Reading is absolutely anti-intellectual, and that’s a good thing. Intellectuals love theorizing and inflicting the results on the rest of us; reading is only a means to that end.
December 2025
Everything Human Is Alien to Him
L. P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Rob Boddice, the subject of Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic profile, apparently imprinted on that line shortly after hatching. Boddice argues that we project our own emotional categories backward — pain, love, grief, even “human nature” — when in reality, experience is historically made, not universally shared. Even a carpenter’s smashed thumb is, in effect, a foreign language.
The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. Plenty of critics, starting with postcolonial thinkers, now understand this to have been an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity is not just an 18th-century one. Freudian psychology also reduced the dynamism of the human mind to a machine powered by predictable and shared drives. By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident.
Mwah! This is so perfectly calibrated to modern midwit pieties. The Enlightenment: a club of privileged European males in powdered wigs inventing “human nature” as a fig leaf to cover the White Phallus of Power as it raped its way through the diversity of history. Before that, apparently, nobody had ever noticed that human beings have anything in common, least of all the Christians, with their quaint doctrine that man is made in the image of God, and their bizarre hobby of preaching to all nations. Or the Stoics, who somehow developed a universal moral vocabulary without the benefit of a Paris salon. Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me”? Montaigne: “Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition”? Take a seat, boys, The Atlantic is here with the highly-credentialed to explain the world atcha.
To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?
It no longer seems so simple as just saying “pain.” We cannot put the carpenter in an MRI machine—we will never have total access to his feelings—but by building out his world in all of its dimensions, Boddice believes, we can get closer to appreciating the specificity of those feelings. This points to another radical element of Boddice’s thinking: To re-create an experience, you need to know all of the conditions that may have led the brain to originally create it, and this means bringing dozens of different academic disciplines to bear on the task, getting fields that don’t usually mingle to interact with one another.
This is the real work of art. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: here we’re told that to understand what it “felt like” for a medieval carpenter to hit his thumb with a hammer, you’ll need a kind of academic Avengers initiative: theology, archaeology, art history, material culture, semiotics, perhaps a visiting chair in Comparative Thumb Studies, and a grant. Only then may you begin to approach the mysteriously foreign experience known as “pain.”
Now, I’ll grant the modest point hidden under the grandiosity. People don’t just feel sensations; they interpret them. The same event, a hammer-smashed thumb, can be filtered through pride, shame, religion, habit, fear of lost wages, or the general anxiety of living in a world where God is watching and your tools are trying to kill you. Fine. Culture supplies scripts. Narratives matter. Buddhists, who of course didn’t appear until the Enlightenment, would call it clinging: the thumb hurts, but the story you attach to it — “I’m a clumsy failure and this is why my wife left me,” “This always happens to me, why am I so cursed” — hurts extra.
Still, the fact that meaning is flexible does not mean meaning is infinite. It doesn’t follow that slave labor under the desert sun was a rollicking good time in the right cultural context. It doesn’t follow that the medieval carpenter might have experienced a broken thumb as a wave of orgasmic rapture. The space of plausible interpretations may be wider than first thought, but it isn’t boundless. Human beings can be culturally varied without being mythical creatures. This is where Boddice’s extreme skepticism resembles something like travelogue-fantasy: the fetishization of difference as an end in itself. It reminds me of Pliny the Elder dutifully describing faraway islands where the inhabitants are all ears, or Marco Polo’s dog-headed cannibals. The past becomes an exotic zoo, and the historian becomes the docent.
And you’ll notice how selectively the skepticism is applied. If “experience” is sealed inside a vault unless we reconstruct “all the conditions,” there’s no reason to stop at medieval carpenters. My neighbors are also concept-laden brains in dark skulls with culturally trained categories. Taken seriously, the view doesn’t just make the past foreign; it makes the present unknowable, and logically points the way to solipsism. (And yet, miraculously, the academic Avengers can still deduce the “true” feeling from texts and artifacts.) But ordinary life plainly assumes the opposite — that we can understand one another well enough to cooperate, console, forgive, punish, and love. My assumption is that Boddice, with his tedious “down with empathy” provocations, is probably making a bid to be the next pop-academic superstar milking the Freakonomics template of counterintuitive insights. I can easily imagine “people in the past didn’t feel the same emotions we do” becoming the next “Eskimos-have-200-words-for-snow.”
Which brings me to the correct research method, and it requires only one professor: Samuel Johnson. If someone tells you we can’t understand an injured thumb without dozens of academic disciplines, a Johnsonian response suggests itself: pick up a hammer, hit his thumb, and say, over top of his howls and curses, “I refute Boddice thus.”
