Being a writer in the same generation as Matthew Gasda is an awful thing. Consider how few writers in their thirties can compete with his cultural footprint: a dozen well-received plays and novels, two poetry collections, a bohemian life in New York City running a theatre company while also co-founding and editing a literary journal dedicated to Romanticism, plus publishing a popular Substack newsletter and writing essays for multiple magazines. Add onto this his formidable talent, and it’s easy to understand why I have twice subscribed and unsubscribed to his ‘Writer’s Diary’ of epigrammatic fragments. It’s no fun to be seething with envy every time you open your emails, knowing that there is a man of your generation who is living a lifestyle you believed was gone for good, and having insightful thoughts about it to boot.

Envy is not a state I wish to remain in, and when I take a deep breath, I do not actually begrudge Gasda his success, given how seriously he takes his craft. If anyone is to take on the mantle of being our generation’s bohemian romantic, I’d rather it be one of the few writers who is capable of grappling with the tension between tradition and modernity, between mysticism and technology, between morals and aesthetics.

And so I’ve resubscribed to his ‘Writer’s Diary’ and have been reading through past entries which are filled with fragments which challenge and inspire and occasionally provoke me. This mode of writing, of arranging a series of short philosophical sentences distilled down to purest observation and truth, is something Gasda excels at. And this mode forms the backbone of his latest novel Stranger Beauty, in which Gasda projects himself into the depressing future of NYC in 2038.

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In this realistic futureworld, AI is fully incorporated into households via agents named ‘Kairos,’ all cars are driverless, food is lab-grown and delivered by drones, many people’s brains are chipped in order to be hyperintelligent, and there are pills which help you live longer via nanobots rejuvenating your body and keeping you artificially young.

Despite its futurism, there’s a timelessness to the way Gasda writes, a timelessness in his settings and characters and preoccupations. Much of Stranger Beauty could easily be set in 1938, aside from a few stray anachronisms. It made me wonder if there are really any new questions to grapple with in the age of artificial intelligence. We are still left with the problems of faith, of how to love others, of the futility of glory, of the value of our legacies.

In Gasda’s imagined future, M has a complicated marriage with an actress, S, a complicated relationship with his institutionalized brother, Christopher, and an uncomplicated relationship with his seven-year-old daughter, Ruby. The novel is immediately immersive in terms of giving you the sense of a dystopian future, and M is well-textured as a character, even if he is an obvious projection of the author. The scenes we get in 2038—Ruby playing the piano while M reads and ruminates, a winter walk and conversation between M and S about their strained marriage, a confrontation about faith and pride between M and Christopher at the facility Christopher permanently resides at—demonstrate Gasda’s playwright instincts of dialogue and blocking. We can hear the characters and their sparking conversations, we can imagine them on stage together. Whether we can believe they exist in a wider world filled with other men and women is another question, as the novel is extremely narrow in its focus on M and how he thinks and feels.

A huge portion of Stranger Beauty is given over to fragments from diaries written by ‘M’, Gasda’s stand-in and the protagonist, before the widespread use of artificial intelligence. M has kept these diaries and a screenplay locked away from Kairos’ prying eyes, determined that they remain pure and unsullied by the cannibalizing instincts of LLMs. The focality of this plot point, and the way M’s wishes are ultimately betrayed, makes one wonder if someone in Gasda’s life has ever uploaded his writing to an LLM without his permission, and whether this would be a sin he couldn’t easily forgive.

If you like Gasda’s Substack, then you will enjoy the fragmented diary portions of Stranger Beauty sprinkled throughout, for as M writes, “The addiction to the fragment is an addiction to the barest and truest parts of speech, the earliest hope of speech, which knows that its dissipation will come through context, explication, iteration.” The magic trick Gasda manages to pull off again and again is the distillation of truth or paradox into a few words. In our age of over-explanation and noise for the sake of noise, this is a welcome countermeasure, and it does work as a method of immersing us into M’s character.

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Gasda is working here in the tradition of Novalis, that German mystic philosopher poet who inspired much of the late 16th Century’s experiments in Early Romanticism. Novalis viewed the fragment as more ‘alive’ than a ‘dead’ book of completed and complex arguments, stating in his seminal work Pollen, “Fragments of this kind are literary seeds.” To Novalis, a fragment was like a poem, more alive because it required the reader’s own imagination to grow and complete it.

Gasda is a master of the form, and like Novalis, he fluctuates from cutting observations on the mundane realities of life, to commenting on modern politics and economics, to deeper questions of faith and reason. Some of my favorite fragments from Stranger Beauty’s fictionalized diary entries include:

“A single good day on earth is good enough. It’s as good as eternity. I think from the premise ‘I don’t want to die,’ we can’t draw the conclusion ‘I should want to live forever’.”

“I am mangled by the digital machinery that I both use and am used by.”

“Some part of me never really accepted that the world outside would not love me as much as the house I grew up in…”

Gasda’s theory seems to be that fragmentary writing, as opposed to over-explained AI sycophancy, forces even those readers with severely damaged attention spans to stop and puzzle out what he’s saying. His fragments are often blunt statements, with little room for nuance. But forcing the reader to consider each fragment is exactly what Gasda is trying to achieve: to arrest us from our smooth glide through a frictionless world, to halt us in our seemingly inevitable downward spiral toward a dystopian future.

Gasda on his flip phone

Gasda is particularly interested in Catholicism as an inescapable inheritance, as something genetic and unshakeable, and yet terrifying and overwhelming. That’s why certain sections of this book reminded me most of Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel Stella Maris, down to the sense of watching a two-person play unfold within an asylum. But Gasda is less elliptical than McCarthy, much more quotable, which is why I often found myself highlighting many of Gasda’s pithy epigrams on aspects of faith and family:

“If I’m a sinner, then I have hope: I can be redeemed. If I’m merely bad, then I’m hopeless: pathological.”

“On one hand there’s the body, which is an engine running down. And then on the other hand, there’s the living world, which is unfolding toward increasing order and complexity. We are dying in other worlds, and the world is living and living and living and living. We’re islands of disorder in a sea of order.”

“The summit of sexual fulfilment is a home with children, like a flare in the distance. But I choose to remain at the base of Mount Purgatory while others climb toward the light; to go forever in a carnival mood and a mood of reproach. Tired of my own lust and overstimulation.”

“All I want is children, a child. I’m afraid to say it. The unconditional love one gives and receives from a child. That all-healing love. This is part of just preparing to get married and looking ahead in a new way; not looking back toward youth anymore or not clinging to it, not quite the same way I used to.”

The particular focus on children and fatherhood are beautiful in the diary fragments, but also reveal the weaker elements of Stranger Beauty’s more plot-based scenes. While the characters of M and Christopher are finely drawn portraits, almost twin brothers who act as mirrors, the character of Ruby (M and S’s daughter) felt thinly sketched; a caricature of a child with M as a caricature of a father. M doesn’t seem to have any strong sense of identity invested in Ruby, despite his purported desires to be a father. He isn’t portrayed as having that heart-tugging investment in the little girl who is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

If I hadn’t recently had a son I may not have noticed this, but fatherhood really is a foreign country and it’s hard to truly project yourself there, to that place where you willfully subordinate yourself to the life of your son or daughter. Although Gasda is a talented writer, it is somewhat limiting that he feels most comfortable writing as M, a futuristic version of himself, rather than attempting to write fragmented diaries in the voice of someone totally different. Even the character of S becomes less interesting in the later portions of the book when she is no longer directly interacting with M. In his absence, she is rendered an inert and cardboard version of herself.

The ending of the novel will be challenging to many readers, a stream-of-consciousness experiment with AI-styled writing that discombobulates and blurs the plot first into an imagined film and then into a word salad, quite unlike the obsequies and chatty LLMs we know today. This final portion is most reminiscent of Ayad Akhtar’s 2024 play McNeal, in which the main character, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., descends into a drug and alcohol induced spiral, increasingly dependent on AI to write a book regurgitating his and his deceased wife’s writing while passing it off as his own, and then ultimately giving the audience an LLM-generated speech to close out the show.

