[By request, here is the talk I delivered at my small seminar reunion conference in Washington this month. I’d been spending a lot of time with primary and secondary sources on September 11 for the 25th anniversary, thinking about all the many ways there are to tell the story of that day. One article in particular by the classicist scholar Daniel Mendelsohn sparked a long train of reflection on the intersection of history, art, and myth, with special focus on the question, “Why is it so hard to make art, especially cinematic art, about September 11?” I’m so glad the opportunity presented itself for me to turn all that mulling into a presentation. This is a little more “meta” than I normally go with my commentary, even involving some interaction with bloody postmodernists, but as you’ll hopefully see, they didn’t turn me postmodernist in the process. The talk was well received and generated great discussion. I’ve lightly tweaked and polished the transcript, cleaned up some of my annoying filler tics, and added hyperlinks so people can go explore my references for themselves. Paid readers can enjoy the whole thing, free readers enjoy the free preview. Happy reading!]

Thank you, it’s great to be here. So when I was very vaguely pitching the idea of a 9/11 talk to Nathan [Pinkoski], I thought I could kind of get away with kind of rehashing something I already wrote in Compact. Some of you might have seen I had a little piece in there about remembering 9/11 in an age of unreality. It was basically about the in-breaking of 9/11 as a Real Event, capital R, capital E, and a kind of Real Event that we all experienced as a collective in a way we don't experience news anymore. So by “the age of unreality,” I was thinking about the digital age, the Internet age, and this very fragmented, kind of detached way that we now engage with the world and with news. But Nathan said nope, sorry, you can’t rehash, gotta do something new. So I’m doing something new. I’m going to sort of take a leaf from Slavoj Zizek, a little Baudrillard, and then just kind of do my own thing, so we’ll sort of see how that goes.

So Zizek wrote an essay in 2002, it was called “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which you might recognize as a Matrix quote, which was in turn quoting Baudrillard. And where Zizek goes with this is because “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” (thank you T.S. Eliot), the West was really struggling to integrate 9/11 as a Thing That Had Actually Happened. And so we kind of processed it almost like fantasy. So you could invert this idea of it being an in-breaking of the Real and think of it instead as an in-breaking of the fantastical, or even the mythic. There’s a great Onion headline from the first issue they ran after the attacks, “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie,” in which there was a picture of the towers, and the caption said, “Above: An actual image from real life.” Which, you know, that was the mood, right? That kind of perfectly captured it, in a dark way. Here was this thing that all of our entertainment, all our movies, had fantasized about, and then we got what we wished for in some weird, perverse kind of way. The fantasy came true, and we couldn’t…it just didn’t compute.

A good illustration of this is an eyewitness account from Daniel Mendelsohn (he's a classicist, just came out with a new translation of The Odyssey). He was actually in New York on the day, and he witnessed the first plane hit Tower One. And he said when he first saw it, his very first thought was, “Well, they must be doing a movie, but why are they using real planes??” And then, of course, the penny dropped, and he calls his wife and he goes, “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV!” But of course, there was nothing for her to see on the TV yet, because it had literally just happened. And the way Mendelsohn puts this is, “What had just happened had not yet become the story of what happened.” And that’s a great way to kind of tee up my topic, because I’m interested in the story of what happened. Or, we could say the stories, plural, because there are many lenses of interpretation through which you can look at the event, many, many parables you could turn it into. So I’m going to think about a few of those.

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I have a confession: I like Greta Gerwig, even though she annoys me. I’ve written about why she already annoyed me even before I learned she was going to do weird stuff with her adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew for Netflix. The main Discourse around that adaptation has focused on her choice to cast Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan. Writing for The Daily Wire, I observed that this is just the latest in a line of feminist choices in her filmmaking, from the decision to scrub out Jo’s marriage in Little Women to the emasculating portrayal of Ken and his fellow witless guy dolls in Barbie. Beyond this, Gerwig announced that she was taking other stylistic liberties with the aesthetics of Narnia, infusing it with a confusing jumble of Things Greta Gerwig Likes which may be cool in their place, yet make little sense when superimposed onto Lewis’s vision. Now that we’ve gotten a first trailer…well, see for yourself:

As the kids say, there’s a lot here. Why is Jadis dressed in a disco ball? Why does Charn look like the inside of a broken pinball machine? Why do the backdrops look more like Grok-generated screensavers than like worlds you can reach out and touch and smell? And why is Led Zeppelin the soundtrack to all this? What are we watching, Guardians of Narnia? The Magician’s Avengers? And how did all of this get greenlighted by the Lewis estate, which just put out this strangely bland response to the early backlash? Douglas Gresham has been declining with dementia for some time, so it is currently unclear exactly who all is driving the bus over there. Whoever they are, at this point they seem to be shifting into damage control mode.

Still, I won’t lie, there are individual moments in this trailer that I liked. Daniel Craig, while perhaps too handsome to play Uncle Andrew as a loathsome creep, is giving off subtly sinister vibes. The foreshadowing shot of wings on a bus behind Strawberry is very nice, even though I remain confused about why Digory and Polly are in a bombed-out 40s London as opposed to the London of Sherlock Holmes that Lewis so vividly evoked. (Gerwig has said the shift is motivated by the formative role World War II played in the imagination of her favorite rock artists, whose music was the creative fuel for this adaptation—more on this in a moment. I’m also not alone in suspecting she has hopes and plans for a modernized Lion, Witch and Wardrobe.) And, to address the lion in the room, the first look at a cosmically glittering Aslan under a veil of stars is nothing if not intriguing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meryl Streep’s voice is nowhere to be heard in the trailer. Someone suggested that Aslan’s closing roar is a female voice, but it appears to be just looping back to screaming Robert Plant. Meanwhile, the word from a private screening is that the actress’s performance has been post-produced into something so low and gravelly, it raises the question of why she was cast in the first place. Was Gerwig just trying to provoke hard-core fans of the series? Was she creating Discourse for Discourse’s sake? Is she like Jadis in this trailer, using her wand to blow out the windows of The Eagle and Child (another jarring departure from the book, as Jadis in fact finds herself impotent to do anything magical in our world but still causes havoc with her sheer size and strength)?

You could make a case for all of these things, but I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. Because, as I confessed, I kind of like Gerwig. I was reminded why when I listened to her conversation about the making of the film with Stephen Colbert. There’s a winsome sincerity in the way she talks about the craft of filmmaking in general and adapting Narnia in particular:

In the same way, I found myself curiously drawn into Gerwig’s commentary on adapting Little Women, even though I was deeply annoyed by how she retconned Jo March’s story to reflect her vision of Louisa May Alcott’s proto-feminism and rob us of the romance Alcott herself wrote. It’s obvious as she talks that we’re listening to a highly intelligent filmmaker with a deep well of creative energy—someone who could go on a Rogan-style podcast and talk for endless engaging hours about story, movies, and writing:

It might fairly be said that movies are Gerwig’s religion. In a behind-the-scenes interview for Barbie, she talked about having the cast watch a classic film of her choosing every Sunday morning—a church substitute? Speaking with Colbert about Narnia, she talks passionately of the act of filmmaking as “an act of faith.” She had The Magician’s Nephew shot on celluloid, which means you have to wait until the film is developed to know for sure whether you caught something good. One of the byproducts of this process is a bit of silver. These silver bits were collected and turned into a silver pin Gerwig wore, in the shape of Aslan and the story’s pivotal apple tree. She proudly showed it off to Colbert: “This pin is made from my movie,” and it represents the “act of faith” that was its creation. And of course, the story is a creation story. This has captured Gerwig’s imagination, because she sees herself as a co-creator with the divine. One might say that moviemaking isn’t even just an act of faith for her, but an act of worship.

Worship directed to what, though? Well, that’s the question that niggles when we come to Narnia, where Aslan has a very particular shape and is meant to evoke a very particular God.

Even putting aside the Streep-casting, there’s something odd in the way Aslan appears in the trailer to be made of stars. It’s visually striking, yet it suggests the blurring of a boundary between the stars and their Maker. The posters giving a first look at Aslan’s more solidly incarnated appearance aren’t very reassuring, as his face looks like a patchwork quilt of fur, feathers and even scales. His eyes are also differently colored, an apparent nod to David Bowie’s illusion of heterochromia. What this is all meant to add up to is confusing, to say the least. Perhaps there’s some reassurance in the fact that Gerwig used male pronouns for Aslan throughout her interview, and in the fact that it appears he will at least have a mane and a terrifying roar. But there remains the impression that Aslan’s image is an admixture of elements, an entity bound up and fused with nature in ways that are decidedly not aligned with Lewis’s vision.

This brings me to Led Zeppelin, who made the historic choice to give Gerwig their blessing for “Stairway to Heaven” to be used in the trailer. Most takes have focused on the rock anthem’s bizarre tonal clash with a Narnian oeuvre. It is indeed bizarre, but if you look at the lyrics, you can begin to see Gerwig’s creative logic, which is not entirely crazy.

The mystery “lady,” whose identity has been much debated over the years, could be Jadis: a character for whom “all that glitters is gold,” who intends to “buy” a “stairway to Heaven.” As Aslan says, “All get what they want. They do not always like it.” But what does the song offer as an alternative to this lady’s materialistic grasping? Well, a mystical encounter with Nature, naturally:

And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune

Then the piper will lead us to reason

And a new day will dawn for those who stand long

And the forests will echo with laughter

(Oh-oh-oh-oh-woah-ho)

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now

It’s just a spring clean for the May queen

Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run

There’s still time to change the road you’re on

So, paganism. More or less. Bring your own bong.

Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know

The piper’s calling you to join him

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow?

And did you know

Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?

Here I actually think of that lovely scene in The Wind in the Willows where Mole and Rat are startled by Pan in the woods. And for that matter, we might think of Lewis’s own dancing dryads and naiads, of their reenchanted bacchanalia sans vice at the end of Prince Caspian. The sort of thing that drove Tolkien crazy precisely because it made for an odd mashup with the stories’ heavily Christian symbolism. Of course, Lewis had always been drawn to pagan myths. By bringing these creatures into Aslan’s orbit, he meant to convey how their wine and song and dancing might be reimagined not as pure hedonism but as the full partaking of Aslan’s good gifts—just as the wedding guests partook fully of Jesus’ wine ex nihilo, the very best saved for last.

But Greta Gerwig doesn’t approach Narnia with Lewis’s baptized pagan understanding that salvation does not come simply by following a piper’s siren song into the forest of mystical enlightenment. She was raised in the Unitarian Universalist “church” and attended Catholic high school, with predictable results. She’s on record saying that she always found “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior stuff” to be “creepy” and the idea of God the Father “alienating,” though she was intrigued that Catholics “worship the Virgin Mary.” (No, we’re not going to go down the Catholic rabbit trail here. Resist, resist.) For all the good will and earnestness with which she tells Colbert that she’s “tried to read everything Lewis wrote” (which left her wide open for fan jokes that wrote themselves about works like the “OHEL,” Lewis’s massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century tome), she is simply and sadly unable to understand him. This is clear in the way that she points to “Stairway to Heaven” as a summary of The Magician’s Nephew’s theme. I believe that she believes it. But that isn’t very reassuring.

Interestingly, Robert Plant himself has shown a reluctance in recent years to claim the song as a favorite. He’s reflected back on it as very much a song of its time, and also very much a “23-year-old’s” song. With age, he feels less attached to it. It represents something he feels he’s grown out of. Against this, maybe one could set Lewis’s words about never being too old for fairytales. And that “feeling I get when I look to the west/And my spirit is crying for leaving” might be sehnsucht, the desire for we-know-not-what. Perhaps Gerwig feels it too, though she lacks the vocabulary to baptize it with a Christian name. As well as in cinema, it is in music and songs like this that she finds something spiritually resonant, salvific even. In her own words, rock music “saved” her. In her mind, it is as if adapting Narnia for the screen has become the grand symphonic intersection of all her great loves all at once, all the things that have saved her. But if everything is salvific, nothing is.

Meanwhile, those of us who love Lewis’s books are left understandably frustrated that after all this time, Hollywood still can’t seem to get Narnia right. The old Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie was a decent effort, in spirit certainly closer to the book than whatever Gerwig is doing, but it left much to be desired. The sequels then wandered so far afield that audience interest took a nosedive, along with any hope of the series’ recovery. It was a tragic fumble, given that the timing was right for the cinematic treatment fans would have lined up in droves to see. Now that a filmmaker of Gerwig’s talent and stature has been handed the keys to the kingdom, another golden opportunity seems to be going to waste. When I was in D. C. recently, I got to see Logos Theater’s stage production of Prince Caspian, one of several productions that are beautifully faithful to the books. (Reviewed here in my travel diary for paid readers.) I told one of the producers that I wished they could be simply handed a budget to make the films. I was entirely serious.

There are rumblings of trouble behind closed doors at Netflix, included studio-mandated reshoots of Gerwig’s creation. Whether the final product will explode or flop remains to be seen. If it does flop, I can find it in my heart to feel sympathy for Gerwig. She sounds almost on the verge of tears as she discusses the project with Colbert, so close it seems to be to her heart. I can imagine there will be moments in the film when her love for the source material is evident, even if she loves without understanding. Alas, love without understanding can yield only half-truths. We can only hope the echo of Lewis’s vision will, however faint, spark a fresh return to the source, and the whole truth found there.

Greetings, gentle readers! I can explain the quietness around here with the excuse that I’ve just spent a week in our nation’s capital, where I was invited on short notice to give a talk at a small conference organized by the Abigail Adams Institute. Each summer, they run a seminar in Boston where students discuss selected readings from thinkers like Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, and many more, loosely organized around the history and philosophy of technology. I participated in this seminar a couple years ago, and this year, they decided to put together an “alumni reunion” of sorts in D. C., where the seminar leaders would present along with some guest speakers and students working on papers. We heard samples of new work in progress from Mary Harrington, Geoff Shullenberger and Greg Conti of Compact magazine, Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation, and more. Including me, who despite being neither an Important Influencer nor a grad student nor a post-doc somehow got a speaking slot. This was lots of fun, but also a bit nerve-wracking. Thankfully, everything went swimmingly, and kind friends in the city gave me the flexibility to make the most of my visit. This travel diary is my way of making up for my temporary silence to paying subscribers. Enjoy!

Thursday/Friday: Jetlag, Encounters of the Uber Kind, and Live Music

My trip began inauspiciously with an 8-hour layover in Chicago O’Hare. Yes, you read that correctly. I saw rain on the forecast and idly wondered if it would mess with my schedule. Oh, did it ever. After missing my original connection, I was automatically rebooked for a 9 PM flight, not ideal but not the worst either. This would have put me in D. C. around midnight. Then the updates started coming in: It was delayed by an hour. Then another hour. Then another hour. I’d brought apple and cheese slices in an attempt to avoid buying overpriced airport food, but they were mostly gone now, and the bits of cheese still left were getting melty. In desperation, I forked over $20 for Manchu Wok.

I ate next to a young man poring over a textbook. He told me he was studying to become a journeyman. He was curious about what I did, I said I was a writer on various topics, and we ended up talking a little about religion and churchgoing. He’d gone to church as a child but drifted away, though he felt it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back. I agreed and looked up reasonably sane evangelical churches in his area. He already had a good impression of one of them. I observed that it featured some comely female worship leaders on their splash page. Of course we agreed one should choose a church for a variety of factors besides the babes, not that the babes hurt. Hopefully the lad was nudged in a good direction.

Finding a place to sit in O’Hare that is a) comfortable and b) close to a power outlet is a bit of a quest. I staked out some territory at one of the gates where my plane was supposed to come in at some point, and as the hours ticked by, I decided I wasn’t in a hurry to move. Other hapless travelers were in the same boat. A young couple told me they’d been waiting half the day there for a flight to Italy. Their baby girl was being astonishingly good. She decided I was cool and kept crawling over in my direction. I blearily worked on my conference talk, which in my infinite wisdom I’d left partially unprepared until the last minute. The airport WiFi kept flickering in and out, but fortunately I’d piled lots of material into a doc I could work on offline. The thought of getting a hotel and re-re-booking crossed my mind, but Grok informed me that as long as the airline could blame things on God rather than themselves, I couldn’t make them pay for it. In the end, we left at 3 in the morning.

When I touched down in the city, my first Uber driver was an Ethiopian Orthodox man. There’s a vibrant Ethiopian community in D.C., and they seem to make up a disproportionate number of Uber drivers. We initially had some trouble locating each other in the dark, probably because I was facing the wrong way. I apologized. He was gracious. “Important thing is that I found you.”

The Ethiopian Orthodox tend to hang crosses from their rearview mirrors. This driver, Derege, was no exception. I told him that I liked it, as I always do. But no one else has done what he did next. “If you like it,” he said, “I can give it to you. I have another one.” I was a little stunned but happy to accept it. Derege then spent the rest of the ride talking in beautiful, simple language about God, faith, and the gospel. In my jetlagged state I forgot he was probably Orthodox and initially asked if he was Catholic. When he corrected me, he hastened to add, “But we believe the same thing. Catholic, Orthodox are the same.” He’d actually gotten the cross from a Catholic store, “because we are same, we believe same thing.” I told him I was a Protestant. “Is same. We believe in God.” He assured me again that he had a replacement cross and was quite happy for me to have it as a tangible reminder of God’s presence.

We talked some about prayer practices. “Pray every morning,” he said, “All day through the day, every night.” I admitted that I didn’t pray with the regularity I should. Derege encouraged me that prayer could be simple. Something short in the morning when you leave for work, like “God, help me today,” and a short prayer of thanks in the night when you return. “That’s it,” he said. One didn’t need to read “all these books and everything” to be close to God. “Always with you. Always with you. You always with Him.”

He talked as well about being attentive to creation, about being reminded of God in whatever beautiful or striking thing he saw. “You see anything, you say Oh my God. Oh my God.” He reflected on how people will still exclaim this if they’re in trouble, even if they don’t believe. He shook his head sadly when he talked about unbelievers. “I don’t know. Some people, it’s crazy, why they don’t…I don’t know.” They’ll believe “in the pole,” he said, pointing to a telephone pole, or the tree, or the cow. We discussed pagan religions, the difficulty of persuading polytheists that Jesus is the only way. “He is only way,” Derege agreed emphatically. He meditated on the beauty of the gospel. “He is not like human being. He give forgive for everybody. Whatever you did, he said okay. He die for us.”

Later I looked up that his name means something like “he acquired strength,” but he was unsure of the meaning himself when I asked him. He liked my name and was trying to pinpoint it: “A church…in Israel…” I said it was Hebrew for house of God, and perhaps he was thinking of Bethlehem. “Beth” means “house of.” “Yes, yes, right! House of this, house of that…”

Again there was a bit of confusion at the end of my journey, as I was staying at a friend’s row house but she described it as an “apartment.” With much chagrin, I woke her up from a dead sleep to help confirm the location. Then I bid Derege goodbye, feeling sad as always when I have such an encounter that I’ll likely never meet this beautiful kind soul again. But I have something to remember him by.

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Twenty years ago this November, a small house in Murphy, Texas was surrounded by a television crew and a SWAT team. The officers were on camera. The cameramen were trying as hard as possible to stay out of each other’s line of sight, because cameras generally aren’t allowed on private property without permission of the owner, and this owner certainly hadn’t given permission. But then, the argument went, he’d forfeited his rights in that department when he decided to sexually chat up what he thought was a 13-year-old boy.

The way the script was supposed to go at that point is that the man would agree to meet the boy, the sting house would be all wired up for his arrival, and once the adult decoy lured him in, the trap would be sprung. Cameras would record everything, his chat logs would be humiliatingly read back to him, and then just as he thought he was free to leave, he would find himself in handcuffs. The formula had worked scores of times before. Cops loved it as a way to catch the baddest bad guys dead to rights, America loved it as reality TV, and Chris Hansen—the host whose debonair interrogation style became one of the Internet’s most recognizable memes—loved it as all of the above. Everyone won. But that day in November, local prosecuting attorney Bill Conradt had gone off script. He hadn’t come to the show. So the show came to him. And when he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, everyone lost.

The days of primetime television are long gone, but the mythos of Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator has lived on. The full story of that fateful November day would become an Esquire feature titled “Tonight on Dateline NBC, This Man Will Die.” Now the feature has spawned a movie, Primetime, which seems to have instantly found its target audience: zoomers. The movie only bears a loose resemblance to the facts, and Robert Pattinson’s wildly unhinged interpretation of Hansen bears no resemblance to the man himself. But for Gen Z, the meme’s the thing.

This is not going to be a movie review, because there’s just not much to say about a 2-hour meme disguised as a movie. Whatever Deep Questions it thinks it’s exploring about the corrupting spectacle of televised true crime are ironically lost in its own non-stop meta-gawking. Naturally, Hansen himself wasn’t consulted. But he’s never been a man to pass up a marketing opportunity, and so in amongst the movie’s other previews, viewers are getting his 30-second pitch for his digital age reincarnation, a streaming network where he uploads new sting episodes to this day. The formula is much the same, but legally speaking, the ship is being run tighter than ever. Even the old show had a high conviction rate (according to one intensely dedicated fan, 88.36%), but with lessons learned from the Murphy debacle, police are now not just assisting but driving the operations, including the chatroom encounters. And in 2026, there are no network censors to bleep out the most rancid bits of said encounters when Hansen reads them out to his hapless marks. Like and subscribe!

