We compulsively read posts. When we wake up, when we’re bored at work, or when we’re anxious at a party, we take out our phone and scroll posts. On our phones we have access to all the great novels and poems, to images of every painting in every gallery, but we choose to read posts.

What we pay attention to is worth attention. We should be curious about posts, not ashamed of the time we spend on them. Posts are the artform of the present.

When people think about art, what often comes to mind is art that’s difficult, like the great novels they can read on their phone whenever but choose not to. The word “art” evokes the older, more refined mediums: paintings, sculpture, ballet, opera, novels. The thought is that art means mining meaning from difficulty to reveal eternal truths.

Art isn’t limited to that. Art is also the cultural output that we compulsively consume, whether or not it’s good.

Our compulsive urge to read posts is what makes them the artform of the present. In the past, people compulsively read novels, newspapers, and magazines, and looked at paintings in art galleries. Those were the widely-consumed mediums of their time; they were not higher artforms that the cultured elite chose over slop for the masses. If you wanted a story, the novel was the best way to get that. If you wanted to see an image, you went to an art gallery.

Galleries used to be culturally vital spaces. Audiences reacted with awe and disgust to new showings. Back then, a painting was the best technology available to transmit an image of a beautiful woman, or a foreign landscape, or a flower. Audiences had visceral reactions to these new images, but we have other image technologies now. Today, if a painting in a gallery evoked visceral awe or disgust, someone would take a photo of it and post it online.

Technology has shifted the vital medium of art before. In the 1950s, television became the primary compulsive medium, replacing both galleries and novels. Television told a story and showed images, all right inside your home. It was easier than reading a book; it just washed over you. Families rearranged their living rooms, centered now around the television. The new technology of video, and broadcast television for its mass distribution, made us choose television over historical artforms.

As television’s popularity grew, there were reservations for whether this new artform could reach the depth and dignity of the older mediums, the same questions we see today for posts. And in many ways those reservations were true. But it didn’t mean that television wasn’t worth analysis.

Now, posts have replaced television as the compulsively-consumed media. Like the shift to television, this shift occurred because of new technology.

Today television executives worry if their content is fit to be “second screen”. They know their audience will be on their phones reading posts while they watch, so they want to be sure that the television content is still a pleasant experience while they’re half-paying attention. Television shows are slower, leaving space for the viewer’s mind to wander, knowing they’re competing even within the viewer’s home. Television still exists, but it’s fighting against the new medium that we compulsively consume.

It’s because posts are compulsively consumed that they deserve analysis as art. There are valid reservations about the potential for posts to be as fulfilling as longform writing, or even television. Compared to the mediums that came before, posts are short and ephemeral, so they can be shallow. Posts can also be pandering, to appeal to the algorithm’s desires.

But posts have benefits. They can be fresh. They’re made and distributed to audiences in minutes. They can also be creative. Millions of people make posts, and content algorithms select the best ones, instead of thousands of people making paintings or novels with the galleries or publishing houses choosing the best. Posts are democratic. The benefits are why we choose to read them.

I don’t discount that art has value for being difficult, for the work of mining meaning out of something hard and beautiful. But again, what people pay attention to is worth attention. I think you should pay attention to posts. You already are.

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When I’m homesick I listen to the song “7-Eleven” by Bladee. The main part I like is the opening lines, which are also the chorus.

Waiting for forever for my weapon

Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven

Sometimes I just wanna go to heaven

When I’m coming home they call me vännen

Bladee is from Sweden, a place he clearly loves, but he’s travelled a lot. “7-Eleven” is from 2016; Bladee first left Sweden to go to America in 2014 to support Yung Lean on his early tours.

7-Eleven is the one of the main convenience stores in Sweden, especially in urban areas like Stockholm, where Bladee is from. Scandinavian 7-Elevens are very clean, but also very cozy.

What does each line of the chorus mean?

• Waiting for forever for my weapon. This is the most difficult and abstract line. I think it’s saying that he’s waiting for a magical salvation to appear, like waiting for a sword to emerge from a lake while on his quest. He’s waiting for a long time, and it still hasn’t come. He’s not sure if it will.

• Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven. He’s back at home, before the quest, before he left, just waiting outside the convenience store. There isn’t any bigger ambition for magical salvation in this line; this line is decidedly nonfantasy compared to the last one. But it’s still important, whatever he and his friend were doing back home.

• Sometimes I just want to go to heaven. This one is pretty straightforward. Sometimes he wants to die, because that would be simpler than the complexities of the current quest.

• When I’m coming home they call me vännen. Vännen is the Swedish word for friend. When Bladee comes home to Sweden, they still call him friend the same way they used to. When he comes back home from the quest, regardless of whether he has the weapon or not, they still care about him, and he’s still one of them.

I like the parallelism of the first two lines, both opening with “waiting”, while describing different but adjacent feelings.

When I’m homesick listening to this song in New York City, I think about sitting outside the Casey’s General Store in Illinois waiting for my friend. When I lived in Illinois, he and I would hike deep out into rural cornfield country, where Casey’s is the main convenience store. Casey’s is kind of a third place in these areas. There’s not many restaurants out there, ten miles from the nearest city, so Casey’s serves pizza. There’s always a few people in there buying something. On our 10+ mile hikes, we’d often get hungry, so one or both of us would go into Casey’s to buy food or an energy drink.

Almost everyone drives to Casey’s, because this area isn’t particularly walkable. Because we were on foot, it took a long time to get to the store once we had decided it was our next destination. So to us it felt like an anticipated oasis.

7-Eleven is a different convenience store, in a different country, but Bladee’s song has the same emotional architecture for me. When I feel like I’m waiting forever for my weapon, I want to be outside the convenience store at home. Sometimes I worry that they won’t call me friend in the same way when I come back, but that hasn’t happened yet.

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I’m a big Rian Johnson fan. He directed the controversial Star Wars film The Last Jedi, which I loved. I wrote a 15,000 word essay defending it. Since that movie, he’s retreated to safer territories, working in the same style as The Last Jedi, but making fewer people mad because the movies aren’t as big as Star Wars. He’s currently on his third installment in his detective movie series Knives Out. Well, it poses as a detective movie series, but it’s a social satire series. The first movie, Knives Out, released fall 2019, was about Trump’s election. The second one, Glass Onion, released fall 2022, was about the pandemic and Elon Musk.

Now, Rian Johnson is back with Wake Up Dead Man. It’s a satire on religion, cults, and the post-truth media landscape, centered around a priest who leads a reactionary anti-modernity right-wing church. The priest is orbited by grifters, sycophants, and desperate people. Like the first movies in the series, the central figure is murdered, which leaves his orbiters clawing for what’s left, and the detective to figure out who did it. The murder mystery plot is a vehicle to tour the characters, who represent larger contemporary cultural archetypes. In this movie, there’s a washed up author turned Substack writer, an aspiring politician vlogger, an alcoholic divorced dad, and the central cult leader.

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This is Rian Johnson’s most didactic movie in terms of being explicitly anti-right wing, but there’s hardly a culturally relevant left-wing to tease nowadays. He tries to be even-handed about religion; the detective is an atheist, but he’s aided by a catholic priest outside of the culture war who has an admirable sense of Christian vocation. That priest is the moral core of the movie; he serves as Rian Johnson’s signature purehearted character navigating the impure world. I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves resurrection, as the title implies. The resurrection makes perfect thematic sense, but not perfect literal plot sense, as Rian Johnson movies often do.

Wake Up Dead Man is a well-executed movie. The jokes are funny, feel fresh, and give depth to my understanding of the contemporary cultural landscape, which are the goals of a social satire. I like this movie, the same way I liked the prior two installments. I also like other strong contemporary social satires, like the White Lotus series and Eddington.

Social satire is important as the media landscape fractures. Art allows for sharp but empathetic dissections of the ways that media and politics change people. A thinkpiece can’t do gentle teasing as well as fictional characters on the screen can. A thinkpiece explains too much; fiction can show. Rian Johnson always remains gentle and optimistic, which is crucial. Even in this movie, which comes at a time where his worldview is very challenged, he still sees a path forward and presents it.

Social satire will rarely be lifechanging art, and by definition it has an expiration date. It describes the present; eventually the archetypes it teases won’t be as important. Still, not all art has to last. This art serves a purpose today. I recommend Wake Up Dead Man. It’s a nice thing to put on your TV for a few hours. I hope Rian Johnson keeps making movies in this series.

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Last summer, Charli XCX released the song “Sympathy is a knife”, in which she confesses jealous feelings for Taylor Swift. It’s a universal song about resentment, but also works because Charli relates it to her celebrity biography. I wrote for this blog last year that in Charli’s song she purports to be confessing jealousy for Taylor’s traditional beauty and wide commercial success, but is actually taking pride that she’s more artistically pure than Taylor Swift.

This autumn, Taylor Swift responded in her new song “Actually Romantic”. It’s less subtle than “Sympathy is a knife”. In the opening line, she says “I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got you feeling brave”, referring to Charli, who is famous for talking about cocaine.

Taylor Swift has legitimate grievances with Charli XCX, to be fair. Not for “Sympathy is a knife”, which is sweet and vulnerable, but for Charli’s attitude about Taylor as an artist. I’m sure the “boring barbie” quote is real, that one of their mutual friends relayed to Taylor that Charli said that about her.

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“Boring barbie” is honestly a great summation of Charli’s attitude about Taylor; she thinks Taylor’s a beautiful woman with mass appeal who doesn’t challenge norms. Charli XCX criticized Taylor Swift’s fans after opening for her on the Reputation tour in 2018; Charli was forced to play her more commercially successful music over her experimental pop to Taylor Swift’s screaming npc teenage girl crowd, and Charli publicly spoke about disliking that experience. On her own Brat tour Charli would say “artistry shines through” before performing “Sympathy is a knife”, meaning that her jealous feelings towards Taylor Swift are valid because she’s the better artist.

But even though she has legitimate grievances, “Actually Romantic” is disorganized and distasteful. This song is not as good of art as “Sympathy is a knife”. Had Taylor Swift written a song about the antifeminist undertones of “boring barbie”, how it feels like Charli is hating another successful woman who other women love, I think that could have worked artistically. But instead she devolves into spite.

She follows “boring barbie” with “when the coke’s got you feeling brave”, saying that Charli does a lot of coke, and that she isn’t brave enough to criticize her when she isn’t drugfueled. I don’t know if I care about that, honestly, and it says something about Taylor Swift that she does. In the next line Taylor says “you high-fived my ex and then said you’re glad he ghosted me”, referring to her ex-boyfriend Matty Healy, who Charli is friends with. I’m sure it was hurtful that Charli was cheering on the end of a relationship that Taylor was deeply affected by, but it feels like gushing out interpersonal slights.

What Taylor is trying to do in “Actually Romantic” is compare Charli XCX’s angry obsession with her to the obsession of romantic love. That sort of comparison might resonate with other people? Maybe? I’ve never felt this about another man, but I’m an intrasexual competition pacifist, and women are meaner to each other than men are in these situations.

Regardless of how universal the feeling is, Taylor is trying to declare she has the high ground because she doesn’t care about Charli as much as Charli does about her. That might be true, but it doesn’t matter because when they’re fighting they’re on the same level. Yes, Charli calls her tacky and boring, but I don’t think the answer is to say “you’re so obsessed with me!” And Taylor thought about Charli to write this song, so it’s ironic in that sense. At one point she compares Charli to a tiny chihuahua, saying that she doesn’t feel threatened by her at all, but again that feels incompatible with the action of writing the song.

If Charli never responds, which I don’t think she has to, because the song is distasteful, she wins the argument. Taylor Swift used her larger platform to release a more vitriolic but less interesting song. It’s operating at a lower level than Charli’s, by focusing on her supposed obsession. Charli XCX already admitted she was obsessed in “Sympathy is a knife”. There’s nothing more for her to say.

The sad part is I think Taylor Swift wanted to mimic the unfiltered confessional lyricism of Brat. It’s a compliment to Charli that Taylor thought she could be this candid. But she didn’t execute well. She wrote some wrong words and came off spiteful. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I don’t think Taylor Swift hates Charli XCX as much as her own song makes out. She wanted to shoot back at Charli, but it just wasn’t as good. Unfortunately, in the world of candid and vulnerable art, if you mess up, it makes you look bad. Taylor Swift spilled her own vulnerable resentment back at Charli, but in a way that wasn’t generous or insightful.

Discussing “Sympathy is a Knife” last summer, I ended with “maybe Taylor Swift is the true jealous lonely artist”. I think this song makes that clear. I don’t think I could do better if I were Taylor Swift, so this isn’t a criticism. It must be hard being the most cared about artist in the world, having a life so different from everyone else’s. Not similar to other artists, not similar to other very wealthy people. I imagine that it’s lonely and painful, but she knows she has to keep going because what she does matters to so many normal people. She’ll rest at some point, but she’ll rest when people stop caring. That is a hard burden; I don’t envy it.

It’s interesting how Taylor relates the dynamics of her megafamous life to the social dynamics experienced by normal people. Complaining about her ex, calling someone she doesn’t like a cokehead. The situations are so different, but she mines the shared elements of them to make it feel like they aren’t. That’s the skill of universalizing that got her here.

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Lorde grew up fast. In 2013, when she was 16 years old, the singles from her debut album Pure Heroine were played on the radio around the world every single day. These early songs, like “Royals” and “Team”, were built on Lorde’s distinct voice, which was given space to shine over minimalist instrumental tracks. In the lyrics, Lorde reflects on her suburban upbringing, both satirizing and romanticizing coming-of-age and aspirational wealth narratives. It’s both wise and naive, always endearing, and somehow written by a 16-year-old. It was an inspiring debut.

Four years later, in 2017, Lorde released her second album Melodrama. Melodrama is her party album. Like Pure Heroine, it feels very mature for her age. The lyrics are good, but not as transcendent as Pure Heroine; she sings about nightlife and how the party makes her feel. The instrumentals were where Lorde took a step forward. Every song on Melodrama is more sonically creative than Pure Heroine. Melodrama was played on alt-rock radio stations because its sound was comparable to well-crafted indie rock like The Strokes. Lorde showed she was a songwriter with a vision, not just a lightning-in-a-bottle teenager.

Both of these albums have aged well, growing beyond their initial reception. Lorde’s most famous song today, the coming-of-age-song “Ribs”, comes off Pure Heroine, but it was not initially popular in 2013. It slowly found its audience in the algorithmic Spotify and TikTok landscape we live in now, because it resonated with today’s youth.

In 2021, Lorde released Solar Power. It sounded different from her first two albums. Her distinct lower vocal register is rarely used. Instead, she uses an ethereal voice similar to Phoebe Bridgers’ on Punisher, which was popular a year before. The backing tracks are light and airy too. The new sound made it controversial with fans of her first two albums.

But I loved Solar Power. Lorde sings about hanging out on beaches in New Zealand, smoking weed in her hometown, and finding beauty in the natural world in a way that resonated with me. At the time I was doing similar things in my own hometown, in Illinois. It’s another mature album for her age. Lorde turns away from parties, choosing instead the sun and stability. She muses about children in “Oceanic Feeling”, speaks affectionately about her longtime boyfriend in “The Man With The Axe”, and writes beautifully about her dog that passed away in “Big Star”. I found the sound still great; Lorde has a unique vision for Solar Power that she totally achieves. This album feels like Joni Mitchell's 70s music pulled into the present, hippie culture blending with neohippie wellness Instagram culture in a striking way. But I get that the fans wanted something more like what Lorde had done before.

Now, in 2025, Lorde released her fourth album, Virgin. Virgin’s defining ethos is vulnerability. Its cover is an x-ray of Lorde’s pelvis, where her tiny metal IUD is visible, and the metal buttons on her blue jeans are visible. It shows vulnerable parts of her but not everything. It’s very creative; maybe the best part of the album.

