Anaïs Mitchell and the Rebirth of Greek Tragedy

Eve Noblezada and Reeve Carney as Eurydice and Orpheus in Hadestown: the Musical

The word “catharsis” enters English from Greek through Aristotle, mostly his book Poetics. Therein, Aristotle uses the word “katharsis” to describe the effect he believes tragic drama has on audiences, raising negative emotions and, by expressing them, leaving them behind in the theater. For the most part, only classics scholars, gastroenterologists, and theatre kids know the word has its origins in medical terminology.

In ancient Greek, “katharsis” meant the removal of harmful substances from the body, especially in large quantities. In Aristotle’s day (and remember, his father was a physician), this might have meant medical leeching or emetics. It also signified heavy menstruation, though Aristotle, a consummate misogynist, probably never considered that. Most likely, he meant a metaphor to powerful laxative drugs and their effects on the gut.

You read that right. By “catharsis,” Aristotle probably meant that large, oft-postponed shit you take and, having taken, find yourself able to think clearly, feel deeply, and judge accurately. Aristotle believed that audiences watching Athenian tragedies, which were religious ceremonies, felt their feelings so intensely that it cleared mental blocks and burdens on the soul. He figured tragedy made audiences take a metaphorical shit, and having shat, emerge spiritually cleansed.

All that is prelude to say: I hope Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, presages a new generation of artistic tragedy. Many audiences, especially in the provinces, may never see a stage production, because the show’s need for multiple levels and trick floors make it impractical for regional and community theatres. But its recent big-screen distribution has made this play into a legitimate phenomenon.

I won’t recapitulate the plot. Writers from Plato and Virgil, to Rainier Maria Rilke and Sarah Ruhl, have reinvented it for their times, as Mitchell does here. I’m more interested in process and effect. Hadestown has all the Aristotlean characteristics of a successful tragedy: plot, character, theme, language, music, and “spectacle.” And, to judge by the stunned silence among the exiting audience at my showing, it clearly purges the emotions.

This production differs from most theatre in its specificity. Orpheus is still a gifted musician, but no longer a hero, he works despised jobs while seeking his break. Eurydice, beautiful but poor, is no longer snake-bitten; she chooses Hades, because at least there’s work. And Hades (the god and place alike) are now metaphors for carnivorous capitalism, the economic machine that consumes dreams and reduces humans to anonymous parts.

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

We, the audience, see ourselves in this Dionysian ecstasy. Not everyone is a poet like Orpheus, surely; but we’ve all known the indignity of accepting work beneath our capabilities because rent is due. Like Eurydice, we’ve known the push-pull between economic necessity and moral integrity. And while we all haven’t been rapacious industrialists like Hades, we’ve all known and worked for someone who, like Hades, is disfigured inside and out.

For years, I insisted I disliked musicals. But recent experiences have shown me that I actually dislike Broadway musicals toned down for production in educational theatres, a theatrical subgenre too many of us know innately. School musicals are perhaps notorious for their thematically neutered structure and precious, virtuoso-driven music. Little could seem further from lived experiences of poverty, inequality, and discordant rhythm.

Mitchell doesn’t blanche to coach audiences to see ourselves in her characters, then hurt the characters. The suffering Eurydice suffers when Orpheus can’t hear her, and she must make a decision alone—why, we’ve all felt that misery when we discover we face life’s violent circumstances, sooner or later, alone. The doubt Orpheus feels, walking out of hell, is doubt we’ve all experienced that our lives are founded on lies.

Finally, Mitchell appends a final scene missing from the ancient sources. Without spoilers, we whether the characters lack free will, and whether they chose their tragedy, or the tragedy was an inevitable outcome. I’ve written before that whether writers and critics see plot or character as more important in storytelling, seemingly depends on whether they believe humans have free will. But we live now in times where such certainty seems quaint.

Hadestown is a tragedy because, like the ancient Athenian tragedies, it isn’t timeless. It uses mythology its audience already knows, but repurposes it for its intended audience. Millennia from now, Mitchell’s references to our real world may seem as abstract as those embedded in Sophocles do to us. But it’s a tragedy, in Aristotle’s sense, specifically because it hits us, the viewers, where we live. We feel because we already do.

Anthony Fauci and the Impolitics of Doubt

President Taco and Dr. Fauci have clearly differed on how to face the problem.

I struggle watching the Senate grilling America’s former chief immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for the same reason I avoid Farrelly Brothers-style doofus comedies: because it pains me to watch hapless dorks struggle. While Senators, particularly Rand Paul, fling bad-faith questions, Dr. Fauci responds by avoiding answers. This isn’t a partisan blowout, as I’d expected beforehand; it’s a disgrace to everyone who loves public policy and hard science.

Much news coverage has focused on Fauci’s diary. Senator Paul leaked reams of Fauci’s personal papers ahead of the hearing, presumably expecting the contents to embarrass Fauci and his supporters. They certainly should embarrass him for writing style—the man uses the telegraphic style and lush punctuation of a 13-year-old girl in an Elmore Leonard novel. But the contents, and the Senate's reaction to them, have proved altogether more interesting.

From the beginning of the pandemic, I compared the responses to religion. To President Taco, and most Republicans, “science” is whatever dribbles from a scientist’s mouth. Scientists are like prophets, their pronouncements are oracular truth, and our only responsibility is to make their parables useful. Watching scientists grasp at straws, change their minds, and struggle for unifying narratives, looks like secularized waffling to those who seek certainty.

I still believe that. However, I’ve come to believe the response isn’t unique to science. A certain kind of public personality believes that truth must be certain, and should never vary from first to last. Changing one’s mind, thinking of truth as conditional, and adjusting one’s language to meet the circumstances, come across to the literal-minded as vacillation and dishonesty. The small-c conservative mind seeks certainty where none exists.

Think back to recent political events. (I’m old enough that “recent” is a fungible term; bear with me.) Remember the brouhaha surrounding John Kerry’s notorious 2004 statement that “actually did vote for [a military appropriations bill] before I voted against it.” This probably submarined his presidential aspirations. Barry Glassner writes about the criticism Bill Clinton received for taking both sides of several political issues.

If Dr. Fauci can change his mind in light of new scientific evidence, it perforce follows that anybody else can, too. Senator Paul himself has stuck with the narrative that Fauci is personally responsible for the economic sinkhole the pandemic caused, if not the pandemic himself. Paul’s narrative persists despite a paucity of evidence, partly because Paul probably believes it, but also because he daren’t be seen publicly changing his mind.

Republicans, who are broadly more religious than the opposition, yearn for the moral certainty of Moses in their political leaders. Moses challenged Pharaoh, and David challenged Saul, both confident that they had God’s imprimatur. This absolute, unwavering confidence can look commanding to people confused or overwhelmed by the rapid social changes which have become hallmarks of modernity. Why can’t we all be as certain as Jesus?

My friends and veteran readers know where I’m headed here. The confidence of religion is, itself, irreligious. Moses initially tried to beg off G-d’s calling; so did Jeremiah and Isaiah. Jesus himself prayed, immediately before his arrest, to avoid what he knew came next. John, in his first epistle, warns against excessive faith: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1).