Gasda seems to be purposefully inverting this dynamic. Instead of the fraudulent genius relying on AI to do his work for him, Gasda’s M distrusts the machine so completely that only another can subject his work to its algorithm, and the reader is left trying to puzzle out the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of this decision and its result. Personally, I was left convinced that nothing was gained and much lost by the sacrifice of M’s writings to the false god of Kairos.

review of Gasda's 'Sleepers'

Gasda may be our greatest young writer working today, and certainly one with the keenest aesthetic sense of what the 21st Century is and might be and ought not to be. Stranger Beauty manages to capture an element of that in a short and constrained book, shedding light on the possible futures immediately before us and laying choices at each of our feet. Or maybe I’m wrong to say that the novel sheds light; perhaps it’s better to say it captures it—light which is mostly generated by Gasda’s keen insight but also generated by the reader, in the act of reading and teasing out his or her reaction to the book and its fragments. As one of M’s diary entries reads:

“Art does not illuminate, it is illuminated, the way a cathedral receives light. A work of art is a cathedral. A structure that can be inhabited.”

Stranger Beauty cements Gasda as an aesthetic auteur, spearheading a generation of writers who are invested in slicing open the ailing body of postmodernity and looking at its many cancerous tumors directly. That Gasda manages to do this kind of surgery delicately, inviting the reader to dance through diaries and fragments and small scenes of domestic discomfort, as well as through screenplays and AI conversations, is no small feat. And it makes me look very much forward to future novels from Gasda where he puts his formidable talents to work painting a larger and more varied landscape.

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The Greeks, with their diverse lands, from the southern slopes of grey crags, to the fertile plains of the north, to the blue infinity of the islands, so too vary in local traditions, especially in their musical lineages. In the tavernas you’ll hear bright bouzouki melodies plucked until the light blue hour of dawn. In Thrace, the pounding of drums, wheezings of bagpipes. In the islands of the Aegean Sea, which in my mother tongue means, The White Sea, are the sounds of bellowing lyres, heavy strumming of lutes, galloping rhythms beating on hand drums, and sensual voices resounding over the islands, carrying their memories, their eternal spirit.

Earlier this summer, Konstantinos Argiros—Greece’s most popular music-star—announced the release of his new album, an homage to the island music of the Aegean. Kabanes, bells, is Argiros’ cover album of Greek classics, most of which were previously recorded by Yiannis Parios, on his albums Ta Nisiotika (1982) and Ta Nisiotika 2 (1992). Parios popularized native island songs, which spawned several versions from Greece’s most influential artists such as Glykeria and Eleni Legaki.1

This tradition, which Argiros has taken up with his latest album, exemplifies my point that—in general—“Western pop has become a cult of decadence whereas Eastern pop preserves cultural spiritual and political memory.”2 Much like Arabic, Balkan, and Turkish popular music, Greek pop melds traditional melodies with newer trends in global pop music. While one can easily recognize hints of house or dembow rhythms on many top-charting Greek songs, they can also detect distinctly Greek elements within the mix. The fact that Argiros has opted to drop an album covering straight-up traditional folk songs is a bold statement that—despite the expansion of global monoculture that erodes local roots—Greece’s musical heritage isn’t going anywhere, and will continue to remain a mainstay in its commercial musical repertoire.

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The lead single “Kabanes,” the album’s title track and its only original song, is a marriage proposal, brilliantly rendered in the song’s music video. A young boy scales the walls of a bell tower of a milk-white island church, tugs the ropes of the bell, releases their clang. The din of metal modulates to the plucking of a laouto, and Argiros sings:

Tell me yes, koritsi3//and I’ll land ashore.

Your eyes the sea—//completely wreck me.

The video depicts an Orthodox wedding ceremony and an ecstatic reception of song and dance. As any ethnic Balkan Orthodox can attest, we have the best weddings. Celebration, even as it borders worldly pleasure of food and drink, is part of our Christianity, whereas historically, Western churches have been suspicious of revelry.4 We drink, dance, and eat to celebrate life.

But the video is not trad-Orthodox by any means. In place of a suit or traditional village wedding garb, Argiros dons a wife-beater and black slacks (what we call Balkancore). The priest’s officiation is barely audible, and cut off, as Argiros swipes the mic away from the priest and initiates the wedding festivities. There’s even some Queer-coded dancers hitting the dance floor with zesty moves!

And then there’s the song itself, composed with instruments common in nisiotika. The melodies are narrow, melodic, and repetitive. I had to listen to the song’s rhythms very carefully to detect the presence of any electronic sounds. Indeed, they are there, but very subtle. The bass line and beat are clearly synthetic, especially towards the end of the track as the song speeds up. Regardless, upon first listen, I was struck. There is not a single moment in Greek music history, and across the Balkan Peninsula, in which a popstar has transitioned effortlessly into a folk aesthetic.5

“Kabanes” is some of the best poetry in Argiros’ oeuvre.

Let the bells ring,//sing for you,//until dawn’s rising,//sung with violins and handkerchiefs.6

Tell me yes, my love,//and I’ll drop my anchor.//I’ll give you//your desires, your searchings.7

Tell me yes, my soul,//and we’ll go to the plain.//I will be in your harbor,//I will shine as your beacon.

Interestingly, Argiros and the actress playing the bride, never embrace. In fact, the wedding is nothing. A mere aesthetic choice, arbitrary, bric-a-brac. The song itself, tender and soulful, celebrated through dance and cheer, is the vessel of joy.

Bring Back Multigenerational Merriment

Early August in Indiana. A cousin has been married. Naturally, there must be a party the day after the wedding.8 Sometime in early evening, as the sun sunk slowly under the horizon, a Greek family-friend, long a part of our lives, joined in. We asked the band to play a Greek song. With enough wine in us to slightly elevate our ecstasy, we twirled and danced a horos, sang lyrics that we didn’t understand.

“Dari Dari,” maybe the most iconic nisiotika, is about yearning. Another famous song from Parios, Argiros’ version is slightly more percussive than the original, yet he performs perfect poetic justice. The speaker of the song wanders around, likely on an island, and seeks his past. Everything reminds him of it—the gulls circling above the shore, the glow of morning on the neighborhood. The chorus uses an interesting lyrical device.

Dari dari, dari dari,//the seagulls fly to the shore//the seagulls fly to the shore,//if only we could play with them.

“Dari” is not real word, but a sung rhythm for dancers to follow, very common in Balkan folk songs. In that August evening, we twirled and stepped, circled, just as the seagulls circle the shores, to “Dari Dari,” thousands of miles away from where it was written. We always find each other. Balkans always find each other. Nostalgic for their ancestral home.

“Dari Dari” ends with an iteration of the chorus, but the last line has changed—“the seagulls fly to the shore / they’ve caught up to us.” We wish we could soar higher than we can, but like the seagulls, we too circle life, landing now and then.

Stephen in the Greek islands

“Ta Nisiotika Paidia” is a cover from singer and bouzouki player Vangelis Perpiniadis. The song tells of a group of boys in their late teens who spend their island lives joyfully partying, drinking, listening to the bouzouki in the taverna. Their “hearts of gold” have no room for sorrow. Even when it comes to love, they break not the hearts of the island girls. Argiros’ cover breaks from the bright sound of Perpiniadis’ original, which represents the laiko style popular in the mainland tavernas, in favor of the island aesthetic (the use of violin, santouri, and toubeleki).

“Gianda”9 is a Cretan song. The music of Crete is dark, bellowing, thanks to the lyra, a bowed string instrument at the heart of Cretan culture. Here lovesickness takes hold. The speaker of the song sings of his love for a woman—“Why won’t you want my love forever? / I fade away for my love / what will I become?” The verb for “fade” here is “svino,” meaning the fading or extinguishing of a candle, in which I cannot help but recall the sad and erotic poems of Constantine Cavafy.

