Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    As you attempt to retire, you will eventually enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and submit yourself to its ritual humiliations: security codes, two-factor authentication, forgotten usernames, password requirements apparently derived from nuclear-launch protocols, contradictory menus, and websites whose navigation systems seem designed to ensure that no citizen ever reaches his intended destination. After enough exposure, you will feel anger rising inside you. Eventually, a human being will answer the telephone, and you will experience an almost irresistible urge to unload the entire accumulated grievance upon her.

    Don’t.

    This is the Misplaced Rage Fallacy: the tendency to direct your fury at the human being who answers the telephone rather than at the labyrinthine system that necessitated the telephone call. After forty-five minutes of authentication codes, password resets, automated voices, contradictory menus, and a website apparently designed by Kafka’s IT department, you finally reach Linda in Benefits and instinctively regard her as the architect of your suffering.

    She isn’t.

    Linda did not design the website. Linda did not decide that your password must contain twelve characters, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, and the blood type of your maternal grandfather. Linda did not send the authentication code to a telephone number you haven’t used since the Obama administration. Linda did not create the seventeen-item telephone menu through which you wandered like a starving hiker lost in the Sierras.

    Linda is trapped in the maze too.

    She just has a headset.

    This brings you to a second discovery, the Institutional Humanity Paradox: the larger, colder, and more impenetrable an institution becomes, the more surprising it is to discover that it is populated by ordinary and frequently decent human beings. There can be a yawning disparity between the personality of a bureaucracy and the character of the people who work inside it. The website treats you like a suspicious package abandoned at airport security. The woman who eventually answers the telephone treats you like a human being.

    This happened to me with CalSTRS. I already had a username and password, dutifully preserved in my records, and naturally neither one worked. I entered them again, because one of the foundational beliefs of modern life is that typing the same rejected password a second time may cause the computer to reconsider its position. It did not. I called CalSTRS, entered the automated telephone labyrinth, requested a callback, and eventually heard the voice of an actual person from the technical-support department.

    She was wonderful.

    For twenty minutes, she stayed on the telephone while we reconstructed my digital identity. She explained that a new system introduced about a year earlier had rendered my previous credentials obsolete, which was comforting in the same way that learning your house key no longer works because someone replaced the house is comforting. Then she patiently escorted me through every miserable step required to establish a new account. She never became impatient. She never spoke to me in the singsong voice adults sometimes use with people who cannot locate the settings menu. She never suggested that the problem was obvious and that any reasonably evolved primate should have solved it without assistance. She was kind, competent, patient, and helpful.

    Eventually, she transferred me to another department so that I could arrange a Zoom appointment. There I encountered another pleasant woman who tried to find me an opening. Unfortunately, the appointments were booked for approximately six weeks. She suggested that I call again the following week and see whether something had opened.

    What was I supposed to do—blame her?

    She had not personally filled the calendar. She had not constructed a retirement system in which someone approaching retirement must schedule a meeting six weeks into the future to discuss how to stop working in the present. She was simply sitting at her desk, looking at the same overstuffed calendar I was confronting from the other end of the telephone.

    She was a cog in the machine, but she had not built the machine.

    This distinction matters. Being rude to the people who take your calls is not merely bad manners; it is strategically idiotic. You are punishing innocent people, alienating precisely those human beings who possess the knowledge necessary to rescue you, and burning emotional fuel you will desperately need during your next gladiatorial encounter with a retirement application.

    Save your rage for the proper target: the system.

    Be kind to Linda.

    Thank the technical-support representative who spends twenty minutes resurrecting your account. Be gracious to the benefits counselor who cannot manufacture an appointment that doesn’t exist. Remember that these people also have mortgages, families, passwords, insurance companies, malfunctioning websites, dental appointments, aging parents, and bureaucracies of their own. At five o’clock they remove their headsets and become civilians again, whereupon some other institution begins tormenting them.

    Never confuse the personality of an institution with the character of the people imprisoned inside it.

    And when you feel yourself reaching the point at which you might begin screaming at innocent strangers, close the laptop. Walk away from the battlefield. Have a healthy snack. Lie down for a restorative nap with your eyeshades and cucumber mask. Allow your nervous system to forget the existence of authentication codes.