My read is that Lorde was influenced by the success of Charli XCX’s Brat, the big album of last summer. There are vulnerable songs on Brat itself, and when Lorde was brought in for a remix track, “Girl So Confusing”, she wrote vulnerably about her friendship with Charli and her body image. The remix was positively received, especially Lorde’s lyrics. I think the success of the concept made Lorde want to do a whole album with that type of vulnerability. Or maybe she was already thinking about vulnerability, and the success of “Girl So Confusing” made her more confident.

The risk with centering an album around vulnerability is if the vulnerability doesn’t feel sincere, but that’s not the case on Virgin. The vulnerability feels authentic. Lorde writes openly about a fragile period in her life. In Virgin, Lorde has left the beaches of New Zealand for New York City, and broken up with her longtime boyfriend. She sings about casual sex, going out to bars in the city, and trying to find her identity again. She’s 27 but acting younger, and coming to terms with that.

Virgin has a song explicitly about acting younger, called “GRWM”. That’s a TikTok acronym for Get Ready With Me, but used in this context by Lorde to also mean “Grown Woman”. The central line in the song is “maybe you finally know what you want to be: a grown woman in a baby tee”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek self-acknowledgment of how it can be silly to act younger while growing older. The phrase “baby tee” makes that even more apparent, but Lorde owns that dissonance anyways.

Lorde has said in interviews about Virgin that she wanted to make music that only she can make. What this meant in practice was leaning into the successful and distinct elements of Pure Heroine and Melodrama. The opening tracks “Hammer” and “What Was That” are Lorde songs that go hard, full of her distinct sonic and lyrical tropes. She opens by letting the fans know she can still make music that sounds like the music they loved, not like Solar Power. In theory, this choice could be a weakness; retreating to past success after failed experimentation, but in my opinion Lorde dodges that too. Lorde’s return to her youth is part of the stylistic goals of this album; her retreat to her earlier style makes sense with how Lorde retreats to her youth throughout the lyrics of Virgin too.

At times it feels like Lorde is writing this for current NYU student teenagers, which is cute. That’s the demographic who liked her music before, but there’s a new generation now, because it’s been 8 years since Melodrama. The music video for the lead single “What Was That” was filmed publicly in Washington Square Park, near NYU. She namedrops New York City locations throughout the album, in a way that feels like a call to the youth of the city for those who aren’t there and mythologization of it for those who are. New York is also the perfect physical place to explore the idea of getting older but acting younger. It’s for the fans, but also for her, and that’s why it works for the fans.

The other way this album feels made for the fans, and for teenagers, is in the subject matter of the songs. I think the songs on Virgin are simpler to grasp than Solar Power. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The simplicity feels intentional, calibrated by Lorde to make the songs more universal.

“Favorite Daughter” and “If She Could See Me Now” are the most representative examples of this. “Favorite Daughter” is about struggling to live up to parental expectations, and “If She Could See Me Now” is a motivational song about recovering from a breakup. These two songs feel almost designed to be relatable for teenagers. These songs aren’t bad, but they stick with me less than Solar Power. Other songs on the album execute teenage accessibility in more fresh ways. “Broken Glass” is about struggling with body image, and “Clearblue” is about feeling less pure after casual sex. Both are also universal topics for young people, but more compelling songs than the first two, where it feels like Lorde is going through the motions a little.

The concept of making universally relatable art for young people isn’t flawed. I actually think it’s extremely admirable what Lorde is doing here. I just think it has to be executed well, with a lot of care to not feel condescending or shallow. Young people are very attuned to those things. One of the songs that young people seem to be resonating with the most is “Shapeshifter”, based on my anthropological research on TikTok and Twitter. “Shapeshifter” is not as neatly calibrated to be universal, but it lands with the kids because it feels raw and probing, more like older Lorde songs.

I guess my central criticism of Virgin is that it feels incomplete. It’s Lorde’s shortest album, only 11 songs. My read is that Lorde really wanted Virgin to come out this summer, to keep her four-year album cycles, and to try to claim the summer artpop spot that Brat charted. But I think Virgin could have used more time. I’ll compare to Bladee’s Cold Visions here, because I think about Bladee a lot. Cold Visions is also a vulnerable album made for the fans, but it’s so great because Bladee invested a ton of artistic care and time in the album. It’s an hour long, so many songs are good, and it’s so dense with ideas. I think Lorde had the talent and artistic vision to make Virgin an album of that level.

But I really can’t be too mean. What we got is a solid Lorde album. I think it’s the weakest of her four, but she set high standards with the other three. The world Lorde builds in Virgin is rich; the way Lorde thinks about youth and New York is interesting. And I love seeing Lorde’s attitude towards her art. I’m excited to see what she does next.

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There is a genre of posts on X Dot Com, and other content aggregation sites too, where porn is reposted or quotetweeted, with a comment like “look at how the West has fallen”. These posts perform well, getting thousands of likes and views, often more interaction than the post by the original creator.

The stated substance of these posts is that the porn they’re showing is evil. But these posts rely on the porn they claim to disapprove of. The presence of the porn is what makes them algorithmically interesting. Readers spend time on the post because the porn keeps them there.

The presence of the porn doesn’t help the post just by serving as an example of the fallen society that the author is disparaging. The porn is the primary entertaining object of the post, with the disapproving words around it as a shield that protects the reader from realizing that they’re engaging with porn in a straightforward sense. They’re consuming the post like porn; probably not masturbating to it, but they’re looking at how pretty the girl is, watching the scene unfold.

The experience they’re having is much closer to that of watching porn than the experience of disagreeing with it. The same sentiment, expressed in a way that doesn’t share the porn and thus signalboost it, would not do nearly as well in the algorithm. Moral condemnation of porn is pretty boring to read, compared to seeing a beautiful woman with some words above her that say it’s actually bad she’s taking off her clothes.

Often these posts are paid collaborations with OnlyFans creators. Many large right-wing cultural commentary accounts engage in paid collaboration with OnlyFans creators, where they repost some of the porn that creator made and disapprove of it. Then the creator leaves a reply to the tweet with a link to their OnlyFans profile. The goal is more paid subscriptions to their content, with the disapproving tweet serving as an ad. Porn has always relied on forbidden tension, but I think that this particular type of collaboration is more sinister.

What I think is worst about this is the way the stated disapproval acts as a shield, preventing the consumer from realizing they’re engaging with porn. Especially for young men, I think this makes them feel anxious and ashamed. They think they’re disapproving of porn, while falling even deeper into pornbrain, resenting themselves for watching it even more when they consume it and disapproving the way women act about sex in real life. They think they’re creating a standard of purity for themselves while violating that purity literally in the moment they’re creating it.

Isn’t coldhealing “TikTok anthropology” the same sort of thing? Aren’t you also signalboosting TikToks that you dislike to share them with an audience? No, honestly. I like the things that I post. I don’t like every aspect of everything, but I’m also sincerely interested in the aspects that I dislike, and want to understand them. I know other people interact with the TikToks because they say they dislike them, but I think they like it too, the same way these people say they dislike the porn but actually like it.

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White Lotus has been very successful. Its first season, set in Hawaii, was a class satire, intended to be a one-off six-episode run about rich people at a nice hotel. It did well, so HBO ran it back and made another season. The second season, set at a resort in Italy, was a sex satire. It took the form of the first season and deepened it beyond just class. The second season did well, so the audience and social relevance of White Lotus grew even more, and it was renewed for a third season. With the continued success of the show, each season has expanded one episode longer than the season before. And more characters die in the finale with each successive season, with higher stakes and more drama.

Season 3, set in Thailand, is still a social satire about rich people at a nice hotel. It takes on class and sex, but also religion, purpose, and death. The episodes are beautifully plotted, especially episode 5, the full moon episode, where all the characters have late nights during full moon parties. But while the episodes are well-plotted together, each character group goes through their arcs mostly separately.

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Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate

These three are longtime female friends, now in their early forties, reuniting on a girls' trip to Thailand. Jaclyn is a celebrity actress, famous enough to be recognized by other guests at the hotel. Laurie is a successful businesswoman, who’s dedicated her life to her office job, sometimes to the detriment of her personal life. She’s divorced, struggling to raise her daughter. Kate has a traditionally happy life; she lives in Austin Texas, has kids and a successful husband.

The friendship between the three women seems supportive from the outside, but often times two of the women team up on one of the other:

• Jaclyn and Kate gossip about Laurie’s career, the drama of her divorce, and her struggles with her child.

• Jaclyn and Laurie unite against Kate when she implies she voted for Donald Trump.

• Throughout the season, Jaclyn encourages Laurie to have sex with a hot male hotel worker. When it nearly happens Jaclyn has sex with him instead. Kate and Laurie unite and gossip over it, but Laurie gets upset, which then causes Jaclyn and Kate to unite against her.

Despite the tension, the three of them are together at the end of the season. Laurie has sex with a different man, a friend of the hot hotel worker. It isn’t totally fulfilling because he asks her for money, but helps her feel more valid. Jaclyn apologizes to Laurie for taking the hot hotel worker from her. And then, to end their time at the hotel, Jaclyn and Kate both first give sincere but shallow toasts to their friendship, followed by an emotionally vulnerable toast to their friendship from Laurie. Laurie admits a lot of her own struggles, and forgives the other two women and affirms their importance to her.

I thought this plotline was very sweet and well-executed. Laurie is a strong character. She doesn’t develop as a person, or find an answer to her problems, but the archetype of a woman who’s successful on paper but lost in her career and personal life was so portrayed with a lot of empathy.

Belinda and Greg

Belinda appeared in White Lotus S1, and Greg appeared in both prior seasons. Belinda is a hotel wellness worker at the White Lotus hotel chain’s Hawaii location, giving massages but aspiring to start her own business. In the first season, Belinda met a wealthy woman, Tania, who promised to give her money so she could start her own massage business. Tania forgot about that promise, Greg married Tania, and then Greg had Tania killed to inherit her money at the end of S2.

In S3, Belinda is visiting the Thailand White Lotus location to learn from a worker there, named Pornchai. Pornchai and Belinda have a brief romantic entanglement, spending the night together during the full moon episode. They clearly like each other, and discuss opening a wellness center together. While she’s in Thailand, Belinda recognizes Greg at the hotel. Greg has moved to Thailand, living in a mansion and going by a different name. Occasionally he comes down to the hotel to hang out. Greg is clearly in hiding because what happened with Tania, so he makes Belinda an offer for $100,000 to not tell authorities about him.

Belinda balks at the offer, calling it blood money. She can’t imagine taking money to hide the murder of her friend. But she’s pushed by her son Zion, who arrives at the hotel in the middle of the season. He tells her she should go back to Greg and ask for more money. They return to Greg together and ask for $5,000,000 instead of $100,000. Greg says no, but Belinda then turns her initial sincere “blood money” concerns into performatively storming out of the room as a negotiation tactic. Her son closes the deal. Greg sends her the money and she celebrates. Belinda immediately pays for her son to a wellness treatment, and decides to leave Thailand the next day. She’s not even thinking about her longheld aspiration to start a business, she just wants time to feel like she’s rich now. Once she has the money, she becomes cold to Pornchai, telling him “things have changed for me”. She doesn’t tell him about the money, and ends their relationship.

I thought this was another strong plotline. I couldn’t tell where it was going until the last episode, but the resolution ties it all together. It’s sad to see it so clearly, but there’s a price for everything. Belinda was a pure and kind person, but five million dollars would change her life, so she compromised her ethics. The way she treats Pornchai after shows how the money changes her, and makes the ending even more sinister.

Rick and Chelsea

Rick is an older and emotionally troubled alcoholic. Chelsea is his much younger girlfriend. She’s naive and sweet, a spiritual girl who likes astrology. She's fond of Rick despite his flaws. She tries to engage Rick with the spiritualism that’s important to her, but he doesn’t care that much. He doesn’t try very hard at the meditation classes at the hotel. He ignores Chelsea often, he’s dismissive of what she says. At one point he lets poisonous snakes out of a cage, and one bites her, but through all this Chelsea remains loyal to him.

About halfway through the season Rick leaves the hotel to go to Bangkok. He reveals to Chelsea that the reason he brought them Thailand is so he could meet the man who killed his father. The man is named Jim, and he owns this White Lotus hotel. He’s a wealthy real estate developer, who killed Rick’s father as he did whatever he could to gain power in Thailand. Rick believes Jim took his happy childhood away from him, so he wants to meet him; maybe to kill him, maybe just to tell him how much emotional turmoil he’s caused him. When Rick meets Jim, he finds the man he built up in his head is old and frail. Rick tells Jim the story of how he ruined his life, and knocks him over in his chair, but doesn’t kill or hurt him.

After the confrontation, Rick returns to the hotel, and for a brief moment him and Chelsea are happily reunited. Rick tells her “the monkey is off my back”, that he’s free from the inner torment he’s had. For a minute the story acts like it believes him. Rick seems to actually engage with Chelsea, and tells her that the plan is for the two of them to be together forever. But Jim comes from Bangkok to the hotel. Jim walks up to Rick, calls Rick’s mother a slut, and says he wasn’t missing out on much with his father. Rick is consumed with rage again. He tries to calm down, tries to get a session with the spiritual therapist that he had previously ignored, but she’s busy and he can’t control himself. While waiting for his therapist, he accidentally runs into Jim, and this time he shoots him. As Jim dies, Jim’s wife tells Rick that Jim was Rick’s father. Jim dies, Rick shoots security guards and kills them, but his girlfriend Chelsea is hit by a bullet from a security guard and dies. Rick dramatically carries her body, and is shot and killed by another guard while he holds her.

I liked the concept here. Chelsea is faithful to Rick in a way that feels like love as pure commitment, and that’s touching. The way Rick almost gets the monkey off his back and then regresses feels central to the ideas the show is going for. But the bloodbath ending felt over-the-top, compared to the subdued social dynamics that White Lotus does well. I especially don’t think the explicit reveal that Jim was Rick’s dad was needed. It’s implied during their first confrontation, and it could have been left unstated.

Gaitok and Mook

Gaitok is a security guard for the hotel, and Mook is a woman who works at the hotel. Gaitok likes Mook, but Mook doesn’t reciprocate. She encourages him to aspire for more and be successful at his job to earn her affection. Early in the season, there’s a robbery at the hotel, which Gaitok fails to stop, and that’s a small humiliation for him. Later, Gaitok learns information about who committed the robbery (it’s the hot hotel worker that Jaclyn had sex with), but he doesn’t act on the information. The hot hotel worker confronts him first, realizing Gaitok knows, and tells him it will ruin his life and maybe even get him killed. In the finale Gaitok is the guard who shoots Rick. The ending implies that it got him a promotion he wanted driving the hotel owner’s wife. Mook seems impressed.

I don’t have strong opinions on this plotline. It’s a little dark what Mook wants from Gaitok to earn her affection. And it’s a little dark the way Gaitok finds purpose pleasing the people around him; he does kill Rick but doesn’t report the robbers, and the main difference was that he was explicitly asked to kill Rick.

Tim, Victoria, Saxon, Piper, and Lochlan

This is a family of five, visiting Thailand on vacation, staying at the White Lotus Hotel. The main purpose of the visit is because the daughter Piper is entering her senior year of college and wants to write a philosophy thesis on monks in Thailand.

• Piper is the middle daughter, shy and reserved, but idealistic. She’s resentful of her family’s wealth, and sees the Buddhist monk’s rejection of material possessions as a way to reject the emptiness of her family’s American consumerism.

• Saxon is the oldest son. He’s a former frat bro, obsessed with going to the gym, but also masturbation and sex. He accuses Piper of being a virgin. He masturbates with his brother in the next room. He drinks protein shakes out of the hotel room blender, and flirts with every attractive woman at the hotel.

• Lochlan is the youngest son. He’s a senior in college, so his identity isn’t set yet. He’s pulled between Piper and Saxon, at times wanting to be more masculine like Saxon, and at times wanting to be more spiritual like Piper.

