In 2007, I started curating playlists for a group of friends, imaginatively titled Mix For Friends. Back then, these compilations were a labor of love: I spent hours mining the internet, downloading MP3s, and uploading zipped files to Dropbox before streaming services eventually made my life easier. I sent the last one out—the sixty-eighth installment—back in March to four hundred and thirty-seven people. Normally, I drop a new mix every two or three months. But I’ve been stuck on volume sixty-nine (cue Bill and Ted) for nearly half a year.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because, halfway through 2026, I’ve been thinking a lot about my current relationship with music. As regular readers know, I declared this the “Year of Mid” and surveying the recent mid-year best-of lists has given me plenty of substantiation for that theory. Still, I realize my complicated feelings about today’s musical landscape are pretty generalized, and those broad-brush assessments are something I usually try to avoid. I’m highly skeptical whenever someone says that all music is garbage even though, to my ears, it kinda feels that way. In fact, I’m often watching YouTuber Rick Beato’s content (“Music Used To Be Good…What Happened?”) rolling my eyes so hard, they risk permanently moving into the back of my head.

But let’s go back in time for a second, if only to establish that it wasn’t always like this. In fact, it used to be the exact opposite. Music wasn’t just a passion; it was a total obsession that superseded every other interest I had. I was recently talking to a friend about my weekly pilgrimage to Vintage Vinyl in Fords, NJ, a sprawling, 10,000-square-foot sanctuary where I’d spend hours digging through used compact discs, amassing a pile of obscure finds ranging from $1.99 to $5.99.

In the early aughts, I got heavily involved in the indie music press during what I’d call New York’s second greatest musical era. It started with ‘Sup Magazine, a truly legendary zine that even has its own Wikipedia page. During those years, I toured with and wrote stories on bands like TV on the Radio and Hot Water Music, interviewed virtually anyone I wanted to, and worked my way up from Managing Editor at ‘Sup to Music Editor at Heeb Magazine, and eventually Editor-at-Large at Self-Titled. These publications allowed me to pursue my obsession in a way that feels utterly magical in retrospect and completely impossible to replicate. I saw Vampire Weekend, The National, Charli XCX, and The xx in rooms the size of my garage, and interviewed all of them on more than one occasion. I would watch Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous and feel like my life had inspired the screenplay.

Eventually, everything changed. I can’t pin it on one single variable that split me off into this current version of the multiverse, but part of it was having kids, and part of it was being Sabbath observant (you wouldn’t believe how much crucial networking happens exclusively at Friday night shows). But most of all, my passion slowly dissipated because when everything is available to you all the time via streaming, the allure of the all-you-can-eat buffet starts to feel overwhelming. Over time, that feeling of overwhelm morphed into something far more complicated: a distant, confusing relationship with the one art form that used to define me. A relationship I’m still trying to untangle today.

It’s been happening more and more lately. I open the Spotify app on my phone and I feel at once like I’m lost. Like a Talking Heads lyric, where am I going? How do I get there? I have so much I want to listen to yet there’s also very little that feels urgent.

The interface greets me with a familiar grid of algorithmic reassurance: Made For You, Daily Mix 3, Discover Weekly, Because You Listened To… It’s a custom-built sonic echo chamber designed with terrifying precision. Spotify’s algorithm doesn’t actually want to challenge you; it wants to optimize your satisfaction and eliminate the risk of a skip. It feeds you slightly varied iterations of your existing taste, smoothing out every rough edge until every session sounds like an endless, polite hallway. Right now, Spotify wants to give me a very specific iteration of a female singer-songwriter, and it wants to deliver her to me over and over again like an entire catalog of one artist recorded under twenty different aliases. Her voice is lithe and airy. Her guitars hearken back to a soft ’90s shimmer. Her lyrics combine the exact same melancholic compound of longing and disappointment in a lover.

On paper, I shouldn’t complain; it’s a sound I’ve historically enjoyed. Which means some of this is my fault. But what the algorithm has done is taken one aspect of my palette, and flattened it into an archetype, stripped of context, edge, or geography. In its desperate bid to keep me from closing the app, Spotify doesn’t offer me a new voice. It offers me hundreds of variations of one voice. Take this week’s Discover Weekly playlist: Soccer Mommy, Chloe Slater, Saya Gray, Sunday (1994), Hannah Jadagu, Katie Gavin, Liz Cooper. Played back-to-back, it all blurs together into one singular aesthetic. What develops is the exact opposite of an earworm—it’s more like an insect buzzing around your head, annoying and impossible to catch.

My friend Sam, who honestly should have been a pop culture professor, thinks this shift explains why so much of Gen Z is gravitating toward livestreaming instead of recorded albums. They aren’t looking for finished, polished products; they want spontaneity. They want the unpredictable nature of musicians, or mostly DJs, turning on a webcam and improvising in real time to sometimes great, and sometimes terrible, results. “I think we’re watching a moment where any art that requires contemplation is looked at as inauthentic,” he told me recently. “Creating ‘moments’ is where the cultural reach actually happens.” What Sam is really saying is that the quiet, deliberate ritual of flipping through a CD bin, taking a flyer on a complete unknown, and sitting with it at home…that feeling is dead. Music streaming platforms didn’t just digitize our music collections; they executed the element of surprise.

And yet, algorithmic homogeneity is only half the problem. The other half is structural, financial, and deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge: music has quietly become an ecosystem built almost entirely by and for the privileged. I know. I know. The big “P” word. I don’t like using it, either. It’s used so often, it’s been defanged of its venom. But I’m here to tell you that I witnessed the myth of meritocracy firsthand. I saw the ascension of dozens of bands based on nothing more than touring, touring and more touring. But in 2026, that myth sounds like something Homer wrote. The economic reality of touring, inflation, and zero-payout streaming royalties has raised the barrier to entry so high that the only people who can afford to play the game are those with a massive safety net built in.

Look at the pop charts. One of the biggest hits on the radio is Stella Lefty’s “Boston,” a track anointed by the New York Times’ Popcast as a potential song of the summer and one recorded by an artist whose father famously founded Groupon. Then there’s indie-pop star Gracie Abrams, daughter of the Hollywood director J. J. Abrams, who has spoken openly about her family connections. Olivia Rodrigo and Ariana Grande, who I both truly adore, girl-dad status or otherwise, built their launchpads through the children’s-television industrial complex. Addison Rae leveraged an empire of TikTok views into a pop career.

This isn’t to say these artists lack talent, but talent is no longer the sole variable, or even the deciding one. What’s changed isn’t that connections exist — they always have — it’s that the number of legitimate side doors has shrunk to about three: inherited capital, a television contract, or a following built before you’ve ever stepped into a recording booth. Every other door has been quietly bricked over. The middle-class working musician, the scruffy indie outfit grinding through local venues, has been priced out of their own industry. In fact, show me one and I’ll show you a Substack they wrote about the difficulties of touring.

And if the female pop pipeline gives me hundreds of variations of one lithe, melancholic voice, the current male pop ecosystem offers something even more baffling: the rise of the algorithmically engineered pop star.

Benson Boone, Sombr, Role Model, Alex Warren, Conan Gray. They all share a strikingly similar visual and sonic template, a sort of curated, llama-haired, soft-boy sensibility coupled with big, emotional vocal belting designed specifically for YA TV series soundtracks and 15-second TikTok clips. Throw Teddy Swims’s pseudo-R&B in there as well even though his aesthetic is very different. But their commonality is a sap as thick as the sticky resin that oozes from a tree.

Individually, sure, they’re talented vocalists. Presented as a collective phenomenon, however, they seem to collapse into one market-tested archetype: emotionally demonstrative, and scrubbed of the danger or idiosyncrasy that once made a frontman feel like an alien visitor or an unhinged poet. Instead of a cultural movement, it feels toothless and redundant. There’s a popular YouTube video making the rounds titled “The Gen Alpha Melody” (3.6 million views) accusing these artists and many like them of reproducing the same melody over and over again. That’s no coincidence—familiarity is halfway there to popularity.

And if you think this homogenization is as bad as it gets, the future of AI music is no longer a hypothetical horror story. It’s an active breach happening in real time. Just look at “Rubberz,” the synth-pop track credited to Fenix Flexin and Purps on the Beat. Despite furious initial denials from both artists, investigations confirmed this month that the track was generated entirely using the AI platform Treblo. It is officially the first fully AI-generated song to enter the Billboard Hot 100, where it has already climbed to number 58.

We have crossed a threshold beyond which artistic intention can no longer be assumed. For a generation largely unbothered by intentionality, as Sam asserts, we are likely only witnessing the tip of a massive sea change in songwriting.

Still, I told myself that algorithms could flatten the present without touching the past. Whatever music became, I would always have the records that had already made a home in me. At the very least, I would always have the Strokes.

I first saw the Strokes on February 27th, 2001, opening for the British shoegazers Doves at the Bowery Ballroom. The quintessentially New York rock band was celebrating the release of their debut EP, The Modern Age, a physical copy I still own. There are moments we romanticize only in retrospect, but I assure you that, this time, my nostalgia is fully warranted. I was utterly enamored by the band’s tightness despite singer Julian Casablancas’ drunken messiness. The quintet channeled chaos and control all at once: a contradictory maelstrom of effortless cool. I purchased a T-shirt that night featuring the Magna cigarette homage, which I also still have. I remember thinking that this was all I could ever want from rock and roll. I was a Strokes devotee for life. Nothing they could do could lose me.

And with each successive release, I remained a… what would you call a Strokes fan? A Stroker? A Strokehead? 2003’s Room on Fire. 2006’s First Impressions of Earth. 2011’s long-awaited Angles. 2013’s divisive Comedown Machine. And finally, 2020’s Rick Rubin-produced triumphant comeback, The New Abnormal. Some of them bore less ripe fruit than others, but who else in a post-Aughts world could sustain coolness for two decades?

Which is all to say that over the last few years, as I’ve written about before, my relationship with the music world has gotten far more…complex. (I’ll return to the Strokes in a moment.) It was one thing to witness an industry-wide silence after the October 7th massacre, a horrific attack that targeted young people at a music festival, of all places. It was another thing entirely to watch that same industry mobilize with terrifying speed to demonize Israel as a nation, and subsequently isolate its artists.

As much as I try to remain an objective listener, and as fiercely as I’ve always insisted on separating the art from the artist, putting in my .20 ounce AirPods became heavy. Listening to music got tangled up in a fog of malaise and betrayal. You can believe in separating art from the artist as an intellectual ideal, but the practical application of that principle is for people far colder, or far stronger, than I am. Idles, once a thrilling revitalization of post-punk, curdled like expired milk. Damon Albarn, a three-decade hero of mine, transformed into a desperate aging rocker seeking relevance through a Gen Z–favored cause. Massive Attack devolved into a singularly fixated political project, while Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie went so far as to graft the swastika onto Jewish and Israeli iconography onstage. Kinda hard listening to “Swastika Eyes” after that.

On April 21st, 2026, the inexplicably popular YouTube series SubwayTakes posted a clip of Casablancas calling out American Zionists who “get the benefits of white privileged people, but talk like they are Black people during slavery.” The singer carried on for another minute or two, but the video generated substantive media attention in advance of the band’s new album release. Gen Z commentators came out in droves, suddenly familiarizing themselves with a band their dads listened to. Even self-proclaimed most important music critic and rival Anthony Fantano praised Casablancas for his “based” take.

It seemed the Strokes had established a brand-new promotional strategy: make Israel their central talking point. After all, it had worked during their Coachella sets a week prior, accompanied by video montages of Israel bombing Gaza playing behind them during “Oblivius.” Why wouldn’t they stay on message?

(Incidentally, when I say “the band,” it’s entirely possible Casablancas was going rogue. Nick Valensi, the band’s guitarist and only Jewish member, announced he was taking a hiatus from the Strokes just two weeks later. But it’s worth noting that aside from their 2001 track “New York City Cops” and a few appearances at Bernie Sanders rallies, this was always a mostly apolitical rock band.)

And here we are with the release of Reality Awaits, the Strokes’ seventh studio album, dropped just two weeks ago on July 24th, the band’s second outing with uber-producer Rick Rubin. How could this not work? How could this record not be a respite from the Sombrs, the Addisons, and the Teddy Swims of the world? Wasn’t this the very band that had sustained the savior-of-rock-and-roll narrative for literally twenty-five years? I eagerly anticipated playing it, even as a quiet, heavy truth settled in my chest: that deep down, as a Zionist, I felt personally targeted by the frontman responsible for the Strokes ouvre. But as I texted another friend yesterday, as an American Jew, I’m all too used to compromising on my feelings. Which is another way of saying I would try to hear this album as objectively as possible.

Which I think I’ve actually managed to do. Because despite Casablancas’ incoherent pseudo-political platforming, I’ve been digging into Reality Awaits, and well… Reality kinda bites. (Sorry. The Gen X’er in me couldn’t resist.) In truth, the album, as divisive as it’s proving to be, isn’t glaringly awful, nor is it brilliant. It is, as any diplomatic music critic would say, interesting. What this means in practice is that it will most definitely not generate any radio hits the way The New Abnormal did, but it will almost certainly be remembered as a cult favorite by the music equivalent of a hardcore Letterboxd user. I mean, the album starts with a song titled “Psycho S***.” It’s pretty clear what its intentions are. I also, at moments throughout, can practically see Rick Rubin sitting in the studio, closing his eyes, and whispering ambiguities from the control booth, like“More Bossa Nova,” or “This guitar riff should sound more like the ending of Terminator 2.”

But frankly, I’m less interested in writing a traditional music review right now—I’m not even sure what the point of reviews is in a streaming world, to be honest. I’m far more interested in exploring what listening to a Strokes album actually feels like in 2026 given the state of rock and music as a whole. And, more specifically, what it feels like for me, someone approaching Reality carrying twenty-five years of devotion, and a whole lot of modern baggage.

That baggage isn’t going anywhere. We can’t un-hear the noise surrounding our streaming apps, nor can we erase the disillusionment of watching an industry we loved lose its moral center. The days of walking into a record store or a tiny club like the Bowery Ballroom and feeling an untainted, frictionless thrill are gone; listening in 2026 is an exercise in navigation, boundary-setting, and emotional risk management. But as I sit here staring at the unfinished tracklist for Volume 69, I realize that giving up on the search means letting the old version of myself down. So I’ll keep digging through the slop, filtering out the noise, and pressing play. Not because I expect music to feel innocent again, but because the next song might still feel urgent enough for me to tell four hundred and thirty-seven people about it.

Of course, I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in IMAX, which is to say I saw it the way Nolan had intended: on a screen the size of a municipal building, at a volume that rearranges your internal organs, and having paid enough for the ticket that I checked twice to see whether it came with a free lifesize Matt Damon popcorn bucket.

I want to be clear that the movie earns all of this. Real boats. Real Sicilian coastline standing in for Ithaca. Travis Scott—of all the sentences I did not expect to type this year—playing a wandering bard who sings the story of Troy to a room of strangers. Nolan has apparently decided that the oral tradition and hip-hop are doing the same job, which is the kind of thesis you can get away with once you’ve made $1 billion biopic about a guy who built a bomb.

The Odyssey, structurally, is a movie about scale: the scale of the sea, the scale of guilt, the scale of how long it takes one man to get home on his commute from work to his wife. Nolan built a mythological IMAX cathedral to make you feel small in your seat, and it worked. I ate popcorn like a person under subpoena.

And then Odysseus goes down to Hades—which is not in New Jersey—and there he meets Tiresias, the blind prophet, who rises out of the dark. As the actor delivers Odysseus’s future to his face—you will suffer; you will lose your men; you will make it home old and unrecognizable—I find myself thinking: the future is not a forecast. Tiresias isn’t hedging. He doesn’t say, “There are several possible paths forward, Odysseus, depending on variables.” He tells him what will happen. Flatly. As a settled matter. The future already exists; it is simply being read to him, like a letter that arrived early.

Sitting in the dark, watching an ancient ghost hand down an immutable fate, I realized why the scene felt so alien to me.

Most of the literature that built our culture—Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Brontë, Twain—was obsessed with the present tense. Their stories felt grounded and lived-in precisely because they took place in the world as it was, or the past as it had been. Characters didn’t spend three hundred pages hyperventilating about what society would look like in the year 2050. The future wasn’t a setting. It wasn’t a genre. It was just tomorrow, a blank slate that would probably look a lot like yesterday.

Somewhere along the line, that balance flipped.

Today, our default orientation is forward-looking hypervigilance. We live in a state of casual, nonchalant doom, where we simply accept that any vision of the future must be a bleak, exhausted landscape. You see it in our movies, you see it in the ambient malaise of social media, and if you’re anything like me, you see it in your own head at 5:00 AM. Fiction, media, and our own brains have trained us to treat tomorrow not as a mystery to discover, but as a crisis to prepare for.

I wanted to figure out when that narrative conditioning actually took root. Not when people started worrying about tomorrow, but when writers stopped treating the present as the main stage and started treating the future as an impending threat.

When did tomorrow acquire a date? And when did the future become a warning instead of a prophecy?

The handoff took centuries, passed through a surprising amount of Enlightenment optimism, and required us to stop trusting the gods with what happened next.

Start with the Greeks, because we’ve been unfair to them. We tend to assume they were future-blind because they weren’t writing about flying cars or cyberpunk megacities. In fact, they were obsessed with the future. They simply accessed it through a different, infinitely less frantic operating system.

Their world was governed by prophecy. The Oracle at Delphi issued riddling forecasts in the voice of Apollo. Cassandra saw the destruction of Troy not because she was running a predictive risk assessment but because she was looking at a fixed future no one else had the stomach to see. Oedipus, frantically trying to out-plan a horrific prophecy, laid the exact brickwork required to fulfill it. In ancient myth, trying to outsmart tomorrow wasn’t merely futile; it was often the mechanism that made tomorrow happen.

This did not make the Greeks innocent or passive. Their tragedies are full of choices, pride, blindness, and blame. But choice operated inside a divine architecture. Fate was something you discovered, resisted, suffered through, or accepted—not a product you were expected to design.

Crucially, look at what Odysseus actually does after Tiresias hands him his doom. He doesn’t lie down on the deck of his ship and wait for the end. He still fights like hell. He straps himself to the mast, steers around the sea monsters, and tries desperately to drag as many of his men home alive as humanly possible. In Homer’s world, attempting to outrun fate might have been foolish—it might have been pure hubris—but it was the exact opposite of malaise. It was a refusal to surrender.

Which made me wonder: what if two centuries of relentlessly bleak future-fiction haven’t just taught us to anticipate bad outcomes, but systematically suppressed our Odysseus-like impulses? What if a steady diet of dystopian narrative has quietly conditioned us to accept predictions as inevitabilities rather than threats worth fighting?

Our future, by contrast, is governed by prediction. Every tomorrow is treated as a causal consequence of whatever we manufacture, code, extract, elect, or post today. That pivot—from fate to causality, from prophecy to prediction—is one source of modern anxiety. Once tomorrow became a human engineering project, catastrophe stopped looking solely like an act of God and started looking like an indictment. If the future goes wrong, perhaps it means we built it wrong.

The Greeks understood engineering gone wrong, of course. Icarus had wax wings. Prometheus stole fire and received, in perpetuity, what can only be described as a severe HR response. The warning was already assembled: build beyond your station and suffer. It just did not come with a date stamp. Nobody set “hubris will ruin you” in the year 2440.

Then, in 1771, one Frenchman did.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier published L’An 2440 (The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One), one of the earliest works of futuristic fiction from what I could discover in my rabbit hole and, more important for our purposes, the book credited with making a crucial move: relocating utopia from a distant island to a specific point in time.

To appreciate the appeal, you have to understand what Paris was like around 1770. It wasn’t the city of croissant-scented light as advertised on Instagram. Its crowded streets doubled as channels for mud, manure, blood from slaughterhouses, and household waste. The air smelled of sewage and rotting tallow. Paris had many qualities. Breathability was not among them.

Mercier’s narrator gets into an argument with a friend about the deplorable state of society, falls asleep, and wakes nearly seven centuries later, in 2440.

A contemporary version of this premise would probably deposit him in a neon hellscape where drones patrol the rubble and an AI bots harvest organs. Mercier, however, was writing in the giddy bath of Enlightenment optimism. In his twenty-fifth-century Paris, humanity has improved almost everything.

The streets are wide, paved, and free of horse manure. Education is rational. Arbitrary imprisonment is gone. Monks and aristocrats—neither group appears to have been high on Mercier’s list—have been phased out. The king is no longer a tyrant in gold leaf but a modest public servant. Even prostitution has disappeared, although Mercier’s ideas about the enlightened role of women remain enlightened mainly by the standards of a Frenchman born in 1740.

It’s a utopian fever dream. Mercier was not warning that science would destroy humanity; he was imagining a world in which reason had finally persuaded people to stop throwing their poop into the street.

Historian Robert Darnton, who specialized in 18th Century France, captured the book’s novelty: it offered readers “the future as a fait accompli and the present as a distant past.” Readers devoured it. It became an international bestseller, was banned in France, and circulated through the underground trade that reliably forms whenever authorities announce that no one may read something.

But whether Mercier did invent time travel or not (my research is relatively limited in comparison to a full-time historian), L’An 2440 helped popularize something more consequential: the future as an improved version of the present, built by human beings over historical time. Utopia was no longer elsewhere. It was later.

This was the honeymoon phase of human agency. Europeans had begun wrestling the steering wheel of destiny away from the gods, and the first reaction was: Look how smoothly this thing drives.

The darker possibilities appeared almost immediately—Frankenstein’s creature was alive by 1818—but industrialization gave them a city to live in. The Industrial Revolution took Mercier’s dream of humans building a better future and delivered it as a monkey’s paw. Humanity had indeed built something new. It happened to be a coal-fired economy in which children worked in factories and chimneys, cities disappeared beneath soot, and the Thames became an open sewer. The future had arrived, as advertised. It had better machinery and significantly more respiratory disease.

Then, in 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species and destabilized another comforting assumption: that nature itself tended toward improvement. Natural selection didn’t promise moral progress. It didn’t promise progress at all, at least not in the sense Mercier meant. Once the future could be understood as blind adaptation rather than a story with a wise author, the ending no longer had to be a clean boulevard populated by reasonable gentlemen. It might simply belong to whatever survived.

Thirty-six years later, H. G. Wells took the basic invitation of Mercier’s book—a man visits the distant future and reports on what humanity has become—and ran it through the Darwinian filter. In The Time Machine, the traveller journeys more than eight hundred thousand years ahead. Instead of finding enlightened citizens in a well-run city, he finds that humanity has evolved into two mutually horrifying species: the Eloi, pretty and vacant and raised as livestock, and the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who come out from the underground only at night to eat the Eloi. Wells then pushes millions of years farther, to a dying Earth beneath a dimming sun.

Mercier used the future to reveal civic improvement. Wells used it to reveal entropy. Same direction of travel. Opposite verdict.

By then, even the word was available. In an 1868 speech attacking British policy in Ireland, English philosopher John Stuart Mill called its defenders “dys-topians”—drawing on the Ancient Greek for 'bad place'—in what was apparently the first recorded public use of the term. It would take literature a little longer to give the word the genre we now recognize.

The word "dystopia" sat there for decades and didn’t get its first real inhabitants until it took an actual world war and an actual revolution to populate the burning landscape. Between 1914 and 1918, all those shiny tools Mercier promised would liberate humanity—engines, chemistry, mass production—were deployed to harvest human flesh at scale. Machine guns, poison gas, and artillery turned warfare into a brutal industrial assembly line: young men in one end, grief out the other. The Enlightenment dream didn't just stall out on the Western Front. It committed high-tech, violent suicide.

Enter Yevgeny Zamyatin, a naval engineer and a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, who then watched revolutionary promise harden into bureaucracy and coercion. In 1920 and 1921, amid the wreckage of war and the emergence of the Soviet state, he was inspired to write We.

We is one of the founding documents of modern dystopian fiction and an acknowledged ancestor of Orwell’s 1984. Set in the distant future, it introduces the One State, a city of glass where citizens have numbers instead of names. The protagonist is D-503. People wear identical uniforms, live in transparent and surveilled apartments, and follow a mathematical schedule called the Table of Hours.

Music is produced by formulas (how prescient). Sex is regulated by pink tickets. When D-503 commits the ultimate crime—falling in love and developing a soul—the state subjects him to the Great Operation, which removes his imagination so that he can finally be happy.

Ancient apocalypses often destroyed the world in order to cleanse it. Beyond the catastrophe waited a New Jerusalem, a reborn Earth, or some restored cosmic order. Modern dystopia did something colder: it made the system itself the apocalypse. No god needed to end the world. Human beings could administer the end indefinitely, according to schedule.

Which brings me back to the IMAX theater, Nolan’s subwoofers rattling my teeth, Tiresias rising from the dark.

I found myself at that moment fascinated by the psychic architecture of dystopia because I seem to carry a small version of it around in my head. Anxiety about the future is a constant hum beneath my days. It’s there while I work, while I’m with the people I love, while I’m trying to fall asleep. The subject changes—health, money, politics, the climate, my children, some disaster I have not yet been imaginative enough to foresee—but the proposition remains the same: if I think far enough ahead, I might prevent pain. Worry presents itself as responsibility.

This is prediction at its most intimate. My brain becomes a private simulation engine, endlessly stress-testing futures I cannot control. And because it calls this work “preparation,” it can be difficult to notice that I’m no longer preparing for my life. I’m missing it.

Tiresias does not release Odysseus from choice, nor does he demand his passive surrender. He warns him not to harm the cattle of Helios; he tells him what awaits at home; he gives him rituals to perform. Odysseus still has decisions to make and crucially, he maintains his autonomy in spite of the gods. And what Tiresias takes from him is not agency, but the fantasy of total control. The sea will remain the sea. The gods will remain unreasonable. His work is narrower, more immediate, and infinitely more human: spare the cattle, endure the journey, pull the next oar through the water.

When the lights came up, I did what everyone does now when released from an enormous screen: I looked at a tiny one. There it all was—the news, the alerts, the forecasts, a pocket-size Tiresias speaking in probabilities and never shutting up.

But here’s the thing: I would like to live in the present tense again the way those older stories did and I’m not entirely sure how. “Be here now” is excellent advice until you try to give it to an anxious person, at which point it becomes one more assignment he’s failing to complete. But perhaps presence begins with a smaller distinction: between what I can act on and what I am merely rehearsing. Between responsibility and the superstition that worrying is a form of protection.

Odysseus still has to steer his vessel through ten thousand miles of wine-dark water. He just doesn’t have to control the sea while he does it.

Let’s play pretend for a minute. Close your eyes at the end of this paragraph and spend a moment imagining a world in which you are a Free Palestine activist. You’ve spent the last three years posting online about a genocide against the Palestinian people, insisting that Israel is an apartheid state. That’s the first part of the exercise. The second part requires a bigger leap: imagine that partly because of your advocacy, Palestine is now free. However this plays out — two-state solution, full integration, dissolution of the occupied territories — the end result is that you got what you wanted. You are thrilled. You can finally unfollow all those accounts you followed for the explicit purpose of educating yourself about the conflict. This is it. This is what you were waiting for.

Now close your eyes again. Now that a free Palestine has happened, I want you to think about how your life in America is different.

Is the housing market more affordable, or are starter homes still priced for a buyer who no longer exists? Are groceries cheaper, or is inflation still running near 4.2%, the highest it’s been since 2023, quietly outpacing whatever raise you got this year? Did the job market get better, or did the economy just add 57,000 jobs when it needed twice that, with unemployment ticking up and young workers, the ones just starting out, facing rates north of 9%? Is anyone less anxious about AI eating their job in the next eighteen months, or did that anxiety simply have nowhere to go, so it went into a hashtag instead? Is the stock market less of a casino propped up by five AI companies that may or may not be a bubble? Is healthcare more affordable? Is the Fed less split, the parties less frozen, the country less exhausted? Is the country closer together? Do we have a government that works for its people? In this hypothetical, in which Palestine is finally free, has life in America improved at all? Will life for any of the 343 million people who live here truly improve in any way?