    Tomorrow you can return refreshed in body and spirit.

  • The Matryoshka Form Principle

    The Matryoshka Form Principle

    If you have never applied for Medicare before—and by definition, most people applying for Medicare have not—you immediately encounter the remarkable assumption that you already understand the system you are attempting to enter. This would be difficult enough if there were, in fact, a system. There isn’t. There are systems inside systems, agencies inside agencies, programs whose names differ by a few letters but whose purposes differ completely, each connected to the others by administrative tunnels whose existence becomes apparent only after you have crawled halfway through them.

    Think of applying for Medicare as opening a bureaucratic matryoshka doll.

    You begin with what appears to be one large, friendly, manageable doll: Sign Up for Medicare. Fine. You are turning sixty-five. Medicare is health insurance for people sixty-five and older. You go to Medicare to sign up for Medicare.

    Already you have made your first mistake.

    You open the Medicare doll and discover Social Security inside, because apparently the place where you apply for Medicare is not Medicare. It is Social Security. So you create or enter your Social Security account, open that doll, and discover—there it is!—your Medicare application.

    Now the fun begins.

    Inside the Medicare application is a checklist asking about your Group Health Plan. Open that doll and you discover that you need the precise dates of your employment and the precise dates of your employer-sponsored health coverage, two periods you had innocently assumed were essentially the same thing. You started working for your employer on a certain date. Your employer provided your health insurance. What else is there to know?

    Plenty.

    Does your Group Health Plan begin on the day you started working? The day your benefits became effective? The year you switched insurance carriers? The date your current policy began? Somewhere in the administrative sediment of the past thirty years lies the correct answer, and Medicare would now like you to excavate it.

    Open another doll.

    Inside you discover Medicaid, an entirely separate government health program whose appearance on your Medicare checklist causes a momentary existential crisis. Do you have Medicaid? Were you supposed to have Medicaid? Did you acquire Medicaid at some point without noticing? Is there a Medicaid number sitting in a government database with your name attached to it, waiting for you to remember a relationship you never knew existed?

    By now, the cheerful wooden woman you started with has multiplied into an entire Russian peasant village scattered across your desk.

    Call this the Matryoshka Form Principle: every bureaucratic task that appears to be a single task contains another bureaucratic task inside it, which contains another task, which requires another account, another password, another document, another telephone call, and eventually another pleasant employee who informs you that before you can complete Form A, you will need information from Form B, which can be obtained only after establishing an account with Department C.

    You keep opening dolls.

    The dolls keep getting smaller.

    The bureaucracy does not.

    The closer you get to the smallest doll, the more you begin to suspect that there is no smallest doll.

    Congratulations. You have now discovered the first of two essential truths about retirement paperwork: the nesting may be infinite.

    The second truth is even more impressive. Every time you open one of these bureaucratic dolls, you are asked a question whose answer requires knowledge of the bureaucracy you are only now attempting to understand. This brings us to the Bureaucratic Foreknowledge Paradox: to enter an unfamiliar bureaucratic system, you must demonstrate knowledge of the system that could reasonably be acquired only after entering it.

    The paradox explains one of the peculiar psychological transformations of retirement. You may have spent forty years making consequential professional decisions without breaking into a sweat. Now a blank field labeled GROUP HEALTH PLAN START DATE can leave you staring at your computer as though you have been asked to select which wire to cut on a bomb.

    This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Matryoshka Form Principle and the Bureaucratic Foreknowledge Paradox protect you from the most dangerous condition a prospective retiree can develop: complacency. Once you understand these laws, you approach every application with the scrupulosity of a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript. You read every sentence twice. You hesitate before clicking Submit. You preserve confirmation numbers. You photograph screens. You maintain folders containing documents whose existence would have embarrassed your younger self.

    Most important, you learn never to celebrate prematurely.

    You may think you have finished the application.

    You have merely opened another doll.