Argiros’ versions of “Sala Sala” and “Chorepsete Chorepsete” (both originally recorded by Parios) are ecstatic, and may be the best versions to date. “Chorepsete Chorepsete” is spiritually the last song on the album, but Argiros decided to cover his own song “Eleftheros” in a more traditional style, omitting the electronic elements. It feels more like a coda, something extra, than a finality. “Eleftheros” was the opening track to Argiros’ previous album 22, his best work. It marked a shift in his aesthetics from commercial Greek Pop, to a fusion of traditional Greek and global sounds.

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Kabanes is a perfect album to complete his aesthetic modulation, and the world seems to agree. It is the first Greek language album to debut on Billboard, and Argiros is embarking on a world tour. He’s already sold out stadiums in the States, and he’ll likely do so elsewhere. In the past year, young Greek artists like New Jersey’s Evangelina, and Megara’s Anastasia, have blended global pop and Greek folk sounds in surprising and new ways. Marina Satti, originally from Athens and educated at Berklee College of Music, is even more radical, with her 2024 album P.O.P. often being described as the European Brat (we should call it the Balkan Brat of course).

Greece has always had a strong music industry, with Serbia and Bosnia trailing close by. What I hope is that more artists in the Balkans seek to fuse a new sound, or redefine the classics of their country. This goes for Argiros, too. Can he make an album of original songs, purely acoustic with traditional Greek instruments? God willing.

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latest pod

Catherine Liu joins the pod to talk about trauma scripts, AOC and other fragile millennials, Laschian narcissism, the identitarian co-opting of the Left, and how to get over yourself. And make sure to pick up a copy of her forthcoming book Traumatized (which we’ll be reviewing soon). Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

pomo people elsewhere

• Stephen

  • wrote about how the real “battle” is not between DSA “communists” or MAGA “fascists,” but between overly-centralized technocratic power and local agency, and how this is playing out on the ground in Newark, New Jersey in Front Porch Republic (which is a lil preview of what’s coming up in his book).

  • appeared in a semi-viral reel on America Magazine’s IG, commenting on the backlash to his article about those people who insist on kneeling/receiving communion on the tongue when everyone else is receiving it in the hand…only to receive even more backlash! Oh well, all publicity is good publicity!

from the archives

So as we all know by now, Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported. It really is a shame that he’s allowed himself to turn into a mere rage-baiting psyop…when he could’ve been the next Oscar Wilde, or at least the male Paglia. As a tribute to our downed-diva, here’s Stephen’s piece from The Critic about how he ruined his own career.

In our discussion with Catherine Liu, I mentioned that the excesses of woke identitarianism has (thankfully) generated a renewed interested in Laschian leftism, with its focus on both class and Freudian psychology. One of our favorite people in this cohort is the great Eli Zaretski, who came on the pod a little over a year ago.

I often write about the themes of virginity/vowed celibacy and thought it would be helpful to delve a little more deeply into what that looked like for two particularly “passionate” saints: Teresa of Avila and Augustine of Hippo. In the spirit of Camille Paglia’s magnum opus Sexual Personae, I’ll explain how they embody two different archetypes of sexual sublimation [a word you can interchange with transformation or offering].

Both Teresa and Augustine were hot-blooded Mediterraneans from well-to-do families and with lively temperaments. It was often the case that their vivacity manifested in intense erotic longing. They also were disposed to thoroughly (some might say neurotically so) examining their thoughts and experiences, which is part of what enabled them to produce such intimate accounts of their spiritual lives (in Teresa’s Vitae and Augustine’s Confessions).

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Yet the two figures diverge in two important ways.

Augustine grew up in the Roman province of Hippo (modern-day Algeria), which at the time was largely pagan, with growing factions of Manichaeans and (Catholic) Christians. His father was pagan and his mother Christian. Thanks to their high social ranking, Augustine was able to obtain a solid education. Though he succeeded in his studies, he had a proclivity for getting into trouble with his group of bandit friends. His exploits ranged from rabble-rousing and stealing to attending lewd performances and fornicating.

His experience of sexual desire was intense and all-consuming:

Bodily desire, like a morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust. Love and lust together seethed within me. In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin…For I had been deafened by the clank of my chains, the fetters of the death which was my due to punish the pride in my soul…I was tossed and spilled, floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication. Confessions Book II Chapter II

He eventually fathered a child out of wedlock. After a dramatic and definitive conversion experience (akin to those who claim to have been “born again”), he left behind his life of debauchery and committed himself to God, the spiritual life, and the companionship of the Church. He eventually was called into the higher rankings of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and shepherded joyfully over the flock entrusted to him. His life panned out to be fairly stable and consistent after his conversion, as he had gotten his erratic, passion-filled tendencies “out of his system” before that point.

Teresa of Avila’s life, on the other hand, was one marked by repression, hysteria, and a continuous tension between extreme poles. Teresa grew up in Catholic Spain during times of conflict with the Moors, the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation, and the Spanish Inquisition. Her family was both aristocratic and deeply Catholic (said to be conversos from Judaism). Her life of comfort and privilege nurtured in her a taste for bourgeois “vices” from wanting to be known “on the scene” and engaging in gossip, to being overly concerned about fashion, reading extravagant romance novels, and fantasizing about finding the ideal lover. She was, for lack of a better term, a party girl, with a richly decadent imagination.

At the same time, she was heavily drawn to spirituality and religious devotion, at one point during her youth escaping from home with her brother in order to get martyred by the Moors. Eventually, she gave up her luxurious life to enter the convent, and—driven in part by her passionate temperament—went on to initiate the reform of the Carmelite order and to found numerous convents around Spain.

Unlike Augustine, there was never a definitive “breaking point” for Teresa. She spent her entire life oscillating between the extremes of decadence and worldly passion on the one hand, and religious devotion and penitential asceticism on the other. This constant back-and-forth made it difficult for her to remain “grounded” in reality, as her obsessive navel-gazing brought her from the depths of shame and scrupulosity to the heights of missionary industriousness and even spiritual ecstasy.

The effects of rapture are great: one is that the mighty power of our Lord is manifested; and as we are not strong enough, when His Majesty wills it, to control either soul or body, so neither have we any power over it; but, whether we like it or not, we see that there is one mightier than we are, that these graces are His gifts, and that of ourselves we can do nothing whatever; and humility is deeply imprinted in us. And further, I confess that it threw me into great fear, very great indeed at first; for when I saw my body thus lifted up from the earth, how could I help it? Though the spirit draws it upwards after itself, and that with great sweetness, if unresisted, the senses are not lost; at least, I was so much myself as to be able to see that I was being lifted up. The majesty of Him who can effect this so manifests itself, that the hairs of my head stand upright, and a great fear comes upon me of offending God, who is so mighty. This fear is bound up in exceedingly great love, which is acquired anew, and directed to Him, who, we see, bears so great a love to a worm so vile, and who seems not to be satisfied with attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way, but who will have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so foul, such as it is through our sins, which are so great. The Book of Her Life Chapter XX paragraph IX

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I don’t mean to indicate in juxtaposing the two that one is morally superior to the other. While Augustine’s path was more stable, the instability of Teresa’s was partially what enabled her to have miraculous out-of-body experiences. More than anything, it’s to highlight two different temperaments of people with both passionate and mystical proclivities, and the creativity of God who uses the raw material that we offer him according to his wisdom and mercy.

I’d also like to point out how those who fall into either of these archetypes have a hard time fitting into the “neutral,” middle-of-the-road bourgeois ideal which upholds moderation as its ideal and avoids any (public) expressions of passion. These two archetypes would rather go to Church or to a disco, listen to Lady Gaga or Gregorian chant, pray the rosary or go to a lavish restaurant, read The Secret History or Brideshead Revisited, watch Elite or Silence…than fill their time with tame or “respectable” affairs. Driven by the Dionysian spirit, they have little interest in more Apollonian pursuits.

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For more on Teresian spirituality, check out:

The Sacramental Love Songs of Bachata’s Romeo Santos

Notes on Duende

Were some saints mentally ill, holy, or both?

