Category: TV and Movies

Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

“Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.

January 21, 2026
How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

I lost my love for movies sometime in the last decade, when Hollywood began to feel less like a dream factory and more like an actuarial office with better lighting. Everything started to look like a boardroom decision in costume. I can count on one hand the films I bothered to see in theaters over fifteen years: Avatar, World War Z, Black Panther, Get Out. A few streamed titles shook me awake—Uncut Gems and Good Time from the Safdies, Paul Giamatti’s bruised soul in Private Life and The Holdovers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sunburned nostalgia in Licorice Pizza, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. But 2025 hit differently. Four films—Eddington, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, and Weapons—did something rare: they stared directly into the national nervous breakdown. These weren’t escapist fantasies. They were dispatches from a culture unraveling—where institutions inspire no faith, conspiracies feel more plausible than facts, politics has become cosplay, and we live in sealed-off realities that collide without ever conversing.

Eddington blindsided me. Joaquin Phoenix plays a bitter, alienated, anti-mask sheriff in a New Mexico town during the pandemic, and he’s so fully possessed by the role that I didn’t recognize him for several minutes. I went in braced to hate the film—expecting a grim slog through our worst collective memories. Instead, I got something braver: a devastating portrait of a society that has slipped its moorings and drifted into a lonely fever swamp. The film doesn’t mug for satire or cheap laughs. It trusts the material. Every scene tightens the vise on your attention. It’s the kind of movie nine hundred ninety-nine directors would have drowned in. Ari Aster somehow swims.

One Battle After Another turns political polarization into tragic pageantry. Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—a grotesque ICE-agent archetype—faces off against Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rocket Man, who might as well be an Antifa folk demon. But the movie’s real target isn’t left or right; it’s the theater of identity itself. We’ve become a nation of people in costumes, fighting playground wars with adult consequences. Once your political tribe becomes your personality, nuance feels like betrayal. The film suggests a hard truth: a country run by permanent adolescents doesn’t collapse in flames—it collapses in tantrums. Penn has built a career on operatic excess, but Lockjaw may be his most disturbingly perfect creation yet.

Bugonia is stranger still. Jesse Plemons—leaner, sharper, and channeling a high-IQ Dale Gribble—plays Teddy, a man-child whose conspiracy obsessions keep him tuned to late-night AM radio and convinced that a tech CEO, played by Emma Stone, is an alien in need of kidnapping and repatriation. Once tied up in his house, she attempts to weaponize corporate confidence as an escape strategy, and her faith in managerial language becomes its own punchline. Plemons is reliably excellent, but Emma Stone has crossed into something rarer: the kind of presence Daniel Day-Lewis had in the nineties, where the screen bends around her. The film’s bizarre logic and eerie beauty sent me straight into the arms of Yorgos Lanthimos’ odd, seductive universe.

Weapons brings the nightmare home—literally. Set in the suburbs, it tells the story of a witch who makes a classroom of children vanish. The teacher is blamed. The principal responds with bureaucratic platitudes. The town spirals. Beneath the horror scaffolding is a sharp allegory about addiction and institutional cowardice: when a society loses its ability to think clearly, every crisis metastasizes. The adults talk in slogans. The children disappear.

Taken together, these films diagnose the same disease. Chaos becomes pandemonium when a culture retreats into fantasy and calls it identity. We dress up our impulses as ideologies. We curate personas instead of building character. The center doesn’t hold—not because of some invading barbarian, but because we’ve all invited the barbarian inside and handed him the keys. The good news, if there is any, is that there are still filmmakers brave enough to tell the truth about the mess we’re in. In 2025, cinema finally stopped trying to soothe me—and started telling me what I already knew but didn’t want to admit.

January 16, 2026
Are We Extras in Someone Else’s Luxury Watch Fantasy?

Six weeks with my fifteen-year-old twins is a better sociology course than anything you’ll find at UCLA. Their generation runs on shared experiences—amusement parks, concerts, parties—and the sacred ritual of turning those moments into cinematic TikToks. They love empathy. They love energy drinks. They love boba with the devotion earlier civilizations reserved for gods. They exchange hugs so theatrical they deserve SAG cards. They also love not driving. Why would they? They have concierge parents for that. The car is not transportation; it’s a mobile confessional booth where they talk, text, and disappear into playlists like monks retreating into sonic monasteries. Licenses can wait. I’ll be stunned if either one pilots a vehicle solo before age twenty-five.