Lochlan is an important part of Saxon’s plot. Saxon helps Lochlan talk to girls, to teach him to be a man, while not being fully competent at doing that himself. Lochlan sometimes looks at Saxon’s body in a way that seems homosexual, in parallel with admiration for Saxon’s masculinity. During the full moon episode, Saxon and Lochlan do drugs and have a threesome together. Lochlan has sex with the girl, while Saxon lays beside watching him. While he has sex, Lochlan gives a handjob to his brother so Saxon can participate too. After the drugs wear off, Saxon is humiliated, and refuses to talk to Lochlan about it. But in some ways he grows from the experience. He befriends Chelsea while Rick is away, and reads a spiritual book she gives him. He engages with her in a deeper way than pursuit of sex, although at times it still seems like that’s what he wants from her.

Lochlan is also an important part of Piper’s plot. When Piper reveals to her family that she wants to live in Thailand once she graduates, not just write a thesis, Lochlan is the first to support her. When Victoria asks Piper to spend the night in at the monk community in Thailand where she wants to live, Lochlan spends the night with her.

That night is the turning point for Piper’s character. Lochlan loves the monastery, and says that he wants to live there, beginning his own spiritual journey. But Piper doesn’t want to do that herself anymore. As Piper talks to her parents about the night she spent at the monastery she converts back to wanting material things. She complains about how the food wasn’t organic, how the room wasn’t air-conditioned. We see her shopping at the hotel’s jewelry store with her mom, and she wears a luxury printed dress on the boat home instead of plain white clothes.

During all this, the father of the children Tim is going through a ton of emotional stress, and tells no one, and no notices. Tim is a high-powered financial worker who made a lot of money and gave his family a good life. Early in the season, he learns that he’s under accusation for financial crimes. He and his family will lose everything. Because it’s a wellness resort, the rest of his family does not have their phones, so they don’t learn about this. Tim considers suicide. He has a series of conversations, first with Victoria, then with Saxon, then with Piper, that makes him believe that they’d be unable to live without the wealth he’d given them but has now lost. He spends more and more time thinking about suicide, not just for himself, but for his entire family.

While this is going on, Victoria, Tim’s wife and the mother of the three kids, doesn’t change much. She takes a lot of pills, and is of out of touch with reality. Tim starts doing those pills as he spirals. Narratively, Victoria serves as a way to make Tim’s character more clear. She lives an out-of-touch life as a consequence of the immense wealth Tim has given the family. Parker Posey’s performance of a pilled-out mom is memorable, but the character doesn’t grow much.

In the final episode, Tim takes poison fruit from a tree at the hotel and blends it into piña coladas to give everyone in his family, besides Lochlan. He thinks Lochlan could live without material things, but the rest of the family couldn’t. They all start to drink, and it tastes bad. Tim abruptly changes his mind, lying that there’s something wrong with the coconut milk so they stop drinking. He chooses for his family to live.

But, Tim doesn’t clean the blender. The next morning, Lochlan makes a protein shake in the blender, not Saxon. In their last conversation, Saxon had been embarrassed about the threesome, and told Lochlan he needed to become a man by himself. Lochlan drinks the remnants of the poison piña colada in his protein shake, thinking Saxon had already made a smoothie that morning. (The mechanics of this are unclear, because Lochlan was in the room when the piña coladas were made. All of them were in the room when the piña coladas were made, and it seems so unlikely that the blender wouldn’t have been cleaned, and that he would get confused like this. But anyways.) Lochlan, the one Tim didn’t want to kill, drinks the poison smoothie, vomits by the pool, and passes out. It’s briefly implied that he dies, but then he wakes up, in the arms of his father. Lochlan tells Tim that he “saw God”.

Finally, at the very end of the show, the whole family gets their phones back as they’re on the boat home. Tim knows that they’ll all find out about his financial crimes, so he tells them that “things are going to be different, and we’ll make it through as a family” as they reconnect to cellular service and learn about the financial crimes. We don’t see how any of them react to the news.

Like Rick and Chelsea, I think this ending felt a little over-the-top. The near death for Lochlan is very dramatic, but it also is irrelevant. The fact that Lochlan almost dies doesn’t impact any of the characters, or change Tim’s attitude.

But more importantly I think the ending was incomplete and rushed.

• Tim’s choice stop his family from drinking the poison piña coladas isn’t explained, or given any room to breath emotionally, so it feels like a death fakeout more than a character moment. He changes his mind about killing everyone for no apparent reason. I don’t think he should have killed his whole family, but it would have been nice to hear some words about why he now wanted to live.

• I don’t mind Piper’s regression to materialism. I think it’s thematically interesting and very funny, but it felt abrupt.

• Saxon’s ending felt ambiguous. In some ways he shows improvement, but in others he’s still very caught up in masculine shame. I don’t think we needed to know how he reacts to the loss of his family wealth, or how he reacts to the news of his friend Chelsea’s death, or how he reacted to Lochlan’s near-death, but the end of the show gave us none of those, or anything else for Saxon. His character basically ends at the full moon threesome in episode 5, when I thought that was an interesting setup for more.

• Even for Lochlan, who had less of a plot of his own, we don’t hear much about how his near-death experience impacted him. We don’t find out if he will go to the monastery; we don’t even see him tell his parents about that.

The ending felt more in service of the dramatic moments of the family and Lochlan nearly dying than it did finishing their arcs as characters. That’s sad, because this was a great set of characters who could have had a special ending.

Frank

Frank only appears in Bangkok, but he’s a great character. He’s Rick’s friend, and he helps Rick get to Jim. When he first meets Rick, he delivers a monologue about how he came to Thailand to have sex with asian women and then realized he wanted to be one. This monologue is popular as a joke online, but I think it’s one of the best things in this season. It’s saying something really interesting things about desire, which tie into the larger goals of the show.

I moved here because, well, I had to leave the States, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls, you know? And when I got here, oh I was like kid in a candy store. If you’ve got money, no attachments, nothing to do… I started partying, it got wild.

I was picking up girls every night, always different ones; petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies at night. I was out of control, I became insatiable, and, you know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? Because she's the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could fuck a million women, I'd still never be satisfied — maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.

So, one night, I took home some girl who turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me, and It was kind of magical. And I got in my head, what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me, and to feel that.

So, I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over and fuck me, got a guy that looked a lot like me. Then, I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls — I thought: I look pretty hot. And then this guy came over and railed the shit out of me, then I got addicted to that — some nights, three, four guys would come over and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay, and at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl who’d just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy is fucking me, and I’d think: “I am her and I'm fucking me.”

Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor; a metaphor for what? Are we are our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl? … I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer, then I realized, I gotta stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn't so hard, being celibate, though, it’s… I still miss that pussy, man.

Frank is sober he meets up with Rick, but reverts to alcoholism with the stress of the plan to meet Jim. Once he starts drinking he immediately goes on a bender and does harder drugs. He calls up Asian strippers to their hotel in Bangkok. Rick doesn’t really care and leaves him there. In the ending montage of the show Frank is shown back a Buddhist temple, restarting his journey. He’s a small character, but he feels emblematic of the show’s larger thoughts on Americans in the East.

Where the prior seasons were thematically united around class and sex, this season is broader. I don’t have any problem with that. Each character arc has interesting things to say about class and sex and purpose. The season portrays Western interaction with Thailand and Eastern spiritual wellness in an interesting way. It’s not entirely cynical; Chelsea’s spiritualism is faithful and endearing. But most of the other characters engage with Buddhism and yoga and the East in a way that feels incomplete, and that’s criticized in interesting ways. I will tune in for the next season of White Lotus because I expect it to continue to say interesting things.

What I worry is that White Lotus will have to keep upping the stakes. Each season of White Lotus has a death, which is revealed at the beginning and then hangs over the plot until the finale. But the deaths in the first two seasons felt thematically central, whereas in this season the deaths felt played for drama. And even deaths that don’t happen are milked for drama. The family’s near-death is milked for tension, and Belinda worries about death, thinking she might get killed by Greg if she doesn’t take his offer. Predicting “who will die in White Lotus” was a big conversation on social media, and I just don’t think that’s the best way for a satire with this great of characters to be viewed. But it leaned into that.

This season is still great. It’s one of the best shows on television. What White Lotus does better than any other show is create characters who feel contemporary and relevant. I hope it focuses on that, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still really inspiring as art. White Lotus has earned its large audience, but I think the audience is pushing it into being worse at what it does well.

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“You return from distant lands and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use then of all your traveling?”

-Kublai Khan to Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Last Friday I visited Venice. I went to Italy for work, and stopped there before flying back to America. I spent just five hours in the city, but that felt like enough for a place I’d seen in images many times before.

Venice didn’t feel real to me but it was beautiful. It’s two miles off the coast, connected to mainland Italy by a long bridge, or by boat, so already it feels so separate from the rest of the world. The city consists of a series of small islands linked by bridges. Between the bridges are canals, the watery thoroughfares of Venice, where its famous gondoliers paddle. It’s impractical to live on a canal island city in our modern world of cars, but Venice has been preserved into the modern world in the exact shape of its medieval mercantile origins.

I drove a rental car across the bridge to Venice. At the front of the city there are a few giant parking decks, a big roundabout for buses to drop people off, and a train station. Beyond that point, there are no intrusive modern buildings anywhere, and no cars. It’s just quaint narrow cobbled streets and centuries-old buildings, on every inch of Venice’s original layout.

Venice’s preserved cityscape gave me a glimpse of what day-to-day life might have been like for someone in the 1200s. I imagined someone waking up in mercantile Venice, coming down from their apartment to the same streets I stood on, walking to the harbor to unpack goods, spending the afternoon in one of the many town squares, and spending the evening in one of the many Catholic churches. This is similar to how I think people feel at Civil War reenactments.

The original medieval Venice, once a vibrant living place, has today turned itself into a museum, or a theme park. Nearly everyone walking through the city alongside me was a tourist, like me, visiting a famous place they'd heard of before. The place has been preserved for our eyes, and restaurants and gift shops have been built on every corner for our sake. I enjoyed my walk through the Venice theme park. I liked the canals, the buildings, and the statues. Everything was exciting and new to my fresh eyes. In America we don’t have buildings this old, or water quite this close to us.

Venetian streets are winding, with no grid like modern cities have. Sometimes the streets pass underneath buildings. It was hard to navigate the city with Google Maps, because my phone couldn’t get a signal down the skinny gaps between buildings. But I never felt at risk of getting lost in a way where I’d be unsafe or inconvenienced. Everything was clean. There aren’t homeless people, and there’s no garbage on the streets.

I was guided at all times by yellow metal signs posted on the stone walls, which read “Per S. Marco” or “Per Rialto” with an arrow. These signs point tourists toward the two largest attractions in Venice.

• The Rialto bridge is in the center of the city. It’s a white marble bridge, which itself is very striking, but also gives views of Venice’s central Grand Canal.

• Piazza San Marco is at the edge of the city near the water. It holds Venice’s largest cathedral, St. Mark’s Basilica. It has pillars made of colored granite, and a gold-leafed ceiling. The colors are over-the-top to modern eyes and it’s hard to imagine how they felt to the many older eyes that have seen it. Nearby is the Doge’s palace, which I sadly did not enter due to time constraints. The plaza also has a big clocktower which gives panoramic views of Venice. The clocktower looks original from the outside, but on the inside it’s been modified to hold an elevator to bring tourists to the top.

Once I finished in the plaza, I walked back through the city towards my car, and I was guided by more yellow signs.

The main reason Venice has been preserved is for the experience I had there; a walk through its stone streets, over watery canals, past gift shops and restaurants and ice cream parlors on the way to the two main tourist areas. It’s a nice way to spend a day; almost everyone would enjoy it. But it doesn’t feel like a real city because there’s nothing happening to it. Venice is preserved in amber by human efforts, against the advents of modern convenience. No families live there, no corporations set up offices there. It’s a story now. I think Venice might feel boring after a while, because it doesn’t feel real, but I’m glad I saw it once with my own eyes.

To be clear, this is not a new insight. Venice has been this way for a while. It’s how Thomas Mann described it a hundred years ago in Death in Venice, as a city that’s distinctly not alive compared to Paris or Berlin. But I think that it’s become even more true over time. Technology like cars and highways pushed Venice farther from being alive as a city. And more recent technology has made Venice more relevant as a tourist destination. Smartphones allow anyone to take a photo in Venice and leave themselves in the canals on their Instagram grid forever, even if they’re only in Venice for a single day. Venice can be a part of your identity if you’re just there once, so the tourism means more.

But I don’t want to be too harsh to Venice. Other cities are like this too when we travel. Walking through a city to see its famous landmarks, eat nice food, and take pictures is how many vacations are structured. This is especially true for Americans visiting Europe, because it’s a contrast to how we live our lives normally. We like to go to Europe and see the old things that have been preserved. We like to walk around instead of using our cars. Even in more alive European cities, we spend our vacation days like this.

Venice is a calibrated mechanical experience, which on paper isn’t fun, because as humans we want to be independent agents in the world, making our own paths. Alive cities make us feel that way more; a tourist could in theory stumble into a Parisian fashion party when they visit, and change the course of the world. Venice is more beautiful than most cities, maybe all cities, so it can get away without giving tourists that feeling of agency. Everyone visiting knows the Venice we see today isn’t organic or alive, and that we can’t make a mark on it. We’re going there to walk around the museum.

Is there anything wrong with that? Could walking around seeing pretty things be all we need? I think so. But we can do that anywhere, if we know how to look at the world.

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On Trump’s second inauguration day, one of the items on his urgent Day 1 agenda was to rename two natural features of the United States. He did this through an executive order called “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness”. The first was to restore the former name of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. It was previously called Mt. McKinley and now will be again. The second was to rename the Gulf of Mexico to something totally new: the Gulf of America.

The Denali to McKinley rename doesn’t bother me much. It’s not a clear positive; Alaska’s state representatives oppose the rename, as Alaskans themselves prefer the name Denali. But Mt. McKinley has precedent as a previous name for the mountain. Denali is an older name and a beautiful name, but this rename comes from Trump’s personal affection for William McKinley as a tariff president, which I think is cute, even if historically misinformed. I hope it’s changed back to Denali, but I’m fine with it for this Trump term as a brief kitschy return.

On the other hand, the “Gulf of America” name change is hard to justify. The official justification is due to the Gulf’s importance to our country, it should be referred to as the Gulf of America, because that sounds more important. There’s also an unstated but deliberate slight to Mexico, by removing their country’s name from the Gulf to replace it with our own. It’s also intended to be patriotic. Having a large body of water with the name America might evoke national pride.

My strong opinion here is based on linguistic norms. No one has ever referred to the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” before. This wasn’t a rename Trump talked about often during his campaign; it wasn’t proposed until the weeks before his inauguration. Americans are not familiar with this term to refer to this body of water.

Changing an established name to a new one that it hasn’t been used before is hard, as anyone who’s watched the switch from Twitter to X Dot Com knows. It can happen, but it takes time. It happens more quickly in official institutions, with editors who have full-time jobs to review which names are used in writing, but in the day-to-day language of everyday people, it takes time to change. It takes work to change. I question the value of that work, and so I question the value of this rename.

Compared to a mountain in the cold, barren, unconnected northwest corner of America, the Gulf of Mexico comes up more often. So this second rename has been more noticeable.

More interesting than the rename of the Gulf is how this rename became a power play to assert loyalty to the new regime. Because the new name is so unfamiliar, use of the name “Gulf of America” signals allegiance to Trump, because there’s no other reason to adopt it. It’s not a name anyone would naturally use otherwise.

