Cinemorphosis

Tag: history

  • Fiona Hill and the Art of Clear Seeing

    Fiona Hill and the Art of Clear Seeing

    Fiona Hill stunned me on Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast—not with theatrics or self-branding, but with something rarer: unvarnished intelligence. She spoke for more than an hour, weaving global politics, history, and sober analysis together without even a hint of schtick. No sales pitch. No influencer glow. Just clarity and competence. Listening to her felt like opening a window in a stale room. I’m now on track to read both of her books, if only to spend more time in the presence of a mind that refuses mediocrity.

    A few moments hit me squarely. She explained that she has never been drawn to social media, which she sees as a global time sink—an interactive void where people argue about nothing as if it were everything. Then she broadened the frame: we are living through a massive transition in politics, work, education, and culture, and we’d be naïve to pretend we understand it. She argued for humility—an acknowledgment that we can’t yet grasp the scale or direction of the upheaval we’re living through. We are, she suggested, walking into the unknown whether we like it or not.

    Sullivan agreed, calling this moment a “liminal” period in history. I hadn’t heard that word in years and had to remind myself that it means transitional—the uneasy space between what was and what will be. Hill embraced the term. She and Sullivan compared our moment to the Hundred Years’ War. No one living through the 14th century knew they were participants in a century-long conflict. They only knew that the ground was shifting.

    That’s where we are now. Nations wrestling for dominance, AI upending national security and labor markets, globalization rewiring identity and culture, political leaders who behave like pranksters with nuclear codes—this is our chaos. And like medieval villagers, we have no idea how long this period will last. Are these volatile leaders a temporary fever, or will they define an entire era? Are we living through a Hundred-Year Grifter Period? No one knows.

    Strangely, the conversation felt therapeutic. Hearing two sharp, grounded people speak honestly about uncertainty made me feel less panicked and less isolated. My anxiety and existential dread aren’t signs of unraveling—they’re signs of being alert during a liminal age that refuses easy explanations.

  • When Distrusting Experts Becomes Its Own Dogma

    When Distrusting Experts Becomes Its Own Dogma

    In his Atlantic essay “Everyone Hates Groupthink. Experts Aren’t Sure It Exists,” David Merritt Johns challenges the reflexive idea that groupthink is always harmful. He notes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement accuse public-health experts of groupthink in order to undermine trust in institutions. Their narrative is familiar: elite scientists misled the public on masks and lockdowns, so now vaccines must be suspect too. But this rebellion against “consensus” doesn’t eliminate groupthink—it simply creates a rival version of it, one driven by conspiracy, resentment, and selective skepticism.

    Johns argues that not all group alignment is created equal. Sometimes consensus forms because experts evaluate evidence and converge on the best available guidance. Other times, conformity produces catastrophic choices. The trick is to distinguish disciplined collaboration from unthinking obedience. Irving Janis gave groupthink its negative reputation as the enemy of independent thought, but scholars like Sally Riggs Fuller and Ramon Alday complicate the picture, noting that what we often label “groupthink” may actually be bureaucratic opportunism—people following political incentives, not blind loyalty.

    The term has since been weaponized. Political commentators now dismiss peer-reviewed science as “groupthink” whenever it clashes with their ideology. Johns argues this is sloppy and dangerous. Blaming pandemic missteps on a mystical force called groupthink distracts from real causes, while assuming “lonethink”—the rebel outsider posture—automatically produces better decisions is equally foolish. Expertise demands rigorous debate, scrutiny, and correction, not reflexive suspicion or anti-institution bravado.

    Following conspiracy movements like MAHA and their crusade against vaccines reveals the stakes. Lives saved through immunization are treated as evidence of corruption, and public-health systems are condemned for doing exactly what they are designed to do: evaluate data, revise strategy, and protect citizens. When political identity replaces critical thinking and “groupthink” becomes a lazy insult for any professional consensus, the result is not liberation—it is reckless decision-making disguised as independent thought.

