First off, thank you so much for your support. I’m sorry I haven’t been as active both here and across the internet as I would like (more later), but I need to say thank you because the support that I’ve had on here recently paid a very expensive emergency visit to the vet for my cat Ilyich. He’s fine now, but without you, everything would’ve been a stress that would’ve made me even more physically sick than I have been.

This year isn’t going quite the way I want it to go, but I’ve had serveral friends and writers recently reaching out, lending some words of encouragement, offers to try and help me get organized, and I can’t help but feel like I have a dizzying amount of people that want me to succeed. It means a lot, truly.

The essay in this post is a first draft of an idea I have for a book chapter. I haven’t worked on the book as much as hoped I would so far this year, but the help has been getting me closer to where I need to get. In still figuring out this book, I’ve decided to write chapters under the “doors closed” teaching method for memoirists. Meaning, specifically, write a draft that’s just for you - write the things that don’t need to see the world - and let that draft help you figure out what the eventual story will be. So, even though I wrote this for class and I am letting subscribers read it, this is only a draft of a chapter and maybe not even all that close to what that eventual chapter will look like. I took simply the idea, wrote what I needed to write, and now maybe I can get started on an actual first draft of what a chapter about disorganized thinking will eventually look like.

I don’t have any other updates right now. I’m getting ready to start making a good push on a new draft of my book proposal. I need to go on a lot of walks to make that happen. I’m learning my writing brain won’t function without my walking brain, and if you would like to help encourage me to find my path out of the rut I’ve been on, tell me to go on a walk. I need to see the world move slowly as I walk through it or else I get stuck inside a mind in which I can easily get lost. And if you’re wondering what I’m talking about - hopefully this essay will make it make sense. I’m working (writing) through it, and I hope you enjoy.

Thank you, again.

• Nathan

Every thought competed against each other, overlapping, swerving off in their own directions, crushing the previous and being crushed in turn, and I was lost amongst them.

Eckhart Tolle has a quote from his famous book, The Power of Now, that I’ve been mulling over. “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.”

I love that concept of mental quietude. I wish I could find it.

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Movies:

I’ve been really trying to get myself off my phone. That’s been the big change I’ve been working on recently, and replacing little screen with big screen, honestly, has been maybe the best thing to happen to me in 2026. I’ve seen 42 movies so far this year (already getting close to my total of 57 for all of 2025), and of that, 10 of those have been in theaters. I’m hoping to keep this pacing going and focus on trying to see at least a few movies in theaters every month. Let’s run through the highlights:

Favorite new to me movie from 2026: The Secret Agent

I’ve been obsessed with this movie. Or, maybe more accurately, I’ve been obsessively thinking about this movie ever since I saw it. I haven’t rewatched it yet, but I can’t stop myself from thinking about it. I’ll be doing an in-depth conversation about this movie soon on my returning (and soon to be announced) but renamed podcast, so all I will say for now is: you need to watch this one. I think there’s a good chance it’ll do to you what it’s done for me. I haven’t felt like this since I watched The Zone of Interest – every headline, every part of politics being unpacked through this artistic lens that’s given me so much to consider about our world. I loved it.

Favorite theater experience: The Testament of Anne Lee, No Other Choice, and The Secret Agent

This really isn’t a three-way tie because this was how I spent an entire day. Leaving a movie and walking back to the box office to buy another ticket. I haven’t like actually started The Artists Way, but I have been thinking about trying to spend time intentionally doing things like she suggests with the Artist Date (an afternoon where you spend time alone doing things that spur creativity). For my Date, I decided to spend an entire day at the theater, and while I can’t say it was a great choice for my lower back, I needed to get out of the house and let different worlds fill my own. I’m still not sure how I feel about the Testament of Anne Lee. It was certainly . . . interesting? I probably wouldn’t have seen other than for the bit of seeing three movies in a day, and honestly, it was all uphill from there. The second movie, No Other Choice, had one of my favorite movie moments for the entire year, and how this movie is able to actually grapple with the idea that we are seriously living with a phone that is inseparable to the self, that was such a great thing to get to unpack. And when my friend joined me for The Secret Agent, I got to do the thing all movie lovers love: sit in a parking lot that’s emptying out and talk about how a movie made us feel and think about things we never expected. Delightful. I really think you should also waste an entire day in a movie theater.

Favorite book lovers’ movie: Project Hail Mary

(There will also be an upcoming podcast episode to talk about this one.) I did the audiobook of this while I was traveling for spring break. I have a tendency to sit on an airplane, put on an audiobook, and, umm, just sit there? Idk. My eyes have a tough time focusing with turbulence, so I really lock in while I have my phone on airplane mode and my headphones in noise cancelation mode. The audiobook is a tremendously fun experience that’s expertly produced, and the movie is pretty much the same. Gosling is charismatic and somehow relatable? However, the star of the show is a rock, and the best rock ever put to screen (sorry EEAAO, but it’s not even close). Whatever you might think of the propaganda of “you have to see this on the biggest screen possible,” I fully and wholeheartedly buy into it. It’s true. I saw this in 70MM IMAX and it’s the only way I want to watch the big blockbusters (at least the ones I care about). It’s nice to have some hopecore content, and if you’re feeling the rainy spring weighing down on you, go find a theater and have some fun at seeing a movie (or three).

Favorite movie that I’ve been meaning to see for years: The Worst Person in the World

I have been meaning to see The Worst Person in the World and La La Land for years. Everyone that’s seen them has been confused why I haven’t seen them, and so I watched them both this past week. I absolutely wasn’t expecting that they’re essentially the same movie: a surrealist impression of how being in your late 20s/early 30s feels like this interminable point of listlessness and life is happening well beyond your control. There’s love and heartbreak and all the middle points in between. For me, The Worst Person in the World was a much more realized version of that story, at least the one that resonates for me, because it’s a lot less interested in the idea of happiness. It sits with, is sometimes consumed with, the mix of emotions that circle but are not quite happiness.

TV Shows:

I’ll make this one quick (until I decide to write an annoying rant on the ideas of fandom and the delusions of viewers of the Pitt).

Heated Rivalry is as good as everyone says. I actually think the idea that this is everyone’s *horny* show is doing it a little disservice (I mean it is very hot) simply because the show is so much more beautiful in every way than most people might anticipate if all they’ve seen is thirst comments about boy aquariums. The writing, directing, music, and cinematography are all spectacular, and I hope it gets people more interested in Jacob Tierney’s other projects because I think Shorsey and Letterkenny might two of the best shows made this century.

Pluribus might be the most conversationally interesting show I’ve seen in a long while. I love talking about this one, and I am a little scared but mostly hopeful that we might be in the middle of a historic run that makes Vince Gilligan the most important tv creator of all time. In a small note, this show also looks incredible. Maybe it’s because almost all TV seems to be produced with Netflix’s model of bland colors and annoying styles, but it’s just fun to watch a tv show that’s both fascinating and genuinely beautiful.

I’m currently watching The Leftovers now in my quest to watch the greatest HBO shows of all time (that also basically happens to be about 75% of the greatest tv shows of all time regardless of network), and I’m watching this one in small bursts. The show is fascinating. It’s quite possibly the most prophetic piece of content I’ve watched. And I look forward to my next binge session to continue finding out all the strange and curious ways this story is going to unpack a question of WTF happens when our world seems to be falling apart!

Paradise (season 2) remains the best not very good TV show out there right now (Bridgerton, you were close, but like, not actually that close – sorry!). I can’t quite put my finger on why I love this one so much, maybe because it’s willing to sit with the absurd in genuinely interesting ways, but I love this show. I have no idea where we are going, I have almost no hope the show will actually be able to have a totally successful run, but I am as locked in as I was for LOST.

Books:

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant is the story I’ve needed. Over the past year, I’ve read about 30 different books on social media, AI, and the general marriage of technology and society, and Blood in the Machine is the book that I think everyone needs to tie together the complicated thoughts we all have on what life is becoming. It’s both a really well told history, but it’s also never afraid of telling the reader about why this history needs to be something we need to understand better. The politics of technology are the politics of life right now, and I think Blood in the Machine is the book that gives the greatest historical contextualization about how we should think, feel, and imagine our world is being shaped, disformed, and rebuilt in the space between our eyes and our screens.

Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert and Football by Chuck Klosterman are the two most fun books I’ve read this year. Delightful, but stylistically could not be more different in how they approach a subject. Gilbert is nearly absent from the story of how a gender analysis of pop culture gives us a deeper understanding of art and life, and Klosterman is obsessed with his own thoughts of how he feels like football is the only remaining monoculture item left in America. I think for writers, both ways of telling a story that are fascinating, creatively inspiring, and some of the most bingeable books you could pick up.

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano had been on my list for years, and I’m so glad I finally picked it up. I have a list of books that I know I’ll love, that I know are important, that I hear all the time how good and impactful they are, but for some unknown reason, I can’t get myself to pick them up. Border and Rule. Cuba: An American History. The Distant Mirror. Revolutionary Suicide. I want to read the whole pantheon of leftist history, and even though I’ve made a good start, it’s taking me longer than I want. I don’t know why that part of me exists. Why there’s things I know I’ll love, that I think the hype will be proved totally correct, and yet I keep on reaching for books, movies, hobbies, and life choices that don’t get me to where I want to be (and who I want to be). And maybe this has me saying this for only me, but I can see that I am trying, but I am looking for the answers to on how to be that person more.

Running

48 miles ran isn’t where I wanted to be by this point in the year. Honestly, I don’t think 48 miles in a month is even all that close to where I want to be, but I keep reminding myself of how pacing and endurance work. The slow miles, the idea of 80/20 running (that 80% of running needs to be slow, methodical, and intentionally not an action of pushing yourself outside of the simple act of doing it), are essential. My path in becoming a runner in my 30s hasn’t been linear. It’s been helpful to sign up for races and keep myself accountable to keep at it!, but it’s not always going to be super apparent that the progress is happening even though it is.

Yesterday, I talked to my therapist about what I need to do to get myself to this idealized version of myself that I feel like I’m competing against (and losing to), and her recommendation was: experiment. So, for the month of April, I think I’m just going to try to get back to the basics. Make sure I take a walk every day. Make sure I stretch everyday. Try and get some type of connection between my mind and my body and see what happens when I’m not stressing over how many (how few) miles I am running, how often I get to the gym, or whether I am going to hit my goals in my upcoming races.

After a long sickness recently, I told my partner, “I’m not going to be able to run the half marathon coming up like I wanted to. I’m going to have to go back to intervals, and even then, I’m not sure I can do it faster than last fall.” And they shrugged it off, “will you be able to finish?” And yeah, I can do 13.1 in a few weeks. Maybe not at the tempo and pace I want. Maybe not as painlessly as I’d hoped. Maybe I won’t even have enough energy to avoid what will likely be a post-race slump in the days following, but I can cross that finish line. Maybe, for right now, maybe that should be all I really think about until I can settle myself into a new season.

Old Hits

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about and how to think about music recently. So much of how we consume music is almost entirely passive. It’s a soundtrack playing in the background in life. It’s nice. It gives this bleak world a little bit of a comfortable ambiance, but I don’t want to simply love stuff because it sounds good while I’m paying attention to where I’m driving. I want to think about music, I want to seek out new sounds, and I want to sit with it and not just have it playing while my life is in motion.

My therapist recommended that as much as I try to figure out some healthy habits I can bring into my life as daily parts of my routines (walking, journaling, writing) I also need to have parts of my life that are fun, that give me energy, that make life calm and exciting. So, I think one of the things I am going to work on is maybe for 20 minutes every day I lay on the ground (floor time is pivotal to the neurodivergent crowd, or so I’m told) and all I do is listen to a few songs. Let my mind wander. Let the music wash over me, and see what happens when all that exists is a soundtrack to the nothingness of the moment.

I’ll report back to this later, but recently I’ve found myself listening to No Other Way by Jack Johnson a lot. I think I’m buying into the rise of hopecore (thank you, Rocky and Ryan), and I have so much nostalgia for those years I used to pour my heart into a mixtape I made for my crushes. Maybe I’ll start making those again. Maybe Jack Johnson will help me getting back into music because it’s a way to communicate the parts of life that we bury deep. Maybe I’ll get a little more pretentious as time goes on, but right now I just need those sweet melodies that seep into the soul.

I’m going to end this review by just typing out the lyrics to No Other Way. I think it’s beautiful to read like a poem, but if you want to take a few minutes to sit quietly and listen to him sing, maybe we can, together, find a little part of our brain that’s needed some attention we can only get when we slow down.

When your mind is a mess, so is mine, I can’t sleep
‘Cause it hurts when I think, my thoughts aren’t at peace
With the plans that we make, chances we take
They’re not yours, they’re not mine

There’s waves that can’t break
All the words that we said and the words that we mean
Words can fall short, can’t see the unseen
‘Cause the world is awake for somebody’s sake
Now please close your eyes, woman, please get some sleep

And know that if I knew all of the answers
I would not hold them from you
Know all of the things that I know
We told each other there is no other way
Mm-mmm-mmm

Well, too much silence can be misleading
You’re drifting, I can hear it in the way that you’re breathing
We don’t really need to find reason
‘Cause out the same door that it came
Well, it’s leaving, it’s leaving

Leaving like a day that’s done a part of a season
Resolve is just a concept that’s just dead as the leaves
But at least we could sleep, it’s all that we need
When we wake we would find our minds would be free to go to sleep

And know that if I knew all of the answers
I would not hold them from you
Know all of the things that I know
‘Cause we told each other there is no other way
Mm-mmm-mmm

The Secret Agent, the most overlooked movie all of award’s season, has the most quietly jaw dropping ending of any film I’ve seen since The Zone of Interest (a movie about how the Nazi’s lived rather unremarkable lives while living on the borderline of concentration camps). Wagner Moura gave my favorite performance of the year as an academic on the run from assassins after Brazil’s fascist 1970s attempted to privatize education and destroy unions, journalism, and public intellectuals. The entire movie looks at how memory works—how can we remember what authoritarian power has worked so desperately to annihilate, what does the truth of struggle mean to us, and what will culture hold onto after we are gone. For anyone that’s heard me talk books, Alexa Hagerty’s Still Life with Bones takes the reader through these same questions. As a forensic anthropologist working with the truth commissions in South and Central America’s quest to uncover the remains of people murdered during the rise of alt-right governments during the Cold War, The Secret Agent and Still Life with Bones are asking some of the most human and intimate questions of how we want to be remembered when the battles have been lost.

A couple of movies that I wish would’ve had a little more attention during award’s season, Eephus and Eddington, go even a step further in trying to display what are we living in when the battle has already been lost. Eephus is movie about baseball that’s actually about small-town America’s quest to turn a profit regardless of what gets in the way. Set during the final game of an adult rec league game before the field is to be destroyed and turned into a school, the future looms dark over people that want to simply enjoy life and community but have been abandoned by the government because the public land is simply too valuable to investors. Eddington’s much darker take on 2020 politics takes the viewer on a ride that shows the radicalization of small town politics amongst a fever dream of masking mandates, BLM protests, and how everyone’s cellphone became the megaphone for conspiratorial blackholes. Eddington has an aggressive tone that smacks the audience over the head with a prophetic image of a shooting target with a bullet hole through the neck, a racist cop that has no idea what he is doing that eventually ushers in the worst future while he is incapable of doing anything but shitting himself, and the closing shot of the world forever made worse by zooming out over a glowing AI data center suffocating the world in which it inhabits.

Bugonia is a nihilist romp by Yorgos Lanthimos, who seem unconcerned with really exploring who is right and who is wrong, but simply that we are all doomed regardless.

Train Dreams takes the industrialization of the US and crafts a beautiful story that explores the loneliness and separation humans feel between ourselves and the natural world and each other.

F1 thrusts viewers into a visually stunning ride that asks the younger generation to stop getting in the way of the Boomers and let them have fun with their toys. A movie that is almost a by the numbers remake the director’s last movie, replacing Tom Cruise’s pilot with Brad Pitt’s driver, the victories are not meant for us even though we have to watch the fireworks.

Marty Supreme places Timothée Chalamet on a Sisyphean quest for greatness, giving the audience a journey of watching a person’s insatiable grind-core mindset that ultimately leads to completely hollow victories. As Marty thrusts his arms up in triumph in the final moments, the audience leaves the theater in a daze due to the sheer worthlessness of this charismatic character.

One Battle After Another, my personal favorite movie of the year, spins our world into a slightly anachronistic version of our lives that ultimately says the fight might not be over, but we cannot escape the losses. The movie is a satire, but it also isn’t. The right’s losses mean nothing; everyone is expendable, and the only goal is complete and total apocalyptic victory. Lockjaw is dead, but no one will mourn him. But when we see Bob taking a selfie on the couch in the closing scene, it’s conflicting. He was fighting for something, futilely (and hilariously ineptly) so, but he’s out of the fight. Can Willa and Sensei save us?

The discourse about One Battle After Another has often talked about the bleakness of its politics. And while I think many people are intentionally misreading the movie, I do think there is something worth exploring about PTA vision of our moment: we, our current generation, have lost and the only hope now is the younger generation. Is that true? I don’t know, but as much as I struggle with that mirror of a question, I can’t help but feel that it is true. The emotional truth might not agree with the historical truth, and yet I think defeat is something we are all reckoning with day in and day out. The world is burning, the atomic doomsday clock ticks on, Charlie Kirk was basically turned into a saint, and if we so much as say Gavin Newsom isn’t an ideal candidate, we risk death threats from No Kings veterans. We’ve lost? We are losing? We’re asking ourselves these questions constantly, and I don’t believe we have absolute answers to them. But, maybe like the hopeful note that PTA ends the movie with, maybe our loss isn’t the final battle. Maybe the younger generation can save the world. At least we can hope so.

