Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • The Dos and Don’ts of Being Flabbergasted

    The Dos and Don’ts of Being Flabbergasted

    If I had to pick my favorite word from the English language, it would be flabbergasted. It’s officially a word for a state of shock or astonishment, but as I’ve heard it used over the years, there are some important caveats. Usually people are not flabbergasted by a tragedy like an earthquake or a remarkable display of cruelty. The word is usually reserved to describe a human failing that goes beyond the realm of normal expectations. This failing could be surprising because of the specific skillset and character of the person who surprised us. Or the failing could simply be so large on scale that regardless of the person’s character, we are left flabbergasted. 

    Another use of flabbergasting is when a person commits a moral inconsistency that contradicts their spoken beliefs so that the irony behind their hypocrisy is simply flabbergasting. It is somewhat flabbergasting to me, for example, that many of us love dogs and cats so much but we compartmentalize so that we eat cows and pigs, savoring these dishes, while being blissfully unaware of our inconsistency. 

    Another use of flabbergasting is when we witness someone’s obtuseness that is so lame that it strains our credulity. For example, I called Kaiser to get an appointment to discuss switching a prescription because my current one had left me extremely exhausted for twelve hours. I told the member services rep my symptoms, but assured her I was fine. The incident was five days ago. I had been working out intensely every day since then and felt fine. As if not hearing a word I said, she seemed to be reading from a script: “Do you have shortness of breath? Can you stand on your own?” Flabbergasted, I interrupted her. “As I just told you, I am physically fine. I am exercising with great intensity, and I feel great.” I wanted to add, “Please put down your script and listen to what I actually have to say.” I was flabbergasted.

    One of the appeals of the word flabbergasted is that it seems made up of the words flab and blubber to create the hybrid “flabber,” which I love because “flabber” jiggles and vibrates like the elephantine upper arms of the cafeteria ladies of my youth. Such jiggling and vibration is part of the body’s paroxysms that occur when one is flabbergasted.

    If I had a rock band, I would call it Flabbergasted. If I were to have a nom de plume, it would be Flabber Gasted. 

    I suspect that to be in a flabbergasted state can be dangerously addictive. I’m thinking of Tom Colicchio, one of the principals of the reality show Top Chef. I have a theory as to the one reason above all others the show is successful. It’s Tom Colicchio’s flabbergasted face when he cannot believe how crappy the food is that was prepared for him by one of the world-class chefs. No other judge can make such a severe expression. I don’t know if Colicchio is authentically flabbergasted or if his facial contortions are performative for the ratings. What I do know is that his flabbergasted expression has begun to chafe at me. For many seasons, I took his expression for granted, but after he started taking GLP-1s and losing forty pounds, his flabbergasted TV face looks more extreme. He has eaten a dish that is so egregious that he is in a state of shock and strained credulity. He can’t believe anyone, let alone a successful chef, could make such an abomination. The implication is that surely he could never be so incompetent. And this is where I get annoyed. These chefs have been taken out of their environment, they are working in time constraints, and are working with remarkable pressure from the competition, the TV apparatus, and the judges. That they could stumble or let anxiety get the best of them is completely understandable and is not a situation that calls for being flabbergasted. Therefore, Colicchio’s is out of line. He is disrespecting good, talented people, and I take offense to it. I am flabbergasted.  

  • Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    As a boy watching Star Trek, I was transfixed by the Tricorder–that tidy slab of certainty doctors waved over a body the way a priest might wave incense over a mystery. No scalpels, no tubes, no anxious waiting rooms with their stale magazines and fluorescent despair. A quick scan, a soft chirp, and the problem surrendered. The body, usually so coy and uncooperative, became a readable document–its secrets itemized, its fate clarified. It was medicine without friction, diagnosis without drama. In that universe, ignorance lasted seconds.

    For decades, the Tricorder sat where all good fantasies sit: just out of reach, gleaming with impossible efficiency. But reality has a way of cheating. The future did not arrive as a handheld scanner; it arrived as chemistry–specifically, a class of drugs that seems to negotiate directly with the body’s most stubborn impulses. If the Tricorder promised instant knowledge, GLP-1 drugs promise something more unnerving: the quiet rewriting of appetite, metabolism, and behavior from the inside out.

