A One-Handed Guide to the Modern Afterlife

James Brogden, The Hollow Tree

Rachel Cooper, a civil servant and young wife from Britain’s West Midlands, lost her left hand in a freak vacation accident. But even worse than losing her hand, is discovering it’s still there. Her “phantom limb” has exceptionally detailed feelings, detecting a world that isn’t there. But soon the nightmares start, connecting her missing hand to an unsolved death during World War II. How much of her did Rachel lose, and what is calling her?

British novelist James Brogden’s novel starts with a premise found in secular humanist cosmology: that the “afterlife” consists of stories the living remember. What if, Brogden asks, that’s true? Rachel finds herself drawn into incompatible stories that have attached themselves to Oak Mary, a mysterious woman whose corpse was recovered inside a dead tree. Which myth reveals the truth of Mary’s life? And which phantasm chasing Mary is her real death? The real story matters.

Brogden essentially breaks his narrative into three segments. In the first, Rachel’s missing hand, and her coming to grips with her sudden disability, exposes unresolved traumas in her previous life. She struggles with her cloying control-freak mother, and the guilt surrounding her father’s death when she was a girl. She also tries to rebuild her life with her blue-collar husband, a life that must reorient around her disabled status in a world organized around work.

Rachel’s mundane, traumatized life exists dually with the intrusions caused by her phantom hand. Though wholly agnostic, she struggles to understand her missing hand’s supernatural implications, especially as she finds her ghost hand can bring matter into the “real” world. Her senses, apparently, create the world she feels—but how? This otherworldly connection offers more questions than answers, particularly when Rachel starts seeing a woman caught between the pressures of the living and unliving worlds.

The novel’s second part shifts tone abruptly, from character-driven to action-oriented. Faced with unimpeachable proof that the other world exists, Rachel and her husband must solve Oak Mary’s death. It was certainly murder, and Mary’s lingering business only promises to get worse. But Mary herself cannot explain which of three stories of her life and death are factual, torn between three avatars of death who cannot permit such permeability between this world and the next.

James Brogden

Where Brogden’s first part is character-driven, introspective, and atmospheric, his second part is physically active. Rachel, her husband Tom, and Oak Mary race around Birmingham, collecting evidence of Mary’s life, and the violence that ended it alongside the fires of the Blitz. This race involves more running and more confrontations than a Doctor Who episode, which the story increasingly resembles. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Dead Zone, where transcendent mystery feeds into a detective story.

But Brogden’s final part resolves the inconsistency by returning to character. Both Rachel’s doubts, and her race against the supernatural clock, serve themes. Rachel must answer, somehow, the question of how much stories create our world. Do our beliefs create our words, or vice versa? Can we change the past? If stories keep the dead present, what happens when nobody remembers the real story?  Brogden raises these and other questions, without reaching for pat answers.

Without spoilers, Brogden postulates a world in which the human soul survives the body’s death, but without recourse to organized religion or God. Rather, the choices we made in life create our afterlife consequences, and the words we used and the stories we told become the choices we face eternally. Hope and despair aren’t just feelings, they’re ways we remake our universe daily. Justice, therefore, isn’t an abstract moral good, it’sa way humans live.

Don’t misunderstand my philosophical maunderings. I previously compared Brogden’s story to a TV series and a genre novel, and those weren’t flippant analogies. Brogden writes a paperback thriller that feeds audiences what they want to consume, though any like good pop author, Brogden proves good at occasionally teasing and denying his audience. It’s a mass-market boilerplate, not a literary think piece. But it’s a really good, contemplative boilerplate. I wish more boilerplates were this nuanced.

In other words, don’t expect Brogden to revolutionize your world, but also don’t expect to forget him lightly. If he seemingly switches between character drama and plot-heavy action, it’s because he and his characters haven’t decided how free their will is. Philosophy serves his story, and he asks questions because we all do, sometimes. Oak Mary is disquieting because, in Brogden’s world, mere human death isn’t the end of the doubts we carry through life.