Doubt, not certainty, is the condition of life in this material world. Science is never “done;” it must constantly revise itself as new evidence arises. Lawmakers must pass the best bills available now, knowing they or their successors will repeal those bills later as conditions, economics, or public morals evolve. Prophets speak to a specific time and place, and their truths, however absolute, must face contingent interpretations.

Say what you will about Dr. Fauci’s over 100 recourses to the Fifth Amendment. (I’d suggest Fauci, a 38-year career civil servant, knew the game well enough to simply avoid common pitfalls.) For our purposes, what matters most is Fauci’s willingness to acknowledge scientific uncertainty without reaching for a pat narrative. He didn’t need to reconcile his doubt, because for him, doubt is simply natural.

Anthony Fauci makes modern lawmakers, media pundits, and other vendors of pat solutions nervous. Because, simply, he reveals that it’s okay to doubt, to question, to change your mind. Politicians squirm at this, because unshakeable certainty looks better in campaign ads. But the more command you have of the facts, the more nuanced your read, and the more vulnerable you are to doubt. Fauci says that’s okay, and that frightens grey-faced nabobs.

Kingdom Politics vs. Imperial Power

John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now

Jesus of Nazareth, the man believers call Christ, existed in a time and place. Too many Christians read the Gospels like a fairy tale, a pleasant lesson unmoored from historical context. But, as former Servite Catholic priest and DePaul professor John Dominic Crossan writes, Jesus’ mission took place in the direct shadow of Roman bloodlust and Herodian greed. Jesus’ message contains references to human power, and postulates an alternative kingdom, without hierarchies crushing the multitudes.

Like most Crossan books, this isn’t casual reading. An alumnus of schools in America, Ireland, Rome, and Jerusalem, Crossan approaches biblical exegesis with an erudite background, and his arguments are long, intricate, and extensively source-noted. His chapters are unusually long for mass-market religious books. Yet for his intended audience of serious-minded, literate Christians, he provides a worthwhile argument about political Christianity, grounded in Jesus’ first-century context, and the ways Jesus’ world resembles ours, and doesn’t.

First-century occupied Israel saw several feuds between competing kingdoms. Rome and its local allies, the temple priesthood, made and unmade Israelite kings. The Herodians and Hasmoneans had their partisans for the Jerusalem throne. Meanwhile, synagogues encouraged regular Jews to ignore the kings, and insist on their uniquely Jewish identity. All these feuding kingdoms asserted their primacy, demanding loyalty from farmers and laborers whose lives would be equally crushed, no matter which king wore the crown.

Against these earthly kingdoms, Jesus postulated the Kingdom of God, where hierarchies are inverted, servants are rulers, and the first shall be last. The Emperor Augustus claimed to be the son of God, savior of the nations, and bringer of peace on earth; Jesus (or anyway his followers) pilfered these titles for an alternate Kingdom. Nor were these parallels accidental, or so Crossan says. Jesus’ Kingdom deliberately reversed imperial claims on human lives and souls.

This is, of course, the short version. Crossan breaks down, in intricate detail, Romes’s history of peace through victory. Crossan believes Jesus offers an alternate vision he calls “peace through justice.” (He carefully defines “justice,” a word that, like “freedom,” changes definitions by context. Crossan is a stickler for close definitions.) Crossan finds multiple places where, to those well informed on first-century history, Jesus’ message recorded in the Gospels deliberately pokes Rome in the eye.

John Dominic Crossan

Crossan’s argument approach suffers some limitations. His level of intense detail is only possible in writing, and restating his claims out loud would bog down in verbosity. Crossan’s arguments are thus not particularly useful in correcting your right-wing uncle who sees Jesus as a conservative nationalist. Crossan’s source-heavy style is persuasive to readers who already essentially agree, but need meat on their arguments’ bones. They’re unlikely to persuade people evangelized mainly by basic cable TV.

Further, his approach is thoroughly Catholic. By this I mean he’s heavily catechistic, and focused on doing, not believing. In Crossan’s telling, Jesus invokes Kingdom law now, on Earth, not in some future glorious return. This approach contradicts Lutheran and Calvinist eschatology (I’m overgeneralizing, but not by much), but also contradicts the Apostle Paul, who expected Jesus’ Second Coming imminently. Crossan says Jesus awaits neither Heaven nor Armageddon, but we reside in the Kingdom immediately.

It bears stating that Crossan’s argument requires Jesus’ physical existence in a historical context. Crossan repeats the phrase “the historical Jesus.” Astute religious readers will recognize this linchpin of the Jesus Seminar, an organization that attempts to blow the later mythological dust off Jesus, the person. Like his organization, Crossan believes Jesus was a divinely inspired human, not necessarily the divine immanence, and his text reveals Crossan questions the Resurrection, and disbelieves the Second Coming.

This may seem confusing to both outsiders and rank-and-file Christians. Crossan is Catholic, but pooh-poohs doctrine. He’s Christian, but could take or leave the Resurrection. He frequently writes “we Christians,” while contradicting Christian belief dating back to the ancient ecumenical councils. Therefore he rejects the moral certainty that often infuses Christian writing, and frequently admits his exegesis is subjective. He invites readers to use discretion and discernment, not to simply believe him, or indeed anybody.

Yet I find this approach invigorating. By embracing Christianity shorn of dogmatism, he challenges us to examine which beliefs are innately Christian, and which are cultural baggage. You almost certainly won’t agree with everything Crossan says. But he makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ message reflects an anti-imperial core, one which remains painfully relevant today, in Nova Roma. If we take Jesus seriously, Crossan asks, we must decide: which kingdom do we occupy, right now?

For another book by John Dominic Crossan:
The Bible as Literature vs. The Gospel as History

Christian Politics Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

John Fugelsang, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds

Let us pray.

Lord, we come before you today in a state of grief. Not only grief for our broken world, the poverty we allow to fester, the disease we fail to heal, the human lives we let slip through the cracks. But also grief for the religious language that others use to justify this rampant injustice. So many people actively making things worse claim to work in your name, Lord. We have seen your mercy perverted into violence and empire.

But in our grief, Lord, you’ve also motivated many among us to recommit ourselves to what your message really means. Actor, comedian, and talk show panelist John Fugelsang is merely one among that number, though this world’s systems have surely provided him a larger platform than others have enjoyed. In these hours of religiously motivated bigotry, he’s chosen to dedicate his platform to challenging the hatred he’s seen perpetrated in Christianity’s name.

Fugelsang isn’t a Biblical scholar himself. His parents were both professional Catholic religious before they left their vocations to get married. But they never relinquished their dedication to the Beatitudes, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, and the Catholic social teachings in support of “the least of these.” They taught him from infancy that Christianity is a responsibility to serve the dispossessed, not a shield against consequence or justification to self-righteousness.

He pitches Biblical literacy, including context and history, against those who see Christianity as “a clique rather than a calling.” Religion has the power to bring people together, but the same nominal religion can give people a sense of holy mission, or an in-group they feel compelled to defend. Which choice they make defines how public-facing Christians relate to the poor, disfranchised, and foreigners among them.