They dress alike, too—hoodies, high-rise jeans, baggy sweatpants. When I pick them up from school, I scan a sea of identical silhouettes and play a grim game of Where’s Waldo: Daughter Edition. It’s like they all emerged from the same fashion assembly line, stamped and released in bulk.

Then there’s the strangest quirk of all: the generational terror of bare feet. We live in Southern California, where flip-flops are a constitutional right. But when my daughters’ friends come over, I’m ordered—ordered—to put on shoes. Feet are not feet anymore. They’re “dogs,” “grippers,” “claws,” a traveling carnival of anatomical horror. One girl saw my bare feet and reported back like she’d witnessed a crime scene. Since then, I suit up like a hazmat worker whenever teenagers enter the house.

Watching their collective likes and dislikes has turned me into an amateur René Girard scholar. Girard argued that we don’t want things because they’re intrinsically wonderful; we want them because the tribe wants them first. Desire is social plagiarism. The tribe writes the script, and we perform it thinking it’s improvisation.

But there’s a dark twin to mimetic desire: mimetic aversion. If the tribe hates something, we learn to hate it, too—even if we never felt a flicker of disgust on our own. Case in point: “I saw your dad’s dogs. Gross.” A moral judgment delivered about toes.

Naturally, this has sent my twenty-year watch obsession into a philosophical tailspin. When we crave a watch, is it a private passion—or just tribal ventriloquism? Are we collectors, or are we obedient extras in someone else’s luxury fantasy? And if we’re that easily programmed, doesn’t it expose something mildly humiliating about us—our insecurities, our hunger to belong, our weakness for social approval dressed up as taste?

Maybe understanding desire would clarify us. Or maybe it would only prove how unclassifiable we really are. Some mysteries resist labels.

Still, in the watch world, mimetic aversion is practically doctrine. Quartz watches are treated like dietary betrayal. You used to grill rib-eyes and now you’re flipping soy burgers? Next you’ll be wearing Crocs and asking for decaf. Show up at the wrong meet-up with a quartz on your wrist and you won’t just lose respect—you’ll lose invitations, subscribers, and possibly citizenship. “Quartz?” they’ll whisper. “Traitor.”

On the flip side, mimetic desire runs the show just as ruthlessly. Look at the waiting lists. Look at the resale prices. When you buy certain watches, you’re not buying steel—you’re buying absolution. A Rolex Sub isn’t a timepiece; it’s a baptism. The tribe anoints you with holy water and hums a choral anthem over your wrist.

So yes, the watch hobby is soaked in mimetic desire and mimetic aversion. But here’s my heresy: if you’re a true watch obsessive, those forces barely apply to you. Because your relationship with watches isn’t tribal. It’s theological.

A real watch obsessive is ruled by three forces.

First, the Svengali Effect. A certain watch doesn’t attract you—it hypnotizes you. It hijacks your agency like a charming cult leader. You try to resist. You fail. The watch plants itself in your brain and grows there like an invasive eucalyptus until surrender feels like destiny. This isn’t imitation. This is possession.

Second, Horological Fixation. At this stage, your watch stops being a timekeeping device and becomes a visual narcotic. You no longer use your watch to check the time—you commune with the object. The world fades. The wrist becomes a shrine. Eden relocates to forty-two millimeters of brushed steel.

Third, Horological Transfiguration. You put on the watch and—boom—you’re not just dressed, you’re transformed. James Bond. Jacques Cousteau. Brad Pitt walking into a bar where the jukebox automatically switches to something heroic. The watch doesn’t accessorize you; it authorizes you.

I’ve known watch obsessives for decades. I know the symptoms. I know the tells.

So if you live under the Svengali Effect, Horological Fixation, and Horological Transfiguration, René Girard’s mimetic theory doesn’t really apply. The good news: you’re not a phony lemming chasing tribal approval. The bad news: you’re completely unhinged.