Florida was the first state to use “Gulf of America” in its official documents, adopting it the day after Trump signed the executive order. A week later, Chevron started using it in earnings documents and on their official website. Google held out and did not change it on Google Maps until it was officially updated in the US Geographic Names government system. But as of this week they have, only for users in America. Wikipedia, a global nonprofit institution, has not yet changed the name of its Gulf of Mexico article, but Mike Solana is on Twitter (or X Dot Com) calling for them to do so, warning that otherwise there will be “a problem”. For weeks, similar calls were made to Google. People opened up their phone and screenshot Google Maps still showing “Gulf of Mexico” and posted online asking why the name hadn’t changed yet, to rack a few thousand likes from people who agreed with them.

This language policing is similar to the language policing done by the left, which was opposed by the same individuals when the left was in power. These same people often mocked the unnatural term “Latinx”, and mocked the insistence on “pregnant people” over “pregnant women”, and mocked the change from “Kiev” to “Kyiv”, to make the name of the Ukrainian capital sound less Russian. They disliked topdown changes to the language they were used to, when it was the other side imposing the rules.

But now, with the old regime politically defeated, the language policing for “Gulf of America” is as widespread as the policing for the old terms ever was. And the support more fervent given the timeline. This change was announced last month, but so many people already know about it, and insist upon using the new name. It would take years for a term like “Latinx” to trickle through the old bureaucracy and into the vocabulary of individuals, but we move fast now.

Even though support for “Gulf of America” appears fervent and widespread, my read is that most people secretly don’t care. The language policing feels insincere. I think for many people this isn’t a subject they’re passionate about, but rather something to scroll past. Change is interesting. Internet language is often based on subtle vocabulary changes that signal belonging to specific groups. When one is endorsed by a political entity as powerful as the US Executive Branch, it gains even more significance. So, more than a sincere belief in the patriotic future empowered by “Gulf of America”, this is a fun subject to talk about on their phones, to see who is being being loyal to the new regime, through the same linguistic games they play every day.

“Gulf of America” is a bad rename, but if people truly cared about it, that would be better. For the renames that were supported by the old regime, many of the old elites sincerely believed the new words were more respectful or accurate. There were many others who didn’t sincerely believe in the terms and used them because they thought they should, or to signal loyalty. Still, a larger percentage of people cared about the changes for the real reasons, even if the reasoning wasn’t correct. My sense is that for “Gulf of America”, fewer people care, and supporting the rename is primarily about showing linguistic support for their winning side.

I think language policing is wrong at a fundamental level. If someone uses “Gulf of Mexico”, accidentally or intentionally, it shouldn’t be an issue. It shouldn’t even be noted. It’s the name it went by a month ago. People need time to learn new terms, and officially decreed language needs time to be accepted by the public. It also doesn’t matter if someone uses the wrong term here, because the old term is familiar to most people. There won’t be confusion to what body of water anyone is referring to.

But avoiding misunderstanding is not the point of this language policing, so of course the focus of the language policers is not on context, or forgiveness, or patience. The point of the policing is the policing. The point is to assess loyalty. Given the context of their opposition to the language policing of the prior regime, I don’t think that’s good. The new reigning culture should not adopt the criticized games of the old one and play them worse, with less spirit and less commitment.

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I went to see the Wicked film with my family this weekend. As I watched, I thought about how many layers of adaptation it took to bring us to this film. This movie is an idea refined over more than a hundred years through a series of previous adaptations across multiple mediums.

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The bottom layer is L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel, published in 1900. I read this book and some of its sequels in the mid-2000s when I was a child, in the wake of the Wicked musical hype. I didn’t love them that much, but I read a lot of YA fantasy at this time. Like many of the twenty-first century YA fantasies I read, this book is a story of a character from our world, in this case Dorothy from Kansas, discovering a new more magical world. She goes on a quest in that world and learns her own power, then goes home. That’s a powerful promise to a child, searching for art that can bring strength to their own life, and one of the reasons The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a commercially successful book.

It also was successful because its fantasy was compelling. The fantasies of 120 years ago are different from the fantasies we have now; maybe even more different than social manners, or technological landscape, or the many other lost parts of the world that older literature can create windows back to. That’s to say I’m not sure I can understand The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a fantasy on the terms it was written. This book was written before the refinement of fantasy into the mass-culture genre it is now. It feels like a bridge towards the sprawling complex fantasy worlds we know now from traditional folk-fairytales. The primal folk-fantasy of Oz, like a witch melted in water, cities of tiny munchkins, and talking scarecrows, is what drove this book’s popularity, and a crucial element of every adaptation after. These elements feel eternal, but with how far the genre has gone they also feel quaint and small. I find it hard to imagine a contemporary child getting lost in this world as a sincere fantasy, but they remain powerful elements.

While this book is a proto-fantasy, it’s also subversive of the fantasy genre. The titular Wizard, who Dorothy expects to save her, is a fraud, from the same banal America that she’s from, tricking the naive inhabitants of Oz with smoke and lights into thinking he’s more powerful than they are. The reveal of the fraudster wizard is at the heart of every Wizard of Oz adaptation, even the later Wicked, which claims to challenge the Wizard of Oz’s simplistic narrative. Though the fantasy of Oz persists through this subversion, it’s a harsh blow to the fantasy to reveal that what the hero had hoped might save them was never real.

The next layer of adaptation is MGM’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. This film is a faithful adaptation of the L. Frank Baum novel. If it changes anything, it makes the tone less subversive. The Wizard is less of a huckster than in the books; his fantastic Emerald City really is Emerald in the movie, where in the book it’s pure white, only appearing Emerald because of green glasses that the wizard tricks Dorothy and her friends into wearing.

This movie is still a fantasy, but it’s also a spectacle. At the time of release, this was one of the more extravagant but simultaneously accessible movies that Hollywood had produced. It famously transitions from black-and-white to color when Dorothy leaves boring Kansas and reaches Oz. The Wizard of Oz plays up the colorful beauty of Oz as an image on the screen to marvel at. The yellow brick road, the fantasy munchkins, and other fantasy elements from the book become more magical when it’s put on the screen. I think it was the capability of 1939’s technology and Hollywood practices to make a story like this visually compelling that drew it to adapt this 40-year-old novel; the visuals fit their capabilities perfectly.

In addition to its initial 1939 theatrical release, this film was also famously aired on American television networks starting in the 1950s and for decades after. This was a time when television was becoming the most accessible ways to consume media. Because it was shown so many times on television, The Wizard of Oz became a fixture in the American consciousness, one of our most widely known pieces of media. This is far beyond the impact of the original L. Frank Baum book.

Based on this fixture of American consciousness, Gregory Maguire wrote the novel Wicked, in 1995. The concept of this book is an exploration of the antagonist of the Wizard of Oz book and film. In the prior versions of the story she’s just “The Wicked Witch of the West”, pure evil without redeeming qualities. Maguire writes this book in an attempt to understand evil, backfitting a sympathetic prequel to explain why “the Wicked Witch of the West” could have been the way she is. Maguire gives the witch the name Elphaba, when the witch was totally unnamed in the prior layers of the stack, just a villain for Dorothy to defeat.

This is the only adaptation that I have not personally consumed so I won’t try to say too much. I have not read the book Wicked; having listened to the musical a few times reading all of the words of its narrative doesn’t sound interesting to me. My impression is that it’s a book about idealism and the best ways to do good, in a more complex and adult political fantasy set in the world from the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, is an outcast all her life, because she is born with green skin. She uncovers a secret conspiracy to stop the animals in Oz from speaking. She tries to get to the bottom of it, while growing up and learning her own power. She spends time with Glinda, who also appears in the Wizard of Oz book and film as the Good Witch of the South, serving guide to Dorothy in her conflict with the Wicked Witch of the West.

The Wizard of Oz is still a figure who our protagonist hopes might save her in this book. Now he’s not only a huckster, but he’s also Elphaba’s father, a father who let her down in the traditional oedipal narrative. He is part of the conspiracy, wants Elphaba for the power she really does possess. But she has purer ambitions than him. When her father lets her down, she becomes “The Wicked Witch of the West”, and then tries to lead a movement against him to save the animals on her own.

Wicked (2003) was a Broadway musical adaptation of this 1995 book, with songs written by Stephen Schwartz. Most books don’t get adapted for Broadway, and though the Wicked novel was commercially successful I don’t think it was obviously a candidate for a Broadway musical. That the The Wizard of Oz film is such a fixture in American consciousness helped here. Broadway musicals are a very competitive medium, and every bit of brand recognition helps. References to a big well-known American story like The Wizard of Oz ensured Wicked would be a low-risk Broadway musical.

From the novel’s sympathetic retelling of the witch’s life as political fantasy, the Wicked musical mines out a smaller and more theme-oriented story. The larger political fantasy world is stripped back, leaving an exploration of idealism, self-perception, and friendship. The story is centered around Glinda, the good witch, and Elphaba’s friendship. It opens with the death of the Wicked Witch, which happens at the end of the narrative of The Wizard of Oz, and then flashes back to far before that narrative, to the two witches as children together. Though one is the good witch and one is the bad, they have childhoods entangled together, each of them striving to the best they can in the world. Elphaba is idealistic and combative, wanting to change the world, while Glinda is conciliatory and wants to be kind. Glinda is also much more beloved by everyone around her, beautiful and blonde, while Elphaba has green skin, a metaphor for disability or race or whatever else you as a reader want it to be as an intractable fact of yourself that cannot be changed.

Each of the play’s two acts climaxes with songs about Glinda and Elphaba’s unique friendship. First, “Defying Gravity”, where Elphaba self-actualizes against the Wizard and decides to go off on her own, offering Glinda the chance to join her. However, Glinda chooses to stay, becoming Elphaba’s explicit enemy in the conflict with the Wizard. Then, in “For Good” Glinda and Elphaba meet for the last time and reflect on how their time together has shaped each of them.

The Wicked musical was successful, shortly becoming one of the most famous musicals ever. It’s played continuously on Broadway to this day, twenty years after its release, and will likely play a lot longer. Its style and tone was influential on high-budget Disney musical films, especially Frozen (2013), which casts the actress Idina Menzel, who played Elphaba in the Wicked musical, as its lead, and has a similar message of sisterly bonds for female self-actualization.

Finally, we have the new Wicked film (2024). Of all the layers in the sequence, I think this one is the least ambitious, despite having the largest budget. It takes the 2003 Wicked musical and transfers it faithfully to the screen, staying true to the tone and content. It expands on some areas, but these additions feel like an expression of such strong love for the original musical that they can't help but indulge in spending more time with it.

If this new adaptation changes anything, it makes Wicked more accessible to the younger audience who would watch musical movies. Wicked's novel was written for adults, and the musical likely targeted an adult audience as well, as adults are typically the audience for brand new Broadway musicals. But this adaptation is rated PG, there were a lot of kids in the crowd when I saw it, and they played a commercial for the upcoming Disney musical Moana 2 just before the movie started. They age down the tone to an audience that might have interest in the content. This adaptation, made 21 years after the Wicked musical, better understands its cultural and market niche, from the way a story like Frozen based on Wicked’s influence was so relevant to young girls, and the way Wicked itself was relevant.

Though it’s faithful to the prior layer in the sequence, and isn’t doing much new, this adaptation layer still can justify its existence because the Broadway musical Wicked is inaccessible. Musicals are an art form that exists primarily on physical stages in major cities, with expensive tickets and significant time commitments to consume the art. The Wicked musical does have a soundtrack, which in some ways is its cultural remnant more than its stage perfromance, but there’s a significant amount of dialog in the musical and much of it is lost in the soundtrack. Film is permanent, it can mix music and dialog, and anyone who can afford a streaming service can watch it. Especially for the younger audience it feels like it’s trying to reach this is valuable, even if the movie isn’t doing anything fresh.

Paul Skallas tweets and writes about “stuck culture”, saying that our contemporary culture exists in endless reference to itself. He cites Hollywood's careful calibrated churn of sequels that are guaranteed to be commercially successful as an example of this. This film, Wicked (2024), is certainly an example of that. But I think this stack of adaptations also serves as a counterexample of just how long culture has been “stuck”. Even in 1939, Hollywood adapted a 1900 novel as their big spectacle movie. In the 1950s, networks aired fifteen-year-old movies on TV. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, The Wizard of Oz was chosen as a commercially safe reference point for new spinoff properties.

Yes, this new Wicked adaptation is especially safe and restrained. Not just safe in reference to the Wicked musical, it also leans on references to the original Wizard of Oz book and film narratives to which Wicked serves as a prequel. There are many jokes that rely on dramatic irony of events in the original Wizard of Oz narrative, like how Elphaba will eventually be melted with a bucket of water by Dorothy. There are a few slightly silly prequel moments, such as explanations for how Elphaba got her pointy witch hat and how the yellow brick road became yellow. I think these prequel reference moments are not great, and undermine what is otherwise an independent narrative. In many ways, Wicked is more meaningful than The Wizard of Oz in our contemporary culture, and this new film doesn't need to rely on such an old story

But my point is we’ve been doing safe references to existing properties for a while. That doesn’t justify lack of creativity; I think art that is totally unrestrained, like the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz fantasy book by L. Frank Baum, is more important than adaptation. That’s the real creative act here, but there were creative artistic touches at every further step along the way, especially in the Wicked novel and musical. They changed the original narrative and made it into something new, with a more moral subtlety than the original Wizard of Oz fantasy. This film does not do that; it just transposes the musical onto the screen. But it wasn’t trying to do more.

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On October 20th 2024, TikTok user realdonaldtrump posted a video of the former and possibly future president working at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the state that’s most likely to decide the presidential election in two weeks. The video is titled “I WORKED A SHIFT AT MCDONALD’S” in all caps, which is really similar language to the titles of Mr. Beast videos (“I Survived 7 Days in an Abandoned City”, “I Spent 7 Days in Solitary Confinement”). Trump has had a lot of content-minded YouTubers visit him in his exiled Florida palace at Mar-A-Lago in the leadup to the 2024 election, and this video feels like it comes from the YouTuber world. It’s dense, so viewers don’t have to watch too long, and tries its best to look casual, even though the dense information in it is very calibrated.

The video is 18 seconds long. It opens with the sound of a bell ringing, and a video of Trump standing in the front area of a McDonald’s. Trump is talking to the manager of the McDonald’s, explaining at first over the sound of the still-ringing bell “I’m looking for a job, and I always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phony story so…” The captions for the dialog are in the default TikTok caption font, even though the video editors here easily could have easily chosen fonts that were more presidential.

For the first few seconds of the video we see Trump speaking that dialog in the McDonald’s lobby, but while he talks the video cuts to shots of him working. First we see Trump going behind the counter, then it quick cuts forward a few seconds to another moment from the exact same camera angle where Trump is handed an apron, then cuts forward again to him wearing an apron. Next we see Trump standing in the drive-through window from behind, before cutting back to Trump in the lobby talking to the manager again. Then we see two shots of Trump preparing fries; one shot of him putting the fries in the McDonald’s fry box, and then another of him shaking the fries in the fry basket as he cooks. All of this while those two sentences play, in the first ten seconds of the video.

The dialog is cut off in the middle of the second sentence, as Trump says “so…”, although maybe he just trailed off there as he was talking. The remaining eight seconds of the video are all shots of Trump in the McDonald’s drive-through window, but this time from the outside. It transitions with a shot of Trump opening the drive-through window, and then the window is open for the rest of the video. It’s shot all from the same camera, but like earlier in the video when he puts on the apron it cuts forward to get to the interesting moments faster. Mostly we’re watching Trump hand McDonald’s bags to people in their cars. His original line of dialog from inside the lobby is interrupted by an unseen customer in their car off camera who says “President Trump!” to which Trump replies “well that’s a good looking group, hello everybody”, before waving out the window. Then Trump says “I’m having a lot of fun here everybody!” to a different a customer. And then quieter, to end the video, Trump says “Look at all the fake news over there” to another customer in the drive-through, which feels like sort of non-sequitur with the subject matter of the rest of the video, and it’s unclear what kind of fake news he’s talking about. But everyone knows Trump talks about fake news. And that’s the end. If you’re watching it on TikTok the video restarts from the beginning, back to Trump in the lobby with the bell ringing again.