Sinners stands out as perhaps the most hopeful movie of the year. It seems like the movie that will last. It’s likely that in 20 years, there will be confusion as to how Sinners didn’t sweep the Awards, but I think that’s ahistorical in many ways. Firstly, because Sinners was never going sweep. As much as the push from fans made it feel possible, awards are not decided by the fervor of viewers. Secondly, the emotions of the larger liberal/left politics are not centered around the catharsis of victory that we see in Sinners but much more reflective of the catharsis of defeat that we saw in basically everything else this year. Killing the Klan feels good, but I think what we feel, at least what we feel is true, is that we are living in the embers of a world that was set ablaze because we didn’t kill the Klan. And it’s good that Michael B Jordan is walking away with an award for showing that the duality of how our love for our communities and our willingness to take up a tommy gun to protect it should be the political message that lingers, but we are too depressed that we have spent the past two years watching children die due to Zionism.

There’s a glowing AI data center on the outskirts of a town, and unless we blow it up, we will always be watching the award-winning movies that revel in our defeat.

Football by Chuck Klosterman

My favorite book so far this year. Chuck Klosterman has an incredibly unique (sometimes divisive) way of exploring topics in culture, and this one looks at why he thinks football is doomed. In his reckoning with how he sees the downfall of the most popular sport in the US, he walks through The GOAT Debate, gives some time to explore violence and CTE, and tells the reader why football is really only good if you’re watching it on TV.

A People’s History of Sports in the United States by Dave Zirin

I don’t have the clearest memory of reading this book so I won’t go into much detail, but I will say I read this for a college class on the history of sports and it was one of my favorite books I read for my history degree. It’s really well done and for anyone looking at a grand scope of the history of sports, I think this is the one for you.

Rethinking Fandom by Craig Calcaterra

When people talk about foundational reads, this is my go to reference for sports. If you want a leftist take on how we should think and feel about the culture of sports, this bite-sized book is essential. I love sports, but I hate what capitalism is set on doing to them, and this one does a brilliant job at letting me know how to feel about loving a thing that is often incredibly toxic.

Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia

I know it sounds like a Black Mirror episode, but every month there is a story in the news about how some AI company has automated shopping, driving, coding, or something mundane and what’s actually happening is someone is piloting all the cameras and machines in the developing world for like $1/hour. If those stories make your brain feel fuzzy, this is the book for you. Why is everything so stupid and cruel and all lies!!!

Enshittificatrion by Cory Doctorow

This is the book that sort of explains it all. Docorow’s book and this term are sort of the blinders people need to put on to understand most every headline about the technodystopia that we are living in. It lays the foundation for understanding the moment, but never strays from the hope that destroying the system is both possible and beautiful.

More Everything Forever by Adam Becker

This is like true crime but for the tech empires controlling our world. This both one of my favorite books to read to understand the ideas guiding the politics of Silicon Valley, but it’s also an incredibly funny way of dismantling some of the mystique of the tech-bro takeover. These people are absolute fucking losers and maybe spending a few hours reading about how to better understand them is one of the ways we can fight back.

There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

My favorite writer wrote a book about basketball, but you don’t need to care about basketball or know anything about it for this to become one of you new favorite books. It’s beautiful. It might not make you have any interest in going to play pick up, but it will give you some insight into how people can see the stories of sports as a way to reflect on life, connect with your community, and why caring about sports (or anything for that matter) should never be something we take lightly. Our passions are why we exist.

NOlympians by Jules Boykoff

There’s almost too much to cover in a single paragraph for a book like this, so I will simply ask: have you ever been not quite sure but certainly suspecting that there is a dark seedy side to the Olympics? Well, you’re right. Obviously, but this book gives you the activists perspective on how and why fighting back, even through our voices, is an essential part of combatting the idea of sports washing (using sports and patriotism to mask the nefarious parts of the world we are often less interested in addressing).

The Other Olympians by Michael Waters

When trying to understand the alt-right’s obsession with talking about trans athletes, I think learning the history of queerness in sports can really show how the growth of fascism has always found a home in anti-LGBTQIA politics. This is a tremendously well-told history, and also a history that we are currently living through.

America, América by Greg Grandin

I’m currently reading this one, so I will just say two things: Greg Gandin is one of the best historians you’ll ever read, and how you see the world around you will be improved by reading his work. This one looks at how The Americas are all influencing each other, always have been, and how taking a myopic or overly European-influenced perspective on our history misunderstands what the United States is.

P FKN R by Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau

I haven’t read this one yet, but when I saw it on twitter last night, I immediately put in a request for my library to pick up this academic press book. Bad Bunny is the number one streaming artist in the world right now, so it’s no suprise the NFL is working to expand its influence. With the next Super Bowl being in Los Angeles, I do think it’s very likely that a KPOP band gets selected to perform. So if you’re tyring to get ahead of the stories, I might try searching for something on that topic!

How the Hide an Empire by Danial Immerwahr

Watching right wingers lose their mind that the half time performance was in Spanish was … something. I’m inclined to say it’s funny, but I think we all are living through a horrifying experience at watching how racism is destroying the fabric of society through the ICE raids. If you want a book that looks at Puerto Rico and gives the true history of US colonialism, this is the book to start with.

Magic Pill by Johann Hari

If you want a good personal and scientific look at Ozempic (GLP-1s), I think this one is going to be really helpful. The United States is GLP-1s, AI and Survailence Companies, and Gambling companies in a trench coat. But unlike the scam economies that almost seem quaint with every ad being crypto a few years ago, the invention of these pharmaceuticals is actually life changing. I’m not saying it’s not complicated (that’s why I’m recommending a book), but these medications are some of the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries of this century that might be worth learning a little more about if you’re tired of reading think pieces about these drugs.

Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken

This is a very complicated topic, one that the scientific community is not exactly solid on, but I do think with the growth of the MAHA movement being eugenics cloaked in healthiness, this could be a really interesting look for how you think about food. I’ve read this a couple times. I’ll read it again. I don’t talk about it online because I don’t think I have yet found the proper words to wade into these conversations, but I do think if you’re wanting to better understand nutrition, this could be a book that helps you think about it critically.

Conspirituality by Beres, Remski, and Walker

If you want to unpack everything about the MAHA movement, these authors (and their podcast by the same name) have dedicated themselves to tyring to help everyone understand how Health and Wellness have been co-opted into the fascist movement. Whether its beef tallow, yoga, vaccines or what the fuck is wrong with RFK Jr, these guys will give the insights that feel fundamental for how to understand the parts of our lives that are supposed to be good but have been siezed by the alt-right.

A Physical Education by Casey Johnston

Casey’s book is a great exploration of the science of weight lifting put also a really endearing memoir about the cultures of how society views our bodies—especially women’s bodies. It’s been motivational at helping me get back into the gym, but also really helpful at letting me see the politics of gyms.

Endure by Alex Hutchinson

Look, everything is about politics - especially my reading life, but I also like to read books that are simply interesting. This is one of those books for me. I’ve listened to the audiobook about 4 times over the past several months, and I really love thinking about the ideas of how our mind and bodies can be, maybe should be, pushed. This really the only book on this list that won’t give you any great insight into the politics of understanding sports and culture, but I do think if you’re on a fitness journey, you’ll be fascinated with learning these almost podcast-like looks into different ways we conceptualize and study endurance across sports.

Swole by Michael Andor Brodeur

A Gay Man Walks Into A Bar(bell Gym). It’s not a joke. It’s actually a really beautiful look at how he found himself while spending time time at the gym surrounded by beasts. This is a wonderful look into the culture of manliness and if you want to understand the compulsions of what drives body builder’s, I think this one could be a really entertaining and insightful book for you.

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Whether you want to talk about hte spectalce of sports, advertisement, or what being online during this moment is like, this book is mostly just a placeholder for my endoresement of reading more philosophy books about the materialist world we are living in. Whether it’s this or the work of people like Mark Fisher, Jean Bauldrillard, Foucault, Deluze, or Bourdieu, I think spending time developing the depth of our understanding is critical for how we talk about what the fuck is happening in this world. I think you should read these and talk about them with friends, because those are going to be the people we need to build a better world with.

Health Communisim by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Veirkant

If you hated seeing Mike Tyson call Americans fudgey and saying his weight made him want to kill himself (I wish he would) in a commericial last night, Health Communism is the book for you. RFK Jr tweeted that this commercial was the “most important message in Super Bowl History,” and he might be right. The rise of fasicm cannot be seperated from how we think and view disability, our bodies, and our health. It’s a foundational part of what makes up the idealogy that some people are better than others, and it’s also the part of us we need to understand in order to care for everyone.

Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin has become one of my must-read, essential authors. This book explores the ways technology unitilizes, endorses, and has been restricted by racism—how unless we reckon with our racism, what we build will always be engineered in order to be used against us. This book, all of her books, have been some of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had for deepening my understaning of the 21st century.

I do want to say, I have not included anything specifically on the topic of sports betting or future/predictions markets (things like FanDuel, DraftKings, or Polymarket) simply because the book world moves much slower than reality. We are currently living through the birth of the crisis, and I have not yet read a book that I think properly reckons with the devistating financial realities/dystopias that we are creating from the gamification of society. I would really recommend checking out Ep. 206 of Citations Needed (a literally essential news podcast), or check out these following youtube videos about the growth of this industry by MORE PERFECT UNION, this short interview from the Daily Show, or how an academic accidently created Kalshi from a recent episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out

And, if you simply want to try dipping your toe into sports but don’t want to commit to going to the library or buying a book, Secret Base on YouTube is one of the best “sports” things you can watch. I’m sorry to call it a sports thing, but some of my favorite videos they’ve made are about a sort of random guy that caught a baseball dropped from a helicopter, a history of the MMA called Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, an analysis of why Bob is no longer a popular name in sports, or a short look at why partial amputees are not allowed to kick field goals . . . anymore.

Right now, it’s the only social media that I haven’t locked myself out of in my attempt at lowering my screen time. I’ve been struggling to get my screentime to average less than 8 hours a day for a long while. A couple a weeks ago, when I could feel my brain atrophying—unable to form any unique thoughts that weren’t a quickly fired off response to whatever stimulating tweet/TikTok/Instagram carousel I scrolled through. When I lose myself to these bouts of social media brain, I am gone and the social media lurker has taken my place, there’s an electrical current running through my brain, a magnetic force that creates an inseparable melding between me and every quick burst of media I can consume. And in this recurring waste of days spent in a frantic inability to separate myself from the scroll, I decided to download Jomo. I made a couple rules for myself: 1) “Time Limit:” locking myself out of all social media after 3 hours of screentime, and 2) “Use with Intention:” block all social media except Bluesky from 9:45pm-10am.

When I came up with these rules, I chose Bluesky as my free social media because I tend to spend less time on it than Threads an X. And with consideration for the short form text based apps (although, in reality, half of the feeds of Threads and X are still filled with recycled TikToks), Bluesky feels like a less compulsive-entertainment-machine. But, already, after only a couple of weeks of using Jomo and now getting back in the routine of waking up and searching for my phone so that I can read headlines, I think I’m going to need to find something a little more foolproof to get myself to have my own thoughts again. (Jomo has a paid feature where you can create a lock on apps until you walk a certain number of steps, but I haven’t done this because it’s been too fucking cold this January. But maybe the only way to let my brain be mine and not the byproduct of all the algorithms that will tell me about the burning world is to get 3 miles away from home before I can find out exactly which embers are sparking new wildfires in our lives.)

Still in bed, with Bluesky now open, I see the reality of a new day.

TIKTOK PERMANENTLY BANS BISAN. Larry Ellison’s project of turning one of the more radical social media sites into a Zionist project takes a massive leap forward. Because the Biden presidency couldn’t handle college students sleeping in tents in a protest for our funding of a genocide, now the fear of censorship has come home to roost and the American quest to crack down on dissent under Trump has a new, powerful tool at its disposal. Like with Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it’ll likely soon be overrun by the growth of artificially popularized conservatives pushing for the techno-dystopia wet dreams of the deep state.

BARI WEISS ADDS 19 NEW COMENTATORS AT CBS. After the documentary about the ICE concentration camps, it was only a matter of time until Weiss’ attempt to dismantle a news organization – strip out all the copper wiring of the fourth estate – was turned into a podcast hype house. And look, one of the Abundanceguys is getting in on the scheme! Soon enough, 60 Minutes will become a QVC for AG1.

DEMOCRATS RELEASE STIPULATIONS FOR DHS FUNDING. I’m sorry, they’re going to fund it. If, and it’s a big if, there are any concessions at all, they will be insignificant. The Democrats cannot, will not, and do not care to stop the ascent to fascism that we are watching take place. They are institutionally, intellectually, and spiritually incapable of standing in the way. They’ll toss out an already defeated “hey, wait now” plead that feels like we should have hope, but I hope, for everyone’s sake, you will not waste a moment believing these people have any interest in protecting you.

NEW VIDEO OF ALEX PRETTI CONFRONTING ICE RELEASED. I don’t know if this is real. I’m honestly not even sure I (and probably most of us) know how to figure out if this video is real or AI. And at this point, after watching news cycles of conservatives screaming about how scary, how much they must fear for their lives, to be these masked piss babies surrounded by people driving 2mph or getting beaten at the bottom of a pile of Nazis, I don’t think this video proof does anything to sway or convey reality.

MORE THAN 60 DEATHS CONFIRMED IN WINTER STORM. But I thought it was global WARMING. Why are snide remarks always said with the most confidence and the least amount of intelligence? And regardless of how we come to a scientific understanding of how cold systems are fueled by the petro-capitalist order of the world, dying of cold is a death caused by inadequate funding in social and infrastructural systems. And it always will be. We have the resources to repair out grid, the energy to heat ourselves as the cold winds sweep across the country, but we have decided to instead to build data centers and concentration camps. Trump wants for America to build itself into supremacy, and we are doing that with concrete to house brown children and servers.

And after I see these headlines, I don’t know what logging off will mean. I know if I start my morning lifting or running that I will feel better, my brain will slow down enough to handle the crushing weight of having a half a pound slab of metal showing me all ways our world is eroding, I don’t know if I should feel better. Sometimes, it feels like I don’t know how useful it is to avoid the doom, even for the few hours when Jomo closes the digital realities and asks me to take care of myself.

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I downloaded Jomo the morning after the Golden Globes. I spent the evening watching awards, and when I checked Threads, I was hit with thousands of people screaming that Sinners didn’t win every award. If you’ve been following any of the film industry awards this year on Threads, you’ve probably seen an algorithmically-generated and -manufactured war brewing between fans of Sinners and One Battle After Another. Online, to love one is to hate the other. But, I loved both of these movies. OBAA was my favorite movie of last year (followed closely by Train Dreams – sorry, this essay is about other things but like all of my writing, I am also here to recommend things to you that I think will truly let you marvel at how beautiful it can be to tell amazing stories), but Sinners made my top 5. They’re spectacular movies, and I had some of my best theater experiences of my life getting to see both in 70mm IMAX showings in Indianapolis. Overall, 2025 had so many incredible bits of media (I say media because Andor, the Pitt, Pluribus, and Interview with a Vampire are all ESSENTIAL) – Movies Are Back, Baby, but looking at Threads, you’d never know that.

Even though for the Golden Globes Sinners and One Battle After Another are literally not competing against each other (they are entirely separate categories), the fact that Sinners lost its major awards and OBAA won theirs created a ravine, a low lying rift in the world of culture, for the frenzy of insane takes to go viral. When I was going to bed around the time Golden Globes finished at midnight, I posted what I thought of as a fairly innocuous Thread that basically said, “Guys, you need to understand that OBAA and Sinners weren’t competing against each other.” (It’s literally true, but that’s not what being online is really about, is it?) And when I woke up around 4am, I checked to see I had about 45 comment on that post and about 30 of them were calling me a racist.

I deleted the post because I didn’t want to be any more annoyed with whatever shit was brewing on Zuckerberg’s attempt at being cooler than Musk and tried to go back to bed, but my brain was already well past the point of returning to sleep. In my head, well before the sun started to break into day, I crafted an essay about being online. I wanted to title it “I’m Leaving Because I Hate You (But That’s Not Entirely You’re Fault).” In that essay I never got around to finishing, I wanted to write about how the digital realities that were created for us were not created for our pleasure but for our attention. They exist as the means to trap us, and one of the most impactful ways of doing that, is creating rage. Manifesting, sparking, and boosting insanity for our brains to play around with. It’s a lot of things you’re very familiar with, and my little twist on the story we’re all living through (at least those of us that spend too much time on the internet) was to bring the story back to the idea that maybe this places are more reminiscent of the idea of bread and circuses than they are the more publicly traded on idea of the public commons and the place for communication and connection. Social media, how we use it, might really be the greatest distraction that exists, and my screen time, the hours I’m wasting in order to stay informed, that’s all part of the façade. And maybe I’m right. It sure feels like it a lot of the time, but where is the line?

What is the right amount of posting? What’s the right amount of scrolling? What’s the ideal number of headlines we should read in order to know what is happening, and then what’s the number of TikTok videos or Instagram posts we should see in order to know how to feel about that thing?

I wish I could arrive at some salient point. Get off your phone, but here’s the safe points of contact with the digital world that shapes and forms our realities. That sort of thing, but I don’t know. I do know that the escalations that we see in the world, the planet heating and Stephen Miller deciding the policies for the country, those are all important to understand, to be able to talk about as publicly as possible. But I also know that my brain will congeal into an inoperable sludge if I don’t make it a point to know, to consume it all, a little less.

Last year I read The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell. In the book, Tidwell spins a really fascinating way in how he understands the hyperobject of climate change through watching what is happening outside of his living room. The trees on his street in Maryland tell a story that he has written down for us – a lens that make one of, if not the most, complex problems of human existence – and tells us that we don’t have to think about the problem; we can reach out and touch the leaves and branches.

And maybe that’s what I am looking for, something tactile, something grounded in the reality that I can observe without looking at the portal to the entire world.

I’ve called my Senators. I’ll call again. I’ll post the infographic of the No Kings March even though ideologically have some issues with how half the signs will be people making jokes about getting back to brunch or watching Heated Rivalry. I’ll get better screen time locks set for myself. I’ll force myself back to running on the trials, seeing the city I live in a more dynamic lens than I often see it through the filters of my mutuals, and hopefully find a way to parse through the realities that feel over abundant.