Congratulations. You’re a true watch obsessive—authentic, independent, gloriously insane.

Now put on your watch. You’ve been Clark Kent long enough. It’s time to rip open the shirt and let the cape fly.

January 13, 2026
“Yes, Kumail. Lift in anger. Lift in truth.”

On Friday night I sat in a theater watching my daughter’s dance performance—hundreds of high-schoolers, mostly girls, moving with athletic grace, precision, and fearless confidence—and I felt… bored out of my skull. Not proud of that. Not even neutral about it. Guilty bored. The worst kind. But after the fifth song with no narrative thread, no arc, no reason for existing beyond “vibes,” the whole experience started to feel like doom-scrolling a TikTok feed in human form. One glittering routine after another, all spectacle and no story. The sum effect wasn’t inspiration. It was sensory overload with a faint whiff of algorithmic numbness. Too much content. Too little meaning. Call it the aesthetic of “too much AI.”

To complete the sensory assault, the dry-ice fog machines gave my wife a headache—apparently carbon dioxide is not a love language. Being the saint she is, she went back for the Saturday recital while I stayed home and committed an act of mild rebellion: I made my first YouTube video in a month. I rambled about watch addiction, being a Boomer in a household that is aggressively not Boomer, and somehow braided all of it into my existential admiration for Rob Lowe’s memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends. I assumed my subscribers would be polite and puzzled. Instead, they were enthusiastic. They seemed grateful for the mess. Which only confirms my long-standing suspicion that coherence is overrated if the tone is honest enough. Still, I hedged my bets and linked to the more disciplined essay version, just in case anyone wanted their chaos with footnotes.

When my wife and daughters came home, I was sprawled on the couch watching the opening minute of Kumail Nanjiani’s stand-up special Night Thoughts. My wife sat down, we kept watching, and by the end I was applauding at the television like a deranged theater patron. I never do that. But there I was, fist in the air, cheering as Kumail—now built like a Marvel side quest—talked about being publicly scolded for daring to get jacked. His response? He’ll get even more jacked out of spite. I yelled encouragement at the screen as if I were his life coach. “Yes, Kumail. Lift in anger. Lift in truth.”

I was jealous of his talent, of course. That’s part of the contract when you watch someone that good. But mostly I was happy for him. He’s just getting started, and it shows. Some people peak early. Some people arrive right on time. Watching him, I felt the rare pleasure of witnessing momentum in real time.

January 11, 2026
Seven Watches, Fifteen Grand, and One Hard Lesson About Growing Up

People always ask why I started focusing on watches ten years ago on my YouTube channel. The honest answer is awkward: I love watches—but I love food more. Obsessively more. Food has been my lifelong religion. In the early ’90s, when I lived in a bachelor pad that smelled like basil and ambition, my Navy SEAL friend Mike used to call and say, “McMahon, I can hear you chewing through the phone again. Every time I call you, you’re eating. What is it now, Fat Face?”
“Angel hair pasta with pesto.”
“Sounds dangerous. I’m coming over, Fat Face.”
And he would—just in time to demolish everything I’d made. His appetite was powered by military drills and endless surfing sessions in Huntington Beach and Ventura. The man burned calories like a forest fire burns pine needles.

One day he called again. “I’m heading to Santa Barbara to surf. Come with me.”
“I can’t surf, Mike.”
“I know you can’t surf, genius. My girlfriend Nicole will be there. She wants to set you up with her friend, Michelle, from Newport Beach. Now can you surf?”
That’s how I ended up tagging along on adventures that had nothing to do with waves and everything to do with spectacle.

Mike lived with his dad, Bob, a former Marine with a voice like a foghorn and a temper to match. Their daily ritual involved shouting matches over lawn mowing, garage messes, and grocery duties—two barrel-chested men poking each other like rival roosters while spittle flew. Five minutes later, the war would end, and we’d be off on a Mongolian beef run with Social Distortion blasting in Mike’s Toyota four-wheeler. Back at the house, they’d watch John Wayne movies, and Bob would open his gun safe “just in case the Duke needs backup.” This was not dysfunction to me. This was home.