  • 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.

  • Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Last night I dreamed that my mother and her family—gone twenty years and counting—came back to life as if they’d only stepped outside for air. No trumpet blast, no spectral fog. Just my aunt’s kitchen in Los Angeles: sunlight on the vinyl, the smell of coffee and waffles, forks tapping plates like tiny hammers. My mother kissed my cheek the way she used to, a quick press and a pat—quality control for the living.

    Between bites of waffles and scrambled eggs my grandfather announced, in the same voice he used for weekend errands, that we were driving to a mansion in Alaska. He said “mansion” as if it were around the corner, not at the end of the continent and a climate shift away. Heads nodded. Coats appeared. Dream logistics are ruthless: one cut and we were already rolling, my grandfather at the wheel of a weary sedan, a caravan of relatives stacking up behind us like punctuation.

    The city dissolved. Los Angeles flattened into a silver slab, then a bright white riddle. Snow stitched itself across the windshield; the tires made that soft, murderous hush you hear on ice. My grandfather drove with cheerful indifference to physics, tapping the wheel to music only he could hear. I watched the road bloom and vanish and thought: so this is how resurrection handles transportation—no chariot of fire, just black ice and a bench seat.

    We crested a hill and there it was: a palace poured in espresso and cream, a latte-colored sprawl with too many windows and the kind of confidence money wears when it doesn’t expect to be told no. Someone in the back called it “Politburo chic,” and the phrase snapped into place—midcentury power with an indoor fur policy. The façade implied heated floors and quiet compromises. The roofline looked like it had read every memo and approved half of them.

    What struck me wasn’t that my family had returned; it was how casual I felt about it. My mother was alive. My grandfather was alive. Aunts and uncles murmured behind me, inventorying snacks, debating rooms. And I sat there with the calm of a man who receives an impossible package on his porch and signs without reading the label. Maybe grief is software and last night the update finally took.

    We idled at the circular drive while the house regarded us with its many eyes. I tried to imagine the foyer: the smell of wax and cold marble, a staircase that curves with the arrogance of a purebred. My brain kept blurring the picture like a censor’s bar. I could sense chandeliers, a staff of refined butlers. 

    But I woke up before entering the mansion. Now more than anything, I feel tantalized by what was inside that mansion. Now I’ll never know. 

  • The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    In Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, paranoia has a name: Harold, a disgruntled English professor who stalks the halls of Shepherd College convinced his masculinity is shriveling under fluorescent lights and academic jargon. The place is no sanctuary of learning but a mausoleum of joyless theory—an institution where semiotics and power structures reign supreme, while Harold dreams of biceps, protein macros, and shredded abs. To him, the Priests of the Intellect are laughable scarecrows, their bodies soft as tomatoes skewered on toothpicks, their credibility dissolving with every Oreo they dunk between papers on Derrida.

    Banished to a basement classroom without sunlight, Harold becomes a musclebound Gollum snarling at his colleagues above, who bask in daylight and collegial belonging. Faculty meetings are his personal hell: an ordeal as odious as wisdom-teeth extractions performed by a dentist with no anesthetic and no soul. While his peers pontificate about “backward design” and “cohorts,” Harold visualizes his metabolism torching fat, each fiber of muscle flexing like a Renaissance sculpture coming alive.

    What makes Harold truly unhinged is Shepherd College itself—a cult in mortar and brick, built on the deranged philosophy of the late R.K. Mort, who declared that architecture should “infect” and “haunt” its inhabitants. Mort’s disciples fawn over his absurdities as if he were an academic messiah, turning the college into a dehumanizing theme park of theory. It’s Severance with faculty ID cards.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder trapped in academia myself, I relate to Harold’s plight more than I’d like to admit. Yet I nearly hurled the book across the room when Harold showed up to his interminable meeting without food. A man obsessed with protein who forgets to pack a meal? Unforgivable. In my forty years of teaching, I never once forgot to bring my Tupperware of chicken breast or Greek yogurt to the institutional trenches. I wanted to shout at the page: “Get in the game, Harold! Respect the gains!” Still, his misfit rage and comic pathos hook me. Harold may be a wreck, but he’s my kind of wreck.

