Cinemorphosis

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  • Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    It’s rare that I fall in love with books these days, but when it happens, I’m grateful because reading reminds me of my glory days, the early 80s when I consumed books with ferocity, imaginative pleasure, and obligation like a bodybuilder taking protein powder and creatine. Three major factors have curtailed my reading of books: One, I’ve grown so cynical over the years that I’ve come to the belief that 99% of books are in actuality just a short story or essay with padding. An author has an intriguing idea, and they sit down with their agent and cook up a book that is mostly chicanery with a dash of substance. 

    Then three days ago, I heard actor Zosia Mamet talking about her memoir Does This Make Me Funny?, a collection of essays, with KCRW host Sam Sanders, and I was so struck by her depth of wit, intelligence, and moral perspective that I immediately bought her book, or I should say the Kindle eBook version of it. Even more rare than buying books as intellectual property, it is even rarer that I buy a hard copy of something, unless it is a kettlebell training book or a cookbook like Miyoko Schimmer’s The Vegan Creamery. 

    Getting most of my books on Kindle speaks to the second reason my reading has diminished. The physical act of reading is unpleasant. Holding the book, turning the pages, getting into a comfortable position, attenuating my eyes to the various font sizes. I find the whole thing disconcerting and unpleasant, like trying to figure out the seat positions, buttons, and levers of an unfamiliar car. The most comfortable forms of reading are either sitting at my desktop and reading the Kindle on a 27-inch screen or reading while sitting in bed with a 16-inch laptop.

    The third reason I don’t read as much is that the Internet and its attention economy have fried my brain over the decades. The attention muscles inside my cortex have atrophied to a woeful state. 

    But occasionally a rose grows out of the cracks in the cement sidewalk, and such is the case with Zosia Mamet’s memoir, as witty, deep, self-deprecating, and salient as the author speaking to Sam Sanders three days ago. Reading the memoir is to connect with someone for whom her writing voice and the core of her being are the same. The result is something distinctive and salient, something that recoils and then snaps forward to leave its literary fangs inside you. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Nabokov was like that. So was Kafka. And so is Zosia Mamet.

    I detest some confectionary celebrity memoir reeking of privilege, superfluousness, and mediocrity. None of that is in Zosia’s collection of essays. 

    As we read in Jancee Dunn’s New York Times article “At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It,” the core of her book is about her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Coming from a family that is deeply entrenched in literature and the arts is a double-edged sword with excruciating pressure to live up to superhuman expectations causing Zosia’s thorn in her side to be the constant sense that she is falling abysmally short. 

    Like the best comedia, she opts out of self-pity for humor as she does a deep dive into her anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, anorexia, and anhedonia, and all the self-destructive behaviors she succumbed to in order to overcome these afflictions. Because she knows that body dysmorphia is a delusion that hijacks her brain, she says about herself: “I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality.” 

    Which in a nutshell is the human condition: Can we trust ourselves or are we getting duped by our own fake narrative? 

    What tools from our emotional toolbox can we use to be more reliable? Perhaps comedy is one of them. Think of our irrational states: overcome by maudlin self-pity, vanity, and grandiosity, we spin grotesque narratives about ourselves that compel us to behave in ways that are ridiculous and often result in self-sabotage. Perhaps comedy is the antidote. Perhaps comedy distances us from our preposterous self-mythology and helps us in the arduous process of self-reinvention. That’s the sense I’m getting from Zosia Mamet’s very necessary book, a book that has no padding at all but has been made from a brilliant mind with blood, sweat, and tears. 

  • Last Car Syndrome

    Last Car Syndrome

    I was nearly sixty-four, four decades of teaching college writing having corroded whatever patience I once had, and I found myself drowning in self-disgust. My life, once measured in lectures and essays, had narrowed to a single, grotesque question: Camry or Accord? I fretted over it as if I were choosing a confession—Catholic or Presbyterian—with my eternal soul dangling over the dealership lot. The absurdity didn’t escape me. I had real problems: blood markers creeping upward, a rotator-cuff tear ruining kettlebell workouts, bedrooms that needed painting, twin daughters who needed driver’s training, retirement forms stacked like little gravestones, and the scramble to joint bank accounts so my younger wife wouldn’t face probate nightmares. And yet I could not stop watching YouTube reviews and refreshing Reddit threads that compared the new Camry to the Accord.