And for more on virginity, check out:

Love, Sex, and Dorothy Day

St. Agatha and the subversiveness of Roman virgin martyrs

photo taken in Rome by Jacob Anthony Amaro.

Day 1

Arrive in Malpensa airport. Six hours til my bus to the outskirts of Milan arrives. Navigate a quick roundtrip train ride to the center of the city to kill some time. Made my way to the train terminal only to find out trains were not running due to a strike. Pause to celebrate Europe’s esteem for the cause of labor…and to lament the fact that this also enables them to be lazy and for their public works to be inefficient and unreliable.

Lunched on subpar airport pizza and peach EstaThe. Checked the label, fearing the globalization of America’s use of artificial ingredients had reached Italy: sucralose (sigh), but no high fructose corn syrup or artificial peach flavoring (relief). Airport full of hijabis and their husbands and numerous children. Bus to small town.

Lodging at 17th century Franciscan friary complete with courtyard, cloister garden, halls lined with baroque-ish original paintings, high-ceiling bedroom devoid of air conditioning (alhamdulillah) with antique prie-dieu and sketch of the crucifixion.

Dinner at caffe bar staffed by Peruvians while a mix of recent reggaeton hits (Rauw Alejandro, Mike Towers, Bad Bunny) plays in the background. I guffaw at the fact that they only charge 4 euro for a glass of red. Followed by vegan gelato.

This globalization of consumer culture, of libertinism and tolerance—and the subsequent idolatry of “development” or progress for its own sake—engendered a new monoculture whose control was totalizing. It absorbs not only political ideologies but also the particularity of cultural differences, making them, as Pasolini put it, “perfectly homogenized and acculturated.” Its alleged tolerance and freedom “conceal a decision to reconfigure everything so ruthlessly as to be without historical precedent,” and thus “represents no one.” Its “imposition of hedonism and joie de vivre” is “a deadly form of fascism.” Unlike the old forms of fascism which blatantly made known their ideals and goals, the new fascism is deceptive: It “has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical in a human way, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganization and homogenization of the world.”

Day 2

Morning in Porta Garibaldi neighborhood of Milan. Say a prayer in the Cimitero Monumentale and roam around the streets. Pop into a church after telling gypsy at the door I don’t have any money. It’s ok, she tells me. I can give her the money on my way out. Streets full of Arabs, Africans, and Latinx…much more than I saw last time I was here back in 2024. Very few indigenous Italians.

I find myself uneasy at having such a knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of migrants in my motherland. My inner millennial SJW is disgusted at myself for thinking thoughts that far-right populists and ethnonationalists think. But then I remind myself that it’s ok—being disturbed by mass migration in Europe is more justifiable than feeling so in the US, where a steady flow of migrants has always been a key element of the foundation, of the cultural fabric of the national identity. In Europe, on the other hand, cultural homogeneity—the passing on of a distinct cultural legacy through the ages—is more of a thing. Thus waves of migrants pose a real challenge to Europe’s stability—for cultural and metaphysical as well as political and economic reasons.

I compensate for my “problematic” train of thought by insisting to myself that ethnonationalism and right-populism are—on top of being morally depraved—politically impotent. They are mere reactions that pose no real challenge to the expansion of globalization. They posture themselves as the antidote to globohomo, while in reality functioning as a mere reactionary performance, a simulation of “tradition” and pride in the particular. As Trump has proven, right populists have little to no real commitment to protecting local agency and cultural patrimony, and thus act in collusion with the very evils they set themselves in opposition to.

Besides, I reassure myself, it’s not the immigrants’ fault. It’s globohomo’s fault. It’s neoliberalism’s fault. Colonialism’s fault. I think of Pope Leo XIV’s insistence during his Apostolic visit to Spain that while people have the right to migrate, they also have to right to stay put in their home country…and more should be done to aid the nations from which natives feel compelled to flee.

Then I remember that had Europe not given up it’s Christian heritage, they wouldn’t be caught in this deadlock between globalist, diversity-coded neoliberalism and xenophonic ethnopopulism. Had they maintained their roots, they would’ve had a host culture to welcome and integrate immigrants into. Europe’s rejection of its roots renders them vulnerable to waves of migrants. I think of Pasolini, who understood the value of local cultures…of Simone Weil who understood the need for roots, of Fr. Arizmendiarrieta who understood that the Church’s vision for society stood apart from capitalist liberalism, nationalist fascism, and socialism.

Years before modern globalism emerged, nationalism was already eroding local cultures and institutions. You could even say that the nationalism that Vance praises—embodied by figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Otto Van Bismarck—paved the way for the internationalist outlook he so openly disdains. By undermining the power of local community, nationalism weakened the most natural and deeply rooted ties individuals posses. After such ties have been cut, the ethical argument propounded by numerous religions and philosophies—that all humans are one community regardless of place—was able to exert its influence without substantive opposition.

Champions of rural America must reject reactionary nationalist attempts to rewind the clock back to the 1950s. They need a totally new solution to rural malaise—one that combines the localism of the past with the values of the open society that will likely dominate the coming century. This is not an easy task; it asks us to combine two things that have not historically gone well together. Yet it is the only real hope for rural America.

-Jeffrey Tyler Syck

Days 3-7

Off to the Alps for a retreat. [top secret]

For the record, I hate nature. I despise being removed from civilization. When I travel, all I want to do is pop into every single church I pass, eat, smoke, dance, and engage in cultural anthropology (observing the culcha and then writing/[shit]posting about it). Sure, you can see the hand of God in the natural world, but I see perceive his handiwork more keenly when watching humans—the apex of his creation—and the stuff they do/have created. In nature’s defense, it’s not as bad as suburbia…where there’s nothing sacred at all, and where there’s nothing to do at all.

Day 8

Arrive at Venizelos Airport, Athens. Impossible to get a taxi. I’m immediately forced to reconsider all my clamoring against the toxicity of America’s cult of efficiency and utilitarianism. My shockingly cheap hotel, which is in walking distance from basically everywhere I planned to go in the city, also happens to be in the neighborhood where Athenians go to buy drugs. The neighborhood’s Bangladeshi restaurants and businesses are interspersed with dilapidated abandoned buildings and lots.

My feelings about cultural cohesion and mass migration are confirmed. I think back to the time my friend in college showed me a Vice News video about the Golden Dawn, a neo-nazi-adjacent, ultra-xenophobic movement in Greece that would go around terrorizing immigrants. At the time, I dismissed them as lunatics. But now I understand the very real problem they are trying to address, albeit with hatred and, ultimately, with stupidity: on top of being morally concerning, ethnonationalism is a hollow solution to the erosion of national identity…only capable of constructing an artificial, simulated version of it, rather than tradition in its dynamic, “living” form—which is capable of both maintaining a strong, cohesive culture as well as receiving foreigners into it.

Once again, back to square one: where has Greece’s Christian heritage gone? I saw a poll on IG reporting that Greece is the 4th most religious country in Europe. 59% of Greek believe in God. 55% say religion is an important part of their lives. 38% go to church at least once a month and 29% pray daily. But much like Luigi Giussani observed about Italy in the 1950s, Christianity is viewed more as a cultural institution or a “natural” religion—treated like a source of morals, magic, and superstitions—rather than an actual “proposal” that ontologically shapes the way you view and live within reality. I came across a handful of deeply pious people (mostly old ladies, the who made up the majority when I attended church services) and a couple of atheistic rebels, but the vast majority view faith as nice background music—which is to say it is a welcomed presence, but not deemed an integral part of how one lives their life.

Surely, this has to do something with the deeply mystical and relatively static nature of Eastern spirituality and Orthodox ecclesiastical governance, with its basis in monasticism rather than in social, political, educational, or missionary/charitable endeavors.

-Geronda, we’ve heard that they are thinking of replacing the Greek alphabet with Latin characters.