This book is structured not only to debunk widely held Christian falsehoods, but also to help readers challenge those falsehoods in others. Fugelsang anticipates readers debating their racist, nationalist, or otherwise intransigent relatives in casual settings where we’ll have to answer pat talking points quickly. His counterarguments are detailed and sourced, but brief, easy to memorize and quick to deploy against the most common thought-terminating cliches.

Fugelsang dedicates chapters to why the Bible isn’t anti-gay (notwithstanding certain Levitical passages), anti-feminist, or pro-gun. Against popular prooftexts and “clobber verses,” he presents a package of thorough Biblical literacy, grounded in history. He also insists on context, and reads popular orphan verses in their full text, demonstrating how, to the audience who first received the Bible, passages often mean the opposite of what modern nationalists claim.

John Fugelsang

Again, Fugelsang isn’t a religious scholar. He grounds his arguments in his spiritual autobiography, and makes many claims based on practical lived experience. But he never relies on mere anecdote. He consults many scholars to ensure he has the full historical and religious background for every claim he makes. This includes consulting Jewish scholars to ensure he doesn’t read the Tanakh through Christian-tinted glasses, a common fallacy.

Many quoted scholars are, like Fugelsang himself, media figures with high public profiles. He repeatedly cites Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Pastor John Pavlovitz, and Professor Kristen Kobes du Mez. Were I to cite one law with Fugelsang’s reasoning, it would be this reliance on high-profile media figures, whose theology sometimes reflects their demi-celebrity status. It’s possible to be factually right, but still disconnected from the worm’s-eye view.

But his sources’ media-savvy responses also make their arguments concise enough for informal argument. When there isn’t time for lengthy perorations and exhaustive detail, speed and brevity are sometimes necessary. Fugelsang organizes his claims well enough that, when somebody says something factually incorrect or spiritually ignorant, readers can say: “That’s wrong, and here’s why.” It’s good to be correct, but better to be correct and comprehensible.

As a comedian, Fugelsang does use earthy humor in his book. (“Earthy” being a euphemism for occasional cusswords.) But he reserves most of his humor for his autobiographical passages and personal ruminations. He takes his spiritual positions seriously, and never lets his stage performance come between him and his message. His writing is useful, informative, and fast-moving enough to never bog down in unnecessary scholarly language.

Writers like Fugelsang give me confidence, Lord, that Christianity doesn’t have to belong to the bigots and nationalists. Your message of mercy and generosity remains persuasive to many Christians today, Lord, specifically because it’s missing from our political and media leadership. The worst Americans have hijacked your message, Lord, but Fugelsang reassures me that this hijacking is neither inevitable nor permanent.

Amen.

White Supremacy Has Shown Its Real Face

The now-infamous photo of an unidentified woman surrounded by
Patriot Front members, captured by Reuters stringer Cheney Orr

By now we’ve all seen the photo taken on July 4^th, 2026, of a lone Black woman on a Washington, DC, commuter train. She’s surrounded by White men in matching polo shirts, balaclavas, ballcaps, and wraparound shades: Patriot Front members heading for a White supremacist march through the capital streets. The woman looks not quite into the camera, not quite at us, the picture of determination and despair.

From the photo’s publication, it struck me that not one White person looked at the Black woman. Though their philosophy relies on the presumption that they are better than her, or at least more deserving of life’s protections, they apparently can’t face her while pushing that agenda. Even on the commute, they remain in uniform, shrouded in comfy anonymity. Imagine  construction workers refusing to remove their hard hats and PPE.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears restatement. Harper Lee presented lynchings, the once-common act of racial supremacy through violence, as an overflowing of po’ White trash hatred in a moment of moralistic outrage. Lee’s “Old Sarum boys” rushed the county prison fueled by indignation and moonshine—but, importantly, they retreated as soon as Scout Finch recognized one and called him by name. Losing anonymity broke their momentum.

Except that’s not how it happened. Anybody who’s read American race history knows that lynchings were almost always planned, usually for days in advance, and frequently took place in broad daylight. Perpetrators photographed themselves with the victims, both before and after the murder, and often sold the resulting pictures as penny postcards. Perpetrators of racial violence didn’t feel obliged to conceal their identities.

This wasn’t coincidental. As theologian James Cone wrote, American lynchings served the same role as Roman crucifixions, an official reminder that the dominant population didn’t just run the country, they owned the underclass. Perpetrators showed their faces, both during and after the violence, not only because they feared no consequences, but to ensure the targeted population knew they feared no consequences. Racial oppressors were brazenly, monumentally unperturbed.

I already anticipate the counterargument: didn’t the KKK wear masks and sheets as uniforms? Yes and no. D.W. Griffith’s silent movie Birth of a Nation popularized the image, but that popularity was commodified by racist huckster D.C. Stephenson, according to journalist Timothy Egan. The Klan hood was an image sold to American racists by a former door-to-door salesman, who wanted to monetize American bigotry.

The Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, February
1960. Note that the participants on both sides aren’t afraid to show their faces. (Source)

My point is, racism used to happen in broad daylight. The counterprotesters who opposed the Woolworth’s counter sit-ins or the Freedom Riders, not only didn’t cover their faces, but they didn’t even mind being photographed. They openly put their faces and names to their violence; the white hood existed mainly for weekend pageantry. These historic bigots would’ve scoffed at needing to hide their faces from anyone, particularly a Black individual.

Saturday’s bigots, by contrast, concealed their whole faces. Other than the occasional nose poking out, all identifying characteristics are sanded off. The matching beige ballcaps with identical patches, the matching polos with Betsy Ross flag decals, the matching Oakley wraparounds: any of these men could be any other. They’ve erased their identities because, as participants discovered in Charlottesville in 2017, the consequences of being identified are now severe.

Indeed, because their faces and facial expressions are whitewashed away, there’s only one way of spotting how these men feel about their situation: none of them, not one, looks at the woman. They avoid even the possibility of meeting her gaze, even through the armor of their mirrored shades. People generally avoid meeting others’ eyes for two reasons. First, they might believe the other is more powerful or of higher standing.

Second, because they’re ashamed.

Patriot Front members might yearn for a beatified past where their melanin-deficient skin would’ve provided them with protection in America. But they know America’s cultural currents have moved on without them. Not that racism has receded; as Derrick Bell taught, racism has a nearly infinite ability to adapt itself to changing cultural conditions. But we’ve reached a point where their outright bigotry and cross-burning theatrics have become pathetic, not terrifying.

But more importantly, society hasn’t just changed; they’ve internalized that change. These men conceal their faces because they know they’ll never recover if they’re identified on camera. They know that we’re not afraid of them anymore, they’re afraid of us. They hide their faces where their ancestors didn’t, because they know they’re doing wrong. And that knowledge won’t just go away, not during their lifetimes anyway.

American State Myth in the Living Era

Today’s quarter-millennium anniversary of American independence is purely formal, if you read history. The document signed on July 4th, 1776, merely clarified the terms of the Continental Congress’s July 2nd resolution of Independence; the signatories famously didn’t begin signing the Declaration of Independence until August. Besides, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, generally considered the start of the American Revolution, occurred on April 19th, 1775.