The video is captioned “I’ve officially worked longer at McDonald’s than Kamala!”, which is purportedly the reason why Trump is working this shift at McDonald’s. His opponent Kamala Harris apparently claimed to have worked at McDonald’s but actually never worked there. I didn’t hear that story before I saw this video, and it kind of feels irrelevant to the real message of the video. There are plenty of other things Trump could have made a video against Kamala Harris about, but he chose to go to McDonald’s. And by the end of the video he’s talking about fake news, which feels like a return to Trump as a character more than one final joke on Kamala. It doesn’t really feel about owning Kamala, although the formal structure is a little similar to owning the libs online content.

McDonald’s is the true American fast food; in every city in the country, the most visited fast food chain. Working at McDonald’s has been the punchline to jokes in American culture for years, the lowest possible status job, but Trump inhabits the space without making it entirely a joke. Trump looks natural in the McDonald’s, wearing the black and yellow apron over his red tie and suit. He looks like he’s having a good time, like he says he is in the video. It feels silly shallow to criticize this as a stunt to make him look like an everyman, even though that’s the stated message of the video. Trump knows it doesn’t look like that. Obviously the restaurant is closed, there’s been two assassination attempts against Trump over the past year. The video feels empty, it feels staged, and I think that comes across to most viewers and doesn’t matter. The image is still compelling despite that, as theater.

Trump has been a president of images in many ways. One of his other great images, from his first term, was when he catered fast food to the White House, when celebrating Clemson’s win over Alabama in the 2019 College Football Playoff National Championship Presented By AT&T. Trump always looks very natural around brands, himself sort of being a brand as much as a person. But the symbols of American dignity being mixed with American brands, fast food in the White House, the president in the McDonald’s drive-through, is very aesthetically compelling. It’s all America, but it’s two parts of America that didn’t always want to touch. Trump, as a political figure, has removed so much of the aesthetic dignity around politics, which is in my opinion why he’s been hated by legacy politicians, more than any policy or even action he’s taken. Other contemporary Republicans want the same policy actions as him, or if anything more radical action, but it’s the assault on dignity in politics that uniquely he does.

Back in 2015 when Trump arrived on the political scene we didn’t have content this refined. Content has grown incredibly competitive in the algorithm age. I don’t think Trump’s team is uniquely gifted at content; a lot of same content strategies of dense content that looks casual are being employed by Kamala Harris’s campaign too. But this feels like just one of best encapsulations of the Trump era, Trump at McDonald’s,  shooting a video with the same content strategies as YouTubers, making a dense vibes-based moment built on subverting political norms for millions of Americans to view as art as they scroll their phones. Right now, a day after posting the video, it has 27.9 million views on TikTok, and 3.5 million faves. Images from Trump’s McDonald’s shift are doing well on other platforms too. I’m sure it’s been seen by at least 25% of American voters already.

I don’t know what this video means for the present, whether Trump will win this election, who will come after him in the Republican Party, what culture the Democrats can build in response. But I do know we’ll see more posts like this in 2028.

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My First Book opens with the C.S. Lewis quote “for the present is the point at which time touches eternity”, which feels like this book’s mantra. The writing that follows leans on internet language, the language of a present, in a way that feels like the defining feature of the book. I haven’t been reading much lately, since I’ve been spending way too much time on the computer and the physical manifestations of the computer in New York City, but when I found a moment to read this book, the internet language of My First Book was easy to get through. I carried the book around on the subway and could get through at least one story every time I opened it.

For some background, Honor Levy and I are Twitter mutuals and have been for a while. We’re the same age, and have been posting around similar people for a long time. She moved to New York City before I did, and became part of “the downtown New York scene” that I sometimes see in real life now that I’m here, but she lives in Los Angeles now. Her internet presence is also wide-ranging, not just Twitter but also Instagram and TikTok and podcasts, and I didn’t follow all of it as it was happening. So we existed in the same world, but I didn’t know much of what was going on with her until My First Book came out.

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I’m unsure what to call My First Book, besides a book, and that’s what I want to write about in this review. Short story collection is the closest term in our current vocabulary, but this is only kind of a short story collection. The longest section of My First Book by far is “Z is for Zoomer”, which is a glossary of Honor’s takes on different Gen-Z internet words: sometimes definitions, sometimes jokes, sometimes art, and sometimes opinions. It takes up 50+ pages of the book’s 200 pages. Technically, it can be argued to be a short story, because there are two older male millennial characters in a frame narrative who sometimes appear in the explanations of the internet words, but I don’t believe in technicalities in art. The section is well-written and makes Honor Levy’s command of internet-English very clear, but it’s more a glossary than a short story.

“Short story” also feels wrong as a description for most of the rest of My First Book. The stories “Love Story” and “Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy” and “Pillow Angels” feel more like riffing on a subject in internet language jokes than stories. “Love Story” is about a boy and a girl who’ve never met irl in love online, “Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy” is about a desirable(?) boy, and “Pillow Angels” is about girls at a sleepover. These pieces are abstract, without much plot beyond the few word summaries I gave. They’re rhythmic, with lots of repeated sentence structure, and have a lot of jokes, from hapologroups to Epstein Island. There’s a lot of edgy internet language, but Honor is also well-versed in Tumblr and Reddit and Facebook, so her writing feels broad across the whole internet. I can see these three pieces doing well at downtown Manhattan readings because you don’t have to pay attention to the whole thing to get each individual joke. These feel closer to poems or songs, sequences of ideas about a theme.

My First Book also includes “Good Boys”, which appeared in The New Yorker as a “flash fiction story”. It’s just a few pages long, with the least digital language of any piece in the collection, only a brief “the sky was pink like Kirby”. It’s describes young boys and girls on a roof in Paris, at a moment where the boys describe certain women as dogs, but not these girls on the roof with them now who “get it”. And so it’s piece of writing about how it feels to be a girl who’s accepted by these boys. It’s a good piece, but it’s a stretch to call it a short story, and The New Yorker didn’t call it that. It feels more like an image; a single moment that Honor expounds upon over a few pages.

One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “Hall of Mirrors”, which describes a upper-class college girl who volunteers at an elementary school, near a factory that produces glass, tying it back to the history of mirrors, and the Hall of Mirrors at Louis XIV’s Versailles estate, which the narrator visited when she was younger and these kids might not visit. This one is one of the closest to a traditional short story, although like “Good Boys” it’s more explaining a moment. The way it switches between fiction and history is a great example of what the internet can do for writing; it feels like a little tiny bit of Sebald.

“The End”, one of the last stories in the collection, is a musing on the apocalypse, often circling back to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming”, which is often referenced on the internet. It has some lines about a “Mormon supersoldier” who saves the female narrator of the musings, which again technically gives it a plot, but he’s not that important to what the story is doing. The story that follows it, “Halloween Forever” is also about the apocalypse. It opens with a list of eerie parts of the present, like “drone strikes on weddings” and “the very normal entries nestled amid the racism on Dylann Roof’s blog”, sort of like Bo Burnham does for 6 minutes in his song “That Funny Feeling”, although Honor is a better written than Bo Burnham. Then the story goes on to into brief autofiction about a Halloween party in Brooklyn, and then goes it on to talk about the viral Facebook event where millions of people RSVPed that they were going to storm Area 51. It’s a dissonant collection of ideas, thematically united together, in a way that also feels united with the prior story.

In Arielle Isaack’s review of My First Book for The Baffler, she describes My First Book as “prose that otherwise resents itself for failing to replicate the vibey ephemerality of a post”. And there’s something to that thought, but I don’t see My First Book as a complete failure to replicate a post. The translation between post and traditional printed writing is difficult, but I don’t think it’s impossible. And more than that, I think it’s important, for the sense of the book’s “present touches eternity” mantra. Posts are what people care about now; so it matters to preserve them outside of ephemerality, into something more concrete and tangible. A book can do that.

The post is a much wider medium than a novel. A post can be a diary entry, a post can be a manifesto, a post can be a poem, a post can be a joke. Most posters mix forms. Honor’s book jumps between a lot of different forms, trying to show all of the different kind of things a post can do. I’ve been thinking about My First Book in the context of other books by internet personalities, like sighswoon’s Notes on Shapeshifting and Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset. Neither of those books are are a novel, or a manifesto, or a short story or poetry collection, but something in between. These books have value for making the world of the posters more permanent and more clear, even though they’re not written in traditional forms.

If you’ve never read Bronze Age Pervert or sighswoon you can pick up their books and get the gist of what they’re about. And even if you know them well, spending continuous time in their mind reading their longform writing makes that world a lot more clear than scrolling past a few of their sentences. Also, it’s nice to have a physical manifestation of the posts you care about, a book-object sitting around in your house to remind you that the poster matters to you. This is true even if the book isn’t a traditional one. A book is just a string of sentences; it has a lot of possibilities beyond existing forms.

I sympathize with some of the criticism of this book, that My First Book achieves its formal goal of putting internet language in traditional writing more than it says substantive things about it. I don’t have any thoughts on the “themes” here; about the culture war, about isolation on the internet, about the potential for empathy on the internet. Honor seems kind in her writing, and I’d like to read more, but I don’t think this book is totally complete. My First Book captures a particular moment of the internet by being so bound in up in capturing its language, along with how Honor feels about this moment. The book is not fully Honor; it’s her voice mixed with the internet. I don’t know if I learned Honor’s world the same way I learned the world of sighswoon and Bronze Age Pervert through their books, although I did know those posters better before I picked up their books.

There’s meaningful criticism to be made of poster writing as shallow. Though Honor Levy definitely has read a lot of novels, My First Book doesn’t try to be a novel, obviously. Though I love posts, I still believe in the power of the novel, I’m eagerly awaiting the next Franzen, it could possibly fix me. Novels explore their topics in more depth, spending more time with characters, taking them through a narrative. Short story collections are the little brother of novels, where authors in the olden days would go to write in short form before the technology was there for posting. Maybe it makes sense to start there as an aspiring young writer but they’re a very particular form. Some internet writers work well in the short story form, like Delicious Tacos, but I don’t think it’s the only answer. The poster book is much riskier and more nascent form, but I’m really excited about the potential it has.

Basically, I don’t know if My First Book needed to be a short story collection to achieve its goals. I think that if My First Book were less concerned with feeling like a short story collection, and more with feeling like Honor’s world, her world could have been more clear. But I’m also optimistic about the present that the book describes, and what Honor can write in the future. A lot of the writing here is great, and points in exciting directions. Honor is twenty-six, I’m twenty-six, it’s fine. We have time, maybe.

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On the week of February 15th, 2021 I was 23 years old living with my parents in my childhood home in Illinois. My parents were out of town together on a Valentine's Day trip, so I was the only human in our four bedroom suburb house because both my sisters were away at college. It felt weird sleeping in my own bedroom because the big house was so empty, so I slept in the living room on the couch. The living room is where our two cats hang out when they want to be social, because they energetically sense that it’s the center of the house. I spent all my time there so I could hang out with them more. I wasn’t leaving the house because all I had to do during the day was my pandemic era work-from-home job and it was also really cold outside so there wasn’t much to do. So it was nice to have other bodies next to me.

A big snowstorm hit in the middle of the week and it was too much emotional labor for me to shovel the driveway so I just smashed my car through the unshoveled snow in the driveway whenever I needed to park. Eventually I shoveled, once the weather warmed and the snow melted a tiny bit. Mostly I was doing it so Mom wouldn’t be mad at me for leaving snow there when she got home.

Cryptocurrency prices were going up a lot during this week so I listened to rap music about making money on the bluetooth speaker in the living room and felt important. Most of my tweets from this week are cryptocurrency takes and they’re pretty bad. But here are some of the tweets that I think are better, and show what I was thinking about at the time.

80-10-10 was a trendy vegan diet type in 2017. “Mastery of space” is a phrase used in Bronze Age Pervert’s book Bronze Age Mindset, where he talks about physical domination of a space as the primary goal of organisms, more than reproduction, and sometimes it was used on Twitter as a phrase to talk about how viscerally pleasurable it is to be the one person in charge of a physical space.

God eventually did set me free of my parents’ house, although I think God would tell me I set myself free, and that’s probably true.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this week now. It’s hot in New York City so it’s nice to think about the cold. My cats are becoming very old and may not be around forever. I miss them because they can’t visit me like my parents can, and they can’t understand the terms of the visits I pay to them. I’m also thinking back fondly on the pandemic work-from-home time, because I felt better when I didn’t have to be in an office quite so much.

The main thing that I feel looking back on my camera roll and my tweets from this week is that they’re still from same person I am now, just at a different moment, in a different situation. I get a little sad missing the problems I had then because they feel simple now, but they felt complicated then.

On November 30th 2023 when I moved out of my midwest apartment to my current apartment in New York City I tweeted:

just locked my apartment for the last time and i'm sad. the passage of time is so retarded, i want to exist in every moment i've ever lived forever, i want to meander through the fourth dimension like i'm hiking a familiar trail

and I guess that’s how I feel right now. Sorry for the r-slur but I was crying when I typed that originally and I’m crying a bit right now. I don’t want to return to the past, but I don’t think I ever fully wanted to leave it in the first place. I think I could exist in any moment from my past forever, and so sometimes I really miss particular moments. It’s nice that I have been writing small things down for so long because small moments are easier to remember, but writing doesn’t capture everything.

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FORTRESS (Apr 28 2024, read at Sovereign House Confessions)

my pussy is so tight. my pussy is so tight that i can't have sex. i don't let anything inside me, and it's not my choice. my pussy closes when the moment of intimacy comes, like the gate to a fortress pulls shut as the enemy army masses outside. my pussy is impregnable, unable to be impregnated. it closes to stay safe like you close your window when the pleasant october freshness hardens into cold gray november.

guys think it's really hot when i tell them about my unfuckably tight pussy. the male urge to overpower my fortress, to be the battering ram that can crack me open and reveal my soft warm insides. i'm two drinks in sitting at the outdoor tables at clandestino, and he's had three. he's sitting on my left, and he's reaching his right arm on to my left thigh, after we've been pulled closer together through the summer night, and i think now is the time to inform him that if he takes me to his place in the east village my pussy will be too tight for us to fuck. and at first he thinks that's really hot. he grasps my thigh tighter, and the words he says don't register in my head because i've heard them so many times. i just smile. we go home separately.

i've been this way my whole life. my pussy has always been a closed asylum that admits no refugees. the first time it happened, when it closed for my highschool boyfriend in his 2008 toyota corolla on the scenic overlook hill on the edge of town after winter formal, it was really difficult. i didn't yet know that i wasn't closing myself specifically for him, i didn't yet know that i close myself to the whole world, and so i thought my biological rejection was an emotional rejection of him. he ended things with me in february, a few weeks after the moment in the corolla where all of our flesh touched the other's but his could not go inside of mine. it was the sort of breakup where the initiating party thinks they're doing it because the other party doesn't like them and they need to protect themselves from continued unsure commitment. and the sad part is i thought he was right, that i didn't really like him, with my too tight pussy as proof.

my fortress has been penetrated exactly one time, by the man with the penis small enough to sneak in. i don't know how much i should say about him because that one night was the closest i've ever felt to love. love falls apart if you describe it too much, but i'll say a little. the man with the small penis loved the adam friedland show, he was a moderator on their fan discord server, he loved shopping at uniqlo, and i think he loved me too. i hadn't even remembered to tell him about my too tight pussy by the time we headed back from the axethrowing barcade to my place. when he took off his clothes, he revealed such a small penis, the smallest i've ever seen. i gasped, thinking maybe he could get inside me. and he did. i can't bring myself to talk about what happened after. i don't know if i'll ever find someone else with penis that small i can love in the same way.

i'm on a quest to revirginize now. it's really hard having a fortress so tight that's been infiltrated just once; it made me realize i'm not invulnerable, but it's still so hard to let someone else in, and now i have something to compare with the emptiness inside my walls i've always felt. my solution is to build my walls taller, trump 2024 style. i'm starting over after the man with the small penis. i didn't choose my tight pussy, but it's the most essential part of me. i want to build my biological reality into my emotional reality. i want to build my pussyfortress into a castle, with a lively noble court, with jesters, and with a big tall tower from which i can gaze out to the outside world. you can't come in to see, but that wasn't the point of this confession. the point was to explain the fortress for me.

