality is presented as if it were a rare mineral dug from the Earth’s molten core, not something your grandmother muttered at you over meatloaf.

    I’ll grant them this: these books are smooth. The anecdotes are lively, the arguments persuasive, the storytelling slick enough to convince you that eating your vegetables is an act of revolution. And yet—I wince. These books are built on a template so predictable you can spot the seams. They’re self-help in disguise, draped in academic robes to save the reader the shame of browsing the “Inspiration” aisle.

    Their authors remind me of medieval minstrels and troubadours, wandering into our living rooms and cubicles to hose down our cobwebbed souls with disinfectant. They don’t strum lutes anymore—they host podcasts, deliver TED Talks, and keynote conferences. We line up for their sermons because they make us feel clean. They are the secular priests of our age, baptizing us in chapter-length homilies and promising to purge our modern sins.

    The journey they lead us on is as predictable as a Disney ride: first the dark woods of dysfunction, then the bright meadows of redemption. The simplicity borders on smugness, and yet—I still buy the ticket. Why? Because sometimes I need to be scolded into eating my broccoli. These books are broccoli dressed up in filet mignon plating: familiar, obvious, slightly sanctimonious, but undeniably good for me in small, bitter doses.

  • Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg challenges the comforting illusion that we live as fully self-possessed beings. Our existence, he argues, is far more random than we’d like to admit. Take the man who staggers home from work and pours himself a gin and tonic. The drink delivers its fleeting pleasure, but the deeper harm lies not only in the alcohol—it lies in the complacency of unexamined rituals, the sleepwalking habits that shape a life. Duhigg leans on William James to make the point: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

    By contrast, when I come home, I reach for sparkling water or diet 7-Up over ice. I probably get the same sensory refreshment as the martini drinker—minus the alcohol. What matters most is that I asserted a choice instead of slipping into autopilot.

    I apply this principle elsewhere. Because I know I tend to drive more aggressively than I’d like, I deliberately leave ten minutes earlier than most people would. That way, I don’t have to be a jackass on the road. Every time I make a conscious choice like this, I chip away at the pull of mindless behavior.

    Duhigg presses us to do the same: make deliberate decisions, rewire our routines, and stop letting unseen patterns run our lives. He cites a Duke study revealing that more than 40 percent of people’s daily actions aren’t conscious choices at all, but habits. From Aristotle onward, philosophers puzzled over why habits exist; now, neuroscience explains not only how they form but how they can be reshaped.

    The book’s central claim is hopeful: we aren’t doomed by our bad habits. We can change them, reprogram our brains, and redirect our lives—if we understand how the mechanics of habit work. I’d assume that anyone picking up Duhigg’s book already has the self-awareness and motivation to attempt change. In the short run, thoughtful people can transform themselves. The greater challenge comes later, when complacency sneaks back after the initial enthusiasm fades. That’s when I wonder if Duhigg’s manifesto offers not just inspiration, but a lasting answer.

  • The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business argues that vice, self-indulgence, and addiction operate on a neurological level. If we can deliberately rewire those pathways, we can free ourselves from much of our self-destructive behavior. Written more than a decade ago, the book anticipates the same themes that now surface in places like Reddit’s “Nofap” movement, where porn addicts admit their compulsions damage relationships and stunt growth, so they commit to abstinence—except with their partner. Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation makes a similar case, charting how dopamine overload leads to the inevitable crash of pleasure into misery.

    Duhigg opens with Lisa, an addict whose husband left her, likely exhausted by her behavior. When she finally saw how deranged her habits had become, she had the spark to change. She replaced her old compulsions with exercise and healthy eating. It’s the familiar “rock bottom” story: you face yourself stripped of illusions. Or as Marc Maron puts it, “Life hands you your ass on a stick.” Only when pride dissolves are you ready for answers.

    As someone who has wrestled with addictions and grown up with alcoholic parents, I read this story with recognition. The researchers studying Lisa’s brain found something striking: her old neural patterns were still visible, but they had been overridden by new ones. The impulses hadn’t vanished—they’d simply been crowded out. And while she overhauled many habits, it was quitting smoking that made the real difference. Duhigg calls this a “keystone habit.” In his words: “By focusing on one pattern…Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.”

    The same principle applies to organizations: find the keystone habit, nurture it, and the ripple spreads across the whole system.

    I learned another useful term from the book: “behavioral inhibition.” It resonates painfully, because from 7 to 10 p.m. I suffer relentless food cravings. By then I’ve usually reached 2,300 calories, and eating more destroys my calorie deficit. But television sabotages my self-control—everywhere I look, people are drinking rosé, eating pizza, ice cream, carrot cake. Triggers, triggers everywhere. If I hid in an igloo, maybe I’d get ripped abs, though the view would be grim.

