Cinemorphosis

Blog

  • Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse, congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to leave at sixty-five, after four decades of teaching. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.

  • Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    After nearly forty years teaching college writing, I can say this without ceremony: AI didn’t knock—it walked in and rearranged the furniture. We weren’t ready. Now we’re scrambling to answer basic questions we once took for granted: What is our role? What, exactly, is our job? How do we evaluate a student’s work when the student can outsource the thinking? And how do we defend the value of higher education—especially the Humanities—to a public that is already drifting away?

    The backdrop isn’t kind. We face a culture that reads less and skims more, chasing quick hits of stimulation instead of sustained thought. The cost of college keeps rising while the promise of stable, predictable employment grows less certain. In that context, debates about AI feel less like speculation and more like triage. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape higher education; it’s how deeply and how quickly.

    In that vein, I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay “Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans” with particular interest. Kang highlights the argument of Hollis Robbins, who offers a blunt standard for survival: universities justify their existence only if they provide access to faculty whose expertise exceeds what AI can deliver. Strip away the academic language, and the message is stark: prove you offer something AI cannot, or become obsolete.

    Robbins pushes the point further. In a classroom saturated with generative AI, she predicts a severe contraction—potentially eliminating a large share of faculty positions. Courses built around foundational, repeatable skills—the kind often taught in the first two years—are the most vulnerable. Specialized fields, particularly those grounded in rare knowledge or deep cultural expertise, are far less exposed. The more interchangeable the instruction, the easier it is to replace.

    That leaves instructors like me in an uneasy position. I’ve spent decades teaching literacy and critical thinking—the very skills that AI now performs with unnerving competence. If Robbins is right, those of us in broad, introductory disciplines face the sharpest edge of change. The specialists may endure. The rest of us may be folded into what she envisions as a rapid and unforgiving contraction.

    This isn’t a distant possibility. It’s a present demand. Adapt—or be edited out.

  • From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    A fad is a brief hallucination we agree to share. It arrives with a rush of hype, a whiff of urgency, and the faint threat that you’re already late. I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when the parade was loud and shameless: the Hula Hoop spinning on suburban hips, vinyl and spandex chasing the “wet look” like a costume department for perspiration, pukka shells clicking at the throat, CB radios chirping coded bravado, clackers smashing together with cheerful menace, 8-tracks thudding mid-song, streakers sprinting through polite society, bean bags swallowing spines, water beds sloshing like inland seas, lava lamps bubbling in slow hypnosis, and the Pet Rock—a joke that sold by the millions because everyone understood it was a joke.

    Two traits define a fad. First, it burns fast and dies young. Second, it requires distance to reveal how thin it was. Time is the solvent; it dissolves the glamour and leaves the residue of absurdity. We laugh because the stakes were low. No one built a moral code around a lava lamp.

    But something has shifted. The fad has learned to dress itself as a life. What used to be a passing amusement now arrives with a manifesto, a diet, a wardrobe, and a tone of sermon. A temporary preference hardens into a permanent identity. Call this Fad Apotheosis—the elevation of the trivial into the sacred, the conversion of a momentary craze into a governing philosophy. It is the difference between owning a thing and being owned by it.

    The present offers a crowded gallery of such conversions. Dietary choices expand into totalizing creeds; efficiency hacks become liturgies; aesthetic preferences acquire moral teeth. A person is no longer someone who eats a certain way or experiments with a regimen; he becomes the regimen, a walking billboard for it. The point is no longer practice but proclamation—signals sent to a tribe that rewards conformity with applause and dissent with exile.

    This inflation does not occur in a vacuum. A culture that reads less and scrolls more trades patience for immediacy and argument for alignment. Nuance is heavy; slogans are light. In that environment, a fad’s simplicity is not a bug but a feature. It offers clean edges, quick belonging, and the comfort of certainty. It replaces the slow work of thinking with the fast pleasure of declaring.

    The cost is not subtle. When identity is outsourced to trends, judgment atrophies. Public life begins to resemble a stage populated by performers fluent in lifestyle rhetoric and thin on competence. The same habits that turn a diet into a doctrine can turn a platform into a career and a persona into a credential. The result is a politics of surfaces—loud, confident, and frequently hollow.