I read this line in an Emily Dickinson poem recently, and I can’t get it out of my head.

“I am alive—I guess—”

And I want to feel that less.

Category 1: Running

1. Run a Marathon

2. Run Two Half Marathons

3. Run a race every month

4. Run a sub 10-minute mile*

5. Run when it’s dark outside

6. Run in a new place once a month

The goals of running for me is all about consistency and sustainability. I would absolutely love to run 5-7 days a week, every week, and maybe getting myself to that point could’ve been the real goal, but I also want to give myself little fun projects, give myselt the pressure to train, to train consistently, and I want to find ways to fall in love with getting out for a run. My first run in about a decade was late last July, and by the end of the year I hit about 140 miles. Every week it’s getting easier. I signed up for a 5k, 10k and half marathon so that the races would force me into training. I would look at my calendar for the year and see, oh I have to run! And if there’s one big lesson about me that I’ve learned from my years of living with a disability that’s made my schedule seem like an amorphous blob, I need, desperately need, structure. If I don’t have a plan, I don’t really do a whole lot. And while I needed that, while that literally saved my life, I need something else now.

When I started, I would play an audiobook or podcast becuase I wanted to listen to something to distract me from my exhaustion. Now, I’m listening to music because I want to enjoy the miles. Maybe a goal of mine could’ve been to listen to 3 albums a week while running or something like that, but I’ll figure it out along all the miles this year.

* special note: I ran a 5k on January 1st and ran my fastest mile yet: 9 minutes 23 seconds. One goal down, 25 left.

Category 2: Reading

7. Read 100 Books

8. Read 25 fiction books

9. Read 10 poetry books

10. Read my priority list (make a priority list)

I made the goal for myself to read 50 books in 2019 and I read 98 that year. In every year since, I’ve made my goal 100 and blown past that. I do know 100 books is ambitious for a lot of people, I think it’s incredible that people read 5 books a year, but for me reading has been the part of my life that directly reflects how stable my mental health is. If I’m reading a lot, I’m doing pretty well. I simply want to keep reading. 100 books? Should be easy for me, but I also don’t care if it’s 75 books and I find things in life that can more accurately track how I’m doing. I’m always going to be a reader. It’s always where my brain has been the most comfortable, but I want to make sure I’m both enjoying myself and pushing myself to make my reading life rewarding (in whatever vague-ery that even means). I want to read more fiction. Nonfiction is easier for me, always has been. But I want to make sure I keep casting my net wide and finding beautiful stories to keep my mind wandering. I do need to read a lot for my book (we will get to those goals), and studying nonfiction for my masters means I’ll still be heavily in the nonfiction world of reading, but I want to try to make reading feel less like homework, less like a job, and more like I am getting to let my mind relax and go on the journeys that writers are crafting.

Category 3: Life(style?)

11. Once a week, go for a walk without headphones

12. Go to 10 concerts

13. Go to 15 movies in theaters

14. Listen to 50 new to me albums

15. Cook 6 vegan meals

When I’ve shared my list with people, the first question people have is “why vegan meals?” More than running a marthon or why would I want to run when its dark outside (to answer that one, because that seems fun? because I don’t think I’ve ever really done that? idk y’all- I’m trying to experience new things . . . that are still things that are only a little scary and still well within my comfort zone). I chose vegan because I want to eat healthy/healthier and I am a terrible cook. I could’ve made a full list of 26 cooking goals for myself, maybe I should, maybe I need to, but I want to learn enough that I feel comfortable in the kitchen beyond grilling meat and throwing a bunch of veggies in the oven. I think I (everyone) should be conscious of how much meat I (we) consume, and I would love to have a little fun with beans (is that a euphemism? idk).

Other than that, I don’t think concerts, movies, and albums need much explanation. I’ve always been a huge consumer of media, far beyond simply books, and I want to make sure I am prioritizing closing the books and not mindlessly looking at streaming service’s options for immediately available entertainment.

Walking without headphones is something I’ve been subtly suggesting for months. Actually, a big goal I didn’t include in this list is run without headphones. I read, watch, listen to things constantly. I often shower while I listen to Hasan Piker talk about politics, and I need more silence. I need more time for my mind to not be captured by the noise of the world. I need my thoughts to not simply be a response to someone else’s. I need some alone time that feels like I am actually alone.

Category 4: Writing

16. Write 80,000 words

17. Submit one essay for publication

18. Fill a notebook while sitting outside

19. Finish my proposal and get a book deal

I don’t know what 80,000 really looks like, and I don’t know how I am going to count it. I wanted to throw a ridiculous number at myself- but do I include my book? My proposal? My homework? I DON’T KNOW. But I know I need to write more !!! I really did think about making a goal for myself to write one substack essay a week, but I don’t want to a really easy thing to fail to be on my resoluations list. So, I want you to tell me to write more. I want to become A WRITER, and . . . I want to figure out a method to becomone someone that writes more often than when inspiration strikes. I need to figure out how to get myself to sit and type without a deadline. I think grad school has been really helpful at forcing thoughts out of my head and onto the pages, but I want to figure out how to do that more without overloading my schedule with 3 classes per semester. I love the moments my brain and hands communicate and produce something, but I want that to be more than a random hook up a few times a year. And maybe sitting outside, finding a bench or something, will give me some fun opportunites to sketch out some notes and play around with the fiction book I’ve been mentally drafting for a while (you read that correctly, but let’s not talk about that, please).

As far as the book proposal/deal is concerned, I am making progress. I just need to focus. I need to keep going. I need to consistently work to complete it, and my goal, I’m saying this now for everyone to hold me accountable, is to have it on submission by the end of the summer. And if I can go for walks without my headphones and let my mind figure out all the tiny details, I know I can get it done. I just need to, as my 6th teacher said, Nike It - JUST DO IT.

Category 5: Fitness

20. 50 Push Ups in 3 mintues

21. 10 unassisted pull ups

22. 285lbs deadlift

23. Go to a yoga class

24. Get a good daily stretching routine

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how easy or hard 20-22 are going to be. I know I can’t do 10 pull ups right now, but maybe I could do the other 2? I don’t know. I really struggle with setting lifting goals because if I can get myself to go to the gym consistently, I know I simply have a body that gets strong fast. It probably has a lot to do with the muscle memory of power lifting during my early 20s, but being strong has kinda always been simple for me. Being in the gym, though, that’s the hard part. Really, my goal is simply being in the gym more. If I could get myself there consistently 3x/week, that’s really the biggest fitness goal that I care about. Running to me is more about tyring to gain something I’ve never really quite had in life - I’ve never been comfortable in the endurance aspects of my physical life, but strength, those small bursts, I am good at. I’ll figure this one out, I believe that. I love the gym when I am there, but it’s just not easy to get myself there. That’s what I want to get better at.

Going to yoga and doing more stretching feel like things I would probably really enjoy. When I take the time at the end or beginning of the day to listen and talk to my body, I always feel better. I would love to become that annoying person that hops out of bed at 7am everyday and does 30 minutes of yoga (I think it would also make total sense based on my vibes as person). I want to be more pliable. More resistant to the aches from running an lifting. I want to feel my body pushing itself slowly, quietly, and mindfully.

My previous essay about getting myself back into lifting

Category 6: The Hinge Points

25. Quit Vaping

26. Lower my screen time

I’ve tried to quit smoking/vaping a dozen of times over the years. I’ve tried all the major methods, and only found success in small doses. I feel like I’m at an impasse, but I want to quit. I’ve been talking to my therapist a lot about it over the past few months, and I wish it was easy. I don’t honestly know what to say about it other than I’m going to (keep trying to) quit. And maybe writing that parathentical phrase is why I am having so much struggle, but I figured I would be honest with myself. I need to quit. I want to quit. It’s just really fucking hard. If you have any personal tips from your quitting journey, I am asking for them.

And at 26, we have the true hinge point. If I want my life, my year, to be what I think it could be, I have to stop scrolling. I have to write, run, lift, walk, and live a life beyond my phone screen. I really think everything on this list wouldn’t even need to be a resolution if I could get my screentime to be less than 4 hours a day. All those parts of my life would fit neatly and I wouldn’t stress about pushing myself. But since my sceen time is more often about 8 hours a day, everything else in life - the parts of life I actually enjoy! - those feel like the things I am pushing myself to do and experience.

It’s funny. Every Sunday morning, me and my partner sit on the couch and compare screen times. There is a direct correlation between how the week went for us and how many hours we spent scrolling. For years, I kept a pretty detailed diary of things to try and track my mental health. Before the era of infinite timelines and for you pages, trying to find some type of correlation to my hallucinatroy mind and what happened in life was a tricky game of reflections. Now, though, when my phone says 8+ hours of screen time, I know I felt like shit for the past week. And I don’t want to fall prey to the “smartphones are ruining our brains” moral panic . . . but maybe this moral panic is actually worth panicking about?

My resolution list might as well be a 2010 buzzfeed article titled here’s 24 tricks to keep you off your phone and maybe it is. But here’s the thing. I love the struggle of writing my thoughts down. I love lifting weights. I am loving running again after years of inactivity. I don’t think I need to even say I love reading. But I love media, and being outside, and just fucking doing things with my life. And I want those things. I don’t want to spend 3 hours a day on TikTok so that I can follow some internet drama that we’re all worse off by knowing about. I want to enjoy life and not simply watch it transpire in the world around me with a flick of my thumb.

I’m breathing heavy, standing in front of a wall of mirrors at the gym, and looking at The Pump. In gym culture, “The Pump” describes the look of how the muscles appear enlarged right after working out. While the mechanics of muscle growth require more than simply lifting weights (sleep and nutrition play a vital yet culturally less-discussed role in muscle growth), The Pump happens when the heart rate rises during a workout. During the constricting and stretching of the muscles against the pressure of the weights, blood flows into the muscles, blood cells filling the interstitial spaces between the muscle cells, and thus making the muscles temporarily larger. The Pump’s aesthetic appeal climaxes while endorphins and endocannabinoids rush to the brain, leaving the lifter’s mind and body flooded with blood and happiness.

After a good workout, I want to capture that moment, that sensation - the physical exhaustion and the mental elation for being here, this time, what feels like finally. Being disabled, having a mind that often overflows with things not real, has made the gym, and most any place with people and noise, a part of life that only exists for me in sparse doses. But I am here. Moving weights, listening to my breathing in circles and cycles my therapist reminds me of every week. Standing here, in this place I dream about it, I want this moment to become as bountiful as the moments that I have to remind myself that I am, that you are, that all of this, is real. And I want to remember that I am and was here.

Looking at myself in the mirror, with every degree my phone tilts, a different shadow highlights or hides the hours of work I’ve spent in the gym. Tilt and see the shadows change how round my shoulders are, the angle of my traps reaching up the back of my head, how sunken the space looks behind my clavicle. Bend and rotate the arm and decide whether my triceps or biceps look bigger when one arm holds the phone and the other dangles to my side. Clench my forearm making it look wider. Flex my hand, but keep it natural, and let the veins distort my tattoos and wrap around my knuckles. Shift my stance, supinate my back foot to show off the curve of my calf. Keep the front foot pointed to show the vein bulging, winding up to my knee. Flex the thigh, let the shadows of the vastus lateralis cast over the patella.

Breathe in, let the air move from my stomach, shrinking it, into my chest, expanding it. Flex. Snap a picture. Keep flexing. Tilt the phone enough that only I’ll be able to see the difference in how these shadows flow over my body. Snap another picture. Relax. Breathe.

I look at the photo and see the hours of work and years of struggle that lead me to this pose. I see myself, the reflections of a changing, aging body that’s survived, and I see more than a gym selfie. The pump, this place, the sweat, these moments capture the elimination of the statis that so often keeps me trapped. But that’s simply the story I see in the selfie. The story you see, the story you craft out of my photo, might be very different.

When the gym selfie remains in my photo album, the meaning of the photo lies only to the story I invent. For me, I look at it and the ebbs and flows of a life with schizophrenia are as prominently displayed in the image as my choice of shoes that day. The art critic John Berger said, “the camera relieves us of the burden of memory,” but I understand that relief not to be of the unnecessary uses of holding onto memory, but of the relief I have that a clump of pixels lets me savor the memories. I see the photo with the nuances only the photographer can give, but I know that nuance evaporates when someone else sees the photo. There is an infinite nothingness of meaning in those pixels of the gym selfie when I am the only one that sees them. But, when you see them, and for every individual person that sees them, there is an infinite everything in its meaning. Knowing the meaning changes, knowing that posting alters every feeling I might have about the photo, I stand in front of the mirror and feel the tension of all the comment I can imagine. Sharing the gym selfie destroys the photo like a volcanic eruption – whatever habitat existed on that landscape is decimated under the flowing lava and toxic fumes that suffocate life. The eruption can be devastating, but it can also bring life. After the magma has cooled, after the weather has broken down the rock, the minerals create some of the most nutrient soil anywhere on the planet. The gym selfie, as they currently exist on our social media feeds, most often only produce the first part of that eruption.

What do you see when someone posts themselves standing in front of the wall of mirrors in the gym?

Those images – people flexing, posing, placing themselves in the optimal lighting to show off their muscled bodies – they tell a story, but what is it? Does it have to do with the beauty of our forms? Do you see the cultural pressure of being fit? Of being skinny? Of starving ourselves to have the bodies that produce the most shares and likes? Do you see bodies that are asking you to look at them and respond with a salivating emoji as an admiration in our lust? Do you see the photo pushing a link to sell you a course that demands you wake up at 5am or a recipe for a celery cleanse? Do you think of that body as a reflection of health and how culture wants to sell us a thousand products that promise vitality? Do you see the body as competition – a calling card for us to work hard, to push ourselves past our breaking points, or the unending need to optimize every metric of our bodies in order to prove ourselves as worthy and valuable? Do you see the shame of seeing someone else bettering themselves while you scroll?

Berger has another quote about photography that I think might capture this dilemma of the gym selfie. “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” But what if what we know and believe about the gym could be altered? What if a gym selfie could mean something other than what culture has captured in those images? What if the stories we tell and see in gym selfies wasn’t about the underlying pressure to improve ourselves relentlessly against a culture that continuously demands more. What if gym selfies told a different story?

SET 1

The first known fitness photos started with Archibald MacLaren in the UK during the early 1860s. MacLaren, a known fitness and sporting enthusiast, was hired by the British army to train recruits with his new methods of strength and conditioning exercises utilizing the early prototypes of modern gym equipment and calisthenics. Over the span of several months of training, MacLaren invented the modern concept of before and after photos to show off his effective methods. Like many of the before and after photos we see today across the social media, the side-by-side images reveal the transformations of the body over time. In MacLaren’s photos, glowing from the intense lighting in the black and white grainy style of early photography, the soldiers appear scrawny compared to their modern counterparts. Even the after images, flexing with a noticeable yet still modest amount of a few extra pounds of muscle, still show shallow chests, shoulders without protruding roundness, and arms appearing in a uniformed thickness all the way up. When the soldier’s flex, a subtle curving shadow under the muscle shows the growth, but they’re lacking the modern display of what might be a full-sized lemon being crushed under the skin. Albeit, the design of the left and right images, the documentation of the effort, tells a story, and the British army loved these stories of stronger soldiers told through photos that they quickly instituted new training regimens across the ranks.

Fitness photography transformed by the turn of the century. Instead of the focus on what fitness could be for the average soldier, the cameras turned to the exceptional. Much like anyone trying to make a living because of their unique characteristics, circus performers quickly became one of the most photographical genres by the late 1800s. Strongmen had been a mainstay in the world of traveling circuses for several decades, and by the turn of the century, Eugene Sandow became an international celebrity when photos of his feats of strength and chiseled body circulated across Europe and America. If you’re imagining what a circus strongman looked like, you’re probably picturing Sandow. Perhaps a handlebar mustache, a leotard or the high-rise underwear that Superman wears, and a barbell with globes on the ends? That’s Sandow.

In 1898, Sandow began releasing a monthly periodical with writings on fitness and photographs of his body called Eugene Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, the first magazine devoted to fitness. What became apparent was that his audience seemed more attached to the photos of his body than the ones specifically showing off feats of strength. The action-style photos popularized by the circus gave way to Sandow posing in different positions, flexing his muscles, and allowing the contours of his body to tell a new story. With his rising fame, he started a gym in London—one of the first of the kind open to the public to promote the ideas he called “body-building.” And in 1901, he organized the “The Great Competition;” the original body building competition where the aesthetics of strongmen was judged instead of measurements of their raw strength. Judges dissected the muscled men. Looking at their bodies’ definition, symmetry, and proportion of muscles across their entire form, the men stood on podiums, flexing to please the judges and the crowd. Sandow molded what became the future of aesthetic as entertainment, as aspiration, as spectacle.

Looking to capture the audience that Sandow created, other magazines seized on the trend of body building. With the cultural success of the Great Competition and Sandow’s rise to mainstream fame, a new pulp magazine by American bodybuilder Bernarr MacFadden started circulating (inspired by and directly stealing off of Sandow) called Physical Culture. MacFadden’s writings and photos of bodybuilders were used to fund the propagandized work of his “healthatoriums.” In certainly not the first conspiracy connected to physical health but in the one maybe the one most connected to our modern wellness movement, MacFadden’s healthatoriums existed to push the ideas of fitness as an activity, a lifestyle, and a belief system. In what reflects up the fitness world’s public detest of public health during the COVID epidemic that fueled the rise of the MAHA movement of today, two of MacFadden’s children died in childhood because he believed medical doctors were quacks. Instead of seeking care for his ailing children, MacFadden pushed physical activity and fasting as prescriptions. When his daughter died of a treatable heart condition, he later remarked, “it’s better she’s gone; she would’ve disgraced me.”