Caring about others is important, and no decent person should rest easy while the world is in pain. I am saddened by those lost in the Venezuelan earthquake just as I am concerned for the immigrants in South Africa just as I am worried about Ukrainians living through their fourth year at war. But if that’s true, if we’re a nation that cares for others as much as ourselves, why has Zohran Mamdani’s politics made Palestine feel not like one position among many, but like an organizing principle? Why has the DSA made it a central plank of its platform with “free Palestine” signs peppered throughout its supporting crowds? Ask any Democratic politician why immigration reform stalls, why rent keeps climbing, why the parties can’t agree on anything, and you get circuitous talk. Ask about Israel and you get a position paper.

Many advocates would have you believe that their issue is in the money we give Israel and how we enable their “oppressive tactics.” But the math alone should end the conversation. The entire U.S. foreign aid budget — every country, every program, every dollar sent abroad — comes to less than one percent of federal spending. Israel’s share of that is a rounding error inside a rounding error. Whatever is broken in the American housing market, the labor market, the immigration system, it isn’t broken because of aid to Tel Aviv. There is no accounting of cause and effect that gets you from “Israel” to “rent is too high.” The math doesn’t explain the disproportion. You’d think otherwise if it were up to next generation Democrats.

If this were simply about the moral weight of American dollars, Israel would not be the only headline. In 2025, the United States inked a $142 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, a country that starved and bombed civilians in Yemen for the better part of a decade, and whose crown prince the U.S. intelligence community concluded ordered the murder and dismemberment of a journalist living in Virginia. We also buy hundreds of billions of dollars in goods from a country running concentration camps for its Uyghur Muslim population. If the objection were genuinely about the moral weight of a dollar, the money trail leads everywhere around the world.

Which suggests that Israel is doing something other causes are not. It gives a fractured movement a shared enemy, a shared language, and a shared ritual. You don’t need Democrats, socialists, campus activists, and online radicals to agree on housing, crime, immigration, policing, gender, speech, or how to win over voters who don’t already agree with them. You only need them to agree on what they oppose. And a small, distant, unambiguously Jewish country makes a remarkably efficient one — small enough to feel righteous opposition, foreign enough to cost nothing domestically, symbolic enough to stand in for every larger fight the party can’t actually win.

This isn’t theoretical. It happened last week. After Mamdani and a wave of democratic socialist candidates uprooted establishment incumbents in New York’s primaries, Kamala Harris, the presumptive 2028 frontrunner, still rebuilding after 2024, picked up the phone and called him. Not about housing. Not about immigration. She’s also been reaching out to Abbas Alawieh, the co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement that organized specifically against Biden’s Israel policy. This is the same instinct playing out at the top of the party as at the bottom: the fastest way back into good standing with the base isn’t a jobs plan. It’s a phone call about Palestine.

That’s the distraction. Not that people care about Palestinians. They should. The problem is that caring about Palestinians has become the load-bearing wall of a coalition that can’t agree on much else. As an American, this frustrates me more than the performative. I not only feel abandoned by my party, I feel disrespected, as if moral performance is supposed to substitute for seriousness.

This past weekend, the country turned 250 years old. I spent part of it thinking about how much I love America, genuinely, uncomplicatedly love it, and how much it has given my family. My grandparents arrived from Hungary with nothing, survivors of the Holocaust, carrying a language and a grief and not much else. My grandfather built a life here anyway. We are, generations later, the proof of what this country can do for people who have nowhere else to go. I don’t take that lightly, and I don’t write any of what follows lightly either.

Because here’s the thing about loving a country: it isn’t the same as loving its government. Trump is not America. Biden was not America, either. You can hold both — deep faith in the country, real frustration with the administration currently running it — without contradiction. If you have a problem with Trump, you have a problem with Trump. You don’t have a problem with America as an idea. The country and the government occupying it this decade are not the same thing, and collapsing them is a category error.

What makes that distinction possible at all is democracy itself. A democracy is never finished. It’s a permanent work in progress, a rolling referendum on who we are right now, and “right now” keeps changing, because the people casting the votes keep changing. That’s the whole design. Compare that to a dictatorship: Russia won’t change unless Putin decides Russia changes, and the odds of that happening while he’s alive are close to zero. A dictatorship is a fixed point. A democracy is a moving one.

Which is the whole case for Israel. Israel is a democracy. Yes, a messy, argumentative, and currently governed by a coalition many Israelis themselves can’t stand, but that means it has the same basic capacity for change that we do. That does not erase the moral and political crisis of the occupation, or the reality that millions of Palestinians live under Israeli power without Israeli citizenship. It does not make Netanyahu defensible. It does not make every Israeli policy wise, humane, or just. But it does mean Israel contains mechanisms for change in a way a dictatorship does not.

Whether Netanyahu loses the next election is a separate question entirely, and one Israelis will decide, not us. But the people insisting that Israel itself is the problem, rather than the government currently running it, are denying a democracy its most basic feature: the built-in potential to become something else. That’s not a minor rhetorical slip. It’s a refusal to extend to Israel the same government-versus-country distinction that progressives understand perfectly well when talking about almost any other democracy on earth.

What if American progressives treated Israeli progressives as allies instead of embarrassments? What if the goal were not to flatten Israel into Netanyahu, but to strengthen the people inside Israel trying to defeat him, end the occupation, preserve democracy, and build something more decent? What if, instead of flattening this into black and white, the way Mamdani and his allies seem determined to do, someone tried color? What if Harris, rather than placing calls to American democratic socialists, had called Israeli progressives instead, like the opposition figures, the peace movements, the people inside Israel actually working to vote Netanyahu out, and committed her party to helping move the country in that direction?

That path gets far less attention than the simpler one. I’ve sat with why for a while now. The answer is a little more insidious than we’d like to admit.

During the peak of the BLM movement, I learned a great deal about historian Ibram X. Kendi by proxy. My wife, a progressive and an advocate in her own right, was reading his work and relaying it to me in real time. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi argues that “not racist” is a functional impossibility. In any given moment, our actions, inactions, or ideas are either actively reinforcing racial inequity or actively dismantling it. You’re either racist or you’re antiracist. He also argues that racism isn’t just an issue. It’s systemic.

I want to borrow a concept from Kendi, one that would probably irritate him to see repurposed this way. Just as he proposed systemic racism, I want to introduce systemic antisemitism.

By systemic antisemitism, I don’t mean every critic of Israel hates Jews. I mean a cultural reflex, older than any one person and larger than any one protest, that treats Jewish power as uniquely suspect, Jewish self-defense as uniquely grotesque, and Jewish sovereignty as uniquely conditional (my wife asked me to refer to it as “unconscious bias” but let’s go with the Kendi’s phraseology).

I know that’s going to land badly with some readers, given how “successful” Jewish people are perceived to be. So let me be precise about what I’m not saying. I’m not comparing Black and Jewish history — this isn’t the suffering Olympics, and I have no interest in entering it. What I’m saying is that antisemitism has been present in some form since Judaism began, whether it’s our own exodus story, Rome, the blood libels, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust. Those are the events that make the history books. But underneath the headline events, there’s been a near-constant, low-grade resentment present wherever Jews have lived, one that rarely rises to the level of a Wikipedia entry. Last week, a white Chevy Tacoma drove past my son and me and someone shouted “f*** you, Jew” out the window. That won’t make anyone’s antisemitism timeline. It happens all the time anyway.

The obvious rebuttal is: aren’t Jewish people extremely successful, though? Sure. And it’s worth asking why. Many of the major law firms, accounting firms, and ad agencies that built the American professional class were founded by Jews for a specific reason: no one else would hire them. Our success wasn’t handed to us. It was self-determined, born out of exclusion, not despite it. We built our own doors because we were locked out of everyone else’s.

I bring all of this up because the standard formulation — “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — isn’t precise enough to survive contact with people like Mamdani or pundits like Tucker Carlson, both of whom will tell you, sincerely, that they hold no hatred for Jews. What I’m arguing is that an obsession with Israel specifically, a disproportionate, relentless, oddly personal obsession, can be rooted in systemic antisemitism whether or not any individual carrying it feels a flicker of personal animus.

Take an influencer like Hasan Piker. Piker isn’t Arab; he’s Turkish, a background that offers a masterclass in how this rhetorical engine operates. Over the last two decades, Turkey’s political culture has systematically blurred the line between criticizing Israeli policy and inciting hostility toward Jews deploying “genocide” as rhetorical artillery and normalizing open conspiracy theories until the country’s Jewish community was forced behind armored security. I’m not arguing Piker inherited an ancient grudge. I’m arguing he was formed inside a modern media ecosystem that spent twenty years teaching people to treat “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish” as the exact same sentence, and he is now broadcasting that imported framework to millions of Americans who have no idea where it came from.

Even the religious texts weaponized in this conflict are far more complex than modern activists pretend. Fourteen centuries of Islamic scripture and scholarship regarding Jews are deeply layered, shifting between protection and adversarial conflict based on specific historical contexts rather than a single, sweeping verdict on a people. I raise this not to parse theology, but to make an honest point: even a 1,400-year-old relationship was never the flat, settled thing it gets reduced to today. It was contested then, and it’s contested now. But nuance doesn’t build a digital coalition.

My wife teaches public school, and she says her students often think Israel is roughly the size of Russia or China. It’s the size of New Jersey. A country that small does not organically earn the volume of attention it receives; something is manufacturing the disproportion. I think that something is systemic antisemitism. Part of it, I suspect, is narrative whiplash. We’ve spent a century absorbing the image of the Jew as intellectual, neurotic, physically unthreatening, like the Woody Allen, or the Larry David. A small, embattled, but militarily capable Jewish state that can actually defend itself doesn’t fit that inherited picture. It’s not supposed to be able to hit back. When it does, it reads as a violation of the story people were raised on, not just a policy disagreement.

It was hard to hear something like this from Kendi too, and he still sold more than three million copies. But the sooner we can say plainly that there’s a deep, structural resentment toward Jewish autonomy specifically — not just toward Jewish people, but toward the idea of Jews holding power and using it — the sooner we can stop relitigating this and get back to talking about how to actually fix this country.

Go back to the beginning. Imagine the activist after the victory. Palestine is free. The influx of single-minded reels worked. The accounts can be unfollowed. The moral performance is complete. But the machinery that made Israel the center of everything remains intact. The need for a villain remains. The hunger for a politics that feels righteous without requiring the compromises of governing remains.

And nothing else has changed. Rent is still too high. The job market is still cold. AI is still coming for work nobody’s prepared to lose. The parties still can’t agree on anything, because agreement was never actually the goal.

So let me say plainly, for those in the back, what this entire piece has been building toward: the Democratic left’s fixation on Israel isn’t a principled stand. It’s a distraction, one dressed up as moral clarity, sold as solidarity, and repeated so often it now functions as a loyalty test. It doesn’t feed anyone, house anyone, or employ anyone in this country. What it does is manufacture unity out of opposition to a small, distant Jewish state, because manufacturing unity around housing policy or immigration or the actual, unglamorous work of governing turned out to be harder. And it works precisely because it’s not being recognized for what it is: not only passion for Palestinians, but something older and more structural: systemic antisemitism, wearing the costume of a foreign policy position, doing the work of a rallying cry.

That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. So I’ll say it twice. In American politics, this is no longer only about Palestine. In some ways, it has become a distraction from Palestine — from the actual lives of Palestinians and Israelis — and from the work of building the country right in front of us.

We just turned two hundred and fifty. I’d like the next chapter to be about realizing what’s actually possible here. Not performing solidarity with a conflict six thousand miles away while the potential sitting right in front of us goes unrealized. Israel’s government can change. Ours can too. But only if we stop mistaking opposition for politics, symbolism for courage, and the distraction for the work.

Follow me at @byaryedworken for more BBS II news and updates.

Apparently, the Supergirl movie isn’t good. No, I don’t mean the one that came out this past weekend starring Milly Alcock. I mean the one from 1984, with Peter O’Toole, Faye Dunaway, Mia Farrow, and a nineteen-year-old Helen Slater. I say “apparently” because I don’t remember a frame of it. All I remember is the crush — Slater’s flaxen hair, her blushing rosebud cheeks, and a peak shiksa beauty anchoring a film that is, by every honest account, terrible.

Yet, that terrible film has somehow outlived its own modern counterpart. Just last week, the popular YouTube channel JoBlo posted a 22-minute deep dive on it, proving that even disaster can breed longevity. Hold that 1984 relic up against this weekend’s new release starring Milly Alcock, and you’ll find the contemporary version clears the only bar it sets for itself: it’s not awful. Even so, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman branded it “super-horrendous.” If only. The real tragedy of the 2026 Supergirl is that it commits the one sin a comic-book movie cannot survive—it’s meh. Super-horrendous would at least be memorable. Instead, watching it with my daughters felt like the poking stick meme. C’mon. Do something.

But Supergirl isn’t the systemic failure everyone writing superhero obituaries claims it is; it’s just the latest misstep in a nearly decade-long identity crisis for the genre. We’ve been stuck in this limbo for years. Remember 2023? The Marvels was genuinely disastrous enough that Brie Larson didn’t even get an evite to the forthcoming Doomsday. Around it, the rest of the monolith crumbled in distinct ways: Shang-Chi evaporated under the weight of its own endless Awkwafina quips; Wakanda Forever meandered through grief in search of a plot; and Quantumania spent two hours setting up a villain who ended up fired. Thor: Love and Thunder wasn’t just bad, it was actively irritating (thanks to a screaming goat), while Wonder Woman 1984 felt like an outright affront to human intelligence.

Somewhere after Endgame, the superhero movie transformed into an annual obligation, and as my kids will tell you after taking out the recycling, obligations are rarely fun.

So why did Endgame work when its successors don’t?

The easy answer is the sheer scale of the runway. More than twenty films and a decade spent memorizing Infinity Stones, all cashing in at once. And sure, that’s part of it. But it’s also a cheat, an advantage no normal movie gets. If the only takeaway for Hollywood is “build a ten-year runway first,” then there’s no lesson at all. A standard film has to work in two hours. Longevity can’t be the secret.

The real secret is that Endgame costs something. It spends its characters and refuses to give them back. Natasha Romanoff goes over the cliff on Vormir and stays there (sorry. Spoiler alert). Tony Stark snaps his fingers and dies on the dirt in a way no post-credits stinger can walk back. Steve Rogers is allowed to grow old. Even the Snap stays half-snapped; the narrative forces the audience to sit in five years of collective grief.

Whatever Scorsese says the genre is or isn’t, watching Endgame in a crowded theater was one of the greatest nights I’ve ever had in a cinema. It earned those goosebumps because it had the nerve to believe its choices were permanent.

Which is exactly what the genre stopped being able to do. Somewhere after Endgame, the industry built a machine to make sure nothing would ever cost anything again. They called it the multiverse. Every death came with a variant. Every sacrifice had a do-over one timeline over. Every loss became a rental. And a universe where nothing stays buried is a universe where nothing was ever really at stake. And we discovered with each consecutive release that the problem with infinite worlds is that eventually nothing in any of them matters.

Before I tell you how we can save the superhero movie, and by “we,” I mean two guys in Hollywood named Kevin and James, let’s first rule out everything it isn’t dying of.

For one, it’s not frequency. In fact, if you look at 2026’s release schedule, the multiplex is downright cape-deficient. Marvel has only two movies in theaters this year—Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday—and DC has just two: Supergirl, the first superhero movie in eleven months, and the forthcoming horror-tinged Clayface. On the small screen, the story is the same. We had Daredevil on Disney+ and Lanterns forthcoming on HBO Max. Spider-Noir dropped on Prime, and VisionQuest doesn’t arrive until October. This is a sustainable cadence.

And it’s not fatigue either, because fatigue is the wrong word for what’s happening. It implies there’s a single, monolithic thing left to be tired of. There isn’t. The superhero isn’t a genre; it’s a costume that genres put on. Noir wears it when Batman plays detective in a cowl. Science fiction wears it when Guardians morphs into a space opera with a talking raccoon. Horror is about to try it on with Clayface, and Brand New Day is, by Tom Holland’s own description, a mystery. You can’t get tired of a costume. You can only get tired of a bad script underneath it.

The appetite isn’t theoretical. Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn’t open until July 31st, and it has already posted more than $37 million in first-day advance sales, the biggest first-day presales in five years, the fourth-largest in the history of ticketing, and it did it without IMAX, because those screens are still booked for Nolan’s Odyssey two weeks earlier. A month out, one hand webbed behind its back, and it’s outselling everything.

So let’s put the fatigue theory in the ground for good. Nobody is tired. People are lining up in June to see a movie in late July, sight unseen, on the strength of a feeling these films used to reliably deliver. That’s not exhaustion. That’s faith, and faith is the most valuable thing an audience can give you, because it’s the thing they extend before you’ve earned it. The crisis was never that people stopped showing up. It’s that they keep showing up, arms open, and then get slapped across the face by a studio’s giant hand like we’re living in a Jackass stunt.

My favorite film podcaster, Sean Fennessey, asked this week in his Projections newsletter whether the superhero era meant anything at all. His diagnosis is mostly right: the flywheel is sputtering, the footprint is thinning, and for all the billions minted, the genre produced surprisingly few great filmmakers. But the “fatigue” argument points the arrow the wrong way. We didn’t outgrow superheroes because the world got too sophisticated for them. We outgrew them because the movies made heroism cheap.

Here’s the shift, and it happened so gradually nobody clocked it. In a culture obsessed with leverage, pure altruism started to look like a design flaw. We got so cynical that a character who does the right thing simply because it’s right began to read as naive, or worse, as fake. So the superhero movie adapted. It stopped being about the tax of responsibility and became a fantasy about the triumph of power. About winning. But the archetype was never an asset manager calculating a moral yield. It was the person who takes on the crushing weight of a crisis knowing it will cost them everything and return them nothing — no key to the city, no monument, no scoreboard. That’s not a relic of a simpler time. In a world where everyone is quietly calculating what they’re owed, a figure who accepts total responsibility and asks for nothing back isn’t irrelevant. It’s practically alien.

We know this because the audience tells us every time they buy a ticket. Look at Spider-Man: No Way Home. It played with the multiverse—the ultimate consequence-killing machine—but it worked because it used that machine to extract a devastating tax. Peter Parker didn’t just save the world; he paid for it by letting everyone he loved forget he ever existed. He ended the movie alone in a bare apartment, stripped of tech, starting from scratch. It felt like a comic book, but the sacrifice felt real. The same impulse is why James Gunn’s Superman completely re-centered the culture. The film operated on a single, aggressive thesis: that in a cynical world, basic human kindness is the ultimate form of punk rock. To some, the earnestness felt borderline cringe (like me!) but it charmed millions because it gave the audience exactly what they were starving for: a hero whose primary power wasn’t a corporate brand expansion, but an unconditional, self-sacrificial sense of responsibility.

Contrast that with Quantumania—and I loathe picking on anything Paul Rudd-related—where characters survive a reality-warping tyrant only to end up right back where they started, cracking jokes over ice cream cake by the end credits. When the danger is a rental, the triumph is hollow. Audiences don’t want a bloodbath, but they instinctively know when a victory has been earned and when it was mandated by people who use words like “corporate synergy” and “product tie-in.” And I’m not suggesting the fanbase needs a corpse. It just needs a cost.

Here we are. We’ve made it. It’s the third arc in our story, the one that normally involves migraine-inducing CGI fisticuffs. But I promise not to subject you to what has become the superhero narrative’s favorite trick: beating one another, along with the audience, into submission.

But before I get to what might actually save this thing, an admission. Never in a million years could I have imagined that the specific stories that comforted me as a lonely kid would become multi-billion-dollar global franchises. Which is why their current strike rate — call it one in four on a good year — hurts the way it does. I take their failures personally.

And as a kid, thinking back on that time, I didn’t love superheroes because they won. I loved them because they made goodness look less humiliating. They suggested that decency wasn’t weakness, that being soft-hearted in a hard world might secretly be a form of strength. That was the fantasy. Not flying. Not punching through walls. The fantasy was that caring could still matter.

And that’s what I’ve finally made peace with: it isn’t that the people making these movies don’t care. It’s that caring was never the variable. You can hand the cape to a director or an actor who would profess adulation for the source material (even though we know most of them are…what’s it called again…acting), and the output will still come out thinner than a comic book. Why? Because the machine itself was engineered to ensure nothing ever costs a thing. The problem isn’t a lack of passion; it’s a total absence of gravity. Nobody stays dead. No loss is permanent. Every tragedy is just a cliffhanger waiting for a course correction. If Kev and Jimmy want to save this thing, the blueprint isn’t complicated: smash the machine, bring back the stakes, and let these stories hurt again.

To understand how to do that, you have to look at what a story actually is. A story is not a collection of intellectual property assets navigating a sequence of plot points; a story is a simulation of human cost. When the modern superhero machine began prioritizing the preservation of its inventory over the finality of its narratives, it didn’t just make the movies worse, it broke the psychological contract between the screen and the audience. And what happens is that they all become predictable.

If they want to rebuild that contract, they have to reintroduce three fundamental laws of narrative gravity.

I. The Wound as an Engine

First, they must understand that the wound has to do work.

For the last decade, the corporate superhero apparatus has treated a character’s trauma like a piece of mandatory flair pinned to a uniform like a TGI Friday’s vest. A parent dies in a flashback, a home planet is destroyed in an opening crawl, and a narrative-depth box gets checked so we can get to the fun part. The trauma is decoration, or a colorful bit of texture to make the action figures look three-dimensional.

But real trauma is never decoration. It’s an engine. Trauma can’t be flair. It has to change the way the hero moves through the world, dictating how they breathe, how they fail, how they love, and the specific, broken way they see the world. Look at Logan. The whole film is a wound that does work, the adamantium that made him is now actively poisoning him, a century of loss calcified into a man who can barely stand to be touched. He doesn’t put the claws away because he’s traumatized; he can’t even take them out without it costing him his life. When a movie treats a psychological wound as something cured by a third-act triumph or forgotten during a CGI laser battle, it insults the audience’s real understanding of pain. If you’re going to give a hero a scar, you need the courage to let them limp. The wound can’t just be the reason they put the costume on. It has to be the reason they struggle to take it off.

II. Radical, Unrewarded Goodness

Second, the hero must save people who will never thank them.

We have to completely kill the return on investment for empathy. The fatal assumption of the modern blockbuster is that goodness requires a payout. But the moment a sacrifice receives its proper compensation, it ceases to be a sacrifice. It becomes a transaction.

The archetype was never a savvy asset manager calculating a moral yield. Think of Diana Prince in the trenches of World War I told, flatly, that no one can cross No Man’s Land, that this particular patch of suffering is not her fight, and that the people on the other side are strangers she was not sent to save. And she climbs out anyway, into the gunfire, for nothing she is owed and no one who will thank her. Who did not get chills during that scene? Or take Christopher Reeve’s Superman, spending an immortal life catching falling helicopters and stray cats for a city that takes him completely for granted, a god who chooses, daily, the unglamorous work of caring about people who will never once return the favor.

When we look back at those moments, the thrills don’t come from the display of power. They come from the display of a deficit. True goodness is only profound when it represents a total economic loss for the soul. In a culture that has become completely transactional, where every public stance is weighed for its cultural equity, every relationship is audited for its leverage, and every act of empathy expects a return on investment, a figure who shoulders total responsibility for a broken world with zero expectation of a scoreboard isn’t a relic of a simpler past. It is an act of war against our modern cynicism. It is the rarest, most counter-cultural image we have left. And that challenge to our reality, my friends, is why we go to the movies.

III. The Tax of Permanence

Finally, and most crucially, they must let it cost something that doesn’t come back.

The human mind rejects stakes without the terrifying reality of permanence. You cannot feel genuine suspense in a universe equipped with a multiversal safety net. When every death comes with an implicit corporate asterisk, when every tragedy is just a cliffhanger awaiting a contractual renegotiation, the triumph becomes as empty as the loss. The audience can smell the lack of risk from the back row. There’s something inherently unfun about knowing how things will end, neat and pat.

Consider what made the end of The Dark Knight land like a hammer. Harvey Dent doesn’t get a do-over. Rachel doesn’t come back. Batman takes the blame for crimes he didn’t commit and rides off as a villain in his own city, and the film has the nerve to simply let that be the cost with no post-credits wink promising it’ll all be sorted out next summer. Nolan understood that a hero is defined entirely by what he’s willing to lose and never recover. Audiences don’t go to the theater demanding a bloodbath; they go demanding a contract. They want to know that when a character steps onto the field, they’re playing for keeps. No loopholes. No variants. No get-out-of-death-free cards shuffled into the deck by a committee worried about Q4 toy sales. For a victory to mean anything, the loss has to be absolute. Nothing can be refunded.

If DC and Marvel can manage that…if they can stop managing inventory and start managing gravity…then the superhero movie won’t just survive the box office. It will matter again to the people who need it. The audience is already there, arms open, holding their breath. They never outgrew the costume. They’re just waiting for someone to give them a reason to believe in the body inside it.

Yes, I remember that I promised you eleven films, eleven diagnoses, and a case for why Steven Spielberg might be the cure for what ails modern culture. And in truth, I meant to deliver on that. But then I saw Disclosure Day.

I saw it on opening night. I brought my son Steven and five friends from a film-centric WhatsApp group I started, all dads, all Spielberg devotees, the kind of men who would clear their schedules on a Thursday night for this man without hesitation. Seven of us walked into that theater with the collective goodwill of a congregation arriving for High Holidays. We wanted to believe.

I knew something was wrong within the first fifteen minutes. Nepo baby Eve Hewson, and the former Prince Charles Josh O’Connor, the co-lead and his girlfriend, had the on-screen chemistry of strangers waiting for the same elevator. And when the film asked me to believe that these two could outrun an army of hired mercenaries within the opening act and then avoid them for the remainder of this movie, I felt something I’ve never felt in a Spielberg film: doubt. Not suspense. Not tension. Doubt. The kind where you stop watching the movie and start watching yourself watching the movie, wondering when it’s going to click.

It never clicked.

I want to be careful here because the man is an artist and his craft is unparalleled and also one day he may read this (you never know). And honestly…? Technically, everything in Disclosure Day works. The camera moves the way only his camera moves. The compositions are immaculate. The set pieces are engineered with a precision that most directors will never achieve on their best day. But technical mastery without emotional connection is like cooking a tasteless meal with the finest organic produce. Every ingredient is there. You can see the quality and there’s like at least one “-reduction” in there. You just can’t taste it. Emily Blunt, who, for me, is the actress equivalent of cilantro, delivers a performance that mistakes volume for depth, confusing emoting with hysterics in a way that made me wonder whether Spielberg, for the first time in his career, simply forgot to rein someone in. You could call her performance a blunt instrument.

What’s even harder for me to process is that what was promised to be the next great Spielberg alien movie, the successor to Close Encounters and ET, was his most literal, most overt, most surface-level work. Where Close Encounters used aliens as a vehicle for obsession, and ET used them as a vehicle for loneliness, Disclosure Day is just... about aliens. The metaphor that always elevated his science fiction into something personal and profound wasn’t there. Neither was the magic. Neither was the emotion. The comedic moments landed where the tension should have been. The tension landed where the comedy should have been. Even the train sequence, which critics are calling the film’s highlight, never made me believe anyone was in real danger.

It felt, and I say this with equal parts disbelief and lament, like a boomer fever dream.

I looked over at Steven–the son, not the director–during the third act. I shrugged, almost apologetically. After the credits rolled, I turned to my group and if a groan could be expressed facially, they all had that look on their faces. Every single one of them felt the same way. My son included. Which bummed me out more than my own disappointment, because I had wanted to be the hyper-critical one. I wanted them to argue me out of it, to tell me I was being too demanding. Instead, they agreed with me. And agreeing somehow made it worse (two weeks later and we’re still negotiating our feelings about the film in our group chat; ”The movie wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either,” Yehuda wrote today).