CHECKING HER LIKES (Jun 12 2024, written on the day Twitter removed the feature of viewing another user’s likes)

i already really miss popping open her likes tab. i loved checking in the morning to see when she was waking up reading her phone. i loved checking on friday nights when she'd had a few drinks. i loved checking at around 1pm on weekdays to imagine her scrolling the timeline on her lunch break. it was great if one of my tweets was in there, but it was okay if she didn't care about anything i'd said recently, i forgave her. i was in there so often that i memorized which tweets she faved when, even though i didn't mean to. it was special if my tweet was the first tweet she faved in a session, because it meant that meant i was at the top of her timeline when she opened the app, that i had earned her affection and the algorithm recognized that. sometimes i'd start a conversation with her based on one of the things i'd seen her like, or watch a movie that she faved a reference to so i could discuss it with her. it made me a richer and more developed person, and also closer to her. sometimes i'd know not to say anything to her at all, if her likes indicated she was going through something. it did a lot for me and i think it's unfair it's gone. but i have to accept that it’s gone, that's what she'd want me to do. the tide has risen and i can't follow her digital footprints anymore.

RING BY SPRING (Jun 27 2024)

here's my advice to single american men who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry:

take sabbatical from your job for the entire month of august and pretend to be an incoming freshman at BYU. sit in on classes and go to lots of clubs. wear only BYU hoodies, get a fake lanyard for your keys. every time you see a pretty girl ask her if she's looking for a ring by spring. it's not going to work every time, but you just need it to work once.

eventually you'll meet a nice girl and start going steady with her. you keep this up for a few months, going back to your fully remote laptop job because you don't need to grind clubs and classes anymore. you see her in the evenings after your work and her classes, and it's nice and comfortable. but something will feel wrong. your deception isn't the foundation of a lasting relationship, and your lives are in such different places because she's so much younger and less experienced than you. but ultimately you aren't even the one to end it because you're too fearful and attached, that's how you got here. with her feminine intuition she senses a gap between the two of you and breaks up with you in february without ever knowing the truth.

you drive deep out into the utah desert to find yourself. you'll find your way to arches national park. you'll be at delicate arch at sunrise the first time you see her. she's been doing van life. you sense in her the same quiet but total desperation you have in yourself. you ask her what she thinks about the band bright eyes and she smiles.

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All of these were originally posted to X dot com, formerly Twitter, using the feature that allows for >280 character tweets. I’m posting them here because I think they’re cute ideas and want to preserve them. Usually I write in lowercase there and in uppercase here, but I left these in lowercase.

This is another image piece I wrote for my long thing about the Midwest that I’m no longer writing, along with Land Acknowledgement / Arborescence and Nike’s Landing. I really like sharing these with you all. They meant a lot to me when I was writing them. Sharing this one was inspired by this Paul Skallas tweet.

A fishing boat is out the Illinois River near downtown Peoria. Father and son quality time. All is quiet and calm until a moaning song can be heard beneath the water. A humpback whale breaks the surface. The largest fish this river has seen is airborne in the center of the waterway just a hundred feet from them, until it reenters the water with a splash. The last they see of him is his fluked tail striking downwards into the water, leaving their boat swaying in his wake. 

The whale has come from the Atlantic Ocean. Swimming his way through the warm Gulf of Mexico, he entered the Mississippi River near its mouth at New Orleans. He doesn’t rest. He was bound north on a mission, a mission never spoken in human words, only known in songs sung deep beneath the ocean. Last night he surfaced near St. Louis and saw the Gateway Arch lit up against the black sky. Shortly after St. Louis, he left the Mississippi and took the calmer waters of the Illinois River, bound northeast. By the next morning he was in Peoria. Sometimes the water is shallow, but the whale sticks to the middle of the river and pushes forward. At times, there are locks and dams that make the riverway impassable without human intervention. The wily whale snuck through these gateways alongside passing barges. 

At a certain point the directions get confusing, like when you pull into a subdivision built after Reagan’s second term and have to decipher incoherently curved streets to find your friend's house. The Illinois River ends at the confluence of the Kankakee and the Des Plaines rivers, so the whale takes the Des Plaines north. Hundreds of years ago, there was no natural waterway between the Des Plaines River and Lake Michigan. Native Americans would get out of their canoes and carry them six miles to the nearby Chicago River. But six miles could be terraformed by twentieth-century man. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal was built, the Chicago River’s flow was reversed, and a continuous path to the Great Lakes was revealed. These human edits are known in the map the whale follows. He heads through the canal towards the Great Lakes. 

To keep invasive fish that run wild on the Illinois River from reaching the pristine Great Lakes, man shoots electricity through a few hundred feet of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The current runs strong enough to stun a fish upon upstream entry, but commercial barges can pass without event. The voltage gets stronger through the electrified zone. At its peak the electric barrier has enough power to kill humans. The whale knew it would be there but it still takes courage now that the time has come. He pushed through the electrified water with all he had, knowing that it was never built to stop him. Electrical shocks raged against his thick blubbered skin while his brain seized with primal visions of his saltwater home. He’s alive but covered in electric burns when he reaches the unenergized water. 

The injured whale rolled through the final waterway of the journey, the Chicago River, in the early hours of the morning. He rounds the corner through River North, spewing water out of his nose to the delight and terror of early morning joggers. For a few minutes, the whale feels free in the ocean-sized waters of Lake Michigan. Then he stops to rest, and doesn’t wake up. Whatever his mission, it will not be completed. The weak waves of the lake wash him to the cement beaches off Lakeshore Drive. With America’s tallest constructions of the twentieth century looming behind, the hulking corpse buzzes with flies that have never known this particular oily flesh. 

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“Sympathy is a knife” is the third song on Charli XCX’s new album BRAT. In the song, she talks about an unnamed girl who “taps her insecurities”, and in the second half of the song she reveals the girl to be Taylor Swift:

Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show

Fingers crossed behind my back I hope they break up quick

Charli XCX is engaged to George Daniel of The 1975, and Taylor Swift briefly dated Matty Healy of The 1975, so Taylor Swift would have been backstage at Charli’s boyfriend’s show. I guess only the first line is needed to reveal that it’s Taylor Swift; the second line is dramatic irony gloating. The listener knows something that Charli the speaker of the song doesn’t, Taylor Swift and Matty Healy did break up quickly, so Charli’s fingers crossed behind her back worked.

Taylor Swift made an entire album about her quick breakup with Matty Healy, the thing Charli wished for, called The Tortured Poets Department. It’s hard to find just one quote from the album that encapsulates Taylor Swift’s thoughts on the relationship because almost every song on the album is about Matty. I like the part on the song “Down Bad” when she says “for a moment I felt cosmic love”. The album frames the end of the relationship as Matty Healy abruptly leaving her after their brief cosmic foretold moment together, which gave Taylor Swift all of these strong feelings that she then channeled into the art.

The Tortured Poets Department is a messy album. The best part is how confessional and raw it is about the Matty Healy relationship, and the two relationships Taylor had before and after. But the individual songs are kind of boring. They’re often long, and they don’t go anywhere. Charli XCX’s BRAT is considerably more artistically successful; the songs are more fun, more culturally relevant, and more universal. Even in the confessional aspect where Tortured Poet’s Department succeeds, BRAT does better. But one of the interesting confessions she makes is on “Sympathy is a knife”, where she says she’s really jealous of Taylor Swift.

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Charli XCX has had a strange career trajectory. She started as a radio-friendly pop star when she was 20 years old, in the 2012 pre-Spotify era, making songs like “I Love It” and “Boom Clap” and appearing on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Then, in 2016, she started collaborating with the music label PC Music and the producer SOPHIE, sharpening her sound towards what is sometimes called “hyperpop”. She had a scrapped album XCX World from this time period, as well as a few singles like “Vroom Vroom” and “Boys”. “Boys” would later do very well as a TikTok sound and “Vroom Vroom” is now a cult favorite, but at the time they were controversial songs. At the time, hyperpop was framed as radical avant-garde pop and this was seen as a big departure into the unknown for Charli.

In December 2017, Charli XCX released her first full album after this stylistic shift, called Pop 2. To promote the album, she opened for Taylor Swift on her Reputation stadium tour. Charli’s setlist was very restrained and not at all in her new style. She performed “Fancy” and “Boom Clap” and “I Love It” to the crowd who knew her radio hits from a few years ago, while trying to squeeze a couple of her newer songs. Later, she said in an interview with Pitchfork that opening for Taylor Swift was like “waving to five-year-olds”:

After Pop 2, she made two more albums in a similar style, Charli (2019) and How I’m Feeling Right Now (2020). In 2022, she made an intentional effort to make her music less abrasive hyperpop and more corporate in her album Crash, but I think that album turned out pretty boring. In 2024, she sort of synthesized that idea of trying to be more corporate while still retaining her unique PC Music influenced style, with BRAT. BRAT in its brief opening weeks has been Charli’s most successful album, and did it by returning to the sound of her prior three albums. It’s successful among a different crowd than Taylor Swift’s audience, successful among people in spiritual Bushwick and people on the internet, but there’s a lot of those people now.

You don’t need to read “Sympathy is a knife” as about Taylor Swift; you can read it as just about jealousy. Most of the lyrics of the song are about feeling uncontrollable paranoid shame related to another person you feel is more successful than you, with some critical distance acknowledging that the paranoid shame is a bad thing:

I don't wanna share the space
I don't wanna force a smile
This one girl taps my insecurities
Don't know if it's real or if I'm spiraling

Why I wanna buy a gun?
Why I wanna shoot myself?
Volatilе at war with my dialogue
I'd say that there was a God if thеy could stop this
Wild voice tearing me apart
I'm so apprehensive now

The song works without any biographical readings. But I think confessional music made by celebrities invites listeners to read their biographies into it. Here I think there’s a second level related to the biographical reading, where Charli takes pride in her paranoid jealousy. The paranoid jealousy is also meant to come across as a very pure and honest feeling. A real artist jealous of the success of someone who isn’t quite as real. At the start of the chorus Charli says:

'Cause I couldn't even be her if I tried
I'm opposite, I'm on the other side

Yes she’s admiring and jealous of Taylor Swift, but she’s also taking pride in the fact that she’s in a different world from Taylor Swift. She couldn’t have Taylor Swift’s success, because it comes from Taylor Swift’s desire for mass appeal, and she’s not built that way. Charli says on the song “Spring Breakers” from BRAT’s extended edition that she’s “always going to lose to people playing safer” which is a more clear version of this thinking.

This might seem like a stretch from the text of this individual song, but it’s how Charli performs it live. Before performing “Sympathy is a Knife” in LA, Charli said “I just feel like artistry shines through, you know what I mean?”

Charli goes on to say that she knows her music isn’t for everyone, but she’s happy to see BRAT is being received well, and she’s grateful for the fans who’ve been here for a long time before that. And then she jokingly says “oh look at the next song, it’s Sympathy is a knife, that’s interesting”. And again, I think that’s because she’s taking pride in the jealous emotions, because it means her artistry was pure.

BRAT has been successful, but Charli was successful before, specifically because of her commitment to the hyperpop moment. Charli XCX has always been the most commercial face of a real artistic push in music. When kids make music in their bedrooms now, the most common genre they work in is hyperpop, and when the biggest artists look to sharpen their sound, they turn towards the production styles of hyperpop. Charli’s influence is known, she has a community of other artists around her who get what she’s doing, and she’s always been respected by people who understand the art. I guess it’s valid for Charli to be jealous of Taylor Swift’s unfathomably large audience, it shows that Charli wants to make art people care about, but Charli has been wildly successful by all standards, even before BRAT.

On the other side of the sympathyknife, yes, Taylor Swift is the most cared about artist on earth. But with that most cared about artist status, Taylor Swift has used her platform to dump a sprawling album about how she’s sad her brief boyfriend left her. She has millions of people who care about her, but her life seems pretty isolating. Unlike Charli, she’s not part of a major artistic moment. She’s riding the remnants of the 2010s radio monoculture into the 2020s algo culture as the peak most listened to artist, but her music isn’t super fresh and brave. In order to keep up her status as most-cared-about-artist she’s on her second summer of grueling four-hour football stadium shows in front of 50,000 people, which she does three straight days every weekend. If I had to choose to live a life like Taylor Swift’s or Charli XCX’s, I’d choose Charli XCX, and it wouldn’t be super hard.

Maybe the fact that I choose Charli’s life is the point of the second layer of taking pride in the jealousy, and “Sympathy is a knife” is functioning as intended. But I guess what I’m left with is feeling bad for Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has artistic ambitions too. Her commitment to her football stadiums full of people who care about all the art she’s made over her long career is so admirable. Yes, Taylor Swift isn’t making music that people in Bushwick will gush over, but she’s making art people care about. Lots of young girls across America feel less lonely because of Taylor Swift’s art, and though it’s not as exciting as what Charli XCX makes, it’s still important. Maybe Taylor Swift is the true jealous lonely artist.

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Cringe is traditionally a verb. Its early etymology is the Old English “cringan”, which was a battle word meaning “to fall, yield, or submit”. In Middle English, it shifted to “crengen/cringen”, which meant to bend or crouch in submission. By early Modern English, it reached its modern form of physically recoiling in discomfort. The Oxford English Dictionary’s current first example sentence to define “cringe” is “he cringed away from the blow.” Its definition expanded as time passed to include metaphorical types of recoiling, like the Oxford English Dictionary’s second example sentence, “I cringed at his stupidity.”

Now that the battles are fought online and in English, cringe as a word became a powerful weapon in the online culture war. Cringe was already on a meteoric linguistic rise to end the 20th century. Starting in around 1980, it shot up to be used around 5x more often in books in Google Books’s archive. I don’t think there’s a short way with current technologies to see which definition was being used more often, but my intuition is it was more often used as metaphorical recoiling from something ugly. 

Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer

With the advent of the internet, “cringe” became even more common in conversational English. Google Trends tracks the usage of “cringe” in Google searches across the English language, and there’s a clear growth starting in the mid-2010s. 

Source: Google Trends 2004 - Present

The subreddit r/Cringe was created on September 10th, 2011, and r/CringePics on October 14, 2012. These were communities dedicated to posting content that merits you recoiling in embarrassment. r/Cringe is pretty dead now, but r/CringePics is active, and even more active is r/TikTokCringe and r/SadCringe and other splinter communities, dedicated to posting specific genres of content that people find it pleasant to cringe at. 

Reddit isn’t the only community that uses “cringe”, of course. I think you’d need a PhD research project to confirm this, but my intuition is that like many other linguistic threads the internet surge of “cringe” came from 4chan and then saturated out to other communities. Today it’s a common word on YouTube, Twitter/X, TikTok, Discord, Instagram, and even Facebook. I think you’d be pressed to find a community online where “cringe” isn’t a part of the lexicon.

But, unlike its traditional role as a verb, cringe is not being used as a verb in most of these internet spaces. More often it’s used as an adjective.  “This post is so cringe.” “I’m putting this in my cringe compilation.” Sometimes people try to correct it from a grammatical perspective with the adjective form “cringeworthy”, but I personally don’t care about the grammar rules. Grammar is a system for clarity of language, and if people are being internally clear to each other it’s fine.