Ed Sheeran’s Art & Monopoly Blues Extravaganza

Ed Sheeran (left) and Macklemore, collage from the L.A. Times

Everything I’ve learned about the Macklemore/Ed Sheeran controversy currently sweeping fan communities, I’ve learned involuntarily. Yet watching the blowback has forced me to consider art’s role in today’s late capitalist hellscape, and what relationship pure art has to commerce. Sheeran bowed to commercial pressures to silence Macklemore, and his own retinue has responded by dropping him completely, leaving him unsupported during a multimillion-dollar tour.

For readers from either the future or a comfortable cultural distance, American rapper Macklemore has been among the opening acts on Sheeran’s Loop Tour. Other opening acts include Vance Joy, Sigrid, and Lukas Graham. Last week, before a sold-out crowd in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Macklemore waved a Palestinian flag and shouted, “Free Palestine.” These actions shouldn’t be controversial; the Israeli state’s continued Gaza war remains deeply unpopular with Sheeran’s young audience demographic.

In response, a consortium of venue owners, led by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, announced they’d rather cancel Sheeran’s scheduled concerts, than give Macklemore a platform. Sheeran, who strives to remain apolitical, removed Macklemore from the line-up. This silencing angered not only fans, but also fellow artists; all Sheeran’s supporting acts, including one of two backing bands, quit the tour, leaving hundreds of thousands of presold tickets in limbo.

Much popular response has focused on Macklemore and Sheeran as artists. What responsibility do musicians, especially touring musicians playing to packed stadiums, owe to hot-button current events? Has Sheeran, in refusing to pick a side, tacitly sided with abusive power systems? These questions matter (and are, I think, less contested than philosophy classes might imply). But they ignore that Ed Sheeran isn’t only an artist, he’s also a business.

Like most musicians, even highly successful acts with major labels, Sheeran’s recordings barely break even, under contract terms. He makes most of his money through touring, personal appearances, and licensing. This means that, to get paid, he must perform. Critics might say that Sheeran should stand on principle and refuse Kraft’s demands, but rent and utilities come due eventually, even for celebrities. Sheeran, like anybody, deserves an income.

But it isn’t Sheeran alone. He, and his supporting acts, are merely the public face of an enterprice that involves countless technicians, roadies, set builders and prop managers, accountants, publicity managers, marketing experts, and press agents. Factor in the thousands of site employees, vendors, machine operators, parking attendants, security guards, and others who keep stadium venues operational. Thousands of livelihoods are at stake nightly.

Ask whatever you will about what obligations Sheeran owes to artistic integrity and current events. No matter your answer, stadium performances are massive economic enterprises that circulate money both locally and globally. Sheeran might lose something if he stands on principle, but he also risks the incomes of countless hourly wage-earners in some of America’s most expensive cities. He has the power to kick poor laborers’ rent into massive arrears.

So Ed Sheeran is a capitalist enterprise, okay; but so is Robert Kraft. Rock stars vastly outnumber stadium owners. According to Macklemore, Kraft’s threats were bolstered by venue owners in several American cities, who threatened to collude to submarine the Loop Tour. This traces the classic Marxist question of who controls the market, management or labor. Put in modern capitalist terms, does the supply side or the demand side control the economy?

If Sheeran withholds his labor, he pinches his workers’ pockets, but Kraft et al. can hold their breath and survive. If stadium owners withhold their venues, Sheeran’s enterprise has no revenue, which hurts workers more. Without these concerts, massive swaths of economic development stop immediately. And Sheeran is one of the few individuals capable of switching the development engine off and on.

I don’t know Sheeran’s thinking, nor whether the innumerable paychecks tied to his performances affected his calculations. He cannot possibly know most of the laborers down his hierarchy, much less care. Yet I have difficulty imagining that he didn’t at least momentarily think about the strangers who would stand idle, without a paycheck. If nothing else, he must know, and innately trust, his microphone technicians and light operators.

Rock stars and other celebrities necessarily choose public life, subject to constant scrutiny. (And it sometimes breaks them.) But their public profile absolutely demands anonymous water carriers whose unrecognized work makes the stars’ careers possible. Telling Ed Sheeran to eat his concert proceeds for artistic integrity sounds uplifting when splashed across social media, but Sheeran serves two masters. Artistic integrity withers when confronted with economic integrity, especially for the rich.