It also forced me to reconsider the entire premise of what I wrote to you all a week or so back.

To recap: I spent part one building a passionate case for why Gen Z needs Steven Spielberg, as if his filmography were a vegetable they were refusing to eat. But who appointed me the nutritionist? Since when is the appropriate response to someone not loving the thing you love to write a bajillion words explaining why they’re deficient?

Also, a friend told me after reading part one that he was tired of essays diagnosing Gen Z as broken. “Every generation thinks the next one has bad taste,” he more or less said.

I wanted to defend my position with the conviction of a man who thinks (knows?) his taste is definitive. But sitting in the theater watching Disclosure Day unfold into something I didn’t recognize, something I couldn’t defend, I started to wonder whether my friend had a point. Maybe the issue was never that Gen Z can’t appreciate Spielberg. Maybe the issue is that I couldn’t accept that they don’t have to. Mea culpa, or for the youth segment, my bad, bestie.

This is a hard thing to admit when your identity is partially constructed around a cultural allegiance. I am the Spielberg guy. I am the guy who takes his son to opening night and watches him watching the screen. I am the guy who even cried at War Horse and admitted it and doesn’t regret either one of those things. When someone doesn’t share that devotion, some lizard part of my brain registers it as a personal rejection as if they’re not just dismissing a filmmaker but dismissing a piece of me.

But that’s my problem. Not theirs.

My kids don’t love the Beatles the way my parents did. I survived. My parents didn’t love Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen the way I did. They survived. My son thinks Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest films ever made, and he arrived at that opinion without me hovering over him with a PowerPoint presentation about why he should feel that way. He found it on his own. He stormed the beach when he was ready.

That’s the grand irony of the cultural evangelical. We spend all this energy constructing elaborate rhetorical fortresses to defend the things we love, forgetting that the love itself was entirely accidental. You don’t fall in love with a record or a filmmaker because you were badgered into submission by a guy with thickly framed glasses. You do it because you were lonely, or bored, or sixteen, or desperate, and the art happened to be the only thing in the room speaking the correct language.

I think about my dad and The French Connection. He talked about that car chase like it was the most exciting thing ever committed to film. When I finally watched it after he passed, I thought it was mundane—something you’d see on a Tuesday night cop show. But then I did something that changed how I watch everything: I stopped comparing it to what came after and started experiencing it on its own terms. I let myself see it the way he saw it, as something that had never been done before. And suddenly, the car chase wasn’t mundane. It was miraculous.

He never argued me into that. He just loved it intensely and told me about it, and eventually, I got curious enough to find out why. That’s all any of us can do. Love the thing. Let people watch you love it. Trust that curiosity will do the rest. Also, print this out and remind me of it the next time I find myself drafting a five-part newsletter series explaining why anyone who didn’t like The Fabelmans has an unmedicated personality disorder.

That night, after seeing Disclosure Day, I stood in my bedroom looking at my Spielberg poster the way you look at a photograph of someone after a difficult conversation. Not with less love, but with more clarity. And I started thinking about what Spielberg actually represents in my life beyond the films themselves.

He’s a constant. He’s been making work since before I was born and he hasn’t stopped. Every few years, a new film arrives like a letter from that long-distance relative, and I open it and I’m a different person than I was when the last one came, and the film meets me wherever I am. I was an emotional kid when ET found me. I was a young man starting to fully comprehend what my grandparents went through during the Holocaust when Schindler’s List found me. Nearing midlife, I was thinking about my own origin story when The Fabelmans found me. The films didn’t change. I did. And Spielberg was the constant against which I could measure the change.

Everyone has one of these. Maybe yours is Springsteen or U2 or Neil Finn. Maybe it’s Scorsese or Tarantino or Miyazaki or a band you’ve followed since their first album. The specific artist doesn’t matter. What matters is the constancy, someone who keeps building rooms for you to walk into at different stages of your life. They become the fixed point in your personal universe. The thing that stays while everything else moves.

And so, here’s what worries me, and it isn’t about Spielberg. It’s about whether the conditions that create cultural constants still exist. Constancy requires something the current ecosystem doesn’t just ignore, but actively criminalizes: staying power. For an artist to become a milestone, they have to be allowed to fail publicly without being permanently deleted from the cultural lexicon. They need the structural space to put out a mediocre album, a baffling third novel, or a soulless summer blockbuster, and still be trusted enough to get another turn at bat.

But we have built an infrastructure that treats human creativity like a disposable software update. We don’t cultivate relationships with artists anymore; we participate in 48-hour algorithmic events. A movie drops on a streaming platform on a Friday, it completely dominates the online discourse over the weekend, and by Tuesday morning it has been thoroughly digested and buried under an avalanche of new content, never to be referenced again (in fact, I’m posting this ten days after Disclosure Day came out and I worry if anyone will care anymore). You cannot build a lifelong relationship with a creative voice when the culture requires you to swipe left on them by next week. The modern attention economy is entirely hostile to compounding interest. It trades the slow, heavy gravity of a decades-long career for the instant, fleeting high of a viral micro-moment. Print that on a bumper sticker.

And maybe that, more than any generational divide in taste, is what I was actually mourning in part one. I wasn’t actually angry that Gen Z didn’t love my filmmaker. I was mourning the fact that they might never get to experience what having a constant feels like. The artist who marks your decades. The work that timestamps your life. And that breaks my heart a little bit. Because a life lived entirely in the ephemeral is a lonely way to experience the world.

To never have an artist mark your decades means to never have that mirror showing you how much you’ve grown, or split, or healed. It means navigating the terrifying velocity of getting older without a single creative anchor holding you to the earth.

They aren’t being denied great art—there’s more brilliant, niche, hyperspecific art available to them than at any point in human history. What they are being denied is the specific, quiet comfort of watching a single human creator grow old alongside them. They are being given a million brilliant fragments, but no anchors.

That’s not Gen Z’s fault. That’s the architecture we built for them.

The poster is still on my wall. It looks different to me now than it did two weeks ago. Not diminished. Just more honest. The man in the frame isn’t a god. He’s a constant. And constants aren’t defined by perfection. They’re defined by presence. In the meantime, all I can do is keep loving his work out loud and trust that somewhere, someone younger will overhear me and get curious enough to dive in. That's how it started for me. That’s how it starts for everyone.

Follow me for more at @byaryedworken.

Of all the men in my life, three of the most important ones are named Steven. The first one is my father Rabbi Steven Dworken who passed away twenty-three years ago but whose memory remains a constant presence. The second is my eldest son Steven, named after my father, who should live and be well for many years to come. The third relationship is the one I have with famed director Steven Spielberg. Now, I realize that unlike the relationships I had with my father and the one I now have with my son, the bond I share with Spielberg is, well, not mutual. It is entirely one-sided, or to make it sound less pathetic than it is, parasocial.

I also wouldn’t necessarily say that their respective impacts on me are split like an equally divided pie chart. But I will admit that every morning after I wake up, I am greeted by a framed, commissioned portrait of Spielberg surrounded by a montage of characters and Easter eggs from throughout his half century filmography. Is it weird? Slightly. Only because I’m not a character on a Kevin Williamson teen drama (real ones know).

But like Dawson Leery, I am an unabashed fanboy. Ever since I first watched ET as a kid, Spielberg has been a spiritual mentor, a creative north star and proof that you can be uncompromising and successful, that you can make things that captivate millions without sacrificing sincerity. Every creative endeavor I’ve taken on, I’ve measured against whatever it is he does: that ability to fill a room with wonder and mean every frame of it. And while this precedent, in ideal, is a great measuring stick, it is also exceptionally daunting and often leads to comparative disappointment (even as I write this week’s Substack, three paragraphs in, I have this nudging feeling that it’s more rambling than Amblin).

Looking back, I don’t remember a time when Spielberg wasn’t in the cultural background of my life. He’s been there at practically every stage, like a long distance relative who sends a two hour movie instead of a card and a check. And since I’ve been old enough to take myself to the theater, I’ve seen every one of his films in a dark room surrounded by strangers (conditions he has explicitly endorsed). Almost always on opening night.

Some of my most vivid theater experiences involve his filmography. Like the time I went to see Saving Private Ryan with my dad, who clutched my hand during the Normandy sequence because he’d never experienced anything that visceral in a movie theater. My son Steven now considers it one of his favorite films. Three generations of Dworkens, connected by “earn this.”

I saw AI by myself, and the ending — that bittersweet, devastating, profoundly ambient ending — literally left me breathless. Not figuratively. Literally. As the credits rolled, I had to get up and walk outside to find air. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the devastatingly soulful epilogue. Maybe it was the way Spielberg was able to distill humanity entirely down to our capacity to love. Whatever it was, this, I remember thinking at the time, is what art is supposed to do for us (incidentally, I loved that prescient film before loving it was acceptable. So, yes, I was AI-hive before AI-hive was a thing.)

I know the counter-arguments, of course. I know that parts of his filmography are divisive, and that critics love to accuse him of pulling too hard on the emotional levers. I see the flaws. But there is something about his approach to storytelling that disarms me so completely. I lose all my standard intellectual armor, reacting with the same fierce, unobjective devotion you feel when your child hands you a drawing they’ve just made. You don’t see that they colored outside the lines; you just see the heart behind it.

Which is my way of confessing that, yes, I even got teary at the end of 2011’s War Horse.

I’m well aware it isn’t his strongest work; it’s sweeping and sentimental in ways that invite cynicism (Salon called it “irredeemable cheese”). But I didn’t see a movie about a horse in World War I. I projected my relationship with my own dog, who was a two year old pup at the time, onto that screen so totally, that the film ceased to be a piece of cinema and became a mirror. Maybe I graded it on a curve because of that, but to this day, I can’t think of a movie that better understands or depicts the bond between a man and an animal. Spielberg doesn’t ask you to look at that love from a distance; he demands that you feel the full, heavy weight of it.

And now the tradition has passed forward. I take my Steven to Spielberg films on opening night the way my father took me. First Ready Player One. Then West Side Story. Then The Fabelmans. Each time, I watch him watching the screen, looking for the moment it hits him — that Spielberg thing, that feeling of being held by a story so completely that the rest of the world disappears for two hours. I don’t know if he feels it yet the way I do. But the door is open. I also took all three kids to see ET in IMAX for its 40th Anniversary which was a moment I will never forget only because it felt the same way it did when I introduced my wife to my parents. God, I hope they like it, I thought (they did).

In anticipation of his newest film Disclosure Day premiering this week, I’m seeing a lot of discussion online around whether Spielberg still has “it.” Not his storytelling chops–no one doubts that. But I can’t help but notice a palpable generational divide, and so, I find myself wondering something I’ve never wondered before: will this be a film for just us — the Gen X and elder millennial devotees who’ve been showing up for fifty years — or will a younger audience find their way in? After all Spielberg isn’t “edgy” like, say, Scorsese who graces the cover of Charli XCX’s forthcoming record, nor does he get mentioned by Gen Z in the way Nolan, Tarantino and PTA do. Last year, the New York Post even ran a story about how few Gen Z’ers have seen Jaws (slow news day, I guess). All of this causes me to wonder whether the man who filmed the most realistic depiction of D-Day will experience one of his own this week at the box office.

It’s easy, and perhaps a bit lazy, to dismiss this generational divide as a simple case of shifting trends. And sure, I could save us both a lot of time here by summarily attributing this discrepancy as another case of “Ok, boomer” but I want to dig deeper. The distance between Spielberg and Gen Z isn’t just a matter of taste; it’s a fundamental variance in how we process the world.

The first barrier is the dialect of emotion itself. It’s a mistake to assume a younger audience simply refuses to show up to the theater; they do, driving massive, culture-shifting box office numbers for properties like Minecraft, Backrooms, or Obsession. But those films speak a very specific, internet-native language. They are built on digital folklore, claustrophobic surrealism, and meme culture, stories born in the same digital sandboxes where this audience spent their childhoods.

Spielberg’s sincerity, by contrast, is stubbornly analog and internally generated. It is gut-first, earnest, and entirely unconcerned with online optics. Because it doesn’t perform itself with the wink-and-nod meta-awareness a younger audience uses to navigate the internet, they don’t always recognize it as genuine. To an audience that rallies around a film by turning it into a collective online bit, unfiltered, sincere awe can feel like a trick, or worse, a cliché. Or as I said before, ok boomer. Spielberg knowingly doesn’t trade in detachment, sleek cynicism, or puzzle-box architecture. He trades in awe. And in a cultural landscape that often feels suffocated by irony, awe can look an awful lot like naiveté to a generation raised on a diet of meta-commentary.

I wanted to test this theory, so I posted a question to a film group I belong to on Facebook, asking younger members about their relationship to Spielberg. The responses confirmed what I suspected. Some called him “underrated” among their peers, which is a staggering word to apply to the most commercially successful filmmaker in history, but it tells you everything about his visibility with that generation. Others were more pointed: their friends found him “sentimental and uncool.” There it is. Sentimental and uncool. The man who directed Schindler’s List, Munich, and the Normandy sequence — sentimental. The man whose films have grossed more than the GDP of some countries — uncool. These aren’t criticisms of his craft. They’re descriptions of a brand problem. And brand problems, unlike talent problems, are fixable.

Then there is the problem of the baseline. For those of us who remember the theater doors opening in 1993, Jurassic Park wasn’t just a movie; it was a rupture in reality. Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant taking off his glasses in awe and disbelief at the herd of brontosauruses was all of us. But Gen Z has never known a world where the impossible wasn’t readily available in forty-four frames per second on a device that fits in their pocket. When they watch those dinosaurs now, they don’t see a revolution; they see old effects. The profound awe that defined the experience for older generations is functionally invisible to them because photorealism became ordinary before they were even born. You cannot easily market a miracle to an audience that grew up in the afterlife of the miraculous. It’s like imagining a time before a Snapchat filter could turn your visage into flirty dinosaur.

To bridge that gap, you also have to speak the language of modern speed, and this is where the technical disconnect gets complicated. Spielberg is, after all, the man who practically engineered the kinetic, breakneck engine of the modern blockbuster. Watch Raiders of the Lost Ark today and it still moves with a flawless, propulsive velocity. But Spielberg’s pace is always deeply physical, spatial, and human; it’s a momentum built on blocking, stunt work, and practical geography.

Short-form digital content has rewired our collective neurology to expect an entirely different kind of speed, a hyper-stylized, fractured density where stimulation happens at the edit level every two seconds. When Spielberg does slow down to build tension—the delayed reveal, the shadow before the monster, the earned crescendo—it doesn’t read as masterful suspense to a TikTok-trained brain (when I took the kids to the aforementioned screening of ET, I was suddenly aware of how little exposition there was and how much took place narratively through facial expression alone). This intentionality reads as a lag in the stream. And when he moves fast, it’s a symphonic, physical kind of fast that doesn’t quite match the frantic, algorithmic chaos they are used to consuming.

There is a branding hurdle here, too, one that is beautifully simple and incredibly difficult to clear: he is, objects notwithstanding, Dad Taste. And I say this as a guy who also happens to be a dad. Spielberg is filed away in the mental attic along with old love letters and physical media. To a twenty-year-old, nothing is inherently less cool than the art that made their parents cry. The very weight of his legacy—the ubiquity of his name—acts as a barrier. The substance of the work may transcend time, but the label on the box is firmly dated.

But perhaps the deepest fracture isn’t about what they are watching, but how they are watching it. Spielberg doesn’t just make films; he designs cathedral spaces. He writes for the architecture of the theater—the collective gasp, the communal shudder, the shared silence of five hundred strangers sitting in the dark.

Gen Z, by and large, experiences media on laptops and phones, often with a secondary screen glowing just inches away. They’re listening to a grand, sweeping symphony through a pair of tinny plastic earbuds while riding the subway. The notes are all technically there. The melody can still be parsed. But the scale, the immersion, and the holy architecture of the experience are entirely missing. And when they do show up to service at the cathedral, which they have, their decorum is perhaps at odds with how we did things in the good ole days (chicken jockey, anyone?). I mean, this is literally the generation that forced movie theaters all over the world to put barriers up between rows so the glow from their phones wouldn’t distract the person seated behind them. Or let me tell you about the time I took my kids to see Zootopia 2 and witnessed firsthand a group of older teens playing a game of tag in the back of the theater.

So here’s where we are. The most important filmmaker of the last half century, a man whose body of work spans every genre, every emotion, and every possible scale of human storytelling, has become invisible to the generation that needs him most. Not because his films stopped being great. Because the culture shifted around him while the work stayed exactly where it was: in a dark room, on a big screen, asking you to feel something without your phone in your hand.

I can’t fix the branding problem. I can’t make Spielberg cool. No matter how many TikToks he’s shown up on in the last few weeks. But I can offer a way in. A map. Not a ranked list or a Film Twitter flex. Just a prescription from someone who’s been self-medicating with this man’s work for forty years and still hasn’t found a better remedy.

So, next week: eleven films. Eleven diagnoses. Whether you’re discovering Spielberg for the first time or remembering why you fell in love in the first place, I think you’ll find something worth revisiting. I know I did.

And until then, I’ll see you in the dark.

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This time of year, at the halfway point, critics post their best-of-the-year-so-far lists. It generates debate, gets clicks, and gives us a moment to pause and reflect over the glut of cultural contributions. And inevitably, someone declares that the year we’re assessing is “mid.” The New York Times did this two years back. But what that article, and the many others like it, didn’t anticipate was that the most mid year in recent memory was still a couple of years away. Friends, let me declare that we are currently wallowing in the Year of Mid.

Exhibit A: two weeks ago, one of our greatest pop stars deposited forty-three songs on the world across three simultaneous albums. A nice Jewish Torontonian named Aubrey Drake Graham decided that quantity could substitute for quality. The anchor release, Iceman, is sitting at 52% on Metacritic. The other two aren’t faring much better.

The reviews tell the story. NME called one of Drake’s track “dumb enough to become accidentally addictive,” which is the kind of compliment that could also function as an insult depending, like a lenticular, on your perspective. Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene was more direct, noting that Drake’s music “hasn’t made prolonged contact with fun in a decade.” He’s probably landmarking 2015’s “Hotline Bling.”

As far as the rest of 2026’s release schedule is concerned, well, James Blake put out a genuinely special record and nobody noticed. His seventh album, Trying Times, isn’t on a single mid-year best-of list. And about those lists…? They read like exercises in obscurity, and the stream counts confirm it.

The other biggest pop star in the world didn’t fare much better. Harry Styles’s fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. landed at a backhanded 73 on Metacritic, which sounds respectable until you read the reviews that produced it. The Financial Times called his vocal performance “inadequately expressive.” Spectrum Culture praised an album that “wisely shoves Harry Styles out of the spotlight,” which is a remarkable thing to say about a Harry Styles record. The Telegraph called it “strange, shallow, and soon to be inescapable.” The Guardian noted he “has a real problem with words.” Even the positive reviews read like apologies: “a fine transition album that points to even bigger and better things,” which is critic-speak for “this isn’t the thing, but maybe the next thing will be the thing.” You get the point.

Now, I should be fair. I realize I’m ignoring some important data here. Styles is selling out a two month-long residency at Madison Square Garden. Drake’s streams are in the hundreds of millions. By any commercial metric, these artists are connecting with someone. A lot of someones.

But perhaps there’s a difference between consumption and impact. Between something that sells and something that matters. Between music people listen to and music people talk about. The biggest albums of 2026 are being consumed at an enormous scale and leaving almost no cultural residue. Nobody is arguing about these records. Nobody is being changed by them. They exist, they stream, they fill arenas, and they evaporate.

Mid doesn’t mean bad. Mid means forgettable. And forgettable at scale seems to be the defining cultural condition of 2026.

We’re nearly halfway through the filmgoing year and there’s been exactly one consensus critical and commercial success: Project Hail Mary. One. In six months. And the road ahead isn’t inspiring much confidence — Masters of the Universe, Supergirl, a live-action Moana, another Minions movie. This is a release calendar that reads like a studio executive shaking an IP tree and hoping something small, yellow and unintelligible falls out. The one genuine wildcard this summer is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in July, and even that is essentially a bet on whether the man can Trojan Horse his way into our hearts. Also, pay attention to how badly people want this film to be good. Reddit threads about The Odyssey read like prayers. That desperation alone tells you everything about the year we’re having.

And lest you think indie cinema will save us, the word from Cannes is that even the festival that gave us Pulp Fiction and Parasite was mid. Not a single film received a rapturous response, according to most accounts. Even Sean Fennessey, the Big Picture podcast host and Patron Saint of Cinema, summed up the festival as a showcase of “restrained chamber pieces.” One of the most talked-about film was a three-hour Hamaguchi about two women talking in a nursing home.

But while Hail Mary dominated the box office, it didn’t necessarily feel quite like a cultural landmark in the way Barbie did, or One Battle After Another. Yes, everyone saw it. They were charmed by it. It did not inspire debates, or hot takes or controversies the way the aforementioned films did. It did not make podcast content fodder for weeks after its release. Project: Hail Mary was inherently crowd pleasing in the way most films no longer are. Which means in 2026, even our one genuine success was mid-passing. Not because it was mediocre, but because it was frictionless.

And the movies released around Hail Mary? The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The Devil Wears Prada 2. Mortal Kombat II. Ready or Not 2. Scream 7. Michael, a movie no one asked for except for people who are in denial about those “sleepovers.” And most damning, Mandalorian and Grogu, which seemingly can’t inspire more sentiment than “it’s fun.” Looking back at it all, this release schedule almost begs the question; what are we even doing here? Like, on planet Earth?

[I should note that my actual best film of the year so far is 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple, a visceral, inspired, provocative piece of filmmaking that had the misfortune of releasing two weeks after New Year’s. By February it had been memory-holed. The best movie of 2026 was forgotten before most people knew it existed. For shame.]

It’s not that these movies are inherently bad from a premise standpoint; I’m no populist hater. I for one am seeing Masters of the Universe opening weekend just as long as I’m guaranteed that 40-year old hardcore fans won’t show up topless and in furry loincloths. In fact, I’d almost go further in asserting that there’s nothing more thrilling than witnessing the cross streams of populism and genuine artistic ambition. That’s what Project Hail Mary achieved. That’s what the best blockbusters have always done — give you spectacle and substance in the same ticket. Jaws did it. The Dark Knight did it. Mad Max: Fury Road did it. The problem isn’t that 2026 is making populist films. The problem is that it’s making populist films that have stopped trying to be anything more than populist. And the results are halfway in, and they too seem pretty mid.

Remember that New York Times article I referenced at the top in which journalist James Poniewozik wrote about mid TV, or professional, competent, perfectly fine shows that never risked anything? He wrote it in the same year we had Mr & Mrs Smith, Hijack, The Diplomat, Poker Face, all shows he referenced in his article, and all shows that look like quality programming in retrospect. James, you had no idea how good you had it.

So what has 2026 given us instead? Margot Has Money Troubles. Rooster. Ponies. Scarpetta. The Miniature Wife. It’s Not Like That. His & Hers. Steal. I’ll wait while you Google them.

My wife and I watched the first couple episodes of Margot, by the way, and we found ourselves in disbelief that it was a TV series not because it was bad, but because we could feel the story being rationed. The premise was sharp enough for a contained ninety-minute film. Instead it was being parceled out across a season.

This is the streaming model’s original sin. The platforms don’t need good stories. They need hours. Hours keep subscribers from canceling. Hours justify the content budget to shareholders. And so ideas that would have been perfect as films get inflated into series, and ideas that would have been perfect as limited series get renewed for second and third seasons, and everything expands to fill the container the algorithm requires rather than the container the story actually needs. The result is television that feels like it’s constantly clearing its throat, preparing to say something, almost getting to the point. Eight episodes of throat-clearing. Then a second season to—ahem—clear it again.

But the one genuine exception, the show that reminded me what good television actually feels like, is Widow’s Bay on Apple TV.

Katie Dippold, who wrote for Parks and Rec, created a comedy horror series starring Matthew Rhys that is unpredictable in a way I’d almost forgotten television could be. It’s funny without winking. It’s creepy without compromising on jump scares. Every episode takes turns I can’t anticipate, which sounds like a low bar until you realize how few shows in 2026 clear it. The Daily Beast called it the best new show of the year. They’re right. Rhys is giving us something lived-in and specific, Stephen Root is doing what Stephen Root always does which is steal every scene he’s allowed into, and the whole thing has a texture — handmade, idiosyncratic, built by people who clearly love horror and comedy in equal measure — that feels almost defiant in a landscape of algorithmic content.

And almost nobody is watching it. I only know this because every time I recommend it, people look at me blankly like I had suddenly started speaking in Slovenian.

That’s the cruelest thing about the Year of Mid. It’s not that quality doesn’t exist. It’s that the landscape has become so cluttered, so fragmented, so overstuffed with content that even the genuinely great stuff disappears. Because Widow’s Bay doesn’t have IP. It doesn’t have a pre-existing fandom. It doesn’t have a cinematic universe or a nostalgia play or a built-in audience trained to show up on premiere night. It just has craft. And in 2026, craft without IP is a tree falling in a forest that doesn’t have a streaming service. Yet.

Because this is what the streaming era has built. Not a landscape of bad television, but a landscape where good television can’t find its audience. The audience has been scattered across so many platforms, so many algorithms, so many personalized recommendation engines, that the shared experience of watching something together has been quietly abolished. Poniewozik worried that TV was becoming mediocre. He was thinking too small. The real problem isn’t mediocrity. It’s obscurity. At least mid TV gets watched. In 2026, most shows don’t even get that far.

So looking back on 2026 so far, why does it feel like everything is mid?

What we are witnessing is not a failure of talent, nor is it a sudden, collective dip in human imagination. To believe that Drake forgot how to write a hook or that Christopher Nolan is the only director left with an internal life is to misunderstand the nature of the ecosystem. The talent is fine. The problem is the math.

We have reached a point of total cultural saturation. There is more music, more film, more television available right now than at any point in human history. And when everything is available, nothing feels essential. That changes how artists create; they stop making things because they need to say something and start making things while imagining how an invisible, fragmented audience will react. The phantom audience is in the room before the first note is played or the first frame is shot.

But it also changes how we consume.

When you overwhelm people with infinite choice, they don’t become more adventurous. They retreat. Think about what your brain does when it’s exhausted. You don’t reach for the challenging album that might rewire how you think about music. You put on the playlist that confirms what you already like. You don’t take a chance on the weird show nobody’s heard of. You rewatch The Queen’s Gambit (which a friend admitted to me on the phone last night). Overwhelm doesn’t breed curiosity. It breeds safety.

But here’s the paradox; we haven’t stopped wanting new things. If all we wanted was comfort, we’d just watch Paddington 2 on a loop. We still want to feel like participants in the cultural present. We still want the social currency of the new release, something to reference, something to have an opinion about. We want the new car smell.

So how does an exhausted audience reconcile the desire for new with the need for safe?

Simple: you look for New Mid.

New Mid is the ultimate cultural compromise. It is a brand-new television series or movie that offers the illusion of novelty while guaranteeing absolutely zero friction. It’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 or whatever Netflix slops out this week. It’s a piece of culture that feels vaguely fresh because the actors are wearing current clothes and the release date says 2026, but structurally, it’s a weighted blanket. It requires nothing from you. It has a pre-chewed premise, a recognizable IP, or a narrative pacing that allows you to look at your phone for twelve minutes without missing a single plot point. It’s newness without risk.

And the platforms aren’t stupid. They see the data. They know that when a human brain faces ten thousand options, it defaults to the familiar, but it still clicks on the “Just Added” tab. So they give us exactly what exhausted people reach for: content that is new enough to feel current and safe enough to require nothing.

The loop locks into place. Studios greenlight sequels because originals are risky. Labels push safe albums because the algorithm rewards familiarity. Streamers overproduce to prevent subscriber churn. The audience drowns in all of it. The drowning audience reaches for whatever feels familiar. The data tracks that preference and funds more of the same. Which adds to the volume. Which deepens the drowning.