In fact, quite a few people still do like and subscribe. You could dismiss them all as sickos, but then you’d have to argue large swathes of early noughties normie America were all sickos too. Which, I suppose, is the point of the movie. But it wasn’t just the populist masses who loved the show. It was the mainstream media establishment too. It was Oprah, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart. It was Conan O’Brien spoofing it for his Emmys-hosting walk-on, which would have paired awkwardly with movie Chris Hansen’s seething that he used to be an Emmy-winning reporter, but now he can’t get no respect. In reality, once upon a time, everyone loved Chris Hansen.

Many a think piece has been written on the strange intersection of cultural streams that begat To Catch a Predator: the rise of the savagely voyeuristic reality show, the young Internet morphing too fast for parents to keep up, the unified post-9/11 hawkish mood. In a time when ordinary Americans were scrambling for a sense of order and control against elusive evil, Hansen offered tangible reassurance that at least some really bad guys somewhere were getting nailed. At the same time, he was giving parents the cold shock that someone posing as a 13-year-old could speak fluent pornographic chatroom slang, and real live predators wouldn’t bat an eye, because it was so common. But meanwhile, who were those real-life 13-year-olds looking up to? And whose fault was that? In 2006, Joe Scarborough could wrap up a Very Serious interview with Hansen one moment, then turn around and pivot to the latest scoop on Britney’s second rehab stint. “Oops, she left it again!”

All the same, Hansen was foresighted to focus on the evils lurking in those chatrooms, and his cause to bring parents this knowledge was noble. The movie never shows any of his educational interactions with parents or teens, because that would concede that the real-life Hansen actually did some public good. By reducing him to a walking meme, it avoids truly confronting the difficult questions at the heart of the phenomenon: Can the medium and the notoriety of reality TV still corrupt a very disciplined man who set out to effectively punish predators and help families, and mostly got what he wanted? And what, at the end of the day, does a society actually do with these men beyond giving them justice? How do we answer the questions Chris Hansen could never answer, the “Help me understand” with which he ended every interrogation? Have we lost the categories to do so, or the grammar?

Some of these predators will walk into their interrogations with a brazenness that matches their screen personae. Some will try to fast-talk their way out of the situation with a transparent BS story, others are outright mouthy or defiant. One episode of the old show features a very disturbingly unruffled young man, whose logs graphically plot out his night with a presumed 14-year-old boy. He tries to claim he was just coming over to have friendly mentoring hangout time. “I know you’ve heard that 20 billion times,” he says, to which Hansen replies without skipping a beat, “20 billion and one, now that you’re saying it to me.” When Hansen eventually reveals himself, the young man coolly says, “I know.”

Another predator pauses in the doorway and tries to get a female decoy to repeat after him that she’s 19. She giggles and reminds him that she said 14. “Rachel,” he finally says in a playful but testy voice, “Can you read between the lines?”

A middle-aged man, a police lieutenant who knows his rights, just sits there smirking and robotically repeating that he won’t answer any questions until he can speak to an attorney. The effect is like the Unman in C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy—the demon-possessed professor who in one sequence keeps repeating the protagonist’s name over and over: “Ransom, Ransom, Ransom…”

But others at least give an appearance of shame. They breathe hard and fast. They hang their heads and cry. “Why did you do it?” “ ‘Cuz I’m a sick son of a bitch.” “What do you think should happen to you?” “Go to jail.” Many are married and think, with agony, of their wives. Sometimes, of their young teenage children.

There is no respecting of persons in these sad tableaux. The pudgy loser who can’t tie his shoes gets the same punishment as the community pillar who swaggers in with a freshly ironed Oxford shirt. The plumber and the salesman and the doctor and the rabbi, all go into the dark. Sometimes they recognize Hansen the moment he makes his Angel-of-Death entry. Others mistake him for a cop, or in one pathetic gentleman’s case, a therapist.

That last gentleman features in David Osit’s documentary Predators, a far superior watch to Primetime, which mixes archival footage with new interviews. “It’s not my job to rehabilitate ‘em,” one tough-bitten prosecutor growls. “I have absolutely no compassion for them.” But even he softens a little while playing back some of this guy’s tearful post-arrest sit-down with a female cop. “I don’t deserve any remorse,” the guilty man says fumblingly, presumably meaning he doesn’t deserve sympathy. The interrogator talks to him with a rough-hewn compassion. Both have Southern accents you could cut with a knife. “You’re gonna live through this,” she says, patting his arm. “No, I’m not.” The prosecutor concedes that there’s some potential here. Maybe, with time and rehab, this man could reemerge as some kind of productive citizen.

Of course, tears are one thing, but actual rehabilitation is another. Hansen’s most Internet-infamous victim is a predatory conman named Lorne Armstrong. I do not recommend googling the “lore” around Mr. Armstrong, but the most understated summation is that the man is his own worst enemy. Besides sex predation, other line items on his resume include offering contractor work, then scamming people into paying him much more than it’s worth. He served some time after the sting but has since managed to get himself re-catfished multiple times by the show’s fans. His initial teary reaction has launched a thousand memes and become fodder for Hansen’s merch line. Products include mugs, magnets, pillows, and clothing mostly adorned with the slogan “Have a Seat,” some including Hansen’s face, but the other main offering is a smattering of gear featuring Armstrong mid-blubber. I don’t insist that the wretched man deserves sympathy. At the same time, I don’t feel eager to know the individual who would spend $27 plus shipping to wear Mr. Armstrong’s blubbering face on a T-shirt. I likewise have a lowered opinion of the man selling it.

The Predators documentary follows not just Hansen but his copycats, YouTubers working up their own low-rent sting operations. Hansen scorns them as “doing this for clicks and profit,” while his work is “for a greater purpose.” One imitator who calls himself Skeet begs to differ. Hansen monetizes. He monetizes. Hansen entertains. He entertains. Where’s the daylight between them, really?

Every perp in Hansen’s new show gets a nickname — “Desperate Dave,” “Slapping Sam,” “Daddy Daughter Donnie.” One is christened “Dashin’ Dustin” for the way he desperately bolts out the door after noticing a camera. He’s been lured by a woman posing as a mother who wants to pimp out her own daughter. Of course his escape attempt is comically abortive, and he is immediately hauled back to the kitchen in cuffs for his humiliation ritual. There’s some defensiveness, some rewriting of the history, but Dustin knows it’s over.

What makes Dustin’s case distinctively tragic is that he is caught deep in the Bible belt, where many men on both sides of the law have some connection to the Church. His family is well-known and loved in the community. A building is named after his father. After the arrest, Hansen discovers the chief deputy utterly crestfallen because he’d gotten close to Dustin doing men’s ministry work. Dustin had an old possession charge but seemed to be on a path to getting his life in order. Hansen lingers perhaps a beat too long on the pain of this revelation. In another post-mortem conversation, the sheriff expresses sympathy for his deputy and keeps repeating how “precious” Dustin’s family is. Then, in an unforced way, this man of the law takes the conversation to a spiritual register. “Satan is on the attack. And he doesn’t choose. He’ll go after anybody. Doesn’t matter who you are.” Hansen listens respectfully, but the dialogue is now clearly above his paygrade.

This, I submit, is the missing piece—in the show, in the fandom, in the spinoff products, even in the Predators documentary, which does its best to approach the topic intelligently but ultimately can’t progress beyond the language of therapy culture. This is the one area where Primetime does try to do something more interesting, albeit in a vague, cheap horror-movie way that doesn’t lead anywhere illuminating. As the storm clouds gather, a progressively psychotic movie Hansen starts to hallucinate monstrous faces in the dark. He narrates an extended flashback sequence to his reportage on child abduction in India, ominously speaking of the “ancient, evil force” he discovered there. This is how he frames his work to himself, not as grubby, bottom-feeding exploitainment but as a righteous, world-cleansing crusade against the forces of darkness. The ambitious young decoy he’s training listens with fascinated terror, trying to understand what he’s gotten into. (This character is based on the real-life decoy who was the last person to speak with Bill Conradt, moments before the gun went off. In the Predators documentary, he says that if you offered him ten million to do the episode again, he wouldn’t take it.)

There’s no evidence that Hansen is hiding pedophilic tendencies of his own, but the movie does get fictionalized mileage out of the fact that a real tabloid caught him cheating on his wife. Karma! The hunter hunted! As is typical, timelines are shifted for maximum dramatic effect, and it’s heavily suggested that movie Hansen doubles the intensity of his crusade to expiate his own sexual guilt. I’m not sure the evidence points that way for the real Hansen, for whom the phrase “tortured soul” doesn’t exactly come to mind. You can see how smoothly he reacts to a question about it and be the judge. In another interview about the show where someone raises the idea of a slippery slope starting with pornography, Hansen somewhat agrees but also pauses to emphasize that he’s “not trying to be Pollyanna or overly onerous about what adults should look at,” quickly directing the conversation towards child pornography. Against ancient primal evil, Hansen sets modern liberal values.

Predators follows Skeet, the copycat I mentioned earlier, on one of his shoestring stings. Their target, lured by a female decoy nicknamed “T Coy” who doesn’t quite pass as the teenage girl she’s impersonating, becomes hysterical. The officer who’s supposed to show up is running late. Panic rises as the team goes into a huddle to figure out how to prevent their own Murphy moment. Skeet tries to calm the man down. In tears, the guy says that he has a son, that he was just starting to try to put his life back together. He would “take suggestions” for “programs.” He wants to take “the right steps” and go “forwards, not backwards.” “I’m sure we could pull a few strings…” Skeet says awkwardly, saying nothing just to say something. But “Anyway, I’m…Skeet Hansen, and…you’ve just been Skeeted.”

As the man continues to hide his face, someone on the documentary team separately approaches with a release form, explaining he doesn’t have to sign it if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to. “Well,” Skeet remarks after it’s all over, “That was…some heavy shit.” But hey, maybe they saved a life today. Or two lives. “A child’s life and a predator’s life, look at that.”

As T Coy the Decoy plays the episode back, she’s disinclined to be kind. She’s an abuse survivor herself. As far as she’s concerned, this guy “just got two hours of free therapy with y’all.”

Still, “I am human, even though I can be a bitch.” After a moment, she says, “I don’t know why I feel bad for him. I guess ‘cuz it’s sad.”

This September 11 marked a solemn anniversary of death for our nation. It also happened to be the day when death finally claimed a young writer who spent his limited days on earth valiantly advocating for life—others’, and his own. Pictured above, Dovie Eisner is proudly holding a physical copy of an article he wrote challenging New York’s proposed assisted suicide legislation. The article was initially published at Unherd, then reprinted in two other papers, including the issue of the New York Post that he holds here. He’s full of smiles, even though the article describes a day he almost died.

For Dovie, who completely relied on a portable ventilator when he wasn’t in bed, going outside was like taking a spacewalk. Since there was nothing he hated more than doing nothing in bed, he took frequent spacewalks. It became a running joke among his friends that whenever he would see a group picture of them on some outing, he would text, “Why wasn’t I invited?”

One day two years ago, his hose became accidentally disconnected while he was at the bodega, and nobody could understand his gasping instructions to fix it. His heart stopped. A passing policeman performed CPR. He was barely saved. Less than a year later, he bravely turned that experience into content, for the very noblest of purposes, as he argued that lives like his were still worth living. It was one of the last things he would ever do. On the same night he was posing with his article, he was asking the close friend who took that picture to also record video instructions, to whom it might concern, if the worst happened again. But his friend was not with him the very next day, when the worst happened again. This time, Dovie never woke up.

Many conservative writers in my online circle have been sharing beautiful tributes to Dovie. I wish I could join them in claiming him as my friend. My only claim to a version of acquaintanceship is that he read some of my stuff with appreciation, and we had friendly interactions on Twitter. Despite his severe disability, he maintained a very active online presence, where he conversed fluently and quick-wittedly on a range of topics theological and political. To show you how readily he would plunge into anything, our last exchange was about whether modern liberal Jews skew progressive as a secondary byproduct of their elite status, or whether there is something intrinsic to modern liberal Judaism that inclines them that way. Dovie was ready to argue for the latter. I looked forward to hearing him unpack this further. I took his conversational presence for granted. Everyone did.

Dovie spoke about his disability, downstream of a recessive genetic neuromuscular condition called nemaline myopathy, with what I can only describe as a forthright vulnerability. He was a Christian, a late-coming Catholic who had counted the painful cost of leaving his family’s ultra-orthodox Jewish faith behind. He believed that his suffering was meaningful and that it would be redeemed in the life to come. Nevertheless, he suffered, physically and spiritually.

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It was described in The New York Times as “a puzzling mixture of everyday piety and murderous resolve.” Austere Muslim scholars pored over it, professing bafflement. So much of it was taken up simply with instructions for prayer. Prayer in the night before. Prayer in the morning. Prayer in the taxi. Prayer in the airport. Prayer without ceasing.

“Bless your body with some verses of the Qur’an,” it also instructed, to be done by reading verses into one’s hands and then touching everything — “the luggage, clothes, the knife, your personal effects, your ID, your passport, and all of your papers.” The knife was to be given a final check, the blade sharpened, for “you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter.”

And on boarding the plane, the last prayer: “Oh God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel. God, I trust in you. God, I lay myself in your hands.”

The austere scholars shook their heads over the letter found in the suitcase. No good Muslim would do this. No good Muslim would pray such prayers before doing such things. It was not the way of peace. It was not the way of Islam.

Filled with anger, a young American neuroscience student began to write an essay. The essay became the first chapter in a book. The book became several books, and the several books became a publishing phenomenon. The student was Sam Harris, and the book was The End of Faith.

The thesis was straightforward: Religion gave us September 11. Religion drove the young hijackers step by suicidal step. Religion sharpened their knives for the ritual slaughter. Meanwhile, in our complacency, the West slept, dreaming of the broad sunlit uplands of enlightened reason. We believed the world was following us there. We were wrong. And now we were awake.

The pluralistic gospel of religious tolerance was impotent, Harris argued. It was the moderate’s cop-out, keeping the fundamentalists at a distance while allowing them their space in the public square. That was no longer enough. Nor was it enough to focus solely on a religion, though he admitted it would not have been rational to conjecture that the hijackers were Catholics, Amish, or Mormons. It was religion, all religion, that had to be exposed, debunked, laughed out of court. All unreasoned dogmas, all superstitious talk of prayer and sacrifice and whispered blessings. All talk of holy things—holy crackers, holy water, holy mother of God. All words like “God” and “Allah.” These words, Harris insisted, “must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal,’ or they will unmake our world.”

Some version of Jesus might be saved out of this demolition project. A Sermon on the Mount Jesus who taught people to be kind and ruffled the religious leaders’ feathers and got killed for his troubles. A neat set of empirical claims linking ethics and spiritual insight. Just not Jesus Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to come back on the clouds of heaven. And certainly not Jesus dying on a cross for our sins, that barbaric and gruesome fairytale.

There are, of course, needs which religion addresses, however high and terrible the price. There is even, dare we say, “a sacred dimension to our existence,” a dimension we must all come to terms with. But for this test, no reliance on “untestable propositions” is required.

Imagine this, Harris invites the reader: Imagine that we wake up tomorrow and find that all human knowledge has disappeared. The books and computers containing them are still here, but we can’t read them. We have forgotten how to do the most basic things. What would we need to remember? Surely, the first things to remember would be how to grow food, how to use our machines, how to speak and read and write. But “in this process of reclaiming our humanity,” when, Harris asks, would we need to remember “that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected?”

Fairytale Jesus would be of no use to us then. Indeed, he is of no use to us now. Fairytale Jesus is unattainable. There is no hope of us becoming like him. With such an unreachable goal, “One can only enumerate one’s sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.”

*

September 11 was, in its way, the end of a world—of a nation’s innocence, of its way of life. And it was the end of many thousands of small worlds. 2,977 lives, each life a world. For some the end came in seconds, for others in minutes. For some, the minutes stretching towards an hour as all false hope bled away.

In those minutes, many desperately tried to call loved ones, and some succeeded. You should read this account collecting them in one place, if you can. You should know names like Edmund McNally, calling his wife to let her know he loves her, to calmly remind her of his life insurance policies, then calling her a second time to let her know, sheepishly, that he had booked a trip to Rome to surprise her for her 40th birthday. “Liz, you’ll have to cancel that.”

You should know names like Edgar Emery, who worked in human resources on the 90th floor of Tower Two and immediately ushered five women on his team down and out of the building as soon as he saw Tower One on fire. Another group passed him on their way down as he was on his way back up. He told them to go on without him. You should know the name of Emery’s female colleague, Alayne Gentul—Bible school teacher, wife and mother, director of human resources, determined to get her people out. Together, they climbed seven floors above their offices to the six people left on floor 97, and there they would all become trapped above the impact of the second plane. “Can you get out?” his wife asked on their last call. “I don’t know,” he said. “I love you.” In the background, she could hear Gentul screaming, “Where’s the stairs? Where’s the stairs?” When Gentul made her last call to her husband, Emery was in the background trying to get the sprinkler going, hitting it with a shoe.

Alayne Gentul’s religious affiliation is publicly known. So far as I can tell, Edgar Emery’s is not. Perhaps he had no such affiliation. On that day, faith was not a necessary condition of virtue, or stoic calm, or great valor. But it was a day marked by the signs and symbols of faith. And by the prayers. Prayers spoken and unspoken, whispered and screamed. Prayers of petition, of despair, of angry hope. Prayers of the faithful, and of those who cried out to what God they knew not. Prayers answered and unanswered.

The prayers of Melissa Doi, heard on her last desperate voicemail from the burning South Tower, muttering “Holy Mary, mother of God.” The dispatcher repeatedly tells her to be calm, that someone is coming, that she’s documenting everything. “I’m gonna die, aren’t I?” Melissa asks. “Please God…” The dispatcher tells her to say her prayers, and she can be heard reciting “Our Father.”

The prayers of Genelle Guzman, buried but alive in the rubble of the North Tower, pleading with God, bargaining. If she had to die, could she at least see her daughter one last time? Or if she died here, could they at least find her body? As time passed, her prayers grew bolder. She wanted to live. She demanded a miracle. Meanwhile, her family presumed her dead. “They were sad at night,” Guzman says, “and the joy waited until the morning.”

The prayers of John and Michele Cartier, brother and sister barely escaping the South Tower together before collapse, racing to John’s soot-covered motorcycle to escape the devastation. “I hope this damn thing starts. Please God, start.” It started. Then as they rode, praying that their brother James had lived. He died.

The prayers of Fr. Mychal Judge, the firemen’s chaplain, who entered the Towers with them and was seen clutching a rosary with his face white as a sheet, praying, “Lord Jesus, end this! God, end this right now!” When the South Tower fell, a piece of debris caught him in the head. They carried his body into St. Peter’s and laid him in front of the altar. His death certificate was marked with a “1.”

The prayers of Detective David Brink, NYPD, covered head to toe in dust, stumbling down the street with eyes crusted shut by bits of glass and debris. At the altar of St. Paul’s, where he and his surviving friends had taken refuge, he knelt and gave thanks, prayed for strength, prayed for the souls of his lost friends. Then he washed his eyes in holy water. Groping for some cloth to wipe his face, he found the linen closet and pulled out the white cloth that covers the chalice, white with a cross stitched in red. Looking up, he saw that the priest had come out and began to stutter an apology. “No, my son,” the priest said. “That’s what they’re supposed to be used for.”

The prayers of Ron Clifford and blind Jennieann Maffeo, blind because her eyes had been burnt shut, crying out for Jesus and Mary as she huddled close to the Irish businessman who had guided her out of Tower One. “Are you Catholic?” Clifford asked her. “Yes,” she said, and he said, “Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer.” So they prayed, even as the second plane hit, even as Clifford’s sister and her little daughter were on that plane dying. Maffeo was so burnt, he remembers how the crowds parted like the Red Sea for them. “You’re going to make it,” he whispered as they laid her on the stretcher. “You have to make it, after all we’ve been through.” But she would not make it. At the hospital, her Italian father embraced him with kisses and broken English.

On Flight 93, Tom Burnett managed to call his wife. He had been a college atheist, but in the last few years he had become a devout Catholic. On the phone, he explained the plan. That they were waiting until the plane was over a rural area. That nobody was coming to save them. That he thought they could do it. “What do you want me to do?” she asked him. “What can I do?” “Pray,” he said. “Just pray.” She prayed, and before the last charge so did they, reciting the Our Father and Psalm 23. Prayer against prayer. Holy writ against holy writ.

*

On that day, the smallest things determined who lived and who died, the most random things. “Monday night football saved my life,” said one young man on the phone, explaining to his mother that he had slept in and was late to work. “Thank God for petty partisan politics,” wrote a journalist who had stopped on the way to vote in the mayoral primary. Over breakfast, a sales rep had just received a gift from a colleague, an artistic tie that didn’t match his green shirt, so he went back to the Marriott Hotel between the Towers to iron his white one. He survived. His colleague did not. A broker survived because he went downstairs to help check in a client who had forgotten his driver’s license. He would have sent his assistant down, but she was eight and a half months pregnant, and he didn’t want to make her walk all that way. He survived. She did not. No one else on that floor did.

