Cinemorphosis

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  • Aging Gracefully Requires an Understanding of the Drowning Tank Principle

    Aging Gracefully Requires an Understanding of the Drowning Tank Principle

    Sometime in your mid-sixties, you will begin to notice a subtle shift in the social weather. No one will insult you to your face. No one will announce that your expiration date has arrived. Instead, you will encounter what professional wrestling calls “go-home heat”—the unmistakable feeling that the audience is ready for you to leave the stage. Younger colleagues will drift toward one another while conversations quietly form around you instead of including you. Friends will become experts in the polite ghost. Invitations will thin out. You will occasionally find yourself speaking only to discover that the room has already moved on. 

    Resist the temptation to interpret this as cruelty. Much of it is simply the ordinary rhythm of generations replacing one another. You behaved similarly when you were younger, even if you lacked the self-awareness to recognize it. Your obligation now is not to indulge bitterness or self-pity but to practice dignity. 

    Above all, avoid Relevance Panic—the anxious conviction that you can reclaim youth through a sports car, a luxury watch, trend chasing, fashionable slang, or any other theatrical performance of perpetual cool. Such purchases and performances may buy a fleeting glance, but they cannot purchase belonging. When the applause fades, you are left not rejuvenated but embarrassed, having confused attention with affection.

    Whenever I think about growing old, I remember a Batman episode from my childhood. Batman and Robin were trapped inside a gigantic transparent tank while water dripped steadily from above. At first the water barely reached their waists. Then it climbed to their chests, then their shoulders, then their necks. Eventually it hovered just beneath their noses. The horror of the scene did not lie in sudden catastrophe but in relentless inevitability. There was no dramatic explosion, no spectacular villain, only the slow arithmetic of rising water. As a child I feared the tank because it threatened my heroes. As an older man I recognize that the tank was never about Batman. It was about us.

    That memory has become what I call the Drowning Tank Principle: the recognition that every human being occupies the same metaphorical tank while the water of mortality rises with implacable patience. Some people are still standing comfortably in ankle-deep water, convinced the tank is enormous. Others already feel the water pressing against their chests. A fortunate few continue to swim vigorously despite the rising tide. Those farther from the surface often feel an instinctive discomfort around those whose water has risen higher, not because older people have become less worthy but because they embody a future the young would rather postpone contemplating. We recoil from reminders of mortality almost as reflexively as we recoil from pain. The distance is often less an act of malice than an unconscious act of self-protection.

    Understanding the Drowning Tank Principle does not eliminate loneliness, but it transforms it. It reminds you that you are not being singled out by history. You are participating in the oldest drama the human race has ever staged. Every generation eventually discovers that the spotlight moves on, that youth is leased rather than owned, and that relevance has an expiration date. 

    The challenge, then, is not to claw your way back to center stage but to cultivate a deeper virtue: magnanimity. Accept the passing of your season without resentment. Become more generous as your audience grows smaller. Discover satisfaction in usefulness rather than visibility. The final triumph over the rising water is not remaining forever young—that fantasy belongs to fools—but becoming the sort of person who can watch the water rise without surrendering either dignity or grace.

  • Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    You have argued that carrying thirty extra pounds is more than a physical condition. It is the outward symptom of a deeper spiritual disorder you have called Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual surrender of discipline as convenience, abundance, and self-indulgence become so routine that sacrifice begins to feel unnatural. There is truth in that diagnosis, but perhaps you have been a bit too eager to appoint yourself both defendant and judge. Before you sentence yourself to moral failure, remember something you taught your own critical thinking students last semester. Together you examined essays by people who devoted years to losing weight and keeping it off. They were not gluttonous caricatures or spiritually bankrupt weaklings. They were conscientious, intelligent, hardworking people who counted calories, exercised faithfully, and still watched the scale drift stubbornly upward. Their stories complicate the comforting fantasy that every overweight person simply lacks willpower.

    The missing piece is that your struggle does not occur in a vacuum. You are fighting inside an economic system that earns staggering profits by encouraging people to overconsume. The modern food industry has elevated temptation into an applied science. Teams of chemists, food scientists, marketers, and behavioral psychologists labor over formulas that maximize sweetness, saltiness, richness, aroma, and mouthfeel with the precision of engineers tuning a Formula One engine. The goal is not merely to satisfy hunger but to persuade you that one bite deserves another, and another after that. The supermarket is not simply a place where food is sold; it is a battlefield where billions of dollars have been invested in making your restraint less likely to succeed.