    I vacillated like a madman.

    Driving to pick up the girls from high school, I’d spot an Accord and sigh: “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. Very peaceful. Not a bad car to die in.” A second voice—practical, bored—would snap back, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” So I’d argue with myself: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely it is my Death Car.” “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

    The next day I’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and melt. “Look how it fits that color—everything’s right. Under thirty-three K and it feels Lexus-adjacent.” My inner realist would applaud the improvement: “At least you’re not talking about death. Progress.” Then the skeptic: “But the Accord is quieter. I need quiet. And the Accord dealership is walking distance—drop it off, walk home. That’s handy.” Followed by doubt: “Wait—people say the new Accord looks like a Ford Taurus. Can I live with that kind of ridicule?”

    It went on and on. My wife learned to read my posture: the slight slump, the hand rubbing the back of my neck—the tell that I was about to launch into Camry-Accord hell. She would cut me off before I even opened my mouth: “Stop right there, buster. I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

    For a while I wallowed alone in the torment.

    Then one morning I woke up and declared I didn’t need a car at all. I’d driven, on average, three thousand miles a year for the last decade—hardly the mileage of a man who needed a shiny new vehicle. The decision felt radical: my daughters could take the older Accord, my wife the newer one, and I’d borrow a car when necessary. No purchase. No shiny new vehicle gathering dust like a suburban reliquary in the garage. Why buy something to admire between piano practice and Netflix binges? I told myself the choice was genius. 

    But after snacking on a virtuous bowl of buckwheat groats with unsweetened soy milk, banana slices, pumpkin seeds, cinnamon, and a dash of manuka honey, the energizing snack snapped me out of my delusion.. Suddenly the whole farce of my deliberation looked naked: I was suffering from Last-Car Syndrome: the unconscious understanding that in my mid-sixties, my next car purchase was essentially my Death Car, so I avoided the purchase like I avoided death. 

    Fortified by my power breakfast, I stood up, chest puffed like a man claiming moral clarity, and barked at the ceiling, “Who am I kidding? I’m buying a new car. I deserve it.”
    So now it’s only a scheduling question—six months from now, or next week.

  • The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    Recently I dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it like they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side like a misplaced airport refugee, and then I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop. This was not their first rodeo: it was their fifth marriage each, the residue of decades spent riding the carousel of lust, liquor, and litigation. Their message was plastered across the sky: hedonism may lead to divorce court, bankruptcy, and sun-damaged skin, but look—if you just keep grinning, it’s practically a lifestyle brand.

    I felt an almost religious revulsion at the billboard. It was hollow cheer dressed up as wisdom, a glossy ad for despair masquerading as joie de vivre. Pulling my luggage closer, I glanced at my watch and felt relief that my wife and daughters would be joining me soon. The counterfeit joy overhead only made me hunger more for the real life that I have.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground-for-the-aged about forty-five miles from Orlando. If synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties sounds like paradise, The Villages will sell you heaven with a tiki umbrella on top. For anyone with taste, patience, or shame, it reads more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay staff to micromanage your leisure until even leisure looks like a job interview.

    The film’s most magnetic human mess is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who’s practiced charm until it’s fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment and in a scene that sticks with you he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it’s a slow, merciless clock—and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can be prison for someone whose last liberty was earned by deceit.

    The director never sneers at the subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable: it’s a retirement complex caught mid-regression, a carnival mirror that reflects geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The architecture of fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom; it’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops. For a year I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. Some Kind of Heaven demolished the fantasy with water ballet and sedated margaritas. The obsession evaporated. Apparently, all it took was Neil Sedaka and a ceiling-fan stare.

  • When It Comes to Swim Trunks the Size of a Hotel Mint, Maybe Opt Out

    When It Comes to Swim Trunks the Size of a Hotel Mint, Maybe Opt Out

    The New York Times article, titled “Skimpy Men’s Swimming Briefs Are Making a Splash,” offers a solemn dispatch from the front lines of GLP-1 drugs, but I would guess that men—having exhausted every form of visible self-optimization—are now expressing their Ozempic-enabled slenderness via tiny, Lycra-clad declarations of status. We’re talking male bikinis, or what I like to call the ego sling.