What, then, does America celebrate today? We celebrate a story, a myth. Like the Christian Nativity, which almost certainly didn't happen on December 25th, Independence Day celebrations hang a neat date on the otherwise vague, shapeless division between the Before Times and the Age of Salvation. Such divisions create clarity, sequence, and an almost catechistic transition from benightedness to true vision.

The parallels between Christianity and American state mythology deserve further consideration, because they speak to our national identity. I've written before about how the official Thanksgiving story serves the same role in America that the Genesis creation narrative serves in the Bible. But if Jamestown and Plymouth commence America's Hebraic “wandering in the wilderness” epoch, the Declaration of Independence is definitely Christmas in the American story. For good or ill.

Like Christ's ministry, the American “Experiment” involves reams of teachings. John Locke, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine serve the same role as the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables. These teachings come from an era, not an individual, so the parallels are imperfect. But American schools teach simplified, bowdlerized versions of these texts just as Sunday School teaches a paraphrased Bible for kids.

But Sunday School elides the contradictions and nuances that make the Bible frequently difficult, even for scholars. Likewise, schoolbook history removes the conflicts, doubts, and often slippery moral center surrounding the Revolution and what came after. Like reformers today, the Founders fought each other as much as the enemy. But you wouldn't know that from most official schoolbooks.

The Book of Acts records that, without Christ around to resolve questions, the Apostles fell to infighting. But they resolved the most important debates at the Council of Jerusalem. Likewise, Jill Lepore records how the American Constitution represents the Founders’ best available solution to their internal divisions. The Council of Jerusalem has no published proceedings; we know only the conclusions printed in the Bible. The Founders tried to achieve the same effect by refusing to publish the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention until all participants had died.

Then the parallels become loaded. The Gospels record Jesus preaching, teaching, and giving theological interpretations. But when crowds started clamoring for him personally, or tried to make him king, Jesus fled. Only after Jesus was absent, and Paul's Epistles became scripture, did the person of Jesus, rather than his teaching, become prime in Christianity.

Likewise, while the Founders lived, they argued about principle and procedure. How direct should popular control be? How strong can the Executive Branch become before it threatens the nation? Only after the Founders’ deaths do we start seeing the personal veneration of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and latterly Lincoln. The individuals, not the philosophic process, become the source of capital-T Truth.

As Jason Stanley writes, when we venerate old texts and dead persons, debate about how to apply their Truths becomes impossible. Too much American political discourse today focuses on the Founders’ words and persons, the fallacy of Originalism. Changing how we apply the Founders’ principles to real life, becomes seen first as decline, then as blasphemy. Truth becomes a fixed, oracular artifact, not a function of how we live.

The idea that we can Make America Great Again relies on the principle that greatness derives from the past, not from how we live now. Change can never happen, since change grants primacy to the present. Our living, breathing needs become a barrier to Truth, which the dead uncovered in 1776, and which must be treasured and preserved, never used.

Jesus himself hated this veneration of the dead. When challenged on “marriage at the resurrection” in Matthew 22, Jesus replied, “God is lord of the living, not the dead.” Even without a literal God, American state mythology should follow the same values. America is a living nation, not a graveyard of ideals. Any moral Truth that impedes living Americans is a contravention of the philosophic process that Washington, Jefferson, and Paine put in motion.

If today is a day to celebrate the dead, then who cares. But if we recommit ourselves to living Americans, we truly remember what this day is about.

The Beginning of Truth at the End of Civilization

Ronald Malfi, Bone White

A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.

I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.

Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.

Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…

Nothing.

Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.

Ronald Malfi

Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.

His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.

Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.

Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.

I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.

The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.

“Easy Words” and the Tyranny of Literature

Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics, squelches humor, and rewards anger. That’s why I still blog.

I don’t want to rehash last week’s Threads debacle over what constitutes excessively difficult language. The two accompanying images should suffice. One platform user requested authors to “use easy words,” citing scrying as an example of needless difficulty. (Some defenders claim this was a joke, though the humor eludes me.) Following a Kelly Marie Tran-level pile-on, another user posted a defense that made things worse by correlating dictionary use with ableism.

The post that created the controversy

I’m more interested in the underlying assumptions about literacy, ability, and writing. As a sometime writing teacher, I recall struggling with students who used clipped vocabulary, short sentences, and especially passive voice construction. I don’t like getting involved in the controversy surrounding America’s purported literacy crisis, mostly because it feels like a media-fueled moral panic. But youth do, anecdotally, have difficulty writing nowadays.

Which is, on consideration, weird. If anything, young adults write more today than my generation did. Emails, text messages, social media posts—these remain mostly language-based communication modes. Youth share in online discussion boards, chat-based RPGs, and other participatory, text-centric communications. Platforms like Smashwords, AO3, and Wattpad have turned youth into published authors without kowtowing to the Big Five publishing conglomerates.

Yet that practice didn’t translate into greater writing capability in my classroom. I recall students using the justification that “I write how I speak,” which I think they believed meant they used a casual tone and relaxed grammar, without a lot of pausing to consider the nuances of word choice. Which, fair enough, I often do too, especially when writing fiction and trying to capture a character’s authentic voice.

So why the difficulty? Students came into my Freshman Comp class having written far more than my peers did outside the classroom (notwithstanding us aspiring authors). They use their own characteristic tones, rather than trying to affect a scholarly tone. They should be able to produce something beyond the short sentences, sweeping generalizations, and tedious reliance on “to be” verbs that plagued me attempting to read their output.

Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but the difference probably involves not what content youth read, but where they read it. Yes, youth write copious text messages. But the SMS format, and the difficulty typing with thumbs, discourages long sentences and nuanced vocabulary. Heck, it even discourages punctuation. I used to wonder why students had such difficulty with comma placement, but texting discourage comma use altogether.

The attempted defense that made things worse

Scrying seems, to me, a pretty straightforward word. I discovered it in grade school while reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the Brothers Grimm, besides being adults themselves, were also transcribing oral tales delivered by community elders, tales which had been passed down, largely intact, across generations. I read books commensurate with my reading ability, mostly published by conglomerate publishers, written by experienced professional authors, who were mostly adults.

You might detect an element of elitism in this, and I won’t deny it. Not just anybody who constructs a sentence is an author, but the person who learns from the best sentence builders of the past and present. Just like not everybody at karaoke is a singer, but the ones who take the time to learn vocalism and breath control and range, the capacity to write comes from apprenticing oneself to better writers and working at it for years.

Instead, youth write copious texts to their friends, but much of their reading consists of texts from their friends. Too many aspiring authors who post fanfic to Wattpad mostly read other fanfic authors on Wattpad. Rather than giving them something to strive after, and challenging content that refines their thinking, it results in a persistent regression toward the mean, as all new writing resembles what came before.

That original Threads user didn’t deserve the abuse they received, a dogpile so severe that they apparently fled social media. But “easy words” is a request for reading as a passive activity, which readers fall into without resistance. It’s a request to feel good enough as we are, to have authors hug us and say “good job.” That’s not a kind of reading I want to do.