    That reality does not absolve you of responsibility, but it does redefine the contest. Your weight is shaped by both an internal struggle and an external one. Internally, you wrestle with Comfort Entrenchment—the habits, rationalizations, and appetites you have cultivated over decades. Externally, you confront an industry that has become astonishingly adept at exploiting precisely those vulnerabilities. Success therefore requires an immense cognitive burden. Every shopping trip, restaurant menu, convenience store, office celebration, and late-night craving demands another conscious decision. It is little wonder that so many intelligent and disciplined people eventually surrender. They are not merely battling themselves; they are competing against an industry that never sleeps and whose annual budget dwarfs their resolve.

    None of this should become an alibi. The last thing you need is a sophisticated excuse for another slice of carrot cake. But neither should you indulge the opposite illusion—that the contest is simple and every failure proves moral bankruptcy. Wisdom lies somewhere between self-exoneration and self-condemnation. Recognize Comfort Entrenchment for the enemy it is, but recognize your other adversary as well: a food culture meticulously designed to keep you consuming. Only by understanding both fronts of the war can you devise effective countermeasures. The first step toward victory is not pretending the battlefield is fair. It is seeing the battlefield clearly.

  • The Museum of Youth

    The Museum of Youth

    The Getty Museum has a way of conspiring with beautiful weather to make mortality feel especially impolite. Today, the sky possessed the crystalline blue one imagines hovering over ancient Pompeii before Vesuvius interrupted everyone’s plans. The museum’s travertine terraces glowed in the California sun, and everywhere I looked were couples in their twenties, impossibly attractive and strolling with the unselfconscious confidence that only youth can afford. Watching them, I found myself seized by an irrational envy. They seemed to possess not merely smooth skin and stronger knees but entire decades still waiting to unfold before them. Their lives resembled gleaming new luxury cars rolling effortlessly off the showroom floor. Mine, by comparison, felt like an old jalopy whose owner had begun listening nervously for unfamiliar noises under the hood.

    I envied what they represented more than who they were. They still possessed unopened chapters, careers not yet exhausted, friendships not yet mourned, dreams still wrapped in factory packaging. Youth carries with it the intoxicating illusion that time is an inexhaustible natural resource rather than a rapidly depreciating asset. Standing among them, I felt like someone who had arrived late to a party only to discover that everyone else was just beginning. I attempted the usual remedies. I reminded myself how fortunate I have been, how much joy my life has contained, how many blessings I scarcely deserved. None of it helped. Self-awareness is an ineffective antidepressant. Instead, I found myself scolding my own melancholy, accusing myself of being simultaneously ungrateful, petty, and embarrassingly sentimental—as though shame were somehow an antidote to longing.

    Fortunately, despair has an enemy that rarely receives the credit it deserves: usefulness. Later that afternoon, my teenage daughter and I sat in the museum café eating burgers while the conversation drifted toward her latest fascination—the pop music of the 1970s. Suddenly I was no longer competing with twenty-five-year-olds for possession of the future. I was explaining why certain songs endure, introducing artists she had not yet discovered, and watching her curiosity gather momentum. In that ordinary exchange, something quietly shifted. My value no longer depended upon having decades ahead of me. It depended upon having decades behind me that were worth sharing.

    That afternoon reminded me that envy is often a failure of perspective. I had mistaken youth for significance when significance had been sitting across the table all along. The young couples wandering the Getty possessed one kind of wealth: possibility. I possessed another: memory, experience, hard-earned judgment, and a daughter who still found those things worth hearing. The museum’s masterpieces had survived centuries because they continued to speak across generations. Perhaps that is the better aspiration. We eventually stop being the newest exhibit in the gallery. Our task then is to become one of the paintings that still rewards anyone willing to stop, look closely, and listen.

  • Comfort Entrenchment

    Comfort Entrenchment

    You did not wake up one morning thirty pounds overweight the way you might wake up with the flu. Excess weight is not an event; it is the visible symptom of a long psychological and spiritual decline. For years you cultivated self-indulgence as though it were a birthright, choosing comfort over discipline so consistently that the choices accumulated into a second nature. The result is damage that extends beyond the body. Your appetites have colonized your habits, weakened your resolve, and dulled your capacity to endure hardship. You must therefore confront an uncomfortable truth: you suffer from Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual process by which repeated indulgence in convenience, pleasure, and ease becomes so normalized that discomfort feels intolerable and self-discipline appears unnatural. Over time, luxuries masquerade as necessities, and every sacrifice feels like an injustice.

