Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Rising From the Sunken Place: Heroism, History, and the Evolution of the Black Quarterback

    Rising From the Sunken Place: Heroism, History, and the Evolution of the Black Quarterback

    Essay Prompt: 

    Drawing on Jordan Peele’s concept of the Sunken Place in Get Out, write a 1,700-word essay examining the heroic effort required not only to lift oneself out of the Sunken Place, but to help others rise as well—an arc vividly captured in the three-part docuseries The Evolution of the Black Quarterback. What does it mean for Black quarterbacks to break the race barrier in the NFL? What forces tried to hold them back, and how do these forces echo the Sunken Place? Consider also the story of Wilbur Dungy—Tony Dungy’s father—who served as a war hero only to return home to the indignities of Jim Crow. How did his dignity, endurance, and moral clarity shape his son’s rise as both an athlete and a coach?

    Your essay will be divided into two major sections.

    Part I (Four Paragraphs): Define the Sunken Place
     Write a four-paragraph definition of the Sunken Place, with each paragraph offering a different lens:

    1. The Sunken Place as depicted in Get Out
    2. The Sunken Place through the writings of Frederick Douglass
    3. The Sunken Place as represented in the Jim Crow Museum, curated by David Pilgrim
    4. The Sunken Place as reflected in The Evolution of the Black Quarterback

    Each paragraph should show how the Sunken Place functions as a metaphor for psychological confinement, social domination, and the struggle for agency.

    Part II (Four Paragraphs): Rising From the Sunken Place
     After your definition section, pivot to your thesis. Explain how early Black quarterbacks in the NFL rose from the Sunken Place and built a legacy that opened doors for future generations. In four paragraphs, analyze their courage and composure in the face of rejection, demoralization, racist taunts, structural exclusion, and even death threats. Show how their resilience and excellence expanded the possibilities for Black athletes who followed.

    Conclusion:
     Close by addressing the broader implications. What life lessons can we draw from these trailblazing quarterbacks? How does their story speak to endurance, leadership, and the ongoing work of lifting others out of the Sunken Places they confront?

    Include a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least four sources.

  • Mature Passion vs. Adolescent Passion: A Contrast Essay on Work, Identity, and the Myth of “Follow Your Bliss”

    Mature Passion vs. Adolescent Passion: A Contrast Essay on Work, Identity, and the Myth of “Follow Your Bliss”

    For years, my freshman composition students wrote an argumentative essay critiquing Cal Newport’s “Passion Hypothesis”—the breezy mantra that if you follow your bliss, success will obediently fall into line. Newport dismantles this fantasy with blunt clarity. Most people don’t actually know what their passion is. Some “passions” amount to grounded purpose, while others are the daydreams of adolescence dressed up as destiny. And, he argues, genuine passion usually blooms only after someone has spent thousands of hours developing real skill and mastery. In that light, personality tests and “job alignment” quizzes reveal almost nothing. What matters, Newport insists, is work ethic and character—qualities that let people seize opportunity when it finally cracks open.

    My dilemma is that the assignment itself lacks controversy. Newport’s critique is sensible, and few students push back. Without real tension, the essay drifts: there’s no argument to wrestle into shape.

    Still, I don’t want to abandon the topic. College freshmen should confront the uncomfortable gap between the passions they romanticize and the careers the job market will actually reward.

    Maybe the solution is to reframe the assignment entirely. Instead of forcing an argument where none exists, the students could write a contrast essay. They could define mature passion and adolescent passion in clean, single-sentence terms; explain their defining traits; and examine real people who embody each version. In that format, the assignment keeps its intellectual weight without pretending there’s a genuine debate where there isn’t one.