We Made Ourselves a Pillar, We Just Used It As a Crutch
This is the awesome power of aphorisms, and it is what sets them apart from the trite sound bites of social-media influencers and the platitudes of self-help gurus: Aphorisms do not make you feel good about yourself. That Burrill saying doesn’t offer an easy fix or a neat solution. In fact, it doesn’t offer a fix or a solution at all. It is a great example of aphoristic intelligence at work. It makes us reconsider what we’re doing, or not doing, with our lives.
I’ve enjoyed Geary’s books about language in general and aphorisms in particular (here and here for those interested), and I certainly don’t begrudge the man for promoting a reissued edition of one of them, but this is The Atlantic, whose audience proudly sits right on top of the bell curve, so of course the topic has to be pre-chewed and spooned out in the consistency of Gerber’s baby food. Hence, “Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence.” You like to read literature, and maybe aphorisms? You feel anxious about AI? You’re a subscriber to the premier magazine for the stupidest smart people in the professional-managerial class? Well! Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…
I love aphorisms, and I would agree that the best of them have a compressed depth that lends itself to different interpretations as opposed to pat answers, but this kind of framing is itself simplistic and, well, platitudinous. Not all aphorisms are about confronting us with our shameful failings. Gary Saul Morson, for instance, uses “Yogi Berra-isms” as an example of what he calls “wise folly,” sayings that sound dumb on the surface but contain surprising depths. And personally, when I read La Rochefoucauld skewering courtly-salon society, I come away thinking less about my own moral culpability and more about how maybe the French Revolution had some good points. Either way, the point is, this quasi-macho attitude — “I read difficult, confrontational literature; I shine the light of moral interrogation into the dark, wretched corners of my soul” — can itself be a form of self-flattery, and self-flattery is what we should be on guard against, in whatever guise it presents itself. The Devil can cite The Atlantic for his purpose too.
Solzhenitsyn famously said that the line dividing good from evil runs right through the heart of every human being, and that this is why schemes which promise to neatly divide vice from virtue and quarantine the former are doomed to failure. Everything in life can present a choice between honesty and self-flattery. You can read aphorisms for shallow reasons and retain nothing; you can use AI intelligently and creatively. In fact, most if not all of the moral sorting mechanisms we come up with are complicated by messy reality like that. There’s no sanctuary from shallow thinking, only the necessity of vigilance. The minute you start congratulating yourself on being immune to shallowness is usually when it has you by the throat.
I’m Not Locked In Here With You; You’re Locked In Here With Me
I know I was just complaining about how people don’t write letters anymore. But at the risk of sounding difficult to please, I have to say that when people did write letters they often weren’t very interesting. College students wrote to mom and dad, but just as an excuse to ask for money, and don’t get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter. The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point. Elegant though they are, they tend to follow predictable motifs. There’s the epistle of consolation, sharing in the grief of losing a loved one before saying it’s time to pull oneself together. There’s the letter in which the recipient’s eloquence is extravagantly praised, and the answer to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty. Closely related is the plea for patronage, a showpiece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same. Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything, apart from the fact that one is writing a letter. It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner and goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, before closing with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible. Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful, well-balanced, Ciceronian sentences to say nothing.
— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy
In other words: the human talent for self-evasion doesn’t need modern technology. It never did.
That’s what I want to use as a moral reminder — not “mindfulness” (that word now comes with incense and merch), but something simpler and harsher: there’s no real escape from yourself. Wherever you go, you bring the same appetite for ease, the same ability to drift, the same knack for making excuses sound principled. Every day offers small temptations to take the shortcut and call it “self-care,” to slide into a warm bath of self-centeredness where your obligations dissolve and your ideals become decorative.
Nostalgia is one of the warmest baths. It whispers that authenticity was easy back then. If only we could return to the mid-90s — before algorithms, before smartphones, before social media — then of course we’d all be living in authentic reality: long conversations, meaningful relationships, handwritten letters, depth everywhere. But those of us who were actually there know what that’s worth. People frittered away their time just fine back then. They dodged hard conversations. They postponed letters. They did the minimum and dressed it up. They simply had fewer gadgets to blame.
If you think “people” should take the time to write more personal letters, what’s stopping you? Not the era. Not the medium. Not the loss of some vanished social grace. You can do it today. You can even do it on a laptop — if you’re willing to pay the real cost, which is attention. Renaissance humanists could produce elegance on command. That was the problem. Elegance became an alibi: proof that something had been done, without the discomfort of actually saying something. And that temptation hasn’t changed. We can all “compose” our way out of sincerity, whether with Ciceronian balance or a perfectly-toned text message. But we don’t like to pay attention, because we’d rather spend our time fantasizing, as people have always done.