What’s a Trillion, More or Less?

Elon Musk

Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure. No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most citizens have money.

Start with how Musk became rich. He didn’t create or sell anything valuable. His IPO on SpaceX common shares enjoyed a price jump, causing the fraction of shares in Musk’s hands to increase. In other words, his “net worth” includes the promised future value of transactions he hasn’t yet made. You or I can claim future transactions as personal value only under specific circumstances, controlled by regulations and personal integrity.

This personal integrity component matters. Musk’s notorious buyout of Twitter caused massive financial losses that reduced stock values by half. Then he stopped the bleeding by selling Twitter’s successor company, X.com, to xAI, his tech startup. He moved his holdings from one pocket to another, giving himself a markup along the way. He later repeated the trick, selling xAI to SpaceX, mere months before selling SpaceX to Wall Street.

Each of these transactions created money without creating value. Neither Twitter nor xAI saw their corporate functioning improved by the transaction; in fact, neither has ever turned a profit. Neither has SpaceX. Smarter critics than me have analyzed the SpaceX IPO and determined that it involves nothing but high-minded promises and Elon’s personal financial network. Tesla’s mediocre cars have no resale value, and the Boring Company’s tunnels barely exist.

Please remember, when we discuss Musk’s “net worth,” we mean its dollar value, not actual dollars he has. Musk’s fortune mainly consists of his stock portfolio, which mostly comprises his own companies. He pumps their floating value by making his companies seem desirable, but he also controls the supply, keeping them scarce. He cannot ever sell his stock holdings, because that would flood the market and crash their value.

Musk isn’t a trillionaire because of products he makes, services he provides, or material he sells. He’s a trillionaire because of resources he owns. This is the definition of capitalism. Sometimes, when we reformists deride “capitalism,” conservatives accuse us of opposing free markets. Not so: markets exist in economic models other than capitalism. Rather, capitalism is the system that controls who owns which resources, and how they’re priced.

Home Depot is a market. So is the informal collocation of off-the-books day laborers in the Home Depot’s parking lot. Home Depot’s market is regulated by legislation, Federal Reserve policy, and labor law. The day laborer market is regulated by trust and honor. But only the Home Depot is capitalist, since it also owns its concrete slab building, its supply contracts, and the parking lot where the day laborers meet.

But Musk has reached a plane where Home Depot can’t reach. Home Depot has value only if it creates value for other people. It must sell product at sufficient mark-up to generate profit, but not so much that it discourages commerce. It must both read the present market, and anticipate future trends. And it must make moral compromises, such as letting undocumented day laborers use its grounds.

Let’s put it another way. A friend of mine, a registered Libertarian and outspoken Musk supporter, owns the local craft brewery. He owns his building, his tanks, his trucks, and his distribution contracts. But to remain solvent and pay his workers, he must produce beer. He can’t sell futures on his proposed ability to produce epoch-making innovative beer, eventually, then punt down the road. He must sell beer now.

This doesn’t apply to Musk. Of the six corporations Musk controls—Tesla, X Corp, xAI, SpaceX, NeuraLink, and the Boring Company—only Tesla currently sells products on the open market. And those, as reported by neutral reviewers, are good-enough cars whose resale value is undercut by limited battery life. Musk mostly sells the promise of future dividends, a promise he’s never consummated, and keeps moving into the future.

It’s apparently paradoxical. He’s charmless in media interviews, disdains workers and women, espouses small-f fascist politics, and sells mostly empty promises. Yet the retail value of those promises has made Musk a trillionaire. Which means that, ultimately, the foundation of that trillion is Musk himself. At least Cornelius Vanderbilt, for all his dick-swinging vulgarity, built actual railroads. What even is Elon’s trillion?

Trek vs. Wars, or, Who's the Better Star?

The original Star Trek bridge crew, sitting comfortably with their moral certainty

Throughout my lifetime, one defining debate in niche culture has been: which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek? Which franchise reflects what we latterly call “nerd culture” in the most practical, incisive way? I’ve always disagreed with the question, because it seemed to me that the two franchises served different purposes. Arguing which was better seemed like debating whether you loved your pancreas or liver more, as though removing one would kill you less.

Star Trek always tried to be more concrete, humane, and values-driven. The structure always featured a new encounter with an alien species, rampant technology, or breakaway sect. And each conflict was, each in different ways, solved by the characters applying Gene Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy. Exactly what that means changed over time—the original series was more swaggering and colonial than TNG, for instance—but it was built to change. It was designed to remain open-ended.

By contrast, George Lucas designed Star Wars to end. It intended to encompass Luke Skywalker’s transition from provincial peasant to galactic hero, and at least as Lucas outlined, it would then end. Whether we want that “original” ending to be the medal ceremony at the conclusion of the first movie, or the destruction of the Empire at the conclusion of the third, either way, the story intended to resolve with Luke assuming his mature role.

So Roddenberry wrote one franchise to continue, while Lucas wrote the other with an arc that resolved. Yet time hasn’t allowed either outcome. The recent release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the twelfth canon Star Wars feature film, accords it with the MCU and James Bond for stories that just continue, long after the cultural milieu that created them has ended. And Star Trek has, if anything fared even worse, at least in fan accounting.

Recent Star Trek outings like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy have received pummelings from fan critics. Admittedly, the internet has given cranky fans a nearly limitless platform to complain about virtually everything. Especially with popular franchises, new entries have suffered in the ratings because of advance fan opposition; outings like Captain Ake or the Fifteenth Doctor have been lame ducks before their episodes even appeared, because of closed-minded, hostile, and even violent fan reactions.

The Abrams movies resurrected Yoda, because Luke wasn't allowed to finish growing up

Put another way, Star Trek’s core audience doesn’t experience the show anymore, they revere it. Most current Star Trek fans weren’t alive when the original series aired, and even first-generation TNG fans are in their fifties and up. The most vocal and committed audience base didn’t experience Star Trek in its cultural context on Cold War belligerence and America’s struggle with its own imperialist history. Star Trek wasn’t an abstraction, it manifested America’s fraying conscience.

Like holy texts, like the Bible or the Koran, Star Trek seems (falsely) to speak for itself. The cultural conflicts it commented upon have become fodder for historians and schoolbooks, not something the audience is steeped in. You could say something similar about Star Wars, which certainly commented upon the post-Vietnam landscape. But Star Wars held itself aloof, a willingly timeless goulash of space wizards, samurai movies, and Flying Tigers splendor that pretended to neutrality.

J.J. Abrams, who sanded Roddenberry’s humanist morals off Star Trek, also snipped off Star Wars’ Jungian roots. He turned the Starship Enterprise into a Lucasian circus, while he rendered the Millenium Falcon into a time capsule that, somehow, must keep fighting. Admittedly, he didn’t do that alone. Besides the connivance of producer Kathleen Kennedy, the process included Lucas himself, who licensed new content in 1990 and flooded the market with novels, comics, and canon movies.