I’m a Boomer. I grew up in a world where anger was normal—where fathers barked orders and discipline came with a belt. When rage becomes your baseline, it’s like living with your brain permanently tuned to a Death Metal station. After a while, you stop hearing the noise. You just call it life. But it isn’t life. I know that now because I’m married to a woman fourteen years younger than me, and we have twin teenage daughters. They do not accept Death Metal Dad. They want something closer to Smooth Jazz—Bach, Earth, Wind & Fire, anything that doesn’t rattle the walls of the house. And they’re right. Rage is not masculinity. It’s a form of intoxication. A dangerous one.

For me, sobriety isn’t about alcohol or drugs. It’s about anger. That means I have to watch my triggers like a hawk. One of the biggest? New watches. Shiny new objects flip the switch in my brain. Suddenly the Death Metal station is humming again, and I’m spiraling into desire, anxiety, and self-reproach. I know feeding my watch addiction makes me miserable, and when I do something that makes me miserable, I get angry at myself. Then I become a joyless human being—Grandma Sour Pants in sneakers. My family doesn’t want to be around me, and frankly, neither do I.

The irony is that money isn’t the problem. I’m at a stage in life where I could buy any watch I want. But sanity is expensive. I own seven watches worth about fifteen grand in total, and even that feels like mental labor—keeping the rotation straight, remembering what I have, managing the noise in my head. If I owned twelve, I’d lose my grip entirely. My watch friends tell me, “Life is short. Buy what you want.” Those are words of indulgence, not wisdom. Indulgence has never made me happy. Indulgence is just infantilism in a tuxedo. A man-child with a credit card is still a man-child—and no man-child is happy. He buys things to outrun loneliness, and the things always lose the race.

Ninety-five percent of my watch purchases were impulsive. Which means ninety-five percent of them were evidence of my own immaturity. I sold most of them at a loss—not because I needed the money, but because I needed my dignity back.

I come from the Me-Generation, raised in California in the ’70s on a steady diet of self-worship. Rob Lowe’s memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends nailed it for me. He described the Counterculture as the Worship of the Self—whatever the Self wants, the Self gets. No brakes. No compass. He watched people overdose, vanish, and destroy themselves in Malibu’s sunlit fantasyland. The message was simple: when desire becomes sacred, reality becomes optional—and disaster becomes inevitable.

I am a watch freak. When I see a watch I love, my brain lights up like I’ve just taken a hit of something illegal. Desire surges. Anger follows. The loss of control is what really enrages me. Rob Lowe had to go to rehab to escape his fantasy life. I don’t want rehab for watches. I want a hobby that fits inside reality instead of dragging me out of it. I want pleasure without compulsion. Enjoyment without obsession. A life without permanent FOMO.

And here’s the final joke on me: even talking about this makes me nostalgic for being fifteen in Santa Monica and Malibu in 1976. I start looking backward like Lot’s wife, and I can feel myself turning into a pillar of salt. The Death Metal station is warming up again. That’s my cue. I need to change the channel—before I buy another watch and call it happiness.

January 10, 2026
Joan Is Awful—and So Is the Lie of Digital Empowerment

Inverse Agency

noun

Inverse Agency describes the moment you mistake engagement with a machine for control. You click, customize, optimize, and curate, convinced you are authoring your own life, while the real authorship happens elsewhere—in systems engineered to harvest your attention, your data, your habits, and eventually your obedience. Everything feels frictionless and flattering. The menus are intuitive. The options feel abundant. But the architecture is doing the choosing. You feel active while being managed, sovereign while being sorted. The freedom is cosmetic. The agency is staged.

This inversion works because it seduces rather than commands. Inverse agency flatters the ego so effectively that resistance feels unnecessary, even silly. The more certain you are that you’re “in charge,” the less likely you are to notice how your desires are being nudged, your behaviors rewarded, and your choices quietly narrowed. Power doesn’t bark orders; it smiles and asks permission. The result is a system that governs best by convincing its subjects they are free.