-Forget it! That will not work! It will not work. We are lucky that God always makes good out of what is crooked and evil. Otherwise, we would all be lost. Our Tradition and language were not lost back then when everything was recorded in hand-written manuscripts and there were no photocopy machines or other ways to preserve them. Nor will they be lost now that we have so many means of preserving them. Have you noticed how Pontian refugees from Russia have kept their customs? It helped that they spoke Pontian Greek and were able in this way to keep their Tradition alive. And even though they were given a little freedom, they still chose to leave Russia in order to be truly free. With only the little freedoms they were given, they were like birds taken out of the cage and left to fly freely in a room. Wouldn’t they feel sorrow there, too? How could they have been happy with this kind of freedom? Imagine how hard their lives must have been!

Some individuals are trying to wipe out this Orthodox nation. Do you know what this means? An Orthodox Christian nation today is a matter of great importance. In the old days, we had philosophy. Saint Catherine used philosophy to silence the philosophers of her time. The ancient philosophers paved the way for Christianity.

The Gospel was written in Greek and spread around the world. The Greeks then enlightened the Slavs. There are those who stand to lose if Greece continues to exist. “She is doing us harm,” they say; “We must destroy her.”

[…]

I will urge individuals that I know in higher education to establish a few more universities in Greece, so that our children will not have to go abroad to study. They should study here. In this way, no children will remain abroad; nor will their parents have to spend a lot of money, and the country will save on currency.

I always say to young people who are going abroad to study, “Go if you want to, but be careful not to lose your faith; take only their expertise. And most important-ly, don’t forget to come home, to our Homeland. Greece is waiting for you. You owe her your help. Stay close to the Greek people. Help all those poor souls who would otherwise have to go overseas to find a doctor or a specialist. Be very careful not to let your hearts grow cold The Europeans are cold people. And the United States is only for becoming wealthy in material goods and becoming spiritually bankrupt.”

-Elder Paisios, With pain and love for contemporary man

Day 9

We roamed around the streets, passing fliers in Bengali, numerous malnourished cats, graffiti of various political persuasions [Antifa, pro-Palestine, “death to America,” pro-LGBT, Christian], and more dilapidated buildings…which I must admit brought back memories from my time in the West Bank. I am reminded of the time that King George II referred to Greeks as “orientals.” Despite being the “cradle of Western Civilization” and belonging to the EU, the lack of order and rationality—thanks in part to its Byzantine and Ottoman patrimony—reminds us of Greece’s “exotic” eastern flair that so allured the likes of Byron.

After dodging tourist trap restaurants and asking locals for where we can find traditional fare, and breathing a nicotine-laced sigh of relief upon being permitted—even encouraged, by the ashtray awaiting me on the table—to smoke while eating (33% of Greeks still smoke, making it #9 in all of Europe), we made our way to Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. Mass was said in modern Greek by a Greek-born priest of Syrian ancestry, with a choir of Filipino children, and a congregation mostly consisting of tourists, Filipinos, and a few east Asians, Latinx, and Africans. Behind me sat a Basilian (Byzantine Rite) monk from Lebanon who, after introducing myself, told me he’d pray for me for my feast day.

This stark example of globohomo didn’t hit me with the same sensation of horror as I felt while roaming the streets…perhaps because this parish provided an ethos of cultural—and metaphysical—cohesiveness. There was a spiritual—and perhaps also—cultural proposal to participate in and belong to, something generative, capable of uniting these people of different backgrounds and fostering harmony rather than chaos. An oasis of hope in a swamp of globohomo-induced nihilism.

Day 10

Taxi to Piraeus to take the 7:15 am Blue Star ferry to Ikaria. I anxiously await the dude with the giant belly and booming voice who sells halva and loukoumi (Turkish delight) to board once we dock at Paros.

I roam the deck, where the groups of Balkan-maxxing young men decked in cut-off Ts, mid fades, Oakley-adjacent sunglasses, jean shorts, with fannypack across their chests are sitting with their frappes and iQos cigarettes in hand, some playing backgammon with each other.

I indulge my craving for kefalograviera cheese, Amita “Motion” fruit punch, and Lay’s Oregano potato chips…only to find out they started adding MSG to the latter. Globohomo strikes again.

I disembark from the ferry hoping to find a taxi, only to find out they are all booked. I begin my 25 minutes walk to the Airbnb carrying 3 bags under the noonday sun, texting the host that I’ll be getting there late since I have to walk. As I sweat profusely, I relish the aroma of figs and symphony of cicadas chirping in the air. Halfway there, the host beckons us into the car and graciously drives us the rest of the way. I plop myself onto the bed, overjoyed to find a ceiling fan and blackout shades. Heaven.

We walk over to a secluded little beach where a woman clad in only a bikini bottom is tanning while her dog takes a dip in the Aegean. A mountain goat watches from the ledge of a cliff hanging over the water. I make my way over to the cafe to get a freddo cappuccino and ask the barista where he recommends we go to dinner. The best place is about a 45 minute walk. Knowing there are no taxis, we resolve to do the grueling walk. It will be ok because we’ll work up an appetite, we tell ourselves.

The waiter is the epitome of European customer service—or the lack thereof. Extremely kind, in a genuine way…because he actually enjoys being nice and not because he’s working for a tip. But also extremely inefficient. We have to remind him 3 times to bring us more water. And serves us the wrong kind of salad. But all with a smile. We ask him if he knows of any taxi drivers who can bring us back. He says no, but offers to drive us on the back of his vespa. Apparently his boss has no problem with him taking 20 minutes to drive customers to their Airbnb and back…but then again it’s common for waiters to take 20 minute cigarette breaks. It is despite, or perhaps because of, their inefficiency, that European waiters can be so genuinely kind.

The loss of (spontaneous, reciprocal, symbolic) human relations is the fundamental fact of our societies. It is on this basis that we are seeing the systematic reinjection of human relations -- in the form of signs -- into the social circuit, and are seeing the consumption of those relations and of that human warmth in signified form. The receptionist, the social worker, the public relations consultant, the advertising pin-up girl, all these apostles of the social machine have as their secular mission the gratification, the lubrication of social relations with the institutional smile.

Everywhere we see advertising aping intimate, intimist, personal styles of communication. It attempts to speak to the housewife in the language of the housewife next door, to speak to the executive or the secretary as a boss or a colleague, to speak to each of us as our friend or our superego or as an inner voice in the confessional mode. It thus produces intimacy where there is none -- either among people or between people and products -- by a veritable process of simulation. And it is this, among other things (though perhaps this above all), which is consumed in advertising.

-Baudrillard, The Consumer Society

Day 11

After a full day on the island, one begins to understand why Ikaria is a Blue Zone. People are both extremely self-reliant and extremely interdependent. They know how to DIY, but have no problem asking a perfect stranger for help. People build and fix things themselves. But they have no qualms with hitching a ride with a perfect stranger. (It also helps that there’s no crime on the island…like, at all.) To a New Yorker, this is bizarre…ridiculous. But for Ikarians, this is common-sensical. This random guy needs a ride, needs help with cutting a tree, with fixing his car…why wouldn’t I help him? Wouldn’t I want him to help me if I were in his shoes?

They cook their own food from locally sourced ingredients. A tomato tastes like a tomato. Cheese tastes like a slice of heaven. They walk everywhere. They nap and dance and have sex frequently. Kids have a healthy balance of work and play, of peer and intergenerational interactions. The 9 year old son of the bakery owner takes my order and rings me up, asking mom for a price check on my bread. While parents eat dinner at a restaurant, kids play with each other in the streets. No helicopter parenting, nor babysitting the kids with iPads.

Even the teenagers seem stress-free. They work non-bullshit jobs—at a restaurant, at a store, in a mechanic shop—part of the day, and hang out at restaurants and parties with their peers while surrounded by babies and octageneraians the rest of the day. They take pride in their appearance without obsessing over it, without making “a thing” out of it. They have social media, but seem unconcerned about the likes and comments. They drink, but not for the sake of getting drunk.