Talkin’ ‘Bout Butterflies In My Head
Let us take a simple example (as Lacassagne would have done): the tattooed butterfly. As butterflies become rarer and rarer in the real world, so the tattooed kind become ever more common on the shoulders, buttocks, and ankles of young (and not so young) women. But what do such butterflies signify? Here we may turn to Charles Dickens for illumination, and to the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. Skimpole, a shallow, charming, calculating faux naïf says:
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.
The tattooed butterfly speaks of freedom and self-pity, for it is more likely that the tattoo symbolises an aspiration than an achievement or an actualised state of being. It is precisely because a woman feels that she is not free that she tattoos herself thus, in the primitive hope that the symbolised quality will become reality in her life. We are never far from magical thinking.
When confronted with a butterfly tattoo, Dalrymple consults the only living authority on the subject: Charles Dickens. (What, Nabokov wasn’t available?) Sure, sometimes people signal what they want, not what they have (wealth, toughness, uniqueness, whatever). But sometimes symbols are just aesthetics, memory, affiliation, grief, a private joke, or “I like it.” Good thing we don’t take Freud seriously anymore, or I’d have to conclude that Dalrymple’s increasingly-fanciful tattoo essays are just a displaced wish to get hammered and come home with a pectoral panther.
Behold the Man
As Is Tradition
Only a couple dozen left to go.
I Can’t Believe It’s Here Again
Last year I heard this song by Sean Keller: “Holy Fucking Shit, It’s Christmas.” It’s a guitar-driven rock song, very amenable to being shouted by a raucous crowd in a pub. I have to admit my first thought was irritation — my normal holiday fare is choral/classical Christmas music, along with mid-20th-century standards, so I heard the chorus and assumed this was just another cheap example of subversion: Haha, let’s write a Christmas song, but with profanity. But as I listened, I realized it was actually a pretty sweet sentiment. At first he’s almost annoyed that it’s Christmas again, shopping for gifts he can’t afford and that no one needs. Then he admits he has fond memories of December, and he wishes Santa would bring that feeling back. Then he accepts he’ll “never be a kid again,” he’ll “never be brand new,” but his reason for the season now is “Christmasing with you.” It ends up a love song — to another person, and to the time of year. A clever twist on holiday music after all.
1986: The Christmas Mission
As the years go, though, “home” gets redefined. Eventually we all end up as the person who dreams of Christmas elsewhere, casting our minds back to a time when our conception of the celebration first coalesced. You may be home for Christmas, but in a quiet moment you think to your childhood, to the tinsel’d tree, the monophonic record player, the bygone dog snoozing by the fire, the living room of grade-school years. You’ve made your own home since then. You’ve made a few. You’ve carried a particular ornament from home to home to make each tree part of the forest of firs in your Christmas memories. You are home for Christmas, but your dreams find their way back to the place you’ll never visit again.
He’s right: “home” keeps moving, but Christmas keeps a fixed address in the mind. You can be home for Christmas, in the life you built, and still, if you’re quiet long enough, feel your thoughts walk back to a room you’ll never enter again.
Mine is 1986. I was old enough to have quit Santa, young enough to still be giddy over the idea of presents, and imaginative enough to turn the whole thing into a playful epic adventure. My brother and I decided we’d do the thing you always think you’re going to do and almost never actually do: stay awake until our parents went to sleep, then sneak downstairs and look at the gifts around the tree.
I tried to keep myself awake by reading, which is how I learned that books can be sedatives. I plowed through one of my mom’s cheesy potboilers — Monster: A Tale of Loch Ness. And because I was awake, I started doing this weird Christmas Eve surveillance thing: I watched cars come and go from the end of our cul-de-sac. At 10:13 a car headed out. At 11:17 another. I remember being genuinely fascinated: Where could they be going this late on Christmas Eve? I had this childish notion that the whole world should already be settling its brains for a long winter’s nap. At 11:30 the neighbor’s lights went dark across the street. The neighborhood going inert, the world dimming, the last inn closing for the night. The clock ticked down to midnight. It’s go time!
We didn’t just plan it. We planned it like a military operation, complete with plastic walkie-talkies. Belly-crawling from shadow to shadow. Midnight rendezvous at the top of the stairs. Descent by the least creaky route. Objective: living room, right turn at the bottom. Problem: family room, left turn at the bottom — where my mother was wrapping presents while watching TV, fully awake, the sentry at her station. We tried it once. She caught us immediately and sent us back to bed.