    Still, I’ve seen the power of a keystone habit. My mornings begin with coffee and buckwheat groats mixed with protein powder. Then I study a book and take notes, as I’m doing now. If I skip this, I get swallowed by the Internet, a dopamine carnival of watches, consumer temptations, and FOMO. I unfollow Instagram “safari” channels that inevitably mutate into half-naked influencers shaking their butts in gym close-ups. Once seen, such images can’t be unseen. Now I choose carefully.

    Replacing bad habits with good—writing, piano, exercise—changes not only my productivity but my temperament. I become friendlier, more patient with my family. But when I binge on Internet dopamine, I snap at people. I become “that guy.”

    The contrast reminds me of something Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin confessed in America’s Team: “We are all imperfect people. And each of us has at least two people in all of us; the person you show everybody and that person you never show to anybody.”

    We curate public personas and believe our own polished lies, all while a darker self hides in the shadows. But once life hands you your ass on a stick, integrity becomes your only way forward. Rewiring the brain isn’t just a neurological project. It’s a moral one.

  • Why Ideas Still Matter in a World of Machines

    Why Ideas Still Matter in a World of Machines

    One of my colleagues, an outstanding writing instructor for more than two decades, has mapped out her exit strategy. She earned a counseling master’s degree, recently completed her life coach certification, and told me she no longer believes in the mission of teaching college writing. Assigning prompts to students who submit AI-generated essays feels meaningless to her—and reading these machine-produced pages makes her physically ill.

    Her words jolted me. I have devoted nearly forty years to this vocation, a career sustained by the assumption that teaching the college essay is an essential skill for young people. We have long agreed that students must learn how to shape chaos into coherence, confront questions that matter to the human condition, write with clarity and force, construct persuasive arguments, examine counterpoints, form informed opinions, master formats, cultivate an authorial voice, and develop critical thinking in a world overflowing with fallacies and propaganda. We also teach students to live with “interiority”—to keep journals, build inner lives, and nurture ideas. These practices have been considered indispensable for personal and professional growth.

    But with AI in the picture, many of my colleagues, including the one planning her departure, now feel bitter and defeated. AI has supplanted us. To our students, AI is more than a tool; it is a counselor, therapist, life coach, tutor, content-generator, and editor that sits in their pockets. They have apps through which they converse with their AI “person.” Increasingly, students bond with these “people” more than with their teachers. They trust AI in ways they do not trust professionals, institutions, or the so-called “laptop class.”

    The sense of displacement is compounded by the quality of student work. Essays are now riddled with AI-speak, clichés, hollow uniformity, facile expressions, superficial analysis, misattributed quotations, hallucinated claims, and fabricated facts. And yet, for the professional world, this output will often suffice. Ninety-five percent of the time, AI’s mediocrity will be “good enough” as workplaces adjust to its speed and efficiency. Thus my colleagues suffer a third wound: irrelevance. If AI can produce serviceable writing quickly, bypassing the fundamentals we teach, then we are the dinosaurs of academia.

    On Monday, when I face my freshman composition students for the first time, I will have to address this reality. I will describe how AI—the merciless stochastic parrot—has unsettled instructors by generating uncanny-valley essays, winning the confidence of students, and leaving teachers uncertain about their place.

    Still, I am not entirely pessimistic about my role. Teaching writing has always required many hats, one of which is the salesman’s. I must sell my ideas, my syllabus, my assignments, and above all, the relevance of writing in students’ lives.

    This semester, I am teaching a class composed entirely of athletes, a measure designed to help with retention. On the first day, I will appeal to what they know best: drills. No athlete mistakes drills for performance. They exist to prepare the body and mind for the real contest. Football players run lateral and backward sprints to build stamina and muscle memory. Pianists practice scales and arpeggios to ready themselves for recitals. Writing drills serve the same purpose: they build the foundation beneath the performance.

    My second pitch will be about the human heart. Education does not begin in the brain; it begins when the heart opens. Just as the athlete “with heart” outperforms the one without it, the student who opens the heart to education learns lessons that endure for life.

    I will tell them about my childhood obsession with baseball. At nine, I devoured every Scholastic book on the subject I could order through Independent Elementary. Many of my heroes were African-American players who endured Jim Crow segregation—forced into separate hotels and restaurants, traveling at great risk. I read about legends like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, barred from Major League Baseball because of their race. Through their stories, I learned American history not as dates and facts, but through the eyes of men I revered. My heart opened, and I was educated in a way my schoolteachers never managed.