    With that in mind, here is the essay prompt rewritten as a contrast, not an argument: 

    Essay Prompt (Approx. 1,700 Words)
    Mature Passion vs. Adolescent Passion: A Contrast Essay on Work, Identity, and the Myth of “Follow Your Bliss”

    College students are often surrounded by a cultural chorus that sings the same reassuring tune: Follow your passion, and everything else will fall into place. This idea appears in commencement speeches, self-help books, career counseling pamphlets, and the nebulous motivational fog of social media. It is a comforting narrative, but also a suspiciously easy one. The message promises agency without sacrifice, destiny without drudgery, and meaning without the slow grind of real development. In other words, it encourages students to build an entire life on a slogan that collapses under scrutiny.

    Computer scientist and writer Cal Newport identifies this seductive slogan as “The Passion Hypothesis.” The claim is simple: find your bliss and success will obediently trail behind. For years, my freshman composition students wrote argumentative essays challenging Newport’s critique of this idea. Newport’s counterargument has a tough, pragmatic edge: passion is not a pre-made, glowing inner truth waiting to be discovered; it is more often the result of discipline, time, and mastery. According to Newport, most people don’t actually know what their passion is. Even worse, many confuse fleeting fantasies with purpose. A true passion—something worth building a professional life around—is rarely the glamorous daydream that clicks instantly into place. Instead, it emerges slowly, often after someone has invested thousands of hours acquiring a deep skill set. For Newport, personality tests and job-alignment quizzes are little more than parlor tricks compared to the importance of developing work ethic, character, resilience, and the kind of competence that opens doors.

    The problem I’ve encountered over the years is that Newport’s argument makes so much sense that students rarely disagree with it. And when no one disagrees, an argumentative essay falls flat. There’s no tension for students to wrestle with, no friction to sharpen their analysis. The assignment, while intellectually rich, has begun to lose its edge.

    Still, I don’t want to abandon the topic altogether. College freshmen deserve—perhaps even need—to examine the gap between the passion narratives they’ve absorbed and the economic realities that shape their opportunities. They should reflect on the difference between the fantasies they carried through adolescence and the work they will need to undertake in adulthood. They need a clearer lens for distinguishing between a passion that grows through discipline and a passion that evaporates under pressure. This is where reframing the assignment can restore its power.

    Instead of asking students to argue for or against Newport’s position—an argument too one-sided to yield strong papers—this assignment will invite students to write a contrast essay. Your job will be to contrast two sharply different types of passion: mature passion and adolescent passion. These are not mere labels; they are categories that reflect deeper psychological, emotional, and developmental differences. Understanding these differences can help you think more clearly about your own aspirations, your academic path, and the professional life you hope to build.

    This contrast essay will ask you to think carefully, define your terms clearly, and support your analysis with real-world examples. It will encourage you to replace slogans with insight, and daydreams with reflective evaluation. Instead of forcing a debate where there isn’t one, you will trace a meaningful distinction—one with lifelong implications.

    Your Task

    Write a 1,700-word contrast essay in which you develop a clear, thoughtful distinction between mature passion and adolescent passion. You will define each term, describe their key characteristics, and analyze concrete examples of individuals—people you know personally, public figures, fictional characters, or even different versions of yourself—who embody each type of passion.

    Your essay should demonstrate that you understand the essential difference between a passion grounded in discipline, purpose, and skill development, and a passion rooted in excitement, fantasy, and wishful thinking. Use these distinctions to help your reader understand how one form of passion can support a meaningful career, while the other may hinder or distort it.

    What Is Mature Passion?

    Before writing, consider the traits that define mature passion. Mature passion is not a lightning bolt. It grows slowly and often quietly. It is less about being “meant” for something and more about discovering meaning through practice. A person with a mature passion may not start with enthusiasm; the enthusiasm develops after they become good at something, after they see how their abilities create opportunities for contribution, competence, or creativity. Mature passion aligns with Newport’s claim that passion is cultivated rather than discovered.