    In her New York Times essay “The Great Ozempic Experiment,” Julia Belluz catalogs the early returns, and they read less like a drug profile than a wish list that forgot to edit itself. Yes, there’s weight loss–the headline act–but the understudies keep stealing the show: concussion recovery, addiction dampening, relief from menopause symptoms, long COVID, alopecia, inflammation, arthritis, IBS, anxiety, brain fog. The list grows with the confidence of a rumor that keeps being confirmed. By the time you finish reading, you suspect the drug might also fix your credit score.

    The catch, for now, is almost comically modest: nausea and paperwork. The body may revolt briefly; the insurance company may revolt permanently. Yet demand surges, fueled by users who report not just slimmer bodies but upgraded lives–better mood, sharper focus, revived social calendars, improved fertility. It’s less a medication than a lifestyle intervention with a prescription pad.

    Clinicians, watching this unfold, have begun to reach for a new framework–the “root-cause” theory–because the old boxes no longer hold. These drugs don’t respect the tidy borders between endocrine, cardiovascular, and neurological disease; they trespass, improve, and move on. Even more disorienting, benefits appear in patients who don’t lose weight at all: better heart, liver, and kidney function, as if the drug were quietly tuning systems we didn’t know were connected.

    And here is where the story turns from miracle to question mark. As GLP-1 use spreads–along with the culture’s sudden enthusiasm for “leanmaxxing”–we risk trading one distortion for another: the cartoon body, now achieved pharmacologically rather than cosmetically. It is far too early to crown these drugs the real-world Tricorder, and just as premature to condemn them as a Faustian bargain. Like AI, they are moving faster than our ability to narrate them. We are watching a technology outrun our categories, and the only honest response, for now, is attention without prophecy.

  • “Marty Supreme” Is a Rebuttal to Liquid Modernity

    “Marty Supreme” Is a Rebuttal to Liquid Modernity

    I sat through the 2.5-hour sprawl of Marty Supreme with a mix of fascination and dread, the way you watch a man juggle lit matches in a room full of gasoline. It doesn’t take long to diagnose Marty Mauser: no self-awareness, no boundaries, no governor on his appetites. Once you see that, the plot stops being a mystery and becomes a countdown. He treats his life–and everyone else’s–as expendable material in the service of his ego. Chaos isn’t an accident; it’s the operating system. The film runs on a kind of psychological determinism: remove self-knowledge and restraint, and watch the dominoes fall. The difficulty, of course, is that Marty is repulsive in the precise way the movie needs him to be. Some viewers refuse the bargain—why spend hours with a moral vacancy? I’d argue that’s the point. Like Uncut Gems, where Howard Ratner detonates his own life in slow motion, or Boogie Nights, where Dirk Diggler mistakes appetite for identity, this film belongs to a category I’d call the Chaos Agent Antihero: a person so unmoored from self-scrutiny that he turns every room into a hazard zone.

    It’s easy to dismiss these films as nihilistic—two hours of bad decisions dressed up as entertainment, but that reading is too lazy by half. Beneath the wreckage is a stern, almost old-fashioned argument about limits: the necessity of boundaries, the discipline of saying no, the unglamorous virtue of constraint. In that sense, the Chaos Agent Antihero is a rebuttal to what Zygmunt Bauman called liquid modernity—the condition in which everything solid dissolves into options. Careers become gigs, relationships become arrangements, identities become costumes you change between scenes. The promise is freedom; the invoice is fragmentation. In that fluid world, a man like Marty isn’t liberated; he’s uncontained. Without structure, he doesn’t discover himself; he disperses.