The modern fitness industry is plagued by the remnants of the birth of fitness photography. The cataloguing of progress created by MacLaren co-opted into before and after photos that are now the main advertisement tool of every diet fad. You’ll never see a Weight Watchers commercial without the side by side of the formerly tight and later lose clothes. Sandow’s capitalization of aesthetic as spectacle pushed the boundaries that we see continuously moving into today’s social media landscape of gamifying the body through steroid use and starvation for entertainment. MacFadden’s belief in health over science, achieved only through the effort of the individual, killed his daughter, and now the most powerful public health official in the nation, who laundered his credibility in health through shirtless workout videos on the campaign trail, has made it his mission for the institutional power of the government to chase his anti-science witch-hunt that vaccines cause autism.

A person posting a gym selfie doesn’t guarantee any of these beliefs or behaviors. There’s no mandatory regimen of starvation or prescription to toss out your meds and try Rieke instead. But the culture of the gym, the image of how the history of the gym has been captured by fanatics and grifters, floods social media. Algorithmically, the most popular content—the content that pays the most, that garners the most attention and fame—creates an atmosphere reliant on messages that spark rage and images of the spectacle. Videos of horrific accidents or harassment will go viral. Images of bodies testing the limits of dehydration, malnutrition, and the hearts tolerance of anabolic steroids will spread across people’s feeds. And the gym created in the reality of social media will be one that is unwelcoming, unsafe, and unsympathetic toward bodies that society (and the algorithms that underlie our reality) deems undesirable.

In the mind of a fitness bro, a gym selfie might be an attempt to invite others to share this space, but for most, it will work as disinvitation.

SET 2

In most gyms exists a built-in sign language system between strangers. Everyone wears headphones, and instead of constantly removing them or fumbling over the pause button, we talk with our hands. A palm facing upwards and a gesture toward a machine or column of cables, “is this free?” Two hands raised slightly with palms facing outward, “nah, you’re good. All you.” One finger held up, “I’m almost done here.” Holding eye contact with each other with your fists in front of the stomach, knuckles almost touching, and then raised a few inches, and jolted back down, “you’ve got this.”

My younger brother and I used the gym language, but we also showed each other our phones when we needed to say more. I don’t know why we didn’t press send after we typed up the message. Maybe we both knew we didn’t want the digital thread between us to be steady, unrelenting reminder that “are you okay” hung over every moment.

In the gym, my mind raced with the unreal. I heard everyone’s thoughts - an inescapable radio broadcast of the horrible things people would’ve never said to me out loud but that I’d been cursed with hearing anyway. Soundproof headphones didn’t do much to block out the sounds my brain invents. I could hear the caterwaul of unintelligible voices above my music. The entire gym smelled like sweat, cleaning spray, and my brain re-invented the noxious fumes of a barn I watched burn as a kid. I felt the movement of bugs underneath my dirty nails, trying to wriggle themselves toward freedom, when I grip the dumbbells. But I was here, as often as I could be, as often as my brother is willing to bring me, because on another track of thought, a voice inside of me, one that feels more like mine, played a steady loop of your heart won’t last much longer. Your heart won’t last much longer. Your heart won’t last much longer.

Next to me, he showed me his phone screen, “what’s next?” And as I scanned the room trying to find the part of the crowded gym with the least amount of people, I took a deep breath to calm my nerves and try to hear myself through the thoughts that aren’t mine.

I’d begun to feel myself calcifying in those years. My body struggled to move. My social life slowly disappeared from the steady buildup of unanswered texts. My mind slowly shutting itself off to the real world. The meds I took to cope with the unreal were slowing me down, and, in almost every moment, I feared the point in which they’d make some part of me stop altogether.

I needed my brother’s help getting to the gym. He moved in with me after his stay in rehab. It felt like a mostly tepid experiment of my parents trying to get their younger sons to keep an eye on each other. And although I didn’t love being 25 years old and having my younger brother be charged with “helping” me, I needed the accountability of a person watching my life devolve to see a different future than I saw. I needed help, and, during those years, I didn’t know how to ask for it in more ways than to have someone witness and be present while I receded into the small, safe spaces of my isolation. My parents told him when he moved in, he could only stay as long as he helped me. And I know they left the idea of help vague because during those years, the most common thing they said to me, aside from “I love you,” was “I wish we knew how to help you.”

My brother showed me his phone again, “do we need to go?” I don’t know. My brain frantically tried to calculate how much social battery I had left before a crash might happen that could lead me to staying locked in my room for days.

I typed out, “we’ll try again tomorrow,” and we headed for the door.

Most days went like that. Small bursts of activity, trying to move, flex, and exhaust myself before the world closed in around me. In the gym, training until failure means the last set can’t be completed. The strength in the muscles depletes entirely. The weights clash and clang back to their resting position against our greatest effort to push and pull them even an inch more. Failure is a feature of growth in the gym. Failure fuels the body. But my failure fell upon me before my body could give out. I exhausted every bit of myself except my muscles, but I wanted to see those failures adding up, hopefully creating something, someone, new.

When I got home, I went to my bathroom, took off my shirt, and snapped a picture of myself standing in front of the mirror. I couldn’t take a selfie at the gym, couldn’t spend the extra seconds of energy that might’ve allowed new paranoias about being watched to flood over me, but in my home, I wanted to see the progress I’d made.

I used Instagram stories to put two pictures of myself side by side to see how my body had changed over the three months my brother has been here to help coax me out of the house. I wrote out the dates, 2/25/2018 and 5/25/2018, screenshotted the photo to keep, and deleted the story so that no one will see.

I lay in bed and look at the photos. On the right side, I see my chest firmer and the shadows under my pecs shrinking out to the edges. The curvature of the three moles under my breast now taking on a slightly new angle. I see the tighter skin around my lower ribs and the love handles displacing slightly less of my body over the bands of my shorts. And underneath my unruly beard, I see my traps protruding upward.

I don’t show this photo to anyone. I don’t see how a before and after photo of my three months of work would be worth posting. I use my social media to post about my mental health advocacy, to share small writings and reflections of life as a schizophrenic, and to talk about politics from my disabled perspective. And I don’t post these photos because I don’t think I want to conflate these worlds – the mind and the body.

These private selfies are the last fitness photos I have until 2023. When my brother moved out after our few months of experiment, I stopped going to the gym. I had needed help getting out of my house, and when the isolation set back into the comforting absence of others, I struggled to fight against it. And for the next five years, until medication changes that didn’t make my body feel like rigor mortis was setting in, the steady drumbeat of my dread played on.

Your heart won’t last much longer.

Your heart won’t last much longer.

Your heart won’t last much longer.

SET 3

Decades before Archibald MacLaren snapped his before and after photos of individual transformations from weightlifting to show the British army, an athletic organization known as the Turners (turn, German for “gym”) started cropping up across Germany during the 1810s. In these local communities, the Tuners built open-air gymnasiums, turnverein, forming the center block of the community. The gyms didn’t simply exist for exercise; they served as the location for organization and outreach, a designated central place for political education and mutual aid, and often even the spot where locals kept a cache of arms and ammunition. The gym was the third place for these radicals. The Turners, as much as they were a group devoted to promoting fitness, were attempting to build a body politic through the community of fitness enthusiasts. For the Turners, the notion of physical culture revolved around a revolutionary fervor for change and the wellness of their community.

On the precipice of the Revolution of 1848, the Turner’s enlisted in droves to right against the monarchical dynasty trying to regain control after the death of Napoleon. The Turners had used exercise to inspire, motivate, and prepare their communities to face the political upheaval of the day. Although the movement was largely defeated during the wars in Germany by the end the 19^th century, the ideology of protecting your community through fitness and health quickly took root in other places of the German diaspora facing political turmoil.

In the United States, the Turners created sanctuaries of diversity in major cities during the late 1850s. Leading up to the Civil War, the Turners held rallies and enlistment events for the North, for a while even being the volunteer security forces for Abraham Lincoln at the start of the war. In St. Louis, the Turners held nine strongholds across the cities – nine gymnasiums built by and for the people training their bodies to save their communities. Nine gymnasiums, more than double the current number of Planet Fitness and YMCA gyms currently in the St. Louis today.

For their help of enlisting recent German immigrants during the war, the Turners became known across the Midwest. In the German strongholds of the North, the Turners became known for their slogan, “sound mind in a sound body.” The Turners community goals of fitness, finding control in the strength of their bodies, provided the stamina to carry out the acts of building resilience and fighting for freedom. Back in Germany, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels watched the movement that had died out in their country flourish in the United States and praised the movement for their commitment to revolutionary zeal during the Civil War.

The Tuners in the United States eventually disappeared amongst the tides of the 20^th century. The national identity of German politics clashed with the rise of Nazism during the 1930s. After the war, the Red Scare descended upon all radical and socialist groups. The gyms closed, and a new culture of fitness worked to replace the Turners. From its inception in the 1850s, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) had directly copied the format of the Turners. In the organization handbook, Muscular Christianity, the YMCA defined the spiritual need for strong bodies, but avoided the radical of building of sound minds that sustained the local communities.

Where the Turner movement built itself for the purpose of body building through the social and civic engagement of the community—a community formed and strengthened by fitness, education, and collection action—the mold of the modern fitness industry and culture lacks the communal nature of the body and the body politic. The latter part of the 20^thcentury and the 21^st century show the tandem death of third places and the birth of neoliberal individualization and isolationism. The death and birth creating our loneliness epidemic. Social life gave way to social media. And now the public places of the past exist in our individually algorithmic realities. The gym selfie emerged to communicate a once communal activity that society morally demands and doctors prescribe for the individual. Posting a gym selfie attempts to broach the death of the communal aspect of the gym and the birth of our loneliness epidemic—showing our sweaty bodies posing in front of a wall of mirrors in attempt to produce connection.

We are asking others to see us, to join us, because we are here standing alone.

FAILURE

I started taking Mounjaro two in a half years ago. The drug is similar to (sometimes referred to as more enhanced version of) Ozempic. I hesitated taking the drug for a year after my doctor suggested I try it.

Pre-diabetes entered my medical chart a few months before my brother moved in with me in early 2018. The new diagnosis was one of the reasons my parents thought it might be good to trial run him living with me. In those years, I needed help with almost everything. My mom would routinely drive a few hours to help me do loads of laundry and clean my house. My dad kept an eye on my finances and made sure I had enough money to eat. A lawyer helped me fight my disability denial. And my brother was there to help me move my body and try to eat healthier. When he left, I tried to manage my pre-diabetes. Soon enough, I was trying to manage type-2 diabetes. It wasn’t until my doctor explained that I had between a 25-30% chance of diabetic retinopathy that I decided to try the drug. Losing my sight would mean that I would lose everything that I felt sustained me. For years, every morning I spent reading and every evening I watched a movie. My sight was everything. I was terrified that the visible world I loved would turn invisible, and that the invisible world that I saw and I fear would consume me.

Since taking Mounjaro, I’ve lost more than a third of my weight. That’s what people see. I see it too, at least when the fog of body dysmorphia hasn’t totally altered my reflection, but my story of lower blood sugar, decreased liver enzymes, and the lower statistical likelihood of a heart attack can’t tell a story as popular as the one I could produce by showing myself during those years of isolation next to a photo of me in the gym.

I’ve never posted a before and after photo of myself. I won’t participate in the trends of show your glow up since 2020 or my style over the years because I don’t want those photos to tell a story that I can’t control.

COOL DOWN

You’ve been to the doctor and told to work out. It’s a nearly universal experience for those that have access to healthcare. “30 minutes a day of moderate-intensity exercise. 5 days a week.” The universal prescription. With a biological body that’s constantly on the verge of failing, we are told our health is ours to control. Our bodies are ours, and how they function derives from what we do to and with them. Exercise prescribed to everyone, but every study confirms that only about a quarter of the population performs regular exercise.

When my body felt like it was failing, the doctor told me, prescribed me, to exercise more. Their involvement ended there, and so did the rest of societies’ involvement.

The Individual Model of disability tries to explain our current reality. Sometimes also called the Moral Model due to the morality framework that society places upon our bodies’ functions, the Individual Model says that the source and the treatment for the disability come from the individual—neoliberal individualization of our bodies, our health, our ability to function in society. According to the model, schizophrenia is mine, and the treatment of this illness is my duty.

When you think of any illness, you’re supposed to think of the individual. The source is the individual. The solution is the individual.

The Turners didn’t agree. The Turners saw the health and fitness of their community as be the duty of their community.

How we interpret gym selfies often relies entirely on this individualization of our health. A gym selfie is a performance of proof that you’re working on your health. Society demands that you push yourself, work, work harder, only you can solve your problems. In Rejected Body, disability theorist Susan Wendell argues that our concept of health is a cultural fantasy. Misdiagnosing how health works absolves our current system of power from their culpability of our ailments and the need to provide systems of care; instead, the problems and solutions are thrust upon individuals with a morality tale about hard work.

Allison Kafer captures a different angle in her work Feminist, Queer, Crip in her concept of “curative time.” In her work, she says that the moralization of our health demands the progress of health – health becoming an action that always pushes us to be healthier. Society expects and insists that we must always be striving for better, more perfect bodies. Individualism necessitates that the timeline of our bodies always moves in the direction of improvement and normalization. Kafer would likely say that our social media feeds of gym selfies work as the cultural artifact or a performative ritual endorsing the system’s request that we always work to improve ourselves to prove our value.

The narrative of the gym selfie is one of improvement, photo evidence that a person is bettering themselves. A gym selfie is not simply the evidence of a personal moment, but instead works as a reflection of what culture demands of us. I think that’s why people often don’t enjoy seeing them. A person telling you, showing you, I work out is a reflection of our inadequacies and an invitation to work harder. And I can’t be too certain I don’t fall into that trap. When I take a gym selfie, I want to take the next one as well. I know that I want my body and my mind to be here, in the gym, again. But I don’t know if I want to see a changing body or a body that simply made it out of the house more often. I don’t know if my story of the gym selfie knows the difference.

REST

I rub the calloused ridges of my palms while checking my watch to see what’s next. Sitting on the bike on the second floor of the gym, looking out over the bodies moving between lifts, I notice the coolness of my body. A calmness settles over me and I feel a comfort in the nothingness of all my senses. The humming of my brain quietly revs like it does when I am home. I can’t feel heated blood rushing through me, and my muscles haven’t clenched or vibrated in a state of frenzied panic. I am sitting here, my feet pushing the pedals through the cycles in a rhythmic steadiness, and I can feel the breath drawing into my nostrils and inflating my lungs.

Yesterday I ran three miles. Today I am biking and lifting weights. Tomorrow I will run another three miles, hopefully a little more quickly than yesterday, if I can – if my mind and my body agree. When my body moves, my heart pumping faster and my muscles tensing against the weights, my brain feels like its swimming in the perfectly temperate pool on a warm day. I am floating, moving my limbs and thoughts, and I am surrounded by water that feels like air.

When I take a gym selfie and post it, I know the complications in this communication. I know that how my body looks, how it’s changed over time, says something; and I know I can’t control what it says.

If I go through my workout routine, the camera will capture this moment. A short story that tells more than simply what exists amongst the pixels of my sweaty body, my muscles engorged from The Pump, my presence in a place that feels unwelcoming to some, and a body that has progressed along the timeline of how society demands our constant improvement. I am in that picture. Yet, the camera can’t capture the entire story. The flick of the shutters locks in this moment into a temporal prison of infinite interpretive value. I know what lead up to this moment, how I got here, and the lives, realities, and unrealities that exist beyond the picture, but when I share that story, its meaning is no longer mine.

I think part of me wants to run through this mental exercise of considering gym selfies in a way to absolve myself for the guilt of how my life has changed. The weight loss, years of isolation dissolving into a life I always wanted, and the desire I have for others to take notice. I see the toxicity that could written in my story. I see a fat, schizophrenic hermit that started running races, going to grad school, and became an influencer. I see how someone could see my life changed and believe that my life changed because I, that I alone, changed it. I know the story that could come from my life, could come from my gym selfie, but I also see the stories of what could exist but that our current system works to destroy.

A gym selfie could exist in which the body of the individual is not the only story we consider. I’m standing in front of the mirrors that I did not place here. In the building I did not build. Looking at myself in the phone I could not even begin to understand how to build. Wearing clothes that workers in impoverished countries stitched together and that a world of logistics and transportation workers helped deliver to me. I am standing here, posing, after hundreds of hours in therapy, and my body is sustained by the medications I do not understand and fueled by the food that I could not grow. I am trying to show you these muscles I have built. But I can only show you that gym selfie because the world has worked together to make this happen, and yet, that same world tells us that this story is only ours.

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” John Berger wrote. I can see how the Turners knew the strength of our bodies could strengthen their communities. I can see how the landscape of the fitness world has been captured by people that want to sell the ideas of individual successes in the march toward the most perfectly optimized bodied. I can see that the gym selfie how the steady drumbeat of my dread—your heart won’t last much longer, your heart won’t last much longer, your heart won’t last much longer—silenced when the people in my life helped me get to the part of my story in which I can be in this room surrounded by all of the gym’s noises and smells and movements across my vision and my body and my brain feel the calming nothingness.

Maybe the culture of gym selfies is a culture of our individualism. But maybe we will find the strength it takes to rip that story apart and write something new.

This being draft one, I already know some of things I plan to change (including actually figuring out a title), but I would be curious what you think as well. Give me some editorial notes, if you’d like. I will republish this piece in December - and if people would like, I might even try posting some pictures of the editorial process so that we can see how draft 1 looks contrasted against draft 2.

This work is about dating, sex, drinking, and mental health, so content warnings if you need them.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for supporting.

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(editorial note: usernames and questions are fictionalized)

Sorry I haven’t been posting much these past few weeks. My alogia returned recently, and I haven’t been able to keep up with my routine posting. In the meantime, let’s do a Q&A. And as much as I love talking about books with all y’all, I’m prioritizing non-bookish questions. Sometimes I need a vacation from the vocation of yapping about books online. I’ll try to answer your questions this morning while I wait for it to be hot enough that I can go wander around some trials all afternoon and temporarily forget social media exists.

So, ask away.

@thaliareadsbooks: What’s alogia?