  • The Mariano Rivera Principle of Retirement

    The Mariano Rivera Principle of Retirement

    Do not wake up one morning, pour yourself a cup of coffee, crack your knuckles, and announce, “Today I’m going to fill out my Medicare application.” This is the kind of statement made by people who have not yet attempted to fill out a Medicare application. You might as well wake up and announce that before lunch you intend to learn Mandarin, replace your transmission, and negotiate peace in the Middle East. Medicare is not something you knock off between breakfast and your trip to Costco. You will not finish it in one sitting. You may not finish it in three. Accept this now and spare yourself the humiliation of watching your cheerful morning agenda disintegrate by 10:17.

    Think of yourself as stepping into the batter’s box against Mariano Rivera.

    For nearly two decades, major-league hitters faced Rivera knowing what was coming. He was going to throw the cutter. There was no elaborate mystery, no carnival assortment of twelve pitches requiring Sherlock Holmes to decipher the clues. Rivera stood on the mound, stared toward home plate, and essentially announced: Here comes the cutter.

    Then he threw it.

    And some of the finest hitters on earth swung at the thing as it darted away from the sweet spot of the bat, leaving them jammed, bewildered, or trudging back toward the dugout carrying the splintered remains of their dignity.

    This brings us to The Rivera Principle: no major retirement bureaucracy can be defeated in a single sitting, even when you know approximately what is coming.

    Medicare is Mariano Rivera standing sixty feet, six inches away.

    You know there will be questions about health insurance. You know there will be dates. You know Social Security will somehow be involved. You know there will be usernames, passwords, authentication codes, employment records, Group Health Plans, and mysterious terminology. You have studied the scouting report. You have stretched. You have brought your reading glasses.

    None of this means you are going to make contact.

    The first pitch asks for a password you thought you had. Swing and miss.

    The second asks for the precise date your Group Health Plan began, forcing you to wonder whether that means the year you started your job, the year your health benefits began, or the year you switched insurance carriers. Swing and miss.

    The third sends you from Medicare to Social Security, causing you to wonder why you are applying for Medicare somewhere other than Medicare. Strike two.

    Then Medicaid appears on a Medicare checklist, and for several bewildering seconds you wonder whether you have Medicaid, whether you were supposed to have Medicaid, or whether Medicaid has been quietly following you for years like a government surveillance van.

    Foul ball.

    Now HR must be contacted.

    Step out of the box.

    The rookie retiree interprets these interruptions as failure. He becomes agitated. He pounds the desk. He begins attacking dropdown menus with the desperate aggression of a hitter protecting the plate with two strikes. This is precisely how Mariano gets you. You become impatient. You expand the strike zone. You swing at pitches you should never have touched.

    The experienced retiree develops Administrative Plate Discipline. He understands that surviving the bureaucracy requires knowing when not to swing. If you don’t know the Group Health Plan start date, don’t guess. Step out of the box. Call Benefits. If you don’t understand whether a question refers to your employment or your insurance coverage, don’t click whatever answer seems approximately correct because you would like to be finished before lunch. Put down the bat. Save the application. Walk back to the dugout.

    Have lunch.

    Take a nap.

    Come back tomorrow.

    Rivera will still be there.

    This is the deeper meaning of The Rivera Principle. Your objective is not to conquer Medicare in one glorious at-bat. Your objective is to remain in the game. Foul off the difficult pitches. Take the ones you don’t understand. Get the information you need. Step out of the box when your nerves begin to fray. Return the next morning with your documents, your passwords, your HR representative’s email, and whatever remains of your self-respect.

    Then dig your heels into the dirt and look toward the mound.

    Rivera looks very tall from sixty feet, six inches away.

    If you’re intimidated, good. You’re alive.

    If you’re not intimidated, you haven’t seen the cutter yet.

  • How the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle Hijacks Your Retirement

    How the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle Hijacks Your Retirement

    Do not assume that when you apply for retirement there are bureaucratic safeguards protecting your money. There are no guardrails, no kindly pension shepherd watching over your flock, no government employee in Sacramento studying your file at midnight and whispering, “We’d better make sure this fellow gets every dollar he earned.” You have entered the Wild West. Think of yourself as a rancher guarding a herd from rustlers, wolves, coyotes, and anyone else who has noticed that cattle are valuable and ranchers occasionally fall asleep.