    I’m only two chapters in but eager to consume the entirety of this delicious satire.

  • Blast from the Past: Angelo’s Review of the Montgomery Ward Airline GEN-1494A Vintage Radio

    Since the very first time I saw this model listed on E-Bay a couple years ago, I’ve wanted one of these:  The Montgomery Ward Airline GEN-1494A.

    I guess the thing that attracted me to this radio the most is the handsome looks.  I like the symmetry of the dual tuning dials, divided by the power meter.  I like the contrast of brushed aluminum and charcoal color plastics, encased in clear acrylic dial covers.  I like the large but not huge size of the receiver.  Simply, I like everything about this radio’s styling.  I wouldn’t change anything—not even the orange and white frequency information, which looks great on the dark gray/black. 

    The materials are not quite up to Sony or Panasonic standards, but there’s nothing to be ashamed of here.  It’s good quality stuff, certainly comparable to any Sharp or Sanyo of a similar vintage.  It’s in that Toshiba/Hitachi category as far as I can tell.

    Performance wise, it’s a winner.  I was astounded by the shortwave reception—very, very close to matching the Sony ICF-5800 that I recently sold.  It picks up shortwave signals that most of my other radios are unable to track.  FM sound is strong, AM crisp.  It’s very capable of getting the full compliment of AM-FM stations that my other good radios can receive.  After the stellar shortwave performance, I was surprised that it didn’t perform well on the PSB 1 or PSB 2 options.  They were pretty dead—and my old Arvin radios generally get activity on these bands.  Maybe it’s just the night and the location.

    Speaker sound is another high grade.  While it’s not as powerful as the Panasonic 888, it has a pleasing sound.  The “tone” adjustment actually does its job too.  It’s equally good for talk or music.

    This is a well balanced radio that I can heartily recommend.  I have seen several of these over the years, and have bid on a few of them.  I was never able to wrangle one until this one failed to cross the $30.00 mark, and I snatched it up in the closing minutes.  It needed a little cleaning—and to get it to work on batteries, I had to use steel wool to remove corrosion from the battery compartment contacts—-but aside from those minor issues, it’s pretty darn nice.  Perfect antenna, no major dings and a real player.

    Is it a keeper?  For me, there aren’t many keepers.  I generally buy radios at what I consider a value price.  After cleaning them up and playing with them for a few months, I’m willing to throw them back to keep funding my hobby and charting new territory—such as a very recent interest in old tube radios.  But I have to say, the great shortwave performance, on this Ward model will make it a tough decision to let this go.  Like my Panasonic 888, Zenith Trans-Oceanic 7000 and Grundig Ocean Boy 820, this Ward Airline 1494 has virtues that might make it a permanent fixture.  That’s pretty strong company that this radio finds itself in.

  • When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) are searing indictments as much as they are testaments to survival. They tell the story of a singular city—New Orleans, a cultural jewel—betrayed and abandoned by its own nation.

    Told through the voices of those who endured the storm in 2005, these films lay bare a fourfold sin against the people of New Orleans.

    First sin: red-lining. Decades of discriminatory housing policies corralled Black families into neighborhoods below sea level—neighborhoods left exposed to catastrophe—while white families secured higher, safer ground. Yet out of this coerced geography bloomed community, kinship, jazz, art, and a way of life so distinctive that New Orleans became not just a city but a state of mind.

    Second sin: neglect. The protective marshlands were carved away, the levees shoddily built, the safeguards ignored. What should have been natural resilience was dismantled piece by piece, until a storm became a man-made massacre.