They don’t have identity crises because they know exactly who they are: They know, enjoy, and take pride in their cultural heritage. They know what village they come from, what family they come from. Their identity is founded in something solid, something meaningful and generative. They conceive of themselves as being in relationship with reality, with “the world beyond their head,” rather than in opposition to it. Their point of reference when thinking of themselves are not abstractions, the machinations of their own minds (or the minds of corporate execs). Rather, their point of reference is the concrete limits, contours, and surprises of reality itself. Their identity is molded by the interplay of tension and harmony with the real, with society, with their relationships, rather than by their own schemes and efforts.

I’m awestruck by being in the presence of kids who are genuinely happy, who are not perpetually anxious, fighting against something, who are not desperate for approval or trying to construct their “best life” or sense of self artificially, but for whom identity emerges organically from their relationship with the real. They are not plagued by the infinity of options presented to them by the liquid-like limits of “The Market.” Reality doesn’t make them anxious or restless. They are at ease with the world around them as it is.

Day 12

Run into Airbnb owner in the morning. “Off to work?” “Hmmm…maybe I’ll go to work today. First I have to go to the beach for a swim.” Thank God Greece was allowed into the EU! Who knows where it’s already crumbling economy would be with that work ethic.

Lunch at the other place the barista recommended. Waiter is extremely friendly, and inattentive to the point that it’s almost amusing. Across from us, there’s a group of young men in Balkan-maxxing attire.

The homosocial culture in Greece is striking. Men go around in packs, exuding a strikingly natural, effortless brand of masculinity: neither hypermasculine/performatively macho nor wimpy/effeminate. They take pride in their appearance, but not in a guë way. They are virile and clearly take pleasure in the hot girls passing by, but not in a lecherous way. And they enjoy being in each other’s company…they enjoy the bond that they can only share with fellow men.

Homosociality among women is less pronounced, more subtle. But they similarly exude an effortless femininity. Utterly gorgeous, done up—hair, makeup and outfit to the nines—more out of a desire to take pride in their appearance than to gain the approval of others. In part out of a desire to attract male attention, but not in a desperate way. Indeed, they are sexy, but without being slutty—emanating a natural rather than forced, anxious kind of beauty.

I begin to wonder where the actual homosexuals are. I notice a couple of butchy women here and there. The only effeminate man I noticed in Greece was the flight attend on the way here. Despite all the leftist graffiti, I’m surprised by the lack of a prominent LGBTQIA++ subculture. Then again, Greece remains an “oriental” culture…it retains its antiquated eastern aversion to “western” innovations like the normalization of homosexuality. Even the communists—who literally run the island [it’s where all the leftists were exiled during the civil war]—voted against gay marriage, for fear of turning children into a commodity.

I text a Greek friend asking what’s up with the Greek gays. She tells me that most of them are on the DL, dating women while snooping around on Grindr. But even the DL gays will tell you they’re straight. They retain the old school dictum—it’s only gay if you bottom. Surely, there’s nothing commendable about homophobia. Yet there’s something somewhat relieving about their holding onto the old school model of gay. Keep heterosexuality as the norm, and keep your naughty (gay) business in the underground…and never turn it into an “identity” marker. Don’t present as femme in public either (unless you become an Ottoman court eunuch). And only pursue gay sex for the sake of sex alone. Don’t pursue a romantic partnership—romance if for hetero pairings, homosexuality is strictly sexual, transactional. Romance between men constitutes a friendship, not a “romance” in the conventional sense. Besides, the secrecy keeps things spicier, on top of maintaining social order.

Day 13

Feast of the Transfiguration. The priest begins the liturgy while simultaneously trying to fix the air conditioner in the sweltering little chapel that overlooks the port. The old ladies with little kids file in, most of the men wander out for a cigarette break, pausing to show reverence to the priest as he incenses outside the doors of the chapel. I love how they segregate the pious from the nominal believers—so natural, so accommodating. The chanter’s 6 and 11 year old sons join him at the paslterion to help him out. At the end, one of the old ladies begins cutting up and distributing the artoklasia—blessed bread—which is still warm from when she took it out of the oven that morning.

Church in the US feels so “processed,” so “developed” as Pasolini would say, compared to this. It’s a production, a consumer commodity—designed to please the customer so they leave a good Yelp review. Some parishes might be nice, but they leave you feeling empty in the end…like after going on a shopping spree or drinking soda with high fructose corn syrup or aspartame. The put-on nature of it doesn’t fill your soul the way reverence shrouded in informality and spontaneity can.

We walk over to a shop that makes fresh spanakopita. The man before us orders a sandwich. The owner tells him she’s out of bread, so she’ll just run over to the baker to get some to make his sandwich. She jumps on her Vespa…while we impatiently wait in line to order.

Quick swim, then back to the Airbnb to get ready for the panigiri—the village feast in honor of the Transfiguration. Panigiria are truly the culmination of everything I’ve ever yearned for: run by the villagers, these festivals—which date back to antiquity—feature fresh homemade food and wine, concentric circles of people—from 3 year olds to 90 year olds—dancing from sunset to sunrise to folk songs that have been passed down through the centuries played by a live band.

We are handed a flier for a communist festival hosted by the youth division of KKE as we walk in, and are barraged with cigarette smoke and the sound of the Ikariotiko being played on the violin. At least 50 tables surround the church, whose doors are wide open for when people want to take a break from dancing, eating, drinking, and smoking to light a candle.

I immediately join the dancers, doing the Ikariotiko, then the kalamatiano, then the balos, until I sweat through my shirt…then taking a break to dry off while puffing on a Greek Lucky Strike. I hop back into the circle…people squeeze in, and the circle gets too big as people start to bump up against the tables. I take the initiative to break off and begin the inner spiral. After 5 minutes I get tired of leading and try to get the Balkan-maxxing dudes next to me to take over, but to no avail. I wave over a middle-aged butch, and she gladly takes the lead. [I even made it into YouTube cut…in the back coming in from the right]

My heart surged with a burst of revelry and pride. I feel myself to have roots, a foundation, a heart, balls—to be fully a man, fully a human being, in this moment. I’m participating in a tradition, a form of culture, of joy, that has been passed on through millennia…knowing that I belong to so great a people as the Greeks. A pride that those living in homogenized, deracinated monocultures—however much “diverse”—will never know…yet that neither will the reactionary ethnonationalists, with all their clamoring about “tradition” and “national identity.”

Indeed, this is the kind of tradition, of cultural institution, that no one can invent artificially. It is too beautiful, too dynamic, too lively to be “constructed,” but can only be passed down through the ages, shared out of gratitude and joy. Indeed, it is this kind of “living” cultural pride that is capable of receiving outsiders, of offering something of substance to participate in and become part of.

I think of how much Pasolini would’ve loved this, this pride in the particular. In a people who smell and taste like something distinct, with flavor, with chutzpah—who are not bland “like a piece of toast.” I think of my grandparents, filled with gratitude for all that they passed down to me. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to care for them on their deathbed, even with all the sacrifices that entailed. I’m grateful to my mom for forcing me to go to Greek school against my will, where I learned the language, history, culture, religion, dance, music, literature of my people—which gave me dignity, which gave me hope in the deracinated hellscape I called home.

People from the motherland wonder why their brethren in America are so proud, why we wave our flags and constantly remind people of our heritage. They wouldn’t understand…when your grow up in the cradle of global homogenization, without roots, without a clear identity…you hold onto to whatever remnant of roots, of substance, that you can (it’s the same reason Americans are prone to inventing identity categories like non-binary, neurodivergent, and Republican).

One of the main characteristics of this equality of lived expression, besides the fossilization of verbal language (students speak like printed books, street kids have lost all colloquial inventiveness), is sadness: joy is always exaggerated, ostentatious, offensive. The physical sadness of which I speak is profoundly neurotic. It is based on social frustration. Now that the social model to be attained is no longer that of one’s own class, but the one imposed by power, many people are no longer in any position to attain it. And this is horribly humiliating.