    Consider what happens when you spend seven years working at a university covered by CalPERS and then move to a college covered by CalSTRS. A reasonable person might assume that your retirement benefits would somehow follow you. After all, you are still you. You have merely changed employers. Both pension systems operate in California. Computers exist. Databases exist. The state knows your Social Security number, your salary, your address, your employment history, and probably what you had for breakfast. Surely CalPERS and CalSTRS can figure out that the person who worked at the university is the same person who now works at the college.

    That assumption reveals a touching faith in civilization.

    Your CalPERS pension remains in CalPERS. Your CalSTRS pension accumulates separately in CalSTRS. The two systems do not simply merge because doing so would be convenient for you. Convenience, after all, is the natural enemy of bureaucracy. Efficiency eliminates procedures. Eliminated procedures eliminate departments. Eliminated departments eliminate jobs. Bureaucracies therefore possess an evolutionary interest in complexity.

    Call this the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle: the tendency of administrative systems to resist simplification because every eliminated procedure, redundant department, and overlapping jurisdiction diminishes the bureaucracy’s reason for existing. Efficiency solves problems. Bureaucracy survives by administering them.

    Unfortunately, the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle is not aligned with your quest for a smooth retirement. It is a noose around your neck.

    You discover this when you finally decide to retire and learn that your two pension systems must be coordinated according to something called reciprocity and concurrent retirement. At first, the rules can leave you with the impression that you must notify CalPERS and CalSTRS at precisely the same atomic second or a trapdoor will open beneath your pension, the government will seize your house, and you will spend your golden years living beneath an overpass eating beans from a can.

    This is not technically true.

    It merely feels true.

    What you have actually encountered is the exquisite bureaucratic pas de deux known as the Laws of Reciprocity and Concurrence. Because you have benefits in both CalPERS and CalSTRS, you cannot simply retire, an act you may have naively imagined consisted of ceasing to work. You must coordinate your departure with two enormous pension systems that have developed different terminology for related arrangements. CalPERS speaks of reciprocity. CalSTRS speaks of concurrent retirement. Each maintains its own applications, regulations, representatives, websites, definitions, deadlines, and little administrative tripwires hidden beneath the leaves.

    Yet somehow you must make these two bureaucratic kingdoms acknowledge that the same human being is retiring from both.

    The safest approach is generally to coordinate the effective retirement dates, ordinarily using the same retirement date, although CalSTRS permits different dates under certain circumstances if you perform no creditable service between them. Apparently even the date on which you stop working requires interpretive scholarship.

    The penalty for getting this wrong is not necessarily that a tactical unit of pension officers arrives before dawn, kicks down your front door, and confiscates your retirement, although by this stage of the process you may find such a scenario psychologically plausible. The actual danger is less cinematic and therefore more frightening: you may lose financial advantages available through proper coordination, including potentially favorable treatment of your final compensation. After decades of accumulating pension benefits, you arrive at a point where an incorrectly chosen date or misunderstood rule can affect money you expected to receive for the rest of your life.

    Call this the Reciprocity Paradox: two retirement systems agree to recognize each other, provided you possess sufficient administrative competence to make them recognize each other.

    And here is the part nobody explains when you begin dreaming about retirement. No sheriff rides onto your ranch to announce the Reciprocity Paradox. No pension guardian appears at your door with a checklist and says, “I noticed you worked under two retirement systems. Before you file anything, we need to talk.” You have to discover the danger yourself, preferably before you make the mistake the rules were apparently designed to punish.

    This is one of the central lessons of retirement: the closer you get to never working again, the more terrified you become of making a clerical error.

    So put on your hat and climb onto your horse. You are the cowboy on the pension frontier. Take out your binoculars and scan the horizon. Look for predators. Look for contradictions. Look for deadlines. Look for the form that generates another form. Look for the rule buried on page forty-seven of a PDF that contradicts what you thought you read on the website. Count your cattle. Mend your fences. Check them again.

    You’re on your own, my friend.

    Welcome to retirement.