    A society saturated with such performances doesn’t flourish; it frays. Attention splinters, conversation coarsens, and the serious tasks—those that require continuity, humility, and evidence—lose ground to spectacle. The nation doesn’t collapse in a single dramatic gesture; it erodes in a thousand small substitutions, trading substance for style until it can no longer tell the difference.

    The remedy is unfashionable. It requires recovering the ability to see a fad as a fad: a diversion, not a doctrine. It asks for a renewed appetite for depth—reading that resists skimming, arguments that resist slogans, and commitments that outlast the season. In practical terms, it means choosing people who do the work over people who perform it.

    Until then, we inhabit a curious landscape: a fever swamp of borrowed identities, where trends masquerade as truths and the trivial is worn like a creed. The exit is not complicated. It is simply difficult: step back, refuse the costume, and let the lava lamp return to being what it always was—pleasant, pointless light.

  • The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    When Tom Junod discussed his memoir with Andrew Sullivan, he described a decision that feels almost subversive now: no contemporary therapy-speak. No “toxic masculinity,” no diagnostic shorthand, no tidy labels to anesthetize the mess. A book set in the ’60s and ’70s would speak in the idiom of those years. The wager is simple and risky: if you refuse the crutch of modern jargon, the character has to carry the weight. By that measure, Junod wins. He builds a father who does what Dashiell Hammett demanded of fiction—gets up, steps off the page, and stands there, unavoidable.

    The book—In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man—borrows its title from the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times,” and the borrowing is apt. Junod’s father, Lou, is less a man than a doctrine delivered at high volume. He is a born pontificator with a salesman’s grin and a peacock’s vanity. He scents himself like a department store—colognes, sprays, balms layered into a cloud—and tans his body into a lacquered bronze that seems to announce itself before he enters a room. He sells handbags, favors turtlenecks, and at the beach reduces himself to a strip of fabric and a glare. He cleans his navel with a witch-hazel-dipped Q-tip and instructs his son to follow suit, as if hygiene were a moral philosophy.

    Compulsion runs through him like a live wire. If you prefer a term to describe his sexual compulsions, call it satyriasis and be done with it, but the word hardly captures the sprawl: gambling, philandering, bullying—habits that bloom into a personality. A man who cannot govern himself makes governance his obsession; he attempts to administer his household the way a tyrant administers a province—loudly, relentlessly, and with a curious conviction that control is the same thing as order. The result is a home pressurized to the point of fatigue, where even silence feels like a reprimand.

    Junod’s refusal to retrofit his childhood with modern language sharpens the pain rather than softening it. There’s a scene that lands like a held breath finally released: in Lou’s absence, the mother reappears as herself. Her face opens. Her voice steadies. When Tom reads her a poem, she brightens—really brightens—and offers the simplest, most generous counsel: read it aloud; the sound will teach you what the page cannot. It is a small moment, but it reveals the scale of what has been missing. When Lou is present, he occupies the air itself. He doesn’t just enter rooms; he consumes them, a man with a gift for turning oxygen into pressure.

    Listen to the audiobook—as Sullivan sensibly suggests—and Lou’s voice acquires a second life. You don’t merely read him; you hear the cadence, the certainty, the unearned authority. It is a performance you cannot switch off, which is precisely the point. The book’s power comes from that persistence. It is painful, yes, but the pain is disciplined into narrative momentum.

    If the experience feels familiar, it should. The era produced a certain model of man—postwar, unapologetic, loud as a virtue—who treated appetite as remedy and certainty as proof. He read “women’s magazines” out in the open, said things he couldn’t defend, and considered objection to his will a breach of etiquette. The code was simple: be emphatic, be unyielding, be right by volume. Junod doesn’t argue with that code; he incarnates it. He takes the template and gives it a name, a voice, a set of rituals so specific they become unforgettable.

    In doing so, he offers a quiet rebuke to our current habit of explanation. You don’t need a glossary to understand this man. You need a page, a room, and the patience to watch what happens when he walks in.

  • I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes with my favorite podcasters and YouTubers and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. I’ve taught college writing for nearly forty years, but I don’t feel compelled to sermonize about it online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. Faced with the spectacle of success, I drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody.

    Two modest ideas interrupt that spiral. The first is a phrase my daughter and I use over a game of Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a full house, a small straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions land between 650 and 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 425 calories in forty-four minutes and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does.