Allow me to offer a very modest example. At one time the baker’s assistant, or cascherino, as he is still called in Rome, was always, constantly cheerful: it was a real joy, which sparkled in his eyes. He used to walk down the street whistling and cracking jokes. His vitality was irresistible. He was dressed much more poorly than his contemporary counterpart: his trousers were patched, and even in good times his shirt was often hardly more than a tattered rag. But all of this formed part of a model that, in his village, had a value, and a meaning, and he was proud of it.

And, in short, what counts is that this person, this man, was cheerful. Isn’t happiness what really matters? Is it not for happiness that one fights for the revolution? The peasant or sub-proletarian condition was once able to express, in those persons who lived it, a certain “real” happiness.

Today, this happiness—with the coming of Development—has been lost. This means that Development is by no means revolutionary, not even when it is brings reform. It only generates anxiety. Today there are adults my age who are so aberrant as to think that the (almost tragic) seriousness with which our contemporary bakers hand us their package wrapped in plastic, with their long hair and moustaches, is better than the “silly” joy of the past. They think that to prefer seriousness to laughter is a virile way to face life. In fact, they are happy vampires, happy to see their innocent victims transformed into vampires, too.

Seriousness and a dignified demeanor are horrendous duties that are imposed on the petty bourgeoisie; and the petty bourgeoisie are therefore happy to see the poor people become “serious and dignified”, too. It never even occurs to them that this is real degradation: that the poor people are sad because they have become aware of their own social inferiority, since their values and their cultural models have been destroyed.

-Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere Lutterane

Day 14

Last day. Airbnb owner catches us having mountain tea outside and asks us how we enjoyed the panigiri. “Omg so much fun…we stayed til like 2 am!” That’s nice, he tells us. He stayed til 5 am, took a quick nap, then went for his morning swim and then off to work.

We hang around on the beach, behaving like obnoxious Americans: talking loudly, drinking, dancing, making a scene…and taking pride in it all. We are the center of the world, and we know it. The Ikarians are eating up our brazen American superiority complex. The young man collecting the fee for umbrellas lights up when we tell him we’re from New York. He always dreamed of going there. He tells us about life on the island, how he rides dirt bikes, and asks to follow us on IG. We make nice with the bartender—Stavros, which means “cross.” My friend asks him if he’s religious, he tells us he goes to church regularly, and that he’s a boxer. Strikes me as much more genuinely chadded than any of the American Orthobros who post about their OCA church and BJJ gyms on X.

I overheard a Greek-American family next to us—the son, about 12 years old, proclaims that the panigiri last night was “the best night of his life,” as he “never had so much fun before.”

At our last supper, I see more people who were at the panigiri, including the lovely butch with whom I danced, and then overhear two women with heavy Noo Yawk accents. I lean over and ask if they’re from Astoria or Bay Ridge. Bayside, they tell me. Close enough. The brief whiff of Noo Yawk makes me nostalgic for home.

Day 15

Back to NY/NJ. I start thinking how much I’ll miss the island life, the people, the food, the music…but then I remember I live in the center of the world. Where I can go down the block to one of the numerous Greek restaurants or markets to get authentic Greek food…or Italian, or Palestinian, or Korean, or Dominican. And I can drive up to Astoria to hear real Greek music, and down the shore to see the sea.

New York truly is the perfect combo of eveything: globalization and ethnic rootedness, corporate power and local communities, efficiency and messiness, tradition and progress, sacred and profane.

I’m glad to be home.

If there is one aspect of Millennial culture I hope that our generational successors jettison, it is the concept of “introverting.” Along with profane tea towels and self-help books, Harry Potter, and Cards Against Humanity, it belongs on the ash heap of history.

Psychology Today explains that an introvert is someone who prefers “the inner life of the mind over the outer world of other people.” “Introverting,” then, is a neologism usually deployed to mean an unapologetic retreat from public or social life. I’m an introvert myself; I tend to prefer time alone to read, exercise, watch a movie, or do housework. But I don’t like the adoption of “introvert” as an identity that requires societal carveouts.

I’ll explain what I mean. “Introvert” is a personality type. It isn’t good or bad, it’s just that you get your energy from being alone or in small groups, rather than from large groups. It isn’t a diagnosis. And yet people who self-identify as introverts sometimes seem to feel like their introversion gives them social license to be misanthropic.

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Take this Instagram slideshow I found. It is entitled, “15 Images every introvert relates to.” The first image is an unkempt cartoon person scowling, wrapped in a blanket with the phrase “current mood” written overhead (why?). Later, a waving cartoon puppy: “I suck at keeping in touch, but I like you,” the caption reads (that’s just inconsiderate?). Still later, a pie chart entitled “Why I am on Instagram,” where the two categories are “To make friends and socialize,” and “To see memes.” Guess which one is a tiny sliver (who is so introverted that they can’t even be sociable online?).

Then there’s another reel explaining introvert life.” “We’re introverts, we want to be invited to the party, even though we probably won’t go,” a woman says with a chipper smile. “We’re introverts. The thought of making small talk makes our armpits sweat, so we’re probably going to ask you really deep, intrusive, inappropriate questions to get to know you better.” It’s funny, and I’ll acknowledge that I find the underlying sentiment relatable.

But whatever this is, I’m not sure that’s actually introversion. Maybe some kind of social anxiety? A touch of autism? Seasonal depression? Anyway, even if the above phenomena were universally true to the introvert experience, in this type of for-us-by-us content, there’s very little sense that anything about it might be wrong in some way. People should just understand.

Maggie on Charlie Kirk

And look, introvert here! I get that it’s often exhausting to do things with other people and it is nice to be left alone sometimes. But I’d also argue that it’s necessary to repress our introvert tendencies more than we give into them, in order to be a contributing member of our communities.

Making “introvert” a key personal identity marker carries an underlying threat. Often, it is accompanied by an evident sense of superiority to the kind of sheeple who go to large parties or make small talk.

the woes of slight autism

It’s what I call “Liz Lemon Syndrome.” In an episode of the TV show 30 Rock, TV sketch comedy writer Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey) remembers her high school experience as a bullied nerd. But at her high school reunion, we learn that she was a quirky loner, yes, but she was actually fairly cutting and judgmental toward the popular kids.

I suspect these kinds of nerdy introverts populate a lot of TV and movie writers’ rooms. At least since I was a kid, popular media tends to portray the kids who roll their eyes at the popular kids, who don’t go to parties, who are allergic to superficiality, as actually the most special, the sensitive misunderstood intellectuals. “Be yourself! Don’t follow the crowd!” is a popular message in kids’ entertainment. That’s fine advice if the crowd in question is pressuring you into risky sexual behavior at a young age or going all-in on National Socialism. But groups of people in public aren’t bad in and of themselves, and you aren’t actually the secret Princess of Genovia just because you don’t care for them.

Stephen on therapy speak

Anyway, I certainly absorbed this message. In my imagining growing up, I was Belle in the opening number of Beauty and the Beast, “never part of any crowd/’Cause her head’s up on some cloud,” meant for better things than the provincial life of my myopic extroverted classmates. But in reality, most of the time, if you stand off to the side critically evaluating or frequently opting out of things that everyone likes–including something as basic as being together in a group–you’re kind of the problem. It took me until I was in my late thirties to realize that aversion to small talk actually isn’t a virtue. In fact, surface-level pleasantries are an important part of getting to know people and your community.

Although I’m not really a joiner, I make myself do a lot of things with groups and organizations. It’s not a natural fit for me, to be honest. And I do find it really draining sometimes at the end of a long day. But the benefit is belonging to a community and being a part of something bigger than myself. As human beings, this ultimately is what we’re made for.

most of you need therapy

If you want society to recognize your introversion as a trait that requires special consideration, the flip side of that is understanding that justice is giving others what is due to them. We owe those around us the best of ourselves. And if we’re being honest, our best self is not always the same thing as our authentic self.

I’ve learned a lot from John Machnee, the host of the Christianity on the Spectrum podcast. He is frequently on X adjuring his fellow ASD1 folks to learn to “mask” (essentially to fake neurotypical behavior), at least just a little bit, if they want to make friends or date.