Alogia is a common symptom of schizophrenia (it’s also a common side effect of anti-psychotic medication … so chicken vs. egg, ya know?) where it impacts a person’s ability to speak. It’s also known as poverty of speech (which is different than poverty of thought (aphasia)). There’s several ways schizophrenia might limit a person’s ability to speak, but with alogia, the connection between the brain and the mouth becomes sort of flimsy. For me, I can think clearly, get my thoughts in order, but when I go to start talking, I feel like everything is on the tip of my tongue. I want to talk but can’t. The words are there, stuck inside my head, and only sometimes can they find their exit from my brain. It’s especially difficult to generate my own thoughts into words, but answering questions helps. It feels like a car engine that won’t turn over, but the questions kick starts the process. When I’m having an alogia episode, I feel trapped, locked in, waiting for people to start a conversation or ask me question so that my brain will finally let me start talking.

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In the days following Kirk’s assassination, I’ve been watching social media and thinking a lot about John Ganz’s recent essay “Why Charlie Kirk was killed.” He gives an honest assessment and places the blame directly on the Second and First Amendments. Guns, obviously. No explanation needed. In his part about the Free Speech, he says, “It’s long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do.” But I think there’s an important part about what made us all feel insane over the last week that’s missing from this great essay.

We all witnessed the moment the second we looked at social media. I can’t even say following his death because that simply took too long to actually announce, but following the shooting of Kirk, immediately, the internet set aflame trying to figure out who pulled the trigger. Not the literal person. Not Tyler Robinson as a person. But Tyler Robinson as a political symbol - the person as a political entity.

Since the news broke, speculations surrounding the shooter’s identity became the hot topic of discussion. From the (potentially doctored) FBI documents revealing he has a trans friend or partner, his conservative family and religious upbringing in Utah, everyone trying to explain to their mothers what a groyper is with a crash course lesson into Pepe memes, and Trump designating Antifa a terrorist organization, we want to know who killed Charlie Kirk, not why.

But we don’t care about the motivation. That’s not the question that’s been consuming everyone’s social media feeds and all of mainstream media. The focus is on who, and by extension what political ideology this man had, is about focusing our fury on who is to blame, because we all know the motivation.

The “why” is so obvious in our political climate and I don’t think many are being honest about it. The why? Because Kirk deserved it. That’s not my stance, that’s what the culture of this moment says. We know why Kirk was killed, from conservatives to communists. We know Kirk was killed because of his politics. And we’re not unpacking the motivation any further because we think he deserved it. Politics will get you killed. Every spot on the political compass thinks every other spot possess an existential threat. We’re not stunned by an event like this happening because we’re all quietly thinking “I can’t believe this isn’t happening more often.”

We saw the same flurry of political affiliation guessing games happen with Trump’s attempted assassination last summer. And the same thing also happened with the murder of CEO of United Healthcare Brian Thompson. We didn’t focus on why – we all know why people would shoot these people. Instead, we want to understand the politics of the person, but something is growing increasingly apparent with these recent shootings. All three of these (alleged) shooters, all of them picking a politically motivated targets, have politics that the media doesn’t understand or won’t allow themselves to understand.

Normie politics. The political compass is broken, and trying to still use it as the lens to an accurate view of politics won’t show the reality of the moment we’re living in. That’s why Ezra Klein’s essay stands out as so trite. He’s trying to understand the political world of this moment as if it existed in the pre-Trump era. His Abundance agenda is repackaged Tea Party austerity measurements, and his obituary is written from his political education inspired by watching Sorkin’s The West Wing.

In John Ganz’s book, When the Clock Broke: Con Man Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, he lays some of the methods for how we ended up this shattered reality. Never addressing the racial tensions of the Civil Rights Movement. The rise of fringe populism movements that conservatives tried to capture into a singular source of power. And the economic precarities of the average worker happening while politicians are either ambivalent or ignorant of economic struggles. And right now, we’re all witnessing all of these continue on, expanding the chasm of the a reality that might very well be totally shattered, all while politicians grow increasingly unconcerned.

It's no surprise that normie politics are on the rise. The Republican and Democratic Party both refuse to both acknowledge the realities of these struggles or give any real solutions on trying to address them. Republicans will scream about wokism and trans people in sports while the farmers cry out for a bailout. The Democrats try to tell us we have to lead with empathy while funding the genocide in Gaza. The capitalist empire continues to chug on. Reality be damned. And normie politics are people trying to make sense of it all. They’re trying, I know they are, but I think what often becomes too easy to chase after is the doom that the problems are simply too much to solve. Kirk, Thompson, Trump. Those are the problems that can be solved. Point a finger. Pull a trigger.

We have a First Amendment and Second Amendment problem. But we also have a reality problem. Our politicians and media can’t do a single thing about that without confronting the whole capitalist order. And, so, they won’t. Nothing will change; however, the chaos will expand.

If you’d like some further reading:

I think the politics of assassinations and mass shootings have distinctly different political and ideological motivations, but I do think one text will give you the greatest understanding that regardless of these small distinctions is Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates. Nearly every shooter is man, and I think we all fundamentally understand why, but I think this gives some of the nuances in unpacking this moment.

For a view of the system as a whole, I think reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism for understanding how history feels to be falling apart in the post 9/11 world, her quasi-memoir of herself contrasting against the growth of the alt-right Doppelganger, and Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do about It all collectively paint a stunning vision of how we can see the pieces of our fractured reality.

And for YouTube, I think an incredible documentary that gets into the culture of this moment through the lens of the growing culture of the right-wing comedy scene is “How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult.” I also think the two part series on the aesthetics of fascism give a really great, shareable insight worthy of discussion with friends. Here’s part 1and part 2

Those radiant orange skies dampened not long after I left. But I was here, now, and the skies, well, I wish they had a color. I know she might not know what month or year it was enough to notice, but I hated that she would die in the winter when everything was so bright, only bright, that you couldn’t see any of the beauty of what that those formless skies created while you were in a room like this.

—

I’ve seen Substack screaming that there should be more fiction on here, so … here you go?

This was my first fiction assignment for my MFA. I’m studying CNF, but really looking forward to playing around with fiction and poetry while I’m in the program. This assignment is for a Reading for Writers class I’m taking, and for it we had to write a piece between 300-600 words inspired by some recent reading. So I’m including the annotation note as well about how I came about the inspiration for this work.

Annotation: I wrote this while watching and reading Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. In the story, the main character, Danny Torrance, is a hospice worker that routinely goes to comfort dying patients. Because of his “super power” (the shining), he’s able to psychically ease his dying patients before their final moment. I love this small bit of care, a thing I think more people should have than currently do, and was left thinking about the care we are going to have as more people are dying due to climate change. I also think approaching Halloween season, I’ve been reflecting on ghosts as more than haunting characters. Or maybe still haunting, but stripped of the horror elements. Doctor Sleep spends a lot of time and attention on the topic of care – how failing to do so can haunt us, and how caring for others can sustain us – and I think ghosts sometimes have that duality as well.

This black hole of scrolling truly feels hard to escape though. Today I’ve lost nearly my whole day to this nothingness that makes me feel like shit. And it hasn’t been until my friend, Anaïs, harassed me into sharing my thoughts about the newest viral story from TikTok about AI and psychosis that I’ve felt like my brain actually does work.

For those that don’t know (and to be honest I’ve only caught maybe a third of the entire story), Kendra started making videos about the incident after her semi-viral reddit thread about how and why her psychiatrist stopped seeing her. She posted her story of the “abuse” she’d experienced by her psychiatrist. As she tells it, he manipulated her into falling in love over years of sessions, and when she finally felt comfortable admitting her reciprocal love, he dismissed her as a client. Now, in what’s caused her content to become the newest viral story, she’s going on Live or making videos about how she can’t be crazy because her therapist believes her. For the skeptics, she has proof. She flips her phone around to show us the AI chatbot Claude she’s employed as her therapist to help her process her trauma and inform her new audience of her sanity. In one video, she’s delightfully expressive as the AI confirms her reality of abuse and closes the video with a quick, “See, I don’t have AI psychosis.”

(I am not hyperlinking to any of this story because I don’t think we should watch it. Not to spoil the rest of the essay, but what Kendra is going through is obviously a mental health crisis in some respect, and having the internet watch a person’s life unravel is not good for her or for us. Kendra deserves and needs helps, and I don’t think we should live our lives being entertained by real people’s suffering – especially when they are actively and unbeknownst to themselves living through their own disaster.)

(Side note: this phenomenon does not only happen in the viral tailspin of people’s momentary unraveling. Joshua Block (@worldoftshirts) is an autistic man that has built an entire platform off of his alcoholism his audience encourages and endorses through views - the comment section of every video is built off a community of anonymous people watching their “captain” slowly progressing to the point of organ failure to entertain the people.)

This story feels like a weird intersection of mental health, AI, social media, virality, gender, race (it seems her psychiatrist is Indian from what most people have gathered), and just the general underlying parts of society that seem to be fracturing.

There’s no doubt about how Kendra’s story could be used to write incredibly important pieces on sexism and racism’s history of using sexual assault as a form of control. And each side can have their historical arguments to make their cases. Emmett Till lynched at the dawn of the Civil Rights era because of a white woman. Or the conversative, reactionary piece by people referencing the Duke University lacrosse scandal.

We could talk about the rise of therapy speak and how everyone being able to diagnose themselves . . . might not be great. And this could lead us into the talking about the parts of psychiatry and psychology that need repaired through better healthcare and justice for patients, but the reversal of the anti-psychiatry movement is simply just as plainly obvious, as it always has been in every evolution. Whether it’s abolishing asylums, re-evaluating the effectiveness of medication, or talking about the growing neurodivergent trend, the political Left and Right are always intersecting and overlapping in ways that muddle the discussion to near uselessness most of the time.

And the use of an AI therapist brings in a long list of anti-AI sentiments that could be easy to capture. Inside of this we could talk about what AI is doing to our brains, our environments, or to the social fabric of our lives – the studies showing we’re making ourselves dumber by using it, getting into investigations about what data centers are doing to the local communities around the country, or how our labor and social lives are all being decimated by the continued fakeness AI is throwing on top of an already burning world. All these things should be said, and they will be, I’m sure.

I’m sorry this isn’t a better essay. I know I could’ve quoted Ron Jonson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and talked about how virality derived from our worst moments literally ruins people’s lives. “But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.” Or Karen Hao’s new, wonderfully insightful book about AI, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (“Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.”) We can talk about Foucault’s panopticon or Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic minds capitalism is creating or Debord’s work on degrading spectacular societies. We all have ways of seeing it, recontextualizing it, giving it a nice substack or quick video essay worthy spin to draw in the eyes and hopefully gain enough shares to make sure people know I am paying attention better than you.

But I can’t help but think the solution might not be philosophizing off of the shit we cannot escape and instead . . . walking away. Literally, walk away.

I know it’s very easy for the argument of “touch grass” or “exercise more” to get subsumed by the alt-right pipelines of wellness into their MAHA campaign at creating their own ubermensch. I watch the growth of the online “wellness” spaces as they try to manufacture a new SS fueled by peptides instead of meth and trying to inspire the masses with Joe Rogan Experience instead of Hanz Schweitzer. But I see the brain rot coming for us. And I think the only real, actualized antidote we are going to have for this insane and stupid society we are building is going to be found in forests, walking trails, cafés, book clubs, and sex dungeons. We’re going to need to find ourselves out in those places or we are going to lose ourselves behind a screen that will melt our brains and turn us into Floop’s Fooglies that can make viral responses to a crumbling society.

I’m reading Fredrick Goss’ A Philosophy of Walking right now and I want to leave you with this quote. “Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.”

I’m not trying to ragebait you here. On Monday morning, we might see something truly great, or something with that potential, anyway.

A contingent of economists and economics talking heads have been alluding to the idea that we might experience something similar to 1987’s Black Monday – a 22.6% drop in the Dow Jones that wiped out $1.7 trillion. And while the numbers were playing with now are much more substantial ($11.1 trillion over the two-day dip last week), anything monumental allowed to happen before Wall Street flips the breakers and stops trading will have the country freaking out even more. All of this happening because Trump believes America isn’t winning anymore.

If you want a purely economic-minded breakdown of how misguided and insane Trump’s tariffs plan is, I’d recommend reading The Verge’s breakdown on the possible use of AI to come up with numbers so unbelievable that economists struggled to grasp how anyone with a background in economics could allow for something like this to happen. In the most simplistic way I can explain, the rate of Trump’s tariffs have been determined by the trade deficits (or trade gaps) between countries. The White House released a formula that looks complicated, but the math is truly mind-meltingly simplistic. Basically, what Trump is selling as “reciprocal tariffs” is actually retribution against the trade deficits with the world – in other words, we’re going to pay more taxes (buy less things) because we buy more from other countries than they buy from us.

Trump’s America First mentality is wrong. At the most fundamental level, every motivation behind his “Liberation Day” is tinged with racism, and it needs to be said his nationalistic approach to economics will be disastrous for, well, nearly everyone, everywhere. In a post on whatever far-right app Trump haunts, he said “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” And Trump’s post perfectly captures the moment. As we’re all reckoning with the Protestant Work Ethic mentality that has created our modern hell, he’s letting us know: salvation is not coming (unless we seize it).

But Trump is wrong in a far deeper level. It’s not simply a misunderstanding of tariffs, but a completely reality-defying misunderstanding of what America is at its core. We are a consumer economy. The reason we run a trade deficit with nearly every country is because we buy everything, and we make almost nothing.

What’s made America Great is that we rose out of the 20^th century as the champion. We won. All the winning Trump wants is simply the greed of a petulant billionaire that lives a life where nothing is ever enough. Becoming a consumer economy is our victory lap for winning. We became a world power when the colonial powers destroyed themselves in the fight over expansionism during WW1. We cemented our wealth through our military and economic victories in WWII. Since the end of the war, we’ve used the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other legal institutions as instruments of enacting inescapable poverty through austerity in the developing world. And for the entirety of the 20^th century, we committed (and funded) genocides and destabilized governments through assassinations and coups whenever workers and socialists attempted to take power. We won, and our prize for winning the the bloodbath of the last century is being able to buy whatever we need and more importantly what we don’t need.

Open TikTok for less than 5 minutes, and you’ll be inundated with bullshit consumerism. Companies like SHEIN, Temu, and AliExpress all exist in order to supply western countries with an endless supply of dopamine hits derived from being able to sit on our couch and buy a new wardrobe for a few hundred dollars. Our inspiration for our fashion, accessories, interior decorations only exist to the level in which they’re all being sold to us through our phone. We don’t want anything until we’re told this eighteenth metal water bottle will cure you of your malaise. That’s what our great colonial victory bought for us.

Our winning exists through genocides and child slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It exists in sweatshops for Nike built atop the devastation of napalm carpet bombings in Southeast Asia. Our colonial triumphs should be remembered every single day as the world is paralyzed into to simply watching as our Nazi puppet state murders hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza.

We won.

We won because we bought everything.

Of course we rigged the game. Of course we threw a tantrum and killed millions when they said the game wasn’t fair. But we won.

If Black Monday 2.0 happens, and we can’t buy anything, what do we have? What is America at that point? We are the supreme importer. We buy everything we need and all the rest, and our trade deficits exist because what we’re selling is technology, arms, culture that all derive from foundation of being the victor.

There’s an aphorism that revolution is not possible because life is too easy. This is certainly the case with why our fight against climate change in the United States feels impossible. We simply have too many modern luxuries in order to risk the violence necessary in toppling the capitalist/colonialist system - being able to drive our oversized cars half a mile to get an iced coffee stopping the class consciousness from fully developing.

But maybe this Depression could be a real victory. People need to understand how we got to this point – how our road to becoming the the great importer was paved with death and destruction.

Maybe Trump’s spectacular ignorance for what America is could become our path for a true enlightenment of our empire that we need to reckon with.

Maybe we will simply collapse under the stupidity of our oligarchy. But maybe America’s parasitic capitalism will cannibalize itself beyond our allowable poverty and into a future where the masses will realize what game is actually being being played.

Maybe we will learn . . . “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite!”

Our condo’s living room is on the third floor. We have an end unit with more than a dozen windows on the three sides. The living room overlooks a walking trail that leads over the White River a few hundred yards away. In springtime, we watch up close as trees bloom at our eye level. In the fall, we’re enveloped into the gold and orange splendor of chlorophyll breaking down. Every Saturday morning, we hear runner groups pass our house, and we can track the birth of spring by listening for children learning to ride bicycles. It’s beautiful, but I worry at some point a storm – winds throwing a tree through our window or the river rising from a flood – will transform our joys into misery.

When it felt safe, we went back to the living room and watched the local weatherman track the storm moving northeast until our tornado warning ended. Tornados touched down in the suburbs west and north of us, but our home in the middle of the city might’ve been spared due to the urban dome effect. The sprawl of concrete and steel surrounding us, absorbing the heat and changing the atmospheric pressure, might save us from experiencing the lightning and tornados (might being something we cling to for hope but never a guarantee), but someday the tradeoff will come back to us in the floods and heat waves. I know that in our house, maybe our windows are less likely to shatter from the debris of a violent storm, but we are becoming steadily more likely to bake inside our homes when the AC can’t keep up with the work. The sprawl will keep us safe until it becomes the thing that destroys us. And at some point, I know it will.

A famous tweet recirculates whenever a natural disaster occurs. “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where we live until you’re the one filming it.” And for an hour last night, I watched the tv flicker off and on from power outages, every time turning back on with the burn-in message of the tornado warning displayed across the bottom of the screen well after our danger had passed. 

On the second Friday of the month, Indianapolis tests the tornado sirens. Last month, the test signal was sent out, but the sirens stayed quiet. Both the city’s emergency services and the manufacturer of the siren are investigating why we didn’t hear the test warning, but this supposed glitch remains a mystery. This breakdown might be a singular incident, but the timing couldn’t feel more ominous. As tornado season begins here in the Midwest and the Plains, lasting longer and spreading out wider with each year of the Anthropocene, Trump and Elon’s burn it to the ground approach to austerity politics has already come out against the weather services in myriad ways. Cutting some of the funding for weather balloon research, mass layoffs of scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Institute, and now the terms like “climate,” “clean energy,” and “environmental quality” all becoming blacklisted terms for grants and federal research, will not make our country great again.