    Third sin: abandonment. When the waters rose, thousands of citizens waited for rescue that never came. They suffered hunger, thirst, illness, despair. Bureaucracies paralyzed by incompetence and poisoned by political rivalry left them stranded—leaders too intent on humiliating one another to save lives.

    Fourth sin: defamation. Media outlets, infected with racism, painted Black survivors as looters and criminals while white survivors were depicted as resourceful and brave. Rumors of sniper fire and marauding gangs turned aid missions into militarized standoffs, with the National Guard pointing rifles at the very people they were sent to save. These lies fueled white vigilantes who hunted Black residents as if the collapse of law gave them license to kill.

    This fourfold betrayal is almost unbearable to watch, yet threaded through the grief is a resilient beauty: the music, the food, the language, the humor, the love of place that make New Orleans irreducible. Katrina remains one of America’s most shameful chapters—but also a reminder that the soul of New Orleans is larger than its wounds.

  • Ghosts at Pearl Harbor: A Morning of Reverence and Unease

    Ghosts at Pearl Harbor: A Morning of Reverence and Unease

    Yesterday we drove thirty minutes from the Embassy Suites in Waikīkī to the Pearl Harbor Memorial, where solemnity hangs in the air like thick humidity. The journey from beachfront ease to battlefield remembrance felt immediate and irreversible.

    Inside the visitor center’s theater, a National Park spokesperson stood behind a lectern—short, compact, dark-haired, with the confident charisma of someone who has delivered this message a thousand times, and still means every word.

    “You’re not on a must-see tour,” he said, with an edge of reprimand. “You’re visiting a mass military gravesite. This is more than a military tragedy—it’s familial. Thousands of children lost their parents that day. That grief doesn’t expire. It echoes. Please treat this place with respect—not as a TikTok backdrop.”

    I thanked him on the way to the dock. His words stripped away any residue of tourism and replaced it with reverence.

    We boarded a navy-operated boat alongside a quietly murmuring mix of global visitors—Germans, Japanese, mainland Americans, Australians. The boat was packed, but no one jostled or joked. You could feel the history pressing in from all directions.

    At the memorial itself, I tried to read the names etched into white marble. I tried to focus. But I was distracted—haunted—by two figures lingering at the edge of my vision.

    They were brothers, unmistakably. In their thirties, pale as winter ash, with dirty-blond hair and heads shaped like crude pyramids. Their eyes—almond-shaped, off-kilter—glinted with something sharp. Their teeth were crooked and small, the kind that suggest years of silent snarling. They were so wiry, so sunken, that even their frosted skinny jeans hung like surrender flags around their twiggy legs. Nicotine-stained, post-industrial, almost spectral.

    They spoke in rapid whispers—something Slavic, maybe Czech or Slovak—always leaning close, always glancing. They radiated the kind of anxious secrecy that suggested they were either up to something or simply never learned how not to seem that way.

    Everyone avoided them. Even when we were asked to scoot together on the boat to make room, the brothers sat untouched—shunned like they carried some forgotten plague. They were the kind of figures who seem pulled from the margins of a Dostoevsky novel or the casting list of a horror film.

    I can’t stop thinking about them. What drew them to Pearl Harbor? What shadow were they following? Their presence felt less like tourism and more like reconnaissance. In another life, in another medium, they could be characters in a Safdie brothers film—like John the heavy from Uncut Gems, who wasn’t an actor at all, just a force of nature discovered on the street.

    You can’t invent that kind of menace. You can only observe it, marvel at it, and wonder: what story did they bring to the memorial, and what story did they take away? And why in my heart do I see them less as tourists and more as criminals embarking on some kind of scheme? 

  • Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    In 1984, while you were still in college, your grandfather—a card-carrying Marxist who frequented Russia and Cuba and claimed to have befriended Fidel Castro—decided to pay your way for a Soviet-sponsored “Sputnik Peace Tour.” He wanted you to see the Soviet Union through his rose-colored glasses. Maybe, just maybe, you’d come home singing the Soviet anthem with a crimson flag tattoo stretched across your 52-inch chest.