    Think about the people in your life who have developed expertise through patience and consistency. Maybe you know someone who didn’t fall in love with their field immediately, but grew into it over time. Perhaps a family member or mentor who built a career the way a craftsman builds a table—piece by piece, with steady hands and commitment. Consider athletes, musicians, engineers, business owners, teachers, or healthcare workers who have spent years refining their craft. What distinguishes their passion from a passing interest?

    Reflect also on the emotional maturity required to handle setbacks. Mature passion can survive boredom, frustration, or failure. It doesn’t disappear when the work becomes difficult. It may even grow stronger because of difficulty.

    What Is Adolescent Passion?

    Adolescent passion, by contrast, often thrives on excitement but collapses under pressure. It tends to be immediate, romanticized, and untested. It is fueled by fantasy rather than process. Someone with adolescent passion often imagines the rewards—the fame, the lifestyle, the applause—while ignoring or minimizing the work necessary to get there. It’s not that adolescent passion is childish; it’s simply undeveloped. It has not yet been made real by discipline.

    Consider people you’ve known who bounce from one dream to another: “I want to be a YouTuber,” “I want to be a professional gamer,” “I want to be a neurosurgeon,” “I want to start a clothing brand,” “I want to be a film director,” “I want to be a crypto millionaire.” The dreams are bold, but the follow-through is thin. Adolescent passion tends to burn bright but briefly. The person abandons the dream as soon as boredom or difficulty appears.

    Adolescent passion also thrives on external validation. It may be driven by trends, social media influencers, or the desire to appear impressive rather than the desire to master a craft. It can feel powerful, but it is fragile.

    Your Definitions

    Your essay must begin with clean, single-sentence definitions of each type of passion. These definitions should be clear enough that a stranger could read them and instantly understand the distinction. Avoid vague, poetic language. Your definitions should operate like the thesis of a dictionary entry: precise, purposeful, and unfuzzy.

    Here is a structural guideline you may use:

    1. Definition of mature passion (one sentence)
    2. Definition of adolescent passion (one sentence)
    3. A brief explanation of why distinguishing between the two is essential for students preparing to enter the professional world.

    Your Analysis

    Once you define your terms, you will devote the body of your essay to contrasting the two forms of passion in depth. Use the following guiding questions to develop your paragraphs. You do not need to answer them in order, nor do you need to answer every single one, but they should spark lines of exploration:

    • How does mature passion develop over time?
    • How does adolescent passion behave when it meets difficulty or boredom?
    • What emotional traits support mature passion—patience, resilience, humility, adaptability?
    • Which emotional traits undermine adolescent passion—impulsiveness, insecurity, fantasy, impatience?
    • How do people with each type of passion respond to setbacks?
    • How do they talk about their goals?
    • How do they make decisions?
    • How do they manage their time?
    • What role do mentors, teachers, or workplaces play in shaping each type of passion?
    • Which form of passion leads to long-term growth, responsibility, and contribution?
    • Which form of passion tends to collapse into disappointment, cynicism, or constant reinvention?

    As you write, avoid turning the essay into a list. Instead, build a sustained contrast. Your goal is to make the reader feel the difference—not just understand it intellectually. The contrast should reveal how these two forms of passion shape lives differently.

    Your Examples

    You must include examples of real people or fictional characters who illustrate each type of passion. The examples should help clarify your distinctions. Good examples include:

    • A relative who developed a mature passion through steady work
    • A friend who chased an adolescent passion that fizzled
    • A public figure whose career reflects mature passion (e.g., a musician who refined their craft over decades, not someone who went viral once)
    • A celebrity or influencer whose adolescent passion flared brightly but collapsed quickly
    • A fictional character who embodies either type of passion
    • A version of yourself at a different stage of life—past, present, or imagined future

    The examples should serve your analysis rather than distract from it. Explain how each example illustrates the traits you have identified. Don’t simply tell a story. Instead, use the example to deepen the reader’s understanding of the contrast.