Life In America’s Dumber Ages

Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

Does it seem like America has gotten coarser lately? Not only the usual suspects, like political vitriol or “lowest common denominator” media content. Rather, we’ve become impatient with nuance, intolerant of expertise, and fearful of innovation or challenge to our existing beliefs. Nor is this a partisan issue, though it’s easier to see in the “other side.” Americans of most stripes seemingly want to snuggle into politics, media, religion, and art that makes us comfy.

I really wanted to like American journalist Susan Jacoby’s 2008 bestseller. Written as the American electorate grew dissatisfied with George W. Bush’s “plain folks” style, and tried to transition to Obama’s starchier, more academic approach to social order, I and others saw much in her willingness to call out Americans’ fondness for bonhomie and informality over knowledge and competence. That is, we saw much in her early chapters. But then her arguments started mounting up.

Jacoby starts well. She doesn’t romanticize the powdered-wig past, and rightly correlates America’s early high culture with its slaveholding and its peonage of the industrial working classes. Far from wishing to return to an idealized aristocratic age, she seems more enamored of “middlebrow,” a culture that arose between the World Wars. She speaks warmly of ordinary Americans’ aspirations to better understand science, history, and politics. Mass media, publishing, and culture encouraged proletarian learning and self-improvement.

In this, Jacoby positions herself in a robust intellectual lineage. She doesn’t even hide the debt her analysis owes to Douglas Hofstadter and Neil Postman, two prior culture critics who derided America’s slippery cultural slope. Like Hofstadter and Postman, Jacoby pooh-poohs television, overextended public schools, and Americans’ desire to see our prejudices verified. Far from revolutionary, these complaints are so well established and widely shared, at least in certain circles, that they too are comfy.

Problems become visible as Jacoby’s peroration continues. Her chapter on religion laments Christianity’s descent into nationalism. Post-WWII public Christians, progressive innovators like Dr. King and Reinhold Niebuhr, gave way to conservative heel-draggers like Falwell and LaHaye. Okay, true enough. But I’ve read James Cone and Gustavo Guittierez, and I spot something Jacoby overlooks: Whiteness. Where Black and other “racialized” Christians still seek justice, White Christians frequently want their prejudices sanctified. Jacoby sees only the latter.

Susan Jacoby

Proximity to power, not religious devotion, often defines how nuanced one’s Christianity is. Scholars like Kevin M. Kruse or Gorski & Perry address this in detail. These sources shipped after Jacoby’s book, but their premises and conclusions aren’t new. Rather than addressing such scholarship, Jacoby compares contemporary (2008) religious headlines with her childhood catechism lessons, and finds the present wanting. She probably hasn’t needed to consider non-White Christianity in her journalism, so she forgets it.

We could continue. Jacoby’s discussions of American anti-science spotlight Intelligent Design, and President Bush’s opposition to Darwinian evolution. This seems quaint after, y’know, global warming and The Pandemic. Likewise, she belittles universities teaching courses on Stephen King, which she sees as decline from the Bronte sisters. Except universities have historically used pop culture analysis to teach students the principles of literary criticism. To say nothing of the importance of analyzing today’s world through contemporary art.

As Jacoby’s claims accumulate, themes emerge. Though she’s largely progressive (though dismissive of Politically Correct excesses), she shows an essentially past-oriented bias, believing things used to be good, and now they’re not. She yearns for moral clarity she believes America had at its middlebrow peak, encouraged by post-WWII economic largesse and the GI Bill. But she isn’t comparing apples to apples. Jacoby’s present consists primarily of headlines; her past mainly comprises memories and cultural touchstones.

The past doesn’t just objectively exist. It took me years to realize how thoroughly curated the past is, even within my own lifetime. Headlines create a perception of urgency, and in today’s saturated media landscape, crisis and catastrophe sell ad space. Breaking news isn’t your friend, and is frequently deceptive. Meanwhile, the past gets trimmed of ambiguity, contingency, or doubt, making positive outcomes seem falsely inevitable. That’s why people yearn to bring greatness back “again.”

Don’t misunderstand me. Historians and anthropologists have long documented America’s widespread opposition to learning, nuance, and deliberation. The years since this book dropped make Jacoby’s 2008 milieu look parochial and sweet; we’ve busted multiple nadirs since, and find new ways to crash ever lower. But blanket statements about a bucolic past and an apocalyptic present are neither useful nor accurate. Good and bad have always existed—and Americans have always chosen poorly between the two.