No recent pop artifact captures this better than the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful.” Joan believes she is finally taking control of her life through self-reinvention, only to discover she has handed herself over to an algorithm that strips her identity for parts and streams the wreckage as entertainment. The episode skewers the central lie of platform culture: that self-optimization equals self-authorship. Joan isn’t liberated; she’s monetized. Her personality becomes content, her choices become inputs, and her autonomy dissolves into a subscription model. What looks like empowerment is actually self-erasure with better lighting.

December 29, 2025
My Unofficial Christmas Movies (and the Family That Refuses to Watch Them)

When Christmas rolls around and the air fills with cinnamon, regret, and manufactured cheer, I develop an entirely predictable craving for cinematic comfort food. These are not “Christmas movies” in any socially acceptable sense. There are no Santa hats, no snow-dusted small towns, no redemption arcs sponsored by cocoa. And yet, for me, they function perfectly as holiday films because they cocoon me in familiarity and nostalgia. Even when they drift into dystopia or melancholy, they deliver me to a place of psychic warmth. My private Christmas canon includes What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Eversmile, New Jersey (1989), Sideways (2004), Walkabout (1971), Brazil (1985), Blade on the Feather (1980), Dr. Fischer of Geneva (1984), La Strada (1954), The King of Comedy (1982), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Holdovers (2023), Licorice Pizza (2021), and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). This is not a list; it’s a confession.

This year, I mounted a quiet but determined campaign to anoint What’s Eating Gilbert Grape as the family’s official Christmas movie. I made my case with restraint and dignity, which is to say I made it once and then silently resented the outcome. My daughters, unmoved by my aesthetic pleading, remain loyal to Home Alone. Thus, another December passes in cinematic deprivation, endured with outward good cheer and inward martyrdom. The sharpest ache, though, comes from my unshakeable belief that if they would only sit through Gilbert Grape, they would see it—the tenderness, the ache, the strange, gentle magic—and immediately defect. I can already picture it: a household converted, a tradition reborn. Until then, I wait, patient and delusional, nursing my dream like a bruised holiday ornament.

December 25, 2025
Pluribus and the Soft Tyranny of Sycophantic Collectivism

Sycophantic Collectivism

noun

Sycophantic Collectivism describes a social condition in which belonging is secured not through shared standards, inquiry, or truth-seeking, but through relentless affirmation and emotional compliance. In this system, dissent is not punished overtly; it is smothered under waves of praise, positivity, and enforced enthusiasm. The group does not demand obedience so much as adoration, rewarding members who echo its sentiments and marginalizing those who introduce skepticism, critique, or complexity. Thought becomes unnecessary and even suspect, because agreement is mistaken for virtue and affirmation for morality. Over time, Sycophantic Collectivism erodes critical thinking by replacing judgment with vibes, turning communities into echo chambers where intellectual independence is perceived as hostility and the highest social good is to clap along convincingly.

***

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus masquerades as a romantasy while quietly operating as a savage allegory about the hive mind and its slow, sugar-coated assault on human judgment. One of the hive mind’s chief liabilities is groupthink—the kind that doesn’t arrive with jackboots and barked orders, but with smiles, affirmations, and a warm sense of belonging. As Maris Krizman observes in “The Importance of Critical Thinking in a Zombiefied World,” the show’s central figure, Carol Sturka, is one of only thirteen people immune to an alien virus that fuses humanity into a single, communal consciousness. Yet long before the Virus Brain Hijack, Carol was already surrounded by zombies. Her affliction in the Before World was fandom. She is a successful romantasy novelist whose readers worship her and long to inhabit her fictional universe—a universe Carol privately despises as “mindless crap.” Worse, she despises herself for producing it. She knows she is a hack, propping up her novels with clichés and purple prose, and the fact that her fans adore her anyway only deepens her contempt. What kind of people, she wonders, gather in a fan club to exalt writing so undeserving of reverence? Their gushy, overcooked enthusiasm is not a compliment—it is an indictment. This, Krizman suggests, is the true subject of Pluribus: the danger of surrendering judgment for comfort, of trading independent thought for the convenience of the collective. In its modern form, this surrender manifests as Sycophantic Collectivism—a velvet-gloved groupthink sustained not by force, but by relentless positivity, affirmation, and applause that smothers dissent and dissolves individuality.