    Your Purpose

    This essay is not merely an academic exercise. It is a chance to examine your assumptions about what a meaningful life requires. The cultural advice to “follow your bliss” is too easy, too vague, too romantic. If you take it literally, it may mislead you. But if you learn to distinguish between adolescent passion and mature passion, you gain a better sense of how to direct your energy in college and beyond. You gain a more realistic view of what it means to grow into competence, purpose, and self-respect.

    What you write here may influence the decisions you make in the next few years—your major, your work ethic, your expectations, and the way you evaluate opportunities. You are not simply contrasting two abstract ideas; you are constructing a clearer map of your future.

    Your Requirements

    Your final paper must:

    • Be approximately 1,700 words
     • Include single-sentence definitions of mature passion and adolescent passion
    • Develop at least five distinguishing characteristics for each type of passion
    • Use specific, concrete examples of individuals who represent each type
    • Maintain a clear contrast throughout
    • Demonstrate careful reasoning and a strong writing voice
    • Be revised for clarity, precision, and logical flow

    The Goal

    By the end of this essay, your reader should understand not only the surface-level difference between mature passion and adolescent passion, but the deeper psychological and practical implications of aligning oneself with one or the other. You are writing to illuminate—not to preach, lecture, or scold. Your job is to show your reader how these two kinds of passion operate in real life and what is at stake in choosing one path over the other.

    If you execute this well, you won’t merely be writing a contrast essay. You’ll be developing the kind of reflective, disciplined judgment that Newport argues is the true foundation of a meaningful and successful life.

    BUILDING BLOCK 1: Definitional Paragraph
     Goal: Produce clear, single-sentence definitions of mature passion and adolescent passion, then expand those definitions into a short paragraph that clarifies the stakes of the distinction.

    Instructions:
     Write a paragraph in which you:

    1. Create a one-sentence definition of mature passion.
    2. Create a one-sentence definition of adolescent passion.
    3. Follow those definitions with 4–6 sentences explaining why distinguishing between the two matters for college students facing decisions about majors, careers, and long-term goals.
    4. Include at least one observation drawn from your lived experience—something you have seen in yourself, your peers, or your family.

    Purpose:
     This paragraph becomes the opening anchor of your essay. It establishes the core concepts and clarifies why the reader should care about the contrast.

    BUILDING BLOCK 2: Characteristics and Analysis Paragraph
     Goal: Identify and analyze the defining traits of each type of passion.

    Instructions:
     In a detailed paragraph (8–10 sentences):

    1. Identify three defining characteristics of mature passion (examples: resilience, patience, incremental skill-building).
    2. Identify three defining characteristics of adolescent passion (examples: fantasy-driven goals, quick burnout, validation-seeking).
    3. For each pair of characteristics (one mature, one adolescent), show how they contrast in real-life behavior—how they handle setbacks, boredom, or responsibility.
    4. Use brief mini-examples (1–2 sentences at most) to illustrate the contrast.

    Purpose:
     This paragraph provides the conceptual foundation of your essay’s body section. You’re defining the landscape before exploring individual case studies.

    BUILDING BLOCK 3: Case Study Paragraph
     Goal: Analyze a real person (or fictional character) who embodies either mature passion or adolescent passion.

    Instructions:
     Choose one person—a friend, family member, public figure, or fictional character—and write an 8–12 sentence paragraph in which you:

    1. Identify whether the person represents mature or adolescent passion.
    2. Describe a specific moment or pattern from their life that reveals their type of passion.
    3. Explain how their habits, decisions, setbacks, and motivations illustrate the characteristics you identified in Building Block 2.
    4. Offer one brief evaluative reflection on what students can learn from this example, either as a model to follow or a cautionary tale.

    Purpose:
     This paragraph becomes one of your essay’s body examples—your most vivid evidence for how passion operates in real life.