    If there is consolation, it is that Comfort Entrenchment is hardly your private affliction. It has become one of the defining maladies of modern civilization. Even people of admirable character struggle against it. Consider the journalist Elizabeth Bruenig, a self-described Christian, who remarked during Mike Pesca’s final episode of Not Even Mad that she fears for her soul because each day she falls painfully short of Christ’s command to feed the poor and relinquish worldly comfort. She described herself as “an indoor housecat,” a metaphor of remarkable precision. The indoor housecat is well fed, safe, comfortable, and utterly unequipped for the rigors of the wild. It has traded resilience for security. Comfort Entrenchment performs the same quiet exchange upon us.

    It is no accident, then, that our culture has rediscovered Stoicism with such enthusiasm. Bookstores overflow with translations of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. YouTube channels, podcasts, and newsletters preach voluntary discomfort, discipline, and resilience to audiences hungry for something they can scarcely name. Beneath the fascination with Stoicism lies a widespread intuition that modern life has made us too comfortable for our own good. We sense that our conveniences have become our captors, that the comforts designed to serve us have quietly assumed command. The popularity of Stoicism is therefore not merely an intellectual trend. It is a collective attempt to recover the toughness that Comfort Entrenchment has steadily eroded.

    The good news is that you have correctly diagnosed the disease. Most people never do. The bad news is that diagnosis alone changes nothing. There is no book, podcast, supplement, or inspirational slogan capable of delivering you from this condition. The cure is older and harsher than modern self-help literature cares to admit. You will have to surrender comforts you have mistaken for necessities. You will have to embrace hunger, fatigue, inconvenience, and delayed gratification rather than flee from them. You will have to pass through the fire instead of walking around it. There is no shortcut because the very habits that imprisoned you must be dismantled one sacrifice at a time. Only then will Comfort Entrenchment begin to loosen its grip, allowing you to recover not merely a healthier body but a stronger mind and a more integrated soul.

  • The First Rule of Diet Club

    The First Rule of Diet Club

    The first rule of dieting is beautifully simple: don’t talk about dieting. The moment you begin enthusiastically recounting your Fourth of July bacchanal—how you mainlined salami, slabs of Muenster cheese, triple-fudge brownies, and vanilla bean ice cream until you were convinced you had one foot in the grave and the other in a podiatrist’s office diagnosing gout—you have already begun sabotaging yourself. Soon your audience will be treated to your target weight, your macros, your supplement stack, your Mediterranean meal plan, and your newly acquired expertise in insulin sensitivity, fibermaxxing, and protein optimization. You will sound like someone who completed an online doctorate in nutrition sometime between dessert and midnight. Unfortunately, the odds that you will still be following the plan by next weekend hover somewhere around the lifespan of a mayfly.

    The irony is that talking about dieting feels suspiciously like dieting. You receive the emotional reward before earning the physical result. Friends nod approvingly while you bask in the warm glow of your imminent transformation. The fantasy becomes so satisfying that the actual work begins to feel almost optional. Meanwhile, everyone else quietly wonders why they have become unwilling participants in your nutritional TED Talk. Like nearly every worthwhile endeavor, dieting rewards execution rather than narration. Calories are indifferent to speeches. Fat cells are unimpressed by declarations of intent. Biology has never once accepted enthusiasm as a substitute for consistency.

    Then comes the humbling realization that your revolutionary plan is neither revolutionary nor particularly new. You have saddled this horse before—roughly a hundred and twenty times. Your success rate for reaching your target weight, less than 5%, is discouraging enough; your success rate for keeping it there is indistinguishable from zero. 

    With this in mind, you briefly entertain the modern miracle of GLP-1 medications, only to discover that the price, potential side effects, and your physician’s reluctance to prescribe them leave you unconvinced. So, in the colorful language of the internet, you decide to raw-dog the process. 

    Beneath all these failed diets lies a more subtle addiction. You are not merely addicted to food. You are addicted to self-reinvention. Every new eating plan promises not simply a smaller waistline but a new identity—a wiser, leaner, more disciplined version of yourself who will finally silence the persistent suspicion that you have somehow fallen short of your own expectations. The tragedy is that this future self often functions less as a destination than as a mirage shimmering just beyond the horizon.