  • The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    Growing old and planning your retirement provide a cruel education in the merciless nature of bureaucracy. You spend forty years imagining retirement as an escape from work, only to discover that before you’re permitted to stop working, you must complete an enormous amount of additional work.

    Most of it involves paperwork.

    Except we don’t call it paperwork anymore because there is no paper. Paper would be too easy. Paper sits obediently on a table. You can hold it in your hands, read it, scribble notes in the margins, and return to page one whenever you get confused. Modern bureaucracy has improved upon this primitive system by replacing paper with websites, portals, passwords, security questions, verification codes, drop-down menus, disappearing screens, and online forms that occasionally erase everything you’ve entered because you spent too long looking for your Social Security number.

    This technological revolution arrives at precisely the right moment in your life: when your eyes are tired, your patience is gone, and your facility with navigating government websites is approaching that of a manatee attempting to operate an ATM.

    No matter. The gauntlet begins.

    First, Medicare.

    You arrive at the Medicare website expecting to encounter something resembling a large button that says START HERE.

    Instead, you are greeted by photographs of radiant senior citizens experiencing levels of happiness rarely observed outside pharmaceutical advertisements. Silver-haired couples stroll along beaches. Healthy retirees embrace grandchildren. Everyone appears recently moisturized. Nobody is squinting at a computer monitor wondering whether he needs to fill out Form B.

    Meanwhile, the website offers you an enormous quantity of information. There are links explaining insurance packages. Links answering frequently asked questions. Links explaining other links. You can learn almost anything you want about Medicare except the answer to the one primitive question pounding inside your skull:

    Where the hell do I start?

    You become a rat in a digital maze.

    Perhaps you need Form B. Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you need it eventually but not now. Perhaps filling it out now will create a problem later. Make sure you have all your information handy, although you’re not entirely sure what “all your information” means until the website requests a number you’ve never heard of that apparently governs your destiny.

    There is no benevolent angel sitting beside you saying, “You’re doing fine. Click that button.”

    There is just you, growing visibly older in the blue light of your monitor while a seventy-two-year-old stock-photo model smiles at you from a sailboat.

    I call this Portal Despair: the distinctive psychological state produced by staring at a beautifully designed institutional website containing enormous quantities of information but no obvious answer to the question, Where do I start?

    The happier the people on the website appear, the worse Portal Despair becomes.

    Once Medicare has softened you up, you move on to CalPERS and CalSTRS.

    Years ago, before our Human Resources coordinator retired during COVID, she warned me that there was some peculiar rule governing the timing of retirement when CalPERS and CalSTRS are involved. The dates have to align correctly. There is a sequence. Something has to happen before something else happens.

    I don’t remember the details.

    I only remember receiving the distinct impression that if I retire on the wrong Tuesday, my pension will turn into a pumpkin.

    So now I must contact the new HR person and ask her to reconstruct this ancient knowledge. My goal is to get CalPERS and CalSTRS working together in perfect harmony so that my retirement proceeds like a smooth stone skipping across a still lake.

    I fully expect instead to discover that one agency requires a document from the other agency, which cannot produce that document until the first agency verifies that I have requested it.

    Then comes health insurance.

    Because I’m leaving my employer’s health plan and moving onto my wife’s, her employer requires official documentation showing that she has “lost coverage.”

    Lost coverage.

    The phrase sounds apocalyptic. It suggests that our family has been cast onto the American healthcare tundra wearing burlap sacks and searching the horizon for a free clinic.

    We haven’t lost anything. We’re changing insurance.

    But the bureaucracy has declared this a loss, and therefore someone must produce an official document certifying the loss. My wife will then present this sacred parchment to her employer, which will presumably inspect the seal, consult the oracle, and permit us to purchase health insurance through her job.

    Then we have to investigate dental and vision coverage. My wife reports that the dental insurance offered through her employer sucks, a technical assessment I trust completely. Perhaps we should continue purchasing dental and vision coverage through my former employer. Perhaps not.

    And although her job will keep us with Kaiser, we don’t yet know exactly what version of Kaiser we’re getting. Perhaps it will be essentially the same. Perhaps it will be Kaiser Lite, with higher copays and subtle degradations that reveal themselves only after you’re sitting in an examination room wearing a paper gown.