So, “Mid” is not a creative choice. It is a market equilibrium.

Which means that nobody specific decided 2026 should be forgettable. The industry and the audience arrived here together, each acting rationally inside a system that stopped rewarding risk a long time ago.

The culture hasn’t stalled because we ran out of ideas. It stalled because we built a machine that manufactures predictability with perfect efficiency, and we’re all inside it streaming forty-three Drake songs we won’t remember next month, half-watching sequels to movies that didn’t need them, and scrolling past the best show of the year because the algorithm didn’t tell us to click.

And the truth is, I don’t have the answer to any of this. I don’t know how to break the loop or rewire the machine or convince a studio that an original idea is worth the risk. All I know is that this is the most mid year that ever mid’d, and that doesn’t feel like a singular and subjective take. It feels like a collective sigh-worthy experience.

But all is not lost. Last night I watched two exceptional episodes of Widow’s Bay. I’m even pumped for Spielberg’s first alien movie in 21 years (totally convinced that a septuagenarian billionaire still got it), and Ecca Vandal’s album Looking for People to Unfollow has been playing in my headphones on repeat. The stuff worth caring about still exists. It’s just harder to find than it’s ever been. Like finding a needle in a haystack. In a haystack of mid.

Paul Laverty, the Irish and Scottish screenwriter, who has contributed to movies I have never heard of, has all of a sudden made headlines. At the end of the Cannes Film Festival’s jury press conference, Laverty moved toward his mic and asked, “Can I just leave one tiny thing?” as if he had a small anecdote to share. “The Cannes Film Festival has a wonderful poster,” he said alluding to an image of Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise for its poster this year. “Yes, and isn’t it fascinating to see some of them like Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo blacklisted because of their views in opposing the murder of women and children in Gaza? Shame on Hollywood people who do that. My respect and total solidarity to them. They’re the best of us, I look up to them.”

“Blacklisted.” That’s a big word. It carries the weight of McCarthyism, of careers destroyed, of lives ruined by political persecution. It implies a coordinated effort by powerful people (who can “they” be?) to silence dissent. So let’s take Laverty at his word and look at the evidence. Are these actors actually being blacklisted?

Let’s start with Sarandon, since she’s on the poster. She’s seventy-nine years old. Her career trajectory tells a story, but it’s not the one Laverty is selling.

Sarandon’s last Oscar nomination was in 1995 for Dead Man Walking, thirty years ago. By the 2000s, even Rotten Tomatoes’ own biography noted her career “slacked” after that performance, citing ill-received films like The Banger Sisters and Elizabethtown. By 2021, two years before her Gaza comments, she was starring in Jolt, a straight-to-streaming action film in which she was credited as “Woman with No Name.” In 2022, she appeared in Red Bird Lane, a TV movie that scored 3.1 on IMDb. Her Fox series Monarch lasted four episodes. It didn’t even finish a full season arc.

This is not the résumé of someone who was thriving and then got blacklisted. This is the résumé of an actress whose leading roles had been diminishing for two decades which is what happens to most actresses in Hollywood past a certain age (again, Rotten Tomatoes adds that Sarandon acted “well past the age most actresses found themselves struggling to maintain their careers). That’s a real problem worth talking about, but it has nothing to do with Gaza and everything to do with an industry that has never known what to do with women over sixty.

It should be noted also that Sarandon was cast as the villain in the DC superhero movie Blue Beetle in 2023, appeared in Nonnas in 2025, and currently has two projects in pre-production. She even recently appeared in the midst of Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella set. It seems that the blacklist keeps forgetting to blacklist her.

Bardem, who recently spoke of the blacklist in a Variety interview; “Yes, I’ve heard things: ‘They were going to call you about that project, but that’s gone.’ Or ‘this brand was going to ask you to do the campaign, but they cannot.” But only a couple sentences later, Variety itself undermines the premise, noting that Bardem has “been riding a hot streak lately.” The article uses the phrase “no small measure of career peril” to describe a man who is currently starring in Cape Fear for Apple TV and Dune 3, arguably the only franchise that can take on the Avengers. That’s a strange definition of peril. Yet, Bardem, despite his personal success, has “heard things.”

Then there’s Ruffalo. In 2025 alone, he starred in two television series — Task, which was renewed for a second season with Mahershala Ali joining the cast, and Hal & Harper. He appeared in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. This year, he was in Crime 101 alongside Chris Hemsworth, he’s returning as the Hulk in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and he’s filming a Vatican thriller for Bertrand Bonello, a Netflix rom-com with Natalie Portman, and a disability rights biopic called Being Heumann. He has an Oscar nomination as recently as 2023 for Poor Things. Whatever my opinion on Ruffalo (and I’ll just say this: one-note), despite his not quite being a box office draw, the character actor gets plenty of work despite his vocal advocacy for every cause under the sun.

What this means is that the man Laverty claims is being blacklisted has nine projects in various stages of production. Nine. Whatever is happening to Mark Ruffalo, it is not a blacklist. It’s a backlog.

Three names. Three careers Laverty called blacklisted. Three filmographies that tell a different story. So if the blacklist isn’t real — and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests it isn’t — then what is this narrative actually doing? And more importantly, who does it serve? Let me put it this way: whatever it is, it ain’t good for the Jews.

Last September, actress and comedian Hannah Einbinder won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy for her role in Hacks. She walked to the microphone and, on live television, in front of the entire entertainment industry, said: “Go Birds, f--- ICE, and free Palestine.” She was wearing an Artists4Ceasefire pin. Her co-star Meg Stalter carried a purse that read “CEASE FIRE” on the red carpet.

This was not a quiet social media post. This was the Emmys. On CBS. In prime time. The most public stage the industry offers.

So what happened to Einbinder’s career after this act of defiance? Hacks was renewed for a fifth and final season. She’s starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a film produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B, directed by Jane Schoenbrun who is also Jewish and a vocal pro-Palestinian activist. The film premiered at Cannes this week with a wide theatrical release in August. Incidentally, the headline out of Cannes for Schoenbrun’s film wasn’t about the blacklist. It was the director explaining that every studio except Mubi passed on the project. Not because of politics, but because of “the limits of what kinds of queer and trans stories are deemed commercial.” Which may be the case. The film may also be commercial kryptonite.

And then there’s Kneecap.

If you’re unfamiliar, that means you’re not reading my Substack. Because I’ve written many times about the Irish hip-hop trio from Belfast who rap in both English and Irish Gaelic, wear balaclavas on stage, and have become one of the most vocal pro-Palestinian acts in popular music. At their Coachella performance last year, they projected “F*** Israel. Free Palestine” on the screens behind them and led the crowd in a “Free, free Palestine” chant. At a London concert in November 2024, a member draped himself in a Hezbollah flag and shouted “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” both banned terrorist organizations in the UK. They’ve been investigated by British counter-terrorism police. One member, Mo Chara, was charged under the Terrorism Act for displaying the Hezbollah flag.

This month, they released their second album. It’s called Fenian. For those unfamiliar, “Fenian” historically refers to 19th-century Irish nationalists dedicated to overthrowing British rule, but in modern Northern Ireland, it’s used as a sectarian slur against Irish Catholics. Kneecap reclaimed it as their album title, a provocation by design. The title track ends with “Tiocfaidh ár lá,” “our day will come,” the rallying cry of Irish republicanism. There's also a track titled "Palestine" performed entirely in Gaelic and Arabic, which is a curious choice if your goal is to spread a message to the masses.

The critical response? NME called the album “fearless.” The Guardian praised its “sharpened political bent.” Pitchfork gave it a 7.7, generous, in my professional opinion, given what feels like a political curve. I listened to the album. It’s a fun novelty record with some genuinely good moments, but it benefits from the inflation that comes with being “important.” A sample lyric from the title track: “Look mate, the Paddies are back / Is tá deireadh le do ríocht / And that’s a fact.”

Here’s what’s interesting though. “Liars Tale,” the lead single released in January, is sitting at roughly 3.6 million streams. Most album tracks hover around 500,000. For an act that received wall-to-wall coverage from every major publication — the Guardian, NME, Mojo, Highsnobiety, The New York Times (of course) — those numbers are modest at best. Which raises a question the blacklist narrative doesn’t want to answer: if the media is powerful enough to destroy careers for pro-Palestinian speech, why isn’t it powerful enough to convert universal critical acclaim into actual listeners?

Now, on to actress Melissa Barrera.

In December 2023, Barrera was dropped from the Scream franchise after posting about Gaza and “Holocaust distortion” on social media. This became the centerpiece of the blacklist narrative — the smoking gun, the proof that Hollywood punishes pro-Palestinian speech. Variety ran a story this week with the headline: “Melissa Barrera Was Canceled by Hollywood for Speaking Out Against Israel. She’s Still Fighting Her Way Back.” It’s worth noting that Variety has been the primary architect of this narrative, running story after story that treats the blacklist as established fact rather than a claim worth interrogating. They’re not reporting the story. They’re building it. And every headline that frames an actress’s career fluctuation as political persecution reinforces the same implication: that somewhere behind the curtain, powerful people are pulling strings.

In the interview, Barrera describes what happened to her:

“The specifics of my situation were like a perfect storm. I’m a woman of color in this industry. I’m ‘on the rise,’ but I don’t have a big enough name to be untouchable, so they can make an example out of me. I am well-known enough that you can write articles and create all the clickbait propaganda that you need, but also not big enough that people are going to care enough or revolt or do anything in the industry for me. I was the perfect scapegoat.”

Read that paragraph again. Count the pronouns.

“They” can make an example out of her. “They” create clickbait propaganda. She was “their” perfect scapegoat. And she never once defines who “they” are. She doesn’t have to. In a conversation about Israel and Hollywood, the blank fills itself.

There’s a part of my admittedly superficial brain that can’t reliably distinguish between Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Rachel Zegler, and Monica Barbaro. Ask me who’s been in what and I’d probably get it wrong. The current ‘it-girl’ demographic is not in short supply in Hollywood. This isn’t a commentary on their talent. It’s a commentary on an industry that has always treated a certain kind of young actress as interchangeable.

Which means Barrera may be experiencing something far less sinister than a blacklist. She may be experiencing what dozens of “on the rise” actors experience every year when the industry simply moves on to the next face. Hollywood forgets. It recycles. It replaces. It’s nothing personal. It’s show business.

The difference is that none of those actors had a convenient “they” to blame for their decline. They just faded. Barrera faded too but she found a narrative, and the narrative needed a villain. And just to give you a hint as to who the villain is: well, it rhymes with Zionist.

Now, let’s talk about what this narrative is actually doing. Because the blacklist claim isn’t just wrong. It’s, dare I say, dangerous. And it’s dangerous in a very specific, very old way.

Every time a celebrity says they’ve been “blacklisted” for criticizing Israel, they are invoking, whether they intend to or not, the idea of organized Jewish power. They don’t say “Jews.” They say “they.” They say “Hollywood.” They say “the industry.” Bardem says he’s “heard things.” Barrera says “they” made an example of her. Laverty stands at the Cannes jury table and says “shame on Hollywood people who do that.”

Who do what? Who are the “Hollywood people” Laverty is shaming? He doesn’t name them. None of them do. The accusation is always gestural, always vague, always pointed at a shadow. And the shadow is always shaped the same way.

This, my friends, is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a Variety headline. I don’t say that to be inflammatory. I say it because the mechanism is identical. A secret group of powerful Jews controls the media and punishes those who defy them. The language has been updated — “blacklisted” instead of “conspired against,” “the industry” instead of “the elders” — but the architecture is the same. It’s the same accusation that has followed Jewish people for centuries: that we operate in the shadows, that we pull strings, that we punish dissent through invisible networks of power.

And here’s what makes the contemporary version more insidious than the historical one: it comes wrapped in the language of human rights. It’s not a skinhead with a swastika making this accusation. It’s a Cannes jury member. It’s a Variety cover story. It’s an actress framing herself as a victim of persecution while describing her persecutors with a pronoun that has meant the same thing for a thousand years. The packaging is progressive. The content is medieval.

Bardem doesn’t say “the Jews won’t hire me.” He says he’s “heard things” about projects that disappeared. Barrera doesn’t say “a Jewish cabal destroyed my career.” She says “they” made an example out of her. The deniability is built into the grammar. You can always claim you meant “the studios” or “the executives” or “the system.” But everyone in the room knows who “they” is. Everyone has always known. And the fact that it’s in response to criticism of Israel is undeniable.

I’ve spent thirty years obsessively following creative industries. I know how casting decisions get made. I know how brand partnerships fall apart. I know how projects die in development for reasons that have nothing to do with politics — budget changes, scheduling conflicts, a star’s Q score dropping two points, an executive getting fired and their slate getting wiped. These are the mundane, unglamorous realities of show business. None of them are conspiratorial. All of them explain every career trajectory that Laverty cited at Cannes.

But mundane explanations don’t generate Variety covers. “Actress experiences normal career fluctuations in competitive industry” doesn’t go viral. “Actress blacklisted by powerful shadow network for speaking truth to power” does. The narrative is more compelling than the reality, and the narrative requires a villain. And the villain, once again, is us.

And so when we look at what Ruffalo, Bardem and, yes, even Sarandon are up to over the course of the next year or so, there’s a reason for the way the respective careers of a 58-year-old, a 57-year-old, and a 79-year-old are getting fewer opportunities. And it may not have anything to do with Ruffalo’s red hands ceasefire pin, or Bardem’s keffiyeh on the red carpet, or Sarandon’s association with Code Pink. It may just be three actors who don’t feel as relevant as they used to when Hulk, Anton Chigurh, and Louise were all in their prime.

Once again, Laverty called them “the best of us.” He leaned into his microphone, and declared that Hollywood was blacklisting actors for their courage. He named Sarandon, Bardem, Ruffalo. He said he looked up to them.

Well, I’ve looked at their careers. I’ve looked at the evidence. I’ve looked at who’s actually working and who isn’t and why. And what I found wasn’t a blacklist. It was an industry doing what it’s always done — rewarding what sells, forgetting what doesn’t, and moving on without apology.

But what Laverty did at that microphone, whether he intended it or not, was something older and more familiar than he probably realizes. He pointed at a shadow and called it powerful. He accused an unnamed “they” of coordinating punishment. He invited a room full of people to believe that somewhere behind the curtain, invisible hands were pulling strings.

He didn’t say the word. He didn’t have to. They never do.

If you wished someone a “May the Fourth be with you” this week, there’s a good chance this week’s column may not be for you. So, there. There’s your warning. And yes, I understand it’s fashionable to take issue with the Star Wars franchise, especially in the weeks before the film premiere of the most infantilizing display of green puppetry since Kermit. But I want to tell you that, for me, this wasn’t always the case. There was even a time when I considered the Force my second favorite religion.

Yet, time and time again, Star Wars will inevitably come up in conversation because I roll with a pretty geeky crowd, and there are many within this crowd that remain Lucas devotees no matter how many times that bearded billionaire let us down. But despite my consistent fandom for, say, the MCU or the Alien films, Star Wars, as a franchise, has left me feeling lukewarm (see what I did there?). I think my distance from a galaxy far, far away had become most obvious when I shared the original trilogy with my kids as I’ve done with many of my childhood favorites.

I remember sitting in the room with my kids and becoming increasingly self-conscious about A New Hope’s many flaws. I hadn’t realized just how whiny Luke Skywalker was until I had whiny humans of my own to compare him to. Even Mark Hamill admitted it: “It was cringe-inducing even at the time.” It’s only gotten worse in the five decades since. I also noticed, maybe for the first time, how slow the pacing is — though my kids had already sat through ET and Batman without complaint, neither of which unfurled at a breakneck speed. Steven got bored. Eleanor opted out. Not even the totality of Darth Vader’s twelve gravitas-heavy minutes in a 121-minute film could keep them invested. I even teased the eventual big reveal in the sequel, but they never read the paternity test results.

Since then I’ve been trying to figure out why Star Wars didn’t work for them, and more honestly, why it stopped working for me. Why every new entry in the Lucas universe lands with a hollow thud. Why I can’t bring myself to care even when I want to. The answer, I think, is less about any single bad Kathleen Kennedy decision and more about what happens to a story when investors value it at $65 billion or, for those not from around here, roughly 260 billion Galactic credits.

Thesis #1: Lore is for historians. Mystery is for storytellers.

When I was a kid, my three favorite characters from the original trilogy were Han Solo, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett, in that order. What made them compelling was in direct proportion to how little we knew about them. Vader and Fett were both masked — Vader doesn’t show his face until the third film. We knew almost nothing about Han’s background, and even now, if you’ve avoided the novels and comics, you still don’t know anything about him before that booth at the Mos Eisley Cantina. The mystery is still there. You just have to choose not to ruin it.

But since The Phantom Menace in 1999, Star Wars has become a franchise of “actually…” guys, the kind of person who pushes their glasses up their nose and then treats a children’s space opera like a talmudic lecture complete with Wookieepedia citations. What was sacrificed in the great contextualization was something harder to name: the gaps. The intentional silences. The moments the story left open so you could move in and live there. That’s where the romance was — not in the mythology itself, but in what the mythology didn’t say. Star Wars no longer trusts you with that silence. It doesn’t ask you to participate. It shoves the canon down your throat and tells you that you want more. And so we live in a world where even Solo’s fuzzy dice gets an origin story.

Thesis #2: Fan service isn’t a reward. It’s a ransom note.

If you’ve ever watched clips from Star Wars Celebration, the annual convention where tickets for April 2027 are already on sale, the crowd is rapturous in a way that should feel familiar. It looks like a revival meeting, or a megachurch crowd, because it functions like one. Especially when a cast member takes the stage. The rapture in the room isn’t wonder. It’s recognition. And recognition, however pleasurable, is the opposite of discovery.

The Celebration crowd is also self-selecting in a way that has become the franchise’s core mistake. These are the people who already passed the test. They know the lore, they speak the language, they’ve done the homework. By optimizing for their rapture, by building every new entry around their recognition, Star Wars has effectively locked the door from the inside. You can’t walk in mid-conversation. Anyone who might have wandered in fresh, the way a nine-year-old once did in 1977, has nowhere to start. My kids are proof of that. And with an aging fanbase and the Skywalkers losing out in the war against the Influencers, the trajectory is frozen in carbonite.

Which is what makes fan service less like generosity and more like leverage. It says: we know what you love and we’ll keep returning it to you in small doses if you keep showing up. The machine doesn’t pause between installments to ask whether it’s telling a good story. It just keeps feeding you memberberries.

Thesis #3: “It’s for children” is a convenient alibi, not a defense.

“I don’t like sand.” “Ooh, icky, icky poo.” “I’m haunted by the kiss that you never should have given me.”

These are lines from the Star Wars movies, written by the man who insists “they’re for children.”

And look, I’ll grant Lucas the original trilogy. Nobody expected Star Wars to become a religion. The story was being invented as it went — Luke and Leia kiss on the lips in the second installment because at the time of filming, they weren’t siblings yet. And you can forgive a filmmaker for not knowing where he’s going when nobody, including him, expected to get anywhere. Nevermind for forty-three consecutive weeks in theaters.

What’s harder to forgive is that the sequel trilogy, made forty years later, with the benefit of hindsight, and the entire machinery of Disney behind it, repeated the exact same mistake. No map. No plan. JJ Abrams, serving as director, co-writer, and producer, all in some capacity, for all three, eventually said it out loud: “Having a plan I have learned, in some cases the hard way, is the most critical thing, because otherwise you don’t know what you’re setting up.” He said this after the fact. Cue the facepalm emoji.

So when George Lucas calls these films for children, he’s not describing his audience. He’s describing his alibi. The wooden dialogue, Jar Jar Binks, Little Annie, the retconned siblings, the three minutes between Chewbacca’s “death” and the revelation that he’s alive — these aren’t the textures of childlike wonder. They’re the consequences of nobody being fully in charge of the whole story. “It’s for kids” means: the adult mind notices the seams, and I’d prefer you didn’t.

But here’s where the defense completely falls apart: the prequels. Because if Star Wars is for children, someone forgot to tell Palpatine. The prequel trilogy is fundamentally about the deliberate erosion of democracy from within; the Emperor manufacturing crises, exploiting fear, accumulating emergency powers until a complicit Senate applauds its own neutering. These are Weimar Republic dynamics in space. This is a graduate seminar on institutional collapse dressed in grotesque CGI. Are children expected to follow the trade dispute subplot? Are they meant to understand the political mechanics of how liberty surrenders incrementally to authoritarianism?

The prequels are conceptually adult and executionally infantile. The ideas demand serious attention. The dialogue insults it. Which means Lucas has it exactly backwards. When the writing is wooden, it’s for kids. When the politics are too sophisticated, it’s actually quite deep. It’s whatever he needs it to be to avoid the conversation.

The cruelest irony is that Palpatine’s playbook — manufactured crises, emergency powers, a legislature that votes away its own authority and calls it patriotism — is more legible now than it was in 1999. If that’s a children’s story, it’s the most accidentally prophetic one ever committed to film. And if it’s not a children’s story, then Lucas owes us a better excuse.

Thesis #4: Fanaticism is not a fanbase. It’s a hostile takeover.

There's a version of loving Star Wars that I recognize and respect. I lived it as a kid; the moment you can imagine the universe suddenly feeling bigger, or the realization that four otherwise innocuous bug-headed musicians can double as nightmare fuel. Those memories live in your chest. That's faith. And faith, at its best, is porous. It welcomes the doubter, the latecomer, the person who wandered in without a program.

Fanaticism is faith that has curdled. The fanatic doesn’t just love the thing. They own it. They write “reylo” fanfic on Reddit. They decide what it means, who belongs, and who gets excommunicated for insufficient devotion. And what makes fanaticism particularly toxic as an editorial compass is that fanatics are irrational by definition. They can’t tell you if something is inherently worthy. They can only tell you if it’s compliant. Ask a fanatic whether The Rise of Skywalker was any good and they’ll tell you whether it honored or disrespected the canon. Those are not the same question.

The tragedy is that the franchise learned to court this. Because fanatics are reliable. They show up. They buy the merch. They sell out Celebration tickets in a parsec. Optimizing for their approval feels like a business decision, but what it actually is, is a creative abdication. You’ve handed the editorial keys of the Millennium Falcon to the people least equipped to drive.

The best religious traditions — and I say this as someone with some experience in the matter — remain porous. They make room for the questioning, the doubting, the newly arrived. The ones that calcify into gatekeeping don’t just stop growing. They start shrinking. More rigid and more brittle simultaneously. Which is exactly what Star Wars fandom looks like from the outside; loud, defensive, and slowly losing the next generation to literally anything else.

This is also why blaming Kathleen Kennedy singularly misses the point. Bad decisions weren’t the problem. The problem is what happens to storytelling when a property becomes too valuable to risk (as it so happens, according to her Deadline interview, it seems Kennedy was in fact the sole risk taker). You don’t roll the dice on a genuinely surprising ending when the IP is worth $65 billion. You protect the asset. You sand down the edges. You make sure the lightsabers are the right color. And protected assets don’t make art. They make product. Which is what Star Wars is now. It’s a product that occasionally gestures toward the feeling of a story.

The evidence isn’t hard to find. Tony Gilroy made Andor, a genuinely adult Star Wars story with no Jedi, no lightsabers, no winking callbacks, just a grounded political thriller about how ordinary people become revolutionaries. It was the best thing the franchise had produced in decades, a one-off miracle in a sea of mediocrity. But alas, only two seasons. The machine had rejected the antibody.

The Mandalorian was, for a brief and genuinely exciting moment, the first Star Wars story that felt like it was made by people who understood why the original trilogy worked. A helmeted stranger. A mysterious child. No explanations, no apologies, no fan service avalanche. Just a man and a baby and a universe that felt dangerous again. It was the first time in decades that Star Wars trusted its audience enough to withhold something. And that theme music! Sergio Leone meets Max Rebo!

And then Din Djarin took off his helmet and, well, it was Reed Richards. Corporate synergy, unlocked. To make matters worse, at the end of season 2, we got CGI Luke when the least they could do was get Sebastian Stan on the comlink.

Just to clarify here: Pedro Pascal isn’t wrong for the role. But when the series was working, the helmet was the role. The mystery was the character. The moment you put a famous face where the enigma was, you’ve made the same mistake Lucas made with Darth Vader and Dave Filoni made with Boba Fett. Which, if you’re keeping score at home, the Book of Boba Fett is the worst thing Star Wars has ever done and I have the “like a Bantha” meme to prove it.

Now, in just a few weeks, we have the imaginatively titled Mandalorian and Grogu, a feature film built around the franchise’s most merchandisable asset, a green puppet whose principal function is to look adorable and drive plush toy sales. Filoni, who deserves genuine credit for understanding this universe better than almost anyone, is nonetheless delivering us the Grogufication of the one narrative that didn’t need it. What was once a spare, existential western set in space is becoming, based on the trailer, exactly what it was never supposed to be — a children’s movie. A real one this time, in the George Lucas sense of the phrase.

Which means we've come full circle. I opened this column with Kermit and I'm closing with Grogu. It's not easy being green. And as the box office receipts will inevitably prove, it’s even harder making it.

There's a moment in Giant, the new Broadway play about Roald Dahl, in which the children’s book author, portrayed by a towering John Lithgow, confronts a woman about whether his antisemitism has "inadvertently" seeped into his children's books. "If it's in me, then it's surely in the books, too," he shouts. To which she responds, quietly: "I don't know that everything you are, the books are too."

It’s been over fifty years since Dahl declared himself an antisemite. In that time, his stories haven’t just survived. They’ve thrived. Matilda. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James and the Giant Peach. The BFG. Every one of them still in print, still being adapted, still being read to children at bedtime by parents who have no idea what the man who wrote them believed about people like me.

“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity,” Dahl told the New Statesman in a 1983 interview. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” And then in 1990, he told the Independent, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism.”

There were moments last night during Giant when I heard gasps from the audience, an appropriate reaction given some of Dahl’s hateful rhetoric. But nothing I heard last night shocked me. Not because I’m numb, but because everything Dahl said in 1983 could have been posted on social media this morning. He even swaps “Jew” for “Zionist,” the same dogwhistle Julian Casablancas, frontman of the Strokes, used just last week in his “Subway Takes” interview. (one of Dahl’s editors even confessed sometimes substituting “Israelis” for “Jews” to make the author’s writing slightly less antisemitic.)

What strikes me most is the timing. Dahl made these statements openly, on the record, in major publications. And yet it took half a century for anyone to put it on a stage. His family didn’t issue an apology until 2020, and even that has since been quietly removed from the official Roald Dahl website. Meanwhile, the legacy split in two: the man faded into footnotes while the stories walked out the front door and never looked back. Or in short, the stories left its creator behind.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens over decades of bedtime readings and dog-eared pages and Halloween costumes and children naming their pets after fictional characters. It happens when a generation grows up inside a world and starts to feel like it belongs to them more than to the person who built it. It happens so slowly that by the time anyone notices, it’s already done.

It’s happening right now with Harry Potter.

The calls for a boycott started popping up after HBO dropped the first trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter series; How could you support anything connected to JK Rowling, a woman who has repeatedly and voluntarily waded into the most contentious debate around gender identity? Rowling mocked the boycott effort on X, writing that “activists in my mentions are trying to organise yet another boycott of my work. As forewarned is forearmed, I’ve taken the precaution of laying in a large stock of champagne.”

And yet. Harry Potter remains a bookshelf staple in nearly every home. The books still sell millions of copies annually. There are seven Wizarding World theme parks across the globe. Whatever Rowling says on X at two in the morning, the stories keep moving without her.

How is it that we keep handing these books to our children knowing what we know about the people who wrote them? Or maybe that’s the wrong question entirely. Maybe the right question is whether everything they are, the books are too. And if they’re not, if the work is clean even when the person isn’t, then who does the story belong to?