What I’m interested in is the effects of the language. Language is viral. People hear one person say a new word, or recontextualize an old word in a new way, and they realize that the language is powerful. So they start using it too. But that process isn’t random. Why did it catch on to use cringe as an adjective? 

The answer, in my opinion, is actually pretty simple. An adjective has no owner, while “cringe” as a verb requires attribution to a single person. Saying “this post is cringe” instead of “I cringed at this post” attributes the embarassment to a universal owner, instead of only to the speaker. Cringe as an intractable descriptor is more powerful than cringe only coming from only one perspective. 

This makes “cringe” as an adjective an especially powerful tool in internet spaces, where people are often writing anonymously about the things they find embarrassing to criticize them. It’s syntactically weaker to say “I cringed at this dumb thing a journalist said” when no one knows or cares who you are, but shifting it to a adjective makes it a criticism and a provocation, and a rallying cry other posters can join. That’s a very memetically powerful set of traits for a word, other people can see the strength of the syntax, so “cringe” grew as an adjective really quickly. Cringe was already rising in use in English as a way to describe a certain type of social discomfort, and the internet accelerated it to its strongest form, by removing the source of the discomfort, and saying this should make everyone uncomfortable.

I’m generally positive on internet language. I think the internet is a place where language develops. It’s often fun to play with fresh internet words because they’re new and still sound silly. People laugh at words, and then the words win and they start using them in sentences.

But my take on cringe is that its original form as a verb is a lot more honest. Cringe as an adjective is an unearned universality. Is the thing you’re calling “cringe” really embarrassing to everyone in the world? So many things that people declare “cringe” are very normal. I think cringe is meaner in its form as an adjective, or at least meaner in a weak way. Firing off an insult without owning that it’s coming from you. I don’t think it’s worth writing a lot of words about being nice, being nice has to come from you, but anyways, cringe is a mean word to launch at someone.

Cringe as an adjective is unearned linguistic firepower. But the thing about unearned linguistic firepower is when it’s deployed too often it loses the power. Language is self-correcting. And I think the self-correction is already happening for “cringe”. People who can’t string together a full sentence calling something cringe with no further followup kills the seriousness of “cringe” as a criticism, it becomes just another hyperbole word that doesn’t mean much except when targeted extremely well. The coolness factor of the people who use “cringe” as a sincere critical descriptor has been going down, decaying into language used by fifteen year old boys and angry fifty year old Facebook commenters. I guess it started with fifteen year old boys, but it was the more incisive fifteen year old boys.

More often than cringe as an insult now, at least in the content that I consume, there’s an embrace of the adjective cringe, like this Tumblr post that says “I’m cringe but I am free”. It’s a common sentiment to embrace the fact that other people might find you embarrassing, but being yourself anyways. 

When I searched my TikTok archive for the word “cringe”, every screenshot I found had this same sentiment.

I think that’s very noble, but I think it’s also okay to reject the terms of the classification.

This piece is not serious etymological research, or moral/karmic advice. It is a writing style guide.

Did this ten years, how many more?

When I retire burn the corpse

Am I the freshest? Yes of course

But it’ll never be like before

Don’t even know what I want anymore

Life has a chance through any storm

-Bladee, “Lucky Luke”, Cold Visions (2024)

I really love Bladee. It's hard to talk about art that you love, but I'm going to try to in this piece. This is a review of Bladee's latest album, Cold Visions. I have to explain a lot of other things about Bladee to explain it.

First off, I guess, it’s pronounced with a silent soft e. But often on his songs he jokes about how to pronounce Bladee, and other singers he features will pronounce it with the double E, as Bladey. I think what he was going for with the second E is an extended feeling to the termination of the word blade, as if it’s extending out like a sword. It reminds me of the little hook on the sword of “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” in the Met; functionally unnecessary but creating greater aesthetic balance. Anyways. In his first album Gluee, he uses this stylization of double Es a few times. Bladee is second language English, growing up in Sweden, and he often sees the English language in creative ways.

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Cold Visions is Bladee’s 16th album on Spotify since 2014’s Gluee. Before Gluee, he made music on Soundcloud, some of which is very good, but I think he intentionally doesn’t want it on Spotify because in this early music he’s still working through the ideas he’d later develop more fully. In the Soundcloud music he sings about swords and drugs and the computer and luxury brands. I really like the part when he says “holy sword shadow blade my girlfriend looks like anime, never had a car but I’m still inhaling the candy paint” in his feature on “Plastic Boy” with Yung Lean, from this time period, but he’s grown a lot since then. 

I think fundamental to understanding Bladee is that he really cares about his music. He has a very high output, producing way more music than other musicians. And all of this output is extremely stylized, with very high effort production, doing something sonically and thematically different on every album. He sings in English, even though that’s not his first language, because there’s a larger audience for art in English. He never signed to a traditional record label, and for a long time he was an artist with a dedicated but small cult following. It’s still fair to say that he has a cult following, Bladee makes the kind of music that it’s hard to care about a medium amount, but the cult has gotten a lot bigger in the past four years.

Bladee sees his music as art, and he does visual art too, but I think what he does is in some ways beyond art. Or at least art as a secret mystery to be deciphered, art as highbrow. He’s interested in art as visceral. On his song “Gatekeeper” from Working on Dying, where he sings about not fitting together with a girl and rejecting record labels, he says "fuck being an artist, I still will go the hardest”, and I feel like that’s the Bladee ethos.

Bladee’s music can be hard to explain because he frequently collaborates. To briefly categorize his output:

BLADEE ALBUMS: Gluee (2014), Eversince (2016), Working on Dying (2017), Red Light (2018), Icedancer (2018), Exeter (2020), 333 (2020), The Fool (2021), Spiderr (2022), Cold Visions (2024)

DRAIN GANG ALBUMS: D&G (2017, with Thaiboy Digital and Ecco2k), Trash Island (2019, with Thaiboy Digital and Ecco2k)

COLLABORATION ALBUMS: AvP (2016, with Thaiboy Digital), Good Luck (2020, with Mechatok), Crest (2022, with Ecco2k), Psykos (2024, with Yung Lean)

This isn’t Bladee’s full post-Soundcloud discography, as he also has many singles that are released separately and never appear on any album, and features with other artists, but it’s most of it. 

An essential part of Bladee’s music is “Drain Gang”, which he frequently references in his lyrics. Drain Gang consists of Ecco2k and Thaiboy Digital as other singers, and Whitearmor and Yung Sherman as producers. Bladee sings about the characters in Drain Gang throughout his songs, even songs they aren’t featured on. Drain Gang is also affiliated with Bladee’s merchandise, which is sometimes stylized and priced like luxury fashion brands and Bladee clearly puts a lot of effort into it. On his song “Nike Just Do It” from Red Light he says “that’s not a real drain shirt, yeah it’s a fake bro”, playing with the idea that his Drain Gang merch is so good people want to make fakes of it.

Bladee has two Drain Gang albums, where he and Ecco and Thaiboy trade leading songs united by production style. Drain Gang members also frequently feature on his solo albums. Sometimes he refers to drain gang as D9, or just with the number 9, because “Drain Gang” is 9 letters and 9 is a cool number. He also sometimes talks about “GTB”, short for “Gravity Boys”, or “Shield Gang” which were two earlier names for the group. I think he came up with “Drain Gang” as a concept in 2015 or 2016, because it never appears on Gluee but appears a lot on Icedancer.

Bladee stuck with the Drain Gang name because drain is also an ideology in his early music. He frequently uses “drain” as a verb, like “take a knife and drain your life” appearing multiple times on Icedancer, and “if you’re not bleeding you’re not drained out” in “Xd Out” on Eversince. Those are some of Bladee’s darker lines, but still the general ideology of his albums in this period. Late nights, drug use, despair, bleeding out the essence of the world. But I don’t think the Drain Gang attitude is entirely a suicidal disregard for life. He’s also very silly on these same albums, joking on Working on Dying and Red Light that Drain Gang is the new One Direction, the new pop collective that people obsesses over.

In around 2017 Bladee starts using the phrase “eat the night” in his music, which I think translates the drain ethos into an actionable phrase.

If I can’t eat the night, Imma let it eat me - “Redlight Moments”, Working on Dying 

No life left, eat the night, no stars out - “No Life Left”, D&G

Eat the night, I feel like Kirby, I’m burning - “For You”, Red Light

Trash star eat the night I do it twice - “Decay”, Red Light

Fuck your life, eat the night like I’m a Homer - “Linkin”, Icedancer 

Eat the night like a locust, we don’t care we brush shoulders - “Bentley”, from Thaiboy Digital’s Legendary Member 

He explains “eat the night” and “drain” in an interview with Vice that’s no longer on the internet: 

“Drain is about loss and gain; it could be good or bad — you could be drained of energy or you could drain something to gain energy. There’s financial, emotional and physical drains, for example — you could just be draining your bank account at the store. It doesn’t have to be deep. Basically, if I’m talking about ‘eating the night’ that means I drain it for its essence. Everything me and my bros do is connected to that concept — we might drain some blood for good fortune.”

Drain Gang helps Bladee’s music feel like a world, but like all good art it’s the details that make the world feel full. Bladee has a unique lyrical style that switches between personal and mythical. Sometimes he’s silly, or sings about things that you wouldn’t really consider beautiful. Bladee loves cars and namedropping cities, but he also loves sewers and malls. The best way to explain more is to give representative examples.

I stay out of sight, it's a satellite life
Got a shadow ice knife, Gucci lenses on my eyes
Bank account match my clothing size
That explains the price of my shoes

- “Deletee (Intro), from Gluee

I don’t know exactly what Bladee means by shadow ice knife, but it’s some sort of fantasy object, and it sits right next to Gucci sunglasses in the same lonely world. Bladee is often emotionally vulnerable within the lonely world of swords and drugs and brands:

The first born got his world torn
I came out of the ice storm
This blood sword is my light source
At the white shores when the night falls
Was my life form worth to cry for?
Off like ten pills, now I'm stillborn

- Bloodveil/Stillborn, from Eversince

Waiting for forever for my weapon
Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven
Sometimes I just wanna go to heaven
When I'm coming home they call me Vännen

-”7-Eleven”, from Bladee’s 2016 EP rip bladee

Vännen is Swedish for friend, meaning that when Bladee goes back to Sweden people still remember him and care about him.

As he got a little older, in Working on Dying and Red Light and Icedancer, Bladee sings about swords a little less, and drugs a little bit more. Though he stops singing about swords, Working on Dying is maybe Bladee at his most depressive, and then he gets a little happier and sillier in Red Light and Icedancer.

I don't know about you but me I fiend that darkness
Sleep-sleep-walking burn my fucking carcass
I know they hating on the low, I caught it
Hole in my head, I'm tryna find out who God is
Ooh you're a goddess, you're flawless
I'm smoking cabbage you're smoking on that garbage
Fuck being an artist I still will go the hardest
You a worker I see your ass at Target

“Gatekeeper”, from Working on Dying

Put a pill in a McFlurry I'm goofy
Shoot me, acting for the cameras, it's a movie
I can see you're gloomy 'cause I'm too t'd
I'm a dog on the roof like Snoopy
Sue me, hate me 'cause you're not me
I'm a white boy, 30 in my khakis
In the Uber and I sleep, fuck a car key
Love the smell of gasoline, bleach, and sharpies

-“I’m Goofy”, from Red Light

I'm a mallwhore and my Pradas look like Tom Ford
Black gloves on, yeah, I'm lookin’ hardcore
Hitman, yeah, I'm rockin' with the dark lord
If you all for me, baby, then I'm all yours
Sometimes I don't understand what it's all for
But I understand when they see me then they all sore
Death knockin' on my door, that's the front door
Dip out of the back door, hop into the black Porsche

-”Mallwhore Freestyle”, from Icedancer

In 2020 and 2021 Bladee’s music changed more. His 2019 single “Apple”, which doesn’t appear on an album, is the fulcrum between these two periods. His immediate album after “Apple”, called 333 has no singers besides Bladee, as does Good Luck, and The Fool only has one very brief Thaiboy feature. But more than moving away from his frequent collaborators, Bladee’s lyrics and musical style became more optimistic and less playful. He doesn’t talk about late nights or drugs or suicide as much, and starts referencing Catholic and Buddhist words. The first album of this period, 333 inverts 666, the satan numbers, which are sometimes referenced in earlier Bladee’s darker music. He has lots of self-improvement style lines, like “turn your mental prison into a maze” from “Noblest Strive” and “Inspiration Comes”. He does the Kanye thing where doesn’t use bad words on The Fool.

I’m a good boy on the track, no cussing - “Hotel Breakfast”, The Fool

The sounds of the music in this time period are very pleasant. Bladee’s early music can sometimes be dissonant and inaccessible, but I can put on “Hotel Breakfast” from The Fool for anyone and it will sound like a nice light pop song.

Bladee doesn’t reference Drain Gang nearly as much in this time period, but he does occasionally. Sometimes he’s referential to his older music in a way that inverts it. In The Fool’s “Let’s Ride” he says “I gave away my Moncler in the sacrifice”, referencing the Moncler jacket that he speaks about with affection on “Romeo” in Eversince. In “Gatekeeper” from Working on Dying he said “pop out like a gopher” to evoke leaving the house for the first time late at night, and in The Fool’s “Hotel Breakfast” he inverts that to the much more pro getting-out-of-bed “pop out like a toast”. But in the song he still is waking up too late to go to the hotel breakfast.

He doesn’t explicitly reference swords, but he spends a lot more time thinking about the concept of nobility. One of the center songs of 333 is “Hero of My Story 3style3”, which samples the Lord of the Rings Two Towers movie and is about being a noble hero in your own small world.

They want to know how I am so trendy
Thirty-three they say I got too many
Be like me, let me know when you ready
Metal round my wrist, it's weighing heavy
Wanna be the hero of my story
Baby if you let me be annoying
Wanna wake up early in the morning
I just never wanted to be boring

In 2022, Bladee released Crest, which is a collab album with Ecco2K. Crest was written and recorded before The Fool but released after. It’s Bladee at his lightest, using Ecco’s ethereal voice to play up almost religious songs. In Crest he uses some latin Catholic words in a way that feels like ritual, like leaning on “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” on “5 Star Crest”. And he also has a song called “Desire Is A Trap”, going deeper into the Buddhist ideas. Crest kind of sounds like “Christ” on the breathy delivery that he does in “Yeses (Red Cross)”, and I think that’s on purpose.

After Crest came Spiderr. Spiderr sheds the spiritual optimism of Bladee’s prior four albums but isn’t totally like earlier Bladee. Spiderr is stylistically all over the place from song-to-song; “I Am Slowly But Surely Losing Hope” sounds like 2000s pop-punk, and is followed by “Icarus 3Reestyle” which samples the CS:GO match start timer. The lead single “Drain Story” is the most offputting and dissonant tracks on the album, with Bladee’s voice not quite lining up with a very strange backing track. I think the dissonance is intentional and the idea of the album. Bladee has most of the song titles stylized in all caps, but two of them aren’t, and the album art is a kind of weird image of a really muscular but still androgynous male that looks like League of Legends splash art.

Thematically it seems like what Bladee wants to do in Spiderr is unite the comsmic optimistic world of the 333/Crest/Good Luck/The Fool music with the earlier style of his music. He opens my favorite song on Spiderr “Icarus 3Reestyle” by proclaiming “three plus three plus three is nine” meaning that the cosmic spiritual optimism of his recent past adds up to Drain Gang/D9 worldview. But that union doesn’t say either one of them is wrong, and the sonic dissonance is a reminder that they don’t totally fit together.

It took Bladee a long time to release another album after Spiderr, almost eighteen months, one of his longest gaps. In March 2024 he released Psykos, a collaboration with Yung Lean, which is kind of a strange album. Bladee and Yung Lean have collaborated since the beginning of both of their careers, but this album is pretty different than their other songs together. Usually Bladee and Yung Lean collabs are playful and casual, where they trade verses and rap about being successful, but this doesn’t feel as much like that. Psykos seems like him and Lean doing late 90s early 2000s sad slow style alternative music. I’m still not quite sure what to think of it.