    You joined a group of about a dozen college students from across the country, a few professors from Arkansas and Tennessee, and a Soviet-appointed tour guide named Natasha. The plan was to travel mostly by train—from Moscow to Kyiv, Odessa, Novgorod, Leningrad, and back to Moscow.

    To prep you for the two-week summer adventure, your grandfather handed you a copy of Mike Davidow’s Cities Without Crisis: The Soviet Union Through the Eyes of an American. According to Davidow, the USSR was a society in bloom—happy children with “rose-colored cheeks” played in utopian cities unblemished by the chaos and violence of capitalist America.

    Out of gratitude, you gave the book a fair chance. But by the halfway point, the propaganda wore you down. It was a slog—repetitive, dull, and deaf to irony. You ditched Davidow for A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian acid bath from Anthony Burgess that, had your grandfather caught you reading it, would’ve gotten you labeled a reactionary.

    You carried that subversive novel on the Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow. That’s when Jerry Gold—a fellow tourist and law student at Brown—noticed it and leaned in with a warning: “They’ll probably confiscate that at the airport,” he said. “They’ll mark you as a troublemaker and keep tags on you. Look over your shoulder. And if anyone offers you good money for your jeans, it’s probably KGB. Black-market trading will land you in prison.”

    You laughed nervously, but the real threat onboard was not the KGB—it was the in-flight food. Small foil-wrapped cheeses, off-color cold cuts, wilted lettuce, and soggy carrot slices—all served by demure flight attendants in drab uniforms. The Aeroflot menu was a direct contradiction to Davidow’s utopia. A lack of good food was a crisis, and pretending otherwise was its own crisis.

    Jerry, peeling the foil off his sad cheese triangle, folded his industrial-grade napkin and pocketed it. “This might be the only toilet paper you get on this trip,” he advised.

    “That’s disgusting.”

    “You ever used an Eastern European toilet?”

    You hadn’t.

    “A hole in the ground. Deep knee bend. Free Jack LaLanne workout. Things can be primitive.”

    You asked why, with all his doom-saying, he’d signed up.

    “College credit. Exotic street cred. How many Americans get to say they’ve been to the USSR?” He bit his cheese like it was a dare. “What about you?”

    “My grandfather wants to convert me. He’s a communist.”

    “So he sent you to paradise.” Jerry pinched a cold cut and gave it a good stare.

    “The food’s not a winning argument,” you said. “Neither is the lack of toilet paper.”

    Jerry smirked. “In the Soviet Union, if you see a line, you stand in it. It means something’s for sale.”

    A week later, you stood sweating in a Kyiv market watching babushkas queue for wrinkled, fly-covered chickens. You thought, Cities without crisis? Bullshit. Sixty-two miles away sat Chernobyl. Two years later, the reactor would blow. Cities without crisis indeed.

    But in 1984, as you encountered shortages, queues, and squat toilets, one detail stirred something close to admiration: classical music playing everywhere—train stations, parks, museums. Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev streamed from speakers like sonic incense. Was it cultural enrichment or state-sponsored propaganda—a rebuke to Western vulgarity? You wanted to believe it was the former. Your grandfather would’ve insisted it was.

    No one confiscated your Burgess novel at the airport, but the following day, at the Moscow Zoo, you saw a silverback gorilla pounding his chest while a Rachmaninoff piano piece played. Then she appeared: a stunning woman in an elegant black dress, black hat, and pearls. She smiled and told you, “You look very Russian.”

    She wasn’t wrong. Your mother’s family hailed from Belarus and Poland. Even your fellow tourists said you looked native. She added, “Russian men are strong. You are weightlifter, yes?”

    You were. Before bodybuilding, you’d competed in Olympic weightlifting and idolized Vasily Alekseyev.

    “Russian women love strong men,” she purred.