I have a theory I’d like to share with you, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. In the last few years alone, I’ve discovered that an unsettling number of my cultural heroes harbor views about Jewish people that range from uncomfortable to unforgivable. Musicians, authors, filmmakers, or people whose work shaped me, whose art I built parts of my identity around. And I’ve had to make a calculation that most people never have to make: do I let go of the art, or do I accept that the person is not their art?

So I developed a framework. Not to excuse anyone, but to survive the contradiction.

If the work is inseparable from the person who made it, if the creator is so embedded in the creation that I can’t experience one without the other, I have to leave it behind. After all, we live in an age of abundant choice. But if the work has taken on a life beyond its creator, if the narrative belongs to the people who read it, listen to it, obsess over it, argue about it, then I can make room for it in my life.

I’ve been trying to reduce this to a formula, because formulas are comforting. Something like: the quality of the work, minus the presence of the creator inside it, plus the degree to which the audience has claimed ownership, equals your ability to separate. But grief and art and moral compromise don’t reduce to math. The best I can offer is a spectrum.

Here’s how it works. Does the work contain the creator’s pathology?

If no → the work has escaped. Keep it.

If partially → the work is entangled. Proceed with discomfort.

If yes → the creator consumed the work. Let it go.

Alternatively:

The distance between the creator and the creation. I’m calling it the Dworken Equation. Hey, I came up with it so I’m naming it after myself (it worked for the Bechdel Test).

The variables:

• W = the work itself (is it clean?)

• P = the creator’s presence in the work (how autobiographical, how embedded?)

• C = cultural ownership (has the audience claimed it?)

• S is separability.

• I is inseparability.

If the work is clean (high W), the creator isn’t embedded in it (low P), and the culture has claimed it (high C) — you get high separability. That’s Dahl. That’s Rowling. W − P + C = S. Still with me?

There are two creators I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because they don’t fit cleanly on either end of the spectrum and mostly because I feel like their works were so influential to me: Woody Allen and Neil Gaiman (As if this column wasn’t already controversial enough).

Neil Gaiman built one of the most celebrated narratives in comic book history with The Sandman, a story about the nature of stories themselves, about empathy, about the cost of power wielded without compassion. It’s a work that taught a generation of readers to take comics seriously as literature. The work is clean. There’s nothing in its pages that foreshadows what we’ve since learned about its creator.

And what we’ve learned is icky. Multiple women have accused Gaiman of sexual assault and coercive behavior. The allegations are serious and well-documented. But they’ve also been dismissed. I’m not here to litigate them — others have done that work. I’m here to ask what happens to the Sandman reader who loved those books and now can’t open them without seeing a different author behind them.

This is where the spectrum gets uncomfortable. Because unlike Dahl, who’s been dead for decades, and unlike Rowling, whose opinions live on a separate platform from her fiction, Gaiman was inseparable from his work. He wasn’t a reclusive author who let the work speak for itself. He was present — touring, signing, engaging, performing the role of the traveling storyteller who genuinely cared about his readers. The work may have been clean, but the persona was wrapped around it so tightly that pulling them apart feels less like separation and more like surgery. And what makes it all the more complicated is that the protagonist Morpheus was inspired by Gaiman himself.

So, yes, Sandman escaped Gaiman in theory. The story is bigger than him. But in practice, he never let it get far enough away. He stood too close to it for too long, and now his shadow falls across every page. This is why Netflix cancelled the Sandman series after only two seasons, a story that could have run for a decade, cut short not by its own limitations but by its creator's. This is why Reddit still argues over its legacy.

Woody Allen is the hardest case for me to write about because he’s the one who made me. Not entirely, but more than I’d like to admit. His films taught me that neurosis could be a comedic instrument. That intellectualism and self-deprecation could coexist. That being a Jewish writer from New York who overthinks everything wasn’t a limitation…it was a genre. To this day, I still consider Crimes and Misdemeanors a top twenty film. I’m as much a fan of his prose as his movies. Allen didn’t just influence my taste. He influenced my voice.

The allegations against Allen, a single accusation, investigated and not prosecuted, are less extensive than Gaiman’s. The legal record is more ambiguous. But the work doesn’t help his case. And this is where Allen’s position on the spectrum diverges from everyone else I’ve discussed.

With Dahl, the antisemitism isn’t in the books. With Rowling, the gender politics aren’t in the novels. With Gaiman, the predatory behavior isn’t in the comics. Again, the work is clean. But with Allen, the thing that makes people uncomfortable about his life is a recurring element in his art. Mariel Hemingway is seventeen-years-old in Manhattan, playing the love interest to Allen’s forty-two-year-old character. At the time, it felt transgressive in the way Allen’s work often did by pushing boundaries, making you laugh at things you probably shouldn’t laugh at. Now it feels like something else entirely. Not a boundary being pushed necessarily. But definitely a creeper being creepy.

And it doesn’t stop at Manhattan. The older man captivated by the younger woman appears across his filmography with a persistence that stops feeling like an artistic preoccupation and starts feeling like a tell. Not every film contains it. But enough of them do that once you see it, you can’t watch any of them without looking for it.

W + P - C = I

This is what the middle of the spectrum actually feels like. I can’t separate Allen from his work because he wove himself into it. Not deliberately, maybe not even consciously, but the thread is there, and it runs through too many films to ignore. And yet the influence already happened. I can’t un-learn what Annie Hall taught me about comic timing (and trust me. It taught me a lot). I can’t un-absorb the rhythm of his dialogue. The person I am as a writer was partly built by a man whose work I can no longer publicly admire. That’s not a position I can resolve. It’s one I have to carry. Or let me put it this way: I won’t be rewatching Deconstructing Harry anytime soon but I’m forever grateful for having seen it when I did. Take this exchange, for example; “Do you care even about the holocaust, or do you think it never happened?” the actor Eric Bogosian asks in the film. To which Allen answers back, “Not only do I know that we lost 6 million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken.” Man, was he good.

Then there’s Kanye.

Oh, Kanye. How did we get here? For those at home keeping score, this is the fourth time I’ve written about Kanye in the last year which means I’ve already spent too much oxygen on him, or in this case, tapped too many keystrokes in his name which, by the way, is now Ye. But truth be told, Kanye is one of the most important and problematic pop culture figures of this century, and if this essay is about the line between creator and creation, there’s no one who’s done more to erase that line than Ye himself.

And especially in light of his cancelled Wireless festival headlining slot, I've been thinking about why I'm relieved that happened, despite the fact that I don't believe in censorship when it comes to art (although fret not, European Ye’heads; Italy’s Reggio Emilia festival still has him headlining in July as of writing this).

I watched 140,000 fans gather at Los Angeles SoFi Stadium earlier this month to see him live and I was having a hard time articulating why this disturbed me so much. Clip after clip on social media, I saw his mostly white fans rationalize their attendance from “I’m just here for the music” to “he apologized and that’s good enough for me.”

But what those fans aren’t taking into account is that Kanye’s behavior is inextricably linked to his music. They’re inseparable. Kanye’s music is autobiographical. It always has been. From his early days as a burgeoning college dropout to his discovery of Jesus to his salute to Hitler to an album called Bully. That’s not an artist whose work you can separate from his life. That’s a man narrating his own ascent and descent, like a roller coaster ride, and selling tickets to all of it.

And unlike every other creator in this essay, Kanye’s work can’t exist without him. Not in the way that Matilda can exist without Dahl or Harry Potter can exist without Rowling, all stories so fully realized they walked out the door and never looked back. Kanye’s music is Kanye. His hubris, his story, his personality, his style; remove any of it and the work collapses. The songs don’t survive in a vacuum because they were never meant to. They’re extensions of him, not creations that transcend him.

This is why most hip-hop heads don’t take him as seriously as his commercial success suggests. His personality doesn’t just accompany the music. It overwhelms it. The drama outweighs the collaboration. The spectacle outweighs the craft.

And here’s the technical proof: most of Kanye’s lyrics are first person. That’s not uncommon for songwriters. Springsteen writes in first person. Kendrick writes in first person. But Springsteen’s first person is often a character — a factory worker, a veteran, a man driving through the dark. Kendrick’s first person is sometimes a parable — his own experience refracted into something universal. Kanye’s first person is just Kanye. No metaphor. No mask. No distance between the man and the music. When he says I, he means it in the most literal sense of the word.

His fans don’t separate the art from the artist because there’s nothing to separate. They adore whatever he puts out — the music, the sneakers, the fashion, the controversy. It’s all one product and the product is him. The 140,000 people at SoFi weren’t there for the songs. They were there for Kanye. And Kanye, right now, is a man who named his album Bully and put a swastika on a t-shirt only months back and dares you to not only tolerate it, but to patronize it. So when he apologizes, it’s just another performance in a line of performances.

Kanye’s inseparability isn’t just high. It’s absolute. The creator didn’t just embed himself in the creation. He consumed it entirely. There’s nothing left for the audience to take custody of, because he’s still standing in the middle of it, insisting he’s the point.

W x P - C = I∞

With Kanye, the “I” in the Dworken Equation doesn’t just go high. Inseparability to infinity. The work multiplies the man. The man multiplies the work. And nobody has taken ownership of either. That’s why I celebrate when he gets dropped from festivals. When brands cancel their collaborations. When streaming platforms deplatform him. Because when inseparability is this total, the path back can’t be a press release or a Wall Street Journal letter. It has to be something real. Something sustained. Something that proves the man has changed, not just the marketing strategy. Because when the creator and the creation are the same thing, you can’t just fix the music. You have to fix the man.

I also suspect that if Kanye had simply swapped “Jew” for “Zionist” the way Casablancas did, the way Dahl did forty years before him, he would have gotten away with it. That’s the quiet part nobody wants to say out loud. The swastika wasn’t the ideology. It was the branding. The ideology has been hiding behind a word swap for decades.

Which brings us back to where we started. To a stage in New York where John Lithgow shouts Roald Dahl’s hatred into a theater and the audience gasps not because the words are new, but because someone finally stopped substituting.

Art comes from complex people with complex thoughts and tangled hearts. It always has. Lewis Carroll. Woody Allen. Roald Dahl. Neil Gaiman. JK Rowling. Kanye West. The list will keep growing because the list has always been growing. Brilliance and brokenness aren’t opposites. Often, they’re roommates.

I know that for some, there’s zero tolerance; any stain on the creator poisons the work entirely. I know that for others, there’s total tolerance; the art is the art, full stop, and the person behind it is irrelevant. I understand both positions. I just can’t live in either one.

So I built a framework. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Because when your bookshelf and your record collection and your filmography keep revealing that the people who shaped your imagination harbor some complicated feelings about people like you, you either develop a system or you stop consuming culture altogether. And I’m not willing to stop.

And so I know my formula is not perfect. It won’t satisfy everyone. But it helps me decide what I can carry and what I have to put down. And in math, I think they call that a solution.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s book since Barrett, my pet of seventeen years, died: the body keeps the score. It suggests that whatever you experience emotionally, your body absorbs it and holds onto it, whether you want it to or not.

I always understood this intellectually. Van der Kolk’s book has been on the bestseller list for seven years, and the idea has seeped so deeply into the culture that it shows up in therapy sessions and psuedo-pysch TikTok captions alike. But understanding it intellectually and feeling it in your actual body are two different things. Last week, I felt it. Rather, I experienced it through all my senses.

This makes sense if you think about it, because the senses are how I knew Barrett in the first place. I heard his paws on the hardwood before I saw him round the corner. I felt his weight lean into my leg when he wanted attention. I saw his ears perk up at sounds only he could detect. I smelled him before he even walked through the door on a rainy day. And every night for seventeen years, I ate whatever we had for dinner while he lingered under my seat so even taste, indirectly, belonged to him.

The senses gave me Barrett. It makes sense that they’d be the ones to help me grieve him.

But what I discovered last week is that the body keeps the score of healing. For every part of me that was absorbing anguish last week, there was a specific, physical response that met it. Not a cure. Not closure. Just the body’s own quiet answer to its own quiet suffering. All through the five senses.

Music for the hearing. Sweetness for the taste. A hug for the touch. Old photos for the sight. And one fading scent for the smell.

This is what happened to my body the week after I lost my best friend. Sense by sense, it found its way back.

Hear

When I’m sad, I don’t listen to sad music. It feels redundant, like putting a hat on a hat. Sadness doesn’t need to be encouraged. But it does need to be accompanied. It needs a soundtrack that lives in the overlap between bitter and sweet, the way dark chocolate does.

For me, the band that’s been on repeat all week is Elbow, out of Manchester, England. Before I explain why, I should acknowledge that, yes, “Elbow” is a terrible band name. When I interviewed the band years ago in 2008, they admitted as much. But don’t let its proximity to the funny bone fool you into thinking this band is anything less than transcendent. No band makes wistfully elegiac music the way they do — eleven albums, all presumably composed with the words “sincerity” and “catharsis” in big sharpie tacked to their inspiration board.

Singer Guy Garvey carries the band’s emotional weight with a voice that sounds like aged whisky, warm, smooth, and carrying every year it’s lived through. He’s worth the price of admission alone. But it’s two specific songs that I’ve found myself coming back to over and over again — “open arms” and “Real Life (Angel).”

“We’ve got open arms for broken hearts/ like yours, my boy/ come home again,” the choir swells around Garvey in the chorus. Midway through, he simply adds: “everyone’s here.” It’s a bit on the nose, but these are the words I needed to hear more than anything. I held Barrett in my arms on his final day as this song played in the background when I needed this reassurance most.

“Go straight to the place where you first lost your balance, and find your feet with the people you love.” “Real Life (Angel)” could be a thematic cousin to “open arms.” Its indigo tones project melancholy in a way that feels empathetic. “Focus on your pulse, focus on your breath, know that we’re never far away.” The more time I spent in the company of Elbow’s discography, the more I realized that the band created a soundtrack of support. Garvey keeps returning to the same reassurance across their discography — stay present, stay breathing, know that the people who love are close by.

When you’re sad, find your soundtrack of support. Don’t wallow in minor chords pulling heartstrings, those songs that want to evoke pain just for the sake of drawing blood. Find your healing music. You’ll know what it sounds like when you hear it; just listen for dark chocolate.

Other listening suggestions: Bon Iver’s “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” REM’s “Find the River,” 10,000 Maniac’s “These Are Days.”

Taste

The doorbell kept ringing last week. Friends, or delivery men, showed up holding boxes, from one, a babka danish from a renowned New York bakery, from another, a viral toast cookie, two others showed up separately with a wide assortment of croissants from a nearby staple. Some were store-bought. Some were homemade. All of them said the same thing: I don’t know how to minimize your pain, but I do know you like it sweet and doughy.

There’s an ancient wisdom in this that predates language. The Greeks honored their gods with honey-sweetened cakes. Rousseau wrote about a princess who thought cake could solve anything. They were both circling the same truth: when words fail, sugar steps in.

I barely ate anything all last week. At one point, I couldn’t finish a single sushi roll. My body had shut that part of itself down — grief had locked the door, swallowed the key and convinced me I was full. But something about a friend showing up with a box, about opening the lid and smelling butter and sugar and someone else’s effort unlocked something. I found I had an appetite, not for a meal, but for life’s crumbly pleasures. Every bite was a small argument that sweetness still exists. Sweetness follows.

Touch

Two weeks before Barrett died, I bought tickets to “Every Brilliant Thing” starring Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway. The play explores depression, suicide, and hope through a list of “brilliant things” a child starts to cheer up their suicidal mother. It’s poignant, moving, and highly interactive. But the play is not my focus here. What I want to tell you about is the hug I received from Radcliffe himself.

Actually, let me back up for a second: The play opens with the narrator detailing his first interaction with death, the euthanasia of his pet dog. I lost my breath. It had only been twenty-four hours since I’d been through this myself. I came to the theater to escape my reality, not to have it narrated back to me from the stage. Obviously, I wanted to cry, but the three hundred people around me were not there to see me perform.

After the play, my niece and nephew, who were with me, convinced me to go to the stage door. My niece in particular is a big fan. We waited a while, but Radcliffe made his way through the crowd, signing, taking group selfies, taking his time with each person with a warmth that most politicians would kill for.

He got to me and something came over me. I told him about the opening of the play and about Barrett, and I got emotional. I surprised even myself. Radcliffe looked at me with deep empathy, pulled me in and hugged me. I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. That must have been painful for you, and then he thanked me for staying despite my sadness.The moment lasted maybe ten seconds. But inside it, I felt something unique — a deep, heartfelt humanity. Two strangers, arms around each other, one of them grieving and the other holding him up.

I got lucky. Not everyone gets hugged by Harry Potter on one of the worst weeks of their life. But here’s what I learned from those ten seconds: the hug mattered more than anything he could have said. Words require thought. A hug just requires two arms and maybe some squeezing. So if someone you know is grieving, don’t wait for the right words. You’ll never find them. Just open your arms. The person inside them will do the rest.

Sight

The texts started arriving before Barrett was gone. Some were long. Some were a single line. Some were from people I talk to every day and some were from people I hadn’t heard from in years.

One friend wrote: “I keep thinking maybe if I wait I’ll come up with a more sophisticated and eloquent text…but instead of searching for the “perfect” words, I just want you to know that I am thinking of all of you.”

I loved this message. Not despite its self-consciousness but because of it. She admitted she didn’t have the perfect words and then sent imperfect ones anyway. That’s what grief asks of the people around it. Not eloquence. Just presence. Just typing something into the void and pressing send even though you know it won’t be enough, because showing up insufficiently is infinitely better than not showing up at all.

No matter what you write, it will be remembered. The specifics might fade, but the gesture is tattooed on the soul.

But the eyes don’t just receive. They go looking.

I spent a lot of time last week scrolling through old social media posts, searching for pictures of Barrett, and what I discovered was that social media used to be social. Back then, my feed was full of friends. Actual friends with their kids, their dogs, their dinners, their vacations. Now I scroll through the same platforms and see almost nothing personal at all. It’s brands. Influencers. Celebrities. Sponsored content from people I’ve never met selling things I don’t need.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss the baby pictures. The first-day-of-school photos nobody asked for. The blurry snapshots of someone’s toddler eating spaghetti. We used to complain about those posts. Now I’d give anything to see one instead of another reel from a stranger performing their life for an audience.

Not everything you see nourishes you, but the texts did. Every clumsy, imperfect, I-don’t-know-what-to-say message reminded me I was being thought of. The feed didn’t. It reminded me that the platforms we built to stay connected have quietly replaced our friends with strangers.

If someone you love is hurting, don’t post about it. Text them. Write to them directly. Send them something only they would understand. The screen is the same either way — but one is a window and the other is a wall.

Scent

Every house has a scent. It’s a mix of your teenage boy’s colognes, the remaining ash in the fireplace, the waft of melted butter from last night’s cast iron pan. All of it culminates into something truly distinctive. A signature scent that can never be recreated or replicated.

Well, our house smells different now. I walk in and something’s missing that I can’t name. Not a bad smell, not a good smell…just a presence that’s gone. Barrett’s bed in the corner of the dining room. His water and food bowls by the fridge. The pungent and earthy smell of a dog that walked in from the rain. The specific warmth of a creature who lived in these rooms for eleven years since we moved in. That scent is fading and you can’t stop it and you didn’t think to memorize it.

It’s hard to articulate how different the air is. Maybe a perfumer could do it. But I can’t. I just know the air is wrong.

But my familiarity with the air is deep and true, because twice a day, I spend twenty minutes meditating, breathing through the nose, eyes closed. This is where I get my balance, my calm, my resolve. It’s twenty minutes with nothing but the air and whatever it’s carrying. And last week, for the first time in eleven years, it was carrying less.

Nevertheless, I breathe. Deeply. Deliberately. The air smells different now. It will for a while. But I keep breathing it in, because that’s what’s left to do: sit in a room that’s lost its weight, close my eyes, and fill my lungs with what remains.

So, in the end, Van der Kolk was right. The body does in fact keep the score. But what I learned firsthand through a week of music and pastries and hugs and texts and one fading scent is that the body also knows the way back. Not all at once. Not completely. But sense by sense, it remembers what living feels like. Listen to Elbow. Eat a pastry. Hug someone. Read a text. And breathe in deep. Or if given the opportunity, be there to facilitate any or all of the above. I would say it’s the least you can do, but in reality, for the recipient, it truly is the most.

When I write here, I’m usually writing to you. Even when the prose is reaching for something true, I’m aware of you on the other side of it. But today, you’ll have to forgive me. Today I’m not writing to you. Rather, I’m writing to Barrett, my dog of seventeen years, who left me last night. I ask that you sit with me anyway. Because you should know about the best friend I’ve ever had.You may learn something from a love that asked for nothing and gave everything anyway. You may learn what it’s like to be loved by something that never once misunderstood you.

Barrett, I remember when I first met you. I answered the door to my one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and there was your mom, holding you. It was Friday afternoon, just an hour or two before the Sabbath. I distinctly recall this because I was stressed enough as it was preparing for sundown without factoring the incorporation of a new animal into my home. You were small, black, frisky and full of heart-bursting energy. And despite Shana and I having already committed to a half year’s search for a pet, having one in theory is very different from having one in barky reality. We brought you that night to our friend’s apartment for Shabbat dinner which might not have been wise in retrospect. You seemed stressed and overwhelmed. You may have even pooped something green on our host’s floor. That Saturday night, we took you to the emergency room because Shana heard that one of Oprah’s dogs died after pooping green. In the end, you were fine. At the time, I truly had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into.

Barrett, if after a hundred and twenty years, I am on my deathbed and I think about the best moments in my life, so many of them were spent with you on our morning walks in Central Park. No matter the weather. No matter how late I had stayed out the night prior. We never missed our walk together. One of my favorite things about New York is how they allow for dogs to run off leash before 9 AM and boy, did we take advantage. I would let you go and you would always come back. Maybe you were attached to me. Maybe it was the treats in my fanny pack. But Barrett, as I write this, I can’t help but think that this time, when I let you go, you will not come back and I am devastated.

But those mornings...my goodness, those mornings. The way you would zip by and do laps around me like you had a subway to catch. We would call you “Black Lightning,” even though over time your fur turned grey. We met so many characters on those walks including an actual cast member of House, MD, and once, Kevin Bacon. We also made many friends that I still keep up with until this day. Those early morning walks were so special in ways I can’t properly articulate, the way I witnessed the seasons change in one of the most beautiful places in the world and the way you kept me company all the while. The foliage changing, the sun shining bright, the most frigid of mornings in which thermals (for me) and a puffer jacket (for you) were both necessary. The thing I noticed about these walks though is how I could spend forty-five minutes in the company of another without conversing. It was the comfort of having you by my side and me by yours that spoke a language beyond words.

We had you for a full year to ourselves. You were our “fur baby,” a nickname that sounds beyond cutesy and annoying to people who don’t have pets. But the relationship went beyond playfulness. You brought a deep awareness of the world around me in ways I hadn’t previously considered. It’s because of you, Barrett, that until this day I still donate monthly to the ASPCA and the Humane Society. It’s because of you, Barrett, that I still buy the way more expensive pasture-raised eggs and pasture-raised milk, to your mom’s annoyance. It’s because of you, dear boy, that my heart has opened wide like a canyon of empathy. Since having you in my life, the depth of my consciousness and my awareness of natural life is deep and acute. My love for you made me want to stand guard over every creature like you so that animals all around the world would feel that same level of protection and care. That’s how meaningfully we connected. That's how deeply you burrowed into my heart, like you would have dug a hole in the backyard in search of Earth's potential treasures.“ I became a different person with him,” my friend Adam texted me the other night about his deceased dog Poe, “I’m not the same without him.”

Eventually, we had our son, but you know this because you were there. We were so worried and nervous about this life change. After all, you had us both to yourself–what was it going to be like when we brought a tiny spotlight-stealing human into our home? Pet professionals all told us to return from the initial post-birth hospital visit with the baby’s diaper rag so you could first familiarize yourself with the scent. So when Steven eventually arrived, it would minimize threat levels from “wait wait wait what is going on here?” to “okay, this scent smells familiar…” I’ll be honest. I was worried. I heard some upsetting stories about dogs biting babies or leaping up in the mother’s arm in a primal moment of jealousy. But what was I thinking? How could I have doubted you? Since, in the last week or two, recognizing that this was your sunset era, nothing has walloped me more than the pictures of you and Steven together back then, him as a baby and you still relatively as a pup. It was like watching a real life Pixar short in which the curly red haired infant teetered his way through New York City but the pup by his side stood vigilant and determined, protecting him from imagined threats. Steven would eventually grow up and replace quality time with you for time spent on his phone, but I know you don’t take it personally. Your tail wagged whenever he walked into the room. You knew that he had changed but the love you felt for him never could.

Barrett, I want to pivot here from the reminiscences for a moment, if you’ll allow it. I find that I am so shattered by your loss that I am legitimately surprised by the intensity of it. You’ll recall that I lost my dad over twenty years back. I’m sure I’d mentioned it to you on one of our walks…and that tragic experience has permanently scarred me in a way that the hardened scab serves as a reminder of what I’d been through. To lose a father is one of life’s unfathomable cruelties, if not the cruelest. I had thought that by surviving it, I had been to the abyss and back. That by having comfort, safety and support shattered into a gazillion little pieces, the loss would make me stronger. I’m finding this to not be the case. I’m finding that this loss is embarrassingly raw. I’m almost mad at you for casting me back into a sorrowful sea, feeling the weight of my emotions as I try to swim toward the surface. And I’m confused by all of it. Confused by how I am not as resilient as I thought I was. Confused by how an animal could reacquaint me with a grief I thought I'd outgrown. Confused by the fact that this mourning, somehow, is its own thing, not a replay of the old one, but a new wound sitting next to the scar. An eventual scab. Then, one day, another scar.

I had written before of a Hawaiian tradition that I had learned about from the HBO Max series The Pitt. It’s a TV show, but that’s not important right now. Anyway, the tradition which I read a great deal more about since then feels rather appropriate here, my boy. The Hoʻoponopono, as it’s called, is made up of four phrases, and is the native way for clearing the air, or rather, a predetermined way to release negativity and to reach reconciliation. I want to say them to you now so please listen closely. The first one is “I am sorry.” I am sorry when I lose my temper. I am sorry when I didn’t give you the love you needed. I am sorry for allowing the stressors of my everyday to prevent me from seeing how pure and good and selfless you are. I am sorry because you are wonder. You are joy. You are a shooting star to wish upon.

“Please forgive me.” Barrett, I know you do. I never had to wait long for your forgiveness. In fact, I don’t think you’ve even been mad in the first place. I know I have seen you get frustrated when I cuddled with you too long (you were definitely not a lap dog) or when I would blow on your ear which is such a weird thing to get annoyed by, but you never got mad. Even when we had two more kids and time allotted to you got smaller and smaller. Even though our walks got shorter and shorter. Even though the time we spent together felt less like bonding and more like quick trips to the bathroom. Forgive me for not giving you more. Even though, to you, what you got was always enough. Because time, to you, was never measured in minutes and seconds, but as individual moments existing in the infinite.

Next in the Ho’oponopono is “thank you.” This one’s harder for me. Not because I’m not grateful, but because “thank you” feels so transactional. Like you did something for me expecting to be thanked. Like you’d wait for it if it didn’t come, clearing your throat, ahem-ing me until I remembered my manners. But you never did because you never wanted to be thanked. Not the way I want to be thanked. Not the way anyone in my life wants to be thanked. You were the only living thing in my proximity who didn’t keep score. But if gratitude is about expression, let me take this moment to thank you, friend. Weird songs pop up in my head during this time of grieving. I keep hearing Ariana Grande’s “Twilight Zone” weirdly even though this song is decidedly not about a pet dog (it’s about her ex Dalton Gomez, by the way). A more appropriate song playing in my mind’s jukebox, though, is Natalie Merchant’s “Kind & Generous”--definitely not winning cool points with this one–but when you’re in pain, you listen to words closely just in case they articulate feelings you’re still invoicing. Merchant sings, “You’ve been so kind and generous/ I don’t know how you keep on giving/ For your kindness I’m in debt to you/ And I never could have come this far without you.” I wonder if you would have liked this song. You seem preferential to Phil Collins.