A month after Psykos Bladee released Cold Visions, which is totally different. It’s a Bladee solo album. On the second song of Cold Visions “WODrainer”, Bladee calls Cold Visions “Working on Dying 2”, and the acronym WOD in appended to “drainer” in the title also evokes Working on Dying as well as the earlier Drain ethos in general. Cold Visions brings back F1lthy, the producer of Working on Dying, who also has a production company that he calls Working On Dying. Like Working on Dying, Cold Visions has tons of features, featuring Thaiboy many times, Ecco once, and multiple features from Yung Lean that are more in the traditional vein of Yung Lean and Bladee collaborations.

Cold Visions goes far deeper into the early Drain Gang world than Spiderr did, sometimes bringing back the solipsistic drug use and nihilism of the Working on Dying era. “I Don’t Like People” opens with “I’m drunk on NyQuil, wanting to kill, even if it’s God’s will I just can’t chill”, with Bladee repeating the title phrase “I don’t like people” a lot of times.

But it’s not entirely a return to that earlier world. Like his past few albums, Bladee often inverts his older music. He inverts the light Bladee period more often. In “Hotel Breakfast” from the The Fool he sang “I am king nothing, I am nothing, take a bunch of empty words and make them mean something.” Here in Cold Visions he inverts the “king nothing” phrase in the song titled “King Nothingg” that’s full of screaming background noises and the phrase “hail king nothing, only king that kills for nothing”, taking what was previously about insignificance into nihilism for the sake of evil. On that same song he flips “I’m a good boy on the track no cussing” from “Hotel Breakfast” to “I’ve been going back to cussing”, which is cute.

But he also he inverts and brings back motifs from his earlier darker albums.

Missing person, I’m a missing person. I’m gone that’s for certain. If they love me I might hurt them, so I stay behind the curtain - “Missing Person”, Eversince

I’m a missing person, I go off the radar - “Rip”, Eversince

To catch my drift I’m going fishing, on my way back from going missing - “Flexing and Finessing” Cold Visions

Other times he reinforces them:

No touching, I find it disgusting - “Who Goes There”, Eversince

I’ve been enforcing the policy: no touching - “King Nothingg”, Cold Visions

In “Wodrainer” Bladee brings back the line “I know I fell off but this is the comeback”, which he says word-for-word on Icedancer’s “Topman”, and that’s a funny thing to say twice. It’s interesting that Bladee says that on both Icedancer and Cold Visions, both of which are doing very similar things to the album before them, but arguably better and definitely more stylized. It’s not a super widely held opinion that Bladee “fell off” with Spiderr, but he says it about himself.

Bladee also brings back singing about fantasy objects:

I’m in a forest with a high priest, I’m in off-white Nike like a hypebeast - “Yung Sherman”

Heavy two-handed axe in a dirty duffle bag - “Sad Meal”

But he seems to sort of be joking this time, whereas in his older music he’s serious about it. And again he sings about luxury brands, but in the album manifesto song “Wodrainer” he jokes about designer clothes and says he wants to step out in converse and vans like a suburban teen.

So much designer, got sick of that
So much designer, we been in that
Put it in the trash, we binning that
Let's leave it at that
Stepping out in Converse and Vans

Cold Visions has songs where he’s explicitly talking about drug use, but then also “Dont Do Drugz” where he explicitly sings about how drugs make you feel bad and make your life worse, which evokes the last few Bladee albums, and is more explicitly self-improvement than anything he wrote for those.

So Bladee is sticking together these two worldviews, the dark and light Bladee, and letting them sit next to each other. He switches between them based on what sounds prettier in each song, leaning on the dark side more, but still letting the light shine through.

Unlike Spiderr’s sonic dissonance, Cold Visions is extremely sonically cohesive. The songs have a uniting bass that feels like it pulses through the whole album, and many of the songs flow into each other one after another. He uses the phrase “Cold Visions” as a production tag many times, and says it many times in the lyrics too:

Let me tell you a little story about this guy that's not important
Let me tell you about these crazy clothes he's sporting
Let me tell you about these cold visions I've been having

-“Flexing and Finessing”

I'm in the battle with myself
But who's winning? I can't tell
Man the visions cold as hell
Man the baddest hand I'm dealt
There's just us, it's no one else
Saddest story I can't tell
But um Gloria excel
But um destiny fulfilled

-“Message to Myself”

Cold winter flowers under snow, is it still living?
Cold vision
Yes, yes, all alone
Summer's indefinitely postponed
I hope, I'll hope
I hope I won't be buried under this snow

-“Cold Visions (Outro 2)”

My name on this part of the internet is cold, so maybe I’m not the best one to speak on this, but I think “Cold Visions” is an evocative phrase that while never totally explained also explains everything it needs to. Cold is both purifying and painful, bleak and isolating, but also a necessary part of the seasonal spin. It’s more pessimistic than optimistic, but that’s okay.

Cold Visions feels like Bladee launching everything he has to make one really great album that unites his prior ten years of music. I don’t think he could ever do an album that sounded like Cold Visions again; there wouldn’t be a point. This isn’t a grand return to dark Bladee, or even a grand intentional synthesis of dark and light. It’s a tour-de-force to show that he can still do it all again.

I think I still find Gluee and The Fool Bladee’s most interesting albums. Gluee feels like a totally alien arrival, completely fresh ideas created out of nothing in such a raw and pure way. And The Fool is a very emotionally vulnerable album that feels like Bladee’s worldview pushed to its conclusion. But Cold Visions is the Bladee album that goes the hardest. I don’t know if you’ll get it if you haven’t listened to the 16 other Bladee albums, but it also may not be for you. I think he wanted to make something for the fans, for the people that have loved the music he’s made before, before he goes on to make something totally different. But the execution on it is just so great. It’s so fun to listen to him skim the surface of ten years of music with the competence he has a musician now. I’m really glad Bladee is making music. There’s no one else doing it like him.

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“My whole life I’ve had visions of ice.” - coldhealing, “The Gate to The Ice Wall”

This is a sequel to the first Vegan Purity, which I wrote last summer. I’ve been vegan since I was 19, and vegetarian my whole life. In the first Vegan Purity I wrote about my belief that veganism is important as a set of restrictive purity rules to ensure continuous opting out of modern animal agriculture practices. More complex rulesets like “I only eat animal products that come from ethical farms” are very gray and can lead to fudging the ethics or abandoning them altogether.

With that said, I spend most of the piece talking about the visceral reasons that people are vegan, not the moral beliefs that I hold. Visceral aversion to flesh makes someone vegan just as much as strongly held moral belief. You are what you eat, and you eat what you are. It takes a certain type of person to be vegan, to opt out of so much of the world, to opt out of consumption of flesh.

At the end of the first Vegan Purity, I said I wanted to try oysters soon:

The only thing that’s changed in the past year is now I have the urge to eat oysters, still unactualized, to fulfill Diana Fleischman’s bivalvegan ethics. Oysters don’t have brains so it’s very ethical. The part in “Red Velvet” when Bladee says “red velvet, I’m selfish, ten bands just to go and eat some shellfish” makes me think oysters are cool. Also Moby-Dick gives me an eternal longing for what comes out of the sea. Oysters scare me because of the slimy high protein density but I think the point is being scared. Some day I’ll do it.

Now, ten months later, I’ve done that. I’m living on the coast and I’ve eaten oysters for the first time.

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The idea of bivalveganism is that though oysters and other bivalves are part of the animal kingdom they are not sentient, cannot feel pain, and so they are ethical to eat under a vegan diet.

I spent some time scrolling around the computer to make sure that oysters really are vegan. The science is not 100% settled and there’s some fun debates in Reddit and YouTube comment sections. My main takeaway is that oysters are really weird. Bivalves are ancient animals, forming on earth before fish existed. They don’t often move around; they sit still and let water wash over their gills, eating algae or phytoplankton from the water for their food. That process also results in cleaning the water of the algae, as the ocean’s natural filters. I saw some vegan takes that oysters are vegan from a sentience perspective, but it’s bad for the environment to eat oysters because you’re removing a natural filter. But then I saw some second takes that most commercial are rope-farmed, put into the water on a rope by humans, and that nothing is being taken away.

Bivalves in the wild have the physical capacity to move though. It’s sort of eerie when they do:

This is a clam, and when a human approaches it it flaps its shell to swim through the water and escape. It looks a little bit alive here, but also it doesn’t seem like a lot is going on inside its brain. Before oysters and clams form their calcium shells they also float around the ocean, looking for a place to settle down.

Is this meaningfully different from a plant’s inward sentience to go towards the light? Or the pain a potato plant feels when you remove its roots for your food? I don’t know. Oysters are so different from plants biologically, but from a sentience perspective it becomes much harder to say. There’s no real evidence that oysters can feel pain; the most I can find is vegan resources online that argue it’s possible we might one day learn they feel pain. And that seems like excessive precautionary principle for a rational set of vegan ethics.

The first time I opened an oyster I didn’t feel uncomfortable from an ethics perspective. It didn’t look like a sentient fish; it looked like a piece of flesh inside a pearly container. I did feel a bit viscerally uncomfortable though. Oysters are slimy and cold, and dense with protein and blood like flesh is. I did like how they taste like the ocean though. I didn’t really find them very pleasant or even filling, but I wanted to be brave, so I ate five of them.

From a health perspective oysters are a good addition to a vegan diet. Vegan diets prompt supplementation of B12 and often Omega-3, and oysters contain good quantities both of those things. I think a vegan diet with monthly or so consumption of oysters is healthier than a traditional vegan diet from the perspective of getting those nutrients directly from food rather in supplements.

But I’m not a dietician, and I didn’t try oysters for health reasons. I’ve been alive as a vegetarian my whole life without flesh and I think humans can live without it fine. What drew me to oysters was the idea of being brave. Having been vegetarian my whole life, I find eating plants very comfortable. The ethics are the framework for my comfort, and while I deeply believe the ethics, it’s important to challenge my comfort. Oysters presented a really interesting gray space where by all ethical vegan rules they are fine, but they’re viscerally uncomfortable and culturally uncomfortable because they aren’t plants. I wanted to push into that space.

I still so firmly believe in the importance of purity in vegan ethics. It makes me sad when my vegan friends admit to small cheating on the diet, or when I explain to people that they can compromise. You of course can compromise, and I believe in general kindness to my fellow man more than I believe in veganism, and veganism is a hard thing to ask fellow people to do. But it should be hard, in order to prove that you care about it and enforce your continued caring. The way we treat animals today is bad, and we need people to actually care.

But I think eating oysters as a vegan actually affirms that purity rather than undermines it. It proves that the purity isn’t entirely a visceral aversion to flesh, but instead a set of ethical rules based on treatment of other sentient creatures.

Now that I’ve eaten oysters it’s reopened up a few other vegan purity questions for me. I joke with people about roadkill, and other carrion items, but it’s a slightly real question. Is it ethical to eat roadkill as a vegan? Is it a moral imperative to prove that my ethics are not based on visceral repulsion to flesh? I think the answer is probably no, roadkill is so gross that most meat-eaters don’t eat it, and the foxes and raccoons will appreciate it being left so there’s nothing karmically going to waste.

But that same roadkill line extends out to eggs produced at more ethical farms, where eggs really do sit on the ground as animal products mostly free of exploitation. I know some vegans argue that you should still opt out of these eggs, because they could otherwise go to people who would eat factory-farmed eggs, but from a capital allocation perspective you can argue the reverse, that financially supporting eggs from ethical farms is what’s necessary for that to replace the very unethical factory-farmed egg process. I don’t actively live in the countryside at an ethical egg farm, but maybe I should seek it out.

The other tough question is food being served to me with non-vegan ingredients; is it really ethical for me to reject fries served to me with sprinkles of Parmesean cheese on the top? The products of the animal exploitation are going to be discarded, and the waiter probably isn’t going to rethink their cheesetopping ethics as a result of my principled moral stance. Most of the time I try to find a friend to give the food I don’t want to eat, but that’s just passing my karmic mess to someone else who isn’t bound up in my same set of thoughts and won’t notice it’s messy.

In my head, my continued rejection of nonvegan foods that were created because of my action is okay because I’m rejecting the world for being this way, saying please stop putting cheese produced through very unethical processes on my fries. It’s exhausting to always say the arguments that we should stop, and people don’t really care to them, so I don’t do that, but maybe that’s weak. And most probably it’s visceral aversion to the food too. I can’t eat it because it makes me sick to think about what happens to produce the food.

I don’t know. Ethics are hard. I’m still very bound up in the visceral, but I’m trying my best.

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I read these two short image pieces that I wrote in late 2022 and early 2023 at my event in New York City this past weekend, so I wanted to post them here on my blog. They’re both fragments from the same larger thing about the green midwest that I was working on then, am no longer working on now, but may one day resume.

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LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For millennia, on this very land, prairie grass swayed ceaselessly under summer sun and died under winter snows. Generations of dead prairie piled on top of each other in communal graves to form the richest soil on the planet. Bison roamed. Snakes lay in wait. The prairie grass stood taller than a man for hundreds of miles. Lewis and Clark walked through it on their westward journey, and that was the herald of the end. In just two centuries, the dynasty fell. We call what came after “the cornfields”, but it took just as much land for soybeans. Our planet’s perfect prairie soil was terraformed into the corn-soy empire. Corn and soy presented as edible food, but this was a trick, to keep the children from asking too many questions when they sat in the backseat of the car looking out the window at the empire’s exposed innards on the way to their grandmother’s house. The empire was too big to hide itself so it had to resort to such tricks. 

Almost none of what was produced in the former prairie was directly eaten by humans. This was an empire spanning millions of acres, producing incomprehensible quantities of corn and soy. If America tried to eat it all directly it would gorge itself. Three-fourths of the soy and half of the corn were fed to livestock. A third of the corn and some of the soybeans were converted to fuel. In terms of the tiny portion of the crops that went to human food, most of the soy went to vegetable oil, and most of the corn went to corn syrup: edibility questionable. What was happening out here was not agriculture in the ancient sense. This was conversion of energy from the immortal sun above and from the corpse of the old prairie below. Corn and soy not as crops, but as biological machines of energy extraction. 

The true purpose of the cornfields is the open secret I want to acknowledge. The hidden secret is that the prairie isn’t really gone. It sets up base on the side of the road, in abandoned lots, at the bottom of quarries, in forgotten parks where tax dollars have run too low for the ruthless blade of the lawnmower to assert itself. Out of human eye, the old grasses and wildflowers struggle against the weedy invaders that the corn-soy empire brings as its anti-native enforcement wing. A difficult battle, but the noble exiled prairie perseveres. Never does the prairie forget its claim to rule. The prairie subsists in the margins of error, margins too awkward for the empire to reach. These corners of resistance are not a real threat to corn-soy. They’re a minor annoyance already factored into its soulless profit projections. But the corn-soy empire is the sworn enemy of the prairie. Usurper of the birthright land, drainer of ancestral reserves. Every night the prairie waits, cloaked in darkness, moonlit dagger shining, plotting its revenge.

ARBORESCENCE

Imagine this: your body, but you're standing tall rigid and dignified, not slouched over all the time. You’re always standing still but it's not out of lethargy; the stillness is part of who you are. You’re protected from the world by a rough coating that's still pleasant to the touch. Every day, you reach out with green fingers towards the sky to catch its light. 

With the light in your fingers you grow bigger. You feel your past totally within yourself at every moment. You grow in rings that clearly delineate your life into “eras” that while distinct are totally complete. And even though they’re distinct and complete they build on top of each other. You have no moments of failure, no reversions to a previous weaker state. You are always growing stronger, and all you have to do is reach out.