    Follow that logic to its end and you get the customary finish for men like Howard Ratner and Dirk Diggler: ugly, terminal, and instructive precisely because it refuses redemption. Marty Supreme flirts with a different exit. Fatherhood appears like a last-ditch intervention, a chance to trade improvisation for obligation, appetite for responsibility. You sense the film asking whether a man can accept the humiliating truth of limits and, in doing so, become something sturdier than a bundle of impulses. The alternative–the radical individualist with no brakes–isn’t freedom. It’s a long fall with excellent lighting.

  • Purple Toothbrushes and Other Acts of Quiet Genius

    Purple Toothbrushes and Other Acts of Quiet Genius

    I have a student who makes the rest of the room recalibrate. Her essays arrive fully formed—sharp, unshowy, and quietly devastating—and in discussion she does what most people only pretend to do: she thinks out loud with precision. If airtime were currency, she’d hold a majority stake. And the remarkable part is that no one resents it. The other students lean in. They listen. At eighteen, she carries herself with a kind of early-onset professorial clarity, but without the usual symptoms—no grandstanding, no ornamental jargon, no whiff of performance. Just a mind doing its work in public.

    Yesterday she told the class she’s neurodivergent. It landed without ceremony. No one froze, no one fumbled for a response. She simply kept going, threading her way back into our discussion of cruelty as entertainment in The Biggest Loser, dissecting it with the same steady intelligence she brings to everything. The label didn’t explain her; it just named the angle of her vision.

    Later that day, I watched Sheng Wang: Purple on Netflix and had a familiar thought within five minutes: here is another mind that refuses to see the world the way the rest of us have agreed to see it. Sheng Wang doesn’t manufacture jokes so much as he exposes the wiring. He takes the banal—the humble toothbrush aisle—and turns it into a referendum on identity. Faced with a rainbow of options, he chooses purple, not because it cleans better, but because it confers a temporary aura of purpose, as if pigment could rescue a life drifting toward mediocrity. It’s ridiculous, which is why it’s true.

    Wang, born in Taiwan and raised in Houston, delivers all this with a soft Southern cadence that suggests a Baptist sermon delivered by a man who wandered in from a parallel universe. He glides across the stage in flowing purple clothes and white sneakers, looking like a kindly prophet of low-stakes revelation. The dissonance works. His demeanor—gentle, unhurried, almost disarmingly sincere—feels less like an act and more like a refusal to harden into one. You don’t watch him perform; you eavesdrop on how he thinks.

    That’s the throughline between my student and Wang. The best comedians aren’t joke machines; they’re cartographers of attention. They map the ordinary at strange angles and invite you to follow. Sometimes they surface thoughts you didn’t know you had—your private negotiations with a toothbrush color, your quiet horror as a friend’s child demolishes a bowl of expensive berries with the appetite of a small animal. Sometimes the thoughts are entirely their own, but the vantage point is so exact you recognize yourself anyway.

    A good comedian, like a good student, doesn’t just entertain or impress. He builds a small porch between minds. You sit there for a while, listening, and realize you’re not being dazzled—you’re being let in. That’s rarer, and far more valuable, than a punchline.

  • Freedom in a Thong: The Theater of Letting It All Hang Out

    Freedom in a Thong: The Theater of Letting It All Hang Out

    Yesterday I watched the final episode of HBO’s Neighbors, and it delivered a character who refuses to be ignored: Danny Smiechowski, seventy-two, sunburned into leather, hair cascading past his shoulders, and dressed—if that’s the word—in a fluorescent yellow-green thong that assaults the eye like a traffic cone with delusions of grandeur. He conducts his workouts in his front yard, a one-man parade of defiance, and reacts to criticism the way a cornered animal does—snarling one minute, weeping the next.

    To his neighbors and the churchgoers across the street, decency means restraint, a baseline agreement about how to occupy public space without turning it into a spectacle. To Danny, decency is the opposite: the right to strip away all constraints, to declare the body sovereign territory. His creed echoes a distant era—the hazy, incense-soaked optimism of the early 1970s, when “freedom” often meant discarding clothing along with inhibition and calling it enlightenment.

    Danny believes the world has failed him by refusing to catch up. He swings between belligerent bravado and wounded self-pity, neither of which strengthens his argument. The result is less a philosophy than a performance—loud, erratic, and increasingly lonely.