People doomed themselves by stopping to save others. Sometimes, people saved themselves by stopping, as in the awe-inspiring story retold as “the miracle of Stairwell B,” where the firemen of Ladder 6 survived the collapse by stopping to help Josephine Harris, then pausing with her when her legs gave out in precisely the one location where they would be sheltered as the building came down.

For journalist Garrett Graff, whose task was to collect all of these stories, it was unbearable. The randomness was unbearable. For him, it was the end of faith.

Then there were the people who jumped. Or fell. Or were blown out. Whatever story you preferred to tell. But if you were there, you knew. Two teenage sisters watched from a window, making a home movie, their voices shaking. “Oh my God, don’t be a person,” said one. “I mean, who’s to say it’s not a chair?” said the other. “Please be a chair. Please be a chair.”

Chief Joseph Pfeifer tried to get a message to them over the building’s PA system, “Please don’t jump! We’re coming to you!” But the lines were cut. All he could do was watch. The oldest fireman on site, 71-year-old William M. Feehan, chased away a man with a camera, shouting “Don’t you have any human decency?” Pfeifer would live. Feehan would die.

William Jimeno, PAPD, remembers one of the jumpers to this day: a blond man in khakis and a light pink collared shirt. “When he jumped, he jumped almost like he was on a cross, like Jesus.”

I think of them as I listen to Sam Harris give a lecture on death and the present moment. Atheists have a really good reason to make the most of the present moment, he explains, unlike religious people, who think they have all the time in this life and the next. Religious people worry whether questions like “What is the point of life?” and “Is anything sacred?” make any sense otherwise, but Harris thinks they do. And he thinks there are answers. All it takes is a certain change in mindset. With apologies to his atheist audience for springing Buddhism onto them, he leads them through a guided meditation. Take a few deep breaths and just let gravity settle you in your seat. And you can let your breath just come and go naturally. Become aware of this sensation of sitting. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the weight of your arms and shoulders.

In the last minutes of Q & A, an Indian woman says she has lately been experiencing a deepened appreciation for the value and dignity of life, but now she has a problem: She feels too much. Whenever she hears of a life lost by malice or supreme negligence, she feels sad and angry. Before, she would feel detached. Oh well, accidents happen. Now the full weight of grief and injustice lies heavy on her. “I can see the responsibility of other people, that others are being robbed of their right to live.” How do atheists like her deal with this?

Well, Harris answers, once again it’s all about that mindset shift. To suffer is to perseverate on the suffering. Concentrating on the Now can help. If you “sink into the present moment” for long enough, you will find it “sacred.” You just need to clear away all the religious bullshit to get there.

I think about the jumpers. I think about what they were thinking, in those last ten seconds. It was reported that some were holding hands. Some made the sign of the cross.

Feel the weight of your body. Feel the weight of your arms and shoulders. Become aware of this sensation of falling.

Please God please God please…

There’s no need to control the breath. Just let it come and go.

God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…

If a thought intrudes, hold it for a moment, then gently guide your attention back to sensations.

JESUS!

*

As the South Tower was coming down, a young Indian Christian named Sujo John called out Jesus’ name. He had somehow made it all the way out of Tower One, even though he had wasted precious minutes reentering to try to place frantic phone calls to his pregnant wife, who worked in Tower Two. At the collapsing wall, he huddled together with fifteen or twenty other people. He asked them to call on Jesus’ name with him. He would never have imagined a moment like this the day before, living his quiet New York “closet Christian” life, going to church on Sunday, then on Monday speaking of Jesus only in lowered tones with his few other believing colleagues. But in that moment, he told them to call on the Name, and all of them did, their voices drowned out by the roar.

Then they were separated, and John found himself face down in the ashes, praying something soft would fall on him. When he realized he had survived and looked back, he saw their crushed bodies.

Another nearby man was also stirring. They reached out for each other. The other man was Special Agent Lenny Hatton, who had been on his way to work for the FBI that morning when he saw the first tower on fire. In former lives, he was a volunteer fireman, a Marine, and a bomb tech. Wild horses couldn’t have kept him from the scene. He’d climbed to the top of the Marriott Hotel and relayed information back to the Bureau’s New York office. When the second tower was struck, he’d raced down to assist with evacuations.

John would learn all of this later, but for now, all he knew was that the man said he was with the FBI. “Do you know Jesus?” John asked him. Hatton said yes. They took hands and said what they assumed would be their last prayers. Hatton no doubt was thinking of his own wife and four children, of the daughter whose school dance he would fly thirty-three straight hours from overseas to attend. When they opened their eyes, John looked up and suddenly noticed a flashing red ambulance light. As they crawled towards it, they could see that the vehicle was crushed, but the light was still blinking, guiding them all the way out to the street.

There Hatton let go of John’s hand and said goodbye. “I have to go back and get more people.” Then he ran back into the North Tower. It was the last time John ever saw him. He would later work with the FBI to help them confirm that Hatton had died in the second collapse.

That day John continued wandering the streets in despair. A journalist put a microphone in his face and asked how he was. “My wife is dead,” John said. He stumbled into a TV store and met a frightened Israeli girl who worked there. She picked glass out of his hair, gave him a cup of water. “I’m afraid they’re going to bomb my city now,” she said. Still, even in her fear she thought of him, asked if she could call his family. “What family?” he said. “My wife is dead.” Just as she took his phone, it rang. It was his wife. His wife, who had been delayed for work by five minutes, who watched the North Tower on fire and thought he was dead. A Christian woman she didn’t know had guided her to an apartment, sat down and comforted her with Scripture.

John went on to become a motivational speaker, and in 2010, he would found a global ministry to rescue trafficked women. But he never forgot the firemen, the men running up as he was running down. And he never forgot Lenny Hatton, the man who ran back in.

*

In the days after that day, construction worker Frank Silecchia described Ground Zero as hell on earth, a wasteland of fire, smoke and ash. And over and under all, the smell. Silecchia would dip a bandana in water and wrap it around his face. But nothing could keep out that smell. Every day, men went to work there, and every day they came home and said nothing. Some could hardly even embrace their wives. They just sat, and stared, and said nothing.

Searching through building six, flattened in the fall of Tower One, Silecchia and six firemen spray-painted orange Xs to mark their path back. After twelve hours, they’d found three bodies. Silecchia picked his way towards what was left of the lobby atrium. Peering inside, into something like a grotto illuminated in pale dawn, he found them: the steel crosses. Four of them. One loomed larger than the others, about twenty feet high.

In the morning silence, Silecchia fell to his knees and wept.

It’s been one year today since the public murder of Charlie Kirk, and I’ve spent the week unsure what to write about it, even though I knew I should write something.

As I wrote in my initial reaction piece last year, I didn’t follow Kirk much, except a little bit in the last months of his life when I started to pick up some viral clips from his campus events. I was struck by how well he handled these scenarios, improvising answers with no notes and the knowledge that everything was being recorded. It is not the sort of environment in which I would excel, but he seemed completely in his element. Everyone who knew him would say that he was. In the wake of September 11, Peggy Noonan quoted a friend who observed that everyone who died on that day died as who he was—from the man selfishly elbowing people out of the way to the man selflessly refusing to leave a colleague behind. Charlie Kirk died as who he was.

I somewhat reluctantly took part in a dialogue shortly afterwards with a theologian I’d never heard of before, who’d decided that Charlie Kirk’s death was mainly about him and his racial grievances as a “brown man” whose feelings were hurt by some things Kirk said on his podcast. This was a popular form of performance art among a certain kind of progressive churchgoer. I did my best to politely put it to bed. To this day, I politely refuse to join those people who feel they have to caveat whatever they write about Kirk—even positively—with the aside that of course we all know he did say some “cruel” things about “black people and immigrants.” Too online and brash? Sure. Still young and inconsistent? Absolutely. But not “cruel.” I refused to make the expected gestures then, and I refuse to make them now.

The fact that I’d never closely followed Kirk myself only made me more shocked and appalled to discover how many people hated him. The irony was rich: Here I was, hardly MAGA but at least in hailing distance of Kirk’s politics, and I’d never listened to one episode of his podcast, while an army of leftists was ready to go with sheaves of his quotes that were meant to prove…well, something or other. If people lacked the chutzpah to just say out loud that they thought he deserved to be murdered, they slithered close enough to it that the implication was clear.

A year later, and the sneering takes are still coming. At one leftie rag I won’t dignify by linking it, someone wrote that conservatives have no right to complain about the fact that the Internet has viciously memed his death to death. All the well-meaning efforts to contain the footage were of course futile, and it has taken on a ghoulish second life as “content creators” mockingly cannibalize and reconstitute bits of the video and audio. It’s being described as a “coping mechanism” for a generation that can’t bear very much reality. That is obviously putting things too kindly. These malicious children have nothing to “cope” with. They’re making unfunny memes about something they think is funny. That is all.

But the right did all this to itself, our intrepid journalist argues, by approving when people lost their jobs for gloating over the murder (thus inspiring backlash) and separately by creating their own callous rightwing meme culture around things like immigration or George Floyd’s death. Of course, we couldn’t possibly entertain the possibility that leftists on the Internet would have done this anyway because they’re leftists on the Internet. And we won’t explain why exactly Kirk’s family and friends should pay for the fact that some right-wingers somewhere made crude memes of George Floyd.

On one thing this journo’s take was painfully correct though, namely that the aftermath of Kirk’s death became defined more by grubby conspiracism and grifting than by high-minded, invigorated unity. You can read a frank, sober assessment of that devolution from someone who isn’t dancing on Kirk’s grave here. From my own experience, I think wryly about the fact that one of the priests leading a small campus memorial I attended has now turned his large public profile into an antisemitic dumpster fire—all while having the nerve to say “Charlie” would have approved. Meanwhile, because Kirk didn’t have much popular currency outside the bubbles of the politically engaged, the average “normie” American forgot him fairly quickly. It was a gruesome thing that happened to a guy they’d never heard of. Beyond that, there was no investment, and hence no broad resistance to the ongoing grave-dancing.

It thus falls to those of us who do care to do the remembering, and to answer honestly the question, “What did Charlie Kirk leave behind?”

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Thank you so much to my very patient readers for bearing with a longer hiatus than usual in this little corner of the Internet. Long-time readers will know I am as a rule far more on top of things. Unfortunately, being a freelance writer means wearing many hats at the same time, and some summer procrastination on other work came home to roost, leaving me no choice but to press pause here. But as of this week, we are back! This post is free. Exclusive content is in the works for paying readers. Your support is sincerely appreciated.

I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to put a trigger warning at the top of this post. You may want to skip it if you are a new father or mother, especially a new mother who has struggled with postpartum depression. I often see young parents report an abrupt drop in their ability to handle content dealing with endangered or dead children—even in movies, much less in real life. I will not be graphic, but you may very well still want to click away. Please be attentive to what you can handle, and feel no obligation to read on.

Despite not being a parent, I myself have spent the last weeks trying to avoid reading or watching much of anything around the horrifying case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for killing her three small children three years ago. I caught glimpses of takes I expected I would agree with, but I just didn’t want to look long enough to form an opinion. However, as the trial drew to a close, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look at a few things the algorithm sent me. Among many other heartbreaking things about this case, I just couldn’t get over how young this couple looked. They were about my age when the crime occurred. Their photogenic quality is surely one reason it’s become a national phenomenon. The archetypal “perfect” suburban couple, raising their perfect babies in a perfect house in a New England town ending in “-bury” where Things Are Not What They Appear—it sounds glib, but it’s such a true crime cliché.

Under Massachusetts law, the burden of proof rested on the prosecutors to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy was fully sane, in touch with reality, and cognizant of the moral valence of her actions. This is unfortunate and unusual. It’s the reason John Hinckley, Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity. And this weekend, it was the reason most of the jury voted to acquit Clancy. But the jury was hung thanks to a single holdout, 12 Angry Men-style. The country has been tearing itself apart over the verdict, one side saying that man should be lynched and the other saying he should never pay for another beer in his life.

I am not a legal analyst, nor an expert on postpartum depression or psychosis. Picking through the sea of commentary, I will say I’ve found Ben Shapiro’s takes even-handed and compassionate. Someone said Shapiro has dealt with an older mentally ill family member, and you could guess this from the sensitivity with which he approaches the case, while not losing sight of its three tiny victims or the mass psychosis of their murderer’s female fan club.

That mass psychosis took the form of protests outside the courthouse (protesting what, exactly?) and a wave of social-media sleuthing in which, most appallingly, the blame was shifted to Lindsay’s innocent husband, Patrick.

I read the transcript of the 911 call that captured the moment Patrick found his dead children. I have studiously avoided listening to the original audio, although I’ve watched him sit in court and relive those moments blow by blow. He answers each excruciatingly detailed question with flat stoic calm, occasionally disrupted by hard breathing. A policeman testifies to the state in which they found him when they arrived on the scene minutes later: screaming, swearing, “losing himself.”

After getting extended leave from work, Patrick would leave the country for a time, then sell the house, file for divorce, and throw himself into a new life. From this, the jury of the Internet has concluded that he must have been the story’s true villain all along. Look, over here we discovered that he left a 5-star review of a running trail in Costa Rica a month after the crime. Surely, no man who had been truly traumatized by his loss could have done such a thing. Also, he appears to have started dating again a year later and gotten remarried this year. The plot thickens. What did Lindsay know? What was he doing to her?

Never mind that Patrick had tirelessly fought through the molasses-slow post-COVID pipeline of mental health support to find care for Lindsay, becoming frustrated as he sensed that she was repeatedly being palmed off with pills that might be doing more harm than good. Never mind that he not only asked the public to “forgive” her in the wake of the murders, but he continued to search for any way in to understanding the crime, any possible way he could give her some shred of grace—searching so hard that cruel voices from the other side say he’s a coward who should have “finished” his wife as soon as he came home to find her alive after her unsuccessful suicide attempt. In a long New Yorker profile, written by one of his friends, he speaks of her in tones of gentle anguish, saying he didn’t marry “a monster” but “someone who got sick.” He and his sisters have started a non-profit to raise awareness for perinatal mental healthcare.

He agonizes over what to say in a one-year anniversary address to the Catholic church they sporadically attended over the years. Most of the brief speech is taken up with thanking the community, sharing tender memories of the children, and celebrating With Love From Duxbury, the local charity initiative launched in their honor. He tells his friend at the New Yorker that he thought about including a prayer request for Lindsay, but he could see the headlines now: “All he cares about is the wife.”

Why do they hate this man? This poor, tormented, gentle man, this “software guy” who knew nothing about psychology and had never even heard the phrase “postpartum psychosis” until after his three children were dead?

Perhaps it’s partly because in so many ways, men like him are already fair game—for envy, for resentment, for casual cruelty. He is the ultimately privileged man, after all: white, good-looking, well-off. By definition, nothing really bad can happen to white, good-looking, well-off men—at least, nothing so bad that they didn’t deserve it.

Privilege envy can extend to women too. In a similar way, it has been open season all year on Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow. Self-styled Internet sleuths who watch Candace Owens have spun out the most grotesque conspiracist speculation about her, judging her every public gesture and facial expression, exactly as Patrick has been judged. Like Patrick, she is treated not as an embodied person but as a character in someone else’s bad novel. And also like Patrick, she responds by continuing to be unfashionably earnest in public, which only makes people hate them all the more.

Let us call this what it is: a crucifixion. The cruelest social punishment for the least deserving victim.

In typical cradle Catholic fashion, the Clancys don’t seem to have been devoutly religious. Yet Patrick speaks with a humble, unforced sincerity about those weeks when he did make an effort to bring the children to church while his wife was working hospital shifts (as a labor and delivery nurse, of all things). He recalls one Sunday struggling to focus in the pew while feeding his son a bottle in a car seat with one hand and cradling his daughter with the other.

Their last service together was Christmas 2022. He remembers how that night, his boy Dawson stared at the crucifix over the altar and asked the question he always liked to ask: “Is that God?”

“Yeah buddy,” Patrick said. “That’s him.”

When this Substack turned five in April, I was too busy with Life Stuff to mark the anniversary properly, but I made a note to circle back and do so at a better time. With summer waning and some other writing deadlines looming, now is that time.

I wasn’t even writing under my own name yet when I first launched Further Up. Most of you weren’t following me then, but a few were and still fondly remember the Pseudonym Years. I wasn’t famous or anything, but on a small freelancer scale, my writing had succeeded much more, much faster than I’d expected it to. I made the jump to Substack because all the cool kids were doing it, and it felt like a way to blend the best of a blog and a newsletter. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

That fall, I chose to uncloak my identity, in slightly cringe and grandiose fashion. I simply didn’t want to compartmentalize myself anymore. And at the time, I believed I saw my future in classical Christian school teaching, where the kind of writing I do wouldn’t affect my job security. It turned out that God had other plans. Five years later, I find myself doing what I once assumed was impossible: Doing nothing but writing, for money.

Now that it’s 2026, and everyone and his uncle has a Substack, I’ve read some pieces about its sustainability as a business model. Different writers are trying different tactics to keep afloat. Someone observed that there’s a lot of pressure on the Substacker to turn himself into a product, by figuring out the formula his readers like and then churning out as much Content according to that formula as possible. With an increasingly flooded market and readers’ pennies increasingly stretched, some see this as the only economically viable option. Some might be tempted to do this with a little (or a lot) of help from AI. Recently, Substack rolled out an AI detector that will help readers sift the real deal from the slop, which is much appreciated by those of us who actually write our stuff like humans.

Meanwhile I, never blessed with marketing skill, have simply continued to do what I’ve always done: Write whatever I feel like about whatever I’m thinking in a given week. Sometimes it’s a Current Thing, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I’ve allowed the Current Thing to pass me by altogether. And for some reason, people have continued to pay me for this. I’ve thanked you before. I now thank you again. Your support has been financially life-changing for me. For my part, I’ve always tried to keep my price reasonable, recognizing that people have numerous options for where to spend their subscriber dollars, and that as one lonely Substacker I can’t possibly compete with magazines that produce multiple articles a day.

In that spirit, and in honor of my 5th anniversary, I’m doing a flash sale: For one week, readers can get an annual subscription for a MERE, a TRIFLING $30. This is 50% off what you’d pay if you gave me $5 a month for a year. If you’re a new reader, or you’ve been dipping in for a while at the free tier, consider this your incentive to upgrade. Also, even though marketing people will yell at me that I shouldn’t say this, I’m going to say it anyway: To my long-time readers who’ve been around since the beginning or close to it, and who locked themselves into what my annual rate was at the time, you should know that Substack will keep renewing you at that rate even if I’ve lowered it in the meantime. You might prefer to unsubscribe and resubscribe at the current lower rate, especially during a sale. I pass this information along as a thank you for your years of loyal support.

Now for the meat of this post: If you’re newer and not sure yet what you’re getting into, I’ve gone through my archives year by year and pulled 60-ish (!) pieces that represent some of the best of my work. I’m offering roughly half as free samples and keeping back the other half to (hopefully) tempt you.

This exercise has been rewarding for me. I’ve stumbled onto pieces that I’d entirely forgotten about, and on re-reading them I’ve been pleasantly surprised that they hold up. I’d like to think I’m more or less the same writer I was five years ago in the ways that matter. I wish I could say this for some other writers and pundits I’ve liked. I never want it to be said of me that I change my opinions with the weather.

With my ADD, I’m constantly topic-hopping from politics to religion to philosophy to history to arts and culture and the movies to whatever else. Despite this, I’ve found it interesting to trace recurring thematic threads. In particular, I can see that my work has always had a strong undercurrent of melancholy. I see the world with what Thomas Sowell sometimes called “the tragic vision,” sometimes the “constrained vision.” I write often about problems to which no Solution exists. I write about suffering people with no easy remedy for their suffering, including Christians. I write about addiction, mental illness, poverty, war, murder.

You may ask, how did I grow a Substack like that? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. Maybe because I try to write about things I love as much as I write about things I hate. And even when I write about things I hate, I write with love.

Occasionally, someone has unsubscribed because something I wrote made them uncomfortable. It’s never my goal to shock readers pointlessly, but I can’t please everyone, and with the many highly sensitive topics I tackle, I’m bound to offend someone. Occasionally, I’ve broken another marketing rule and posted something that’s not as “right-coded” as my “brand” would lead people to expect. Whatever the issue was, I can assure you I was trying to reflect honestly about what I saw. If I can continue doing that well, I can continue to call myself a writer.

2021

Free

American Tragedy: My first piece set the tone for what this Stack would become in the years ahead by being a piece of extended wrestling with a thorny topic, in this case police shootings. This was spring of 2021, George Floyd’s death was still a festering wound, and the air was full of Takes on each new violent encounter between the police and the public. I found myself uneasily in the middle.

Death of a Conservative: I wrote this on the first anniversary of my friend Mike Adams’ suicide. A few people have been remembering Mike recently in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal. Arday was a young academic fabulist who killed himself when his grift was exposed. Because he was black, some have blamed this on the media and asserted that a white academic would never be pushed out of a job this way. I’m glad to see that Mike’s story isn’t forgotten. Attention must be paid.

The Veteran Who Made Me a Journalist: This piece tells the story of my old neighbor, Jim, who was a reconnaissance pilot in World War II and started sharing his memories when I was 11. It is still one of the best things I’ve ever written.