Lastly, “I love you.” What else can I add to that? I love you, Barrett. I always will. I love you so much that I don’t want to stop writing this. Because when I stop, I’m afraid the pain will start to fade, and I don’t want it to. Not yet. And right now, I don’t know if I want to heal just yet. I want to be here in the rawness because that visceral acidity reminds me of you. It reminds me of the way you would often hop home like a rabbit, pouncing on your hind legs and dart into the kitchen as if you had important news to share. It reminds me of the way we would find you rubbing your face on the shag carpet like a baby seal because I guess it felt good…? It reminds me of the way you would always knock over your food bowl so you could eat the kibble directly from the ground. I don’t understand why you did any of these things but goddamnit, I love you for all of it. All seventeen years of it.

Barrett, you were the best friend I have ever had, and ever will have. And to call you my best friend is no slight to the humans in my life; it is simply the only way to describe a soul intrinsically connected to mine so completely. I’ll see you on the off-leash side, my sweet boy, running circles in the world beyond.

Escapism has a reputation problem.

Say the word out loud and listen to what it implies: fleeing. Avoiding. Checking out. The literary establishment has spent a century using “escapist” as a synonym for unserious. Genre fiction is escapist. Superhero movies are escapist. Anything that transports you somewhere more interesting than where you currently are is treated with suspicion, as though the act of leaving reality for a few hours is a moral failing rather than a basic human need.

As I’ve written beforehand, Tolkien pushed back on this. He pointed out that the only people who resent escape are jailers. But even Tolkien’s defense assumed the experience was solitary—one reader, one book, one private journey into Middle-earth.

But the thing is, escapism wasn’t always solitary. Going to the movies was a group activity by design. Reading was solitary, sure, but then you talked about the book—at dinner, at school, at the water cooler you keep eulogizing. The escape had a return trip, and the return trip was communal. You went somewhere alone and came back to tell people about it. Also, remember book clubs?

And then there was television—the hybrid. You watched it in your living room with your family, and you watched it at the same time as everyone else. Thursday night meant something. The next morning meant something. Twenty million people saw the same episode and arrived at work ready to process it together. Television was a private setting with shared timing, or intimacy at scale.

Now every show lives on a different app on a different device in a different room of the house. Movies stream on laptops under covers. Music lives inside individual earbuds connected to individual phones running individual playlists. Even the group activities got privatized. We go somewhere alone and stay there.

I know this because I live with three kids who prove it nightly. They just recently reached the age in which animated movies are for “babies.” They’ve aged out of Moana and Encanto and whatever Pixar is currently serving up. I wanted to take them to Hoppers and they said no. And for a while, I took that a little personally, another symptom of the Great Retreat into separate screens and separate rooms. But the problem wasn’t that my kids had stopped wanting to escape. The problem was that I’d forgotten escapism could be a destination you travel to together.

Over the past few weeks, three things reminded me of that. A manga adaptation so unhinged it became my daughters’ new obsession. A movie so vast it made us all feel like we were floating in space. And an album so ghostly it made me disappear entirely, alone, with headphones, for forty-seven minutes.

These aren’t recommendations. They're field notes from three escapes I took over the last week.

I am deeply, profoundly jealous of Eiichiro Oda’s mind.

Oda-San, as he’s referred to in his native Japan, is the creator of One Piece, the manga that’s been running since 1997 and has now been adapted into a live-action series on Netflix. I convinced my two daughters to watch it with me. They were initially very reluctant—a live-action adaptation of a 1,115 episode anime series adapted from a manga didn’t exactly scream “must-watch”—but by the end of the first season, we were all in.

One Piece operates on fever dream logic. The rules don’t make sense, but they feel right. There’s a villain named Mister Five who makes bombs from the boogers he picks from his nose. There’s a talking reindeer named Tony Tony Chopper who also happens to have a medical degree. The protagonist, Monkey D. Luffy, ate a Devil Fruit that turned his body into rubber, so he can stretch his limbs like taffy and bounce back from punches. There are pirates with swords, navigators who can predict weather patterns, a skeleton musician. Sometimes I can’t believe myself how much I enjoy this show.

What makes it work, despite the absurdity, is the deep sincerity embedded in the live action. One of my daughters teared up during Chopper’s highly tragic origin story episode. Not because it was manipulative, but because underneath all the zaniness, there’s real emotional heft. The show earns its sentiment by being so thoroughly committed to its own ridiculousness that the quiet moments land like ambushes.

What makes me jealous isn’t just that Oda-San created this world. It’s that he seems completely uninhibited in his thinking. Nothing is too weird. Nothing is out of the realm of plausibility within the logic he’s established. Every idea he has, he explores. He goes with it. He doesn’t self-censor. As adults, we tend to restrict ourselves. We’re constantly thinking about how others will receive an idea before we’ve even finished having it. Will this land? Is this too much? Will people think this is stupid? We edit before we create. We optimize before we explore.

Oda-San seems to have built a world entirely unconstrained by that instinct. He’s tapped into the same resource that fuels childlike imagination, the place where a talking reindeer doctor makes perfect sense because of course there’s a talking reindeer doctor. I’d love to visit that creative place but I have to pay a mortgage and take out the recycling.

Here’s what struck me about watching it with my daughters, the thing I didn’t expect: One Piece isn’t just an escape. It’s an escape that insists on company.

Luffy can’t do anything alone. That’s the whole point. He’s not a lone hero; he’s a captain building a crew called the Straw Hat Pirates which includes Sanji, Nami, Usopp, my daughters’ crush Roronoa Zoro. They also happen to be uncompromisingly loyal to each other absolutely. They believe in their dream because they believe in it together. There’s no irony, no cynicism. Just optimism and determination and friendship that would be unbearable if it weren’t so completely earned.

Watching characters operate with that level of earnestness felt like a gift. But the real gift was what happened around the television. My daughters started arguing about which crew member they’d want to be. They developed theories about what would happen next. They crush on Zoro, hard. We all went somewhere strange together and kept going back.

Oda-San doesn’t just imagine freely. He imagines generously. He builds worlds big enough for other people to live in. That’s the difference between escapism as retreat and escapism as invitation. One Piece isn’t a place you go to hide. It’s a place you go to find your crew.

In an interview this week with The Big Picture podcast host Sean Fennessey, Steven Spielberg was talking about movie theaters. He said, “We’re all together. We don’t all know one another. But when we’re all watching something together, there’s a collective impulse that only happens in full movie theaters. We congregate as strangers, but at the end of a really good movie, we’re all united. There’s nothing like that.”

He’s right. And he would know. After all, Spielberg spent fifty years engineering exactly that experience. Jaws was the invention of the summer blockbuster, which was essentially the invention of everyone in the same room at the same time watching the same shark. When he describes strangers becoming united, he’s describing the machine he built.

Two nights before I finished the book it’s adapted from, I took all three kids to see Project Hail Mary. We sat five rows back, close enough that the Dolby screen blanketed over us, close enough that at times it felt like we too were floating in space. There were moments where it felt like we were close enough to touch the stars.

The premise: Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. Slowly, he realizes he’s humanity’s last hope sent on a desperate mission to save Earth from extinction. The story is part mystery, part science thriller, part unlikely friendship with an alien named Rocky. It’s optimistic and earnest and crowd-pleasing in the best way.

Here’s the beautiful paradox: the movie is about maximum isolation—one man alone in space, farther from other humans than anyone has ever been—and yet it’s the most communal experience I’ve had all year. Grace is alone, but we weren’t. My kids and I sat in a dark room with two hundred strangers and had the experience Spielberg was describing. The screen was so big and we were so close that there was no room for distraction. No one reached for a phone. No one checked a notification.

The movie is hopelessly old school in its ambition to connect with people of all ages. There’s no cynicism. No winking at the audience. No metacommentary about the genre it’s operating in. It just wants you to care about Ryland Grace and his mission and his friendship with Rocky, an alien who communicates through musical notes. And because a theater full of strangers all decided to care at the same time, the caring became contagious. Spielberg’s collective impulse, happening in real time.

But what I’ll remember most isn’t the plot or the spectacle. It’s the smaller things. Hands held during the tense sequences. Science questions whispered and answered (we whispered, of course—we’re not animals). My kids cried at all the right cues. They’d kill me if they knew I told you this, but they did. All three of them.

That’s what I mean by the return trip. We drove home and talked about the movie for a while. About whether they’d go to space if they knew they couldn’t come back. About whether Rocky was brave or just loyal or if those are the same thing. About what they’d miss most about Earth.

We’d gone somewhere. A spaceship hurtling toward an alien star. And then we came back and couldn’t stop telling each other about it, even though we’d all been there together. The four of us amongst the stars, seated in the dark.

James Blake’s latest albumTrying Times, his seventh, has been on repeat in my office for weeks.

Not because it demands attention; Blake’s music rarely does. It exists in the background, and I meant that as a compliment, creating atmosphere rather than narrative. It’s calming enough to zone out to, interesting enough to pull you somewhere else. Somewhere you can’t quite name but somehow recognize.

Blake records the sort of music a ghost would compose if it were trying to seduce you. His signature croon sounds like it’s coming from underwater, or from the next room, or from somewhere in the ether trying to reach you. My youngest heard it once and dismissed it as “spooky.” She wasn’t wrong. Blake’s music is made for ghost hunters, or those of us who want to feel a presence in the room, something just outside our peripheral vision.

But Trying Times feels like Blake fully realized as a band rather than as a solitary voice. “Make Something Up” is the standout track for me. It's the songwriter less dependent on the croon and more invested in something fuller, like a pop-infused, earnest, almost joyful. There’s a fullness to it that earlier Blake albums sometimes avoided.

Then there’s “Didn’t Come To Argue,” which sounds like a swooning love song playing out of dystopian speakers until Monica Martin joins in toward the end and the song suddenly becomes blippy resolve. It shifts. The atmosphere changes. You’re in Springtime now.

And “Rest of Your Life” initially sounds like an echo from the afterlife before progressing into a cathartic, flashing-lights club track. The lyrics loop obsessively, “where are you gonna spend it, where are you gonna end it,” before resolving into a plea: “spend it all with me.” It’s ghost music that suddenly becomes embodied, present, urgent.

Now here’s the part where I break with my own thesis.

This wasn’t a group experience. My kids heard Blake and moved on. I sat in my office, alone, with my headphones, and disappeared for forty-seven minutes. In fact, I listened to it on repeat while writing this column. Exactly the kind of solitary retreat I’ve spent this entire essay arguing against.

But I don’t think that contradicts the argument. I think it completes it.

Because the escape was solitary. The return trip isn’t. You’re reading it right now. I went somewhere by myself, into Blake’s spectral, gorgeous landscape, and I came back and I’m telling you about it. That’s what the water cooler was for. That’s what this is for. The escape doesn’t have to be communal for the experience to become communal. It just needs a return trip.

There’s a strange synchronicity between the album closer “Just A Little Higher” and Project Hail Mary. Blake’s falsetto pleads just a little higher until, at the end of the song, he tenderly sings from a great height. It could have been the closing credits for Ryland Grace’s journey into space—both reaching for something beyond where we are, both trying to get a little farther from where we started.

One Piece goes sideways into the fever dream, into the Grand Line, into Oda’s impossible imagination. Project Hail Mary goes up into space, into the dark, into the unknown. James Blake goes inward into the ether, into the ghost frequency, into the private landscape of headphones and closed eyes.

Three escapes. Three distances from other people. But each one had a return trip. My daughters and I came back from the Grand Line and talked about it over dinner. My family came back from space and talked about it in the car. And I came back from James Blake’s haunted atmosphere and I’m talking about it right now, with you.

The escape isn’t the point. Coming back is the point. Coming back and having someone to tell about where you’ve been. My kids will retreat to their rooms. I’ll retreat to mine. We’ll all go somewhere alone for a while. That’s inevitable, and I’ve stopped thinking of it as a failure.

But the best escapes, or the ones that actually matter are the ones that make you want to come back. The ones that give you something worth carrying home. The ones where, even if you went by yourself, you return with the overwhelming need to grab someone by the shoulders and say: you have to see this. You have to hear this. Let me tell you where I just was.

That’s what I want more of. Not the escape, necessarily. But the return, whether you come back on a pirate ship, a spaceship, or follow a haunting vocal home.

You know what makes for truly compelling television in 2026? Not gargantuan monsters fighting in Tokyo. Not epic sword battles. Not prestige dramas about morally complex antiheroes doing morally complex things while giving morally complex looks.

It’s watching people do their jobs well.

As it turns out, watching a high-functioning gearbox in motion is riveting. There’s something transcendent in witnessing a workplace operate functionally and effectively. (Which perhaps makes The Office such an impossible, visceral cringe-watch for me.)

Right now, no show depicts competence as competently as Max’s The Pitt. The series, midway through its second season, follows an emergency room shift in Pittsburgh through a 15-episode arc—each episode representing one hour of a single shift. Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch at the center of it all.

The premise is deceptively simple: Someone comes in having accidentally glued her eye shut, and they fix it. Someone else comes in with terminal cancer and they don’t “fix” it, but they provide optimal conditions and consistent pain management. Dr. Robby and his staff—like Katherine LaNasa’s Nurse Dana Evans, who anticipates crises before they arrive—simply do their jobs. They don’t perform; they function. They admit when they don’t know something and call for a consult. In an era of constant institutional friction, watching people ask the right questions feels like a superpower.

The writing isn’t particularly brilliant. The performances aren’t revelatory, even though Wyle and a LaNasa both won Emmys. I’m not desperate to know what happens next or invested in anyone’s personal drama. I keep watching because the doctors know what they’re doing.

That’s it. That’s the whole appeal. Competence.

Meanwhile, the world’s most famous male popstar released an album last week called Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally. I’ve always wondered about Harry Styles’s popularity, and with every consecutive release, I continue to wonder. If someone created an “Inoffensive Playlist” on Spotify, Styles would be the marquee image. Yet the man is playing 30 nights at Madison Square Garden beginning August 26th, so obviously he has a fanbase. He even fares relatively well with critics, who hold back the barbed bat for softer blows. The Guardian, for example, gave the new album three stars and called it “muted, subtle, and pleasant.” The New York Times wrote that “those straining too hard to find the substance in Styles’s music should keep in mind the joys of his surname.”

But then I thought about the baseline. Styles makes vocationally sound pop music. He’s not reinventing the wheel; he’s just delivering well-crafted songs that don’t demand much from you. “Muted, subtle, and pleasant” isn’t an insult—it’s an accurate description of exactly what he’s trying to do. His music is what he unintentionally self-proclaimed in a song title from his prior album: “Music for a Sushi Restaurant.” And it makes sense–do you want to hear provocative music playing in an establishment serving raw fish?

There is, of course, a sliding scale for this. When a pop star is merely “competent,” the stakes are low; the worst-case scenario is a boring car ride. We can live with that. But the comfort of competence evaporates when you realize it’s no longer the baseline for the things that actually keep the world spinning. In art, competence is a choice. In governance, it’s a life-support system. And when you look up from your phone, past the curated playlists and the medical procedurals, you realize we are living through a catastrophic failure of the baseline.

There’s a reason we’re drawn to competence right now, even the unremarkable kind. We’re living through a moment where it’s genuinely hard to tell what’s actually happening. Is there a war with Iran? Is there not? The news cycles through contradictory TikToks and conflicting “official” statements so quickly that the truth doesn’t just feel hidden; it feels irrelevant.

When the government doesn’t inspire confidence, you can’t assess whether what they’re doing is necessary or reckless. You’re left with confusion instead of clarity. And confusion is exhausting in ways that even bad news isn’t, because at least bad news gives you something to react to. The West Wing used to be fantasy. Now it’s science fiction. The idea of an administration—people who know what they’re doing, who can explain their reasoning—feels as distant as lightsabers and time travel.

Last week, President Trump fired his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after what one adviser described as her burning through “a ton of goodwill.” Another said simply: “It was everywhere. It was everything.”

Here’s what “everywhere” and “everything” meant:

“Everywhere” meant $270 million of immigration enforcement funds spent on luxury Gulfstream jets with onboard bars. “Everything” meant a disaster in Minneapolis where federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens during a botched raid. It was the mismanagement of FEMA funds, the refusal to show up for congressional hearings, and $200 million spent on self-promotional ads featuring Noem herself on a horse while the Department was effectively shut down during an international crisis.

This is what incompetence looks like at scale. Not just failing to do the job well, but failing to understand what the job actually is. Spending deportation money on luxury aircraft. Shooting citizens during immigration raids. Promoting yourself while disaster victims wait for relief. Leaving homeland security unfunded during an international crisis.

There’s a term for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s the cognitive bias where people with low ability in a specific area give overly positive assessments of that ability. Noem was incompetent enough that she couldn’t recognize her own incompetence. She thought the luxury jets were justified. She thought the self-promotional ads were good leadership. She lacked the metacognitive awareness to see how badly she was failing.

Here’s the cruel irony of Dunning-Kruger: the people most confident in their abilities are often the least skilled. Which means the inverse is also true. The people who constantly doubt whether they’re doing it right? They’re probably the ones who actually are.

I think about this a lot as a parent.

There is an endless, digital line of people waiting to tell me I’m failing. Another expert with a master’s degree in “Gentle Correction.” Another Instagram infographic explaining why the way I just handled a tantrum is actually a core memory of trauma. I live in a state of perpetual, suboptimal guilt.

But if Dunning-Kruger holds true, the truly dangerous parents aren’t the ones lying awake at 2:00 AM wondering if they’ve permanently stunted their child’s emotional growth because they let them watch forty minutes of Bluey so they could finish a deadline. The dangerous ones are the ones who think they’re “crushing it.” They have no check-engine light. They are the Kristi Noems of the playground—confident, loud, and fundamentally unaware of the damage in their wake.

So my anxiety might actually be a good sign. Which is either comforting or deeply depressing depending on how you look at it.

This same anxiety is now the defining feature of our professional lives. For decades, being a “competent professional” meant being a reliable engine of output. You were good at your job if you could produce the brief, the deck, or the code faster and cleaner than the person in the next cubicle.

But in 2026, output has been commodified. If the goal is just “more stuff,” the machines have already won. The landscape has shifted from production to stewardship. Being invaluable in today’s market isn’t about how much you can do; it’s about how much you can save—saving a project from a hallucinated fact, saving a client from a tone-deaf strategy, or saving a team from a path that looks efficient on a spreadsheet but is disastrous in reality.

We’ve moved from an economy of “Doers” to an economy of “Assessors.” The doctors on The Pitt aren’t portrayed as infallible geniuses; they are portrayed as master assessors. They consult, they second-guess, and they call for backup when a case is beyond their expertise. That is professional competence in the age of automation: not having all the answers, but knowing exactly which questions will expose the wrong ones.

Being “useful” used to mean you were a tool. Now, being “invaluable” means you are the one holding the tool, constantly checking its calibration, and knowing when to put it down and rely on your own eyes.

This brings us to the fundamental gap between human competence and AI capability. People like to say that AI can’t replace human creativity because we have souls. It’s a comforting thought, but it’s too vague to be useful.

At the bottom of every response an AI generates, there is a disclaimer: “AI can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.” That disclaimer exists because AI lacks metacognitive awareness. AI is Dunning-Kruger rendered in silicon; it will describe the taste of a sunset with total, unearned confidence, lacking the “wait, is that right?” reflex that keeps a human doctor from prescribing the wrong dose.

That’s what separates human competence from AI capability. Not creativity. Not soul. Metacognition.

A competent human knows when to double-check their work. When to ask for help. When they’re in over their head. They can assess the gap between their skill level and the task at hand. AI can’t do that. It just generates with confidence regardless of accuracy.

Which brings us back to Dunning-Kruger. AI is the ultimate example of low ability combined with high confidence. Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT all produce responses without the metacognitive awareness to know if they’re any good.

Human competence—real competence—requires knowing what you don’t know.

So what makes us human in an age of AI? Not soul—that’s too ambiguous, too easy to claim but impossible to prove. But competence? That’s measurable. That’s real.

Except here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI will eventually get better at competence too. The metacognitive gap will narrow. The disclaimers will become less necessary. The machines will learn to assess their own outputs, to know when to ask for help, to recognize their limitations.

But there’s one thing that might remain distinctly human: the anxiety. The self-doubt. The lying awake at 2 AM wondering if you’re doing it right. That gnawing feeling that maybe you should have done it differently, asked more questions, tried harder.

AI doesn’t lose sleep over its mistakes. It doesn’t wonder if it’s good enough. It doesn’t carry the weight of wanting to do better.

And that weight—as exhausting as it is, as uncomfortable as it makes us—might be the thing that keeps us striving for competence in the first place. Not because we’re confident we can achieve it, but because we’re terrified we won’t.

And right now, in a world run by people who lack even basic competence and machines that simulate it without understanding it, that quiet, anxious striving feels like something worth holding onto.

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A few years ago, everyone had an opinion about U2. You either loved them or found them insufferable. There was passion on both sides, even if that passion was negative. But in 2026, what I had long suspected seems to have come true. The unforgettable fire has faded. Ask any nearby Gen Z’er and chances are they would have no opinion of them at all. An entire generation has grown up completely unaware of their existence, unable to formulate a take because they’ve never been given a reason to care. And also because Bono is, like, really old.

For the once-biggest band in the world—a band that dominated MTV, sold out stadiums, won 22 Grammys, and shaped the sound of rock music for two decades—that cultural invisibility must be devastating. Because of all the reactions a rock band might fear—boos, walkouts, critical savaging—the shrug is the cruelest.

Last week, U2 released a new EP called Days of Ash. Five songs about Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, immigration and, well, love. The Guardian gave it four stars. Personally, I don’t care much for it. And that failure—not just of the EP, but of my ability to connect with a band that once meant everything to me—is probably worth examining. Besides, what else am I going to do with my time?

When I first discovered U2, they were taking over the world. The Joshua Tree wasn’t just everywhere. It was the cultural moment of 1987. They dominated MTV with that iconic video shot in downtown Vegas; they filled stadiums; critics took them seriously. They were on the cover of Time, which, kids, was a magazine, or a booklet of paper with pictures in it. Even people who didn’t particularly like rock music knew who U2 was and understood why they mattered. This was before Bono became a meme, before the free iTunes album debacle, before we all learned to reflexively roll our eyes at their earnestness.

There used to be a time when if you asked me who my favorite band was, I wouldn’t hesitate. U2. Without question. But somewhere along the way, that certainty evaporated. Not suddenly, but gradually, the way you stop calling an old friend until one day you realize you can’t remember the last time you spoke.

But first, let’s go back. I heard “With or Without You” as a kid and it devastated me. Something awakened in me that I was only slowly learning to articulate. This wasn’t just music. It felt deeper, more urgent, more spiritual than anything else on the radio. For me, lacking wider references, it sounded like synagogue distilled into a four-minute-and-fifty-six-second rock ballad. The Edge’s infinite guitar delay didn’t sound like an effect; it sounded like a prayer echoing off high ceilings. U2 seemed to understand something the rest of mainstream music didn’t. They weren’t just making songs. They were channeling an otherworldliness.

When Achtung Baby, their seventh album, dropped in 1991, it fundamentally changed what I thought a band could do. After spending the late ‘80s as the world’s most sincere rock band, they showed up in bedazzled leather pants and comically large sunglasses, dripping with irony and reinvention. “Zoo Station,” the album’s first track, opened with industrial noise and Bono, or rather, MacPhisto growling “I’m ready for the laughing gas.” This was not the same band that made "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The Joshua Tree had been uprooted.

Achtung Baby is still my favorite album of all time. Partially because my dad, rest his soul, purchased it for me while I was in school and surprised me at pick-up with the CD in one of those cardboard longboxes. I remember the oversized vertical art that made a tiny plastic disc feel like a grand monument. That CD represented a bridge between my childhood sincerity and a new, darker world I was entering. Laugh all you want, but putting out “The Fly” as your first single definitely stressed a conference room of record executives. It was a deliberate act of sabotage against their own brand.

They doubled down with Zooropa two years later, even weirder, even more experimental, proof they weren’t interested in retreating to safety. I stuck with them through all of it. I even enjoyed Pop, the album that alienated most of their fanbase by leaning into electronic music and ironic detachment. In retrospect, the commercial failure of Pop was the beginning of the end. Not because it failed, but because they never forgave themselves for, of all things, that giant mechanical lemon.

The cruelest irony in all of this is that U2 saw it coming. In 1997, they launched the PopMart tour, a massive, satirical spectacle designed to mock consumerism, corporate excess, and the commodification of rock and roll. They built a 100-foot golden arch modeled after McDonald’s. They performed in front of a 165-foot LED screen showing consumer imagery and corporate logos. They emerged from the aforementioned giant mechanical lemon. The entire aesthetic was a critique of late-stage capitalism and the way entertainment had become product, spectacle had replaced substance, and everything, including rebellion, could be packaged and sold.

I saw that tour twice. I took photos with an analog camera, maybe a disposable, of the stage, the golden arch, the absurd spectacle of it all. To this day, I have envelopes filled with those photos. The lighting is terrible. Half of them are out of focus. Physical photographs, printed on paper, stored in my house. That’s how much I wanted to capture those nights. That’s how much it mattered to me. The tour was meant to be ironic. A warning. A giant middle finger to the very idea of rock and roll as commodity.

But when the album flopped commercially, they retreated. 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind was their apology tour. “Beautiful Day” was them saying, “Don’t worry, we’re still the band you loved.” And it worked—commercially, critically, it was a massive success. But the retreat marked the end of U2 as risk-takers. From that point forward, every album would be an attempt to recapture past glory rather than create something new. Every collaboration would be a hedge against irrelevance. Every production choice would be calculated for maximum palatability which isn’t a word that a rock band should have on its vision board.

The real shift happened gradually, the way most betrayals do—not in a single catastrophic moment but in a series of small compromises. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) has exactly four great songs: “City of Blinding Lights,” “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” “Original of the Species,” and “Vertigo”—though the latter starts with a middle-aged Irish guy counting down in Spanish and was most likely introduced at concerts as their attempt to “reclaim rock and roll!” (a sentiment they’d sadly recycle with “Get On Your Boots” five years later).

But the real cringe moment is in “Miracle Drug,” when Bono sings: “Freedom has a scent / Like the top of a newborn baby’s head.” Chuck Klosterman was in Bono’s Maserati when he first heard this song in 2004, and watched Bono turn up the volume specifically for these lines, calling them “the best on the album.” That level of self-conviction would be charming if the line was actually good. Instead, it’s the moment you realize Bono can no longer tell the difference between profundity and greeting card sentiment. This is Bono at his hokiest, his most convinced that sincerity turned up loud enough equals depth. The golden arch wasn’t a joke anymore; it was a blueprint.

And here’s the pattern that’s emerged: every album since All That You Can’t Leave Behind has four or five genuinely good tracks. U2 hasn’t lost the ability to write songs. But they’ve lost the ability to sustain an album. Every release since 2000 peters out on the B-side. Even Pop—the commercial disappointment—had “Gone” and “Please” as modest hits on the second half. Since then? Nothing. The stamina is gone. The focus is gone. They front-load the good songs and mail in the rest.

There's another tell: the overuse of the word "song" itself. 2014's Songs of Innocence. 2017's Songs of Experience. 2023's Songs of Surrender. Then there's "Song for Someone" on Innocence, and "Song of the Future" now on the new EP. When your album titles and song titles are all variations on the word "song," you're not creating anymore—you're meta-commentating on the act of songwriting. Maybe there's a thematic reason for it. Maybe it's intentional. But a band desperately trying to prove their relevance should work harder than recycling the same word across three album titles and multiple song titles.

When it comes to music, you can either focus on commercialism or artistry. You can’t commit to both in the way a man would have two girlfriends and tell them both they’re the one that matters. Eventually, you have to choose. And the choice you make defines everything that follows.