    Apparently, if you’re dropping $18,000 a year to chemically suppress your appetite and shed your humanity one subcutaneous injection at a time, you deserve the privilege of looking like a Bond villain’s pool boy. I suppose this is the endgame: pay to waste away, then wrap what’s left in a luxury logoed banana peel.

    Luxury underwear companies, never ones to miss a chance to monetize body dysmorphia, are now marketing these second-skin briefs not as mere swimwear, but as power statements. To wear them is to say: “I’ve defeated fat, joy, modesty, and comfort in one fell swoop.”

    I’m almost 64. My aspirations remain high—ideally, I’d like to look like a special-ops operator on vacation in Sardinia. But I know my place. I wear boxer-style swim trunks, the cloth of the pragmatic and the semi-dignified. They’re not exciting, but neither is seeing a sun-leathered septuagenarian adjust a spandex slingshot over a suspicious tan line.

    There’s a difference between being aspirational and being delusional. The former means striving for vitality, strength, and energy. The latter means stuffing yourself into a satirical undergarment and pretending you’re a twenty-two-year-old wide receiver with a sponsorship deal.

    To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. Some of it deserves to be left in the chlorine-stained past, right next to Axe body spray and Ed Hardy tank tops.

  • The Aesthetic Pharmaceutical Complex (a College Essay Prompt)

    The Aesthetic Pharmaceutical Complex (a College Essay Prompt)

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that evaluates this claim: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (e.g., Ozempic/Wegovy) offer a Faustian bargain–they blunt appetite and deliver rapid results, but at significant cultural, moral, and social costs. Examine whether these drugs simply cure an individual problem or whether they reshape appetite, pleasure, gender and marital dynamics, class inequality, body aesthetics, and personal agency in ways that should alarm us.

    Use Rebecca Johns (“A Diet Writer’s Regrets”), Johann Hari (“A Year on Ozempic…”), Harriet Brown (“The Weight of the Evidence”), Sandra Aamodt (“Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”), and at least two additional reputable sources of your choice. Address both sides: acknowledge the medical benefits (for diabetes, metabolic disease, disability reduction) while testing the claim that GLP-1s amount to a societal deal with the devil — trading desire, culinary culture, and autonomy for narrow aesthetic and market outcomes.

    Be sure to define terms (e.g., “Faustian bargain,” “GLP-1 drugs,” “body aesthetics”), offer evidence, and include a clear counterargument and rebuttal.

    Five Sample Thesis Statements (with mapping components)

    1. Thesis 1
       GLP-1 drugs are a Faustian bargain: they deliver rapid weight loss and metabolic benefit, but they also erode culinary pleasure, exacerbate social inequality, and replace disciplined habits with pharmaceutical dependence.
    • Mapping: (1) immediate medical and psychological benefits, (2) cultural costs to food and pleasure, (3) social/economic consequences and dependence.
    1. Thesis 2
       While GLP-1 medications can rescue lives in a clinical sense, their mainstreaming industrializes thinness—privileging aesthetics over health, amplifying economic divides, and outsourcing self-control to corporations and prescribers.
    • Mapping: (1) clinical life-saving benefits, (2) commercialization of body aesthetics, (3) economic and ethical fallout.
    1. Thesis 3
       GLP-1 drugs pose an ethical dilemma: they promise to erase cravings and curb addiction, but in doing so they risk flattening human desire, unsettling intimate relationships, and converting a public-health problem into a luxury aesthetic market.
    • Mapping: (1) pharmacological suppression of appetite, (2) impact on relationships and social life, (3) marketization and inequality.
    1. Thesis 4
       The rise of GLP-1s reframes weight management from moral failing to medicalized consumerism—undeniable benefits for some masked by troubling costs: cultural loss, shifting marital dynamics, and a dangerous dependence on biotech fixes.
    • Mapping: (1) medical reframing of obesity, (2) cultural and interpersonal costs, (3) risks of technological dependence.
    1. Thesis 5
       GLP-1 drugs give individuals the power to silence hunger, but that power comes tethered to troubling social outcomes: it amplifies privilege, intensifies pressure for aesthetic conformity, and weakens the role of habit and self-discipline in healthy living.
    • Mapping: (1) appetite suppression and individual gains, (2) exacerbation of aesthetic and class pressure, (3) erosion of habit-based agency.