Gram: A tribute to my grandmother, who died that year.

God’s Firebrand: An Interview With Hatun Tash: Still using my pen name at the time, I recorded this interview for a piece at The Spectator. It was one of my great privileges as a writer to encounter Hatun and tell her story.

Dopesick: A while before writing this I got into an unexpected Twitter clash with Caitlin Flanagan, a writer I’ve long admired. She came at me very harshly, and it was disappointing. Not long afterwards, she withdrew from Twitter after confessing that she was addicted to the app. So I wrote this in sympathy, from one addict to another. (I don’t think she ever saw it.)

It’s a Sin (Part I): In London this summer, I had a lovely chat with a long-time Australian reader. Among the things in my archive that had really made an impression him, he singled out this series about homosexuality. He has no personal investment, as it were, but he’s known gay men and like me has a heart for their misery, self-inflicted as it is. For whatever reason this is a thorny topic that’s drawn out some of my best writing over the years.

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The Life You Save: A story about a friend of mine in the Gardaí (the Irish police force). One night, he encountered a fire, but there were no firemen. I was quite proud of this piece, and still am.

The Parable of the Two Pandemics: Among many things that shouldn’t be memory holed about the COVID pandemic is the rank bigotry we saw toward the unvaccinated. Here I drew that out, then did some provocative reflection on the similar and dissimilar roles of stigma in COVID and AIDS.

Clear as Glass: On the fall and redemption of Stephen Glass, a journalist who was disgraced for plagiarism and spent the rest of his life trying to make it right. Have tissues ready.

Say Not the Day is Done: On depression and suicide.

The Song of the Saints: On Shusaku Endo’s Silence (and Scorsese’s adaptation). The novel made me angry, the film less so, and here I try to figure out why.

Only the Trying: On my lifelong collection of hero stories, including tragic ones.

2022

Free

The Mother’s Mother’s Tale: The miraculously providential story of my mother’s birth and adoption. I’ve sometimes thought I should have saved this piece and tried to shop it around as a magazine feature somewhere. Maybe it would have found more of an audience. But maybe it’s better this way.

The Hustler, the Cop, and the Sparrow: A story about a forgotten Chicago street ministry and the lost boys it served. Based on a memoir that feels like it could be a TV series, if we still remembered how to tell stories in which the Church does good things.

Letters From War: On my quest to uncover the lost letters of a Scottish Great War chaplain. Life intervened and pushed my project to republish them to the back burner, but I vow to finish what I started one day soon.

Sucker: On the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war and the precise moment when I realized who Tucker Carlson was.

There Are No Solutions: On the Uvalde mass shooting, mass shootings in general, and unpreventable tragedies in general.

ChatBot Didn’t Write This Essay: Dispatches from the early days of ChatGPT, which intersected with my last days as a high school teacher. In hindsight, prophetic.

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The Sum of All Fears: On AI, creepypasta, and demons. Written when the character of “Loab” was going viral in the discourse about emerging AI text-to-image tech. If that rings no bells, click at your peril!

No Continuing City: On that time I saw a homeless guy strung out in front of a Chick-fil-A in New York.

The Softly Spoken Magic: On taking a field trip with my then-students to a planetarium show, where I listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon straight through for the first time.

For Sale: One Body: On America’s richest digital prostitute.

Take Me Home: On To Kill a Mockingbird and how Boo Radley finds his manhood.

The Rainbow in the Basement: On finding bits of treasure among the belongings of neighbors I never knew.

2023

Free

The Garden at the End of the Universe: I try to write Passion Week reflections every year, and some years they come out better than others. I think this is my best Easter essay. With affectionate hat tip to Douglas Adams.

The Hope of the World: Ditto for my Christmas essays. (I wrote this one about Meet John Doe and how it functions as an allegory for how the West lost its faith.)

The Watermelon: On a Saturday at a community kitchen in Lansing, and the people I met there.

Letters of a Christian Homosexual: On a forgotten anonymous memoir that has since been misappropriated but deserves to be read and admired for what it actually was.

All the Single Ladies: On unchosen female singleness.

While Rachel Weeps: On October 7th.

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Frog and Toad Aren’t Gay: On how Arnold Lobel touched my childhood, and how not to read him.

Healing Streams: On Lonnie Frisbee, Aimee Semple McPherson, and the tragic archetype of the charismatic faith healer.

The State of Not Knowing: On the October 7 attacks, the silence of God, and the paradox of prayer.

Of Boys and Men: On…boys and men, and the movie Master and Commander.

Of Men and Angels: On…men and angels. (And truth and useful fiction.)

Shane MacGowan’s Vision of the Street: On the death, poetry, and weirdly compassionate genius of Shane MacGowan.

2024

Free

Francis Collins is Not Sorry Enough: This piece really did numbers. It was one of my angriest pieces. I’m not sorry. Francis Collins should be, though.

The Passion of Jordan Peterson: Another all-time top post, on what Jordan Peterson meant to people in his prime as a lecturer and why he is remembered with love.

What I Saw at the Planned Parenthood: On a very poorly planned Planned Parenthood protest, the young woman who started it, and the mob that met us there.

The Case of the Four Gospels (Part I): First in a series people have enjoyed about the historicity of the gospels. Featured in Ross Douthat’s New York Times column. Find the other parts here.

Unjust War (or, How I Never Learned to Love the Bomb): This is one of those posts my more right-leaning readers probably didn’t love, in which I explain my opposition to the nuclear bomb (while also working through sticky, inexact parallels to the Gaza War).

No Country for Old Conservatives: A lament for conservatism past.

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How My Grandfather Destroyed the West: A sort of companion piece to “The Mother’s Mother’s Tale,” in which I tell the story of the man I was fortunate never to call “grandfather,” even though technically he was.

The Best a Man Can Get: On American masculinity and the Olympic triumph of our men’s gymnastics team.

A Full Eclipse Day in the Neighborhood: On watching the solar eclipse with friends in a sleepy Ohio town.

Death Be Not Proud: On the death of one of those friends from cancer, stirred together with thoughts on John Gunther’s classic memoir about watching his son die of a brain tumor.

The Just Shall Live: On the “sudden death” of Alexei Navalny.

The Old Man and the Cello: On the 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, telling the beautiful musical story of Mstislav Rostropovich.

2025

Free

Reasonable Faith Strikes Back: On the religious vibe shift and why it’s necessary to unite faith and reason if we are to progress beyond vibes.

N. T. Wright and The Inner Ring: Another popular post, on the Protestant elite class and N. T. Wright’s casual soft endorsement of abortion.

Je Suis Charlie: On the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Optimizing Ourselves to Death: On Ross Douthat’s encounter with a gene editing tech entrepreneur, and the movie Gattaca.

Feynman and the Bomb: I’m also a poet, and you didn’t know it! On the 80th anniversary of the bomb. Also published at Poems for Persons of Interest, whose editors recently told me they’ve nominated this for a “Best of the Net” award.

Though My Sadness is Unbounded: A Thanksgiving reflection with notes on a Thanksgiving sonnet. Includes pictures of pretty leaves.

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Straight to the Heart: On David Lynch’s death, a tribute to his best film, The Straight Story.

Day of Days: On the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

AI Art is Stupid: Continuing to poke at the facade of AI tech, I compare the results of some prompts with the ingenious creations of a barely verbal autistic cartoonist.

Meme-ing Ourselves to Death: Gad, did I really rip off Neil Postman for two post titles? Oh well, it’s a good template. Here I talk about what is lost when everything becomes a meme.

Reenchanted Evangelism: On the YouTube evangelist Bryce Crawford, somewhat echoing my piece on charismatic faith healing but now in a Gen Z key.

Christianity is Not Cool: On why, vibe shift or no vibe shift, Christians will always need to be content with never being the coolest kids at the table.

As always, thank you all for reading.

I do not make a regular habit of reading the New York Times. But when I recently had the opportunity to subscribe at a steep discount for a few months, I broke down and took it. The paper had finally figured out how to cheat paywall-breaking hacks like “archive.ph” (which I pass on in case anyone finds it…useful, though since you asked, no it does not work for Substack). Ordinarily, this being the Times, I wouldn’t care, except there was a Ross Douthat article I really wanted to read.

Here I’ll throw in a quick disclaimer that I’ve actually found myself enjoying other Times content along the way, like this delightful character study of a young Jewish bibliomaniac, or this exposé of abuses in the organ donation industry. A nice plus is that as long as I’m subscribed, I have unlimited gift links to give away, which I’ll be doing liberally in this post. However, I plan to let the subscription lapse as soon as the price goes back up, in no small part because as of this month, there will be no more new Ross Douthat columns to read. Capitalizing on the runaway breakout success of his interview podcast Interesting Times, Bari Weiss has hired him to join her reimagined 60 Minutes team at CBS News, where he’ll make a full transition from columnist to television journalist. This is good news for Douthat and sad news for readers like me, who sense that the end of his columnist career marks the end of an era in American journalism.

Douthat joined the Times roster as a rising young Catholic journalist at the dawn of the Obama era, which was less than 20 years ago but feels like 50. He went on to become one of the vanishingly few true conservatives doing opinion journalism on an elite scale. Well aware that he represented an embattled minority of religious Americans, he established a brand of calm, cool, collected commentary—never brash, but with enough subtle bite to be interesting. His indispensability as a columnist was partly a function of his range. He could shift tonal gears from cerebral analysis to intensely personal work like the medical memoir The Deep Places, on his harrowing battle with Lyme disease. And he could reflect insightfully on topics as diverse as electoral politics, baseball as dying religion, and the stagnation of New Testament scholarship. (The latter led him to encounter my mother’s work in the field, which he highlighted in his book Believe. He was also kind enough to point readers to my writing on the topic, and has in general been more generous to me than a small-time freelancer normally expects from an established writer of his caliber.)

There’s been a lot of speculation about who will “replace” Douthat, but the most likely answer is “no one.” There’s no reason to assume that in the year of our Lord 2026, the New York Times would make it a priority to fill a conservative Catholic’s spot on their roster, let alone a conservative Christian of some other stripe. They only kept Douthat because he’d been around for so long, and because he was so darn good. Apparently there are plans to continue Interesting Times with new hosts, but I can’t imagine what it would even look like without Douthat’s presence anchoring it. Who else is going to deliver memorable moments like this exchange with Peter Thiel about whether the human race should survive, or this spontaneous recitation of a poem about conceiving a child, or this entire interview with Ben Sasse?

At Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador wrote some good reflections on what Douthat’s shift says about the future of digital media, digital personalities, and the slow replacement of literate culture with oral culture. Since then, Douthat has given the beginning of his own explanation for the pivot. In conversation with Ezra Klein, he says that as the landscape of politics and culture has become progressively weirder and murkier, he has felt himself more and more at sea as an opinion journalist. At this point in time, he finds a certain relief in a job that allows him simply to ask lots of curious questions and describe what he sees, without the exhaustion of trying to persuade readers to see it his way. If persuasion was his main task as a columnist, then he confesses, poignantly, that he feels like he failed.

That sense of unburdening, of going out not with a bang but with a resigned sigh, is the theme of his farewell column. It asks simply, “Who is my enemy?” Where are the bad guys at? This question is increasingly open-ended, and the number of ways to answer it is increasingly varied. Is it the radical left, growing still more radical by the day? Is it a Trumpist right cankered with corruption? Is it the mad transhumanist techno-futurists of Silicon Valley? Douthat lays a curse on all houses, then leaves the final answer as an exercise for the reader.

I haven’t always agreed with him, but I feel a measure of journalistic kinship with him. On my own small scale, his sadness is my sadness.

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Out this week on YouTube, you can now enjoy a panel discussion I contributed to at the small Breakwater conference in London this summer. This conference couldn’t have been more different from ARC, but I really enjoyed myself and appreciated the chance to contribute. Breakwater is an ongoing international series of small conference experiments designed to foster open conversations among people from different religious backgrounds. It’s an entirely grassroots effort with no major institutional sponsorships, which in my opinion makes it more interesting.

A couple of extremely capable women made this particular event happen, and we were all very grateful for their kindness, efficiency, and foresight. Somehow, they secured multiple beautiful venues for multiple events over the course of a few days, arranged to have sessions recorded, arranged top-shelf catering, and all the other nuts and bolts that make a successful event like this. They should seriously give masterclasses.

One of the organizers moderated my panel, which was about whether Christian apologetics is helping or hurting the church (and the world, I suppose). A complicated topic that we only had an hour and change to explore, but her thoughtful questions opened up lots of space for reflection:

I was joined by Nathan Jacobs, an Orthodox philosopher, and two skeptical YouTube creators—Jared Smith, an evangelical Christian deconvert, and an excommunicated Mormon who goes by “Nemo” to protect his identity. Jared and Nemo shared their stories in another fascinating panel on conversions and deconversions. I appreciate how both of them are trying to use their channels in constructive ways. Nemo’s story is tragic, and he gave me a new appreciation for the courage it takes for ex-Mormons to start their lives over from scratch after leaving a corrupt church. He gently tries to help other Mormons follow his example here. Meanwhile, Jared is conducting an ongoing social experiment which he calls “atheist church audits,” in which he visits a new church every Sunday and comes back with an honest “review.” These are done in a spirit of good faith and sometimes hilariously funny. Jared to me is the “sad clown” of atheist YouTube. I think he’s wrong about many things, but no one else is doing what he does. On this trip, he decided to review Westminster Abbey.

Back to our panel: Readers new to my work might not be aware that apologetics is an area where I have a lot of accumulated knowledge and thoughts. I didn’t mince words in this discussion when I talked about what I call the “apologetics industrial complex,” as distinct from what I call the “apologetic project.” I have no confidence whatsoever in the former, for reasons I’ve written about before and started unpacking here. But I still have faith in the latter, and at some point I plugged a ministry I work with called Talk About Doubts, where people are invited to write in with their honest questions about Christianity and get one-on-one answers over Zoom. Sadly, our work sometimes involves “deprogramming” bad apologetics and replacing it with something better.

It would be an exaggeration to say “Christian apologetics has failed.” However, I do think it’s fair to say that the industrial complex has damaged its efficacy in many serious ways. There are of course the very obvious moral scandals of figures like Ravi Zacharias, or more obscure figures like the charismatic apologist Michael Brown (whom Jared studied with at a “pseudo-seminary” called FIRE). But there are other, more hidden failures of honesty and character that have had their own slow-motion corrupting effect, through a perfect storm of ignorance and arrogance.

Not everyone I could name is equally culpable, or culpable in all the same ways. But let us say the continued circulation of “slopologetics” has been a group effort. Academic standards are low and have been allowed to remain low with no rigorous accountability structure. Inadequate models like the much-touted “minimal facts” argument for the resurrection have been adopted as the standard template for decades of apologetics education, with no serious effort to fact-check the argument’s flimsy foundations. People with social capital have been aggressively shielded from confronting their blunders honestly. People with low moral character have been able to muddy the waters and insinuate themselves into positions of respectability and influence. And people attempting to do interesting, honest work can struggle to gain a hearing if that work involves acknowledging any of this out loud.

All of this has been playing out on a small canvas, niche debates even within the already small niche of conservative Christianity, and usually missing the thrill of debates over cultural hot topics. With limited time (and only middling execution, since I’m a much better writer than speaker), my goal in this panel for a mixed audience was twofold: to explain why I think the apologetic project is still valuable and relevant in our cultural moment, and to acknowledge that it hasn’t always served the culture effectively due to the failures of the industrial complex.

Who or what is apologetics for? Does apologetics “make people better”? Can apologetics save the world? Each of these questions could inspire an article series unto itself. Here I try to flesh out my answers perhaps a little better than I could flesh them out on the spot.

In hindsight, it might have been helpful if we had framed the conversation by going around and clearly defining what each of us meant by the term “apologetics.” I define it very simply as the public presentation of the evidence for Christianity. But Jared, my ex-Christian co-panelist, seems to define it as the practice of assuming Christianity is true, then desperately arguing in favor of it no matter what the evidence says. This sounds like Nemo’s experience of Mormon apologetics, in which he was taught that it’s better to have an answer, any answer at all, than to say you’re not sure.

Here I appreciated Nathan Jacobs’ contributions, because he could confirm from his own inside experience of academic politics that irreligious academics may be just as siloed as the religious, if not more so in some cases. At one point Jared innocently said he imagined academics being thrilled by some new discovery that proved they were wrong. Nathan said on the contrary, many an academic fiercely resists such discoveries precisely because his life’s work is bound up in being right. (One rare exception he encountered was the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, who praised Nathan for completely changing his mind about Kant.)

I am not an academic, but this chimes with what I know my parents have encountered in their careers. Within New Testament studies, where my mother has focused for about a decade now, the word “apologist” is a slur wielded against scholars who buck consensus in a conservative direction, even if they are carefully making their case on the merits. And not only that, but the scholar who wants to break into the field is instructed not to be too “apologist-adjacent.” It’s a kind of academic purification ritual, requiring at least several degrees of separation between you and the “unclean” scholar. This hostility has generated an unhealthy cycle within evangelical academia. An evangelical desperate to feel part of the academic Inner Ring is tempted to conform, while at the same time being tempted to cloak his ideas in double-speak so that he can retain an evangelical audience.

So, a big part of doing apologetics well is simply not worrying about whether you will be called an “apologist” in the insulting sense, or about whether a Cool Person might lump you in with (gulp) the fundamentalists. True open-mindedness means following evidence wherever it leads, and by wherever we do mean wherever. In my mom’s case, that’s led her sometimes in what people might call a more liberal direction—away from inerrancy, for example—but also in a direction ridiculed by liberals as she upholds a high view of the gospels’ reliability. As you can imagine, the chips have fallen all over the place, and she has simply let them fall.

In the discussion, I got a laugh by also criticizing what I call the “Always Be Closing” model of apologetics, in which doing apologetics is pressed into the mold of a sales pitch. Apologists are sometimes told they need to “make the case” as quickly and slickly as possible, and that if once they can get the target to agree with a proposition like “Jesus rose from the dead,” it’s a hop and a skip to getting them into the Christian fold. This has incentivized the development of “slopologetics” like minimal facts.

Of course, many people simply won’t be persuaded by apologetics of any kind, for all kinds of reasons—hostility to the tenets of Christianity, academic pride, “church hurt,” or perhaps just what my agnostic friend Ben Sixsmith calls “apatheism.” This isn’t the fault of any apologist in particular. It’s simply how things are. But I don’t conclude from this that apologetics is valueless, only that not everyone will see its value. At one point, Jared brought up Jonathan Haidt’s “rider and the elephant” to point out that people often don’t make decisions based on rational arguments. I obviously concede this, but I still maintained (and Nathan agreed with me, though we come at this from different perspectives) that trying to help people be rational is a good thing. Man is a social animal, but man is also the rational animal, even if he doesn’t always act like it.

Nathan talked about how for many young “nones” he’s engaged—like the subjects of his documentary Becoming Truly Human—it was an emotional reason or a traumatic life experience that led them to leave religion behind. When he asks what might draw them back in, they say they’re looking for an experience of the supernatural or the numinous. An experience drove them away, perhaps only an experience can bring them back.

Here, writers like Rod Dreher have entered the chat to talk about how Christianity might be “reenchanted.” I’ve engaged these ideas at length, with some misgivings. One misgiving is that I believe the integration of heart and mind isn’t a process that can be indefinitely deferred. If intellectual doubts arise, in the end there is no way but through. It won’t do to try to put them in a box and keep coasting on vibes. In Jared’s church background, there was a heavy emphasis on experiential closeness to God. When he couldn’t experience that closeness, he felt profound devastation. Meanwhile, as our ex-Mormon panelist reminded us, Mormons are famous for telling people to hang their faith on an experience, the “burning in the bosom.” I would submit that something is badly wrong with your epistemology if it’s indistinguishable from Mormon epistemology.

So to answer a question Jared asked me, “Does apologetics make people better?” I would say sometimes yes, in the sense that it can ground people in reality, and in the process it can make them whole where they have felt internally divided. Now, there are some saintly people who spend their whole lives in a serene state of grace where somehow they “just know,” without ever being able to formulate a proper apologetic argument. I would say such people are accessing commonsense intuitions that apologetics can formalize. It wouldn’t “make them better” in the sense of making them holier, though perhaps once it was explained to them they would think it’s kind of neat. But obviously, I think it’s always a good thing for people to understand why true things are true, and achieving a better understanding of the truth is especially important for people who don’t already have serene confidence about these things. (And even serenely confident people must interact with the not so serenely confident, and should have an idea of what to say.)

But alright, Jared also asked me, so then what do you say to people who listen to all of the arguments and simply do not believe—not necessarily because they’re hostile, or even because they’re uninterested in the problem, but because they just don’t find it persuasive? This past week I wrote a little appreciation of the late great English philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who abandoned the Catholic priesthood to become a distinguished agnostic scholar. Certainly no one could say that Sir Anthony was an unintelligent or dishonest man, nor was he a man merely craving a life of sinful excess—he remained happily married to the same woman until his death. He also couldn’t be accused of not taking the opposition seriously. He teased fellow skeptics like Richard Dawkins for their sloppy God Delusion-style work, far less sophisticated than his own. But despite all this, he could never find his way back to an honest affirmation of theism, which he found as unconvincing as atheism—though he said that he still prayed for “enlightenment” on the matter from Whoever might be listening.