We attempted another unsuccessful sortie around two. Eventually I fell asleep. I woke around five, disappointed, like I’d missed the important part. I don’t remember a single present I got that year. But I remember the anticipation so vividly that it still feels like a magical Christmas.
I still love this time of year. I love the decorating, the smells of baking and seasonal scents, and especially the music. But I’ll admit there’s one part of childhood Christmas I haven’t been able to recreate: the extravagance of the gift-pile. I’ve never really been in a position to ring the tree with a couple dozen boxes, the kind of abundance that makes the room look temporarily enchanted.
That’s the funny thing about the 1986 “mission.” We weren’t plotting to steal anything. Even if we’d succeeded, we wouldn’t have opened a single present. The rule had long been that we could only open stockings if we woke up before our parents, and we had no intention of breaking it. We just wanted to look. To tally the packages, to see which ones were ours, to feel the suspense in our hands without spending it. The nostalgia is for the tense, quivering anticipation; the sense that the world, for one night, was quietly stockpiled with surprises.
The Long, Foul Rant That Is Our Moment In History
My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 or 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.
— Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
The internet didn’t invent deception, of course, but it did make mediation the default condition of social life. Most of us have probably heard the old joke from the New Yorker: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Once you live through screens, you’re always inferring a reality you cannot directly inspect. Even when nobody is lying, the medium itself encourages curation, performance, selective lighting, selective framing. A fragile trust is inherent from the start.
Social media monetized that uncertainty. It turned identity into a product and status into a scoreboard. It incentivized us to treat the self as a brand and attention as a currency — quantified, gamable, and therefore permanently vulnerable to counterfeiting. Filters, lighting, editing, branding, metrics; none of it is “fake” in the simple sense. It’s real, but optimized. And optimization is the prelude to suspicion, because it blurs the line between honest self-presentation and calculated manipulation.
As Gurri explains in his excellent book, the basic claim that institutions can certify reality — this is true; this is false; these are the rules; this is what happened — has been weakened. That doesn’t mean institutions are always wrong, or that the public is always right. It means the power to end arguments by proclamation has decayed. The public can keep disputes permanently open. Competing narratives can be built cheaply, distributed instantly, and defended by swarms of “people from nowhere.” Arguments metastasize, every claim begins to feel like propaganda, every correction begins to feel like power protecting itself, every disagreement starts to carry the tone of betrayal. You don’t merely think I’m mistaken; you think I’m captured, paid, brainwashed, malignant, or stupid. And once that adversarial posture becomes political weather, it spreads. “Chaos rampant, an age of distrust. Confrontation, impulsive habitat,” the metal band Slayer sang, describing hell, social media, or both.
For a while, we still had reliable tells. Spam looked like spam. Machine writing sounded like a machine. Bad Photoshop had a visible sheen. The reassuring thing about fakery was that it was legible.
Generative AI is an accelerant because it collapses the tells. It produces competent imitation at scale — text, images, voices, short videos — often good enough to pass the first glance, sometimes good enough to pass the second. So the aesthetic question (“is it good?”) gets replaced by a forensic question: “Who made this, how, and do they deserve credit?” When outputs get cheap, the status war moves to authorship and provenance. Everyone becomes a customs officer stamping passports of authenticity.
It’s common to say “online isn’t real life,” and for a long time that was comforting because in-person reality could still function as the ultimate lie detector. Filters might beautify a photo, but presence would reassert itself up close. You can curate your profile, but you can’t curate your face at close range under ordinary lighting on an ordinary day. Digital editing can’t firm up a weak handshake.
Except now the body itself is becoming a kind of interface, not so much because bodies are “fake” than because the meaning of a body is less legible. PEDs and GLP-1s create an actual result, not a mere illusion. The suspicious question isn’t “is that physique real?” It’s: “What does it signify?”
For decades, we treated physical transformations — lean bodies, muscular bodies, big lifts, dramatic before-and-after stories — as costly credentials. We read them as moral evidence: discipline, self-control, sacrifice, will. You could argue about how fair that moral reading was, but it was socially legible. It made sorting easy. Now, a person can be leaner because appetite has been pharmacologically altered. A person can be bigger and stronger because recovery and hypertrophy are pharmacologically assisted. Now the old inference (“therefore virtue”) is unreliable because the method is opaque. And humans hate unreliable inference. We hate it the way we hate a loaded die: not only because it might be unfair, but because it makes the game hard to interpret.