Recently, one of the most famous climate scientists, Professor James Hanson, said that the target of keeping global warming under 2C was “dead.” Many scientists have been sounding the alarm that the by the 2050-70s we could see the death of billions as the planet continues heating faster than expected. And while this morning the world economy falters from Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of how tariffs work (in a darkly comical call back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that truly kicked off the Great Depression), climate scientists show models that by 2050, 40% of the world economy might vanish due to ecological devastation – that number and those models not fully up to date with how the Drill, Baby, Dill! cohort seems to have a childlike ignorance of the simple “actions have consequences” law of existence.

We still have trouble imagining the difference between Depression and Collapse.

When we talk about our future, sometimes our salvation, we refer to them as windows or doors, moving between opened or closed. For some of us, our windows are closing. For others, they’ve already closed and we just don’t know it yet. The wildfires haven’t lit in this moment, but they will. The hurricane hasn’t destroyed the city, but it will. The weather feels cool and temperate right now in the spring, but this summer we know thousands will die from heat exhaustion, stroke, and dehydration. Cool nights will not come under the heat dome. The water will not arrive as it evaporated cooling the next AI model.

The windows and doors are supposed to be the gateway to something else, but right now, we should start thinking of these windows and doors as part of our homes in tornado ally. It won’t matter if they’re opened or closed when they’re thrown off the foundation. If you survive the storm, you’ll walk out of your safe hiding, past splinters of wood and shattered glass, and you’ll be surrounded by a wasteland.

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This year hasn’t been at all what I expected. I think something I’m still learning about my illness is that adjustments are never smooth, even when I feel prepared, even when I spend weeks trying to think and plan and self soothe. And while I’ve mostly done my duty to try and contain the psychotic parts of my brain that used to get set loose under similar circumstances, my mood, body, and energy still slow me down. It didn’t help that I ended last year with catching a bad case of COVID on my birthday. The future of TikTok still looms. I’ve spent many sleepless nights and sleep-filled days not writing or filming. So far this year, my eczema has torn up my hands too many times to count, and my mouth sore flares (complicated, it’s not herpes though) have created recurring periods where I’d simply prefer to not talk. I’m doing okay – “okay” in the way that a person with a disability will try and sell you on something that means “not so good, but it’s fine” so that you’ll understand our distancing but not worry enough to stress me out with daily check ins to make sure. I’m okay . . . let’s let that be enough, if we can?

Before getting into some things I want to recommend from the year thus far, I want to vaguely (not) promise some things coming up . . . I’m working on an essay about nihilism I’ve been chewing on for months. A couple other essay topics I’m scratching notes on: sexuality and the gym, ENM dating and disability, and two climate essays that I might want to hire an editor for because I know they’re going to be aggressively long. With my book, I finished my CNF workshop pieces for my first grad school class, and these have been incredibly helpful to making progress on my book proposal. Roughly, I can say, I see the ending now. I’ve had a mental block on the last section of the book for nearly a year, but it’s making sense now. If my agent agrees, I’m hopeful we will have some more official news to share about that soonish. And for any news about my podcast and getting me to sit in front of a camera more . . . I will just say . . . (semi-depressed, defeated, but sorta nonchalant shrug).

Okay . . . Here’s My Top 4 THINGS of 2025 Q1:

1. TV . . . are we so back???

I’m not the first critic to ask, “are we in a new golden age of television?” because I’m not actually asking that. I don’t think so, I think we’re having a mystifying amount of luck that I feel very positive won’t last even the rest of the year, but I do think there’s a few good lessons to learn from the incredible TV that’s come out this year.

1) White Lotus hits because it’s an anthology. So does Penguin. We don’t need an entire universe built out of IP to have enjoyment. We need strong characters, talented writers, and film makers that care what shows look like aesthetically. We need to explore ideas, re-examine them, let them change and morph, but we need stories to be fixed to what’s actually in front of us. White Lotus is great because we hate everyone. Penguin is great because we love everyone. Well-crafted shows can BUT DON’T NEED TO have some shared universe or grander narrative to pay attention to. The show needs to feel complete in and of itself and not rely on stupid Rick Dalton pointing at the tv moments for stories to be enjoyable.

2) Walton Goggins, you’ve always been a star! If you’d like a good watchlist, check out his IMDb and run with it. As stated, his slimy, mysterious White Lotus character is phenomenal, but his slimy, couldn’t be any less mysterious character in The Righteous Gemstones might have given us two of the greatest songs in TV history. If you haven’t been watching Gemstones, the new season releases soon, and it’s maybe the best satire on American Christianity I’ve ever seen (Mickey 17 was really fun though). Goggins also stared in one of last years surprise hits, Fall Out. His previous co-star performance alongside Dany McBride in Vice Principles (2016-17) is finally getting its dues, and I’ve officially moved up Justified on my watchlist. He’s so sexy. He’s so funny. He’s so the moment.

3) I’m currently in the middle of the Pitt. I’m watching it with my girlfriend, and we’ve only been able to devote about an hour or two to the show each week, but I want to tell you that all those “the Pitt is the best show of all time,” people are not saying anything I’m ready to argue with right now. The show is a bundle of chaos, wrapped in sweet tenderness, and presented to us by really sexy, normal-looking doctors. McDreamy is nowhere to be found. All these doctors look like they could actually be doctors. The show might create a few stars, but I don’t think you’ll recognize nearly every single person on screen, and it’s all the better for it. Give me more non-Hollywood Star/super models playing realistic rolls, and let us all fall in love with our own characters that actually look like they might just be a completely disheveled ER doc in Pittsburgh (call me, Dr. Robbie).

4) Everyone has told you to watch Severence. And they’re right! But no one has told you to watch Last One Laughing (UK) and it makes me sad. For those sickos that spent way too much of their early twenties watching British panel shows (like me) and have become obsessed with non-brain rotting reality TV shows like Taskmaster or anything Drop Out is doing (also like me), Last One Laughing is the perfect quick watch. Richard Ayode remains potentially the funniest man alive, and watching a room full of comedians try and make each other laugh while Jimmy Carr act all disappointed when they do has been one of the most calmly enjoyable watches of the year.

5) Is it official: is Netflix dead? The largest lesson to learn from this year has been the streaming service wars biggest competitor is nowhere to be seen while AppleTV might just be the real number 1. I’ll give you my top 10 shows from the year so far, but not only does Netflix not make the list, they’re not even making shows that people watch anymore. I just looked up the critic top 10 Netflix shows of 2025, and I swear I’ve only heard of one of them. Who knew the business model of turning out slop would eventually crush the entire world economy . . . ohhh, I mean your streaming service

Top 10 Shows of 2025 (or late 2024 that I’m just now watching) So Far…

1. Severance (Apple TV) – stop trying to be cool and just listen to everyone screaming at you to watch it

2. The Pitt (Max) – my book club’s discord might need to get shut off until I finish this show.

3. White Lotus (Max) – Parker Posey why do you sound like that. Please keep talking

4. Slow Horses (Apple TV) – we need more gross MCs

5. Silo (Apple TV) – REBECCA FURGESON

6. Say Nothing (Hulu) – Tiocfaidh ár lá

7. Shorsey (Hulu) – I’d be so good to ya

8. Last One Laughing UK (Amazon) – you’ll understand why British comedy is centuries ahead of US comedy

9. Paradise (Hulu) – is it good? Idk, but I genuinely loved wasting my time with it

10. Reacher (Amazon) – Please, just let me have a little fun watching a big, strong, sexy guy be big, strong, and sexy

2. What I’m (Not) Listening To

I know I started my MFA and I don’t want to come off pretentious already, but I will say the best thing I’ve heard all year has been bird noises while I’m out walking without headphones. Maybe it’s my desperate need to unplug, or maybe I just have been deeply unimpressed with most new music from the year (sorry Lucy, it was just okay), but spending time outside without distractions genuinely has been giving me life. I won’t say it’ll solve all your problems, but I think maybe a constant soundtrack to life is making the world worse. I’m not joking, sadly. Go sit by a stream and listen to the water. Walk in the woods and pay attention to the scurrying squirrels and chipmunks. I’m not sure how much of a luddite I (we) will become in the near future, but my brain has felt absolutely crushed by the deluge of our modern moment and getting away from things really has been the only thing keeping me consistently happy.

My last post included a playlist of country music, and I plan to do a lot more music writing in the future, but I just want/need an excuse to tell you that I think we have to find it in ourselves to let our brains wander. I’ll try to explain myself better in future posts, but unless we can unplug, at least in bits, I’m starting to buy into more and more of the fatalism I see people spouting online. It’s not until I step away, go listen to nature, and let my brain reform itself from the maladaptations caused by scrolling that I feel any real hope or peace.

3. Short Books

I’ve read 5 incredible books this year, and all of them are short books.

5) The Employees by Olga Ravn (125 pages)

Told through employee memos and statements, this sci-fi novel explores the mundanity of labor and the disconnect of living in order to work. I loved this creative exploration of serious quandaries about our modern life. I think the writing style of quick hits and plotless ruminations really works exceptionally well for letting your brain fill in whatever contexts it wants in order to understand its message. I would love to talk to friends about this one, and I think it’s one worth checking out.

4) Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly

If you’re wondering why I spent the music/podcast section of this newsletter telling you to touch grass, blame Liz Pelly (don’t actually – this one is on me, but I was inspired). I think Mood Machine is one of the best reported books in a long while. It reads so much like Bad Blood (Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes), that a book on music and tech reporting really does feel like a proper true crime obsessions piece. It’s wonderfully articulate, and Pelly shines with the rapid changes her method of story telling that switches between journalism, cultural criticisms, and history of music in the 21^st century.

3) Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson

Poets Square releases at the end of April, and I don’t want to say too much about it. For those that don’t know, Courtney became a wildly successful TikToker with her viral videos on moving into a house that had 30 stray cats. Most of the story will be familiar for her audience, but what her audience might not know is how unbelievable talented Courtney is at pulling together a beautiful story full of deeply emotional moments. This book blew me away, and I can’t wait for people to read this book. I’ve included the intro to the book below just to show how perfectly me this book is. Whether you love cats or you love my taste in books, this will be one of the memoirs from 2025 you absolutely shouldn’t miss out on.

2) Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

I’ve read a lot of books based on lectures, and I don’t think I’ve ever recommended a single one publicly. I enjoy some of them, but broadly, it’s a genre that sort of feels like a cash grab I’ve not been entirely inclined on supporting. However, Recognizing the Stranger might be the greatest book in this genre and also the best sub-100 page book I’ve ever read. I plan to read this several more times this year, but reading this alongside the number 1 pick of the year so far really is maybe the best dual reading experiencing you’ll ever have.

1) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

I’ve read this one twice this year already. I do a little bit of rereading, but I have never sat a book down and immediately started it again until now. Everything about this book is what I hope for in a reading experience: brilliant articulations of the culture, beautiful writing that leaves you speechless, and a purpose or essence that makes you want to scream to everyone to read this book. I’ve had a video idea for this book of asking people to comment a random page number and let me read one thing from that page as a way for me to persuade my audience into reading this book. It truly is one of those books where every page contains something both brilliant and beautiful. I plan on writing a longer post about this (and Recognizing the Stranger) later this year, but I think while you wait for that, you really need to pick this (both) up as soon as possible.

4. Stuck in the Past

Even if you haven’t been paying close attention to the box office from this year, you probably know things are bad. But they’re like historically bad, actually. And while there’s a few projects I’m looking forward to this year (F1, One Battle After Another, Frankenstein (2025?), Wicked: For Good, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and… well, that’s literally it), the rest of the year could not be looking any bleaker. The MCU is swinging for the fences, and I think Avengers Doomsday might literally cause a mass psychosis event of people trying to persuade themselves it’ll be an even palatable movie. There hasn’t been a single good trailer for the unnecessary sequels (M3gan 2, Jurassic Planet 3, Now You See Me: 4 Real). And maybe I’m a doomer, but I’m not even sure I believe Tom Cruise’s last Mission: Impossible can save us (. . . god, please save us, Tom. We need you!). So, I’ve determined that 2025 is my year to finally commit to watching the movies I’ve always been neglecting for, oh, about 15 or so years. So, here’s a rapid fire list of some of the ones I’ve been working on:

· Heat (1995) – why did no one tell me this was a romance movie between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro???? (4.5 stars)

· Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – man, fuck all of these assholes. Also, why don’t they teach this script in high school English classes? (4 stars)

· Ocean’s Eleven (2001) – this was my 30^th watch, but I felt that point was important . . . (5 stars)

· Heavyweights (1995) – one of the all-time best kids movies. I really wish I would’ve seen this as a kid, but it still eats (4 stars)

· Capote (2005) – I was invited on a podcast to do talk about this movie and if you would ever like to have me on a podcast, just ask me to talk to you about a movie. It’s always a yes (4 stars)

· Death Becomes Her (1992) – I truly don’t understand how this isn’t top of the list when looking at the Best Of lists for Bruce Willis’ career (4.5 stars)

· Barry Lyndon (1975) – whenever someone says “they don’t make movies like this anymore,” all I think about is this movie. And like most people, I finally committed after seeing the viral TikTok edit about 80 times (5 stars)

· Amadeus (1984) – much like Omar El Akkad’s book, this required two back to back experiences. And as someone with a history degree, I’ve often been asked about the necessity for historical accuracy in movies, and I’ve got to say, if you make something as good as Amadeus, do whatever the fuck you want (5 stars isn’t enough)

PS – that’s it for my newsletter, but I need to ask a question about this platform. I’ve had quite a few pledges from people offering to pay for my Substack. I’ve maintained that I would keep it free, but I’m now looking at a dollar amount that could be genuinely helpful. I don’t know that I can promise even monthly subscriber posts, what they would look like, or what people are offering to buy when it comes to offering subscriptions. So, whether you’re one of those people that clicked the button saying you would pay or someone that might if it became an official offer, what is it you want? I don’t want it to seem like I am scamming people out of money if I turn it on, even though I prefer to write for everyone. Is that a scam? Or, do people just want to toss some money to help support me regardless of the benefit? I genuinely don’t know, but don’t want to do the wrong thing. Or would people like a specific type of pay-walled content from me? What would you want it to be? I don’t know how much of my audience understands how incredibly helpful an extra few hundred bucks a month would be for me, but I also don’t want to upset people that like what I do. I’m really thankful for all the support. My subscribers on Patreon and Instagram, the random Venmo payments I get, and everyone that’s part of the silly metrics of any of my infrequent internet posting hobbies, it means a lot, truly, but I just don’t know how to handle all of this. I’m trying. I sometimes wish my social media usage had assignments. Maybe all of this wouldn’t break my brain if it felt like an actual job. I don’t know that any of this makes sense, but in your opinion: what do I need to do? What are people willing to pay for? What would you suggest I do in order to make my disability life a little easier and so that I don’t need to run any more ridiculous ads that all of us hate? Let me know.

Those years passed by, unremarkably except to tell you I was there even though little proof of those years exist, and I stopped scrolling the new release page on Spotify every Friday morning. After I changed my medication and my mind opened and expanded, I spent my mornings much the same but substituted books as my coffee partner. And then couple years ago, when my body felt like it might not last much longer, I started walking in the mornings. I wanted something different. I changed my routines, devoted my food budget to smoothies, and left Spotify and the history we shared. I needed a new life and a new algorithm. I walked while finding a new soundtrack to keep the silence at bay.

You found me because after I changed medications and my thoughts rearranged and reconfigured into something you could understand I talked about the books I read that filled the gaps between waking and napping. I’ve built an audience from sharing some thoughts about those books, but I kept my music journey to myself for the most part - only appearing to you when I couldn’t show myself on camera from days without showers and hair brushes or when I couldn’t organize enough words to fill a minute of video.

While my book taste might be noteworthy because of the volume of nonfiction I read as compared to the rest of the social internet, my music tastes might not be noteworthy. But since my brain has struggled to finish the thoughts I’ve been spinning for future essays on need for doomerism, sexuality and the gym, and dating while being disabled, I thought I’d talk a little about music on this Friday morning.

A recurring question I get in comments and DMs about nonfiction is, “where do I start?” “I don’t really read nonfiction, but I’d like to start. Any suggestions?” I’ve answered that a lot, and maybe should answer it more often, but I’d like to answer that question for my music taste, even though no one is asking.

But before my recommendations, I want to take a second to talk about the platforms. People have a personal preference about reading – ebooks, physical books – hardback and softback, and audiobooks. Most of the time, people are dedicated to a format. Those preferences exist within music as well, and often they’re even more dedicated – people’s taste in where and how to listen to music set in concrete. Playlists vs albums. Spotify vs (almost always over) the rest of the options. And since this isn’t a book review essay, I will say if you’ve ever questioned that these preferences might not be good, I have to tell you, you must read Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. It’s an exceptional work of reporting and cultural criticism, and a beautifully articulate argument against how most people listen to music – specifically, by using Spotify’s algorithm and pre-made playlists. If you’re at all curious about how this could be a bad thing, go read the book!

When I started walking, I left Spotify. My taste in music had grown monotonous, even to myself. And while I still listen to Lucy Dacus, Snail Mail, Phoebe Bridgers, and all the (mostly) women that have created a new horizon in indie music, I wanted to start finding my taste and no longer rely on Spotify’s algorithm to serve me what it thought I might like. I left behind a decade of data recording who I was during different phases of my life, and I switched to Apple Music’s slightly difficult user interface, reveled in the better sound quality, and started searching out my own taste in music beyond the algorithm. The thing about the algorithmic feed of finding music is that it works, for the most part, but this stripped me of making any intentional choices for my own. Everything was palatable, but nothing felt personal. I felt as if I was always in a coffee shop listening to the music I liked, but never getting to decide which tastes of mine to pursue or what rabbit holes to dive into. The soundtrack to my life wasn’t mine. (Interested in this? Read Filterworld: How Algorithms Make Everything the Same by Kyle Chayka.) (Additional side note: having a different app for music and podcasts [and books] has also made being intentional with each so much easier.)