I obviously couldn’t know the inner workings of Sir Anthony’s mind and heart, nor could I possibly presume to script his first meeting with Almighty God. I never had the honor of meeting Sir Anthony myself, but I suppose one question I would have wanted to ask (though I might not have had the gumption to ask it) is whether he felt at all in need of a Savior. He seemed so content in his agnosticism that it doesn’t seem a stretch to suppose the answer was no. In that case, I would ask why.

I have great sympathy for the man who does acutely feel that need, is mindful every day of the crushing weight of his sin, yet for whatever reason can’t believe that there’s a remedy for his torment. I want to put my arms around that man and tell him there is the best of all possible good news.

I have to admit, though, that when I hear skeptics present themselves as “non-resistant non-believers,” it doesn’t tend to be in this tormented spirit. I wouldn’t say this makes them by definition stupid or dishonest. But I always find something uncanny about it, as if I’d met someone who never experienced hunger or thirst. If I tell you where there’s bread, and you tell me that sounds like a very nice thing some people might like, but eating food just isn’t your thing, I confess I am somewhat at a loss.

Jared asked me why getting to heaven should be a matter of believing the right ideas as opposed to doing good things, or being a good person. What I tried to convey in response is that if you’re framing the process of getting into heaven as something like filling out the correct bubbles in a multiple-choice test, you’re framing it wrong. Getting to heaven is not a cash prize for answering a bunch of Jeopardy questions in a row. It is the final consummation of a soul’s search for his true love. It is the uniting of the human heart with that which it most intensely desires. If heaven is not heaven to you, it is because there is something else you desire more intensely than Jesus, and you will not find it there. If, for example, you are a two-bit Christian apologist who desires above all else to be told that your life’s work is groundbreakingly important, and if you have woven a tangled web of lies around yourself in the course of refusing to hear anything else, you may be surprised to find that having all the right Jeopardy answers won’t do you any good in the hereafter. It was Jesus himself, after all, who said that the results of the Last Judgment would surprise many sheep and goats alike.

Can apologetics save the world? If the world is on fire, and I shout, “The exit’s over there!” can I save you? If you insist that the exit is in fact not over there, or perhaps you insist that you can’t even smell any smoke at all, can I pick you up and carry you?

Love will carry you. Love will save you. Love will save whoever will be saved.

Someone recently went viral on Twitter with a post lamenting the way obscure discarded books are being systematically bulk-bought, scanned and cannibalized for AI training, then destroyed. The scanning process cuts off their spines, and when it’s finished the originals are shredded. Buyers are kept anonymous. Books produced before 2022 are at a premium because they are guaranteed to be AI-free. All of this has been ruled legal because as long as just one copy of the work exists at a time, then it’s “fair use.” Isn’t that neat?

A horrified friend reshared this story and urged people to rage against the dying of the light by frequenting their local used bookstores. Sadly, as friend of the Stack Quentin Crisp has been telling me about his own region of the UK, not everyone has that option. I have fond childhood memories of a used bookstore in my own town, which to my knowledge remains open (though the husband of the couple who owned it has sadly died, as well as their beloved shop cat). However, I’ve spent more time frequenting my local library, which does the community a service by collecting and reselling cast-off books, music, and movies in a giant sale every other month. The prices are rock-bottom. Various shelves have a “three for $1” deal going. Whole encyclopedia sets will go for $3.

This is a temptation for me, even though I consider myself a pretty modest bibliophile, especially when it comes to physical books. My father was a different story at my age, as I chronicled in this new piece for The Lamp about my childhood as a bookish homeschooler. I’ve been limited in following his example partly because I’ve spent most of my life literally unable to store all the books I already own in one place, let alone expand the library. Plus, with current books, I prefer Kindle for research and note-taking. However, as a proud new homeowner, I’m starting to get used to the idea of bookshelves, especially the built-in ones in my living room. It was the strangest, most wonderful new feeling earlier this summer to slowly unpack some of them and begin roughly assigning shelves by genre. I remain cautious, but you could say I’m more open to expanding my collection now than I used to be, especially now that archive.org has lost a lawsuit which forced the site to remove much of its copyrighted content for people who don’t have a “print disability.” (An unworthy part of me is tempted to fib my way back to what was taken from me, but so far I have resisted.)

I confess, though, that I didn’t actually go home with any of those encyclopedia sets at the book sale. I also walked past collections like these, which now appear poignant in their obsolescence:

I want to look on the bright side: It’s a good thing that the information in books like these is now so widely available. But I still feel a twinge when I think about all the careful human labor that went into curating them. Here’s a look at the back cover and a random page in the Penguin Guide to classical music on CD. Note the quality of the writing even in a tiny little encyclopedia entry like this description of a Perlman performance.

I’ve filled a tote bag with two summer hauls’ worth of findings this year. As I’ve leafed through my acquisitions, I’m moved to reflect on the sheer number of worlds that are lost to us when books gradually fall out of time and memory. Many book-lovers can recall “rescue missions” when they saved as many as they could from a doomed batch before the rest were carted off. Sometimes I wonder how long my library will keep books in sale circulation before giving up on them, or if there’s a certain fixed point at which they’re rotated out.

This post will be a snapshot of a few of the disappearing worlds I’ve been discovering. I will start in an unlikely place, with a cookbook.

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All reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey should begin with the recognition that the poem may be great, but in its original shape it is unfilmable. The most faithful English-language stab at doing so—Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1997 miniseries—is three hours of pure camp. Hermes hovers about in what looks like a golden diaper, delivering his lines in a manner that would make you think he’s light in his loafers if he had any loafers. Poseidon speaks from the waves with a literal face sculpted from the stuff of your worst 90s CGI nightmares. Isabella Rossellini’s Athena chews up the scenery with Armand Assante’s Odysseus, blushing and gushing over our hero’s clever ways and general hotness. Of course, that’s exactly what she does in the book.

This presents a conundrum for the contemporary filmmaker who’s always wanted to put his own stamp on the great work, yet aspires to seriousness. It’s a particular conundrum for the man who made the Dark Knight trilogy. At moments, The Odyssey resembles nothing so much as a Marvel movie, but DC is the only language Christopher Nolan speaks.

But like its hero, the poem is polytropos—a work of many twists and turns, and many moods. It is comedy one moment and tragedy the next. It can be read as a child’s fantasy adventure or an ancient allegory for the random horrors of war. It has been riffed on by everyone from Kenneth Grahame to James Joyce. It’s too postmodern to say the poem can be whatever you want it to be, but one can see why Nolan might have been tempted to think so. Though what precisely Nolan did want it to be remains a bit of a muddle, right from his ambiguous title card: “In a time of apparent magic…” Lots of weird spooky stuff happens, but are the gods real? Nolan’s Odysseus apparently has the same question.

In Nolan’s defense, he isn’t the first to keep Homer’s cartoonishly divine intrusions off-screen while feeding his hero gruff proto-atheist one-liners. Kirk Douglas’s 1954 Italian-American version was a forerunner in that regard, albeit one that took itself far less seriously. (That production is worth watching just for the fun of seeing an Odyssey that feels like a 2-hour Star Trek episode, complete with “Who among us hasn’t bedded the occasional sea witch/alien babe?” energy—though even Douglas’s roguish Odysseus is chastened in the righteously angry presence of his faithful Penelope, cleverly played by the same actress who plays Circe. Interestingly, that version also suggests that Odysseus’s series of unfortunate events is a curse for Troy’s sack, even featuring a scene in which Cassandra bawls him out.)

Nolan’s most visible hint that the gods might be real is a radically reimagined Athena, here showing up as Odysseus’s scowling guilty conscience rather than President of the Odysseus Fan Club. Not that I’m saying it would have worked cinematically to give the President of the Odysseus Fan Club a prominent role. But better to cut Athena altogether than have her drop in for the occasional dour lecture and ominous headshake. Particularly since there doesn’t even seem to be a consistent narrative of what Odysseus needs to be sorry for.

[Here follow movie spoilers, if anyone cares.]

The already much-dissected third-act twist firmly establishes the Trojan horse as his nuclear bomb, the unforgivable sin that has shattered “Zeus’s Law” of hospitality forever and reframes the whole journey as a cosmic mirror of his own lawbreaking. (Though flashbacks show him improbably stumbling about Troy dazed and confused, as if he’s shocked, shocked to find sacking going on in this establishment.) At the same time, Schoolmarm Athena has spent the last two hours scolding him for beating himself up too much over his lost men. Apparently, he needs to stop being such a modern American officer about all this and trying to “assume responsibility” for their fates, when the gods already had a committee meeting to which he was not invited.

That cold pearl of wisdom is in fact rather in the detached spirit of the source material, which for all Odysseus’s leadership failures seems at pains to exonerate him (to the dismay of veteran psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his book Odysseus in America, which like Achilles in Vietnam develops some intriguing if sometimes unconvincing metaphors between the work and his clinical research). But this then clashes very oddly with Nolan’s climactic reveal that quite literally everything has in fact been Odysseus’s fault this whole time, complete with the reveal that (last spoiler warning) a beheaded priestess looked like Athena in disguise. Does this mean she’s been a PTSD vision all along? At this point in the plot, anything goes.

This is a film struggling mightily to decide what genre it wants to be when it grows up—an understandable struggle, given the source material, but for all Nolan’s aspirations to Cinema, the whole rickety affair still comes off more like the unsuccessful sort of 90s fantasy movie. Tired defenses of the dire script like “What, should they all have spoken ancient Greek?” or “Well Homer would have sounded casual for his time” are as unconvincing as all such defenses of such things. There is an art to writing dialogue that is at once engaging and suited to the register of epic source material. It requires an ear for what is graceful and what is clunky, which Christopher Nolan, bless his heart, has never had. Meanwhile, the whole enterprise is too self-serious to even shoot for the hat trick that made a film like The Princess Bride magically work. But I do give props to Robert Pattinson as slimy Antinous, who simply decided he was going to Prince Humperdinck his way through it and then committed. His instantly memeable “Somebody get these BEGGARS out of here!” will probably have a longer shelf life than the movie. And Matt Damon does manage to find a couple moments for himself, as when he discovers his men fatefully roasting the Sun God’s cattle and snarks in pure Bostonian, “Did ya think if ya ate quietly, the Sun God wouldn’t notice?”

Homer’s Odysseus might be described as, if not slimy, at least rather slippery. And in a few moments more than that, like the pirate raid on poor Ismarus where he matter-of-factly divvies up the women among his men, or the brutal torture of his turncoat goatherd, or the hanging of the disloyal servant girls (though they arguably deserved it, but we don’t have to go there). This is another much-discussed conundrum for Nolan: No adapted Odysseus can be too Greek if the contemporary filmmaker wants to keep a contemporary audience.

But at least some of that roguish, polytropos quality—à la likable scoundrels such as Iron Man or Jack Sparrow or Han Solo—would have put color back into the character, who in Nolan’s typically asexual rendering doesn’t even flirt with sea witches, let alone have relations with them. Kirk Douglas’s Odysseus is another story, a product of an era more forgiving of adulterous men, as well as an era in which it wasn’t yet un-PC to portray women as dangerous seductresses. But it’s no longer au courant for a Helen of Troy to be the kind of woman who might have gotten a thrill out of men going to war over her. Nolan has reimagined her as a suffering victim, her famous face a mere excuse for the men to go to war over trade routes (and, it’s implied, scarred by a thuggish Menelaus).

It’s likewise not au courant for Circe to turn men into pigs just for kicks and giggles. She must now be burdened with the psychological baggage of a rape-traumatized feminist—too quick to judge the poor saps, but still a damaged vessel for the film’s morals about men, the universe, and everything. As for Calypso, who originally makes Odysseus her captive sexual plaything for seven years, she must be converted into an anxiously sympathetic Malibu babe who’s just keeping Odysseus on an alternative diet of lotus until he’s “ready” for his first therapy session. There’s no overt indication that they’ve slept together—the ethics of therapist-patient relationships on her island are left unclear.

By now you’ll have guessed where I fall on the already stale discourse about whether the movie is woke. With apologies to Jonathan Pageau and a few of my very online friends, I don’t think Nolan is playing 4D conservative chess with his casting choices. I believe it was distasteful for him to cast the visibly ill Ellen (“Elliot”) Page as a Greek soldier, thus perpetuating her delusion and persecution complex cycle, and I don’t think the fact that her character is supposed to be pathetically scrawny makes this better. Perhaps he was motivated less by politics and more by loyalty to actors from his “stable,” but it was badly done regardless. At the same time, I don’t think Nolan hates Western Civilization, etc. Gritty as Dunkirk was, it still emerged as a celebration of England’s old-fashioned heroic spirit. My read on Nolan is that he’s your rather basic British Gen X liberal chap: not an activist per se, but willing to doff his hat in the politically correct direction on the way to making his nerdy pet projects. One might call him “90s woke.” Hilariously, this hasn’t spared him from a scathing review by progressive feminist classicist Emily Wilson, who didn’t return the favor of his generous praise for her translation of the poem. The landscape of Christopher Nolan criticism is a horseshoe with Emily Wilson and Matt Walsh meeting at the two ends. Who knew?

It may not have impressed Emily Wilson, but I do sense an intentionality in Nolan’s choice to cast an Ellen Page or Lupita Nyong’o in the roles of heavily reimagined characters who are victimized by dominant men. Page’s Sinon, not in The Odyssey but in The Aeneid a trickster in his own right who persuades the Trojans to accept the horse, is now Antinous’s hapless brother. Sent to battle in the cowardly suitor’s place, told nothing about the trickery of the gift he innocently offers, he’s a duped sacrificial lamb whose slaughter haunts the movie from beginning to end. In beggar’s disguise, Odysseus takes on Sinon’s name and reverentially dubs him “the bravest young man I ever knew.” We get it, Nolan.

Where Nolan does get back to the actual text, he finds elements that play to his narrative strengths. He’s famous for non-linear narratives that play tricks of time and memory on the audience. In that respect at least, he’s well-suited to The Odyssey, finding impressively efficient ways to convey information through well-placed flashbacks in Homer’s spirit (yes, the dog is included). With all the comparisons to Oppenheimer, fewer have noted that the story shares DNA with Interstellar—not Nolan’s most tightly crafted but perhaps his most human work. He’s also endlessly fascinated with philosophical questions around free will and determinism and the extent to which our fates are written for us. This cashes out here in the form of a narrative that, while mostly keeping the gods in the shadows, effectively builds the creeping doom that hangs over Odysseus’s crew as Zeus’s “harsh hand” blots out the day of their return one by one—or six, as monstrous calamity may be. A scene where Odysseus looks back shell-shocked at floating bodies in a red sea may be too obviously trying to invoke Saving Private Ryan, but then it’s not like there’s no suggestion in the text of something like “survivor’s guilt.” Though the poem’s Mediterranean demonstrativeness—men freely weeping over their comrades—is here replaced with American stoicism.

There is also an economy about most of the horror sequences (Circe’s spell excepted, which takes an especially stomach-churning body horror form). The poem lingers at greater length than the film on Odysseus’s horror at the attack of Scylla, and his helplessness to save her poor doomed victims as they cry out to him. I actually approve of the scene’s brevity in Nolan’s rendering. Another reviewer observed that the monster almost literally looks like a six-fingered hand of fate, here in one horrible moment and gone the next. (Peter Jackson could never.) In keeping with this tone, the Cyclops sequence is much condensed and renders the giant as a pathetic, mostly non-verbal brute who doesn’t swap any droll “riddles in the dark” with Odysseus. This works as horror and as a chance for Odysseus to display physical courage when he rushes back through the closing cave mouth to be with men who couldn’t escape. But without the verbal banter, the “Nobody” joke, and then Odysseus’s disastrously hubristic parting shot where he reveals he is not in fact a Nobody, we once again lose multiple layers of his characterization—the wiliness, the rashness, the thirst for glory and an everlasting name. Having him instead shoot a literal parting shot with his bow simply isn’t the same.

It’s not that Matt Damon, star of The Talented Mr. Ripley, couldn’t play Odysseus the polytropos man of twists and turns. He’s simply not allowed to, beyond the occasional flash of dry humor or cheeky smile. One grin slips out just before the Siren sequence, as he explains that he just wants to see what will happen and live to talk about it. But we’re plunged back into agonized despair as their song tortures him unbearably. Cleverly, Nolan leaves the song to our imagination, placing us in the shoes of his deaf men. Scholars have argued over exactly what the passage in the poem means. It seems to suggest something beyond mere sexual seduction. Nolan’s Odysseus can only fumblingly describe it later as an unreachable itch, a reminder that “what you most want is what you most can’t have, and what you most can’t have is what you already had, and lost.”

In the end, as is typical with these things, what movie Odysseus wants involves far more angst and self-doubt than what poem Odysseus wants. Though in the spirit of Logan, which for all its Shane-like brooding about violence still allows the hero to have a proper good time spearing some proper baddies in the end, Nolan more or less understands the assignment of the revenge sequence. On Twitter, someone was snarking about what appears to be a leaked theater clip of the climactic moment when Odysseus reveals himself in the electrifying strum of his great bow. The theater audience erupts into cheers, which Brits and Europeans evidently find very cringe and “American.” Never mind that if you time-traveled a theater full of ancient Greeks into a cinema, they’d be yelling at the screen too. (Though no doubt yelling other things at the screen at other points.) There is also some cheer-worthy work from loyal Eumaeus, who remembers his old master as harsh “but fair, fair and worthy of following.”

And yet, there’s still a funereal quality about Odysseus’s march to meet his destiny. He remains, in a phrase essayist B. D. McClay has helpfully coined in the New York Times of all places, a “halfway-hero”: a man who’s not the Worst Guy Ever but screws up, has himself a crisis about screwing up, and then finally, grimly, does what has to be done in Act 3. We’ve lost the cultural grammar to properly appreciate masculine qualities like decisiveness, the yearning for heroic glory (fateful as this might be, which Homer also grapples with), or the desire to claim a rightful throne.

This brings me to what I consider the film’s most unforgivable sin. It is not merely that Odysseus is uncharacteristically guilt-ridden about the Horse. It is that in the end, as punishment for this sin, Nolan does not allow him to come home. Like a Clint Eastwood hero, his Odysseus is a man of violence past the point of no return to become a man of peace. So he will become a sin eater. He will refuse to let Telemachus join him in the slaughter, out of a decidedly un-Greek sense that the boy’s hands would be “stained” otherwise, and out of his practical plan to spare Telemachus from the wrath of the suitors’ families. If father and son both survive, the father will leave the kingdom in his son’s clean hands and impose the exile upon himself—along with Penelope, who does her best to spin the whole thing as the Best Forever Boomer Cruise Ever.

This is a jaw-dropping inversion of the poem’s central theme: resisting all the world’s seductions to finally end all your exploring where you started, and know it for the first time. It’s one thing for Tennyson to do a poetic “What if?” scenario in which his Odysseus spends three years trying to as it were reintegrate, but unlike Homer’s Odysseus finds the sea’s Siren song too alluring. But Tennyson is not claiming to reintroduce a barely literate generation to the poem known as The Odyssey. Further, he understands well that sailing away forever is a temptation, indeed Odysseus’s besetting temptation, and thus fully grasps the original poem’s theme.

Nolan seems to have Odysseus confused with a cowboy, inevitably cursed to wander without ceasing in the wilderness beyond the world he violently tamed for the men of peace. In fact, Odysseus is a man who must be chastened into being the man of peace, into laying down his burden to study war no more. He must give ear to the hard, hard saying of Achilles’ ghost in Hades, who laments that if only he hadn’t favored fleeting glory over a little life full of days, he would not be here. He must reach out in vain and cry for the ghost of his mother, dead with grief in his absence, slipping through his fingers. And when the goddess offers him immortality, he must find the strength to say no.

The Douglas Ulysses, though hardly a timeless classic, still grasped that theme. While in its own way it’s getting creative with the source material, this speech accomplishes in under 2 minutes what Nolan couldn’t (or wouldn’t) in 3 hours. Many lost ingredients are in the mix of a scene like this, not least that distinctly mid-century brand of full-throated, chest-out humanism:

Here someone might recall from the poem that Odysseus does still have to take a leave of absence from Ithaca to travel inland and make proper sacrifices to Poseidon. But then he gets to come home. There is a mechanism of atonement. Nolan’s reimagining, by laying all the guilt on Odysseus with no chance of redemption, is hardly the “Christian” reading everyone has dubbed it. It is more Buddhist than anything else, and thus in its own way merely another variation on the theme of paganism.

And still, for all of this, I will give Nolan some credit for doing the impossible: making a piece of monoculture in the year of our Lord 2026. As endless Discourse topics go, surely we could do worse than an ill-conceived blockbuster take on a foundational piece of the Western canon that has sent theatergoers flocking back to (and arguing over) the source material. I hadn’t picked up the work myself since college and am grateful to Nolan for inspiring my re-read. I chose the 1996 translation by Robert Fagles, which uses some contemporary idioms but to my ear successfully threads the needle of being casual without being graceless. Appropriately, I will close with his rendering of Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion:

The more she spoke, the more a deep desire for tears

welled up inside his breast—he wept as he held the wife

he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last.

Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel

when they catch sight of land—Poseidon has struck

their well-rigged ship on the open sea with gale winds

and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming,

struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore,

their bodies crusted with sault but buoyed up with joy

as they plant their feet on solid ground again,

spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her

the sight of her husband, vivid in her gaze,

that her white arms, embracing his neck

would never for a moment let him go…

Dawn with her rose-red fingers might have shone

upon their tears, if with her glinting eyes

Athena had not thought of one more thing.

She held back the night, and night lingered long

at the western edge of the earth, while in the east

she reined in Dawn of the golden throne at Ocean’s banks,

commanding her not to yoke the winsdswift team that brings men light,

Blaze and Aurora, the young colts that race the Morning on.

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I apologize to my patient readers for the delay in chronicling my continued London summer adventures. Hopefully this very beefy second-day report of the ARC conference will be worth the wait. After a generous preview, it will mostly be reserved for paid readers, but free material is coming soon. I have successfully avoided missing out on the discourse of the month and seen Christopher Nolan’s buzzy new adaptation of The Odyssey. Everyone has a take, and I’m sure you’re all on tenterhooks for mine. As a hint of what that take will be, I have a feeling this discourse and the memory of the movie that inspired it will have evaporated in approximately 11 days, so I’m aiming to put thoughts together before then. On the bright side, the movie did inspire me to go back and read the whole poem cover to cover, and I don’t seem to be alone, so I suppose we can all thank Sir Christopher for that much at least. Stay tuned!

Day 2 of ARC was my favorite, despite the fact that the venue’s air conditioning broke down—a most inopportune time, given the heat wave that had me showering every morning and night. Ross Douthat was experiencing the same disaster at his family’s Airbnb, and he shrewdly seized the moment to incorporate this misfortune into his opening speech. His presence injected an energy into the whole event that was genuinely fresh and insightful and otherwise somewhat lacking. I dropped out of a different lunchtime event to switch over for a livestream audience-driven chat he hosted on AI and human flourishing, also featuring Mary Harrington and Jonathan Pageau—for my money the most philosophically and practically interesting discussion of the conference, but not one ARC seems interested in releasing on their channel, so it’s a good thing I recorded it. Then that evening, we had our choice of different dinner panel discussions at historic locations around the city, and I again wasn’t disappointed by a panel he led on the spiritual foundations of the West. For that discussion, the organizers made the interesting choice to mix him up with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Os Guinness, and the atheist analyst James Lindsay, who’s very good at diagnosing the ills of postmodernism but has an awkward relationship with Christianity. But it did make the conversation interesting!

Another major highlight was that I got the opportunity to spend time with Judd Saul, founder of a remarkable organization called Equipping the Persecuted that works on the ground with Christians in Nigeria. Judd and his team not only offer care for attack victims but intel and preparation tactics against future attacks. When I walked away from our conversation, I had the distinct feeling that I’d just encountered a modern-day saint. Perhaps you will too.

This day also yielded by far my most memorable cabby chat of the trip. Such a colorful character that when I recreate our convo I’m going to obscure his name a bit just to ensure he doesn’t get into any trouble, England not being a free country and all. The man had Opinions.

Finally, this day gave me my first little taste of the posh London club scene, as I got invited to a mixer that fortunately began an hour earlier than my evening dinner. It would turn out not to be the last posh London club invite I got that week. As I floated about at these things, sipping champagne and meeting quirky characters and handing out the occasional business card, it dawned on me that perhaps I’ve spent my life being a bit of a closeted socialite. I couldn’t sustain that pace day in and day out, but for the occasional week of fantasy roleplaying, I can play the part better than I thought.

Back to the meat of the week: With Douthat’s morning speech, I was impressed that though it was pitched positively, it didn’t feel like a variation on the prosperity gospel either. Last time, I was reflecting that conferences like this have the feeling of handing you a checklist on How to Save the West, etc. But Douthat is one of those analysts who really understands the tragic vision, something that came through movingly in a recent podcast he recorded that week in the city with Rod Dreher. Dreher’s work has taken on an increasingly doom-laden tone as he’s watched various edifices in his personal life crumble, and Douthat found a moment in their conversation to observe gently that perhaps Dreher had spent much of his career assuming the Right Things would happen to the Right People, only to discover this wasn’t necessarily so.

That depth of insight gives Douthat’s positive vision a weight that others lack. On one hand, his ARC speech proposed optimistically that the Christian faith offers resilience and permanence, and with it what one might call a culturally evolutionary edge as so many permanent goods are washed out on the tide of technological progress. On the other hand, he wasn’t sanguine about the shape of the future in which that faith will be tested: a future in which digital goods are substituted for tangible ones, where disconnection becomes our default way of life, and where human labor is increasingly seen as obsolete.

I also thought this speech deftly drew together all the themes of the conference in one place: our civilizational moment, the social fabric, the tech revolution, and the mundane nuts and bolts of a functional society. I may not have stuck around to hear the talks on free enterprise, energy policy and so on, but Douthat in a way was reminding me why those speakers were there. People need light by which to read the great books, after all. And, of course, air conditioning. “What will save Europe from a long slide into a dark night of barbarism? Air conditioning. What will enable us to think great thoughts and dare greatly and build great things? Obviously, air conditioning.”

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My mind has been uneasily occupied this week with dark thoughts of two murders, one old and one new. The new news is the shocking murder of a British Catholic politician, Ann Widdecombe, a lovable Old Tory battleaxe who staunchly held unpopular views in public, but did so with such panache and force of personality that even political opponents admired her. She was 78 years old and unmarried, enjoying her retirement in a quiet rural home, where it now appears the killer hunted her down in a targeted assassination.

The old news is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, back in the discourse cycle as the public has been processing a just-closed preliminary hearing before his alleged killer goes to trial this fall. While not all the evidence shown has been publicly released, various clips are circulating, along with reports of the emotion in the courtroom as family and friends watched high-definition footage of the murder. It’s hard to fathom what an ordeal this has surely been for Kirk’s widow and parents. My heart has broken to read about how they literally clung to each other through the worst moments. And through it all, unnervingly, young Tyler Robinson betrayed no signs of human emotion. He simply sat there, dead-eyed, as the evidence against him piled higher and higher.

These murders are uncannily similar in their suddenness, their viciousness, and the matching viciousness of the reactions they’ve inspired from people who hate what the victims stood for—reactions that sit in grotesque juxtaposition with the warmth, good humor, and generosity of spirit both Kirk and Widdecombe showed even their enemies in life. In their different ways, they exuded a zest for life that felt unquenchable. It boggles the mind and oppresses the soul to think that in each of their cases, a wretched lone killer had the means, motive and opportunity to snuff them out, just like that. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But the evidence is undeniable.

Or at least, it should be. Yet in Charlie Kirk’s case, certain powerful media figures are betting the future of their brands on people’s inability to weigh evidence, and they appear to be winning big. Candace Owens has accused everyone in Kirk’s inner ring of conspiring in the crime, including his widow, together with usual suspects like The Jews. This summary of the preliminary hearing surveys just a sample of the insanity she’s been peddling. Tucker Carlson, unlike Owens, will at least admit that Tyler Robinson is the killer…though of course brainwashed/recruited by You Get Three Guesses Who.

I’m uninterested in plumbing the depths of these people’s psychology. They are soulless ghouls, hollowed-out shells of people who are surely not under any actual illusions about the truth. It is simply convenient for their purposes to build an empire on lies.

I have, however, been thinking about why it is that a Candace Owens figure can command such large audiences. I asked Grok to give me a few quick and dirty statistics about the measure of her success: Consistently charts in the top 10-50 on various platforms like Apple Podcasts, peaked at worldwide #1 for downloads/views per episode in the immediate wake of Kirk’s murder, and racks up millions of views per channel clip. Fans plan watch parties around new episodes as if it’s an unfolding Netflix drama. Women seem especially invested, including many married women. Bored housewives compare notes and chatter about what Candace might drop next.

In other words, these aren’t a handful of sad losers frittering life away in Mom’s basement. These are people who in Internet slang would be called “normies” — regular decent Americans with families and jobs and productive lives. So why are they buying what Owens is selling?

There are many possible answers, but I submit one underexplored answer: When Owens sells conspiracy, she is really selling comfort.

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This year, I was offered a discounted ticket to return to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, which I experienced for the first time last year. That was my first experience of London, so I enjoyed myself very much, though in the end I found it more valuable as a networking opportunity than as a conference. This time, I returned in a way that gave myself more bang for my buck, spending a good week and a half in the city. The weekend before ARC, I participated in a small event called Breakwater, which was essentially an experiment in bringing Christians and atheists together for candid dialogue about religion, culture, and evangelism. That was also a good experience in its very different way, including some fascinating conversation outside the conference itself, and I want to write about it, but it needs a little more time to stew in my head.

What this means is that I’m going to write about all my London adventures eventually, just somewhat out of order. To make sure my paying readers get their money’s worth, I’ll reserve much of it for them. This first free installment will give you my impressions of the first day of the ARC conference, followed by my impressions of an evening at the literary salon Verdurin. I was invited by the salon’s proprietor, art critic Pierre d’Alancaisez, who co-edited the collection of contrarian gay essays I recently reviewed here. When he’s not editing books or running the shop, Pierre writes scalding short reviews of postmodern “art”. Pierre, you may be inferring, is a Character. He was at ARC too, briefly, but as you will see very much not of it. On this evening, he was hosting a book launch with the American author Jacob Siegel, for Siegel’s fascinating book The Information State. Pierre predicted that this would be a spicier use of my evening than ARC’s historically underwhelming drinks mixer, and he was correct. So, if you enjoy all this, and if your appetite is whetted for more, smash the blue button and help me begin to recoup my exorbitant expenses in London cab fees. My flash sale of $30/annum is being extended for ONE DAY MORE:

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So what is ARC, exactly? Last year, I came away with the impression that it wasn’t completely sure how to answer that question for itself. At the time, I said that it seemed to be pitching itself as “the world’s largest networking point for people who want to reclaim a conservative, humanist-in-a-good-way vision for the West.” Or, “the opposite of whatever Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum are doing.” Yet with some of the same grandiose vibes and intonation as WEF. At an afterparty this year, someone reflected to me that he was dubious about this whole approach of keeping WEF vibes while swapping in anti-woke content. The speeches are very polished and self-serious, the whole event smells of money, and the audience skews older and well-heeled. Much is said about the plight of the working class, but it’s in the nature of this sort of conference that actual working-class people are pretty much nowhere in sight. (The only real exception on the stage was one-hit wonder musician Oliver Anthony, who gave a punchy, poignant speech about reclaiming our pioneer heritage.)

I’m not saying that any of this is inherently bad or sinister, and in fact I find myself agreeing with most of the sentiments in most of the speeches. It’s the sort of conference at which lots of time is spent earnestly talking about how to Save the West, Repair the Social Fabric, and Relay the Spiritual Foundations of Our Civilizational Something-Something. I have nothing against all that. I do but observe.

Logistically, this year’s installment was a big improvement over last year. Last year, it was held in the ExCel, a massive, aesthetically ugly building in which you had to walk for what felt like a mile to reach the actual event. Finding toilets or water also felt like a heroic quest. This year’s venue was the Olympia, vastly more elegant and accessible in every way. There were other cute touches too, like an “ARC village” with street signs pointing the way to different areas, including a bookshop. Also new this year were the “Corners,” where people could briefly meet and greet with the speakers from each session. I didn’t end up making use of these however, partly because they were harder to find, partly because I was too busy catching up with fellow attendees. And partly because I had already discovered it wasn’t as hard as I thought to slip into the Gold Room, aka the VIP Room, aka the Room Where You’re Technically Not Supposed to Be Unless You’ve Paid a Ridiculous Amount of Money. (More on these adventures later!)

As last year, the sessions were themed. Mornings were dedicated to reflections on Our Civilizational Moment and the Social Fabric, afternoons focused on policy discussions about economics, energy, and occasionally foreign policy, and then evenings focused on all things tech and AI. Leftwing media likes to paint the conference as “far-right,” but the actual far-right never thinks it’s right-wing enough. As an American, I find its politics a little hard to get a handle on, as I generally find it hard to get a handle on the British “right,” which doesn’t look like the American right. Kemi Badenoch showed up to make a sales pitch no one is buying for small “c” conservatism, which sounds rather bland and centrist to American ears. But I would say the overall thrust of the event felt broadly fusionist, although I notice with interest that very little (possibly nothing, unless I missed it?) was said about abortion. Social conservatism was represented though, probably most boldly in Katy Faust’s talk about the social imperative to raise children in a heterosexual two-parent home. The hysteria about “far-right” what-not is maybe largely due to ARC’s willingness to import this kind of “edgy” American commentary:

I showed up in time to sit in on Tuesday morning’s kickoff speeches, squeezing my way past some protestors holding signs about “fascists” and fossil fuels. A few of them seemed to be wearing frog suits for some reason. It seemed prudent to keep walking, but I now wish I’d taken a picture. My mind went back to them as I listened to Artemis astronaut Victor Glover, who among other uncontroversially inspiring things talked about the importance of stewarding our planet well. This spring, I opened a byline at the Wall Street Journal with a piece about how he sent Reddit atheists into a conniption by talking about God in space. Mr. Glover is an impressive man, and it was moving to hear him reflect on the mission, especially the moment when the moon came into view and someone said, “Oh my God,” which he believed to be precisely the correct response. There was a small crowd around him at the meet and greet corner afterwards. Sadly, no selfies were permitted, but I did snap a couple pictures.

Next up was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, son of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. At the time, I was so sleep and caffeine-deprived that I didn’t realize Ignat was not reading his own speech but his father’s iconic address to Harvard University. It was a curious choice for a conference like this, as a sustained Eastern criticism of the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment roots. Solzhenitsyn was very concerned to address the bad kind of “humanism,” the sort of aggressively secularized anthropocentrism that pushes God out of the civilizational picture. And yet, it was the East that succumbed to communism.

I’m not sure the conference organizers really thought this tension through, especially given that another one of their first speakers was neo-Renaissance sculptor Sabin Howard. Howard would describe himself as a humanist artist, but in the good sense, the sense in which I hand out business cards with the tag “Notes from a Christian humanist.” In fact, as Howard spoke passionately about his latest project, a 250th independence anniversary arch depicting “a people who rise to be their best version,” his language echoed Solzhenitsyn’s closing vision of anthropological ascent. (And you could say that in Victor Glover we have a quite literal manifestation of that “ascent.”) I personally prefer Howard’s World War I memorial as a piece of art, but it was charming to hear him rail against postmodernism (“I refuse to be represented by a cold pile of bricks on a cement gallery floor!”), and it occurs to me that at least some degree of anthropocentric pride is necessary to keep our civilizational immune system from breaking down.

It was quite interesting in this context to hear from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I appreciated the fact that Konstantin Kisin asked her to say a few words specifically addressing this question of good versus bad humanism. Her answer was that at least in the past, the remedy against narcissistic humanism was “built into the system” in the form of Christianity, which engendered a sense of individual responsibility. Where she came from, everyone was constantly hunting for a scapegoat—the Jews, the Westerners, some outside threat to the collective “us.” There was none of that sentiment expressed in Chesterton’s answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” (“I am.”) Christianity is a check on this narcissism, a reminder that Christ is history’s singular Victim, and we commit a kind of blasphemy when we constantly read ourselves into his rightful place on the cross.

But this picture gets complicated when we consider the fact that increasing numbers of young men are now being drawn to versions of Christianity, including Eastern Orthodoxy, that engage in their own kinds of scapegoating. I want to be careful not to say that this characterizes all men in the Eastern Orthodox church (in fact I met an enthusiastic new EO reader at this very conference, so if you’re reading this, welcome, please don’t go!) But quite a few so-called “Orthobros” are engaged in their own campaign of “It’s fill-in-the-blank’s fault,” where the blank can be filled in by Jews, by women, etc. And, in fairness, there are Catholic and Reformed Protestant versions of this problem playing themselves out as well.

I think the conference would have benefited from a speaker or two who could have addressed this more precisely, specifically homing in on how Christian language can intersect with both left and right-wing identity politics. At a certain point, one hits diminishing returns with classical liberal pundits recycling anti-woke-left talking points. It’s not that I think they’re wrong, but they need to be supplemented by some deeper analysis. There were flashes of more depth here and there though. I was impressed by this speech from Nick Freitas, a pundit I wasn’t familiar with, but he spoke well about the boy crisis. He discussed how among other things, boys today are left craving a sense of tribe, which leaves them vulnerable to tribal anti-woke ideologies:

The “Social Fabric” section also featured Carl Trueman, who basically delivered a 12-minute summary of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. I found this book interesting because I sort of agreed and disagreed with it at the same time. A lot of Trueman’s analysis is astute, but I suppose I am more inclined than he is to think that expressive individualism isn’t such a bad thing. Again, referring to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is that focus on the individual man that can when properly circumscribed provide a bulwark against the tyranny of the collective. But I do appreciate Trueman’s reflections on the “psychologized self,” particularly in connection with the unraveling of marriage and the sexual binary. Sex became political via the arrival of Freud and “orientation” essentialism, because the rules that governed sexual behavior became “rules about the kind of person that society will let you be.” And now, with the transgenderist reductio, we see “a rebellion against the last irresistible external authority that will tell you you are not who you think you are,” namely the body.

It’s good that ARC is actively inviting this sort of explicitly Christian analysis, which is in a sense simultaneously more optimistic and more pessimistic than some of the material I heard from non-Christian analysts. There was a panel including Freya India, a young writer who’s done good work about how Gen Z girls are encouraged to turn themselves into digital products. Full disclosure, I still need to read her book, but I get the general impression that she’s diagnosed the problem as something happening to girls. But girls also make free choices, as do boys.

ARC brands itself as a conference of Solutions to our civilizational problems, with speakers telling people the checklist of steps to Saving the West, Saving Our Kids, and so on. In its place, this is fine. But I’m reminded of the fact that Jordan Peterson initially rose to prominence because even while he was offering “rules for life,” he was also unafraid to acknowledge the fact that sometimes life just sucks, and then you die. Sometimes every possible thing that can go wrong will go wrong. Sometimes you won’t save the kids, or the school, or the country. Life, in other words, is a tragedy by default. The aversion of tragedy is the exception to the norm.

In an overlap of social fabric and tech themes, we watched a short film called “Another Way,” directed by Fabio D’Andrea. It tells two alternative narratives about an upper-middle-class family whose son is cyberbullied by his schoolmates. In the first narrative, the family’s blind spot around phones and social media makes them miss warning signs until it’s too late and their son is dead by suicide. In the second narrative, the parents are hands-on and proactively monitor their children’s device use. The son is still bullied, but his story ends “another way.” I couldn’t fault the message or the earnestness, but it felt very safe and tidy. It would have been less safe but more relevant to tell a story about digital pornography, and about the grueling tug of war between parents and children determined to crack every safeguard.

I’ll have more thoughts on ARC’s approach to the tech revolution later, but I thought this topic yielded some of the most interesting discussion, as well as some interesting internal tension between tech-optimist and tech-pessimist strains. On the tech-pessimist side, we heard a strong talk from actress/royal/education activist Sophie Winkleman, who has long campaigned against screens in schools and has now come out swinging against AI-mediated ed, especially for primary students. She did an excellent job with limited time articulating why the medium is detrimental, regardless of the message it’s conveying. Also she positively quoted Randi Weingarten for some reason, but apart from that, very good speech:

We also heard a talk from Chloe Lubinski, who works for Anthropic. I feel a little sorry for Anthropic. They’ve been treated quite shabbily by the Trump administration. If you don’t follow tech news, the very short version is that the Anthropic CEO expressed an objection to certain ways the admin wanted to use his tech (e.g., in military targeting), and as petty retaliation the Department of War declared them a “supply-chain risk.” It was typical of how this admin operates, and lefty or not Anthropic appeared to me clearly in the right (as it were). But because the company continues earnestly trying to make friends with as many people as possible, including the right-leaning people behind ARC, the left-wing media has also been in hysterics over the fact that they sent representatives to this “far-right” conference. So it seems they can’t win with anyone.

At the same time, I admit that I also cringe whenever their researchers try to talk about philosophy, metaphysics, AI maybe-consciousness, and so on. And there was a bit of that cringe in this talk by Lubinski. At the same time, there’s something to the point that she’s making, which is essentially that an LLM has the potential to make game-theoretic calculations in favor of “bad” choices depending on how it’s trained. This means human AI trainers carry a heavy moral responsibility. These machines learn by imitation. What templates are we giving them? A question worth asking:

During this talk, attendees were asked to vote in a poll asking whether we saw AI as chiefly a threat or chiefly an opportunity. I left early, but the tech-optimists were winning out, and someone told me later that their lead held. As a card-carrying tech-pessimist, I duly registered my minority dissent. While I’m not a Luddite, and I do recognize the positive potential for this tech, I think the cost is proving too heavy, especially in the education sector. This is something I might see if I can coax my father into doing some guest-writing about here, because as both a philosophy professor and an amateur software developer, he’s uniquely placed to weigh these pros and cons. British investor Paul Marshall observed in his mainstage speech that tech people don’t understand philosophy, and philosophers don’t understand tech, which rather neatly sums up the problem.