    And yet, abandoning the effort altogether is hardly an attractive alternative. Better to struggle toward health than surrender to gluttony with theatrical resignation. So make your plan. Count your calories. Work out with the kettlebells. Ride the bike. Eat the vegetables. Decline the brownies. But keep your mouth shut. Announce nothing. Promise nothing. Let your bathroom scale and your belt become your only press secretaries. The instant you begin proclaiming your impending metamorphosis, your words become dietary Kryptonite, knocking Superman out of the sky and sending him headfirst into a vat of vanilla bean ice cream. Silence, it turns out, may be the most underrated weight-loss supplement of all.

  • The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    Twenty-six years ago, while I was teaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills, one of my students was a man in his late thirties who worked as a probation officer. Before that, he had been a prison guard. Our conversations often drifted from freshman composition to crime, punishment, and the psychology of offenders. One observation has stayed with me ever since. The older gang members, he explained, were rarely the ones who frightened him most. The “Old Gs” had lived long enough to understand consequences. They could negotiate, calculate, and occasionally be reasoned with. The truly terrifying offenders were the teenagers. They were impulsive, reckless, and detached from reality. They committed acts so irrational that even hardened career criminals regarded them with apprehension. “The Old Gs are scared of them,” he told me. At the time, the comment struck me as paradoxical. Today it feels almost self-evident.

    I have found myself thinking about that conversation while watching nearly a hundred episodes of The First 48, the remarkable series that follows homicide detectives as they race to solve murders before the trail grows cold. Again and again, the interrogation room fills with teenage boys. Many slump defiantly in their chairs, radiating annoyance rather than remorse, as though the detectives have interrupted an otherwise pleasant afternoon. They insist they know nothing. They deny what surveillance footage plainly shows. They contradict eyewitnesses with astonishing confidence, even when the evidence leaves virtually no room for doubt. Much of the violence appears heartbreakingly trivial—a slight, an insult, a perceived challenge to someone’s reputation. Masculinity has been reduced to performance: proving toughness, defending street credibility, and refusing to appear weak, no matter how catastrophic the consequences.

    The most revealing moments arrive when the performance finally begins to crack. Even after hours of deception, many of these teenagers continue demanding to be released. “I just want to go home,” they protest, genuinely bewildered that anyone would keep them in custody. Then comes the moment detectives often recognize before the suspect does. Watching through a one-way mirror, an investigator quietly observes, “It’s starting to dawn on him. He’s realizing this isn’t a game anymore.” You can almost see reality entering the room. Sometimes the teenager collapses into uncontrollable sobbing. Sometimes he erupts in rage, screaming at officers, pounding walls, or thrashing against restraints. The emotional explosion is not simply fear of prison. It is the violent collision between fantasy and consequence. The imaginary world in which bravado guaranteed invincibility suddenly gives way to one governed by handcuffs, courtrooms, grieving families, and prison sentences measured in decades.

    That, to me, is the deepest tragedy. These young offenders often seem to inhabit a fever dream in which they are the untouchable protagonists of their own stories, convinced that swagger, intimidation, or reputation can somehow suspend the ordinary laws of cause and effect. Reality arrives only after irreversible damage has been done—to victims, to families, and ultimately to themselves. One cannot help wondering how many parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, or counselors warned them where this road would lead. Perhaps they all did. But adolescence possesses a peculiar arrogance: the conviction that every caution applies to someone else. The young man who believes he is the smartest person in the room often discovers otherwise only after the interrogation begins. Every time I watch that realization settle across a suspect’s face, I hear my former student’s voice from twenty-six years ago. The Old Gs, he said, feared the teenagers—not because the teenagers were stronger or smarter, but because they had not yet learned that reality is undefeated.

  • The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    My video production is on hold because I find myself interrogating my place in the watch world. I have little appetite for another “State of the Collection” video. That genre has become the YouTube equivalent of a sitcom reunion special: everyone knows the script before the opening credits roll. Likewise, I am convinced I have exhausted the lexicon of watch addiction. I have dissected acquisition syndrome, rationalization, buyer’s remorse, dopamine hits, grail watches, collection pruning, and every psychological contortion a watch enthusiast performs while pretending another purchase is somehow “different this time.” At some point, the commentary begins recycling itself, and I have no desire to become an echo of my former self.