In other words, Star Wars, like LotR or Narnia, was always supposed to end. But, controlled by America’s largest media conglomerate, it can’t; not while money exists to wring from audiences. For thirty-six years (as I write), Skywalker and company have been forced to re-fight their original battles, amended only by meaningless set dressing. They never get to govern the galaxy they liberated, because they’re busy constantly resisting another apocalyptic empire that, somehow, never dies.

Meanwhile, Star Trek had no limiting arc. It had little canon continuity until The Wrath of Khan; it simply responded to surrounding culture. This fluidity reflects in how the franchise constantly moves Khan Noonien Singh’s birthdate: Trek isn’t designed to be consistent, it’s designed to be current. Yet fan reverence for its roots keeps the most strident audiences from seeing the story in the present, reducing it into a lifeless artifact, a fly in amber.

Life in the New Protein Carnival

We already know that public standards in food consumption are deeply fad-driven. From the grapefruit diet of the 1930s to “organic” food in the 1970s—a concept that means something very different now than it did then—to low-carb diets in the 2000s, mass-marketed ideas of healthy diets rise and, usually, fall. We’ve all experienced serious dietary regimes in our own lives or those of loved ones, usually dressed in the ceremonial robes of science.

Currently, high-protein diets apparently dominate. Health-conscious eaters, especially men, seem obsessed with ensuring every meal includes a source of protein. (Speaking anecdotally, of course.) For most people, “protein” is synonymous with red meat, which results in people gorging on beef and pork. Of course, we can ask who benefits from this, especially in America’s highly subsidized meat growing system, with its network of often inhumane confined animal feeding operations. But how does this diet affect humans?

A recent stumble through the grocery store showed me significant numbers of foods bolstered with protein. High-protein breakfast cereals and breads. High-protein granola and pretzels. High-protein cheese and yogurt. Okay, those last two might just be opportunistic marketing, because cheese and yogurt are just dairy products fermented to bring out the protein, which is the substance that makes them more solid than milk. But even where “high protein” is cynical marketing, it’s become ubiquitous.

Then I saw high-protein water. Okay, it was sparkling water, which is already fortified with ingredients like sugar, fruit juice, and herbal supplements. But seriously, folks, high-protein water? Whose diet is so lacking in basic nutrition that they have to supplement it with faux soda-pop? At some point, these markers become an indication that the market has become saturated, and that it’s nothing but an advertising niche, intended to part the gullible from their money.

In fairness, I’m a biased source. Doctors recently diagnosed me with a disease caused by my body’s inability to eliminate proteins, which my liver turns into uric acid, and deposits in my joints. Early last month, gout left me in such disabling pain that I could barely walk for days, and spent weeks relying on a cane. This reflects my diet, and my mother taught me several recipes, all of which started by browning the meat.

For some people, gout also comes from drinking alcohol. Not me, though; I don’t drink often enough for that. Though determining the exact culprit would require expensive lab work that I can’t afford, my doctor and I decided, based on best available evidence, that my gout was most likely caused by overconsumption of animal protein. Alleviating my symptoms means reducing my meat and cheese consumption, so I basically have to relearn how to cook.

Not everyone has gout, certainly. But approximately one in 25 American adults has it, enough to count as medically “common.” Nor is gout the only protein-related disease, despite it currently looming large in my life. Excess protein can cause kidney and liver diseases, cardiovascular problems, digestive inflammation, and plain old weight gain. That’s saying nothing of nutritional insufficiency when eaters fill up on meat, and the protein crowds out vegetables, fiber, and other diverse foods.

Some people need (or want) higher protein for legitimate reasons. Bodybuilders and weightlifters need protein to achieve the useful, photogenic muscles that pay their bills. Patients suffering from certain nutritional insufficiencies or malabsorption issues may need more protein than most people. But these are specialized cases and, especially for the bodybuilders, a temporary state necessary to achieve clearly defined goals with end dates. Nobody ought to eat like this for the rest of their lives.

Yet the popularity of ketogenic and low-carb diets have people loading on proteins in hopes of looking like fashion models well into their fifties. The American diet is already the most meat-rich on Earth, and the health risks have been visible for years. Jordan Peterson famously put himself on an all-red meat diet, claimed extravagant health benefits—and has almost vanished from public view over the last year as his body lapsed into catastrophic collapse.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t advocate complete vegetarianism. I tried that in graduate school, and discovered that the human body simply can’t replace certain nutrients that come from meat. But like in most of life, health comes through balance. Gorging ourselves on proteins has only temporary, nominal effects. Putting proteins in places they don’t belong, like fizzy beverages, isn’t healthy, it’s a sign of deep cultural imbalance that will warp our bodies and health.

The New Gods of the Old World, Part One

Nnedi Okorafor, She Who Knows

Najeeba, daughter of Xabief, has never conformed to the standards of her people, the Okeke, who reside in a far-future African dreamland. When she receives The Call, which usually only summons boys, her family understands and accepts her urgent feelings, but the rest of her village doesn’t. Seriously, a girl following The Call into the wilderness to pursue her people’s highest mission, salt mining? But this is only the beginning of Najeeba’s journey beyond civilization.

Per her author’s note, Dr. Nnedi Okorafor originally intended this novella as a companion to her breakout novel, 2010’s Who Fears Death. It covers similar themes, including ethnic identity under conditions of persecution, and being female in male-dominated places and professions. But as in the other novel, this story’s protagonist discovers that, when you change the world, you can’t control all the changes you start. And you certainly can’t control others’ response to that change.

The Salt Roads lead Najeeba and her family to the Dead Lake, a relic of some apocalyptic event that transformed Africa centuries ago. We never learn exactly what happened. But we witness the aftereffects: a land where agrarian citizens use another society’s nigh-magic technology, without really understanding it. Physical relics like the Dead Lake dot the land, letting the Okeke survive amid the devastation. And the Okeke share the land with sorcerers and tormented spirits.

But once away from the safety of village, hearth, and comforting gender roles, Najeeba discovers that her Calling isn’t the only unique thing about her. She discovers untapped powers that change her family’s fortunes, bringing sudden wealth to her impoverished village. But her X-Men-like superpowers draw attention from forces that her traditional people would prefer to continue ignoring them. Soon, phantoms begin pursuing Najeeba across the desert, while very human enemies threaten her ancestral home.

Dr. Okorafor champions an art movement she calls “Africanfuturism.” Spelled exactly thus, don’t abbreviate it, she’ll catch you. Her theory, which she asserts is interdisciplinary, involves applying the same speculative eye to African peoples and places that science fiction authors have long dedicated to Western societies. It’s more than that, but that’s a useful precis. Here, Dr. Okorafor uses time-honored themes of human resilience, and matching human venality, in the face of distant apocalyptic devastation.

Nnedi Okorafor

The Okeke people live an ancestral lifestyle, organized around community, land, and ritual. But they’re also divided: the Nuru caste drive cars and pursue capitalism, while Najeeba’s Osu-nu villagers plow, keep herds, and mine salt. This hierarchy derives from the Great Book, a holy writ which Najeeba’s father studies relentlessly, but which Najeeba distrusts. Okeke religion involves gods and spirits which intervene directly in human affairs, but which doesn’t apparently involve what Westerners call “faith.”