    You won’t know until you’re inside the belly of the beast.

    Good luck.

    Then there’s the pension.

    A CalSTRS representative tells you the amount you’ll receive every month, and for approximately eleven seconds you feel rich.

    Do not enjoy those eleven seconds.

    That number is gross income.

    Taxes still exist.

    The government, having spent decades taxing your salary, does not shake your hand at retirement and say, “You’ve done enough. Keep the rest.”

    So when the pension representative gives you that beautiful monthly number, mentally shrink it immediately. Do not start pricing Viking cruises. Do not buy a Porsche. Do not inform your children that Daddy has entered the leisure class.

    You’re not rich.

    You’re simply receiving taxable income while wearing sweatpants.

    By this point you begin to believe you’re making progress. You’ve completed several forms. You’ve spoken to HR. You’ve created accounts. You’ve written down passwords. Somewhere in the distance, you think you can see light.

    You are delusional.

    There are more forms.

    Forms beget forms.

    One form requires an attachment. The attachment requires certification. The certification requires proof. The proof must come from another institution, which requires you to complete another form before it will provide the proof required by the first form.

    Eventually there are subforms attached to larger forms and subforms attached to the subforms. You begin with the innocent objective of changing your health insurance and find yourself three weeks later downloading a PDF called “Verification of Qualifying Event Supporting Documentation Supplemental Certification.”

    Chefs have an expression for reaching this condition:

    You’re in the weeds.

    I prefer Form Metastasis: the tendency of one bureaucratic form to generate additional forms, certifications, attachments, proofs, and follow-up requests. Form A requires Form B. Form B requires verification from Institution C. Institution C cannot provide verification until Institution D processes Form E.

    Nobody designed the entire system.

    That’s what makes it terrifying.

    I could have retired three years ago.

    I didn’t.

    You want to know one reason?

    I hate paperwork.

    I hate paperwork with such intensity that I would rather get dressed in the morning, drive to work, attend tedious meetings, answer emails, listen to administrators explain exciting new initiatives, and grade thousands of student assignments every year than confront the administrative machinery required to stop doing those things.

    Work, at least, I understand.

    Retirement requires training.

    But I’ve finally made the decision. I’ll be sixty-five in a couple of months. I’m retiring.

    Except “retiring” now strikes me as a fraudulent description of what is happening.

    I’m not retiring.

    I’ve changed jobs.

    I used to be a college instructor. Now I am an unpaid administrative assistant assigned exclusively to the Jeffrey McMahon account.

    My responsibilities include Medicare enrollment, pension coordination, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, document retrieval, password management, deadline compliance, and maintaining good standing with an assortment of institutions that possess the power to interfere with my money or healthcare.

    There will be no salary.

    There will be no vacation.

    There will be no administrative assistant because I am the administrative assistant.

    This is Bureaucratic Retirement Capture: the process by which institutions ostensibly designed to facilitate your retirement instead colonize your time and attention. You leave your employer expecting liberation from schedules and administrative obligations, only to discover that Medicare, pension systems, insurance companies, tax agencies, and benefits departments have inherited you.

    Which brings me to the cruelest discovery of all.

    The Retirement Paradox.

    Leaving the workforce requires taking on another job: the administration of leaving the workforce.

    Instead of meetings and grading, you get Medicare enrollment, CalSTRS, CalPERS, HR documentation, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, deadlines, passwords, portals, forms, subforms, supplemental forms, and forms verifying that you have completed other forms.

    For decades, I imagined retirement as a great exhalation. I would finish my final semester, turn in my grades, clean out my office, drive home, and feel the enormous machinery of employment finally release me.

    Instead, the machinery has merely transferred me to another department.

    How stupid am I?

    Why didn’t I just keep working?

    It would have been so much easier.