  • The Art of Humble Submission

    The Art of Humble Submission

    When you’re a writer, you draft, revise, despair, polish again, and then perform an ancient ritual of humility: you submit. Whether your offering goes to a magazine, an agent, or a publisher, the act is the same—a small bow before the gatekeepers. In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche seizes on this word—submission—as the perfect metaphor for the writer’s life: a posture equal parts hope and humiliation. “Writers live in a state of submission,” he observes. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” And digital culture has intensified the ordeal. With online forms and instant attachments, rejection arrives at industrial scale. A determined writer can now collect hundreds of dismissals a week. Ninety-nine percent will never land a deal, and those who do may make less than the barista who hands them their morning latte.

    So what exactly is a writer submitting to? Not just editors. Not merely algorithms. A writer submits to the dream that the private mind might earn a public life—that interiority, sculpted into sentences, might sustain you financially and spiritually. You write in the hope that your imagined worlds might become someone else’s emotional reality, that your pages might matter to strangers.

    Marche’s advice is blunt: persistence is not optional. Writing success is not a meritocracy but a lottery with a talent filter. The more tickets you buy, the better your odds. “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” he writes—a relentless knocking at a door that may never open, but sometimes does for reasons no one fully understands.

    And this capriciousness is not unique to writers. Marche notes that actors secure roles only 7 percent of the time because of talent; the rest depends on age, look, market trends, and even “box office value in China.” Painters, dancers, musicians, designers—all create under the same unstable sky. To make art is to gamble against indifference. Persistence isn’t noble; it’s necessary, because fate occasionally rewards the stubborn.

  • From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche dismantles the fantasy that writers can transform themselves into entrepreneurs and save the craft through hustle. He has watched brilliant minds waste their genius on branding decks and content calendars, convinced that a marketing plan can substitute for a literary life. Everyone, he notes, now arrives armed with a social-media strategy; even legacy writers chase streaming deals. Yet the “digital ad revenue” that was supposed to be salvation barely buys groceries. This notion of self-promotion on a social media platform may work for a handful, but for most of us, this plan is all chicanery. Most  writers would earn more working part-time at Starbucks than posting their book excerpts on Instagram. 

    And still writers persist, driven by an ancient question: How do you make a living by thinking? In a world where platforms shift beneath your feet, young writers must reinvent themselves with exhausting frequency—editing careers as relentlessly as they edit sentences.

    Marche reminds us that postwar America once had sturdy literary institutions: robust magazines, influential newspapers, university presses, publishers willing to cultivate voices rather than chase viral heat. That era nurtured Boomer writers who could achieve cultural celebrity and economic stability. But those scaffolds have collapsed. We live among the ruins of that golden age. Institutions fray, readership declines, and the professional writer now sits on the same endangered-species list as the white rhinoceros.

    With writing now fully digital, the terrain resembles a lawless frontier. The deep, contemplative reading that literature requires has been replaced by rapid-fire commentary. Instead of essays and books, the culture rewards short-form skirmishes and performative certainty. As Marche put it to Sam Harris, America’s most profitable export is now “the peddling of moral outrage.” Rage scales. Nuance suffocates.

    This erosion of the writing life carries consequences beyond the page. When outrage becomes the ambient air, critical thinking dries up, public trust decays, and democratic habits atrophy. To lose serious writing isn’t merely to lose an art; it is to endanger the civic imagination that sustains a republic. The crisis of literature is not an aesthetic inconvenience—it is a political warning flare.

  • The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche shows zero patience for the self-help fable that “failure leads to success.” The myth says: suffer now, triumph later; keep grinding and the universe will eventually reward you. Marche calls this narrative pure nonsense. His friendships with writers who have made millions and basked in praise only confirm the truth: acclaim doesn’t cure insecurity, fame doesn’t dissolve alienation, and even celebrated authors carry the bruises of obscurity under their tuxedos. They remain misunderstood, jealous, anxious, and haunted by irrelevance. Success doesn’t banish failure—it merely decorates it. Celebrity is not salvation; it is a spotlight that makes the neediness easier to see.