    You blushed and beamed. Then Natasha grabbed your arm and marched you behind some bushes. She said the woman was probably KGB. A honey trap. Kompromat. Whatever the game was, Natasha wanted it shut down.

    But you couldn’t stop thinking about her. You had been awkward and monkish in college, more comfortable with piano, Nietzsche, and protein powder than dating. Now you felt unshackled, lusty, hungry for connection. Natasha had ruined your chance—or so you believed.

    The next morning, you found a grand piano in the lobby of the Moscow Olympic Hotel. You played a sad piece you’d composed. Your fellow tourists gathered, impressed. Truth was, you were a sloppy pianist who overcompensated with melodrama. But you had flair.

    At a nearby table, Soviet military officers drank warm beer. The Commander—tall, square-jawed, festooned in medals—watched you. Then you saw her again: the woman from the zoo, standing by the piano. Before you could approach her, the Commander locked eyes with her, leered, and sent her fleeing.

    He turned to you and mimicked your piano-playing with theatrical finger waggles. His men laughed. He invited you to his table, poured you warm beer, and barked, “Drink!”

    Three times he commanded. You complied. It was the price of being a charlatan. A dandy. A fraud. Russians trained their children in piano. You were a ham with no chops. He knew. They all knew.

    When you got back to your room and twisted the sink’s cold-water knob, the entire unit came off the wall and slashed your chest. You bled, cursed, and lifted your shirt the rest of the day to show off your injury as proof that Russia itself was trying to kill you.

    The Commander popped up again—on the train to Novgorod. He laughed when he saw you. Jerry speculated he was keeping tabs on you. CIA paranoia, or just Soviet protocol?

    You weren’t sure. But by the time you arrived in Novgorod, you had a fever. Natasha insisted on a doctor. Soon, a stunning, no-nonsense woman in a white coat examined you, declared it a cold, and ordered you to drop your pants for a Soviet “remedy.”

    The shot felt like hot tar. Your fellow tourists watched, delighted.

    At a barn lecture the next day, the Commander showed up again, reinforcing that you were always being watched. Jerry managed to prank him with a piece of hay, brushing his neck like a mosquito. The Commander slapped himself silly. Your group stifled laughter. You limped away, your ass sore, your ego tattered.

    Later, at a toy factory near the forest, you saw buses of children arriving. When you asked Natasha if they were starting a shift, she had them shooed away. One boy even got a boot to the backside. You had glimpsed a truth they didn’t want captured.

    That night, North Korean kids in uniforms got the best dinner service at the hotel. You and your group got leftovers, like stray dogs. You were done with Novgorod. You needed Leningrad.

    The next evening, you were sitting in a Leningrad discotheque, still nursing a sore ass, and talking to a cute Finnish girl named Tula. It turned out you had a lot in common. You were both in your early twenties. You both shared a passion for Russian literature and the music of Rachmaninoff. As you conversed under the glittering gold disco ball, the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” blared across the club. Through your mutual confessions, it became clear that neither of you had any real romantic experience. Tula was short, diminutive, bespectacled, and elfin, with short sandy blond hair. At one point, she said, “I will never marry. I have, what do you say in English? Melancholy. Yes, I have melancholy. You know this word?”

    “Yes, I was no stranger to melancholy,” you said.

    “I am so much like that,” she told you.

    “That explains your love of Rachmaninoff,” you said.

    She clasped her hands and almost became teary-eyed. “How I love Rachmaninoff. Just utter his name, and I will break down weeping.”

    You thought you were a depressive, but in the presence of Tula, you had the perkiness of Richard Simmons leading an aerobics class.