Then comes the new complication: AI doesn’t arrive as just another tool, like a better wrench. People talk to it. It answers. It imitates personality. It can console, flatter, argue, roleplay. So even if it has no intentions in the strict sense, it reliably triggers the human perception of agency. A new force enters the already-chaotic field — something that can amplify messages, imitate people, generate culture, automate persuasion — and the public can’t agree what kind of thing it is. Friend, enemy, mercenary, or merely a new industrial capability. The disagreement itself becomes part of the atmosphere. Europe got a “German Question” in 1871. We’re getting an “AI Question” now.
Our atmosphere of suspicion is less paranoia than a rational adaptation to broken shortcuts. When cheap trust signals stop working, people do what they always do: they demand receipts (“prove it,” “disclose it,” “show your drafts,” “are you natural?”), they invent new tells (“AI slop,” “natty or not,” “Ozempic face”), and they fight to rewrite the moral code. It encourages moral entrepreneurship. Not everyone is seeking truth; everyone is seeking advantage. Authenticity becomes a weapon because authenticity is a status currency in a world where the old currency is being inflated.
It’s sort of like musical chairs. Technological change, as it often does, has set the music playing again, and people are circling around warily, hoping to be well-positioned in the scrum for a high-status seat once it stops. Eventually some settlement will arrive. Possibly, as Gurri says, one that defies the terms of the struggle. But for now, the defining feeling is that the old shortcuts for telling what’s real are failing, and we haven’t yet agreed on new ones.
Memento Mori (IV)
‘Tis the year’s midnight…
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays…
The world’s whole sap is sunk…
— John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”
****
Winter sends the world to sleep; the wood in winter is as hushed as a temple, in contrast to May, when it resounds to birdsong and picnickers. And so we come to the night, the great, dark, continent of quiet.
— John Lewis-Stempel, Night Life
****
Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Obiter Scripta, no. 150
Those who write abstractly are rather lucky: they will have commentators. Others only have readers, which, it seems, is to be looked down upon.
— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks
In Midnight Maxims, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.” Likewise, Camus’ commentators are the bureaucrats of the book world. The bureaucrat’s survival skill is activity that can be documented, not outcomes that can be verified. A text that stays “richly ambiguous” is a renewable resource. A text that gets nailed down is a closed case. It’s safer to write “a reading of” than to say something falsifiable. And if you can turn “understanding a book” into a method (frameworks, lenses, rubrics), you can always claim progress even when nothing clarifies. Clarity reduces the need for the middle-management of meaning.
The Soft Hum of Suspicion
If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense. I’m driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern “It’s not X, it’s Y,” even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare. But whatever these little quirks of language used to mean, that’s not what they mean any more. All of these are now telltale signs that what you’re reading was churned out by an A.I.
A specter is haunting the severely-educated — the specter of AI usage in writing. All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; the NYT Magazine and the Atlantic, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Turnitin, university integrity offices and Reddit bot-sniffers. And so here we have Sam Kriss, yet another spoiled-rich-kid communist who wants to burn down the system that gave him his rarefied aesthetic education (and who nonetheless still harbors bourgeois dreams of inheriting his parents’ “massive house“) swirling a vintage line from Virginia Woolf under his nostrils as he informs you plebs that he was already bored with ChatGPT in 2022, before you even knew it existed.
Seriously, though, the people most likely to see AI text as contamination are the people whose social identity is bound up with text: the literary humanities set, the professional writers, the custodians of taste. For everyone else, it’s just a convenience. An appliance. Maybe that’s part of the outrage: automation was supposed to take the warehouse and the assembly line, not saunter into the poetry workshop and start doing an impression of “voice.” The machines are stealing the wrong jobs.
Most people have never treated everyday writing as sacred in the first place. We flatter ourselves that Christmas wishes “come from the heart,” but come on: normal people use templates because they have lives. Mass-produced holiday cards work for their intended purpose, and no one regards them as a civilizational threat. If anything, the sincere and authentic are the ones who refuse the template and send a detailed, self-important “year in review” that makes everyone vaguely regret having an inbox. Before chatbots, the socially-striving could always reach for Bartlett’s book of quotations; AI just makes the rhetorical prosthetics cheaper and faster. And of course, anything that steals fire from Olympus and gives it to the masses is, by definition, sacrilege.
We are changed by what we change. Good ol’ Auden. It’s the best description I know of what’s happening to public language right now. People imitate their peers constantly. So of course we’re going to imitate the newest voice that surrounds us, even when it isn’t a person. If the environment becomes saturated with AI phrasing, we will begin to speak it the way you catch an accent. From a strictly evolutionary angle, that’s neither good nor bad. It’s adaptation. It’s the social animal looking for a snugger fit.
