“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.