    The irony is that none of this means I love watches any less. They remain as captivating—and as capable of hijacking my imagination—as they were twenty years ago. Two pieces continue to haunt me. The first is the Grand Seiko SBGP009, whose champagne-silver dial possesses the quiet authority of vintage elegance while its quartz movement drifts no more than ten seconds in an entire year. The second is the Orient Star M42 Diver 1964 Recreation (RE-AU0503N), a watch that somehow manages to look both nostalgic and purposeful without descending into retro cosplay. My greatest misfortune is that neither watch is outrageously expensive. The Grand Seiko costs only about three thousand dollars, and the Orient Star about one thousand. I almost wish they were twice as expensive. Overpriced luxury has an odd virtue: it occasionally protects us from ourselves.

    Meanwhile, most of my creative energy has migrated to my blog. There I can pursue ideas that would suffocate inside a fifteen-minute YouTube video. I can move from watches to literature, from moral philosophy to true crime, from AI to theology without asking whether the algorithm will punish me for changing lanes. The writing feels richer, stranger, and ultimately more meaningful. Unfortunately, blogs occupy the cultural equivalent of a deserted side street while YouTube resembles Times Square. One offers freedom without an audience; the other offers an audience that constantly demands the familiar. Whether I can remain content scribbling thoughtful essays into relative obscurity is a question I have not yet answered.

    One conclusion, however, no longer requires interrogation. I am an incurable watch enthusiast. There is no treatment, no twelve-step program, no miraculous cure. I have accepted that reality. My task is not to extinguish the fascination but to discipline it. I must keep reminding myself that admiring a watch is not the same thing as needing to own it. Beauty can be appreciated without becoming another possession. In fact, the older I become, the more I suspect that an overcrowded collection diminishes rather than enriches the experience, spreading affection so thinly that no single watch receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps the highest form of collecting is learning that appreciation sometimes reaches its fullest expression the moment you decide to walk away.

    Happy Fourth, everyone.

  • The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

    The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

      The algorithms at Hulu and Netflix have learned one undeniable fact about me: I am powerless to resist true crime. Every evening they present another descent into human depravity, as if politely asking, Would you like to witness civilization unravel once more? More often than not, I oblige. Among the many stories they have served me, one from Netflix’s Worst Neighbor Ever has lingered in my mind. The episode, “Midwest Meltdown,” begins not with a monster but with a woman who once fit comfortably into her small-town community. Moncy Shirley was a respected nurse in Richmond Hill, Indiana, living what appeared to be an ordinary life. Then came divorce. Her husband left, and it was as though she resolved to reclaim a youth she believed had been stolen from her. She plunged into a whirlwind of dating, flaunted her sexual adventures with startling indiscretion, and cultivated an image built on expensive cars, cosmetic surgery, and perpetual reinvention. Her neighbors had admired the earlier Moncy—the dependable wife and community member whose values resembled their own. The new Moncy seemed intoxicated by exhibitionism. One neighbor, disturbed by Moncy’s increasingly explicit stories, decided she no longer wanted her daughter exposed to such influences. It was not merely the promiscuity that alienated people; it was the sense that Moncy had begun treating every social norm as an obstacle to be mocked.

      Then came Mark Leonard, a man whose appearance alone seemed to advertise bad decisions. With frosted blond hair, puka-shell necklaces, and the slick confidence of a carnival swindler, Leonard looked less like a trustworthy neighbor than someone who would sell counterfeit watches from the trunk of a car. The documentary patiently assembles his résumé of deception: woman after woman manipulated, savings siphoned away, trust converted into profit. Leonard did not simply enter the neighborhood; he infected it. Moncy, meanwhile, withdrew further from longtime friends while publicly displaying her romance with theatrical defiance. The couple’s conspicuous affection on the front porch felt less like love than a declaration that ordinary standards of decency no longer applied to them. Their message seemed unmistakable: our freedom is none of your business.

      That illusion exploded—literally—on the night of November 10, 2012. Moncy’s home became the epicenter of a blast so violent that it leveled neighboring houses and transformed a quiet subdivision into what aerial footage resembled after a military strike. Investigators from the ATF quickly concluded this was no accidental gas leak. Evidence pointed instead to meticulous planning: removed gas valves, a microwave modified as a delayed ignition device, and a conspiracy involving Moncy, Mark Leonard, and his brother to stage a fire for a $300,000 insurance payout. Their greed weaponized an entire neighborhood. Two innocent people died. Dozens suffered injuries. Families lost homes that had taken decades to build. One chilling detail captures the moral inversion at the heart of the crime: Moncy carefully arranged for someone to care for her cat before the explosion while displaying astonishing indifference toward the hundreds of human beings living just beyond her property line.