Does “Pheromone Maxxing” Even Exist? or, Don’t Believe Every Panic

Aaron Parnas

Since August 30^th, 2026, social media has veritably reeked with users posting about “pheromone maxxing,” a supposed manosphere trend. This trend putatively has men skipping showers before dates, wearing unwashed clothes to magnify their natural aroma, and even drinking their own pee. These activities ostensibly magnify men’s pheromones, an olfactory hormone observed in many animal species (but not humans), linked to sexual desirability and performance.

Nearly every social media post I’ve read cites a TikTok video by opinion aggregator Aaron Parnas, dated August 29^th. It’s unclear how many people even heard of this “trend” before Parnas’ video; it certainly wasn’t trending worldwide. Some subsequent posts cite no sources whatsoever, suggesting the online umbrage has become self-supporting. The concept went from no meaningful presence, to capturing the internet’s collective imagination, in four days.

I’ve struggled to source this nominal trend. Parnas cites “new reporting from Vice.” This almost certainly means this article, dated August 12^th. Notably, this is Parnas’ only source. His one source, in turn, cites only one pertinent source, this article from Men’s Journal. This source, in turn, cites Instagram user Topher Cusumano, a modest influencer with less than 5,000 followers, and one ten-second Instagram reel with the byline of “wandering_optics”.

For those playing along at home, that’s a remarkably tenuous chain of evidence leading to just some guy, whose questionable influence doesn’t much impress me. Vice and Men’s Journal do cite other sources: Vice quotes several reliable sources identifying pheromones as pseudoscience, while Men’s Journal correlates underarm fetishes with queer culture. Neither provides anything like longitudinal data or evidence of more widespread influence.

Perhaps more notably, “pheromone maxxing” has produced no celebrities, primary-source images, or even meaningful footprint. Recall last April, when Braden “Clavicular” Peters pushed “looks maxxing” into public consciousness. Peters’ notoriety ended almost as quickly as it began, but at least he provided a recognizable face, demonstrating his “trend” actually existed. The one “pheromone maxxing” personality I’ve identified, Topher Cusumano, remains virtually anonymous.

Which raises the question: does the “pheromone maxxing” trend even exist outside its social media reaction? Online journalism has produced only two accounts I’ve found that willingly associate themselves with the concept. And in fairness, the “wandering_optics” reel seems notably ambiguous and may itself aim to satirize other “maxxing” subcultures. We have a trend with no participants, an influencer with little influence, and a story propelled mainly by disgust.

Topher Cusumano

Social media programmers learned long ago that fear, anger, and revulsion sell content faster than optimism, progress, and contentment. Happy people don’t panic buy. Therefore, it’s perhaps understandable why the Vice story, amplified by Aaron Parnas’ demi-celebrity status, gave the story legs. After decades of conditioning by advertising and PR that our bodies are dirty, stinky, and gross, this story reverses that, activating deep-rooted ego defense mechanisms.

Aaron Parnas isn’t a journalist. Despite covering current events, he mostly reports others’ prior coverage. His social media footprint suggests he spends most of his day online, spreading his message across multiple platforms. Parnas’ videos frequently provide lite commentary, followed by a pertinent Substack link. He begins many TikToks by saying “Breaking news” or “Heads up,” terms designed to cause viewers to feel alerted, if not outright threatened.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with opinion aggregators amplifying others’ coverage. American society broadly detests self-promotion, so rebroadcasting through third-party voices is often the only way to get stories heard. Parnas has a light touch compared to basic cable outlets like Fox News and MSNOW, which both butter their bread by layering thick partisan commentary onto other journalists’ prior reportage.

However, when a story trades primarily on disgust, a powerful motivator, the influence can spread. Many post-Parnas comments have attributed this phenomenon to “men,” rather than one minor Instagram influencer. This presents the problem as widespread and specifically gendered, a conclusion that seems plausible prima facie, but isn’t supported by the evidence. It certainly doesn’t justify tying all men together.