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Moving forward, I will continue to write a miscellany of things on my blog, which is a sort of proxy for therapy–as is my piano and exercise–and I will stop trying to be a YouTube star and tell my stories on my small piano channel because that’s where my heart is at and I don’t feel I have anything deeper to offer the fusion of my piano compositions and the fable-like stories that spawned them.

  • Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    When I watched Send Help two nights ago, I kept waiting for the horror to announce itself with a straight face. It never did. The film opens in a fluorescent office where Bradley Preston—an heir in a blazer, a man-child in executive drag—struts through a company he inherited the way one inherits a bad habit. His confidence is all surface tension: glossy, brittle, and one sharp object away from collapse. From the first scene, it plays less like a fright fest and more like a comedy that knows its punchlines will land harder if they’re soaked in blood.

    The supporting cast speaks fluent “bro,” a dialect of buzzwords and chest-thumping that echoes the bleak satire of In the Company of Men—only here the jokes move faster and the air is less suffocating. Early on, the movie tips its hand with a small, perfect humiliation: Linda Liddle, a socially awkward office worker with Survivor dreams, approaches Bradley with a chunk of tuna clinging stubbornly to her cheek. He can’t hear a word she says. The camera betrays him—cuts to a close-up of his eye, deranged and hypnotized by that fleck of fish like it’s a moral crisis. The gag is surgical. It reduces Bradley to appetite and Linda to spectacle in a single, merciless beat.

    The degradation doesn’t stop there. Bradley and his phalanx of bros revel in their own language, a lexicon designed to inflate mediocrity into swagger. Then the film detonates its premise: a flight to Thailand, a thunderstorm, a crash, an island. Suddenly the hierarchy flips. Bradley’s confidence evaporates in the salt air, and Linda—quietly competent, long dismissed—becomes indispensable. Her survival skills, once a punchline, turn into the only currency that matters. The movie sharpens into what it always wanted to be: a comedy of reversal, where a cocky lightweight is schooled by the person he spent years underestimating.

    Yes, there’s horror here—gore, shocks, the occasional indulgence in spectacle—but it all feels enlisted in the service of the joke. The violence doesn’t deepen the dread; it punctuates the satire. The film moves briskly, with clever turns that keep it buoyant where LaBute’s film sinks into a kind of moral tar. And yet the two works feel like distant relatives: both obsessed with cruelty, both fascinated by the theater of male arrogance, both willing to strip their characters bare. The difference is that Send Help has the decency to laugh while it does the stripping—and in that laughter, it finds its edge.

  • The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Roland Beavers, a thirty-year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Roland was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Roland paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Roland would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday Roland met a new blonde, somehow more beautiful than the previous one. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach’s imported sand.

    On one such afternoon, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Roland in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Roland’s methods. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Roland give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Roland began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Roland’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Roland was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Roland died on the spot.

    I was never the same after that incident. I obsessed over Roland’s demise, I suffered nightmares about it, and I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. 

    About six months after the incident, a peculiar daydream began visiting me with unnerving regularity. In it, I did not watch Roland die from a distance; I inhabited his final moments, seeing the world through his eyes. As his body failed, his mind seemed to step into an alternate life—a gentler, unperformed existence. He was no longer the peacock on the grassy knoll but a husband, walking along the shoreline with his wife, four children orbiting them in laughter, and two rescue dogs bounding through the surf. The air carried a soft, almost cinematic music. The sky was a pale, forgiving blue. Sunlight fell not harshly, but tenderly, as if it had chosen to console rather than expose.

    In that imagined reprieve, Roland turned toward something higher—toward God—and spoke with a clarity he had never shown in life. He promised to abandon the theater of conquest, to relinquish the hollow rituals of charm and pursuit, to grow into the man he had postponed becoming. It was as if the world had paused to offer him a final rehearsal for redemption. The horizon opened. A stillness settled over everything. And within that stillness, he seemed to experience, perhaps for the first time, a quiet and unadorned peace—a beauty that required no performance and asked nothing in return.

     And just as the possibility of redemption flickered into being—it was extinguished. His body failed. The bee won. His life ended mid-sentence.

    I carried that ending with me to the piano, where I tried to make sense of Roland’s death the only way I knew how. For two years I worked on “The Ballad of Roland Beavers,” a piece that refused to resolve cleanly because the life it memorialized never did. Nearly fifty years later, I still play it. The notes haven’t dulled. Neither has the lesson. Some performances end not with a bow, but with a collapse—too little, too late, and no encore.

  • Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and Ari Aster’s Eddington, characters pursue power with a confidence that borders on delusion. What begins as bold ambition gradually mutates into hubris, and ultimately into a distorted relationship with power itself. In Kipling’s story, this transformation is dramatic and mythic, culminating in a literal fall from godhood. In Eddington, the transformation is more diffuse and contemporary, shaped by media ecosystems, ideological certainty, and the intoxicating feedback loops of modern influence.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare how both works portray the dangers of unrestrained ambition and the intoxication of power. In your analysis, consider how each work defines “power,” how characters justify their rise, and how their environments either reinforce or challenge their sense of authority. You should also examine how hubris manifests differently in each work—whether as overt self-deification or as a quieter, more insidious certainty—and how these differences shape each narrative’s resolution.

    In developing your argument, you may consider the following questions: Does power corrupt in the same way across different historical and cultural contexts, or does it simply adapt to new environments? Is the downfall in each work caused by external forces, internal flaws, or a combination of both? To what extent are the characters victims of their circumstances versus architects of their own collapse? Support your claims with specific evidence from both texts, and be sure to include a counterargument that challenges your interpretation before offering a rebuttal.

  • Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    I drank my first protein shake in 1975, at thirteen—an age when you’ll ingest anything if it promises muscle. It was milk and two heroic scoops of Bob Hoffman’s “Super Hi-Proteen,” a granular blend of soy, brown sugar, and the kind of mystery ingredients that seemed to come with a warning label in spirit if not in ink. I swallowed it like a pledge of allegiance. Years later, I realized I’d been spooning down hog slop with a marketing budget.

    Protein powders, of course, grew up. Whey replaced soy, monk fruit and stevia replaced sugar, and the flavor profile advanced from “punishment” to “tolerable.” I returned, cautiously, folding a scoop into my oatmeal or stirring it into yogurt. A lifetime lifter develops a habit I’ll call protein insurance—the quiet reassurance that your muscles won’t starve because you forgot to eat like a grown man.

    And so the shake became a fixture—less a meal than a policy.

    Bodybuilders and civilians alike now drink these things by the gallon, not just for insurance but for convenience. Which raises a question that refuses to stay polite: assuming we’re not slowly marinating ourselves in trace metals such as lead and cadmium, are we doing something more subtle—something that damages the soul? Rachel Sugar poses a version of this in her Atlantic essay “Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent,” where the modern ideal appears in a hoodie: a tech bro so devoted to efficiency that he outsources eating to a beige slurry. Why cook, why chew, why pause, when a bottle can reduce nourishment to a task you can complete between emails?

    Enter Soylent, the Willy Wonka chewing gum of Silicon Valley—a full meal compressed into a swallow, a dinner table dissolved into a transaction. At best, it tastes like competent baby food. At worst, it tastes like ambition without appetite.

    Soylent had its moment and then receded, but the protein shake did not. It adapted, multiplied, rebranded. Giants like The Coca-Cola Company now print money selling pre-made bottles fortified with protein, “adaptogens,” and antioxidant halos. The label reads like a résumé; the experience reads like chalk. A nation too busy to cook, trained to snack, and newly anxious about muscle retention—thanks to the rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists—is primed to accept frictionless nutrition. Open. Sip. Be optimized.

    None of this is accidental. The arithmetic of food is unforgiving: real food spoils and yields modest margins; ultra-processed food endures and pays dividends. The industry didn’t just produce these powders—it educated us to desire them, dressed them in the language of health, beauty, and time savings, and invited us to trade ritual for efficiency.

    Last week, I tried a thought experiment on my writing students. They’re working on an argument about whether ultra-processed foods are villains to both body and soul.

    “Imagine,” I said, “three protein wafers a day. They regulate appetite, deliver perfect nutrition, sculpt you into an Instagram after photo, and carry you past a hundred. No cooking. No dishes. No decisions.”

    I let that sit for a moment.

    “Now imagine what disappears. The dinners that run long. The laughter that spills over the table. The argument that turns into a story. The quiet, ordinary pleasure of chewing.”

    In this optimized life, your insurer applauds and your followers multiply. But you become something flatter—efficient, photogenic, and faintly ghostlike. Not dead, exactly. Just thinned out where life used to be.