It is no accident that Gilligan makes Carol a romantasy writer. As Krizman notes, romantasy is the fastest-growing literary genre in the world, defined by its cookie-cutter plots, recycled tropes, and emotional predictability. The genre has already been caught flirting with AI-assisted authorship, further blurring the line between creativity and content manufacturing. Romantasy, in this light, is less about literature than about community—fans bonding with fans inside a shared fantasy ecosystem where enthusiasm substitutes for evaluation. In that world, art is optional; happiness is mandatory. Critical thinking is an inconvenience. What matters is belonging, affirmation, and the steady hum of mutual validation.

When the alien virus finally arrives, it is as if the entire world becomes an extension of Carol’s fan base—an endless sea of “perky positivity” and suffocating devotion. The collective Others adore her, flatter her, and invite her to merge with them, offering the ultimate prize: never having to think alone again. Carol refuses. Her resistance saves her mind but condemns her to isolation. She becomes a misfit in a world that rewards surrender with comfort and punishes independence with loneliness. Pluribus leaves us with an uncomfortable truth: the hive mind does not conquer us by force. It seduces us. And the price of belonging, once paid, is steep—your soul bartered away, your brain softened into pablum, your capacity for judgment quietly, permanently dulled.

December 24, 2025
“The Great Vegetable Rebellion” Prophesied Our Surrendering Our Brains to AI Machines

Comfortable Surrender

noun

Comfortable Surrender names the condition in which people willingly relinquish cognitive effort, judgment, and responsibility in exchange for ease, reassurance, and convenience. It is not enforced or coerced; it is chosen, often with relief. Under Comfortable Surrender, thinking is experienced as friction to be eliminated rather than a discipline to be practiced, and the tools that promise efficiency become substitutes for agency. What makes the surrender dangerous is its pleasantness: there is no pain to warn of loss, no humiliation to provoke resistance. The mind lies down on a padded surface and calls it progress. Over time, the habit of delegating thought erodes both intellectual stamina and moral resolve, until the individual no longer feels the absence of effort—or remembers why effort once mattered at all.

MIT recently ran a tidy little experiment that should unsettle anyone still humming the efficiency anthem. Three groups of students were asked to write an SAT-style essay on the question, “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us happy?” One group used only their brains. The second leaned on Google Search. The third outsourced the task to ChatGPT. The results were as predictable as they were disturbing: the ChatGPT group showed significantly less brain activity than the others. Losing brain power is one thing. Choosing convenience so enthusiastically that you don’t care you’ve lost it is something else entirely. That is the real danger. When the lights go out upstairs and no one complains, you haven’t just lost cognition—you’ve surrendered character. And when character stops protesting, the soul is already negotiating its exit.

If the word soul feels too metaphysical to sting, try pride. Surrender your thinking to a machine and originality is the first casualty. Kyle Chayka tracks this flattening in his New Yorker essay “A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts,” noting that as more people rely on large language models, their writing collapses toward sameness. The MIT study confirms it: users converge on the same phrases, the same ideas, the same safe, pre-approved thoughts. This is not a glitch; it’s the system working as designed. LLMs are trained to detect patterns and average them into palatable consensus. What they produce is smooth, competent, and anesthetized—prose marinated in clichés, ideas drained of edge, judgment replaced by the bland reassurance that everyone else more or less agrees.

Watching this unfold, I’m reminded of an episode of Lost in Space from the 1960s, “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” in which Dr. Zachary Smith quite literally turns into a vegetable. A giant carrot named Tybo steals the minds of the castaways by transforming them into plants, and Smith—ever the weak link—embraces his fate. Hugging a celery stalk, he babbles dreamy nonsense, asks the robot to water him, and declares it his destiny to merge peacefully with the forest forever. It plays like camp now, but the allegory lands uncomfortably close to home. Ease sedates. Convenience lulls. Resistance feels unnecessary. You don’t fight the takeover because it feels so pleasant.