But there’s always a counter-movement. A stock phrase can be useful right up until the moment it starts to sound insipid from overuse. Then we drop it and reach for something else, not because we’re heroes of authenticity but because we’re bored. “AI voice” will eventually become a class marker the way corporate-speak already is: safe, competent, emotionally pre-chewed. And as that dialect hardens into “middlebrow, typical, mediocre,” anyone who wants to sound alive will have to push harder for distinction — more particularity, more risk, more texture. So it goes: the mass adopts a style because it’s easy, and then a minority flees it because it’s everywhere.
These pieces about AI writing all share the same undertone: suspicion. A kind of low-grade paranoia that turns reading into auditing. You can’t just take in a paragraph anymore; you have to scrutinize it for tells, like a customs agent checking passports. “Tapestry,” “delve,” the syrupy uplift, the eager sincerity. ChatGPT, like Kilroy, was here. Maybe that’s justified, maybe not. But it’s corrosive either way. Even when you’re right to be wary, living in that posture constantly makes you meaner, narrower, less amused.
And it isn’t just AI. It’s a broader collapse of trust in cheap signals. I don’t have any grand analysis or conclusion; I’m just observing what appears to be the prevalent mood. A sincere paragraph used to be a mild indicator of effort. Now it might be a one-click artifact. So the audience becomes forensic, and the writer becomes defensive, and both sides grow touchy. It reminds me of the obsession with PEDs in sports: post a physique photo or a lift total and you’ll be swarmed by amateur detectives hunting for signs of steroid use. Enhancement spreads (or the suspicion of it spreads), and suddenly every impressive result is presumed guilty until proven otherwise. The honest have to perform extra authenticity; the dishonest learn to fake the performance; and the spectators get to feel clever for “catching” someone.
We are changed by what we change. We built machines that can produce endless fluent prose, and now we’re building a world in which fluent prose is no longer evidence of a mind behind it, only evidence that a machine exists. Reading starts to feel like border control.
Word Tords
I might have guessed. Most trendy words gradually grow in popularity; this excrescence became omnipresent almost instantly. Part of that is because of its association with AI, but it quickly became a much more general term of derision. I mostly see it used on Twitter, which I browse because, as Elon Musk said when he bought it, it functions as something of a town square in the digital age. I must admit, though, that the sheer maddening repetition of “slop” in our digital town square has given me persistent fantasies of climbing a nearby bell tower to…jump. (What? What did you think I was going to say? Sickos.)
I think what I hate isn’t slang, or argot, or jargon as such. Those can be vivid, funny, even clarifying. What I hate is autopilot language, what I’ve started thinking of as meme-phrases: prefab little utterances engineered for online life, easy to repeat, easy to recognize, and rewarded mostly for being the correct noise to make at the correct moment. “Gaslighting.” “Psyop.” “Read the room.” “Not a good look.” “Quiet part out loud.” “Take a seat.” They’re verbal reaction GIFs: not necessarily stupid, but too often substituted for an actual sentence.
Clichés, whatever their faults, at least express a thought. In a way, they’re victims of their own success: they’re true enough and useful enough that they get repeated into linguistic satiety. Unlike many, I’ve never had any problem with “It is what it is.” It’s a perfectly serviceable way to express resignation or acceptance.
The meme-phrases that irritate me are different. They don’t spread because they’re true; they spread because they’re socially efficient. They’re low on meaning and high on utility as a signal. “Read the room” isn’t an insight, it’s a rebuke — an attempt to shame someone into conformity with the group’s mood. “Gaslighting” gets used indiscriminately to mean everything from ordinary lying to actual, sustained manipulation. “Slop” started as a particular insult for subpar AI churn, and within minutes it became a universal solvent: anything I dislike, anything I’m tired of, anything I want to dismiss without describing.
What drives me insane isn’t that language evolves. It’s the mindless repetition, the obvious parroting. You can watch the phrase spread through a feed the way a yawn spreads through a room. People aren’t choosing words; they’re selecting a noise that marks them as current and aligned. The phrase could be replaced by a grunt, squeak, or hoot and do the same job of indicating displeasure or disapproval.
And yes, I admit I might simply be a curmudgeonly asshole: I’m getting irritated at a sign of what a social species we are. It’s like getting annoyed at the sound of a flock of ducks quacking. Why would I expect each duck to sound unique or interesting? Yet — irrationally, stubbornly — that’s exactly what I expect from people. I want to hear thoughts, not noise. Ah, well, it is what it is.
Praise You Like I Should
We always suppose that others possess great powers of acute penetration thanks to which they will discover our worth, whether real or imagined, and that they will then devote considerable attention to these merits of ours, even when we refuse to recognize such qualities in respect of any other object.