If it feels like I’m excessively describing background, this isn’t coincidental. This novella covers three years of Najeeba’s adolescence, but besides her personally, it describes the world Najeeba rebels against. Her people have centuries of tradition that kept them alive following whatever pivotal devastation nearly destroyed their world, but those ancient traditions have become ossified. Now some people preserve tradition, even at great harm to themselves and others, because continuity has become its own destination.

This isn’t a freestanding story; it starts a trilogy of novellas within which Dr. Okorafor expands the story and setting of Who Fears Death. This expansion serves a purpose, not only for the story, but for the audience. Confession time: when Who Fears Death dropped, I initially gave it a disparaging review, because I didn’t understand Dr. Okorafor’s purpose. I read through White Euro-American eyes, and dropped the ball. I was so young and daft.

For readers who, like my younger self, need a broader context to understand Dr. Okorafor’s mission, this novella reveals a larger world of culture and experience. This setting feels lived in, occupied by people whose lives are defined by work, but whose choices are shaped by Sufficiently Advanced Technology. And it demonstrates why, in a world of male intransigence, female rebellion becomes the reasonable choice. Najeeba’s mostly quiet resistance isn’t merely personal, it’s also necessary.

Audiences who haven’t read Who Fears Death will probably enjoy this novella by itself. It’s barely 160 pages, and the events of the prior novel only receive mention in the final two pages. Dr. Okorafor creates a smart, subdued, and notably concise tale of the social forces that shape our lives. She investigates what her protagonist can control, and what slips beyond control. And she sets the stage for bigger, darker journeys yet to come.

Living on Planet Gout

My gout-infested left foot, photographed
in the ER on May 6th, 2026

In 19^th-Century literature, gout, the disease, signals seedy characters: cruel landlords, rapacious capitalists, maiden aunts judging your choice in men. Both Austen and Dickens used “gout” as shorthand to indicate that this character didn’t understand current mores, because this character couldn’t walk out of the house without excruciating pain. In 21^st-Century literature, gout barely exists. Like malaria, it’s become something Anglophone writers no longer mention.

That’s why, when I was diagnosed with gout last week, my first thought was: I’ve become an anachronism. Based on the Availability Heuristic, a logical fallacy, gout seems rare today because it’s mainly mentioned in older literature. But gout remains, indeed, remarkably common. It’s not that the disease doesn’t exist anymore, it’s that we’ve stopped talking about it. As I’ve needed to think about it recently, I’ve reached some conclusions.

Austen and Dickens used gout as a moralistic shorthand which their intended audiences simply understood. That context has drifted away. We can consider why this happened by what causes gout. Though the underlying cause is usually medical, like kidney disease or cancer, the proximate cause to symptom flares is usually lifestyle-related, and reflects the foods we eat. It’s common after consuming salt and sugar, but especially animal proteins and alcohol.

When Austen and Dickens wrote, meat agriculture and brewing were still labor-intensive processes that racked up costs which knocked onto consumers. Not that people didn’t eat meat or drink alcohol in older times; venerable traditions like Christmas hams and Saturday booze-ups preceded these authors. But they were less common indulgences. Only when automation streamlined production did most people consume red meat and liquor regularly.

Victorian authors wrote when most ordinary citizens subsisted on diets composed mainly of cheap carbohydrates. As Paul Graham writes, before the 20^th Century, most people’s diets consisted more than half of bread, not because it was highly nutritious, but because it left people feeling full. More nutritionally dense foods, like vegetables, protein, and seeds, kept humans alive, but weren’t very filling. Also, without salt and spices, they often tasted bland.

Humans evolved in conditions where vital nutrients like magnesium, calcium, and zinc were abundant, but sodium, protein, and sugar were rare. These latter three are necessary in appropriate quantities. However, because they’re rare in nature, our bodies retain them greedily, while our kidneys process away the more abundant nutrients in our urine. As Dr. Janet Bond Brill writes, modern diets after automated agriculture are backward to our bodies’ processing abilities.

A Victorian cartoon of the capitalist
hierarchy (click to enlarge)

The landlords, capitalists, and sexually repressed older relatives who populated Victorian moral fables, were therefore coded as having the resources to consume steak, wine, and dessert. In a time when these foods were uncommon and expensive, simply having gout meant these characters had enough money to spend it on themselves, not their families or communities. Marx would later shorthand such characters as “the bourgeoisie.”

But economic conditions have changed. Not only do more of us have more money, but a combination of extractive farming, automated production, and government subsidies have made once-expensive foods downright cheap, in constant dollar terms. Red meat and wine, once occasional indulgences, have become snacks we gobble without thinking. Convenience foods, the staple of poverty diets, are flush with sodium and protein that only the rich could once afford.

Gout is, therefore, no longer a moral judgement on individuals; it represents a consumer society. While not everyone has gout, we who do are more likely to have painful flares earlier and more often than our ancestors did. In Victorian times, switching to a gout-resistant diet meant eschewing self-indulgent goodies which most people couldn’t afford. Today it means pricier, unsubsidized fresh ingredients. Gout has become the default, not the exception.

Maybe that’s partly why the anti-bourgeoisie revolution Marx predicted never occurred. Not because we aren’t disfranchised like our ancestors during the Industrial Revolution, but because our society buys our loyalty with cheap treats. Marxist revolutionary art often specifically depicts the bourgeoisie class overeating and drinking. Nowadays, excessive rich food is a sign of poverty, not wealth. Time and capitalism have overturned Marx’s economic equilibrium.

If you’ve never had gout, I don’t wish it upon you. The excruciating pain is often poorly placed; I could barely walk for a week, as putting any weight on my left foot caused nearly the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. However, statistically, you’re more likely to have flaming gout flares than virtually any generation ever. And preventing that won’t be possible through good individual moral choices; it requires amending an indulgent economic system.

Obsolete Men and Vanishing Adulthood

This essay is a follow-up to Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic and Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

Braden “Clavicular” Peters

I don’t like giving Braden “Clavicular” Peters free oxygen, largely because his philosophy is so dangerous that I fear it becoming airborne. His belief that life belongs to those who are good-looking enough is maybe not controversial, as we merely average-looking men can attest. But his desire to manipulate his physiognomy to become as absurdly handsome as possible, involves a regimen of intensive self-harm.

It was bad enough with men like Andrew Tate, whose abusive workout regimen has distorted his body as badly as his soul. Any psychologist can tell you that obsessive bodybuilding, to the point where your body becomes cartoonish, emerges from the same well of self-hatred that manifests in women as anorexia nervosa. Tate is loud and charismatic enough to make his insecurities everyone else’s problem, at great mutual cost.

Peters, though, doesn’t just distort himself. Bodybuilding is only part of a larger regimen, which includes injecting dangerous drugs, wolfing down questionable supplements, and self-flagellation. He became the public face of “looksmaxxing” in recent months as the most grotesque part of his regimen—self-administered facial beatings with a hammer—went viral. He believes that treating himself with violence will make him more conventionally handsome.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Recent photos show Peters looking like an exaggerated form of a mid-20^th Century matinee idol, with big shoulders, great hair, and a well-defined chin. Of course, as I write, Peters has recently turned twenty, so whether his good looks represent his abusive regimen, or simply graduating from awkward adolescence, is subject to debate. What we can’t debate, though, is: this man looks thirty.