    She asked what you were doing in Russia. You explained that your grandfather was a card-carrying communist, a friend of Fidel Castro, and a supporter of the Soviet Union. He used a shortwave radio in his San Pedro house to communicate with Soviet sailors on nearby ships and submarines. He visited Cuba whenever he could, bringing medical supplies that were in demand. One of his friends, a Hollywood writer, had lived in exile in Nicaragua after being arrested in France by Interpol for driving a Peugeot station wagon filled with illegal weapons. Your grandfather had wanted you to fall in love with the Soviet Union and become a champion of its utopian vision, so he paid for you to go on a peace tour.

    Had you fallen in love with Russia the way your grandfather had hoped? Not really. So far, you had been approached at the Moscow Zoo by a striking woman in black and pearls—whom Natasha, your tour guide, claimed was a KGB agent trying to frame you for soliciting a prostitute. You had been washing your hands at the newly built Olympic Hotel in Moscow when the sink fell out of the wall and gashed your torso. You’d caught a fever in Novgorod, prompting a beautiful, stern-faced doctor to give you a shot in the ass. You’d been approached by young men on the subway asking if you wanted to sell your American jeans—just as Jerry Gold had warned—most likely a KGB setup for black-market entrapment. And everywhere you went—hotels, trains, restaurants—grim chamber music poured from loudspeakers, as if the Soviet authorities were saying, “Try not to be too happy while you’re here.”

    Tula listened to your long-winded tale for a couple of hours, wide-eyed, touching your shoulder. “I need to see you again,” she said.

    You agreed to meet the next day at the Peterhof Royal Palace by the Samson Fountain. The place was enormous—a garden the size of multiple football fields, full of gold statues and fountains shooting jets of water into the air. You and Tula sat on the hot concrete steps in the near-ninety-degree heat, flanked by golden naked statues posed around a spectacle known as the Grand Cascade. She wore a short white dress. Eventually, the heat got to you both, and you decided to get ice cream.

    On your way to the ice cream bar, a gypsy suddenly tried to hand you a baby—like a quarterback executing a handoff. Before the infant could land in your arms, a Russian police officer swooped in, seized the baby, returned it to the gypsy, and shouted at her. You thought for sure she’d be arrested, but the officer merely berated her. She shriveled under the scolding and slinked away with the child.

    You returned to Tula with the ice cream and recounted the bizarre scene.

    She nodded. “Things like that happen all the time here.”

    “But what was I supposed to do with the baby?”

    “Perhaps adopt it? Buy it? Save it from a life of misery? There is so much tragedy here.”

    “So I was supposed to fly back to the States with a baby? Go through customs and everything?”

    “I know. It’s crazy.”

    “I don’t think I could be a parent. I don’t have the hardwiring for it.”

    “Me either. I’m too sad to be a parent. Sadness is a full-time job that leaves me with little energy for much else.”

    She finished her ice cream and smiled at you, then said, “You and I are like two kindred spirits meeting each other in this strange world.”

    “It’s hotter than hell out here,” you said.

    “So will you marry someday?”

    You shrugged. “I doubt anyone will take me.”

    “Don’t be so hard on yourself. If I were the marrying type, I would come to America and spend my life with you. We could live in California and be sad together. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

    And oddly, it did sound lovely—living in shared sadness with Tula, marinating in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, discussing the existential torment of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What other kind of life was there?

    She stood up and said she had to catch her plane back to Finland. She gave you a chaste kiss on the cheek.

    “I really hope you find happiness. You are such an outstanding person.”

    “Outstanding?” you repeated, unable to hide your skepticism. The word struck you as hollow—like describing a house beside train tracks as “charming.” You echoed the adjective with a trace of sarcasm and said goodbye. You never saw her again, but you never forgot the vanilla ice cream—it remained the best you’d ever tasted.

    Nine months later, you were back in your Bay Area routine of working out, playing piano, and slogging through college assignments. You were living with your mother, standing beside the loquat tree in your front yard, holding a letter with a Finnish return address. Mexican parrots shrieked from a neighbor’s dogwood tree. It was a warm May. You walked under the porch light and opened the envelope.