    I asked for a show of hands. Who would choose the wafers?

    Not one hand rose.

    For all our flirtation with powders and promises, the verdict was clear: they want to be healthy, yes—but not at the cost of becoming efficient shadows of themselves. Real food, with all its inconvenience and noise, remains the center. The shake can stay as insurance. It just can’t be the policy that replaces the warmth of home.

  • Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Five days ago, an hour before my afternoon class, I performed my sacred office ritual: a Barbell’s Salty Peanut protein bar followed by a red apple. The pairing is non-negotiable. The bar coats my teeth in a fudge-like film; the apple arrives like a janitor, scrubbing the residue with righteous crunch. It’s dental choreography. It works—until it doesn’t.

    Mid-bar, I bit down and hit something that did not belong in the human diet. A crack, a jolt, a flash of pain in my upper left molar that suggested litigation. I spit out the offending bite and there it was: a small, defiant piece of gravel. Not metaphorical gravel. Geological. I briefly entertained the idea of a calcified peanut shell, but no—this was the kind of object that builds driveways, not snacks.

    I discarded the rock, finished the bar like a man negotiating with fate, and approached the apple with the caution of a bomb technician, chewing exclusively on my right side. The tooth protested—sharp when I bit down, sensitive when I dared sip cold sparkling water. I called my dentist. He agreed to see me Monday while my daughters are in for their cleaning, a kind of dental drive-by.

    I told him, only half joking, that if this turns into a root canal, I’ll be leaving the country under an assumed name. My claustrophobia is not a charming quirk; it’s a governing principle. The rubber wedge they use to keep your mouth open transforms my throat into a closed border. When I can’t swallow on command, panic doesn’t knock—it kicks the door in. I am praying for a humble composite fix, something modest and merciful. A root canal would turn me into a beachside exile, scanning the horizon for dental extradition.

    As if one anxiety weren’t enough, two days later my college’s learning system—Canvas—collapsed under a ransomware attack that apparently took down thousands of schools. An hour before class, I discovered my lecture had vanished into the digital abyss. I called my engineering friend Pedro to deliver a live report of my unraveling. I told him I’d have to improvise, which in teaching is another word for “pray for coherence.”

    Then a thought arrived like a small miracle: my lectures are linked to Google Slides. If I could log into my Google account, I could resurrect the class. I told Pedro I’d head to the room early and test the login before the students arrived. I looked down at my desk—keys, empty protein bar wrapper, the usual debris of academic life—but no phone.

    “Where the hell is my phone?” I said.

    “You’re talking to me on it,” Pedro replied.

    We laughed the way men laugh when reality briefly exposes its wiring. For twelve years, Pedro has been my unofficial tech support, but informing me that the phone I was using was in my hand may be his finest work.

    Between the compromised tooth and the compromised Canvas infrastructure, I felt like a man auditioning for a nervous breakdown. Instead, I walked into class and, perversely, had one of the best sessions of the semester. We discussed ultra-processed foods—their design, their addictiveness, the way they quietly rig the game of weight management. Then I offered a heretical counterargument: homemade food can be just as seductive, just as dangerous to restraint.

    To prove the point, I pulled up a photograph from the Los Angeles Times: a $38 basturma brisket sandwich from Yerord Mas, built from Australian wagyu and dusted with cumin, garlic, and chiles. The image did not educate so much as seduce. Within seconds, my students had located the menu and confirmed the price with the forensic zeal of the hungry.

    “We should Uber to Glendale,” I said, “and call it field research.”

    At that point I added, “Some of you are going to complain to the Dean that you enrolled in a critical thinking class and all I do is talk about food.”

    They laughed—real laughter, not the polite classroom version. The room had a charged, fizzy quality, as if the collapse of Canvas had granted us permission to loosen the tie a notch. Chaos had stripped the day down to its essentials: conversation, curiosity, a shared joke.

    I needed that laugh more than I care to admit.

    Now I’m waiting. Will the dentist deliver a quick, civilized repair, or will I be pricing one-way tickets and practicing aliases on a beach somewhere in Mexico, scanning the horizon for a man carrying a drill?

    In the meantime, I chew carefully, avoid gravel, and consider the possibility that the most dangerous part of my day is not the curriculum, but the snack.