    Counterargument (fair, strong):
     Proponents of GLP-1 drugs argue that calling them a “Faustian bargain” ignores the very real medical and social benefits these medications deliver. For many patients—especially those with type 2 diabetes, obesity-related hypertension, or mobility-limiting weight—GLP-1s reduce blood sugar, lower cardiovascular risk, and unlock functional gains that years of dieting could not. Early reports also show improvements in mood, self-efficacy, and social participation: when chronic hunger is quieted, people can exercise more, sleep better, and engage with life instead of being consumed by food preoccupation. From this perspective, the drugs restore agency rather than remove it; they are tools that expand options for people trapped by biology, food environments, and limited access to behavioral medicine. To label them morally corrosive risks stigmatizing patients who finally find relief.

    Rebuttal:
     That claim deserves respect—but it doesn’t dissolve the deeper social harms that mainstreaming GLP-1s threatens to produce. Medicine can relieve individual suffering while simultaneously reshaping culture in ways that reward aesthetic conformity and widen inequality: when a pharmaceutical becomes the fastest route to thinness, weight status shifts further from a health metric to a marketable badge of status, attainable first by those with money, time, and prescriber access. The drugs also substitute biochemical fixes for social solutions—affordable nutritious food, safer neighborhoods for exercise, workplace protections—that address root causes of metabolic disease; this medicalization risks absolving policymakers and corporations of responsibility. Finally, the long-term psychosocial costs are real: appetite suppression can blunt pleasure and disrupt food’s role as social glue, and couples who diverge in access to these drugs face novel tensions over desirability, divided resources, and identity. In short, GLP-1s can be miracles for patients; they can also be catalysts for cultural and economic shifts that deserve critical scrutiny before we call the bargain a fair trade.

  • Expiration Date, Please Hold

    Expiration Date, Please Hold

    I have been lifting longer than most marriages last. My barbell education began in 1974 at Earl Warren Junior High, when the world still smelled of gym chalk and cheap cologne. By twelve I was worshipping squats, chasing pec pumps, and counting out 200 grams of protein like it was scripture. Weightlifting wasn’t a hobby; it was a program for staying human in a chaotic world. Say what you will–and I will–but lifting saved me. Plain fact.

    Being a lifter has been a suite of advantages: I look younger than my driver’s license suggests, my muscular frame reads as backup insurance against chronic illnesses and wayward surgeons, and I can still train with a teenager’s ferocity. There is a chemical grace to it–the endorphin blast after a set that feels like a small, private resurrection. I am, frankly and proudly, a workout addict.

    But let’s not romanticize. Every addiction has its dark shadow. There will come a winter–perhaps in my eighties–when my body will send a clear memo: enough. The garage kettlebells I currently haul like battle standards will be too heavy, the Turkish Get-Up will turn into a consult with gravity. That prospect terrifies me because the kettlebell isn’t just steel and handle; it is a throttle on my will to live.

    We are all animated by different things. For me it is sweat, breath, the rattle of plates. For my old beloved Finnish Spitz, Gretchen, the decline arrived as a refusal of walks and food. When desire dies, everything else follows. So long as I rise hungry and ache for a workout, I count myself unexpired. When hunger and will fade, I suspect I’ll understand what Gretchen taught me without lectures, philosophy, or think pieces about aging in The Atlantic: the stopwatch of life has clicked.

    Am I foolish to have stapled my life to a routine of kettlebells and protein scoops? Have I mistaken the ritual for immortality? Maybe. Maybe I should cultivate other anchors–friends who aren’t gym bros, projects that don’t require a heart rate monitor. Or maybe I did the right thing: built a life that keeps me moving, thinking, and sufficiently irritable to remain alive.

    I don’t have the script for what comes after the iron thins. I’ve got the stubbornness to keep trying. If anyone’s got a convincing new plot, I’ll listen. Preferably between sets.

  • The Camera, the Angel, and the Mantra

    The Camera, the Angel, and the Mantra

    Last night I dreamed I was drifting up the coast with my twin daughters, sermonizing like a broken record: There is a physical world and there is a spiritual world. I said it so often I sounded like a street preacher who’d lost his pamphlets but kept his conviction.