    Marche believes the situation is worsening. We live, he argues, in a cultural moment where institutions are collapsing and traditional literary prestige has been replaced by digital noise. Novelists chase television deals. Journalists pivot into professional outrage machines. The literary public square has splintered into algorithmic micro-audiences. And in this fractured landscape, the writer’s deepest fear is not rejection—it’s evaporation. Not being debated, but forgotten.

    Even the “independent writer revolution” gets little mercy from Marche. Platforms come and go, each proclaimed the future of writing, each eventually forgotten. “Every few years there’s some new great hope—right now it’s Substack,” he writes. Then comes the hammer: “Substack will die or peter out just like the rest.” The point is not cynicism for sport; it is a reminder that technology cannot build the cathedral that literary culture once occupied. The medium keeps changing; the instability remains constant.

    As a reader drowning in subscriptions, I find his skepticism refreshing. I can’t reasonably pay $60 to $120 a year for dozens of Substack writers I admire. If I did, I’d be shelling out ten grand annually just to keep up. That is not a sustainable model for anyone but tech-company accountants. So yes, blogs collapsed, digital magazines buckled, and Substack may be next. Writers are still wandering, looking for a home that isn’t a platform built on a countdown timer. We are living in a literary diaspora—talent everywhere, shelter nowhere.

  • Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche reminds us that roughly 300,000 books appear in the United States every year, and only a few hundred can reasonably be called creative or financial successes. Most books by “successful” authors flop. Most writers are failures. And then there is the vast shadow population: the would-be writers who never finish a book, yet earnestly introduce themselves at parties as working on one. If they are legion, it’s because failure in writing isn’t an exception — it’s the baseline condition.

    Lately I hear a parallel refrain: “Everyone has a podcast.” The cultural fantasy of “being a writer” — once the preferred badge of intelligence and depth — is being shoved aside by the fantasy of being a podcaster, which is the new intellectual flex. Instead of the solitary novelist hunched over drafts, we get booming-voiced men with battle-hardened beards and canned energy drinks, thumping their thighs as they dismantle “the mainstream narrative.” And if that theatrics doesn’t suit your tastes, you can choose from endless niches: politics, wellness sermons, nostalgia rants, paranormal confessionals, or gentle whisper-therapy for anxious brains. The point isn’t content; the point is talking.

    Marche dissects the layers of literary failure, but he forces us to consider a stranger threat: failure may be vanishing simply because writing itself may be vanishing as an arena where one can fail. You can’t fail at spearing a sabre-toothed tiger in 2025; the task no longer exists. Likewise, journaling and “mindfulness notes” have replaced drafts and essays, but only matter once they’re converted into soundbites on TikTok or a monologue in a podcast episode.

    If writing once demanded endurance, rejection slips, and a skin thin enough to bruise yet thick enough to keep showing up, now the danger is different: a discipline can’t hurt you once it stops being culturally real. Increasingly, I wonder whether writing, as a vocation and identity, even exists in the same form it did twenty years ago — and if it doesn’t, what exactly does it mean to “fail” at it anymore?

  • Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Stephen Marche, veteran journalist and author, says the secret to becoming a writer isn’t inspiration or networking or the right MFA program. It’s endurance. Grim, stubborn, occasionally delusional endurance. His slim volume On Writing and Failure makes one argument with relentless clarity: if you want to write, prepare to suffer. Forget talk of “flourishing,” “mentorship,” and “encouragement.” Writing isn’t a wellness retreat. It’s a trench.

    Marche opens with the perennial questions writers whisper to each other after one rejection too many: Does this get easier? Do you grow thicker skin? The response he quotes from Philip Roth is a gut punch: “Your skin just grows thinner and thinner. In the end, they can hold you up to the light and see right through you.” In other words, the longer you write, the more naked you become. Vulnerability isn’t a side effect of the craft; it is the craft.