On a new platform, I found out I actually loved country music and was shocked. I grew up in small town in the Midwest. Most of my years of discovering my music taste happed in the wake of the post-9/11 world – and if you know anything about music during this time, country music was bad. Unlistenable drivel about patriotism and drinking in oversized truck beds. The music sold, exceptionally well, and country became a symbol of bad politics and uncultured taste. I might’ve spent an occasional $.99 on a particularly catchy Kenny Chesney or Little Big Town song, but you wouldn’t catch me dead admitting that. My burnt CDs were filled with Bon Iver, Margot & the Nuclear So and Sos, and Manchester Orchestra. For decades, I avoided country. But a great schism has been growing in country music for the past few years, and I’ve been swept up inside of it like any religious zealot during a schism. The country we grew up with is bad, no argument. But this new stuff? It's almost something else entirely. This new wave of country draws inspirations from folk, southern rock, outlaw country, and bluegrass. While I’m not sure these bands are playing with the ethos of “this machine kills fascism”, they stand, at least sonically, affronted against the country that’s a gleeful soundtrack to fascism. And with this new wave, I’m now following my evangelical roots and publicly professing my love for country. So, if you’re still with me after telling you to abandon Spotify and the playlist it made for you called “soul crushing comforting afternoon,” let me give you a mini playlist of ten country song recommendations to see if you’ll follow me on my journey.

(If you’d like the playlist this post, you’ll have to check it out on Apple Music)

1. Wondering Why by The Red Clay Strays

The lead singer has the infectious tendency to sing elongated and mispronounced vowels from the top of his mouth that feels inspired by the late 90s rock music of Creed and Nickleback (don’t lie, we all had that phase!) and mix with powerful resonance filled with a tasteful amount of whine. The music starts and stops and continues to pull you back and forth with crescendos and decrescendos that keep the music fun and lively.

2. Bonny Light Horseman by Bonny Light Horseman

This song is about something, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe I could spend a little time trying to figure out the grander references of this (Fictional? Real?) horseman during the Napoleonic war, but I don’t particularly care. Every time the band (Bonny Light Horseman) lilts the lyrics Bonny Light Horseman on their album titled Bonny Light Horseman my brain becomes the screaming meme of Rick Dalton pointing at himself on tv. It’s weird, sure, but it’s genius. Sometimes you fall in love because it means something. Sometimes you fall in love because you just have to.

3. it won’t always be this way by Kaitlin Butts

I’ve started putting this song as the first song of the last few playlists I’ve made. It’s the start of her album, and it’s the perfect start. A distant guitar slowly pulls you in, reverb cranked until the bass drum kicks in asking, “are you ready,” and then Kaitlin’s beautiful voice says, “speak of the devil, in he walks.” And by the second stanza, her voice starts showing off the typical country sound paired with a rough guitar picked sparingly until the bridge hits. And it hits!

4. Cowpoke by Colter Wall

This song has everything the post-9/11 country scene has been scared away from but that makes country good. A nice harmonica, sliding guitar, welcomed instrumental solos, a powerful but controlled baratone, and lyrics that talk about actual country shit – poverty, labor, lonlines, and the joy of a simple life. (And I don’t want to take away from this, but if you need help convincing, go look up some “react” videos on tiktok or youtube to Colter Wall. If you like those type of things, you’ll love his music even more.)

5. Tyler Childers

I know I said a ten song recommendation list, but if you’re on this journey with me, I think you can go out on your own journey a little. Tyler Childers is the godfather of this new wave of country music, sitting prominently on the Mount Rushmore, the King of Appalachian music. And I think you’ll enjoy finding your song of his. Lyrically he’s unmatched by anyone - with emotional and powerful reckonings with his past, he’s gone through different eras of music in his journey of becoming sober while still holding true to his roots. There’s no bad place to start, but if you want a pulled together, beautiful ballad, start with the album Rustin’ in the Rain. If you want a frantic chaos, try Country Squire. If you want someone that’s fully discovering their full potential, try Purgatory. And if you want to find a person that trying to rediscover themselves, listen to him mess around on Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven. But if you need a song, let your soul get ripped apart with Shake the Frost (Live).

6. Homewrecker by Willow Avalon

This new wave of country can still be a little jubilant, a party anthem in the right place, without becoming a commercial slog wrapped in an American flag. If you want someone that ups the tempo and has a lot of fun, Willow Avalon takes you on journeys with her songs. I grew up hearing the term firecracker used disparagingly about girls that didn’t always follow the rules and couldn’t be tamed by many toxic religious institutions that meant to control (specifically young women), and in the most affectionate way possible: Willow reminds me of those firecrackers.

7. A Bar Song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey

This new wave of country music is happening with more diversity than country has seen in decades. While queer and BIPOC artists have always been making country (hopefully you’ve seen some of these conversations happening in the wake of Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter), what’s changed is this schism has shown the room for marginalized voices in country is over due. Shaboozey’s song become one of the most successful singles of 2024 (in all genres!) and is a certified bop. If you haven’t listened to the song outside of a bar or in the background of some shop, you should actually sit and take a listen. The song is magnetic, but also sonically beautiful. This whole album is great, and it’s making the future of this great schism look brighter and brighter.

8. Welcome to Hard Times by Charley Crockett

While not the most popular artist to come from this schism, Charley Crockett might be the most prolific. With 15 albums in a decade, Charley Crockett has dedicated himself to his blues influences and keeps the show moving. As if calling from a mythical past with his assertion of being a descendant of Davy Crockett, Charley continues to put out smooth music and lets his voice shine. No one is doing the aesthetics of country as well as Charley, but his music doesn’t seem to be an act either. If you’re in need of the perfect album for a long drive, you’ve got a lot of options to choose from. Welcome to Hard Times was my most played song last year, and it’s certainly become my anthem for the moment.

9. Throw Me in the Thicket (When I Die) by The Local Honeys

Every other artist on this list is either playing a halfway decent sized concert venue or a sold-out stadium. I saw The Local Honeys last year in a sold-out show, but it was at small bar here in Indianapolis called Duke’s Honky Tonk. I loved getting to see my most played album of the year, and The Local Honeys have me considering going to my first ever music festival (full disclosure: it’s a folk festival in Bloomington, IN so we’re not talking Coachella) just so I can see these songs performed again. The concert, hopefully that festival, and definitely this album are all intimate affairs. The music speaks to my soul. The singers have a beautiful interaction with each other, and the songs make you feel like you fully understand their emotions even though you don’t know those farms, those woods, those horses. You still feel like you’re there, with them all.

10. Oklahoma Smokeshow by Zach Bryan

I started walking when my body started failing. I knew my blood sugar, my tarred lungs, heart, and liver were going to find me in an early grave. I’d tried and failed to make changes, and I resisted taking Mounjaro (similar to Ozempic) until I started getting scared. The doctor told me I needed to exercise alongside the medication. Every morning for months, I drove myself to Dunkin for an iced coffee and drove to a local walking trial. I set out to save myself. I lost a lot of weight, and the unintended side effect of all of this was falling in love with country music. Oklahoma Smokeshow blared in my headphones for months. Even though its been almost a decade since I left my small town and even longer since leaving the politics and religion that infested that place, I still feel pulled to the small towns, these forgotten places, that mentality that you’ll only know if you’re from one of these places. This song came to me when my life started changing. Pounds sloughing of my body. My liver shedding its fat encasing. Getting sober, and no longer buying my daily Camel Blues. Switching to Apple Music because what’s one more change when I decided to spend my mornings with in the woods instead of books. Oklahoma Smokeshow was something new . . . but it was also the oldest thing about me. The idea of country music was home for a while, and now it’s home again, and I love it.

This essay is my first assignment for grad school. I’m doing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and our prompt was to write a “hermit crab essay” (one that takes direct inspiration from another essay’s form) based on I Love Being Gay by Edgar Gomez (author of Aligator Tears, coming out 2/11/25).

I love being schizophrenic. I love that the quiet means something, and although it’s often fleeting and hard to hold on to, when it’s here, it’s everything. I love the dissonance that happens when I’m stressed­—my mind tracking what my body has a tough time noticing. I love smelling popcorn when there’s none close by. I love how sleep floods over me when I take my medication on the proper schedule.

I love that I can see schizophrenia, even though we’re supposed to say it’s an invisible illness. I love that my world has contorted, distorted, and crumbled enough for me to see through what other’s often get stuck on. My realities, your realities, both obscured by the unrealities of living amongst the capitalist ruins and voices screaming for our attention. I love that sometimes my dates end abruptly when this illness is mentioned and that I’ve saved myself from wasting time on people that have no space to understand. I love that I get to spend my days with my cats.

I love my free time. I love afternoon naps. I love spending my time with books, books, books, sometimes interrupted by aimless walks through woods or on streets bustling with people going back and forth to their jobs.

I love the way my split mind split my life into sections – before and after psychosis being what you imagine, but I’ve lived so many more. I love waking up when my body’s ready and dressing in slutty shorts and nothing else. I love that you believe my happiness is radical, and maybe it is, and maybe yours should be too.

I love that I told you about my schizophrenia, because when I disappear somewhere behind my eyes, you’ll know where I’ve gone. I love that my mind destroyed the person I could’ve become. I love that I chose, and continuously choose, to be here with you. I love never being quite sure of my surroundings, of what I hear and see, and living a life truly defined by letting the nuance and absurdity wash over me while it ensnares everyone else.

I love my paranoia making me return home to double (and sometimes triple) check on the cats to make sure they’re okay. I love how hearing voices got me to read Marx, Lenin, and Fanon. I love how seeing disfigured faces led to modeling in Times Square. I love how feeling spiders crawl all over me when I try to sleep led to falling in love with someone that likes decorating our bookshelves with rocks, knickknacks, and tchotchkes.

I love the quiet I’ve carved out of the chaos.

I love watching the world around me – through screens, windows, and pages - when I’m unable to be part of it and how these barriers in-between me and everything else filter reality into something that finally makes sense.

I love that the years I hated happened.

1. The Social Internet Is Going to Get Worse (enshittification)

Here is my prediction for the future, and I believe it’s a fairly safe bet: when the TikTok ban goes into effect, every platform will get worse. Content creators will flood every platform trying to regain their follower count and grow their new audiences. There’s one simple method, the two golden rules of social media growth, that works for every platform: 1) make a lot of content, and 2) try to please the algorithm. It doesn’t matter if this new content is sustainable, good, valuable, or authentic. For some, maybe it will be. For most, it certainly won’t be. The social internet runs on cycles, and chasing those cycles means latching onto whatever performs the best. This happens with -bait type content, rage-bait or engagement-bait, and it’ll make everyone see how unbelievably stupid this social internet reality is that we’ve built for ourselves.

If you spent any time on Threads over the last year, you’ve seen the worst parts of our modern times come to life. Corporate accounts repeatedly asking, “what are you reading today.” Everyone attempting to make a viral post with insane hot takes. The most cruel, mind-numbing, and nonsensical posts accumulating more viewers than any earnest post. A year into Threads existing, it’s only started to feel like a real online platform. And with the whims of Zuckerberg trying to please the growth of alt-right political class that’s waging a war on “woke,” the future of the platform is precarious at best.

We’ve witnessed the death of Twitter. X – the everything app – is here. I understand why people still call it Twitter, but this is wishful thinking. X is the zombie corpse threating everything, but Twitter is gone – there’s no bringing it back. A bullet in the zombie’s head (or someone’s . . . ) might make tour current problem disappear, but Twitter has been lost to the infection of the culture war. What’s happened is a decay so astounding that I don’t believe the app even functions the way Twitter did in the past. With millions of accounts leaving, the algorithm trying its damnedest to make sure the manosphere and Nazis are alive and well, there is nothing worth salvaging. And although the story of Musk’s takeover of the platform might be unique in how singular the source of this destruction has been, don’t for a second believe it won’t happen again.

In Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, he talks about the flattening of culture as everyone attempts to please the algorithm. All coffee shops look the same. BookTok recommends the same 5 books (a statement as true as it is false, mind you). Superhero movies are so corporatized that they’ve become part of the mass culture that everyone seems hate and resent for their unavoidable qualities. The manifestations of what performs well on social media leaks into the real world, the separations shrink by the minute. As everyone starts creating content that does numbers, escaping off these platforms will not be enough to avoid the repercussions. Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification is the reality that we’re living through, but we need to understand it’s a two-fold problem. The platforms, our time spent scrolling the timelines, is in danger of getting worse, but so is the rest of life. The separation, the ability to unplug, is vanishing. If we don’t mentally brace ourselves for it, that feeling we’re all experience of reality withering way (why is everything fake and stupid?) will only grow worse. The TikTok ban will be a seismic shift, a flood of enshittfication descending upon us that will exacerbate every sentiment of hypernormalisation that fuels our nihilism. It’s going to become a feedback loop at some point. The social internet gets worse, so reality follows, and so the social internet follows. And so on and so on. We’re at a critical moment of witnessing decay, and I’m not sure we can escape.

What can save us? Let me backtrack a little, and then we will get there.

2. What I Am (You Are) Losing

Over the past 4 years, I’ve had more than 65 million views on TikTok. It’s gained me a sizeable, but not super large following. Currently at 182.3K followers, I’m one of, if not the, largest nonfiction focused BookTok accounts. I’ve been interviewed in articles about the culture of BookTok, put on lists of most influential book accounts to follow, and even ended up in Men’s Health Magazine as must follow. It’s strange and weird, but for the most part, people enjoy the ways I talk about books. And while my income from this work has been modest, my impact on the publishing industry has been substantial.

I’m going to be using some rough estimates to talk about numbers that publishers keep behind a paywall. Let’s say my conversion rate for people purchasing a book is 1% (and let’s stick to TikTok, even though I have millions of views from TikToks reposted to Instgram). If that 1% is correct, I’ve been responsible for 650,000 books sold over the past several years. In direct communication with publishers, I’ve been told I’m the reason a book has sold enough copies to get a paperback, that backlist titles have had to have a new print run, and that several titles have been out of stock even on Amazon after a viral video. (If you want a weird impression of my recommendation prowess, check out the amazon’s recommendations for some of my favorite books – they’ll also be my favorite books.)

In an email exchange with a library system in Minnesota, they let me know the circulation numbers for my favorite book of all time, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, had been steady at around 50 borrows for a couple years until I made a few videos and the waitlist for the title shot up to more than 700. I’m not the reason this book has sold well, but I am part of it. I’ve recommended it to other BookTok accounts that have recommended it to other BookTok accounts. (Small note on this: I did purchase 10 copies of this book to send to my favorite book content creators – so there has been some intentional, perhaps non-organic, choices to make this a prominent book in these spaces.) This is how this system works. I read a book and so do a dozen other creators that make their videos. And those other creators impact me the same. It’s an ecosystem. The nonfiction side of BookTok is small, there’s maybe a few dozen of us, but together, we might be one of the best marketing tools the publishing world has.

Actually, we probably are the best. I don’t know why it’s hard to say and not sound completely delusional, but do you know how small the budgets are for a majority of these books? Non-existent is not hyperbole for a lot of these titles. And the fact that we are unpaid (nearly always – sometimes, but not always, receiving a free copy of the book) means the economic output of BookTok benefits everyone else but us.

In a good month (of which I’ve had plenty), my audience is larger than the readership for the New York Times book reviewers. Thousands of people have picked up a book because of me. Thousands have gotten into reading more nonfiction because me. The impact can’t even be centered on how many people bought the book I talked about in a single video, because the impact is so much wider and weirder than what I can even conceive of. And, yes, there is a lot to argue about in terms of cultural value and unpaid labor and the authenticity of reviewers, but all I’m trying to say is . . . I am good at selling books.

650,000 or 100,000 or 5 Million. It doesn’t matter.

What I am losing is my platform to tell people what books I enjoy. I can still (and will) do it other places, but the ecosystem birthed out of BookTok changed the economy of the book world over the course of the past few years. I know I played an incredibly small part of that. But this is just one side of the app. BookTok has been talked about ad nauseum because it makes people feel smart to talk about books, but the economic impact of the loss of TikTok will be a windfall we have trouble understanding. In the same ways my reviews have spread across internet spaces, so have other’s videos on video games, movies, restaurants, gyms, doctors’ appointments for autism diagnoses, the vile world of fast fashion, and anything else your For You Page figures out you will tolerate watching beyond 5 seconds.

TikTok is insidious. I’m not sure I even believe it should exist. But it’s impact almost can’t be overstated, and it’s death can’t be minimalized. But what I am losing is my ability to reach random people and get them to have a little more confidence to pick up nonfiction books. I’ve sold an untold number of books. I’ve made the publishing world millions of dollars, but the loss is that there’s still people out there I haven’t helped discover how beautiful and wonderful nonfiction writing and stories can be. And that make me sad.

3. The Politics of the TikTok Ban

TikTok’s algorithm is better than any other social media. That’s why it’s being banned. Government hearings have tried (and failed) to craft stories of national security concerns, but we know this is a farce. Zuckerberg and Musk haven’t lobbied because they worry about our data leaking to the Chinese; they worry because their data is less valuable than ByteDance. It’s simple Red Scare propaganda and nationalism.

In a materialist approach to thinking about politics and history, it must always be remembered the hegemony of the capitalist class is not logical – put simply, the powerful are not always going to behave in the way that makes them the most money. They are always and will always chase after the essence of power. The purely economic reasons to keep TikTok far outweigh the economic reasons to ban the app. But the political and capitalist classes believe control of the levers of power is more impactful. TikTok is a threat – and that’s not because it radicalizes the youth into communists – but because the power of TikTok is out of their control.