And just so I’m being clear here: this isn’t about U2 suddenly having nothing to say. I admire Bono, Edge, Larry, and Adam for consistently being moderate in their opinions, for never descending into the performative outrage that defines so much celebrity activism. The problem isn’t their convictions. The problem is the intentional shift they’ve made in how they express those convictions, a shift that demeans their own urgency.

U2 began to suffer from a different kind of anxiety. They didn’t want to be “who was there”; they wanted to be “who was next.” In interviews around No Line on the Horizon, Bono admitted they brought in hitmakers like OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder because “pop songwriters were focusing on superior melody.” This is the band that wrote “With or Without You” and “One.” They decided they needed to hire someone to teach them how to do the thing they’d been doing better than almost anyone for thirty years.

Why? Not because they wanted to grow artistically, but because they wanted a hit. They wanted to stay on the radio. They chose to let commercialism drive the artistry instead of letting artistry drive the commercialism. Aside from Tedder, they looked for youthfulness through producer Danger Mouse. They cross-pollinated with Kendrick Lamar on two songs. Bono even appeared as an animated lion in a karaoke movie. These weren't collaborations; they were focus groups. And it worked, sort of. They stayed visible. They filled stadiums. But something essential was gone. U2 became the band that still hasn't found what it's looking for, but apparently, they'd prefer to keep searching in a boardroom rather than a rehearsal space.

Now, let’s get back to Days of Ash.

“American Obituary” begins the EP with good intentions and clunky execution. It memorializes Renee Nicole Good, shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis. But then Bono starts singing: “930 Minneapolis / To desecrate domestic bliss / Three bullets blast, three babies kissed / Renee, the domestic terrorist??” The rhyme scheme trips over itself. The wordplay feels forced—”domestic bliss” and “domestic terrorist” doing heavy lifting that the melody can’t support. Then comes: “The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” It’s a bumper sticker. It’s what you’d write if you were trying to sound inspiring without actually saying anything specific or challenging.

When Bono sings “Seventh day January,” it echoes his line from “Pride (In the Name of Love)”: “Early morning, April 4 / Shot rings out in the Memphis sky.” Both songs commemorate tragedies. But “Pride” soared. It turned MLK’s assassination into something transcendent—not by explaining it, but by feeling it, by capturing the spiritual weight of the moment in a way that made you understand what was lost.

“American Obituary” just sounds like familiar retreads. The guitar work echoes “Elevation”—that same urgent chug, that same sense of forward momentum that worked in 2001 but now feels like muscle memory. Worse, you can hear the calculation: these are the issues we should address, this is how a protest song should sound, this is what will earn us respect again. This isn’t about desperation. U2 are millionaires several times over. They don’t need hits. What this is about is disingenuity, the fatal difference between making music as product and making music as expression.

And that’s what makes Days of Ash such a revealing failure. The band wants it to be passionate. But it sounds like armchair advocacy. Social media posts set to music. The kind of activism you perform because it’s expected of you, not because you can’t not say something. And I haven’t even mentioned the Ed Sheeran duet at the end but you probably know enough about it just by hearing that it’s an Ed Sheeran duet.

Here’s the brutal truth: no one under 40 cares about this EP. Not because they disagree with the politics. Not because they don’t care about these issues. But because U2 has squandered their goodwill over two decades of mediocrity.

It’s like the boy who cried wolf, except instead of crying wolf, the boy spent twenty years forcing his music onto your iPhone. And now that there’s an actual wolf—real issues, real urgency, real pain—the villagers have all moved on. Days of Ash might be the most sincere thing U2 has made in years. The tragedy is they’ve earned their irrelevance so thoroughly that it doesn’t matter.

I should have grown with this band. We should have aged together, gotten more complicated together. Instead, we grew apart. They went one direction and I went another, toward artists who still trust that artistry matters more than commerce.

But I still have those envelopes of photos from PopMart. Blurry images of a band brave enough to mock what they might become. They saw it coming. They understood the danger perfectly. And then they became it anyway.

The tragedy isn’t that U2 got old. The tragedy is that they forgot what made them young: the belief that taking risks mattered more than playing it safe. I still believe that. I just wish they did. They became the product they once mocked. They became the Brand™. They became the spectacle without the substance. They became the thing PopMart was designed to warn us about.

Somewhere between the desert of The Joshua Tree and the golden arch of PopMart, they lost their way. They're still trying to find those streets with no name—the place where art matters more than brand, where risk trumps calculation, where the music comes first. But you can't find your way back to a place you've deliberately abandoned. They once sang about tearing down the walls that held them inside. Now they're building them higher, brick by brick, to keep themselves confined. Days of Ash isn't just the title of their new EP. It's what's left after you burn down everything that made you matter.

Billie Eilish stood on the Grammy stage accepting the award for Song of the Year for “Wildflower.” The room was full of people who’d spent the evening celebrating music—Sabrina, Kendrick, Chappell, Addison and Bieber in his boxers. When it was Eilish’s turn to speak, she said what felt, in that moment, like the right thing to say.

“I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything, but no one is illegal on stolen land,” Eilish began. “It’s really hard to know what to say and what to do right now. I feel really hopeful in this room and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting. Our voices really do matter and the people matter.”

Then the broadcast bleeped out what came next, though anyone watching could read her lips, and, well, because this is a family Substack, the pop singer was not suggesting the American people make sweet, tender love to ICE agents.

The room applauded. Her brother Finneas stood beside her. The moment was intended to read as significant.

The backlash was immediate. Businessman Kevin O’Leary called it out. A spokesperson for the Tongva tribe—on whose ancestral land Eilish’s home actually sits—offered a pointed clarification: they appreciated the sentiment, but Eilish had never reached out to them directly. Mark Ruffalo jumped to her defense, telling O’Leary to “STFU” and praising Eilish for “saying something that resonates with 100’s of millions of people the world over.” Finneas lashed out at critics by invoking the Epstein files.

The people who agreed with Eilish cheered. The people who didn’t had fresh ammunition. ICE continued operating. Nothing changed.

Class, this is how celebrity activism works now: loud, heartfelt in the moment, and ultimately without consequence. Say the thing, get the applause, watch the news cycle move on.

But there’s another way to do this. Bad Bunny showed us at the Super Bowl.

The Puerto Rican rapper emerged at Levi’s Stadium in head-to-toe white Zara—not Gucci, not Schiaparelli (who’d literally created their first menswear collection just to dress him at the Grammys the week before), but Zara. A custom faux football jersey bore his family name, Ocasio, and the number 64. Spotless chinos. Cream Adidas sneakers. He looked like an everyman who’d gotten very, very good at dressing himself.

The stage behind him was a miniature Borikén (bo-ree-ken). A pink casita (kuh-see-tah). A piragua stand. Backup dancers in traditional jíbaro regalia—all-white clothes topped with pava hats. Toñitas (toe-nye-tah), the legendary Nuyorican (newyorican) matriarch, behind a bar. Bad Bunny opened with “Tití Me Preguntó,” football in hand, and spent the next thirteen minutes proving that you don’t need to say the thing when you can simply assert your culture with such joy that even your enemies have nothing to weaponize.

I’ll confess: I had to Google almost every other word to understand what I was watching. Piragua? Shaved ice. Jíbaro? Puerto Rican farmers. Pava? The straw hat. Toñitas? A real person who runs a legendary Williamsburg bar. This is embarrassing for someone as culturally curious as I claim to be—and writing about it three days later feels a little like Wednesday morning quarterbacking. The hot takes have been taken. The think pieces have been thought. But my reaction was visceral enough that I couldn’t shake it. It kept rattling around in my head long after the confetti settled. So here we are.

But here’s what struck me: I didn’t need to understand every reference to feel what he was communicating. The performance wasn’t a translation. It was an assertion.

He perreo’d through his set, and at one point, during “MONACO,” looked into the camera and said, in Spanish, “I never stopped believing in myself, so maybe you should believe in yourself.” No lecture. No call to action. Just an invitation.

And then: a wedding.

A real couple—whose names we still don’t know—stood on stage. They’d invited Bad Bunny to their wedding. He’d invited them to the Super Bowl instead. While Lady Gaga emerged in a blue Luar flamenco dress to sing “Die With a Smile,” the couple kissed. Bad Bunny signed their marriage certificate. They cut a three-tier cake. The world watched two people get married while a Puerto Rican artist danced in the background, and somehow this felt more radical than any slogan ever could.

And none of it—not Ricky Martin’s trembling anti-colonial cameo, not the telephone poles representing an island that still loses power, or the sugar cane evoking centuries of colonial extraction—felt like a lecture. It felt like a party.

Bad Bunny closed with “DtMF,” and shouted “God bless America” while waving the Puerto Rican flag. Dancers held flags from every country in the Americas. Bunny held up a football stamped with “Together We Are America” and spiked it at the goal line. “Puerto Rico, we’re still here,” he said in his native tongue.

The jumbotron displayed the final message: “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love.”

Donald Trump hated it. Called it “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Complained that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” But he had nothing specific to attack. No soundbite. No slogan. Just a Puerto Rican artist performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl, building a miniature version of his homeland, marrying a couple, and dancing with so much joy that even fury had nowhere to land.

Conservative group Turning Point USA had planned a counter-halftime show: Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, a guitar solo of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and—according to their supporter poll—a preference for “anything in English.” Four million people streamed it on YouTube. It became a punchline.

Compare this year’s halftime event to last year’s Super Bowl featuring Kendrick Lamar. In many ways, Kendrick was doing exactly what Bunny did: he was planting a flag for his city, turning the world’s biggest stage into a masterclass in Compton history. It was technically flawless and culturally dense. But where Bad Bunny’s performance felt like an invitation to join a party, Kendrick’s felt like a closing of the ranks. He used that massive, universal platform to continue a localized, surgical beef with Drake—settling scores and litigating grievances. It was an assertion of power, sure, but it was an assertion rooted in ‘us vs. them.’ It felt small not because of the talent, but because the spirit was corrective rather than celebratory.

Bad Bunny took the high road. He could have used his thirteen minutes to attack Trump directly, to call out ICE by name, to turn the Super Bowl into a political rally. Instead, he threw a party. He celebrated his culture so loudly and joyfully that the politics became embedded in the performance itself rather than announced through it.

Even Lady Gaga’s appearance—which felt slightly shoehorned in, like a tourist speaking the native language with an American accent—couldn’t detract from what Bad Bunny understood: joy is harder to dismiss than anger. You can ignore a lecture. You can’t ignore a wedding.

At some point in the last decade, fandom became contingent on political positions. We stopped asking “Is the art good?” and started asking “Is the artist on the right side?”

Thom Yorke knows this better than anyone.

In 2017, Radiohead played Tel Aviv despite pressure from the BDS movement and artists like Roger Waters. Yorke defended the decision, calling the boycott “patronising” and “offensive,” arguing that playing in a country doesn’t equal endorsing its government. It was a principled stance: artists shouldn’t be forced to perform their politics.

Then, in 2024, a protester at Yorke’s solo show in Melbourne started shouting about “dead children.” Yorke snapped back—”come up here and say that”—and briefly left the stage. By 2025, he’d reversed his position entirely, saying he would “absolutely not” play Israel again and calling Netanyahu’s administration “extremists.”

Was this genuine evolution or coercion? Does it matter? The point is that we’ve created a culture where artists can’t just make art. They have to issue statements. Take sides. Submit to purity tests. And if they don’t, we’ll heckle them until they do. Some artists get pushed. Others, bafflingly, volunteer.

Nobody Ruffalos my feathers quite like Mark Ruffalo—and longtime readers of this Substack know this isn’t our first rodeo with the Hulk’s political alter ego. He’s passionate about Palestine, global warming, Trump, antiwar advocacy, basically everything a person can be passionate about while still maintaining a successful acting career. Which would be fine, except for one glaring detail: his last three projects have him playing cops. Now You See Me 3. Task. Crime 101. The man advocates against state violence while literally portraying agents of the state. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a nightstick.

Then there’s Primal Scream.

Last December, the Scottish indie band performed at London’s Roundhouse and screened a video during “Swastika Eyes” that showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face with a Star of David entwined with a swastika in his eyes. The slogans “stop genocide” and “free Palestine” flashed across the screen. The venue apologized. The Community Security Trust reported them to police. Primal Scream defended it as “a piece of art” that “draws on history” and “provides debate, not hate.” They also called it freedom of speech and expression while shutting down the comments under their Instagram post.

But what Bobby Gillespie’s aging art rock band did wasn’t art. It wasn’t even particularly clever political commentary. It was lazy provocation masquerading as both—the kind of thing that feels radical when you’re conceiving it backstage but just looks like hatred when projected on a screen in front of actual Jewish people trying to watch a concert.

This is what happens when artists prioritize being activists over being artists. The art suffers. The activism becomes performance. And everyone gets more insufferable.

The Atlantic published an insightful piece about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, arguing that both he and MAGA are responding to the same 21st-century phenomenon: “the decoupling of culture and geography” that leaves people feeling “strangely placeless and adrift.” Bad Bunny chose joy and cultural assertion. MAGA chose protectionism and anger.

But there’s something else we’re losing in this moment: the ability to let art be art. We’ve decided that every performance must be a loyalty test, every artist must issue statements, every creative decision must be interrogated for its political implications. We’ve turned complex geopolitical conflicts into binary choices and made fandom contingent on passing purity tests.

What Bad Bunny understood—what Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo and Primal Scream don’t—is that the most powerful art doesn’t announce its politics. It embodies them.

Consider the wedding.

A celebration, an assertion of love in the middle of America’s biggest spectacle—it felt more radical than any slogan Billie Eilish could have shouted from a Grammy stage.

This is what performance looks like when it’s not performative. This is what resistance looks like when it’s rooted in joy rather than anger. Bad Bunny didn’t need to tell us what he stood for. He showed us. He built Puerto Rico in the middle of a football stadium. He performed entirely in Spanish. He danced with his culture on full display. He said “God bless America” while waving the Puerto Rican flag. He spiked a football that read “Together We Are America.”

The jumbotron said it best: “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love.”

Billie Eilish got her applause. Mark Ruffalo got his righteous retweets. Primal Scream got their controversy. And none of it mattered. None of it changed anything. The people who already agreed nodded along. The people who didn’t had fresh ammunition. The cycle continued.

Bad Bunny did something different. He created something so culturally rich, so joyful, so undeniably beautiful that even his critics had nothing specific to attack. Trump could only sputter about not understanding the words. Turning Point USA could only offer Kid Rock as a counter-programming punchline. The performance itself was bulletproof because it wasn’t asking permission. It was asserting existence.

I watched this performance and felt a kinship to Puerto Rican culture even though my proximity to it is, at best, the neighborhood where I went to college (shout out to Washington Heights). He made me empathize with the immigrant experience—not through guilt or lectures or shouted slogans, but through joy. Through celebration. Through beauty. That’s how you know it worked. That’s how you know the difference between performative activism and actual art.

“Puerto Rico, we’re still here,” he said at the end.

That’s not just better art. That’s better resistance. And if you’re an artist trying to figure out how to say something meaningful in this moment—this suffocating, exhausting, relentlessly political moment—Bad Bunny just gave you the template.

Don’t perform your politics. Make your politics into performance.

Don’t shout slogans. Build a casita.

Don’t lecture. Dance.

And if you can manage it, marry someone on stage while the world watches.

Because the only thing more powerful than hate–sincerity alert–is love. And the only thing more powerful than performative activism is art that doesn’t announce what it’s doing—it just does it, beautifully, joyfully, undeniably.

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio figured that out on a Sunday night in San Francisco. The rest of us are still learning how. Because when it comes to art that actually means something, we all speak the same language.

Most men buy Porsches. Others get an ear piercing. But for my midlife crisis, I became an elf.

Not metaphorically. I didn’t discover some hidden heritage or have a spiritual awakening. I joined a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and created Rowan King, a half-elf bard with a tragic backstory and an ability to inspire people through song. I played for the first time this past Sunday. Which means I’m metamorphosed into what sociologists would designate as Geekus Maximus.

This is not the sort of thing I planned to take up in midlife adulthood. Usually D&D is either something you did as a kid or something you come back to later because nostalgia convinces you life was better when you played it. I did neither. I initiated it.

I’ve always been Dungeon-curious, and D&D felt like an opportunity to form deeper bonds with people who live close by, or geek-adjacent friends who, like me, were looking for a reason to gather consistently and pretend the world outside wasn’t an imploding stress ball.

When I pitched the idea, I expected some hedging. Instead: immediate enthusiasm. Even acquaintances I mentioned it to in passing seemed intrigued.

I have friends I talk to about substantive things—news, family, the general collapse of civil discourse. Becoming an elf felt wildly disconnected from all that. But nobody mocked me. They admired it. I think the seriousness of everything else helps people understand why you’d want to escape into a world where the biggest problem is whether that goblin over there has a hankering for Jewish men from New Jersey.

I’m picky about my escapism, always have been. Just because something lets you escape reality doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be quality. Comics and the MCU have been disappointing me lately—Eternals, The Marvels, Brave New World. The hair on the back of my neck no longer rises when Captain America shows up. I no longer react in disbelief that my childhood is now a global cultural phenomenon. I no longer believe in magic. This is what middle age does to you. This is what corporate greed does to us.

D&D felt like a chance to reconnect with that part of myself without settling for mid.

Our first session: amongst us, a doctor, a lawyer, and a therapist, sitting around a dining room table pretending to be fantasy characters. If this were a joke, the punchline would be “and they all had existential crises.” Instead, we rolled dice and fought imaginary monsters and had a surprisingly good time.

It felt weird at first, I’ll be honest. A glass of wine helped. Two helped even more. But then something shifted. It felt bonding. Connecting. What surprised me most: it felt emotional. Our characters carry pain. They have histories. I made Rowan to explore parts of myself I’ve always wanted to develop—the ability to inspire people through words, to make them feel better in their darkest moments. As my father’s son, a Rabbi, that idea has always fascinated me.

Rowan’s hunting for someone he lost. He’s studying magic, trying to decode the rules that govern everything. He thinks if he can understand how it all works, he can bring her back. What he doesn’t know: the more he learns, the closer he gets to his own death. The truth he’s hunting could kill him.

I chose that backstory because good stories need stakes. I’m sure an analyst would have thoughts about this. Fortunately, the closest therapist in proximity was also too busy fighting off orcs.

In the last month, four people in my orbit have been diagnosed with cancer. Two are terminal.

One is my father-in-law. He’s 87. Stage 4. It progressed so quickly that by the time they found it, there was nothing to do but manage pain and decide where he wanted to spend whatever time he had left. He chose home. He didn’t like hospice. He wanted his own chair, his own television, the familiarity of normalcy.

We visited him last Sunday. He was in good spirits, which is his default setting. He’s a perpetual jokester, the kind of man who deflects every serious moment with a punchline. My job when I’m there is to quip back. To smile at his grand-dad jokes and pretend I haven’t heard them before.

This is what he wants more than anything. Not somber goodbyes or tearful confessions. Just normalcy. Just the usual feathery rhythm of lightness, which has always been built on humor rather than depth—even now, especially now, when disease has made itself at home.

Saying goodbye is a privilege, if that’s the right word. Getting to tell someone you love them, what they meant to you, having the chance to sit with them while they’re still here…it’s the deepest conversation you can have. My father-in-law has that opportunity. He’s chosen how he wants to spend it.

What my own father would have wanted, I don’t know.

I lost him suddenly when I was young. I was on a date when it happened. There was no warning, no goodbye, no chance for a deep conversation. Just a phone call that ended everything. It was like a shiv wound from behind, quick, brutal, final.

Since then, I’ve had armor. It keeps me from feeling too vulnerable about most things. Almost everything else in life feels comparatively inconsequential when you’ve already survived the worst thing that could happen to you as a kid. The armor works. It protects me. But humanity is complex. We’re walking contradictions. The armor works until it doesn’t.

The other terminal diagnosis got to me more than I expected: a former coworker.

We’re just Facebook friends now. I haven’t thought about her in a decade, maybe two. We worked together briefly in my twenties, probably talked about early aughts television, like Lost or Survivor, by the coffee machine, probably complained about the same printer that never worked. Then life happened. We went our separate ways. She existed in my mind as frozen in time, permanently fine, living her life somewhere out there in the world.

There’s something uniquely jarring about someone you haven’t kept up with sharing with the world that they’re fighting off death. That person exists in your memory as young, healthy, invincible in the way everyone in their twenties feels invincible. Then suddenly they’re not, and you realize mortality isn’t just coming for the old or the sick or the unlucky strangers in news stories.

It’s coming for people who were sitting in the same office as you fifteen years ago, complaining about the same things you complained about. Most likely how the client wanted the logo to be bigger.

After I heard about her, I became convinced my chest felt dry.

I’m fairly practical about these things, generally. I don’t immediately jump to “is it cancer?” when something feels off. I either do something about it or I call a doctor. In this case, I did both. I ordered an aloe drink off Amazon—because I’m the kind of person who responds to mortality anxiety with Prime shipping—and I made a mental note to mention it to my doctor at my next appointment.

I was going in anyway for routine blood work. Cholesterol medication follow-up. Speaking of aging and all the indignities that come with it.

When I got there, I mentioned the dryness. The tightness. The vague sense that something wasn’t quite right.

The doctor pulled out his stethoscope and listened. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Again.

“Your lungs sound amazing,” he said. “Probably just the cold you had a few weeks ago. Probably the dry heat we’ve been having.”

I nodded.

Mortality is a weird thing. You can think about it in the abstract—we’re all going to die someday, memento mori, dust to dust, all that—but it stays theoretical when it comes to you personally. Like something you can’t quite make out from afar, as if you have your glasses off. It’s there in the distance, but you can’t make it out clearly unless you squint really hard.

Except now, it’s getting closer. Close enough to make out the details I wish stayed blurry.

Here’s what I’m learning about Dungeons & Dragons: it’s not the stereotypical escapism—frustrated weaklings living out their fantasies of biceps and triceps. It’s something more complicated than that.

When I sit at that table, I make choices that matter. I roll dice and see what happens. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I succeed. But I always have agency. I always have the chance to try.

I’m not escaping death when I play. Rowan’s story is about death. He’s walking toward it with every choice he makes. What I’m escaping is something else entirely.

I’m escaping the weight of being an adult. The bills that need paying. The recycling that needs taking out. The constant seriousness of everything. The sense that you’re running toward the moon on a treadmill that never stops, and nobody ever says thank you or great job for just keeping it all together.

Not that I’m expecting applause for taking out the trash or remembering to pay the electric bill on time. But still. Being alive is beautiful and wonderful and also really, really hard in ways that nobody warns you about.

I’m admittedly a novice, but my takeaway so far is that D&D gives me a world where my choices matter in immediate, tangible ways. Where if I make the wrong choice, we reset and try again next week. Where the rules make sense.

There’s a helplessness I’m all too used to feeling. I’ve been feeling it as I watch my father-in-law deteriorate, his body betraying him in ways that medicine can slow but not stop. As I think about my former coworker fighting for her life somewhere, hooked up to machines I can’t even picture. As I watch the news and wish, just once, that real-life tyrants could be defeated with a twenty-sided die.

They’re different sensations—watching someone die, watching democratic ideals crumble—but the core feeling is the same: powerlessness. There’s always more I could be doing, and it’s never enough.

In real life, I have no control. No way to know if the choices I’m making matter at all. But at that table, for three hours, I do.

Rowan King is walking toward his own death, hunting for answers to save someone he loves. I created him that way. Gave him that doomed quest.

Meanwhile, I’m walking through life with armor up, minimizing danger, being practical about throat dryness, ordering aloe drinks off Amazon, telling myself the doctor knows best and my lungs sound amazing.

Rowan gets to do something. He gets to search, to fight, to try. In real life, I mostly watch. Not out of apathy, but because there’s always another thing demanding care. Another crisis. Another injustice. Another person suffering. It’s an empathetic hurdle run with no finish line. On your mark. Get set. Go. Keep going. And keep going. In fact, don’t ever stop.

I’d like to think I’m not afraid of death. I’d like to think I’ll have a long life ahead of me. I’m healthy. I exercise. I take my cholesterol medication and eat my vegetables and do all the things you’re supposed to do to stave off the inevitable. Except pastries…because, well, pastries.

But as I’m seeing now, we can’t escape whatever happens. We can just hope for the best and prepare for the worst and try not to think too hard about the Grand Canyon-sized gap between those two things.

And sometimes, when the gap feels too wide and the world feels too heavy, we need a place to step off the treadmill.

I don’t know if escapism is the right word for what D&D is giving me. It’s not denial. It’s not avoidance. It’s not pretending that bad things aren’t happening in the world.

It’s rehearsal.

It’s finding a place where you can practice having agency when the real world keeps teaching you that you don’t. Where if you die, you can come back next week. Where your choices have consequences and sometimes you get to save everyone.

I don’t know if Rowan King will find the person he’s looking for. I don’t know if he’ll discover the truth that kills him or somehow find a way around it. I don’t know if playing him will make me braver in real life. Or kinder. Or better at inspiring people the way my father did.

But I know that when I sit at that table with friends who have mortgages and medical appointments and impossibly over-scheduled calendars, for those three hours, we get to choose. We get to act.

The rest of the time? We’re trying to keep the armor from cracking. We’re just trying to get through the day. Take out the recycling. Pay the bills. Keep running toward the moon.

We’re all running toward the moon, actually. All of us carrying weight we didn’t ask for, managing fears we can’t control, watching people we love face things we can’t fix.

And we all need somewhere to put that down for a while.

It doesn’t have to be D&D. It doesn’t have to involve dice or elves or pretending to be someone else. It just has to be a place where you’re not just surviving—where you get to choose, to try, to matter in ways that don’t involve carpooling or errands or managing everyone else’s expectations.

Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from becoming an elf, as I write this with a straight face, it’s this: we all need a place where we’re not just keeping it together. Where we get to practice agency. Where we remember what it feels like to make choices that matter, even if those choices are pretend.

Find your table. Roll your dice. Take your turn. Because the seriousness never stops. The weight never fully lifts. But for a few hours, you can be someone who has agency. Someone who can try.

And that table can be represented for you in a less literal sense. No, you don’t have to be an elf, nor do you have to be an orc. You just need to be free. Free from the hurdles. Free from the weight. Free from everything the world keeps demanding you carry. Now, sit down. Life can wait. It’s your turn to roll.

A special thanks to Imu Shalev for his masterful Dungeon Master duties.

Two days ago, Kanye West, otherwise known as Ye, published an apology in the Wall Street Journal. I read it twice, looking for something that felt real, and came away with nothing but skepticism.

Like the hitmaker that he is, the letter hits all the expected notes: traumatic brain injury from a car accident, undiagnosed frontal lobe damage, bipolar disorder, manic episodes, losing touch with reality. “I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it,” he writes. Then the pivot: “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”

I’ve spent twenty years working in creative direction. I know what a rebrand looks like. I know the specific kind of corporate sterilizing language designed to protect IP rather than express remorse. This wasn’t a confession; it was a press release for Kanye 3.0. It follows the same brief I’d get for a crisis management campaign: Acknowledge the problem, pivot to personal growth narrative, re-establish value proposition. High-fives all around the conference room.

The structure is perfect. The problem is there’s no evidence of sustained change, just a well-crafted letter that says the right things at the right time.

And I know how this movie ends. Give it six months, maybe a year. He’ll claim the Mossad forced him to write this, or some new conspiracy will grip him, and we’ll be right back here. I don’t want to forgive him. I want him to earn forgiveness. There’s a difference.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: I recognize the hollow apology because I’ve been that person too.

During Trump’s first term, I said terrible things to people. Sitting in my house in Teaneck, comfortable and furious, I posted that anyone who voted for Trump was “either mean or dumb.” Felt righteous at the time. Feels humiliating now.

Think about who read that. People in my life. People whose circumstances I didn’t understand. People who were scared about their jobs, their healthcare, their futures, and I compressed them into two categories: malicious or stupid.