    Marche’s bleak comfort is that every writer feeds off failure. Success is accidental—a borrowed tuxedo, worn briefly. Failure is the body underneath. Even the authors smiling from dust jackets look like rescued hostages, blinking at daylight before returning to the bunker of their desks to keep going. They don’t do it because it’s glamorous. They do it because not writing would be worse.

    I understand the pathology. After decades of cranking out what I believed were novels, I finally admitted I couldn’t write one—not at the level I demanded, not at the level worth inflicting on readers. That revelation didn’t spare me failure; it merely revealed strata of it. There’s the failure of rejection, the failure of the work, and the quiet, private failure of recognizing your own limits. Perhaps I could’ve spared myself time and spared literary agents grief. But failure has its curriculum, and I attended every class.

    Marche’s book is a sober reminder that writing is less a triumphal march than a pilgrimage carried out on blistered feet. Failure isn’t a detour; it’s the terrain. Rock layers of it: topsoil doubt, subsoil rejection, shale humiliation, limestone stubbornness. Dig deeper and you hit coal—compressed ambition under impossible pressure, black and combustible.

    Failure isn’t fashionable grit or a TED Talk slogan. When executives brag about “learning from failure,” they’re dilettantes. Writers are the professionals of defeat. To be a poet today is to live like a post-apocalyptic monk, scribbling in candlelight, shadow thrown against the cave wall, not out of masochism but because there’s no other way to stay human. The world may not care, but the work insists.

  • What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    For the past few months, I’ve been devouring true crime docuseries with tireless fascination. The more I watch, the deeper my appetite grows—not for gore, but for the raw human stories that unspool behind every case. There is, of course, a price for such voyeurism. Nearly every episode revisits the same dark origins: homes scarred by domestic abuse, children numbed by neglect, and adults who turn to drugs and alcohol to quiet the pain. Whole worlds of criminality form around these wounds—ecosystems where cruelty becomes normal, even rational.

    Then there’s law enforcement. Most detectives and officers I see in these stories are decent, sharp-minded people pursuing justice through an endless fog of human wreckage. They face so much depravity that it exacts a psychic toll. They carry the collective sorrow of others, walking the earth with hearts cracked open by everything they’ve witnessed.

    There’s a strange repetition to these lives of crime—an awful sameness—but also a singular fingerprint on each story. Some criminals are narcissists, intoxicated by their own chaos. Others are the broken offspring of violence, haunted by demons they now unleash on others. Many strike out in panic, wielding a mallet where a scalpel would have sufficed.

    I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’d transpose it this way: All paths to decency share a pattern—discipline, love, structure—but the paths to ruin twist in countless variations, each marked by a wound that never healed.

    This is what keeps me watching. Too many fictionalized crime dramas can’t resist the tidy seduction of redemption—some tearful confession, some sentimental coda of forgiveness. True crime spares me that. It denies me comfort. No background music softens the horror, no clever dialogue redeems it. These stories show the human condition not as we wish it to be but as it is: excruciating, broken, and endlessly complex.

    In that sense, I find myself siding less with Steven Pinker’s optimism and more with Robert Kaplan’s realism. Pinker argues that humanity is improving—that violence is receding and irrational behavior is on the decline. Kaplan, in Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis, sees something else entirely: that the struggle between good and evil is eternal, and evil often enjoys the advantage because it fights without restraint and acts as if it has nothing to lose. Kaplan isn’t a pessimist. He’s a realist.

    If I’m to prepare for life, I’d rather confront the world as Kaplan does—without illusion, without sentimentality, without anesthetic. Pinker’s optimism feels like comfort food for the mind. Kaplan, like true crime, gives me the bitter taste of reality—and that’s the kind of nourishment that lasts.

  • Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    It was a Friday night at Castro Valley High, that weekly pageant of teenage aggression disguised as school spirit. The bleachers were packed with hormonal thunder; the air reeked of nacho cheese and Axe body spray. And then the rain came, that democratic force that flattens everyone’s hair and dignity alike.