Scare tactics are engrained part of American Society. The Satanic Panic and child abduction panics of the 1980-90s weren’t about saving children. It was about supplanting puritanical evangelical voices as mainstreamed sources of political power. The paranoia of the American mind has fractured us so entirely that accurately perceiving power often comes across as conspiratorial. So many methods have resurfaced again with the TikTok ban. Followers of Taylor Lorenz have seen her talk about the dozens and dozens of local news anchors terrified of a new “TikTok Trend that’s sweeping the country,” when in reality some scared parent doesn’t know what a single shit post is. Reality, if it even exists, doesn’t matter much to how much we fear.

Fear doesn’t need to be authentic or realized to the powerful. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. But, it is always a method of control for both policy and culture. Fear is a distraction technique – a magician’s true power of misdirection. Misdirection is the ethos, pathos, and logos of American politics. And we know it, but our attempts to see through the tricks often end up in Naomi Klein’s Mirror World – a reflection of culture more interested in mass conspiracies than a materialist understanding of reality.

TikTok is about to die, and with its dying breathe, with the last few gigabytes we can add into the ether of this platform, a good portion of content about the LA wildfires is centered around conspiracies of arson. While the story of LA burning is a direct reflection of our history of capitalism-driven climate change, the housing bloom of American Exceptionalism and Expansionism, and our disregard for Indigenous ecological methods for caring for this planet, viral video after viral video will be the unintelligible ramblings of people talking about Diddy’s House or allusions to Hawaii (and some form of space lasers).

The TikTok ban represents a capture of culture. This seizure of power won’t the social, moral, political, or economic victory that they’re hoping for though. The powerful are about to pull a lever, and we’re all waiting to see what happens next. And unlike their seizure of power with the Homeland Security Act, I think it’s possible they’re overplaying their hand . . . at least I hope.

4. The Future of the Social Internet

We’re at a breaking point. Right? I know I’m not alone in my disillusionment of culture over the past few years. There’re already big enough fractures in the façade that we’re starting to see them. Luigi Mangione assassinated a healthcare CEO and the majority of the country cheered on the handsome boy. The elite and media class raged against our ambivalence, but the growing sentiment is “we want more.”

We are cornered into the looming futures of technofuedelism, disaster capitalism, or a culture war turning into a civil war. No one believes we will go gentile into the good night. We will rage, rage on into some new future, but what will it be?

The social internet is the modern moment, the thing we can try and guess at for the next few years, but what apocalypse awaits us is further out, but not detached from what we do over the next few years.

The social internet started with blogs. It moved to short form text on specific platforms. Next we had the pivot to video era that was birthed out of lies about metrics but supplanted into reality in our modern moment with TikTok. We’re now on the precipice of something new, some new mixture of formats, platforms, and the internal war for whether or not influencers will even be part of it or will they totally capture that future. As one of these influencers trying to look out into my and our future, let me take my guess . . .

The threat of dead internet theory and AI is simply too massive, the economic forces driving them too big too fail, that’s why I believe the social internet will collapse. TikTok’s death will destroy Instagram in its wake – making it a slog of bad content, too many ads, and people trying way too hard to grasp a transitional part of culture. YouTube and Substack will come out on top as the bits of culture that hold the most relevance and social power, at least for a while. Instagram, like Twitter and Facebook, will have a slow death – transitioning into irrelevance without people paying proper attention. This will have a cascading effect on the birth of new influencers. No longer able to rely on the all-powerful algorithm to make any person a celebrity, the masses will become disenchanted. Instagram will go in the way of Facebook; an ecosystem with a userbase but that’s mostly small and insular. Discord will become something new. Tiny pockets of culture, blocked off from the rest of the internet, will crop up everywhere.

Cory Doctorow has written extensively on the concept of democratizing the social internet. In short, making these entities public utilities that the masses own and are not beholden to the whims of the shareholders. I want to believe this is possible, that salvation could be captured if Silicon Valley was allowed to, and made to, die. However, this feels a little too utopian for me. I think most of the internet will go in the way of what we are currently experiencing with X/Twitter. Death, but a death that a large swath of culture seems unable to totally comprehend. We will all find ourselves on dead platforms. We will live amongst the ruins, and for some of us, it’ll be beautiful.

Maybe a new platform will come along and the trajectory will change. Maybe there will be a resurgence of Luddites will drive millions offline and back into local communities. Maybe libraries will be the new social hubs, and themselves transform into the location of where culture exists and transpires – I hope so. Maybe our nostalgia will keep us trapped on these dying platforms until a climate apocalypse comes for each of us in our own time. Maybe Trump will save TikTok and all of this will go unchanged until a new generation charts a path separated from the digital realities we are living in and suffering in.

My advice? Find the people that make your digital life worth living. Culture is finally starting to reckon with the Mr. Beast-ification of the internet – starting to understand that people that are the most popular, being the person with the most views, being the entity that captures the algorithm is not and should not be a signifier of good, healthy system.

We will learn the algorithm is a dangerous tool – one that’s created a society of MLMs and Andrew Tates. We will learn that, I’m sure of it, but I just hope it’s not too late.

I hope you’re able to find your people. I hope those people help you make sense of this chaotic world, and I hope they encourage you to spend less time on your phone. I hope we will see something different in the future, and even if that means less people see me, I hope that the death of the social internet, my death of my short-lived influencing, will birth something that matters, something that feels real, and something where we find a sustainable way to take care of ourselves and our planet.

Last week their AI system placed the company in hot water when a year wrap-up graphic urged a its user Tiana Trammell, “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?” We’re here, living in our unrealities, watching an AI system and parents at school board meetings plead, in unison, “don’t forget white folks write books.” Fable said they’re trying to learn from this, and that its system’s “playfulness” settings have been pulled back

People have reacted to this AI bigotry with earnest pleas to their audience to pay more attention to the little AI symbol cropping up more and more – the spark (some have called it sparkle) icon signifying the parts of our digital realities created and dispensed from one of the rented out AI systems built by a litany of transnational tech conglomerates. Fable couldn’t find a way to pay its hosts that have made it one of the most successful reader apps, but they will always have money for the server space needed to give their CEO the warm fuzzies knowing her company is part of the birth of this new internet age.

A couple weeks ago I was sitting on an exercise bike reading Orbital. The book follows six astronauts flying around the earth, all of them reckoning with their internal struggles of a pastoral longing for and a not-fully articulated but deeply felt fear of the planet below. I had my headphones in noise cancellation mode while I peddled along to these space explores’ internal monologues. I listened to an instrumental playlist Apple generated for my journey. With my hamstrings tiring out, I went over to the treadmill to finish my workout while walking an incline and scrolling cat adoption pages.

Me and my partner have three cats. A fourth seems inevitable, our love for these animals not quite quenched for all it can be or driven to a point of regret. When I go to the pet store for weekly supplies of litter and food, I always stop by the cages to see if maybe it is time for that fourth cat. Spread around the store, paper posters meant to pull at the heartstrings ask the reader to, “adopt a new friend.” But on these posters, an AI cat’s cartoon eyes can’t speak to my soul. Right now, it would be hard to afford the cost of another cat, but the tipping point for discovering our perfect human-cat ratio balancing act isn’t going to have the scales tipped by the daunting chasm of this feline uncanny valley

Over the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time looking out the window and watching the snow collect in Indianapolis. I moved here from north east Indiana, and the lack of snow here has always been hard to deal with as part of the trade in a better life. It’ll only get worse and more chaotic. Some winters won’t see an inch of snow until a calamitous event occurs – a storm rivaling the still talked about Blizzard of ’78 will happen, and happen again, soon enough. The gray drab eclipsed in a white flurried burst that’ll kill a few dozen people and melt away in 60 degrees in January. It’s all part of our future.

This morning, I’m switching back and forth between my TikTok algorithm sending me updates on the Pacific Palisades wildfire engulfing western Los Angeles and reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Listening to the new Ethel Cain album, I’m setting my own vibes as millions struggle to breathe from the smoke drifting across Santa Monica Bay.

Spotify was started by ad execs trying to find a new, fun way to get you to see more ads. Music, an afterthought. Don Draper isn’t smoking in the office trying to sell us a new enlightenment born out of the American Dream because we’ve already bought into our perfectly personalized world of playlists remixing the same fifty songs.

We are the afterthought of how capital can be accumulated. We are the system through which dollars can be harvested. The cats, the music, the books, the photoshoot out in the beautifully snow-covered forest – we are the testing ground for what AI systems we will tolerate enough for executives to shove down our throats.

The fire expands with the embers floating in the winds. A tiny flicker, a spark, engulfing and consuming everything in its path.

The spark is here, it’s all around us, and despite our disgust at its vacuous uselessness, we celebrate it for how it makes us feel human. The numbers on our wrapped tells us how we did this year, and that with a little more attention, how we can be better next year if we chose to consume more. Read a little more and tell them you’re a good little boy – so informed and so grounded in the moment. Listen a little more and let them tell you how you’re one of a kind – an amazingly brilliant soul from New Hampshire, a top 5% type of girlie that truly understands the essence of a your chaotic Brat Summer or Me Espresso trysts. You’re you, and they must tell you, so that way you know and believe your own uniqueness.

I’ll still log Mood Machine when I finish it. I’ll type up another essay while Dustin O’Halloran Essentials plays over the speakers. I’ll post a photo of my fourth cat and let the algorithm decide if and when you get to meet her. I’ll do this all while the data centers poison the drinking waters and the fires get closer to my home. I’ll feel safe in my own little, perfectly constructed digital world until I’m not

“Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.” - Jarod K Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

1. Book I would recommend to a younger me

I think the answers often overlap with the questions of “what things should I prioritize reading in the new year” and “what would I recommend to a younger me?” And this might be disappointing that I didn’t select a book on political theory (I’m sure many of you expected me to), but one of the things I am craving out of my future reading life is the confidence that I am reading deeply - that I’m paying close attention to what I read. Meander, Spiral, Explode brings about a beautiful approach to how we should see and notice the structure and movement of stories, paragraphs, and sentences. As I start writing more, and my reading continues to grow and develop with more niche and difficult topics, being mindful of the text can’t be overlooked.

2. Best book with the worst cover

I actually don’t think Creep has a bad cover. So, I am slightly cheating with my own answer, but this is something I’ve been confronted with when talking to both booksellers that are having a tough time getting people to pick it up and people in the comment sections of my videos where I’m telling everyone to read this book (DO IT!!!). As far as I remember, Creep is the only time my book clubs have had any prolonged conversations about cover design. The group was mixed. I know for the longest time I was a little hesitant. I find it sort of entrancing – slightly unsettling with the contrasting tones and confrontational image and text – but I suppose inviting wouldn’t be an apt descriptor. And for a book that will suck you in and put you in a stranglehold until you finish, it’s one I think people just need to get over their uneasiness. Stare deeply into Myriam’s bright, unblinking eyes, and I’m sure you can have your own mental debates about how the idea of creep might be inside us all.

3. Best cover with the worst book

I have an unreleased podcast episode on The Age of Magical Overthinking. I tend to be a generous reader, especially with authors whose previous work I’ve loved so much. While reading the book and planning the episode, I was texting one of my favorite bookstagrammers, Anna (@book.hex), and we we’re both in the headspace of “Wait, this isn’t very good.” Somewhat tepid, and ultimately disappointed, but by the end of our hour-long conversation, I hated it. HATED IT. The more I think about it, the more I talk about this book, the more I unravel. If enough people need to hear us fall apart trying to figure out how this was the finished version of a book, let me know.

4. Book I am confused about why it’s popular

I’ve seen at least 8 different book clubs select Monsters. I’ve asked how those meetings went, and without fail, “um, well, there we’re a lot of strong opinions, but I’m not sure anyone loved it.” I don’t know how many copies this book has sold, but I know an inordinate amount of readers that have picked this one up. And the ultimate consensus I’ve almost unilaterally heard from everyone is . . okay . . . (shrug emoji). It’s very thoughtful, it’s full of beautiful sentences, but it is never, not for a single fucking second, interested in taking a hard stance in answering the single question the book proposes: “How should we think about loving media made by terrible people?” Maybe we all picked this up because this question is an unavoidable part of our lives. Perhaps it’s popular by its nature and not because of its quality. It’s complicated and personal, and maybe this is one of those things that’s better for discussing with friends than it is reading 300 pages that ends with “a lot of mothers are as big of monsters as Harvey Weinstein” (sorry, spoiler . . . but I really don’t recommend this one.)

5. Book that stuck the landing

Last year my favorite book of the year was The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle. For me, it’s perfectly organized. The story builds on itself. A difficult topic is explored in all of its layered complexities. The book is series of puzzle pieces that fit together to show a beautiful image. The Palestine Laboratory is the same. These are probably my two very favorite works of journalism I’ve ever read, and I think they’re both essential. Not only are they incredibly important topics to learn about, but as books – as an art form – they’re about as perfect as you can find.

6. Book that didn’t stick the landing

Sorry, I need to rant a little bit. But I think “The Doom” is actually okay. When you read about climate change, I think it’s okay to make the audience feel a sense that the future might be an apocalypse. That shouldn’t be the standard method for talking about climate change – not the industry standard, but it needs to be as present of a style of conversation as optimism. Some books should be okay with the doom. We need a plethora of approaches. And what The Uninhabitable Earth promises (and delivers for about 60% of the book) is a brilliant, poetic, and visceral look at the doom. And then, right at the end, right when you can drive it home, the author pulls the rug out and says “ehhh, it’ll probably be fine.” Capitalism is ending the world in a thousand ways, but we will figure it out???? Trust me bro??? NO! Sit with the doom. We desperately need the doom – it’s our only hope.

7. Book I recommend to ruin the family holidays

If you can get past the initial dizzying onslaught on political information you’re repeatedly smacked in the face with during this densely packed 200 page philosophical scream into the ether, you’ll not be able to stop yourself from dumping the arguments back out to a dinner table. It’s very typical I don’t talk about books until after I finish them, but I was sending paragraphs of Disaster Nationalism to my friends by page 5. And what’s good about this book’s ability to ruin a dinner is that it has bipartisan possibility – if your family is conservative or liberal or even a little bit on the left, there’s something in here to really shake the foundations and get everyone to point of wanting to ignore you. It’s fun . . . in a “I feel like I’m going insane” type of way.

8. Book that made me cry

Wild Faith could be the book you use to ruin a family holiday. Honestly, it would work even better, hit a thousand times harder if your family Christian and conservative, but it’s also a book that’s so internally devastating that you might not want to even tell anyone you’ve read it. Lavin’s previous work the online alt-right, Culture Warlord, is still on the mount rushmore of best books about this inescapable part of being online in the 21^st century. Wild Faith takes a look further back into histories of how this all got started and down deeper into what’s happening, specifically to children, and tells you the story of how fascism/nationalism exists and grows inside the the homes of millions of Americans. I left the church about 15 years ago, and I thought I’d gotten over my religious trauma by now. And then I read this . . .

9. Book that turned me on

Getting turned on isn’t something you get to experience often as a nonfiction reader. Most work on sex that I read tends to be approached from a educational perspective or explores the traumas many of us have experienced. I didn’t think So Sad Today was going to be either of those. I thought I was reading a short memoir about depression, and I guess that’s what it was, but it was more an exploration of the author’s many, so so so many, kinkiest experiences. I did this an audio book while on a long walk and I finally felt like that person reading smut on the subway – am I pervert for consuming this in public??? If you’re looking to add in a short memoir, I loved this one. It’s wicked – sexy, smart, sad, something strange.

10. Book that made me want to look at rocks … more

On Trails tells the story of the authors walk of the Appalachian Trail (AT) and the philosophies of why we make trails and what that says about us. It’s a phenomenal and unique nature book, and a book I’ve thought a lot about over the years. I chose it for my book club this year, and asked a question I thought would have a near-universal answer: “Does this book make you want to escape life and go spend 6 months walking the trial?” Everyone said no, citing the very obvious reasons like toenails falling off and the horrendous weather that’s inevitable in this long, grueling journey, but my answer is different. I can’t go more than a few weeks without daydreaming about ditching my quiet, book-filled life and setting out for a loooooong walk. People’s sense of adventure often includes climbing Everest or deep sea and sky diving, but mine has always been walking. Whether it’s the AT or the Camino de Santiago (yes, I’ve also read books on this one), I think someday this itch will need to be scratched.

11. Book that made me lose hope

Whenever people find out that my “professional” life is spent reading nonfiction books, the instant, almost instinctual response they ask with a twinge of accusation is, “how are you not depressed?” And, well, obviously, I am on disability, but I think I’ve also been blessed (cursed) with a brain that never wants to stop learning. I love that I get to spend my time reading and learning about climate change, the rise of fascism and the online alt-right, the genocides we’ve either conducted or funded, the criminal healthcare industry we’ve manifested to make some (thankfully now one fewer) CEOs into the god emperors of this nation. To be clear, learning doesn’t make me happy, but it does make me feel better, more grounded, to learn how our world works. But one topic breaks me. Cobalt Redexplores the rare earth mining industry and the slavery and genocides it creates. You can’t read this one without crumbling in the thought spirals when considering how we’ve created this industry that will only grow worse as we make the world more sustainable. I read about atrocities all the time, but reading about an atrocity that will grow worse because we want to get better, well, that’s fucked up. I’ll read more on this subject, but I know the more I learn, the more I understand, the more the crushing weight of how fucked up our world is and how fucked up our goal of living modern lives will become. When I consider quitting social media, it’s because I know every second I spend online further endorses the human need to continue the slavery in Africa. And unlike climate change, war, and school shootings, there’s nothing I’ve learned about this topic that feels like a real or even fantasy-based solution to this problem is possible. And with AI, this future is only going to get worse. The history of colonialism destroyed Africa, and we have no plan on stopping its further destruction unless we unplug.

12. Book that helped me find hope

Despite what people think about the depressive power of nonfiction, nearly every book has a conclusion that explores the ideas that change is possible. Our potential for change, the possibilities for better futures, these exist, and we must never lose sight of that hope. Imagination gets into the very essence of that power and pleads with the audience that we need to understand how we should make it part of our social lives. Our imaginations drive our lust for revolution, and we should be intentional and mindful of creating lives that focus on imagining futures that can fight against our modern horrors.