    Exiled in spirit from his San Diego suburb, he seeks refuge in Eden, a Florida nudist enclave populated largely by fellow Boomers who seem preserved in amber from the Age of Aquarius. It’s a place where retired engineers and former professionals shed not only their clothes but their timelines, reliving a moment when rebellion felt like revelation. Add cheap wine, a little chemical haze, and a game of naked water polo, and you have a community convinced it has outsmarted the system.

    At the colony’s karaoke bar—equal parts nostalgia lounge and social experiment—Danny encounters a young woman with the clarity of someone who has no illusions about the transaction she’s proposing. She wants a sponsor, not a soulmate. Danny, eager for validation, obliges: shoes, dinner, the usual gestures of misplaced hope. She exits with efficiency. He is left with the bill and a deflated sense of destiny.

    Back in San Diego, Danny does what any committed ideologue would do—he builds his own Eden in his backyard, a private republic of one, governed by the constitution of his own stubbornness.

    The episode raises a question that refuses to stay trivial: why do some people feel compelled to be naked as a permanent state, not an occasional choice? Nostalgia plays a role. For many in that generation, nudity carries the residue of a time when breaking rules felt like breaking through. To be unclothed was to signal membership in a select tribe—the enlightened, the unshackled, the ones who had slipped past the guards of convention.

    There’s also a theatrical element. Just as children dress as superheroes to feel invincible, adults can costume themselves as liberated sensualists. The wardrobe is minimal, but the identity is elaborate. It promises transformation without requiring much beyond attitude.

    And yet, beneath the surface, something feels off. At Eden, I saw intelligent, accomplished people—engineers, inventors, individuals who had clearly mastered complex systems. One man, surrounded by photos of extraterrestrials, warned of a creature called Draconian poised to devour humanity. He seemed to believe that rejecting society’s norms—walking naked within the colony’s borders—offered a kind of existential protection. It was as if the abandonment of convention could ward off forces far larger than decorum.

    That’s the paradox. These people are not fools. Many are thoughtful, even admirable in their way. But the lifestyle strikes me less as freedom and more as a carefully maintained illusion—a soft-focus rebellion that never quite matures into anything durable.

    I can observe it with curiosity, even a touch of amusement. But I can’t inhabit it. To me, freedom isn’t the absence of clothing or the indulgence of every impulse. It’s something quieter, less theatrical. What I saw in Eden felt less like liberation and more like a well-rehearsed fantasy—Peter Pan with a pension plan, still refusing to land.

  • Escaping the G-Shock Dopamine Hamster Wheel

    Escaping the G-Shock Dopamine Hamster Wheel

    I offer no apologies for wearing my G-Shock Frogman with the unfiltered delight of a boy kneeling in the sandbox, staging epic battles with a platoon of GI Joes. When I strap that amphibious brick to my wrist, a certain kind of theater begins. I become a heroic caricature of myself—a grizzled football coach barking orders, a deep-sea operative, a cyborg navigator of hostile terrain. It’s ridiculous, yes. But it’s also fun. And fun, when properly contained, is one of life’s few renewable resources.

    The key phrase, of course, is properly contained. Because there’s a difference between fun and desperation, and any hobby that survives long enough eventually reveals the line between the two.

    Right now my G-Shock situation sits comfortably on the side of fun. I own three models: the Frogman, the GW-7900, and the GW-6900. By coincidence—or perhaps by horological fate—each of these watches debuted in 2009. That means the design language on my wrist has survived seventeen years without revision. The 6900, in fact, traces its lineage back to 1995, when the digital watch still believed it might someday conquer the Earth.

    In other words, I have not assembled a museum of the new. I have assembled a small triumvirate of classics. No influencer told me to buy them. No YouTube oracle guided my hand. I simply chose them myself. It’s comforting to believe, even briefly, that one’s consumer decisions were made under the influence of free will.