  • How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    As my writing students and I explore McKay Coppins’s “Sucker: My Years as a Degenerate Gambler,” I realize that sports betting does not lead to a single research question. It opens the door to at least four distinct arguments:

    1. Is sports betting designed to function as a harmless hobby, or does its business model depend on cultivating addictive behavior?
    2. Will the growing alliance between professional sports and gambling eventually produce enough corruption and suspicion to destroy fan trust—and, with it, the sports business model?
    3. Is sports betting so structurally tilted toward the house that a rational understanding of the system should compel us to avoid it altogether?
    4. What does the astonishing normalization of sports betting teach us about the dangers of the Overton Window?

    The fourth question interests me most. Sports betting was once associated with bookies, organized crime, ruined families, fixed games, and moral decay. Now the same basic enterprise arrives on a glowing smartphone, endorsed by Hall of Fame athletes, promoted during broadcasts, and wrapped in the cheerful language of bonus bets, profit boosts, and enhanced fan engagement. A platform capable of exploiting addiction, encouraging corruption, and monetizing human weakness has been repackaged as wholesome mainstream entertainment.

    That transformation may be the most disturbing lesson of the entire unit. The Overton Window shows us that social pathology does not have to defeat our moral resistance in a frontal assault. It can simply change its clothes. Give vice enough celebrity endorsements, corporate partnerships, technological convenience, and relentless exposure, and eventually we may stop seeing vice at all. If my students and I can watch that transformation occur without becoming deeply unsettled by it, then perhaps the normalization is already doing its work.

  • The Price of Admission

    The Price of Admission

    Walking to my office this morning on the first day of the semester, I came upon a sight I had never seen before. A line of students curled around the library lawn, hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the morning sun. I estimated more than four hundred.

    I stopped and asked one of the students what everyone was waiting for.

    “Laptop loaners,” he said.

    The answer caught me off guard. These weren’t students lining up for concert tickets, free food, or some first-week campus giveaway. They were waiting to borrow the basic piece of equipment required to function as a college student in 2026.

    I looked at the line again, and it suddenly appeared different. I had to assume that many of these students simply couldn’t afford to spend even $300 on a Chromebook. They needed a computer to write papers, access Canvas, conduct research, communicate with professors, and complete the daily machinery of college life, yet purchasing one was beyond what their budgets could absorb.

    The sight humbled me because I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about computers. I research processors, RAM, displays, keyboards, battery life, and the microscopic differences between one generation of hardware and the next. I can become genuinely excited about a new chip or convince myself that some incremental specification represents a meaningful technological event. Meanwhile, four hundred students were wrapped around the library lawn waiting to borrow a machine that could run a browser and open a word processor.

    Standing there, I also confronted the enormous difference between the economic world in which I attended college and the one my students inhabit. My generation had its struggles, and nostalgia can easily airbrush them away. But college was cheaper. Housing consumed a smaller portion of ordinary incomes. The job market was more forgiving of young people trying to find their footing. The financial penalties for making a few wrong turns were not always so severe.

    My students have entered adulthood in a different economy. Tuition, rent, food, transportation, and nearly every other necessity compete for money many of them simply don’t have. Even the laptop that college now quietly assumes every student owns can become a luxury.

    I continued walking toward my office, carrying an uncomfortable awareness of the distance between my college experience and theirs. I had always known that distance existed. But abstract knowledge is bloodless. It is one thing to read about economic inequality and another to see it materialize in front of you as four hundred young people standing in a line, waiting for a computer.

  • The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    At certain crosswalks, you press the button and wait for the light to change while a Martian voice begins issuing a command:

    Wait.

    A few seconds pass.

    Wait.

    Then again.

    Wait.

    I assume this auditory feature exists for visually impaired pedestrians who need a clear signal before crossing the street, an entirely sensible and necessary function. But apparently nobody designing these systems has discovered a way to make the human voice both audible and pleasant. The crosswalk voice doesn’t merely enter the ear. It arrives through the skull. Each Wait lands less like a word than the neurological thunderbolt that shoots through your body when your bare toe collides with the leg of a dresser.

    A couple of weeks ago, my family and I encountered these talking crosswalks while walking around downtown Carlsbad. At first, I merely disliked the voice. Then it began drilling into my brain. After sufficient exposure, something peculiar happened: my mind decided that the only way to survive the sound was to absorb it.