    Across the stands, I saw her—the girl the boys called Tasmanian Devil. I didn’t know her name. No one did. She was a broad-shouldered girl with a face that inspired the cruel kind of laughter—the kind that hides insecurity behind volume. Her twin brother was in the special ed class with her, and their father, the school’s enormous janitor, lumbered around campus in denim overalls so faded they looked ghostly. His ears were so large they could have doubled as warning flags—and he had passed them on to his children, a hereditary curse of ridicule.

    They lived in a trailer next to the football field, an eternal reminder that some people never get to leave campus. That night she sat alone in the bleachers while the rain came down in cold, merciless sheets. Her hair clung to her forehead like seaweed, and black mascara streamed down her face like ink from a wounded pen.

    She stared out at the field with a look that broke something inside me—a look that said, I know the joke, and I know I’m the punchline. I know no one will ever love me, and I will always be an outsider.

    I wanted to call her over, to hand her my jacket, to do anything that resembled decency—but I did nothing. I sat there with my friends, pretending to watch the game, while she drowned in rain and loneliness.

    That night, guilt chewed through me like battery acid. I told Master Po about it—my silence, my self-loathing.

    “Master Po, I can’t forgive myself for doing nothing.”

    He looked at me the way only the wise can—equal parts compassion and indictment.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “being angry with yourself achieves nothing. Flogging yourself achieves nothing. Shoveling hatred over yourself achieves nothing. If you wish to help those who have no place in this world, you must first make peace with yourself. The wise help others not because they are saints, but because they are whole.”

    I lay awake that night thinking about the girl in the rain—how she seemed to know her fate, and how I had rehearsed mine: a spectator of suffering, paralyzed by self-awareness. It was the night I learned the cruelest sin isn’t mockery. It’s inaction dressed up as reflection.

  • Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Yuval Noah Harari opens 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with a line that feels more prophetic with each passing year: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”


    He’s right. Millions of people rush into the digital coliseum to debate humanity’s future, yet 99.9% of them are shouting through a fog of misinformation, moral panic, and algorithmic distortion. Their sense of the world—our world—is scrambled beyond use.

    Unfair? Of course. But as Harari reminds us, history doesn’t deal in fairness. He admits he can’t give us food, shelter, or comfort, but he can, as a historian, offer something rarer: clarity. A small light in the long night.

    That phrase—clarity in the darkness—hit me like a gut punch while listening to one of the most illuminating podcasts I’ve ever encountered: Sam Harris’s Making Sense, episode #440 (October 24, 2025), featuring author and geopolitical thinker Robert D. Kaplan. Their conversation, centered on Kaplan’s terse 200-page book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, offered something I hadn’t felt in years: coherence.

    Most days, I feel swept away by the torrent of half-truths and hot takes about the state of the planet. We seem to be living out Yeats’s grim prophecy that “the center cannot hold.” And yet, as Kaplan spoke, the chaos briefly organized itself into a pattern I could recognize.

    Kaplan’s global map is not comforting—but it’s lucid. He traces the roots of instability to climate change stripping water and fertile soil from sub-Saharan Africa, forcing waves of migration toward Europe. Those migrations, he argues, will ignite decades of right-wing populism across the continent—a slow, grinding backlash that may define the century.

    Equally destructive, he warns, is our collapse of media credibility. Print journalism—with its editors, fact-checkers, and professional skepticism—has been displaced by digital media, where “passion replaces analysis.” Emotion has become the currency of attention. Reason, outbid by rage, has left the building.

    Listening to Kaplan for a single hour taught me more about the architecture of global disorder than months of doomscrolling could. His vision is bleak, but it’s ordered. Sobering, but strangely liberating. In a time when everyone is shouting, he simply draws a map.

    And as Harari might say—maps, not megaphones, are what lead us out of the dark.