— Leopardi, Zibaldone
It’s funny, because most of us recognize our own narcissistic tendencies here, especially from our self-involved adolescence (mine, at least). To be recognized by others as being smart, sensitive, and talented, and to be marveled at! Of course, he’s talking about the ways we daydream about other people paying close, positive attention to us, captivated by our awesomeness. The flip side of that is the equally-narcissistic fear that they’re paying close negative attention to us, seeing every flaw and judging us harshly. The deflating truth is, most people are as wrapped up in their own personal soap opera as we are and probably hardly think about us at all. Likewise, we are often guilty of the same self-absorption. How often do we hand out affectionate compliments to people who are, after all, just doing their job?
A small episode at our doctor’s office reminded me of that.
My stepson and I have been going in weekly for testosterone injections for about a year now. Our nurse is a young woman, reliably conscientious and caring, and we always look forward to chatting with her. The appointment is ten minutes long, but repetition turns ten minutes into a kind of ritual. You get familiar. You pick up conversational threads where you left them the week before. It becomes, in miniature, a friendship.
So we decided to get her a little Christmas gift: a gift card to a local coffee shop. Nothing grand, just a thank-you for being consistently cheerful, kind, and competent while doing something for us that’s pure convenience.
We stopped by the clinic’s open-house Christmas party that weekend and gave it to her. Easy. Done. Good deed logged, Christmas cheer spread.
Then we came in several days later for our injections, and my stepson was curious to see if she’d used it yet.
“Did you get any coffee today?”
She said her sister had brought her some that morning. She didn’t seem to pick up on the hint, though.
He tried again. “From [redacted]?” he asked. (The shop’s name withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.)
No, she said. She doesn’t like [redacted]. Apparently they’d pulled some underhanded move against another local coffee place — reneged on an agreement, stole floor plans, something like that. Her sister is a barista, so she’s up on the local bean-water gossip.
Uh-oh.
Then it occurred to me: she might not even have looked at the gift card yet.
So I gently said something like, “Well, if you’d prefer, it’s no trouble to get you a different gift card. We can use that one ourselves…”
Horrified comprehension dawned on her.
“OHMIGOD, you guys!!”
She was profusely apologetic. Flushed and perspiring, she explained she’d gone straight from the party to her other job where she worked all weekend, she’d put the card in her purse and forgotten to look at it, she really was grateful, she didn’t mean to sound rude — on and on. The poor woman was mortified, and my stepson and I started laughing, partly because it was genuinely funny and partly because laughter is the quickest way to say, Please stop punishing yourself. We’re not prosecuting you.
We reassured her: it was just a comedy of errors; we weren’t upset or offended; it was fine; all’s well that ends well.
The next day I went back for a blood draw. She came out to go over last-minute details and joked, “Can’t be too mad, I guess; you came back!” I told her, honestly, that I hoped she hadn’t gone home feeling bad about it.
She admitted she had. Worse, it had become a topic of conversation at dinner. She told her dad and he said, “That’s terrible!”
This is the part where I risk sounding like I’m polishing my halo, but I promise, the point is really about how easily we imagine we’re being judged, and how strangely rare it is to tell someone, plainly, “I see what kind of person you are.”
We know you better than that, I said. We know you’re not the kind of person who’s capable of being rude about a Christmas gift. And I reminded her of something she’d done that she probably thought no one would remember.
In autumn of last year, a hurricane came up from the Gulf and, rather than continuing up the coast, veered inland and tore through parts of the South. We lost power here in central Virginia for about 24 hours, but western North Carolina got severely devastated. Our nurse posted a note online saying she wouldn’t be available the following week because she was going down there to volunteer her nursing services for hurricane victims. I told her that that’s the sort of thing that shows who she really is, not an awkwardly-timed honest opinion.
She smiled and lowered her eyes, and we neatly segued back to talking about blood tests. I like to think that maybe I did my part to disprove the general truth of Leopardi’s observation, and I hope that maybe I gave her a little bit of an inner glow by making her feel unexpectedly recognized and praised for something she would never dream of boasting about.
This comes up in a smaller way every time we visit. If we have to wait, she always apologizes. But this is a tiny private practice; she’s the only nurse on staff; they offer the injections for free; we show up whenever it’s convenient for us and they fit us in as soon as they can, using their own supplies — gloves, syringes, alcohol pads, band-aids. So one day when she apologized, we told her the truth: you guys are doing us a favor; how on earth could we complain about sitting for fifteen minutes? She gave this wistful little smile and said, “I wish everyone felt that way!”