    And I genuinely enjoy wearing them. When I look down at the wrist, something childish and harmless awakens. The imagination reactivates. Suddenly I’m a spy, a special-ops diver, a space monster, and occasionally a wrestling coach with a suspiciously tactical sense of timekeeping. I accept this man-child energy. I embrace it. There are worse midlife coping mechanisms than a durable plastic watch that makes you smile.

    But every hobby contains traps, and the G-Shock world offers two of them in fluorescent colors.

    The first is the dopamine hamster wheel. This is the stage where watches cease being tools and begin behaving like glazed donuts. One purchase leads to another, then another, until the collector starts foaming with evangelical excitement over limited editions, colorways, and collaborations with Japanese streetwear designers whose names sound like software updates. The language shifts from appreciation to hysteria. FOMO spreads like a rash. Consumer diabetes sets in.

    That spectacle has nothing to do with why G-Shock exists.

    The brand was born to serve people who actually need tough watches—rescue workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, wilderness guides. It was designed to provide durable, accurate timekeeping to people whose jobs might involve cliffs, oceans, explosions, or at least a very bad Tuesday. It was never intended to become a glittering shrine to hype.

    So I refuse to ride the hamster wheel.

    The second trap is attention hunger. Sharing enthusiasm for a hobby is healthy. Talking about watches with fellow enthusiasts can be joyful. But somewhere along the spectrum, conversation mutates into performance. The watch becomes less about personal enjoyment and more about being seen enjoying it.

    And that distinction reminds me of a film I loved in high school: Saturday Night Fever.

    John Travolta’s Tony Manero dominates the disco floor with effortless charisma. When he dances with Stephanie Mangano, the attention they receive feels earned. Their chemistry produces its own gravitational field. People watch because something authentic is happening.

    But the film also shows another kind of attention.

    Tony’s friend Bobby C., trapped by family shame and a pregnancy he feels powerless to handle, tries desperately to be noticed. Near the end of the film, he asks Tony to look at a new shirt he bought. It’s a small request—a fragile signal that he wants someone to see him. Tony barely registers it. Shortly afterward, Bobby climbs the bridge railing and falls to his death.

    The moment lingers because it exposes the difference between joyful attention and desperate attention.

    When I think about my G-Shocks, I want to remain firmly on the joyful side of that divide. I don’t want to become the collector who escalates endlessly into more extreme watches—bigger, louder, rarer—while begging the internet to notice. In this regard, I want to employ the Contained Fun Principle: the discipline of enjoying a hobby while consciously preventing it from expanding into compulsive acquisition. The Contained Fun Principle recognizes that pleasure remains healthy only when boundaries are enforced—when a collector deliberately limits the size of the collection so the hobby remains play rather than psychological obligation.

    Once containment is gone, the fun is gone.

    Once containment is gone, I’m in the Bobby C. Zone.

    So for now I’ll keep things simple. Three G-Shocks. Three classic designs. All born in 2009. I’ll enjoy the boyish pleasure they bring and try to stay off the dopamine treadmill.

    After all, the whole point of a watch is to tell time—not to consume it.

  • Castle Kings and Backyard Wars in the HBO TV Series Neighbors

    Castle Kings and Backyard Wars in the HBO TV Series Neighbors

    For a while I was determined to build a writing assignment around the often mesmerizing HBO series Neighbors, a show that turns suburban living into a laboratory of petty grievances. The program is an anthology of paranoia, narcissism, wounded pride, and backyard cold wars. Broken neighbors glare at one another across property lines as if those strips of grass were the demilitarized zones of Eastern Europe. Everyone is intoxicated by the phrase “Be the king of your castle,” and each homeowner interprets that slogan with medieval enthusiasm. Lawn edges become sacred borders. Wind chimes become psychological warfare. A misplaced trash bin becomes an act of territorial aggression. It seemed like fertile ground for a classroom essay about the intoxication of home ownership, the cult of hyper-individualism, and the strange pettiness that emerges when people confuse property rights with personal sovereignty.