Telling a twenty-year-old woman that she looks thirty would probably get you smacked. In American culture, female physical beauty correlates with outward markers of fertility, which means youth. Women use ointments, tinctures, injections, and surgery to stave off the appearance of age, though the results are questionable. Lauren Sanchéz Bezos’ recent appearance at the Met Gala resulted in laughter at her augmented appearance and questionable wardrobe.

Lauren Sanchéz Bezos

But for men, looking older is desirable. In interviews, Peters describes injecting himself with steroids at age fourteen to achieve the shredded look that normally requires years of dedication and effort. His famous, highly defined jaw, does indeed come to most men through years of small-scale trauma, sports injuries, and dangerous work. Like millions of adolescents, Peters wants to skip the dues-paying stage and be recognized as an adult.

Who can blame him? As entry-level professional jobs dwindle, men keep jobs into their twenties and thirties that formerly belonged to teenagers. Countless adults, of both biological sexes, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ houses. Student debt, once a ten-year commitment, has become a lifelong burden. The average age of first-home purchase is now forty. In such an environment, paying one’s dues in linear time is downright foolish.

In such an environment, Peters doesn’t want to merely look good. Placed in his social context, Peters wants to speed-run adulthood, or anyway the one aspect of adulthood which he can control. Savvy media manipulators can fake the personal characteristics that make older men attractive to women, including emotional regulation and economic stability. But only those willing to treat themselves violently can look old enough to enter the market.

However, let’s continue looking at that same broader context. The ways that men used to hasten rugged good looks, like playing sports or doing difficult physical labor, are all communitarian. There’s no such thing as solitaire football, and building a house requires a team. The ways men formerly organized themselves into communities, including labor unions, religious congregations, and even bowling leagues, look increasingly quaint, if they even still exist.

Peters has to speed-run adulthood alone because, otherwise, he has nowhere to go. Modern life has become mostly solitary and, unless you’re born to money, the chance of getting ahead through hard work and ingenuity alone is virtually nil. Peters has made himself a mass-media grotesque, but in doing so, he’s captured our attention, the one meaningful resource for cash-poor boys hoping to make themselves a life in American modernity.

Our solution must involve getting outside our own homes, and outside our own heads. Easier said than done. But even as churches and unions seem irrelevant, many communities still have adult sports leagues, maker spaces, and public libraries. Individuals and small groups can organize new networks, like community choirs, improv companies, and charitable volunteer organizations.

We must seek the trappings of adulthood, once hoarded in the workplace, out in the large rcommunity.

Creating a Marketplace for Reliable Guessing

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Why are professional prognosticators so consistently bad at predicting the future? We know this phenomenon most clearly from basic cable news, where credentialed experts prognosticate about how good, bad, or volatile the near future will be, usually in ways that support their ideology. But it manifests in other environments: business professionals who fail to forecast economic trends. Legislators who let lush opportunities slip away. Inventors pushing questionable technology.

Canadian-American psychologist Philip Tetlock, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, asked himself this question immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mass-media oracles predicted either swift, easy victory, or else nigh-apocalypse. The reality reflected neither partisan extreme, but instead descended into the same quotidian brutality that has characterized American intervention since WWII. Why, Tetlock asks, were both sides so wrong, and why has nobody paid for their overconfidence?

He favors the metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs, which he pinches from Isaiah Berlin, though it’s far older. Foxes know many things, Tetlock writes; hedgehogs know one big thing. Mass-media operators love highly credentialed experts, especially on economics and world affairs. But those experts’ predictions are often only marginally better than committed dilettantes who read newspapers daily and remains informed. Further, the more advanced one’s credentials, the more marginal the gains.

So far, so good. Tetlock’s description essentially accords with our recent experiences of camera-friendly experts reliably whiffing their predictions. My problem arises when Tetlock transitions from describing to explaining. A consummate scholar, Tetlock is reluctant to say anything which he cannot support strictly from quantifiable evidence. And holy moly, does Tetlock have extensive and thoroughly documented evidence to deploy.

Let’s make something clear: despite his praise (often muted) for well-informed dilettantes, he writes for scholarly audiences motivated by deep research. He fortifies his prose with histograms, p-values, and confidence intervals. He spends several column inches breaking down the mathematical modeling which supports his conclusions, and he seldom goes beyond the evidence. He dedicates an entire chapter to anticipating and transcribing his critics’ likely counterarguments.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Tetlock briefly acknowledges, but doesn’t expand much upon, the reality of who receives attention. TV pundits, hero CEOs, civil rights activists, and tech bros all broadly favor certainty, volume, and swagger. Reliable predictors, working from diversified backgrounds and intellectual caution, can look timid on Sunday talk shows or corporate board meetings. Put another way, saying wrong things confidently looks more telegenic than trading in likelihoods, conditionals, and caution.

Unfortunately, Tetlock himself demonstrates this. He refuses to offer opinions without sourced evidence, and he refuses to offer evidence without lengthy discursions on mathematical variance. Because his status relies on measurable outcomes—what he terms “reputational bets”—he refuses to place everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. The product he thus creates is more likely to be accurate, but less compelling in a media-saturated “attention economy.”

He also omits something I consider vitally important. The principle of homophily means we’re more likely to spend time around people like ourselves. Scholars congregate with other scholars; journalists chill with media professionals; lawmakers drink with lawyers. We see this particularly in economics, the scholarly field least likely to cite sources from other disciplines: our environment discourages seeking differing influences, disconfirming evidence, or even a diverse friend network.

Invested dilettantes make reliable predictions, perhaps, because they see how hypothetical outcomes postulated in scholarly journals actually unfold in daily life. Unfortunately, to calculate his confidence intervals on reliable predictions, Tetlock generates a core sample of prognosticators who are, like himself, flush with academic credentials. If military historians predict one outcome for war, and generals predict another, maybe consult the enlisted men carrying weapons, not more historians and generals.

Rereading what I’ve written, I feel I’ve misrepresented Tetlock’s product. I like his thesis, that intellectual diversity trumps depth in creating reliable forecasts. Later chapters on public accountability are particularly promising, if underwritten. Especially in subsequent years (Tetlock’s first edition appeared in 2005), we’ve seen public experts become increasingly hostile to criticism or disconfirming sources. Doubt has become, not the precursor to better thinking, but a sign of disloyalty. Unsurprisingly, experts have become more likely to be wrong.

Considering my doubts, and new evidence since 2005, we could perhaps read this volume as a prolegomenon to further research. Tetlock himself co-wrote a subsequent volume, which I’ve already purposed to read. But I feel it actually serves Tetlock’s thesis to suggest that future research should come from an interdisciplinary source, perhaps a public-private partnership. The future of the forecasting business is too valuable to entrust only to other forecasters.