    Dear Jeff,
    So much has happened since I met you. I took your recommendation and read A Confederacy of Dunces. I laughed my ass off, but the book was so sad. I keep the book on my shelf and always think of you when I see it. You won’t believe this. I’m getting married! I have you to thank for this. I never thought I was the marrying type, but those two days I spent with you in Russia changed me. When I got back to Finland, I was restless, I thought about you constantly, and even at one time I had this mad idea that I should arrange to visit you, but a high school friend Oliver came into my life, and we began seeing each other, not as friends but as lovers. I have you to thank for this. Meeting you awakened a part of my soul that I had never known before. I hope that you don’t forsake love, as I had planned to do, that you too will find someone special in your life. You deserve it. You are an amazing man!
    Love Always,
    Tula

    You stood there, staring at the letter, listening to the parrots cackling in the distance.

    So that was your role—you were the guy who helped a sweet-souled depressive fall in love. Not with you. You weren’t the recipient of her love. You were the lighter fluid, the spark, the kindling that got her fire started. You’d made a difference.

    You went inside, sat at your ebony Yamaha upright, and played something sad. You tried to imagine Tula as your audience, but her image was pushed out by the Russian Commander. You could see him sneering.

    “You are a charlatan,” he said in your mind. “An American charlatan in Russia. You must always be put in your place. You must drink warm beer until you puke your guts out. Only then can you redeem your vain self.”

    Over the years, the Commander had become a constant voice in your head—a reminder that you were pretentious, fraudulent, self-regarding. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe you needed him. He was the unexpected gift of a trip designed to make you a Communist but instead taught you to keep your inner ham in check.

    Because an American charlatan in Russia was still a charlatan everywhere else.

  • The Cult of Cool: How Fashion Brands Turned Insecurity Into Gold

    The Cult of Cool: How Fashion Brands Turned Insecurity Into Gold

    Three documentaries—White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, and Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel—reveal a sobering truth: some of the most iconic youth fashion brands haven’t just sold clothes; they’ve trafficked in identity, manipulated insecurity, and run full-scale psychological cons dressed up as marketing.

    These brands built empires on seductive illusions—creating tight-knit aspirational worlds where beauty, desirability, and social status were pre-packaged into a logo and sold at a premium. The catch? Entry required blind conformity to a narrow aesthetic, behavioral uniformity, and uncritical loyalty. This wasn’t fashion—it was Groupthink in skinny jeans. And behind it all pulsed the emotional engine of modern consumer culture: FOMO, the fear of being left out, unseen, unchosen.

    White Hot, reviewed by Ben Kenigsberg, focuses on Abercrombie’s marketing of “aspirational frattiness”—a euphemism for white exclusivity wrapped in khaki shorts and cologne. It was a smug, muscular nostalgia trip to a sanitized, all-white upper-class fantasy where thinness, wealth, and preppy arrogance were the unspoken requirements for membership.

    At the helm was CEO Mike Jeffries, a marketing savant whose obsession with aesthetic purity bordered on cultic. Under his reign, the company embraced racist T-shirts, discriminatory hiring practices, and a toxic definition of “cool.” His executive team mirrored his vision so fully they might as well have been in a bunker, smiling and nodding as the walls caught fire. Groupthink didn’t just enable the brand’s rise—it ensured its blindness to its own downfall.

    Why revisit Abercrombie now? Because its story is a pre-Instagram case study in the mechanics of cult marketing: how insecurity is mined, branded, and sold back to consumers at 400% markup. My students in the 90s already saw through the ruse—complaining the shirts fell apart in the armpits within a week. What mattered wasn’t the clothing but the illusion of status sewn into every threadbare seam.

    Ultimately, White Hot offers a rare glimpse of justice: a cool brand undone by its own arrogance, its aesthetic no longer aspirational but pitiful. The Abercrombie collapse isn’t just a business story—it’s a warning. When branding becomes religion and coolness becomes a weapon, consumers become disciples in a theology of self-erasure.