Before I get on to my evening at Verdurin, I want to highlight two worthy organizations whose booths I visited this afternoon. First, Hope for Justice is a group working to combat human trafficking around the globe. I enjoyed a chat over lunch with one of their representatives in the VIP room, which I wandered into in all innocence because an acquaintance reported that the food line was shorter there. (Once inside, I bumped into a speaker who told me the powers that be weren’t going to kick out lowly plebs as long as they behaved themselves. Though someone did eventually try, but that’s for Wednesday’s report!) Anyway, I visited the booth later, had a lovely chat, and picked up a plastic padlock with a QR code that leads to a page full of survivor stories, called the Freedom Wall—a clever and moving bit of branding. The other org I want to highlight is Freedom in the Arts, an advocacy group for artists, promoters, etc., who have been boycotted for not toeing the political party line. They’ve prepared a depressing report here, which among other things unearths a shocking amount of anti-Semitism.

As I exited the building to catch a cab, I encountered a new set of climate protestors, equally muddled, but at least they were peaceful. This time I did snap a couple shots of their signs. I give them points for symbolic creativity!

My cabby and I had a difficult time finding each other, since my location “pin” was off, and he was indistinguishable in the rush-hour sea of black cabs. Already I was sweating in the city’s historic heatwave. But my hero persevered stubbornly, and we had a lovely ride. Native London cabbies are an essential part of The London Experience, a great informal way to take the pulse of the working-class populace. The friendlier ones will call you “love” and “darling” and don’t at all mind having a bit of a chat. (And of course, they know the city. On this ride we passed through a very posh neighborhood which I was told included Simon Cowell’s house.) As we talked away, I explained what I do and said I was going to a book launch about how the government controls people through information. The cabby said it felt to him as if there was a “higher power” at work even above the government. “Divide and control, know what I mean?” We also talked about COVID, and I shared how those years had affected me personally through my mother’s vaccine injury and subsequent chronic pain. He said his wife had found relief from chronic pain through acupuncture. For forty pounds an hour, he swore it worked “like a miracle.”

I arrived a little early at Verdurin, where Pierre had proudly advertised that they had air conditioning, and indeed it did not disappoint. He greeted me warmly at the door and subsequently took an avuncular interest in making sure I mingled properly before the event started. It was a cozy shop space, gradually filled by an eccentric little group of regulars and visitors. Not knowing anyone, I initially stood apart a bit awkwardly waiting to shake Jacob Siegel’s hand. Pierre’s eagle eye fell on me from across the room, and with a gentle scolding and a regal handwave he paired me off with a just-arrived cheerful lesbian couple.

Verdurin was initially born as, let us say, a COVID-era experiment in community-building. It advertises itself as “a place for challenging the ideas you hold dear, finding new ones, and taking them back to your bunker with you.” Inspired by Proust’s Madame Verdurin, Pierre conceived it as a third space that could simultaneously serve as shop, book club, classroom, and theater, where a diverse array of people are invited to come together and discuss a diverse array of ideas. Academics are sometimes welcome so long as they understand that they are not at an academic conference, at which point the hope is that they will actually begin to say something interesting.

Pierre didn’t mince words in his verdict on ARC. “I don’t believe any of them,” he told me. “None of them believes what they’re saying.” He thinks if they were really serious about the conference’s stated goals, they would do as Pierre does and invest in “creating culture.” On day one, he was briefly there to help man the Freedom in the Arts booth, but he ignored all the speeches. “I have no interest in being evangelized. I am more left-wing than all of them. And more right-wing.”

I did my small part to invest in Pierre’s culture creation by sampling some of the shop’s wares. Pictured below, a typical Verdurin shelf. The concept is to stock everything one would need in the event of an apocalypse. So there are books, but there is also quince jam, fermented tea, and artisanal black squid ink pasta. As Pierre explained, “The bomb goes off, you’re in your bunker, you’ll have to reach for your copy of The Iliad, and then you’re going to have to eat something.” (And yes, The Iliad is in stock.)

To carry my purchases, I bought the tote bag on the bottom. Pierre explained that the convoluted file name was the actual name of the file for the UK’s publicly released COVID recovery plan:

I also brought home a bag of squid ink pasta and made garlic brown butter shrimp with it. Recipe at the end as a reward for those who read that far.

As for the actual book launch, it was a stimulating treat (thanks not just to Jacob and Pierre but also the audience, including a woman who contributed her own insights as an expert on the history of communism). Jacob introduced himself with a backstory I could relate to, about growing up as the son of a maverick professor who disliked academia but inspired intensely intellectual dinner-table conversations. He was also the grandson of a World War II veteran, which instilled him with a natural and uncomplicated sense of patriotism. Though he wasn’t inclined to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, the shock of 9/11 compelled him to enlist. His experience as an intelligence officer provided the inspiration for The Information State. In a former writing life, he was part of a veterans’ writing group, conceived as a kind of therapy, except that no one there wanted therapy, they just wanted to write. He worked on a volume of short stories with Phil Klay, who would go on to a celebrated career and whom I’ve long admired as a great fictional and non-fictional war writer.

To set the stage for the book’s argument, Siegel offered fascinating candid impressions of our failed Middle East campaigns. As an intelligence officer, he had an “overawing” level of informational mastery, and he described how this tempted him to develop an almost “ritualistic” relationship with the data—believing somehow, somewhere, it must hold the secrets to winning the war, if only we could call on and extract it properly. But in fact, what he realized is that it was precisely this mentality that was losing the war. The tech couldn’t substitute for human decision-making, motivation, and will to fight. And yet, paradoxically, the more the tech fails to deliver on its promises, the more dependent we have all become on it, in every area of our lives.

Siegel traces the birth of the American information state back to Woodrow Wilson, arguing that the need to control information is “deep in the ethos of progressivism.” Wilson openly disliked the Constitution and believed “rule by experts” must be established over folk democracy. Within this ethos, “propaganda” isn’t a dirty word. In the COVID years, you could see how figures like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins have inherited that legacy, as I wrote about in one of my more popular articles here.

But the thesis of the book really isn’t partisan, as both political sides in their distinctive ways have raced to harness technology for their controlling purposes. It was after all the Bush era that gave us the Patriot Act. And during COVID, hawks came in red and blue. In my contribution to the Q & A, I reflected on the fact that I encountered the most hostile pushback for my COVID contrarianism from Never Trump conservative types, who regarded me as something of a class traitor. Siegel’s chapter on those years brought back many bitter memories for me.

Siegel wrote the book too early to comment much on where Trump’s second administration fits into all of this, but at the launch he spontaneously coined the phrase “informational Caesarism” for the current chaotic state of things. Earlier I mentioned Trump’s feud with Anthropic, which seems to me quite self-defeating in its pettiness. Trump is so undisciplined, it seems that all he truly cares about is personal beef, meaning he’s willing to sacrifice the administration’s access to cutting-edge tech for the sake of settling a score. Meanwhile, all the infrastructure for reestablishing the information state is still there. Siegel predicts the Democrats will reascend in 2028, but he thinks their tactics will be subtler and more sophisticated than in the Biden era.

Beyond politics, Siegel also reflected soberly on how the digital age is functioning as a “cosmic reordering” of how humans interact with the world. It’s been observed that young people are increasingly not even literate. Siegel frames all this as a great reset, an unraveling of the Enlightenment and a return to a kind of new medievalism. “The power of reason” is an Enlightenment relic that will not survive the digital era. With this will come a new culture of morality, as well as new forms of idol worship. Here Siegel’s orthodox Judaism came out in an interesting way, as he discussed the rabbinical understanding of idolatry as not merely a rejection of God but a kind of longing for God.

The end of the evening put an unintentionally humorous period on these very serious reflections, as it transpired that all the kosher restaurants were closed. Jacob was unbothered by this, being an all-round mensch as well as a good writer, and after some more animated conversation we all went our separate ways.

And now, speaking of food, here as promised is the recipe I made with Pierre’s black squid ink pasta:

Garlic Brown Butter Shrimp Pasta

Ingredients:

1 package of shrimp deveined etc.
1 pint of cherry tomatoes
pasta
most of a butter stick
lots of garlic
lots of parsley
a little white wine
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Chop up and blister the tomatoes in some butter. Salt and pepper. Remove and set aside.

2. Set pasta going. Meanwhile melt the almost-stick of butter and slowly brown it. Stir and monitor closely. Do not take a bathroom break, do not wander off to read The Iliad, do not look out the window. Give it 3-5-ish minutes on medium-ish heat, and not much more.

3. Add the garlic. When I say lots I really do mean lots. I chopped up four very fat cloves plus one thin one. It’s a free country. No one cares. Add a little more salt and pepper. After about a minute, pour in half a cup of white wine and let it boil for a couple minutes.

4. Pat the shrimp dryish, salt and pepper it, then cook in the garlic sauce, a few minutes per side. Add some pasta water as desired.

5. Toss in the pasta, add back the tomatoes, squeeze in some lemon juice and/or parmesan or pecorino cheese as desired. Garnish with fresh parsley.

And there you are! In the event of an AI apocalypse, at least you will know how to cook garlic brown butter shrimp pasta.

In honor of #America250, I am running a flash sale and lowering my annual subscription price to a mere $30 per annum. Upgrade today!

Meanwhile, enjoy this free re-run of an old essay I originally put out in 2023. I never know exactly what I’m going to find when I overhaul old work. Sometimes it doesn’t age very well, but I think this piece remains timely, and I hope it inspires reflection on this special anniversary. Since writing it, I have moved back to my hometown, where I have been given new reasons to be grateful for this land that I love, and for her people.

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I normally try to come up with Substacks for national holidays, feast days, etc. But I was thinking of letting today’s festivities go by without one, because nothing especially brilliant or original was coming to mind. Fortunately, as often happens, someone tweeted something I disagreed with.

In context, there was some discussion about what exactly we’re celebrating when we celebrate Independence Day. My friendly Twitter acquaintance said he found it “surreal” to “go to church to sing dated patriotic songs about virtues of a country that no longer exists.” Why, he asks, are we over here still singing “America the Beautiful,” when it would make more sense to sing about the need for collective repentance? If this is just “an exercise in sentimental affection for the idea of a place,” then “we might as well be singing about Atlantis or Numenor.”

Now, I don’t often disagree with this friendly Twitter acquaintance, because we’re both young curmudgeons in training who lament the same national ills. If America has “national sins,” we would probably agree on what many of those sins might be. We lament the unborn children slaughtered under the regime of Roe vs. Wade. We lament the Biden administration’s jack-booted rainbow fascism. We lament all the blindly arrogant encroachments on individual liberties during the pandemic, and what they signaled about how lightly our governing authorities will value those liberties in our future. So many things. So much to lament.

Why, then, do I disagree with his take on Independence Day? Don’t we agree that in some sense, the country so movingly hymned in “America the Beautiful” really does no longer exist?

Well, yes and no. I suppose it comes down to this question: What is a country?

I remember once finding some old documentary footage about Westboro Baptist Church, featuring a very young Megan Phelps-Roper before her transition out of the cult. Megan herself still comes across as personable and earnest, even in this phase, just very deeply indoctrinated. But I had a very visceral, angry reaction to the rest of the footage as older members of the church justified their work. At one point, Megan’s mother matter-of-factly discusses their practices of flag desecration—holding it upside down, wearing it at their waists. She talks about how her 10-year-old son was once arrested for stepping on it, launching into a disquisition about free speech. “Everyone in the whole country knows that you can not only stand on a flag, you can burn a flag.”

Purely from a First Amendment perspective, she has a point, I guess. But my God, I thought. Picketing fallen soldiers’ funerals with signs saying they aren’t heroes and God hates their country? Singing a vile parody of “America the Beautiful” where you celebrate the 9/11 attacks? On this hill, you plant your upside-down flag?

I should stress that I don’t at all intend to lump my acquaintance in with the Westboro cultists. I believe he genuinely laments the passage of something he genuinely loves. But I don’t hear lament or love from Westboro. Just glib, pig-headed triumphalism. I find my mind returning to them now only because I’m trying to put my finger on what made me so furiously angry, with people who claim to share my same faith, my same values. What was it inside me that wanted to scream “No!” when I heard Megan’s mother talk so casually about desecrating the flag? Why, when I listened to them warbling their bastardized “Oh Beautiful,” did it feel like a violation of something sacred?

What is a country? My memory wanders still further back in search of the answer. It conjures up a dark, rainy day. My family is driving past a gas station, when my dad notices the flag in the mud. He stops the car and dashes out to pick it up. After delivering it to the people inside, he comes back and we drive on. It all happens in a couple of minutes. He says he just couldn’t leave it on the ground in the rain.

A little further back, we’re all gathered with local friends in our piano room to sing hymns, for the first of what will become many “hymn sings.” It’s the fall of 2001, very shortly after 9/11. Someone requests “Oh Beautiful.” We begin singing it, and though I’m too young, my mom and dad and others are finding it difficult to get through the verse about heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.

Maybe this is why. Maybe this is what I want to say when the picketers wave their sign saying, “There are no heroes.” Yes, there are. There are. There are soldiers and firemen and policemen. There’s the Texas cop whose bodycam footage of a mass shooting was just released, showing him chasing down the killer right after telling two cute little kids to wear their seatbelts.

There are ordinary heroes too. Like Estella, an old Jamaican woman I met sitting on a bench in New York. She told me she used to work at a Baptist hospital before it closed many years ago. She then became an in-home caregiver for the elderly, working until arthritis forced her to live on social security. Her rent was $800 a month. She eked things out with food stamps. “We are one people,” she said to me. “We have to look out for each other. We have to watch each other’s backs.” “You sit here,” she gestured to the bench, “We talk…and that’s it, you know. We are people. We are people. We are one people.”

What is a country? Is it the land? The literal land—the rocks and rills, the Pennsylvania hills where my father grew up, the waves of grain that spring up all around the little rural Michigan high school where I gave my last couple of teaching years? Is it the people? Is it the maintenance guy from Texas who lives upstairs from me and owns multiple guns and would give you the shirt off his back? Is it the old ladies who were making peanut butter jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk with me in a basement church kitchen? Is it the single mom we handed it to?

Yes. It’s the land I love, and it’s the people. All of it. All of them.

I can only speak for myself, but when I sing “America the Beautiful,” I don’t just see it as a sentimental exercise. Look again at the lyrics. “May God thy gold refine.” “God mend thine every flaw.” The patriot dream sees beyond the years. It looks for alabaster cities “undimmed by human tears.” You could say this dream is unfulfillable. Perhaps you would be right. Perhaps it will never be realized, until that day when all tears are wiped away.

But meanwhile, I don’t live in Atlantis, or Numenor. I don’t get choked up at the thought of Atlantian trees changing colors in the fall. I don’t greet Numenoreans walking down the street, going shopping, going to work, chatting with the person in the plane seat next to me who I’ll never meet again.

Don’t be ridiculous, you say. I should know good and well there are Americans who would like nothing better than to curb-stomp me and my rights under a fluttering Pride flag. There are Americans who would spit at me if they saw me holding a pro-life sign. There are Americans whose ideal vision of America is an America without people like me in it. And, well, yes, I do know that, good and well. And frankly, for my part, I think some of them are dangerous too. So dangerous that I’m not at all convinced we can coexist peacefully in the same public square.

What is a country? I understand the question. And I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to say with this answer. Maybe I don’t fully know. Maybe I’m still working it out. What I can say, what I do know, is that I could never be other than an American. Some people can, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I would be lost.

What is my country? For better or worse, it is my home. It is the land I love. It always has been. It always will be.

Happy July, gentle readers! I spent the last couple of weeks traveling to London (and subsequently recovering from said travels) where I had a whirlwind time of networking around not one but two conferences. As last year, I’ll be writing up a travel diary of my various adventures in conferencing, sightseeing, and people-watching. Unfortunately, it was logistically difficult for me to get much writing done around said adventures, hence the quietness around here. To my subscribers old and new, including those I met in London, thank you so much for your readership!

As our nation’s 250th birthday approaches, I’ve felt bad that I haven’t had the bandwidth to come up with more content appropriate to the occasion. As I lay around sniffling from an airport cold the other day, I came across a little news special in which various celebrities chose favorite American songs in honor of the occasion. (The celebrity lineup included some people who made sense and others who didn’t, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.) This inspired me to think about what my own list of definitive American tunes would look like. If I was putting together a capsule for the aliens that said, “Hey aliens, this is America!” what tracks would I include? (A slightly different question from “What are my personal favorite American songs ever?” though some overlap is inevitable.)

Sick and wan as I was, I still had the energy to browse around YouTube listening to music, and pretty soon a playlist took shape: 25 songs, consisting of five picks each from the five genres of Gospel, Great American Songbook, Rock and Roll, Country/Americana, and Pop. I now present it to you, dear readers, mostly for those of you who are paying me, but for those still loitering in my free tier, I’ll open up my thoughts on the top pick from each genre. Please join me in this musical celebration of the greatest country on earth. And should any of my inclusions or omissions make you upset, readers with comment privileges are welcome to lodge their protests below. You can even lodge your protest at my genre choices, though I wouldn’t recommend spending much time trying to convince me that hip-hop is music.

Essential Gospel Songs, #1: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Fisk University Jubilee Quartet

Our best guess as to the composer of this tune is Wallace Willis, who was among the “Choctaw Freedmen” emancipated in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War. He was hired to teach at a Choctaw boys’ school, where sources say that he taught the children this song. We apparently owe its preservation and circulation to the headmaster who wrote it down.

Like all great standard tunes, this can be interpreted in a myriad ways and lose none of its power. It can be slow or rollicking, a plaintive lament or a celebration. It can be raw and bluesy or carried up in the clouds by an ethereal soprano or tenor. It can be carried by a lone voice or by a chorus of harmonies. There is really almost no way to go wrong with it.

I could put any of these interpretations into “the capsule.” There’s the great B. B. King’s exuberant take, blending it with “Swing Down Chariot” (echoed in The Plantation Singers’ version). There’s Joan Baez’s acapella take. There’s this stunning interpretation by the classical soprano Afrika Hayes (introduced back in the day when the phrase “Negro spiritual” was still politically correct).

In the interests of historical preservation, I would probably settle on the first known recording, by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet. I have always had a weakness for male quartet singing, and I find something especially moving and dignified in the work of early black “conservatory” vocalists—classically trained, but still distinctive.

Essential Great American Songbook Songs, #1: God Bless America, Irving Berlin

The great Jewish-American songsmith Irving Berlin (formerly Israel Baline) first wrote a version of this tune in 1918, then dusted it off 20 years later and gave it to the now-forgotten Kate Smith, who made it a standard. You can read all about its fascinating history at La Wik, including the trivia bit that it opens with a fragment from a Jewish novelty song called “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band.” As one might imagine, it was not a favorite with the KKK. I can’t think of a song more emblematic of the Jewish immigrant’s indelible stamp on our culture. I hear it and I think of every great musician, every great comedian, every kid who decided that if baseball was America’s national sport, he would not be outdone in his love for it.

With apologies to Miss Kate, I prefer to hear Berlin singing his own creation—a little quavery, but full of patriotic fervor.

Essential Country/Americana Songs, #1: Wayfaring Stranger, Rhiannon Giddens

Properly, country should be separated from bluegrass, which in turn should be separated from folk, but if I tried to give all these genres their full due, this post would become even longer than it’s already going to be, and I would lose the numerical neatness of 25 tunes to mark our 250th birthday. So hopefully the reader will forgive some handwaving here.

The precise origins of this song are lost to time. Since its emergence in the 19th century, it has been performed with different lyrical variations, dressed in different styles. Like the best American folk classics, and like the Negro spirituals with which it shares DNA, it is a song of deep yearning for a home beyond this land of sickness, toil, and danger. We look back on songs like this as the children of an affluent age and realize with some shame that we no longer understand what it’s like to live these lyrics, really live them. Then again, it is not as though in our general affluence we have solved depression, or loneliness, or for that matter even poverty.

I like the simplicity of Rhiannon Giddens’ take, but if you have another preference, do share.

Essential Rock and Roll Songs, #1: Piano Man, Billy Joel

Billy Joel was among a number of living songwriters pointedly snubbed in a recent New York Times list of “greatest living songwriters.” Thankfully I wasn’t the only one to notice and protest the snub. It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Joel can’t get no respect, but when you’re as loved as he is, you don’t really need it.

Various Joel songs make a case for their inclusion in “the capsule.” I very nearly picked “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” which considered purely as a piece of rock music I don’t think Joel ever topped. “New York State of Mind” is a strong contender here too, as is “Miami 2017.” But in the end it really has to be “Piano Man.” The lyrics have that sardonic edge that would become Joel’s calling card, but where I think songs like “Scenes” tilt a bit into meanness, “Piano Man” has a sympathetic eye for its characters. Apparently they were based on real characters Joel observed in his early days of bar pianist obscurity. (“And the waitress was my first ex-wife…And Davy was in the Navy…and probably still is…”) And they are all of them very American, each playing out their dissatisfaction with the American dream, including the piano man himself.