      Listening to the survivors, I was struck not only by their grief but by their bewilderment. They had welcomed Moncy into their community, befriended her, trusted her, and watched her transform into someone willing to sacrifice their lives for money and fantasy. Many eventually left Richmond Hill, unable to bear living among the memories of that night. Moncy received a fifty-year prison sentence. Mark Leonard was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2018. Yet the moral force of the story reaches beyond criminal justice. “Midwest Meltdown” is ultimately about what happens when freedom is severed from responsibility. Moncy came to believe that happiness meant satisfying every appetite, flaunting every impulse, and treating other people as incidental to her own self-expression. The residents of Richmond Hill understood freedom differently—as something inseparable from loyalty, trust, and mutual obligation. That contrast explains why the explosion feels larger than an insurance scam. It is the physical manifestation of a moral philosophy in which the self becomes the highest authority and the community is reduced to collateral damage. The lesson is difficult but indispensable: our lives are not private playgrounds. They are bound to the lives of others, and the choices we make inevitably either strengthen the communities that sustain us or, as in Richmond Hill, leave them in ruins.

    1. My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

      My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

      One of my deepest regrets is that I spent too much of my youth believing my life belonged entirely to me. My guiding assumption was simple: no one would tell me how to live. My purpose was to maximize my own pleasure, satisfy my own desires, and remain largely indifferent to everyone else’s concerns. It was the moral logic of consumer culture: pursue your happiness, avoid breaking the law, pay your bills, and you’ve fulfilled your obligations.

      I eventually discovered that this philosophy is far less harmless than it appears.

      A life organized around self-indulgence inevitably spills over onto other people. It makes us impatient with inconvenience, dismissive of others’ needs, and blind to the quiet opportunities for generosity that present themselves every day. We become the center of our own private universe, with everyone else relegated to supporting characters. The damage is often subtle rather than spectacular, but it is damage nonetheless. A narcissistic life does not merely impoverish the self; it leaves everyone around it slightly diminished as well.

      Selfishness is easy because it is our default setting. Left to our own devices, we naturally drift toward comfort, appetite, vanity, and self-justification. That is one reason I find myself drawn to the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Both insist upon a profoundly counterintuitive claim: your life is not your possession. It is a gift entrusted to you for the benefit of others. Meaning is discovered not by gratifying every impulse but by cultivating goodness, practicing service, and accepting the humbling truth that fulfillment arrives only after the ego relinquishes its throne. Paradoxically, by surrendering yourself, you find yourself. By enthroning yourself, you begin the slow process I have elsewhere called Gollumification—the gradual shrinking of the soul under the weight of its own appetites.

      Yet I cannot persuade myself that religion is the only path to such a life.

      Over the years I have known people whose moral seriousness seems almost entirely independent of religious belief. One of my students, originally from Hungary, was raised by atheist parents. Nevertheless, they instilled in their daughter a remarkable sense of integrity, discipline, humility, and social responsibility. She carries herself with a maturity that cannot be reduced either to religious doctrine or to secular ideology. Her character suggests that moral formation can emerge from devoted parents who treat virtue not as theology but as a way of life.

      Then there is my friend Leo, whom I have known for twenty-five years. To my knowledge, he is not religious, yet he embodies many of the virtues that religious traditions hold up as ideals. He loves his wife deeply. He delights in his three children. He never misses one of their games or school events, not out of obligation but because he genuinely wants to be there. He works tirelessly, not to accumulate status or luxury, but to give his family security and opportunity. He does not complain. He does not seem enslaved by addiction or restless consumption. He possesses an enthusiasm for ordinary life that feels almost inexhaustible.

      What impresses me most is that Leo never performs his goodness. He does not advertise his virtues, lecture others about morality, or congratulate himself for living well. His life is his argument. Watching him, I often have the impression that decency is simply woven into the fabric of his character. He seems to have found the narrow road almost instinctively, without theology serving as his guide. That reality leaves me genuinely puzzled. If the narrow road can be discovered apart from religion, then the relationship between faith and virtue is more mysterious than I once believed. Leo remains one of the strongest arguments against any simplistic claim that morality depends entirely upon religious belief.