I was flattening people. Taking the full complexity of their lives - their fears, their reasons, their desperation - and reducing them to a binary that made me feel smart and them feel small. Mean or dumb. That’s it. No room for “I’m terrified about losing my health insurance” or “I haven’t had a raise in ten years” or “I feel like nobody’s listening to people like me.”

Flattening is easy. It’s efficient. It lets you sort the world into good guys and bad guys without doing the uncomfortable work of sitting with complexity. And once you’ve flattened someone, you don’t have to listen to them anymore. You’ve already decided what they are.

What changed over the years: I learned that reducing people to binaries accomplishes nothing. That if you actually want to understand why someone made a choice you disagree with, you have to be curious about them, not just certain about yourself.

This took years. Years of sitting with my own shame and gradually understanding that moral certainty is easier than empathy, and that the person I become when I’m just performing righteousness is not someone I recognize.

That’s what accountability actually looks like. So when Ye writes “I’m committed to meaningful change,” I know that’s not how meaningful change works. You don’t announce it in a letter. You demonstrate it over years like stopping in major cities all over America with speaking engagements in synagogues. Ye could even package it as the Forgiveness Tour and sell some merch. Just as long as the T-shirts don’t have swastikas on them.

Cut to now. Trump’s second term. Last week, I read the New York Times‘ detailed breakdown of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, complete with video documentation from multiple angles.

The timeline is excruciating: Pretti had a legal carry permit and no criminal record. He was filming a detention with his phone. An agent shoved civilians, pepper-sprayed Pretti, then multiple agents wrestled him to the ground. While Pretti was restrained on his knees by seven agents, one agent removed what appeared to be Pretti’s gun from the scene. Then, with Pretti still on his knees, still restrained, agents fired at least ten shots in five seconds.

The Department of Homeland Security called these “defensive shots.”

Watching the Pretti video was a different category of terrible. It wasn’t dramatic. It was bureaucratic. It was the banality of a government form being filled out with bullets. This isn’t complicated. This is murder. The video is unambiguous.

But I’m watching people I know - people who would’ve been outraged by this exact scenario five years ago - find ways to justify it now. “He had a gun.” “He shouldn’t have been there.” “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” The man had a legal carry permit. He was on his knees. He was shot ten times. And they’re working backwards from “federal agents must have been justified” to make the facts fit.

This is what we’ve built. A system that can process any atrocity and neutralize it.

Kanye’s apology gets absorbed. We debate whether to accept it, think pieces get written, like the one you’re reading now, and eventually everyone moves on. Whether he’s actually changed doesn’t matter. He’s said the words. The performance is sufficient. It’s okay now to take your Yeezys out of the closet.

The Pretti video gets absorbed. DHS says “defensive shots” and compresses a 48-second encounter into two words. A man with a legal carry permit becomes “armed individual.” Being restrained on your knees by seven agents becomes “approached agents.” The official narrative flattens what actually happened into something more palatable, and the video gets filed away as evidence of whatever you already believed about federal agents or immigration enforcement or Trump.

My angry posts from 2017 got absorbed. The outrage felt righteous, accomplished nothing, and disappeared into the general noise. I stayed mad, other people stayed defensive, and everyone retreated further into their corners.

The system doesn’t suppress these things. It processes them. Catalogues them. Files them away. And then we’re on to the next thing. Nothing sticks. Nothing to see. Keep scrolling.

The growth I’ve experienced over the last few years is real. I’m not the same person who posted “mean or dumb” in 2017.

I learned to ask “why did this person get to this point” instead of just condemning them. When someone says something I find offensive, my first instinct to flatten them into “bigot” or “idiot” is just me taking the easy path. The harder path is asking: what happened in their life that led them here?

When someone apologizes, I ask: what does accountability actually look like over time? When I witness something horrible, I ask: what does it mean to actually be changed by what I’ve seen?

This is harder. It’s slower. It requires holding multiple truths at once: Kanye is mentally ill and he did terrible damage. Alex Pretti was killed unjustly and using his death as a prop for politics dishonors him. I was wrong about how I treated people in 2017 and I still believe Trump is dangerous.

Here’s why flattening is so destructive: once you’ve reduced someone to a category, you’ve eliminated the possibility of change. If someone is just “mean” or “dumb,” what’s the point of talking to them? If Kanye is just “irredeemable antisemite,” why would we expect growth? If federal agents are just “fascists” or just “heroes,” we can’t hold them accountable for specific actions.

Flattening doesn’t just simplify—it fossilizes. It turns people into permanent positions rather than humans capable of transformation. And when you do that, you guarantee nothing will ever shift.

The system is designed to prevent exactly this kind of thinking. Because holding complexity is slow, individual, unglamorous. It doesn’t generate content. It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t give you the dopamine hit of dunking on someone who’s wrong.

The system rewards quick takes, moral certainty, performed outrage. Real transformation - the kind that actually changes you - can’t be rushed.

The exhaustion you’re feeling is real. We’re watching the same patterns repeat. Hollow apologies. Video evidence that doesn’t lead to consequences. Outrage that goes nowhere. The system counts on us being too tired to maintain sustained attention, too overwhelmed to tell the difference between performance and reality.

But you can change. I did. It took years, but I learned to resist the urge to flatten people, to sit with complexity even when binaries are easier, to understand that transformation is measured in years, not posts.

The work is refusing to let atrocity become content. Refusing to accept performance as accountability. Refusing to reduce people to categories that make you comfortable.

Don’t flatten Kanye’s situation into “mental illness excuses everything” or “he’s irredeemable.” Hold the complexity: he’s sick, he caused harm, he needs to demonstrate sustained change over years, not paragraphs.

Don’t flatten Alex Pretti’s death into a talking point for your preferred politics. He was a person. He had a legal carry permit. He was killed by federal agents who will face no consequences. That’s the truth, unflattened.

Don’t flatten the people in your life who disagree with you. They’re not just wrong or stupid or evil. They’re three-dimensional humans who got to their positions through experiences you might not understand. You don’t have to agree with them. But you can refuse to compress them into caricatures.

This is slower, messier, harder to explain in a headline. But it’s the only way anything actually changes.

And it may not fix the system. Nor will it stop the scroll. But refusing to flatten people—holding complexity instead of collapsing it—creates space for something the absorption machine can’t process: actual understanding. Not agreement. Not forgiveness you haven’t earned. Just the messy, slow work of seeing people as they actually are. That’s the only place change lives. That's the only way out of Flatland.

Last week, on Thursday, January 9th, I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my Substack. There was no party. No champagne. No commemorative cake with fondant icing shaped like a laptop. I didn’t even post about it that day.

However, a year is a year, and that feels worth acknowledging. So here we are. Yay, me! Commence: back-patting.

But before we celebrate 365 days of my blathering on the internet, let’s get into an origin story. Way back when I was just a wee lil’ Substacker, I started Bring Back Sincerity II because I was frustrated about The Brutalist.

Not at the film itself—Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian Jewish architect surviving and building in post-war America is extraordinary. I was frustrated at the conversation around it. At the Golden Globes, the film won three awards, and not one acceptance speech mentioned the words “Jew” or “Holocaust.” Critics kept reading it as Corbet’s meta-commentary on being a misunderstood filmmaker, as allegory for the artist’s turbulent journey creating pure vision in a world that doesn’t understand. They were missing what the movie was actually about: the multidimensionality of Jewish assimilation. The specific, lived experience of survivors like my grandparents, who were Hungarian immigrants just like Adrien Brody’s László Tóth. The way trauma and ambition and compromise and reinvention all tangle together when you’ve lost everything and have to build a new life in a country that doesn’t quite want you.

The discourse was wrong. You’re making it about the filmmaker when it’s about the Jews. About survival. About what it costs to assimilate while carrying the weight of what you survived. About whether a Jew can ever truly feel at home anywhere except Israel—which the film’s ending suggests, even if Corbet himself won’t say it.

So I wrote a piece. Published it. Sent it to some friends who were all like, tell it to your blog, man. And then I kept going.

A year later, I’m still here. I’ve written essays about progressive Jews providing cover for antisemitism. About how outrage feeds the things we claim to oppose. About mid television and experienced musicians and why we’ve stopped making space for artists who refuse to settle. About male friendship and why we’re all so spectacularly bad at it. About prayer that feels distant. About Billy Joel’s radical uncoolness.

I’ve written long pieces about topics that aren’t clickbait. I’ve kept at it through a full year. I’ve built something I’m genuinely proud of.

That’s worth celebrating. A year of consistent writing is a real accomplishment, even if—especially if—the work was done without any guarantee that anyone would care. Because I know from experience, caring is hard. I’ve tried to do it. At least, a few times.

Yesterday, I listened to David Marchese interview the post-modern novelist George Saunders for The New York Times Interview podcast. Marchese wondered aloud if writing feels like an artisanal pursuit in 2025, a craft that’s being displaced, made irrelevant, losing its cultural role.

Saunders’ answer has been echoing in my brain ever since I heard it: “It’s the one thing I can really do. It’s the one thing that I’ve been good at all my life. If nobody was reading it, I would still be inclined to do it. Even if the role has declined...what else am I going to do?”

What else am I going to do?

I’ve been wrestling with that question all year. I notice other Substacks that launched around the same time as mine, ones with hooks, with viral potential, with growth strategies. They know how to optimize. How to make their work shareable. How to turn writing into audience-building. I remain spectacularly bad at all of these things.

I would be lying if I said I don’t wonder sometimes if I’m doing this wrong. That I don’t question whether writing 2,000-word essays about Steely Dan’s rehabilitation or the death of communal viewing is the best use of my time. But then, like George asked himself, what else am I going to do?

Looking back over a year of work, patterns emerge. Themes that kept recurring, questions I kept circling even when I thought I was writing about completely different things.

Sincerity versus performance. The loss of shared cultural experience. What we feed with our attention. The costs of progressive Jewish identity. The value of experience over novelty. The middling-ization of everything. Connection versus consumption.

The meta-theme underneath all of it: what have we lost in the pursuit of comfort, safety, and ease?

I kept writing about different things—politics, film, television, music, antisemitism, friendship—but I was always asking the same question: why have we become so willing to settle? Why do we accept mid television, defensive irony, parasocial relationships, outrage economies, well-crafted content that demands little, or sometimes, nothing, from us?

I wasn’t building toward some grand unified theory. I was just noticing the same loss over and over, from different angles. The way we’ve traded genuine connection for performed attention. The way we’ve replaced creative risk with professional competence. The way we’ve turned art into content and sincerity into liability.

Every piece was me saying: this matters. This costs us something. We should notice what we’re losing.

Speaking of loss [smooth transition?], I lost my father when I was young, and one of the most painful parts of that loss is how little I actually know about what he thought. I have memories, of course. But I don’t have a record of his inner life—what made him angry, what he cared about deeply enough to argue for, what kept him up at night thinking. I can’t ask him now what mattered to him beyond the immediate concerns of being a father. I’ll never know more about who he was outside of the stories others told me about him.

So I write for my kids. Which sounds either deeply meaningful or deeply neurotic depending on your disposition. Probably both.

I have three kids. They’re young enough that they don’t really know who I am yet, not beyond “dad who makes dinner” and “dad who tells the same stories on repeat” and “dad who has opinions about TV shows.” Or “dad who is impossibly charming and impeccably dressed.” Okay, the last one is wish fulfillment. Someday they’ll be adults. And I’ll be old, or gone. And they might wonder: what did he actually think about the world? What mattered to him? Who was he when he wasn’t just being our father?

Bring Back Sincerity II is my answer. These essays are evidence of how I thought, what I cared about, what I believed was worth fighting for even when it wasn’t popular or profitable. Legacy—but legacy in the most intimate sense. Not “will I be remembered by the culture” but “will the people I love most know who I actually was?”

If that sounds morbid, well, welcome to being Jewish. We’re very good at thinking about mortality in practical terms while making jokes about it at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, take my Substack, please.

Last week, I saw Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie’s film about the ping pong champion Marty Reisman, with Timothée Chalamet playing the title role. I liked it a lot—maybe even loved it, though I’d need to see it again to be sure.

But one thing stuck with me immediately: Chalamet’s compulsion. He plays ping pong with world-saving urgency. Every match feels vital, essential, as if the sport could actually matter on a cosmic scale. You could almost mistake his determination for heroism.

But it’s not heroic in the traditional sense. He’s not curing disease or fighting injustice. He’s hitting a small ball across a table. To most people, it’s silly. Frivolous. A non-essential pursuit.

To Marty, it’s existence.

That’s what the film understands: compulsion doesn’t require justification. Marty doesn’t need ping pong to be important to anyone else. He needs it to be important to him. The fact that others see it as trivial doesn’t make his commitment any less real.

I thought about that in relation to my writing. About “crafting” (or more accurately, pooping out) long essays that not many people read. About caring deeply about cultural criticism in an age when everyone’s too busy scrolling to read 2,000 words about anything. (I say “everyone” but I mean “most people” because you’re here, reading this, and I appreciate that more than you know. By the way, you’re looking amazing of late. New facial moisturizer?)

I didn’t start this Substack to build a brand. I started it because I was frustrated about The Brutalist and the conversation around it felt wrong. And I kept going because I kept encountering things that felt wrong in similar ways.

That’s compulsion, not strategy. I write not because I’ve figured out how to monetize attention or optimize for growth (again: spectacularly bad at this). I write because I see things being misunderstood and I need to articulate what’s actually happening.

My pursuit is sincerity, or the bringing back of it. Genuine expression. The refusal to optimize or simplify or make it clickbait just because that would be smarter.

George Saunders writes because it's the one thing he can really do. Marty Reisman played ping pong because it was his existence. I write these essays because the alternative feels impossible. Not writing means accepting mid television as fine, scrolling through feeds without resistance, letting conversations miss the point. I can't do that. I don't know how to do that.

So I write. Long pieces about things that matter to me. I write for my kids. For the readers who’ve stuck around. For myself. So that someday, when my kids are adults and I’m not around to answer their questions, they’ll have this record of who I was and what I cared about. They’ll be able to know me the way I wish I could have known my father.

No, Nicole, we don’t come to this place for magic. We come to this place for expression. About refusing to settle. About insisting that sincerity matters, that genuine connection is worth fighting for, that we should notice what we’re losing even if noticing it makes us uncomfortable.

It's about leaving behind words that will outlive me. It's about expression as compulsion—not because anyone asked for it, but because I don't know how not to. Besides, like George asked, what else am I going to do?

Every December, the internet becomes an assembly line of year-end lists. Best albums. Best movies. Best TV shows. Everyone constructing their own monument to Taste™, as if being the first to champion something obscure still means anything when every niche has its own subreddit and every microgenre has its own Spotify playlist curated by an algorithm that knows you like Sabrina Carpenter more than you admit you do.

I thought about making my own list here. I really did. I sat down to make it and realized: what’s the point? Anything good enough to make my list has already been on thirty other lists. The consensus has formed. The think pieces have been written—we all think Rosalia made a “challenging” fourth album. The discourse has moved on (after all, it’s been 2026 for at least a few hours). In an age where nothing stays undiscovered for more than forty-eight hours, claiming to have found something feels less like curation and more like arriving after the party’s ended and announcing to an empty room, “hey, guys! I’m here!”

Here’s what year-end lists have become: a performance of having paid attention. You scroll through them and they read less like genuine discovery and more like attendance records. Cultural box-checking. Proof you were present for the conversation, not that anything actually moved you. The lists aren’t about what stuck with you, what changed how you see the world, what you’ll still be thinking about in February. They’re about demonstrating you kept up. Which, honestly, is an accomplishment all of its own.

That’s what lists are now—proof of attendance. Dutifully responding "here" as Big Culture calls roll. Which means they’ve stopped telling us much of anything interesting. They document consensus without examining why that consensus formed. They catalog what we consumed without asking what we were actually hungry for when we consumed it.

Because consumption isn’t the same as connection. We’re encountering more art than ever—more movies, more music, more television—but are we actually building relationships with any of it? Or are we just checking boxes, accumulating cultural credentials, performing the role of someone who has taste?

That’s the question that interests me more than any list could answer. Not what we watched or listened to, but why. What does it reveal about us? What were we looking for? What did we find, and what does that say about this particular moment? (And while we’re asking questions, where the hell is my husband?)

In a culture where everything is a bandwagon moment, where every take gets amplified and every counter-take gets amplified louder, ideas are more valuable than recommendations. The what is everywhere. The why is what’s missing.

So this isn’t a best-of list. It’s an attempt to understand what our favorites say about who we are right now. About what we’re hungry for. About what we’re missing. The gestalt of the zeitgeist, if you’re in graduate school.

Let’s start by going to the movies.

MOVIES: THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD (BUT IT MUST)

I didn’t see enough movies this year to make a top ten list. That’s the confession I’m leading with. I still haven’t seen Marty Supreme, Bugonia, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Is This Thing On, The Testament of Ann Lee—all films that by various accounts deserved my attention. And even among the films I did manage to see, most didn’t feel substantial enough to warrant a slot on any list that pretended to mean something (was Sinners really that good?)

But two films this year—films that couldn’t be more different on the surface—revealed something essential about where we are as a culture. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ari Aster’s Eddington, my two favorite films of 2025, are spiritual cousins, and together they’re proof that cinema isn’t dead, or an Avatar sequel—it’s just waiting for filmmakers brave enough to say something.

Both films are about bubbles. About what happens when people retreat so far into their ideological corners that they can only see the other side as monsters. OBAA shows us leftist revolutionaries so committed to abstract principles they abandon actual humans, and right-wing authoritarians so consumed with power they’ll destroy everything to keep it. Eddington gives us the mirror image: Antifa militias and corrupt sheriffs framing innocent Black men. Each film presents the other side’s worst nightmare made real.

Here’s what makes them brilliant: they’re not really taking sides (although PTA struggles with objectivity a bit). They’re showing us how both extremes become monstrous when they lose sight of basic humanity. Both films are making a contextually “radical” argument—radical in 2025, that is—that maybe the center is where we find our way back to each other.

Eddington does this more explicitly than OBAA, which surprised me (I’ve written about OBAA before here, so let’s shift our focus on a film very few people saw. And for shame). I’ve avoided Ari Aster since he started making features. His brand of intense provocation generally isn’t for me (his student film about incestuous abuse proved his intentions from the start). But Eddington is different. It’s a Covid-era genre movie that references westerns and action films and video games in a way that feels genuinely original. It’s gorgeous to look at, thanks to cinematographer Darius Khondji. And underneath all the action and horror, it’s making a profound argument about how our devices, our feeds, our algorithmic bubbles are turning us into the worst versions of ourselves.

The film understands that we’re all trapped in feedback loops now, rationalizing and self-justifying, finding confirmation for our biases through social media. It shows us characters on both sides doing exactly that—scrolling through content that tells them they’re right and the other side is evil—until they can’t see their opponents as human anymore.

Both films feature directors at the peak of their powers, making movies that are simultaneously accessible and provocative, entertaining and deeply human. They’re not lecture films or political screeds. They’re stories about people trying to navigate a world where everyone seems to be losing their minds. And the only way out, both suggest, is to turn off the feed, step out of the bubble, and remember that the people on the other side are still people. For PTA, that humanity is anchored in a father-daughter relationship—the belief that love transcends politics. For Aster, it was, well, way less sentimental.

In a year when everything felt designed to push us further into our corners, these two films showed us a way back to the middle. Center isn’t compromise. It’s survival.

TV: THE YEAR WE SETTLED FOR FINE

Recently, I created an exercise: a top 25 list of my favorite TV shows from the last 25 years. The usual suspects made the cut—The West Wing, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. But so did some less predictable choices: The OA, Station Eleven, Watchmen, The Leftovers. Shows that took genuine creative risks, that felt unpredictable and profound and poignant.

At the end of this exercise, I realized something surprising: none of them were from this year. I’m not sure any were from last year either, except maybe Succession, which ended whenever that was. (Time is a flat circle when everything blends together.)

Which made me wonder: is the problem the shows, or is it me?

I watched a lot of television this year, and I don’t feel emotionally attached to any of it. The shows I enjoyed most in 2025 were Department Q, The Pitt, and Pluribus. Department Q is a Netflix detective series created by Scott Frank, featuring Matthew Goode as a detective working cold cases. It’s good. It’s well-made British crime television, which I’ll consume any day. But it’s not reinventing anything. The Pitt, which people genuinely loved (including me), is essentially ER with better production values. Competent, watchable, occasionally moving. But within a single hour-long episode, they’ll pack in multiple profound tragedies—a festival shooting, a car accident, a drug overdose—all happening within one hospital shift. It’s emotional compression rather than earned emotion.

Even Pluribus, the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series, felt... fine. Professional. Accomplished. But not essential. I admired it the way I admire a quality kitchen gadget: well-designed, and perfectly serviceable. People say, wait until Season 2. Series creator Vince Gilligan is surely cooking up something. Well, to quote the show he got his start on, I want to believe.

Everything I watched this year felt like well-crafted content. Professional, competent, but not trying to push boundaries or say anything genuinely new. We’ve moved from an era of television as art to television as well-made product.

James Poniewozik wrote about this phenomenon in The New York Times back in 2024, calling it “The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV.” He was early to identify the trend—shows with great casts, cinematic production values, and nothing particularly wrong with them. They’re just... mid. What was a problem in 2024 became epidemic in 2025.

The apex of this trend might be the return of Stranger Things, which dominated the last quarter of this year with its sustained release schedule. I was watching an episode the other night where characters explicitly reference the references the Duffer Brothers are making. Dustin talks about Return of the Jedi while they recreate elements from Return of the Jedi. Maya Hawke’s Robin references The Battle of the Bulge while implementing a plan based on The Battle of the Bulge. The show has become so comfortable with pastiche that it has characters do the work of pointing out the homages for us.

Everything looks cinematic, has great casts, professional execution. And everything feels safe. Referential. Built from templates we recognize.

Which is why The Rehearsal stands alone as my favorite show of the year.

Nathan Fielder’s series was the only thing on television that felt genuinely unpredictable. Every episode took sharp turns in directions I couldn’t anticipate. It was pseudo-reality, presumably scripted or planned somehow, but the absurdity and lengths Fielder went to kept me completely off-balance. Comparing Paramount executives to Nazis. Acquiring a commercial pilot’s license. Hosting a reality singing competition for an airline. Making Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” relevant again. I honestly couldn’t tell you which aspect of the series is the most absurd.

None of this was referencing anything except its own deranged internal logic. You couldn’t second-screen it because if you looked away for five minutes, you’d miss something that would recontextualize everything you thought you understood.

The Rehearsal demanded your full attention because there was no template to follow. No familiar structure to coast on. It was pure creation in a year when everything else felt like competent recreation. It was legitimately banana-pants.

Poniewozik wrote that mid TV is “friction-free”—it has “an A.I.-like, uncanny luster.” That’s exactly right. It’s smooth, professional, algorithmically optimized. But smoothness is the opposite of what makes television memorable. The shows on my top 25 list all had edges, rough patches, moments that felt risky or uncomfortable or genuinely surprising.

Television this year forgot how to take those risks. It became too comfortable being well-made, too satisfied with professional execution of familiar formats, too willing to mistake technical competence for creative ambition.

The only show that broke through was the one that refused to reference anything but its own absurdity. In a year of well-crafted pastiche, genuine originality felt so pungent, but in a good way.

When I think about the shows on my top 25 list—the ones that felt essential, transformative, impossible to ignore—none of them were content just being fine. They demanded something more. From themselves, and from us.

That’s what 2025 television forgot how to ask for. Now, excuse me, while I fold laundry while watchingThe Diplomat.

MUSIC: THE CASE FOR GETTING OLDER

When I was a music journalist, I was a debut chaser. New bands, first albums, breakthrough artists—that’s what got you credibility. That’s what made you a tastemaker. You didn’t build your reputation championing someone’s seventh album, no matter how good it was. You built it by being first to call the next big thing (I was right about Charli XCX, though).

It’s a young person’s game, music journalism. And like most young person’s games, it mistakes novelty for quality, discovery for depth. The whole apparatus—from Pitchfork to Spotify’s computer generated playlists—is built around finding the new, not celebrating the refined.

Which is why this year felt different. Because this was the year experience won.

Some of my favorite albums from this year were Sharon Van Etten’s latest and Bon Iver’s new record. Neither made Pitchfork’s top 50. Neither generated much online chatter. Neither felt like “events” in the way debuts are supposed to feel like events. But both were extraordinary—the sound of artists who’ve spent years honing their craft to the point where they make it look effortless.

Van Etten’s Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory sounds like someone who’s finally figured out exactly what she wants to say and exactly how to say it. There’s no searching, no experimentation for its own sake. Just perfect execution of a vision that’s taken fifteen years to crystallize. Bon Iver’s SABLE fABLE does something similar—Justin Vernon using every tool in his troubadour toolkit, every autumn-tinged falsetto, every lesson learned from a decade and a half of making music, to create something that feels worn-in, familiar, and completely fresh. This, by the way, is my favorite album of the year and I wrote about it at length here.

These albums, along with Royksopp’s True Electric and Ludovico Einauldi’s The Summer Portraits and others, are like watching a surfer ride a wave in perpetuity, that moment when technique becomes so refined it looks like pure instinct.

But you don’t get tastemaker points for praising mastery. Mastery is boring to write about. It doesn’t generate hot takes or viral moments. It just... is. Which is why we’ve trained ourselves to ignore it in favor of whatever 22-year-old just uploaded their first song to Soundcloud or Bandcamp (are you guys still doing that?).

Even the artist who dominated conversations this year—the one that felt like a discovery—wasn’t actually new. Geese became the internet’s obsession, but Getting Killed was their third album.

The paradox of 2025 was a hunger for “new” so persistent that we retroactively made established artists feel like discoveries. Geese isn’t just a young band finding their sound—they’re a band that finally found the right moment for the sound they had been developing since they were teens. But the cultural machinery can only process things as either “new” or “over,” so when Geese broke through, we had to pretend it was their debut moment rather than their culmination moment.

This says something important about where I am as a listener. I’m finally ready to value craft over novelty, depth over surface, the seventh album over the first. I’m getting old enough to recognize that the best art comes from artists who’ve had time to fail, learn, and try again.

There’s something deeply satisfying about hearing an artist who’s completely in command of their tools. Who’s not trying to prove anything or chase trends or break new ground just for the sake of it. Who’s just making the thing they’re best at making, better than they’ve ever made it before.

That’s not exciting in the way discovery is exciting. But it’s exciting in a different way—the way watching someone do something perfectly is exciting. Even if they’ve been doing it for years.

Especially if they’ve been doing it for years.

IN MEMORIAM: THE UNCOMPROMISING

And then there are the ghosts.

The deaths I felt most acutely this year: we lost Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Reiner, Robert Redford, Val Kilmer, Gene Hackman, David Lynch. Six men who lived lives that could never be described as “mid.” Six reminders that the artists we remember aren’t the ones who played it safe.

But it’s more than that. These men represented a bygone era of certainty—not arrogance, but focus. Ozzy never seemed to doubt himself, even when he probably should have. Redford committed to causes and indie cinema with unwavering tenacity. Kilmer sustained a career through sheer force of will and steely-eyed methodology, refusing to compromise even when it cost him everything. Lynch built entire worlds out of his singular vision and never explained himself. Hackman walked away at the peak of his powers because he was done, and that was enough. Reiner believed in sincerity when cynicism would have been easier.

They weren’t making art to fill algorithmic quotas or satisfy click count. They were actualizing visions—sometimes flawed, often difficult, always distinctly theirs. That kind of confidence, that commitment to a singular perspective regardless of whether it was marketable, feels almost quaint now. We’ve traded vision for versatility, conviction for competence. Their deaths feel like the end of an era not just because we lost them, but because we've stopped making space for artists like them. For people who refuse to be fine. For work that demands something from us in return. Like putting our phones down long enough to be present and maybe let ourselves be changed in a way that only culture can change it.