That stuck with me. To us, it’s obvious she’s a good person who deserves appreciation. But she’s probably dealing with a steady trickle of people who treat “free” as an entitlement and still find something to gripe about. And those are the people who give the loudest feedback. If you’re the one who only speaks up to complain, you end up training the world to expect complaint. Which is one reason it feels worth setting aside a little time and money, to say, formally and out loud: we notice you, and we appreciate you.
Bartleby the Scribbler
There’s nothing like the book section at Goodwill to serve as memento mori for literary ambition. Shelf after shelf of novels and memoirs you’ve never heard of, each one the culmination of somebody’s dream. Years of work, an agent, a contract, launch parties, reviews; and now, a buck and change on a thrift-store shelf, moldering away after the original owner stuck it in a box with unwanted Christmas gifts and old sweatshirts and dropped it off in the donation bin like Rousseau leaving an infant on the orphanage stoop.
And that’s the ordinary outcome. At the more spectacular end, you get something like Olivia Nuzzi’s recent memoir, American Canto. A wall-to-wall media circus, months of scandal coverage, an affair with a cabinet secretary, her ex-fiancé serializing his side of the tawdry story on Substack — and after all that, the book moves a little over a thousand print copies in its first week. Imagine whoring away your privacy and integrity for an audience smaller than a mid-tier YouTube channel’s Tuesday upload.
Rob Henderson has a post about what it takes to be a writer now: not just writing, but running a one-person media operation. Newsletter, social feeds, a constant stream of “content,” and enough personal disclosure that readers feel like they “know” you — so that occasionally you can step in and say, “By the way, here’s where you can buy my book.”
On paper, I look like the sort of person a publisher might get ideas about. I’ve been blogging regularly for years. There’s an archive, a recognizable voice, recurring obsessions, a small audience that keeps wandering back. If you’re a literary marketer, this is the kind of thing you point at and say, “Look, a platform.”
This is not to say I could have a career as an Author if I wanted. If I ever published a book, odds are it would sink without a ripple, like most books do. The only point I’m making is narrower and more boring: the visible behavior the publishers and marketers want — regular posting, a sense of personality, a trickle of readers — is already there. What interests me is how the meaning of that behavior would flip the moment it became someone else’s plan. Right now, when I write a post, I’m just following an itch from inside. Something bothers me, or amuses me, or catches my attention, and I want to see what it looks like in sentences. That’s the whole story. If I don’t post for a few days, no one is waiting with a spreadsheet and a frown. The activity begins and ends with my own curiosity. Now imagine the same surface routine, but add a publisher, a publicist, or a boss.
“Time to produce some topical content; your recent posts haven’t really done numbers.”
“You really need an Instagram account; the marketing data are clear.”
“Could you say something a bit provocative on Twitter to juice interest before the launch?”
Nothing material has changed. I’d still be typing words on a screen. But suddenly the internal itch is secondary. The primary thing is fulfilling an obligation someone else has defined: keep the graph pointing up and to the right. The exact same habit becomes part of a strategy deck.
I don’t think obligations are bad. It’s normal to have them. Civilization more or less depends on people doing things they wouldn’t spontaneously choose at 7 a.m. on a Monday. You can even take pride in meeting your obligations, whether you resent them or cheerfully accept them. But obligations have a way of draining some of the spontaneous joy out of an activity. The more something is tied to money, status, or other people’s expectations, the less it feels like play and the more it feels like work, even if you’re doing precisely what you “love.” Which is why I’ve always preferred to keep writing in the hobby column. I’ve heard it said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” For me, this gets it precisely backwards. The surest way to ruin something you love is to make it responsible for your mortgage and your self-worth at the same time.
I already have a job. I treat it as a task: something I do competently in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t need to express my deepest self. It just needs to keep the lights on. Writing is the thing I do for its own sake, the place where a stray thought can turn into an afternoon’s entertainment. No deliverables, no targets, no sense that I’m failing if it doesn’t lead to anything. No one has to care. No one has to pay. If I never earn a cent from it, nothing is “wrong.” In my view, something in your life needs to work like that, something that is allowed to be pointless in the best sense. Hobbies are ideally placed to fill that role. For me, writing is a hobby.
Maybe there’s something quintessentially Gen-X about it after all. I’ve never dreamed of being an author, but I do find it amusing to imagine practicing passive resistance against a publishing house and a publicist. “But you like blogging! You’ve already been doing it for decades! Why can’t you just keep doing it with a link at the bottom of every post to the sales page at Amazon?!”
“I would prefer not to,” I’d say. “That’s all.”
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