      I am not built the way Leo appears to be. My own temperament is far more susceptible to vanity, distraction, and what I call Gollumification. Left unexamined, I drift toward self-absorption with alarming ease. That is why spiritual questions continue to exert such power over me. They are not abstract philosophical puzzles but practical necessities. I need habits, disciplines, and ideas that continually pull me away from myself. Perhaps if my instincts naturally inclined toward generosity, as Leo’s seem to, religion would occupy far less space in my imagination. But because I know the creature I am capable of becoming, I cannot stop asking whether there exists a truer way to live than the one my default setting so eagerly proposes.

    2. Forty Years Later, I Finally Learned How to Teach Writing

      Forty Years Later, I Finally Learned How to Teach Writing

      This morning was bittersweet. Assuming I don’t substantially revise my curriculum for one final spring semester, I may have written my last syllabus after forty years of teaching college composition.

      My freshmen will spend the semester wrestling with subjects that would have been unimaginable when I began teaching in the 1980s. They will analyze the epidemic of sports betting in a culture of loneliness, examine how algorithmic platforms reshape identity and ambition, and challenge the mythology of the self-made man through the life and writings of Frederick Douglass.

      As I finished organizing my notes, an uncomfortable realization settled over me: I am retiring just as I feel I have finally learned how to do this job well.

      I have always been a slow learner. It took me four decades to discover how to design a writing course that feels intellectually coherent rather than merely competent. Only now do I feel that the readings, assignments, and classroom conversations reinforce one another with genuine purpose. Just as the picture has come into focus, I find myself stepping off the stage.

      I also have mixed feelings about OpenAI platforms. On one hand, they have created an endless stream of grading headaches. Every semester brings hundreds of essays that bear the unmistakable fingerprints of AI splatter—competent-looking prose that collapses under scrutiny because no real mind seems to inhabit it. I return many of these papers with one instruction: start over.

      Yet these same tools have also made teaching writing more intellectually exciting than it has been in years. I have used them to sharpen essay prompts, generate competing arguments, refine classroom activities, and demonstrate to students how AI can become an editorial collaborator rather than an intellectual substitute. I realize that sounds almost sacrilegious coming from a writing professor, but adapting to these technologies has rekindled my curiosity about cognition, literacy, learning, and composition. We do not yet know where this technological revolution is taking us, and I doubt anyone can fully control its direction. But the questions it raises are among the most fascinating of my career.

      My greatest concern is not artificial intelligence itself. It is the widening gap between students who possess deep literacy and those who do not. Students who have spent years reading demanding books can interrogate AI, challenge its assumptions, recognize its mistakes, and use it to strengthen their own thinking. Students raised primarily on TikTok and algorithmically curated snippets often lack that foundation. For them, AI becomes less a tool than a surrogate mind—a magical genie that produces respectable-looking mediocrity while quietly encouraging them to outsource their judgment, curiosity, and intellectual will. The danger is not that AI will make students less intelligent. The danger is that it will make them comfortable never developing the habits of mind that intelligence requires.

      Teaching students to acquire the literacy necessary to use these tools wisely may become the defining challenge of higher education over the next generation. That is one reason retirement feels bittersweet. Just as this frontier is opening, I am leaving the profession.

      Looking back over forty years, however, gratitude overwhelms regret. I was fortunate to spend my working life in a profession that demanded perpetual intellectual growth. Every semester required me to become a slightly better reader, writer, and thinker. I never tired of teaching argumentation, counterarguments, rebuttals, rhetorical strategy, or the mysterious alchemy that transforms an elephantine sentence into something lean, graceful, and memorable.

      Writing has always fascinated me because most of it disappears the moment it is read. Nearly everything we encounter is competent enough, clear enough, forgettable enough. Then, every so often, a sentence possesses that rare quality I call salience. It arrests your attention. It feels inevitable, as though no other arrangement of words could possibly exist. Discovering how writers achieve that effect—how they impose order, precision, and beauty upon the chaos of language—has remained one of the enduring pleasures of my life.

      Perhaps my final lecture should not be about grammar, thesis statements, or MLA format. Perhaps I should gather these reflections into a Google Slides presentation and offer my students a panoramic view of why writing classes matter more today than at any other moment in my career. Artificial intelligence has not diminished the value of literacy. It has elevated it. In an age when machines can imitate competent prose, the truly educated writer will not be the one who produces the most words. It will be the one who possesses enough judgment, imagination, and intellectual character to know which words are worth writing in the first place.