    The idea tempted me. Students could analyze how the mythology of the suburban castle feeds grievance culture—how people who should be exchanging tomatoes over the fence instead become amateur border patrol agents guarding their kingdoms of mulch and vinyl siding. The show practically begs for a discussion of how hyper-individualism corrodes the habits of community. Every driveway is a throne room; every neighbor is a potential usurper. It’s an American morality play performed with leaf blowers.

    But the more I watched, the more my enthusiasm cooled. The truth is almost too obvious to sustain a thoughtful essay. Many of the people featured in these conflicts aren’t philosophical case studies; they’re simply hurting. Some appear lonely, unstable, or chronically aggrieved. They need counseling, medication, friendship—anything that might interrupt the feedback loop of suspicion and hostility that has taken up residence in their living rooms.

    Of course I could dress the whole spectacle in sociological clothing. I could write about post-pandemic malaise, the alienation of the social-media age, or the surveillance paranoia that grows when every doorbell camera becomes a witness stand. Those are real themes. But beneath all the academic scaffolding lies a simpler truth.

    Strip away the respectable lighting and the neatly trimmed hedges, and the show begins to resemble The Jerry Springer Show, except the stage has been dismantled and moved into people’s kitchens and backyards. The audience isn’t clapping from studio seats; it’s watching through Ring cameras and HOA newsletters.

    That realization drained my appetite for turning the show into a classroom exercise. Sometimes a spectacle is just a spectacle. Not every shouting match across a picket fence needs to be converted into a philosophical treatise.

    Tempting as the assignment might have been, I think I’ll pass.

  • The Narrative of Justified Cruelty and Heroic Delusion (college essay prompt)

    The Narrative of Justified Cruelty and Heroic Delusion (college essay prompt)

    When disturbing acts of manipulation or cruelty appear in documentaries, viewers often search for a simple explanation. One explanation is psychological: the person must be mentally unstable. Another explanation is moral: the person knowingly chose to harm others. Yet many real cases resist this clean distinction. Individuals who commit harmful acts rarely see themselves as villains. Instead, they construct narratives that justify their behavior. They portray themselves as victims, defenders, truth-tellers, or heroes correcting an injustice.

    The documentaries The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish explore this unsettling dynamic. In both films, individuals escalate conflict through patterns of deception, resentment, and obsessive grievance. At times their behavior appears irrational or emotionally unstable. At other moments their actions seem deliberate, strategic, and calculated. What makes these stories disturbing is not simply the harm they cause, but the way the individuals involved interpret their own actions. Each person constructs a story that makes their behavior appear reasonable—even righteous—from their own perspective.

    These documentaries raise an important question about human behavior:

    How do people justify cruelty to themselves?

    Psychologists often describe this process as moral disengagement—the ability to harm others while preserving the belief that one is still a good or justified person. People may blame the victim, exaggerate their grievances, reinterpret their actions as self-defense, or frame themselves as the victim of a hostile world. Or they may see themselves as heroes in their own drama. Some people commit harmful acts while believing they are the morally righteous or aggrieved protagonist in a moral drama. Both documentaries actually illustrate that pattern remarkably well. When these narratives take hold, the line between psychological instability and moral wrongdoing becomes difficult to distinguish.

    Essay Task

    Write a 1,000-word comparative argumentative essay analyzing how The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish portray the stories people tell themselves to justify harmful behavior.

    Your essay should develop a thesis that addresses this question:

    Do the individuals in these documentaries appear primarily mentally unstable, morally responsible for their actions, or trapped inside narratives that allow them to see cruelty as justified?

    Thesis Requirement

    Your introduction must include a thesis that:

    1. Takes a clear position on the role of self-justifying narratives in the documentaries.
    2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.

    Example thesis with mapping:

    The destructive behavior portrayed in The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish becomes understandable when we examine the self-justifying narratives constructed by the individuals involved: each person frames themselves as a victim of injustice, interprets retaliation as moral correction, and gradually loses the ability to see their actions from the perspective of others.

    Mapping components:

    • victim narratives
    • retaliation framed as justice
    • loss of empathy or perspective

    Each of these becomes a body paragraph.

