May 2025

Obiter Scripta, no. 131

By in obiter scripta

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

—François de La Rochefoucauld

I noticed the warehouse manager limping around the other day. It turns out his sciatica is paining him greatly. I gave him some advice, and the number of a fantastic medical massage therapist, so, you know, I’m a good person, clearly. But this is a guy who doesn’t take much care of himself, never goes to the doctor if he can help it, smokes tobacco and pot, and is definitely carrying too much fat around the midsection for his age. Until now, though, he seemed impervious to the costs of unhealthy living. I have to admit, it’s a little…reassuring to think, Ah, so you’re human after all.

Shake It Up Is All That We Know

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Ed West:

This is not some dark new age of ‘cancel culture’, something that goes against the grain of western liberalism; it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time that could never be sustained. The sexual and cultural revolution has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do when they storm the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own.

The new order has brought with it many of the methods used by the old regime to exert control – censorship, word taboo, rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies gravitate towards censorship of some kind.

I was just saying to the Lady of the House that the first time I really felt old was when the trans fad was first catching on. Not just because it didn’t appeal to me — I’d always felt like an orangutan among chimpanzees, solitary and uninterested in whatever the rest of the troop is hooting about. No, I say “old” because at first, I was just perplexed at the obvious absurdity of it and wondering how something so stupid and regressive could have caught on, only to realize, Oh. I’m no longer anywhere near the cultural center of gravity. I’m past it, out of touch, and no one cares what people like me think about anything.

I feel like I aged a bit more reading West’s harsh-but-fair assessment here. It’s disconcerting to have the open roads and empty horizons of your youth shrunk and contained within a couple of brief paragraphs. Sub specie aeternitatis, my whole world is no bigger than a snow globe.

Postop

By in battling personal entropy

Inguinal hernia surgery yesterday. I already had one side repaired over a decade ago. Now I’ve completed the whole set. My dad asked if lifting weights caused it. I said that I’m sure it contributed, but I reminded him that he just had his third hernia surgery last month, and he’s never been inside a gym, so maybe there’s just a genetic component. “You, all right? I learned it by watching you!”

What He Said

By in ai, battling personal entropy, fresh hell, media/propaganda

We’ve recently seen garbage articles from GQ and Vanity Fair about gyms and lifting weights; now it’s the New Yorker’s turn. As I was saying just last week, there’s no substance to grapple with here, just a lot of pretentious literary chin-stroking. If that were all there is to it, I wouldn’t even bother rousing myself to post about it. But as it happens, the Lady of the House has been using ChatGPT a lot for research lately, and she decided to jokingly ask it, “Why does this article seem so utterly pointless?”

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Why the Prose Feels Impenetrable

  • Abstracted Language: Instead of saying “Johnston got into lifting because it made her feel better,” Jackson filters everything through critical theory and literary metaphor (e.g., Raymond Williams on “form”).

  • Shifting Registers: The essay jumps from cultural history (Bush/Arnold) to memoir to academic theory to internet culture to queer subtext.

  • Ambivalence: The author avoids definitive claims—everything is “paradox,” “tension,” “ambivalence,” or “complicated,” making it hard to grasp a central thesis.

Central Tension

The article is less a review than a recursive reflection on whether any bodily discipline can free you from aesthetic and gender expectations—or if it just gives you a new way to serve them. Johnston believes lifting saved her. Jackson believes it helped, but sees too many cultural echoes to declare true liberation.

If you want the clean one-sentence version:

Jackson argues that while weightlifting may feel like an escape from diet culture and gendered expectations, it still operates within—and often reinforces—the same systems of performance, self-surveillance, and aesthetic conformity it claims to subvert.

You said:

Well, I suppose when you’re contracted to write 4000 words for the New Yorker, you’d better deliver.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that’s precisely the structural constraint that often distorts these essays. The New Yorker doesn’t publish book reviews; it publishes essays that orbit a topic using the book as a gravitational center. That means:

  • The writer must appear to wrestle with an idea, even if the conclusion is lukewarm.

  • Every tangent (Arnold, Raymond Williams, Instagram captions) must serve dual purposes: padding the word count and signaling cultural literacy.

  • Ambivalence is currency—commitment is gauche. A clear thesis would make it seem like the conversation is over. Better to “trouble the narrative” than resolve it.

The result is often less “what do we learn from this book?” and more “what does this book let me talk about for 4,000 words in this house style?” A skilled reader can dig out the substance, but the opacity isn’t accidental—it’s ornamental.

****

I have to admit, I couldn’t have said it better myself. If these chatbots can be gratuitously ornery or make vulgar jokes, I might be out of a blogging job.

When Vegans Attack

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda

Boy, if I could read, I’d probably be really angry over this.

Seriously, though, I thought it would be amusing to make fun of this article, but, no pun intended, there’s no meat to the argument, such as it is. There’s nothing to sink your teeth into. Like so much of contemporary media, it’s all just “vibes” and “feels,” a vague constellation of trendy grievances. (The link is here in case you want to see for yourself.) The aim is not to inform, or even to put forth an argument. It’s just supposed to poke you in the amygdala. It’s like a prose poem in which this ditz free-associates about protein and whatever negative connotations she can hallucinate in connection with it.

So, since rational argumentation isn’t the name of the game here, we may as well respond in kind. From the NYT notice of her wedding in 2020:

They planned to get married on June 6 near the Burnett Fountain in Conservatory Garden in Central Park, with 60 guests, before the coronavirus outbreak. Instead they spent the morning with their puppy Fauci (a rescue from Tennessee) at a social justice march, along Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But of course.