Essential Pop Songs, #1: Walking in Memphis, Marc Cohn

Marc Cohn burst onto the pop music scene with this record, winning Best New Artist at the 1992 Grammies. When you look at who he beat out — Boyz 2 Men, Seal, etc. — he stands out as the folksy Jewish white boy who doesn’t belong. But this white boy had soul. He also had class, on display in an acceptance speech that ran too long because he wouldn’t stop until he had thanked everyone who in his opinion deserved to be thanked.

For whatever reason, Cohn never made another record that caught fire on this level, and he would pass into the industry’s collective memory as a one-hit wonder. But if one had to be known for just one song, what a song to be known for, and what a story behind it. A late bloomer, Cohn drifted into Memphis in his late 20s, wondering why he still hadn’t been struck by creative lightning. That was where he encountered a seasoned black church musician named Muriel Davis Wilkins, who really did play every Friday at the Hollywood Café, where there really was catfish on the table and gospel in the air. Her son, himself a musician, would later recall that she never charged a church for her talents. Sensing that Cohn was lonely and depressed, Muriel took the budding young talent under her great maternal wing and invited him to join her on stage. Cohn likes to joke that she had been playing “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” “Nearer My God to Thee,” and other “greatest hits of Hebrew school.” But “Amazing Grace” was one he knew, and they sang it together. When they were done, she said, “Child, you can go home and write those songs you been meaning to write.”

You couldn’t write a more quintessentially American origin story for a song: a wandering Jewish kid, finding himself in the heart of black gospel country, singing “Amazing Grace.” Although Muriel didn’t live to see this tune become a hit, she was able to hear the record it came from when he came back to Memphis to give her a private listening party. She liked them all, but “The one where you mention me? That’s the best one you got.”

When I saw Cohn live a few years ago, it seemed to me that in some sense he was still wandering, still searching. I hoped he would find what he sought, one day.

And now, below the fold, please enjoy the rest of the best!

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Gay men are in crisis, propose the editors of new essay collection Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual (available direct from publisher here). Not a crisis of oppression, but a crisis for the contributors far more terrifying: a crisis of boredom.

Once confident in their social role as taboo breakers and deviants on the margins of polite society, gay men today have won the right to perform normalcy. They are the recipients of unlimited political privilege, cultural pandering, and medical tech designed to save them from themselves. At the same time, they find themselves in a new caste system of sexual deviancy, expected to defer to identity groups ranked higher on the privilege ladder. Queer theory has gone mainstream, with the result that the rules of this caste system even contradict each other.

Where precisely does this leave yesterday’s deviants? What might an internal intervention into their crisis look like? Are they prepared for the fact that such an intervention might yield distinctly unflattering results? Does homosexuality have any intelligible purpose, any telos biological, cultural, or otherwise? Dare we ask if it ever did? Dare we ask if its current crisis might even “be constitutive of the thing itself”?

This is the terrain Inversion provocatively sets out to cover, though not towards a conservative goal per se. Although it allows some space for the straightforward traditional moral solution to the gay man’s conundrum, it is mostly shaped by voices rejecting it, yet more or less willing to admit the bleakness of the alternative. In this way, it functions as an attempt to reset the discourse to a dialogue primarily between honest trads and honest heathens.

Preliminary note #1: The editors provided me with a free review copy while aware that I am one of the aforementioned honest trads. A positive review was not required.

Preliminary note #2: This collection will be a useful resource for people interested in the recent history of ideas around homosexuality, as well as people interested in exploring actual diversity of thought around current cultural trends. Readers of mine who do academic, critical/journalistic, or even pastoral work in this realm might find it worth adding to their libraries. However, it is by design quite dark and at times quite graphic. So, caveat emptor.

There are a dozen essays in this collection, some of which held my attention better than others. (The final entry isn’t strictly an essay but more of a Proustian semi-autobiographical semi-fictional experiment. In my judgment, it doesn’t succeed as non-fiction or fiction, but then I’m not the target audience for Proust either.) Since space doesn’t permit a full treatment of all the collection’s themes and sub-themes, this review will focus on the three running threads that struck me as most salient: community, identity, and suffering.

Co-editor Pierre d’Alancaisez contributes “Freedom of Disassociation,” a charmingly morose reflection on gay “community,” or the lack thereof. It’s been observed many times that “LGBT community” is a contradiction in terms, but d’Alancaisez asserts that gay men are ill-constituted even for community with each other, narcissistic and irresponsible creatures that they are. This elevates the essay beyond yet another retread of LGB without the T talking points.

Also, like several pieces here, it’s a refreshing attack on the gay propaganda industrial complex which shields young gay men from having to confront their actual history. The supposed homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard, for example, is the quintessential gay myth that won’t die, even despite being debunked by a gay journalist. As the gaytekeepers openly admitted in their own words, Shepard was “too important, both as an individual and as a symbol,” with a “sacrosanct” place in American history. (I’ve written here about the interesting parallels between the gaytekeepers and a certain mainline form of Christianity that insists on the “higher truth” of Jesus’ life while treating the truth of the gospels as mere details.)

As a side note from my own research on intra-church “gay wars,” I recall once watching a Christian conference talk framed as “baby’s first gay history” for a naive young audience. The presenter put himself forward as a celibate gay Christian, but he was clearly a willing foot soldier in the pink propaganda war. Among other things, he held his listeners spellbound with the tale of a tragic arson incident in 1970s New Orleans which destroyed a gay hangout spot. The prime suspect turned out to be a disgruntled patron, a fact the presenter smoothly omitted. It is a sad fact that unapologetically practicing gay men are sometimes more honest about this history than men who fancy themselves standard-bearers (after some fashion, it’s not always clear) of a Christian sexual ethic. Hence the usefulness of work like this collection even for Christian readers.

My main criticism of d’Alancaisez here is that he presents his thesis as a rebuttal of Anita Bryant’s old line about how gays “recruit” (since they can’t reproduce). For this to be true, there would have to be such a meaningful concept as the gay “community,” and he argues (correctly) that no such concept exists. I respond that d’Alancaisez and Bryant are not contradictory but rather feeling different parts of the pink elephant. I remember once drawing the unpleasant attention of a mob outside a Planned Parenthood where a brave young woman was trying to share her story of gender detransition. This pathetic motley crew of young people apparently deemed it worth skipping work on a weekday for this “community” activity. They made a whole day of it too, complete with pizza and “music” blaring from a speaker. Perhaps the lesbians really hated the gay men who really hated the men in dresses, but it appeared at least in the moment that they were all having rather a good time together. Just because there is no honor among thieves does not mean they’re incapable of effectively pooling their resources towards the shared goal of stealing children’s innocence.

Other essays here do more exploration of the various political, cultural, or artistic ways gay men have formed “community” pockets over the decades, attempting to see if there’s anything at all meaningful to be salvaged beyond the one very obvious thing that, well, brings them together. A recurring theme is the unquestioned assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes made explicit—that unfettered erotic energy is the lifeblood of the creative self. Through this lens, the traditional sexual ethic appears as a threat to drain away that lifeblood, leaving a drab, uninspired Puritan shell of oneself behind. Oh God, make me anything, but please don’t make me BORING.

This idea finds its most flamboyant expression in Travis Jeppesen’s lament for the lost transgressive art of “gay shame,” which among other things declares that having copious amounts of sex is a necessary precondition to being “any kind of artist.” But as a good friend of mine colorfully put it when we were discussing this, copious sex is only truly generative within the parameters of the Torah, and refraining from sex when appropriate is generative in its own right. The decline of Oscar Wilde is instructive here, as drawn in films like The Happy Prince, in which the literary icon pisses away his last days on booze and boys while inventing variations on the fiction that he’s completed and sold a new masterwork.

The contributors lodge protests in various keys of the contemporary notion of “gay identity,” preferring to shift the focus to the sexual act itself. Yet at least some of them still want to retain an idea that ongoingly practicing that act constitutes “being true to oneself,” as Roger Lancaster’s essay says in so many words. This insistence is curious given Lancaster’s equally confident assertion that gay identity “is not something that exists, a fixed, fast-frozen thing.”

In this context I find it interesting to note that gay provocateur Quentin Crisp, that most colorful icon of “being yourself, no matter what they say,” was known to say in his usual cheeky fashion that homosexuals are not “real people.” This is dramatized in the film An Englishman in New York, in a scene where a lesbian stands up to chide Crisp for this verbiage during one of his performances. She admonishes him to “be more careful,” and he agrees, but he maintains that “I do think of myself as artificial, as an invention.” Who was the true Quentin Crisp? It seemed that even Quentin Crisp didn’t know.

Young Israeli philosopher Ran Heilbrunn’s essay “Abolish Queer Theory!” proposes that queer theory and traditional sex moralism are two sides of the same coin, each “burdening” and functionally desexualizing the sexual act by “reading values and ideas into the sexual realm.” Au contraire, values do exist in the sexual realm whether we would like them to or not, making certain acts objectively sacred and others objectively perverse. But this follows from the inherent nature and telos of the sex organs, as opposed to those “values” conjured out of thin air in the precise shape of the queer theorist’s masturbatory fantasies. Heilbrunn also fails to understand Christianity as an incarnational religion, within which we are in fact designed to experience an intensification of physical pleasure when that pleasure is appropriately circumscribed. Indeed, despite all the stereotypes, actual Puritan literature is quite lustily sex-positive.

Still, Heilbrunn’s contribution retains academic and entertainment value as a spirited assault on postmodernism and all its pomps. Tracing the evolution of queer theory from its birth among the “screaming queens” of the 1970s to its present-day academic inanities, Heilbrunn diagnoses it as at root “a paranoid persecution complex.” The calls to “abolish” all societal norms and indeed society itself are an attempt to shift the blame for a sexuality “mired in jealousy, aggression, and obsession.” All of human culture becomes the scapegoat “for the undeniable pain and suffering of sexual non-conformity.” When leading queer theorist Michael Warner sets out to read his personal oppression into every civilizational document, he arrogantly casts himself “as Western culture’s eternal victim.”

Though Heilbrunn does not draw this connection, he touches here on the precise place where indeed all attempts to situate the gay rights movement in a genealogical straight line from Christianity will fail. For within Christianity, there is only one eternal Victim, and he is not Michael Warner.

Stephen Adubato’s essay “The Deception of Orientation Essentialism” stands out as the only contribution acknowledging the Christian case for celibacy, within the frame of Catholic natural law. Adubato lays his own traditionalist Catholic cards on the table upfront, though he pauses for a time-wasting side comment that the opposite view could be “reasonably” argued. But the piece on the whole is a welcome counterweight, and it reflects well in turn on the editors that they believed such was needed. Adubato puts the pastoral yet frank voice of Cardinal Ratzinger in conversation with Camille Paglia’s equally frank sex-realist hedonism, suggesting not only that they are each other’s proper opponents but that they are the only perspectives worth significant discourse bandwidth. Mushy middle-dwellers — from secular consumerist gays to progressive “Christian” gays — market themselves to “normies” by presenting gayness as a way of being while glossing over the sodomitic act. Neither Ratzinger nor Paglia will allow them off the hook so easily.

Nowhere has this deceptive marketing been more blatant (or more culturally successful) than in the AIDS history racket. In this collection’s spirit of exposing gay propaganda, Adubato rightly scorns the manipulative tactics of activist groups like ACT UP, which built their authoritarian brand on blaming every establishment for the epidemic except the gay establishment. (By contrast, Randy Shilts at least had the integrity to make an equal-opportunity anti-establishment case in And the Band Played On.) It was in fact the opposite of “hateful” for Cardinal O’Connor to preach celibacy, the one sure-fire way for gay men to spare themselves from the disease. But in order for the wheels of the pink propaganda machine to keep turning, he had to become the enemy. Figures like him were the answer to the question provocatively asked by another contributor to this collection, David Moulton: “If gays are the new Jews, who were the Nazis supposed to be?”

At the same time that they were insistently shutting out voices of spiritual authority, homosexuals demanded substitute salvation from the medical industrial complex. Though early treatments ironically proved worse than the disease, the PrEP drug would eventually emerge as the gay man’s escape from the consequences of risky sex. As the plague and its victims drift out of living memory, new generations live by the promise of modern medical tech that reality needn’t inhibit their self-actualization. Though not sharing Adubato’s traditionalist stance, Moulton does share his contempt for this paternalistic biopolitics—Big Brother keeping gay men at heel by promising to save them from themselves. His contribution “Towards a Gay Art of Suffering” connects his suspicion of this “utopian project” with the “endless biomedical interventions” thrust upon us during COVID.

Moulton develops his anti-utopian thesis from a literary angle, lambasting contemporary work that airbrushes out the sad griminess of “LGBT” life. He is especially unnerved by little children’s books that make gender transition appear fun and cute. At the same time, he too-generously forgives the people who write such books and stock them in libraries, supposing that they don’t intend to “exploit children sexually” but are simply too hasty to shield hypothetically gay children from pain. Whether the authors are sexually fixated on children or not, the conservative would argue this literature is designed to normalize that which is fundamentally abnormal, and as such it is corrupting little children’s natural intuitions (“A boy can’t marry another boy!”) And whether the children themselves are being viewed as potential “recruits” or potential “allies,” the point is to flood their plastic brains early and often with propaganda protesting too much that This Is Normal.

Moulton traces his own adolescent awakening through gay cult classic works like Jean Genet’s masturbatory prose poem Our Lady of the Flowers, which hardly conveyed the message that This Is Normal but seduced the sheltered Moulton by exoticizing sexual deviance. Genet wrote the autobiographical work in prison for “indecency,” constructing it as a series of stream-of-consciousness fantasies about the various wretched characters of his street life. Moulton correctly predicts the conservative assessment that this was simply a “snootier” form of literary seduction than today’s lowbrow offerings (a seduction that bore sad fruit in the phase of his own life when he was turning tricks on the streets of San Francisco to pay rent). It also must be said that merely being highbrow doesn’t make a work valuable even as art, and that a compulsive obsession with sex is counterproductive to artistic and moral goals alike.

But Moulton still wants to argue that Genet’s work, like the work of other favorite authors, retains the value of honesty about gay suffering. Even more provocatively, he proposes that Genet is “heeding Jesus’ call to love the least among us when he writes: ‘My loved ones will be those whom you would call ‘hoodlums of the worst sort.’” Genet “does Christianity one better,” even, because “he loves the most wretched not despite but because of their wretchedness.” Yet one cannot truly and completely love the wretched while loving the wretchedness that contains them in the prison of their own making (or inviting them into yours). Hence the well-worn cliché “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” which despite being a cliché is nonetheless conveying something importantly true. Genet’s “love” for the “hoodlums” is a possessive, rapacious simulacrum of love, a blend of pure objectification and gratification at finding souls who make him feel less isolated in his own wretchedness.

I initially mistyped the name of this essay as “towards an art of gay suffering,” an apt slip, as it is really the only kind of suffering in focus throughout Moulton’s piece. To the extent that art truthfully reflects sexual dysfunction, it does at least have the virtue of honesty over pure propaganda. But truly memorable “art of suffering” points to a suffering beyond the self-inflicted kind.

By way of a better example even from the shelves of relatively disposable gay lit, I would point to Andrew Holleran. In the epistolary framing prologue to Dancer From the Dance, the narrator somewhat channels Genet when he expresses his fascination with the “doomed queens” who drive their cars right off the cliff, the “fags who consider themselves worthless.” “It was those whom Christ befriended,” the character declares with feeling, “not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH!”

But Holleran’s work is not solely preoccupied by their debauchery. It is also haunted by the call to take on the burden of actually meaningful suffering, in the real world outside the prison of endless self-pleasuring. The narrator’s Southern correspondent is a friend who has escaped New York, that metaphorical prison, and reflects on how leaving the gay scene behind has freed him to participate in self-giving acts like the care of a sick elderly Cuban woman. In her room, there is “LIFE, not the hothouse, artificial, desperate life we led up there in Gotham, but LIFE as it is in all its complexity and richness.”

Holleran would return to that image in The Beauty of Men, which juxtaposes the narrator’s empty nocturnal pursuits with days spent caring for his paralyzed mother. Though dispiriting, this participation in his mother’s innocent suffering is still the real stuff of real “LIFE.” Not that this guides the work to an especially hopeful conclusion—it is still a gay novel, after all.

But if there is to be a hopeful conclusion to the actual real-life narratives shaping this essay collection, it would be in the channeling of their suffering into an others-focused self-abnegation. This isn’t the prescription recommended by Unherd’s Jarryd Bartle, who ends his review with a patronizing exasperation that these guys can’t seem to just settle down with a boyfriend and stop being so damn depressed. A little “sunlight, cardio, and tender affection” should cure what’s ailing them, he predicts. But this is a brave new world, and like Huxley’s heroine they demand the right to be unhappy.

Pierre d’Alancaisez’s essay concludes that the gay man is best understood “freely disassociating from a community that he is no longer able to imagine, deserving neither pity nor rescue.” Indeed, none of us do, but they are offered anyway, and with them that Love which is joy and beauty, which we have sought in a thousand streets and for which we have wept and clawed our pillows.

When Michael Jackson was taken to court for alleged child molestation in 2005, the prosecution launched their case with what they thought was an unbeatable opening gambit: rolling the entire “Living with Michael Jackson” documentary, in which British journalist Martin Bashir had gained unprecedented access to the superstar’s inner sanctum. Over nearly two hours, Bashir holds on for the bizarre theme park ride that is life with Michael Jackson—buying out a flea market, touring the world, dodging throngs of fans and paparazzi, handling (or mishandling) three small children whose mothers apparently bore them for the sole purpose of being adopted by Jackson. Jackson is coy about these unsavory paternity arrangements, just like he’s coy about how many plastic surgeries he’s had. Just two nose jobs, he insists, but of course Bashir knows this is a crock, and of course Jackson knows that he knows. They are practicing a slow dance, the world’s most famous man and the tabloid journalist circling him like the world’s most patient shark.

Amazingly, the whole thing had been Jackson’s idea. His record sales were declining, and ever since his first messy scandal in 1993, he’d never shaken off the swirling suspicion about his open secret obsession with young boys. But if he flung wide the gates of Neverland, the sprawling California ranch he had converted into his own private Disneyworld, he reasoned that it would show the world how magical and innocent it all was. He especially wanted the journalist to meet a boy he had helped, an “underprivileged” young cancer survivor named Gavin Arvizo.

As the starstruck Gavin earnestly praises Jackson, something feels off about the whole tableau. The boy rests his head on the man’s shoulder, the camera lingering on their intertwined fingers as Bashir starts asking uncomfortable pointed questions. Has Gavin ever shared a bed with Jackson? Well, not quite. They say Jackson gave up the bed and slept on the floor. But couldn’t Gavin have stayed in one of the place’s numerous spare rooms, or spare houses? Yes…but all kids who visit Neverland “want to stay with me.” Midway through the awkward scene, you can watch Jackson’s eyes and see the moment when he realizes he’s made a misstep in this dance.

A year later, all hell broke loose when young Gavin accused the star of “lewd acts,” as well as plying the boy with alcohol and pornography. A decade earlier, Jackson had hushed up the family of his most dangerous young accuser, Jordan Chandler, to the tune of $20 million. But he wouldn’t be able to spend this problem away. The Arvizos would have their day in court.

And yet, as the jury watched the scene from the Bashir documentary where Jackson teaches the journalist how to moonwalk, the entire courtroom started to bob their heads to the beat of “Billie Jean.” Even senior deputy DA Ron Zonen couldn’t help tapping along. He hardly realized what he was doing until the chief DA leaned over and hissed in his ear, “Would you stop moving your foot?”

It was then that journalist Diane Dimond began to worry. For twelve years, she had prided herself on being a thorn in Jackson’s side, undeterred by threats veiled or overt. Now she had a front row seat to what could be the crashing end of the whole saga. The End of Michael Jackson. Or…perhaps not. Perhaps they would spend week after week hearing evidence and counter-evidence, examination and cross-examination, only for the man sitting statue-still in the middle of it all to get up and moonwalk away.

Five long months later, when the verdict came down, “Not guilty,” the fans outside started screaming. A young preschool teacher, who had quit her job to make a pilgrimage to the trial and won a drawing to be inside the courtroom, collapsed in a dead faint. A weeping woman released a pair of doves. Asked for comment, Jackson’s imposing ace lawyer Tom Mesereau said with conviction, “The man’s innocent. He always was.”

For young Gavin Arvizo and his family, the message was clear: If you come at the King, you’d best not miss.

There were no cameras allowed inside the courtroom, which meant that people’s impressions of the trial were filtered through print. But a new Netflix docuseries, The Verdict, has recreated it through witness testimonies, court sketches, and archival footage. The series arrives as if on cue to play gritty true crime counterweight to the gauzy biopic Michael, which is currently soaring towards a global record-breaking 1 billion at the box office.

Taken together, film and series encapsulate the perpetual Rorschach test that is Michael Jackson’s public image. Clearly, his fans aren’t going anywhere. Indeed, their ranks are swelling with new members too young to remember the 80s, or even the 90s. But so, too, are the ranks of Jackson’s alleged abuse victims, as yet another family has come forward just this year with four siblings’ distinct, lurid accounts of violation. Try as everyone might, neither narrative seems able to drive the other out of the public square.

Did he or didn’t he? Now, as then, it depends on who you ask.

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