    Essay Requirements

    Your essay must include:

    • a clear thesis with mapping components
    • comparison of both documentaries throughout the essay
    • analysis of specific moments from the films
    • a counterargument that challenges your interpretation
    • a rebuttal defending your position
    • a concluding paragraph reflecting on what these documentaries reveal about human moral reasoning

    Possible Directions for Your Argument

    You might argue that:

    • people justify cruelty by constructing victim narratives
    • resentment allows individuals to reinterpret retaliation as justice
    • deception becomes easier when someone believes they are morally right
    • psychological instability intensifies but does not fully explain destructive behavior
    • the documentaries reveal how ordinary people can become morally dangerous when they stop questioning their own stories

  • The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    Read “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks and “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson. Then watch the comedy special Lonely Flowers by Roy Wood Jr..

    In Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to a rise in anger, hostility, and violence in American society. Brooks and Thompson also describe a culture that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, and socially brittle.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that develops a thesis responding to Roy Wood Jr.’s claim. Using the ideas from Brooks and Thompson, argue whether social isolation is a convincing explanation for the rise in cultural hostility and violence. Your essay may support, refute, or complicate Wood’s claim.

    Thesis + Mapping Requirement

    Your introduction must include a thesis that does two things:

    1. Takes a clear position on Wood’s claim about loneliness and violence.
    2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.

    Example thesis with mapping

    Roy Wood Jr.’s claim that loneliness is fueling violence in America is persuasive because, as David Brooks and Derek Thompson show, the collapse of community institutions, the rise of hyper-individualism, and the retreat into private digital life have produced a society that is increasingly disconnected and emotionally volatile.

    In this thesis, the mapping components are:

    • collapse of community institutions 
    • retreat into private digital life
    • loss of meaningful language
    • loss of intuition to connect with others

    Each of those becomes a body paragraph.

    Essay Requirements

    Your essay should include:

    • a clear thesis with mapping components
    • analysis of key ideas from Brooks and Thompson
    • references to Roy Wood Jr.’s argument in Lonely Flowers
    • a counterargument that challenges your thesis
    • a rebuttal defending your position
    • a concluding paragraph that reflects on what these ideas suggest about modern American culture

    Possible directions for your argument

    You might argue that:

    • loneliness and isolation are making Americans angrier and more volatile
    • loneliness explains some hostility but not actual violence
    • digital life is replacing real community and increasing resentment
    • other forces (economic anxiety, media outrage, politics) are stronger causes of violence

  • College Essay Prompt: Crime, Entertainment, and the Ethics of Vigilantism

    College Essay Prompt: Crime, Entertainment, and the Ethics of Vigilantism

    Few crimes provoke stronger public outrage than the exploitation of children. In the digital age, the internet has expanded the opportunities for predatory behavior, making the protection of minors an urgent social concern. At the same time, some media platforms and online personalities have turned the pursuit and exposure of suspected predators into a form of public entertainment. These productions often present themselves as acts of justice, but they also raise difficult ethical questions.

    The 2025 documentary Predators explores these tensions by examining the growing trend of turning crime-fighting into a spectacle. In some cases, individuals attempt to expose suspected offenders through online stings, public confrontations, and viral videos. Supporters argue that these tactics raise awareness and help bring dangerous individuals to light. Critics, however, argue that transforming criminal investigations into entertainment risks exploiting a serious issue, encouraging voyeurism and vigilantism, and potentially interfering with legitimate law enforcement.

    In a 1,000-word argumentative essay, respond to the following claim:

    Turning the pursuit of suspected predators into entertainment or sport is a form of exploitation that undermines justice and trivializes the serious problem of child predation.

    In your essay, you may defend, challenge, or complicate this claim. Consider questions such as: Does public exposure help deter crime and protect victims, or does it encourage reckless vigilantism? What are the ethical risks of turning criminal investigations into viral entertainment? Can awareness and entertainment coexist responsibly, or does spectacle inevitably distort justice?

    Your essay should present a clear thesis, analyze examples from the documentary, consider counterarguments, and explain why your interpretation of the issue is the most persuasive.