    We stopped at a retreat, the entrance nothing more than a ladder plunging into a meadow. Down we went, rung by rung, my mantra trailing after us like incense: physical and spiritual, spiritual and physical.

    In the meadow stood an angelic blonde, late teens, all halo and camera gear, fiddling with a tripod as if she were about to capture the resurrection. Beside her was her younger brother, a sweet kid who instantly bonded with my daughters—proof that love doesn’t check the itinerary before showing up.

    I told the angelic sister this was an inconvenient day for romance, since we were traveling north to find the rest of our family. Still, watching affection bloom like an invasive weed, I conceded we might linger a little longer. My daughters, I suggested, could teach her brother the finer points of philosophy, relationships, and all the grand illusions we adults mistake for wisdom. She nodded, grateful, and asked where we were headed. I repeated: north, always north.

    Her camera squatted in the grass, looking familiar—something from an earlier chapter of the dream, mediocre at best. I bit my tongue rather than insult her equipment, repeating inwardly my refrain: The world is both physical and spiritual.

    Meanwhile, my daughters and the boy turned the ladder into a playground, climbing and descending until their thighs grew visibly muscular—an anatomical exclamation point underscoring my point. The body is flesh, the soul is fire, and the dream was happy to remind me of both.

  • The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    At nearly 64, with four decades of college writing instruction corroding his patience, Aiken Riddle found himself drowning in self-disgust. His life, once measured in lectures and essays, had shrunk to a tormenting question: Camry or Accord? He obsessed over the choice as though he were deciding between Catholicism and Presbyterianism, his eternal soul dangling in the balance. The absurdity wasn’t lost on him. He had genuine problems—blood markers creeping north, a torn rotator cuff ruining kettlebell workouts, rooms that needed paint, twin daughters who needed driver training, retirement forms stacked like gravestones, and joint bank accounts to secure before death turned his finances into a probate nightmare for his younger wife. Yet he couldn’t stop watching the YouTube videos and Reddit pages comparing the new Camry and Accord. 

    He vacillated like a madman.

    One day while driving to his twins’ high school to pick them up, he would see an Accord and would say to himself with a sigh, “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. A very peaceful color. Not a bad car to die in.” Then another voice would say, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” Then he’d retort: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely, it is my Death Car.” Upon which he’d rebuke himself, “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

    Then the next day while picking up his girls from their school, he’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and would say, “Ah, the Camry seems to be made for that color. Everything fits perfectly. Plus for under thirty-three K, I’m getting a taste of Lexus.” Upon which his other self would say, “At least you’re not talking about death. That’s an improvement.” Then he would say, “But the Accord is a quieter ride. I need quiet. Plus, the Accord dealership is walking distance away. I can drop off the Accord and walk home. That tips the advantage to Accord. But, wait, people are saying that the new Accord body style looks like an old Ford Taurus. Can I live with such ridicule?”

    Over the ensuing days, he would go back and forth. It reached the point that his wife could tell by his body language that he was about to talk about his Camry-Accord dilemma and she would interrupt him even before he opened his mouth: “Stop right there, buster! I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

    So he was alone in his torment. 

    One day he woke up and said he didn’t need a car. He calculated that for the last decade he had only driven three thousand miles a year. That hardly merited getting himself a new car. The decision was final: His daughters would take the old Accord and he’d give the newer one to his wife. He would simply borrow their cars when he needed them. 

    The decision was genius. He would not be less obliged to drive when he felt his driving skills had compromised over the last decade. He was by nature a recluse. His decision to not buy a car helped his cause. Why spend forty thousand dollars so I can behold a rarely-driven car in my garage before returning to the living room to play the piano or watch Netflix?

    He learned that sometimes a decision is not either/or. There is sometimes another option, and not getting anything can be the best one of all.  

  • Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    I work obsessively hard to develop essay prompts for my college students. When they prove effective and resonate with the students, I am gratified beyond words and will keep the prompt for perhaps too long. I have an assignment about a diet writer Rebecca Johns who in her essay “A Diet Writer’s Regrets” explores the irony and misery of gaining weight while dispensing weight-loss tips in her women’s magazine articles. Her inability to execute her own advice becomes an opportunity for my students to explore the notion of free will when it comes to weight management, especially now that GLP-1 drugs are proving that dependence on technology can be so much more reliable than aspirations toward self-agency. The students’ essays over the last four semesters have been truly engaging, revealing either their own weight-management torment or a friend or family member’s. 