    I will also tell them about my lost years in college. I enrolled under threat of eviction from my mother and warnings that without higher education, I faced a life of poverty. I loathed classrooms, staring at the clock until I could escape to the gym for squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. Yet in an elective fiction class, I discovered Kafka—how he transmuted his nightmarish inner life into stories that illuminated his world. Then Nabokov, whose audacious style made me long to write with the same confidence, more than I ever longed for a luxury car. If I could capture Nabokov’s authority, I thought, I would be like the Tinman receiving his heart. I would be whole.

    These changes did not come from professors, institutions, or—certainly—not AI. They came from within me, from my heart opening to literature. And yet, a sobering realization remains: the spark for me came through reading, and I see little reading today. I am not dogmatic—perhaps today’s students can find their spark in a documentary on Netflix or an essay on their phones. What matters is the opening of the heart.

    I cannot deny my doubts about remaining relevant in the age of AI, but I believe in the enduring power of ideas. Ideas—true or false—shape lives. They can go viral, ignite movements, and alter history.

    That is why my first assignment will focus on the Liver King, a grifter who peddled “ancestral living” to young men desperate for discipline and belonging. Though he was exposed as a fraud, his message resonated because it spoke to a generation’s hunger for structure and meaning. My students will explore both the desperation of these young men and the manipulations of Bro Culture that preyed upon them.

    Ideas matter. They always have. They always will. My class will succeed or fail on the strength of the ideas I put before my students, and I must present them unapologetically—defended with both my brain and my heart.

  • Trees Bent by the Wind

    Trees Bent by the Wind

    In An Abbreviated Life, Ariel Leve recounts the shadow her mother cast across her existence—a narcissistic, volatile presence who trailed her daughter across continents. Her mother blurred boundaries, confiding adult affairs, romantic escapades, and private fantasies to her child, then lacing those disclosures with guilt trips and psychological sabotage.

    At eleven, Ariel was told she was going blind—a lie without evidence, a mix of cruelty and madness. This was not an isolated cruelty but the common cadence of her mother’s speech. At six, Ariel’s caretaker, Kiki, died of a stroke mid-flight, with Ariel in the cabin. Ariel stopped speaking for six months; a psychiatrist prescribed Valium.

    Her mother, often wearing a nightgown even to school functions, could deliver barbed declarations without breaking her routine. “When I’m dead, you’ll be all alone because your father doesn’t want you,” she told her young daughter, pausing only to reapply makeup. “Just remember that and treat me nicely.”

    Her father, in Bangkok, refused to take her in. Ariel lived in grief that he wouldn’t rescue her from the chaos. Decades later, a therapist told her that growing up with such a mother caused neurological damage—her brain, shaped by constant stress, had developed like a tree twisted by relentless wind. Trauma was not a lightning strike; it was climate. The result: a life stripped of adventure, self-acceptance, and trust. Ariel’s default mode became hypervigilance and retreat.

    Her partner, Mario, an Italian with no literary ambitions, no awareness of New York publishing, and no taste for bagels, embodies the opposite—balanced, unselfconscious, open to life. He steadies her, if only temporarily.

    In one conversation, her father asked if she could let go of the past. Could she destroy her demons? Ariel was unsure. A novelist told her discipline could harden one’s “emotional arteries,” making childhood wounds less decisive. Ariel countered: some are “front-loaded with trauma,” not victims but soldiers—scarred, but still standing.

    Neuroscientist Martin Teicher affirmed her point: childhood abuse alters brain wiring. Adaptive coping mechanisms in childhood turn maladaptive in adulthood, creating an adult mismatched to their world. The traumatized blunt emotion not with a scalpel, but a sledgehammer—shielding themselves from joy as well as pain.

    For Ariel, this explains a life “within brackets.” She sees herself in the patterns Janet Woititz described in Adult Children of Alcoholics: mistrust, emotional volatility, self-loathing, and a skewed sense of normalcy.

    Her chosen remedy: EMDR therapy for PTSD. Nine months of “the light saber”—eyes tracking a green light, headphones delivering sound, memories replayed until they lose their grip. Sessions leave her exhausted. There is progress, measured in patience with Mario’s daughters, in small openings toward joy. But she does not present herself as cured—only as a permanent convalescent.

    Her memoir probes the ethics of trauma. How accountable are the wounded for maladaptive behavior? Can faith or philosophy save them, or does failure deepen self-blame? Are they sinners, soldiers, or something in between?

    Leve’s life raises a tension between two extremes: the nihilist’s surrender—“nothing can be done, so I’ll live recklessly”—and the motivational credo—“discipline and positivity conquer all.” The truth lies somewhere in the messy middle.