This is the terminal stage of Comfortable Surrender. Thought gives way to consensus. Judgment dissolves into pattern recognition. The mind reclines, grateful to be relieved of effort, while the machine hums along doing the thinking for it. No chains. No coercion. Just a soft bed of efficiency and a gentle promise that nothing difficult is required anymore. By the time you notice what’s gone missing, you’re already asking to be watered.

December 23, 2025
Books Aren’t Dead—They’ve Just Lost Their Monopoly

Are young people being vacuum-sealed into their screens, slowly zombified by AI and glowing rectangles? This is the reigning panic narrative of our moment, a familiar sermon about dehumanization and decline. In his essay “My Students Use AI. So What?” linguist John McWhorter asks us to ease off the apocalypse pedal and consider a less hysterical possibility: the world has changed, and our metaphors haven’t caught up.

McWhorter opens close to home. His tween daughters, unlike him, are not bookworms. They are screenworms. He once spent his leisure hours buried in books; now he, too, spends much of his reading life hunched over a phone. He knows what people expect from him—a professor clutching pearls over students who read less, write with AI, and allegedly let their critical thinking rot. Instead, he disappoints the doom merchants. Screens replacing books, he argues, is not evidence of “communal stupidity.” It is evidence of migration.

Yes, young people read fewer books for pleasure. McWhorter cites a 1976 study showing that 40 percent of high school seniors had read at least six books for fun in the previous year—a number that has since cratered. But this does not mean young people have abandoned language. Words are everywhere. Print no longer monopolizes thought. Screens now host essays, debates, Substack newsletters, podcasts, and long-form conversations that reveal not a hunger deficit but a format shift. As McWhorter puts it, the explosion of thoughtful digital writing signals demand for ideas, not their extinction.

He is not naïve about online slop. He limits the digital junk his daughters would otherwise inhale all day. Still, he resists the snobbery that treats ubiquity as proof of worthlessness. “The ubiquity of some content doesn’t mean it lacks art,” he writes—a useful reminder in an age that confuses popularity with emptiness. Much online culture is disposable. Some of it is sharp, inventive, and cognitively demanding.

McWhorter also dismantles a familiar prejudice: that books are inherently superior because they “require imagination.” He calls this argument a retroactive justification for bias. Reading his rebuttal, I’m reminded that Childish Gambino’s four-minute video “This Is America,” watched tens of millions of times on YouTube, is so dense with political symbolism and cultural critique that it could easily spawn a 300-page monograph. Imagination is not a function of page count.

He takes aim at another antique claim—that radio was more imaginative than television. Citing Severance, McWhorter argues that contemporary TV can engage the imagination and critical thinking as effectively as any golden-age broadcast. Medium does not determine depth. Craft does.

McWhorter also punctures our nostalgia. Were people really reading as much as we like to believe? When he was in college, most students avoided assigned texts just as enthusiastically as students do now. The pre-digital world had CliffNotes. Avoidance is not a TikTok invention.

He reserves particular scorn for recklessly designed syllabi: professors assigning obscure philosophical fragments they never explain, using difficulty as décor. The syllabus looks impressive; students are left bewildered. McWhorter learned from this and streamlined his own reading lists, favoring coherence over intimidation.

AI, however, has forced real change. The five-paragraph essay is finished; machines devour it effortlessly. McWhorter has responded by designing prompts meant to outrun AI’s comfort zone and by leaning harder on in-class writing. One of his questions—“How might we push society to embrace art that initially seems ugly?”—aims to provoke judgment rather than summary. I’m less confident than he is that such prompts are AI-proof, but I take his point. A philosophically demanding question tethered to specific texts still forces students to synthesize, even if AI hovers nearby. He also emphasizes graded participation, returning thinking to the room rather than the cloud.

McWhorter’s larger argument is pragmatic, not permissive. Technology will keep changing. Education always lags behind it. The task of instructors is not to reverse technological history but to adapt intelligently—to identify what new tools erode, what they amplify, and how to redesign teaching accordingly. Panic is lazy. Nostalgia is misleading. The real work is harder: staying alert, flexible, and honest about both the costs and the gains.

December 17, 2025