    One problem, though, with an essay prompt is that as it gets used semester after semester some of the essay components, such as the counterargument-rebuttal section, start looking the same. I suspect the previously written essays become in some form or other available to the new batch of students, and for this reason, I think even the best essay prompts have a limited shelf life. 

    Another challenge with creating essay prompts is that you don’t really know how they will land with the students until you actually try it out. For example, I was very enthusiastic about my freshman composition class’s first assignment in which they write about the crisis of young men who lack a sense of belonging and purpose and how in their vulnerable state they become vulnerable to the deceptions, manipulations, and false claims of bro influencers. We studied the Liver King who is said to have made over a hundred million dollars and in his caveman cosplay, he was simply too ridiculous and grotesque for my students–all athletes–to take him seriously. He proved so absurd that whatever gravitas I was trying to squeeze out of the assignment just felt like a joke. While millions of men followed their organ-eating cult leader, my athletes were not impressed, and I felt that my essay prompt suffered for it. As a result, I doubt I’ll do that one again.

    Looking ahead, I’m thinking of Florida as less of a physical place and more of a mental fever swamp where I can explore the notion of freedom in its immature and mature incarnations. The TV comedy series It’s Florida, Man and the documentary Some Kind of Heaven about a hedonistic senior citizen home could be an effective exploration of the perils of perpetual adolescence. To avoid making the essay prompt nihilistic, I am leaning toward a contrast essay in which the students explore a more healthy kind of freedom as Cal Newport advocates in his message of “deep work”–the idea that focused work is essential to flourishing and self-fulfillment. 

    Another topic that possesses me is Hurricane Katrina, the idea that a natural disaster was made into a man-made catastrophe through neglect and reckless disregard for the people of New Orleans. This ignominious chapter in American history is a powerful window into red-lining, government corruption, and media misinformation. The riveting documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) convince me that I will be exploring Hurricane Katrina next semester. 

    My challenge with Katrina is making sure the story doesn’t collapse into pure tragedy. To balance the devastation, I need to highlight the unique culture of New Orleans—the joy, the tight-knit families, the music, food, and resilience that define the city. The message I want to leave students with is that, despite catastrophe, New Orleans has a distinctive soul that continues to draw the world to its city.

    I suspect even after I retire in less than two years I will still sniff out writing prompts. Coming up with essay prompts is my addiction, and this addiction isn’t going away anytime soon. 

  • The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    Today to make room for a brand new LG OLED TV, we played a round of Musical TVs, the sad cousin of Musical Chairs, where everyone gets a screen but no one gets a perfect fit. The ten-year-old, 43-inch LG—now equipped with a trusty Roku brain—was dragged into the limbo-like office while my daughter debates whether it’s worth sacrificing square footage in her already modest quarters. The 50-inch Samsung, a QLED that once lorded over the living room, now teeters on another daughter’s dresser, swallowing what little space she had left for, say, books. I myself dragged the other Samsung—a year-old 50-incher—into the primary bedroom, wedging it precariously above the dresser like a luminous monolith threatening to tip over in the night.

    Here’s the irony: both Samsungs, with their decent QLED panels, are sluggish as elderly donkeys thanks to endless software updates. The new champ in the living room, a sleek 55-inch LG OLED with all the bells, whistles, and marketing superlatives, purrs along just fine and the interface moves at lightning speed. 

    The oldest and smallest of the TVs, the 43-inch LG, weighs more than both Samsungs combined. It radiates old-school build quality, but if I mounted it on the wall, the drywall would come crashing down in an avalanche that would obliterate my family mid–Netflix binge. 

    What important lesson have I learned? These so-called “smart TVs” are dumb as dirt. You spend $700 to $3,000, and in a few years the software updates strangle the hardware until it wheezes. The fix is cheap and almost comically obvious: don’t throw the TV out—give it a new brain. A Roku or Apple TV box, a mere $100 to $150, resurrects the panel for another decade. A carton of milk lasts longer than a smart TV OS, but a $99 box of plastic keeps the pixels glowing.