    I became a victim of Auditory Possession: the involuntary internalization of an irritating sound until you begin reproducing the very noise you desperately want to escape. The crosswalk doesn’t merely assault you with Wait. It enters the nervous system, establishes residency, and eventually begins broadcasting through your mouth. You haven’t imitated the machine. The machine has acquired a human speaker.

    So I began walking around downtown Carlsbad saying Wait in precisely the same robotic voice.

    Wait.

    My family asked me to stop.

    Wait.

    They asked again.

    Wait.

    At this point, they were presumably reconsidering the wisdom of bringing me on vacation. Perhaps I should have remained safely in Torrance, where I could work out, watch true-crime documentaries, and pose no threat to pedestrians.

    Instead, I wandered around a pleasant seaside town sounding like a malfunctioning piece of municipal infrastructure.

    By the end of our walks through Carlsbad, the only true crime anyone had actually witnessed was a grown man roaming the streets repeatedly barking Wait at strangers while his mortified family maintained a safe distance behind him.

  • What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    I’ve been examining the effects of generative AI on my college writing students’ compositions over the last four years, and the best analogy I can come up with to get a handle on generative AI is to compare it to the way athletes use PEDs. 

    Athletes want an advantage, they want an edge, and they don’t want their opponents to have a better arsenal at their disposal, so they feel compelled to take PEDs. Same with college students who want the AI advantage. PEDs give athletes confidence that becomes a crutch. As AI does for students. 

    PEDs can give athletes a false sense of power, making them feel like superheroes. These PEDs give dope up their bodies until they don’t want to revert to the natural version of themselves. So does AI for busy students. Students with abysmal reading and writing skills can launder their writing through the AI machine and get a product that looks polished and articulate. This gives them a sense of cognitive doping. They become dependent on its sense of power. 

    Over time, PEDs make the body go flat because it acclimates to greater and greater doses. In this regard, AI makes the brain go flat after its users default to outsourcing their half-baked thoughts and letting AI generate full-blown, overwritten compositions. The disconnection between the writer and the output is soul-deadening. 

    Just as PEDs will never leave sports, AI will never leave writing or academia. Unless the data centers become too expensive to be sustained, the tool is here to stay. 

    The best thing I can do as a college writing instructor is craft assignments that defy AI use, such as field research, interviews, and personal reflections. I know full well that students will try to cheat the system and that I may have to have some blue book compositions to get a better handle on their writing, but we live in a high-performance world where often dangerous tools have to be harnessed. Otherwise, they will destroy us. 

  • Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    About fifteen years ago, one of my students wrote a personal narrative about losing herself. She was in middle school. Her friends persuaded her to dress in extremely suggestive clothing with tons of makeup. In a revealing outfit that would have caused her mother to have a brain hemorrhage, she looked in the mirror and started crying. “I didn’t even recognize the girl staring back at me,” she wrote. “I wiped the makeup off, got back in my regular clothes, ran home, and cried in bed.” 

    I thought about that image as I started working on some writing prompts for the Fall Semester in which my eighteen-year-old college freshmen contrast writing with AI and writing “natty,” to use an expression that describes “natural” bodybuilders who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs. Generative AI can be a great writing tool, but it tends to overdo everything. Our writing becomes that crying overdone girl staring back at herself, or the bloated bodybuilder who is more cartoon than a celebration of the physique. In all of that generative AI, something gets lost. 

    Us. 

    We can hardly be blamed. Generative AI can feel like magic, taking a 300-word idea and blowing it up into a 2,000-word essay with vivid descriptions, highly stylized metaphors and witticisms, and Socratic rhetorical flourish. Eventually, we begin to believe we are the source of that 2,000-word essay. We flatter ourselves to our own detriment. We lose authenticity. We lose ourselves. We are that middle school girl staring into the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at us. 

    Using AI tools with my students for the last four years, I can say from personal experience that writing natty feels cleansing, like going off sugar-laden processed foods. Just as too much dessert causes diabetes of the body, too much generative AI causes diabetes of the mind and soul. We need to carve out natural writing spaces where we can connect with who we truly are before it’s too late.