Briefly put, this story appears tenuous at best, passing through a cascade of increasingly specious re-reporting, back to one lone guy of questionable influence. The “trend” barely exists beyond its pushback. But the emotion underlying the story’s coverage has outlying effects. Revulsion and anger drive clicks, the root of online economics, but they create divisions between humans; this story has already named another out-group who, by their basic existence, disgust us.

The last thing America needs now is another designated disgusting out-group. But the second-to-last must surely be another online trend that splits people despite barely even existing.

“Chai Tea” and the Perils of Words

Several times recently, I’ve seen social media users post variations on “You mustn’t say ‘chai tea,’ because chai means tea, so ‘chai tea’ means ‘tea tea.’” These posts aren’t verbatim, so they presumably aren’t copypasta; but they repeat the same message, that “chai tea” is a tautology. I take the poster’s point. But I think this misses something important about how language evolves, and how meaning is something we make, not something that just exists.

Why do we pronounce the name of Notre Dame University, in South Bend, Indiana, differently than the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris? Well obviously, because Notre Dame University is in the United States, while Notre Dame cathedral is in France. The transition between countries, with their different majority languages and historical conventions, means the words change when moving across contexts. When stated that way, the difference seems obvious. But seems is a loaded word.

Continuing the French metaphor, English has several loan words from French. This probably reflects French cultural influence in British and Continental affairs from the Renaissance through the Napoleonic era, and the fact that speaking French has long been considered mannerly. But in reading how these French loan words cross into English, it becomes clear that the words’ meanings change. Language is dynamic, usage creates meaning, and we reinvent language when we imbue words with significance.

In French, un sachet is simply a bag, any bag. Plastic grocery bags, designer handbags, and over-the-shoulder totes are sachets. But the English word bag already exists. Therefore, in making the transition, the word sachet in English morphs into a small ornamental bag, especially one used in displaying scented herbs. Likewise, un bureau is an office desk with drawers, but in English, it becomes an office full of desks, especially a remote or subsidiary office.

When English-speakers say chai, we aren’t speaking Hindi; we aren’t ordering “tea,” because the word tea already exists. Generally, we mean masala chai, a specific way of preparing tea, which only recently came into English-speaking consciousness and has become a fad for its rich texture and intense flavor. If chai simply meant tea, the word would be prolix and unnecessary, or anyway redundant. But by naming masala chai, the word becomes valuable, and therefore survives.

We could stop there. The fact that words, like species, change to fit their ecology, is sufficient. But I see something deeper happening here. When a certain subset of tea connoisseurs demand the Hindi definition persist in English, they’re trying to establish strict linguistic controls and stop meanings from changing. Many of us remember this form of prescriptive grammar from grade school, from teachers upset over split infinitives and the difference between “can” and “may.”

I’ve written before about my students who were terrified to write anything for class because they’d had such extensive, sometimes tyrannical grammar rules drilled into their heads. Language rules, even within the same language, are often contradictory, arbitrary, and driven by personal preference. And they often share a previous supposition that language is in a state of decline. Many classroom language rules intimidate students because they reflect how English was spoken decades, even centuries ago.

It bears stating that I taught in an overwhelmingly White, working-class university, in an overwhelmingly White, working-class state. But the students most intimidated by aggressive grammar enforcement were Black, Hispanic, and poor. In unguarded moments, they speak particular gradations of English reflecting their racial, economic, or provincial backgrounds. But teachers, rule-bound to teach “standard” English, can be particularly harsh, deliberately or otherwise, with students they perceive as belonging to out-groups. The result is tragically imperialist.

And remember, there is no tea commerce, much less tea vocabulary, without European imperialism. Vast swaths of India and China still haven’t fully recovered from English damage during the Opium Wars, conducted specifically to open the tea trade on terms advantageous to White Englanders. Though Britain’s overseas empire has substantially crumbled since World War II, America—or, more accurately, American multinational corporations—have stepped into the role. Americans drink “chai tea” because of ancestral imperialism.

I’d rather not say that American tea connoisseurs demanding chai purity are Orientalist imperialists. Those I’ve known care deeply about Indian history and its postcolonial legacy. But the attempt to freeze language according to past usage, always winds up being about preserving power hierarchies. Whether it’s the hierarchy of imperial conquest, or the hierarchy of tea snobbery, prescriptive grammar is an act of power. And power inevitably burns its users as much as its targets.