Making introversion a key component of your personality risks a kind of entitled safetyism. Where is it written that we should never be tired or uncomfortable if we can help it? Who owes us that? Reality has a bias, and it favors extroverts. And thank God for that, because that’s the whole reason we were able to develop market economies and governments and culture. What do you gain by opting out? A few more hours alone?

Take an invitation to a house party for instance. Someone who has undertaken the logistical, emotional, and financial burden to host a gathering is owed the courtesy of the introvert’s time and attention. Showing up tells that person that you value them: you made the effort, you put in the time. If you as the introvert are a little more tired than usual on the other end, that’s simply the price you pay to be a part of something human.

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Frankly, not liking to go out doesn’t make you special. Moreover, staying home or standing on the margins when you could otherwise put yourself out there isn’t justice. But you can strike a balance. A therapist once explained to me the value of “putting in an appearance.” Essentially, she explained to me that habitually declining (or worse, ignoring) invitations is actually really rude. But if you’re an introvert, you’re also not obligated to stay the entire time or to be the life of the party. Show up, drop off a bottle of wine, make yourself known to the host and exchange a few pleasantries with other guests, and you’re home in your socks watching Widows Bay again before you know it.

To quote George Costanza, “We’re living in a society.” I’d encourage my fellow introverts to act accordingly. The urge to protect the authentic introverted self from feeling emotionally depleted is as deleterious to the introvert as it is to their community. So fake it till you make it. Accept the next invitation whether you want to go or not. Don’t flake. Show up and join in some small talk (without judgment). Then, go home at the earliest possible opportunity, and go to sleep.

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I continuously find myself confused by British people’s cultural politics. Take for example, the proliferation of TERFs in the UK, or the very “politically incorrect” gays and lesbians who publicly express their reservations about mass migration—especially of people from majority-Muslim nations, or this gay British dude’s very strange reaction to Inversion.

In the US, feminism and gay rights are categorically left-coded: as oppressed minorities, women and gays are by default members of the left…and thus are natural allies with trans, Muslims, disabled people, and immigrants. The idea that a feminist would be against trans, or that a gay man would be against Muslim immigrants, is foreign to us here across the pond.

I took the liberty to ask about this during our pod discussion. Her insights shined a lot of light on the matter.

If your attention span is too short, you can watch these reels taken from our interview about the US’s lack of leftists, the idea that you must categorically accept certain causes in order to be on the “right side of history,” and why American libs falsely think your enemy’s enemy is your friend.

Here are some conclusions I’ve drawn about why the fault lines of the culture war are different in the US vs UK:

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I am a product of the Indiana public school system. When I was in elementary school, there was a form of moral education. It was developed by Susan Kovalik. The technical term for it is “Integrated Thematic Instruction” or “ITI,” but we were introduced to it as the “Lifelong Guidelines and Life Skills.” It included five central “guidelines” and nineteen further “life skills.” Here, I’ll enumerate them for you:

The Lifelong Guidelines:

1. Trustworthiness

2. Truthfulness

3. Active Listening

4. No Put-Downs

5. Personal Best

The Life Skills:

1. Caring

2. Common Sense

3. Cooperation

4. Courage

5. Creativity

6. Curiosity

7. Effort

8. Flexibility

9. Friendship

10. Initiative

11. Integrity

12. Organization

13. Patience

14. Perseverance

15. Pride

16. Problem-Solving

17. Resourcefulness

18. Responsibility

19. Sense of Humor

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This is a system of virtue ethics, but it certainly does not map tightly onto religious systems. Pride and curiosity are both sins in Catholicism, but are given positive content here. Kovalik has built this system to produce a specific kind of person who is well-adjusted for the elementary school classroom environment. Such a person can be trusted to tell the truth, listen attentively, try hard, and refrain from undermining other students’ learning. If this well-socialized student positively identifies with this behavior, taking pride in their ability to do these things, that is not unhelpful—as long as pride does not lead the student to violate the injunction against putting down other kids. For this reason, pride is often framed in relation to doing your personal best. You are not supposed to take pride in the result, but in the fact that you tried as hard as you could. If other kids are trying as hard as they can, even if they get inferior results, they are every bit as entitled to be proud of themselves as you are.

In practice it gets a little messy. For instance, I frequently outperformed my peers. I was unwilling to believe the other kids were doing their personal best, and I therefore tended to think that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. I often made students feel bad without putting them down. For instance, I would finish work much faster than the other students, and then I would get up from my desk and start reading the enrichment materials scattered around the room. The other students saw how quickly I was able to do this, and they were made to feel inferior. But I didn’t say a word to them, so how could I be accused of putting them down? All I did was get up and read things. I followed my curiosity, using all of the time available for learning. I was proud of how fast I could do things. Pride and curiosity were life skills, so how could I be reproached? If the other kids responded by putting me down, they were the ones in violation of the guidelines. Because I was proud of myself for being good at school, I tried very hard. And, because they didn’t want to feel bad about themselves, the other kids tried to keep up with me, even though they could not. Isn’t that what the teachers want? Pride is a functional part of Kovalik’s system, as long as it does not issue in put-downs. Of course, as soon as it issues in put-downs, you tell the teacher the truth. You shout to the teacher, “That’s a put-down!”

So, while the lifelong guidelines and life skills are not perfect, they are fairly successful in producing students who are adequately socialized for the purpose of learning elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic. The character problems that do arise—excessive hubris on the part of gifted students and a tendency for everyone to become a tattle-tale—may have had certain negative effects on the Millennial generation. But they do not interfere with the acquisition of English and math skills. Indeed, they produced a generation that tests better in English and math than any generation produced before or since.

Once we moved on to middle school, we stopped hearing so much about the lifelong guidelines and life skills. Instead, moral education was increasingly negative and behavioralist. Don’t do drugs. Don’t have sex. Don’t join gangs. Don’t bully other kids. The flagship moral program, “Creating a Safe School” or “CASS,” was all about preventing students from endangering one another with bad behavior. Students are taught conflict mediation techniques, in the hopes of preventing conflicts from rising to the level of requiring an adult intervention. When bullying nonetheless occurs, the authorities create restorative circles in which students are pushed to empathize with one another.

Once you’ve constructed functional students with the lifelong guidelines and life skills, the aim is to prevent teenage hormones from undermining what you’ve built. There is no vision of further moral progress at the secondary level. The moral interventions are preventative and negative in character. One would not be remiss in thinking that, from the point of view of the school system, we reach our moral peaks at around the age of 10. Everything that happens after that is a kind of decay. Those who survived the period of decay went to college. The rest were written off as a kind of attrition.

The schools are falling apart

Gifted kids were cordoned off in honors classes to protect them from the moral decay. Since, in our schools, maturity is associated principally with forms of moral decay, putting off moral decay also involves putting off maturity. The social development of honors students is arrested so that they can remain within the classroom paradigm that leads to high test scores for the longest possible period of time. Maturity is put off and delayed, and the habits inculcated in elementary school cease to be examined. Do your personal best, take pride in your results, and find ways to shame your peers without putting them down. Those who stick rigorously to the ancient ways, without engaging in the prohibited “mature” behavior, will be rewarded in college, which comes to appear as a kind of afterlife. Once you get to college, everything will be okay. It’s what the school system believed, and it’s what we were encouraged to believe, too.

They don’t believe it anymore. Today, the Indiana public school system is no longer sure that it wants its students to go to college. “Maybe trade school?” it thinks. “Be a plumber or an electrician, they make good money.” “What about the army? You’ll get health insurance that way.”

Now the Indiana public schools emphasize three outcomes—enrollment in college, employment in the workforce, or enlistment in the military. Students are now required to provide free labor to businesses in their community as a formal part of their education. These paths require different, conflicting skills. The social norms that prevail on campuses do not look like the ones that prevail in business around town or on military bases.

teachers are burning out

A consensus on the form of moral education requires a consensus on the purpose of education. But if students are to be prepared for three conflicting institutional settings, any form of moral education provided to all of them becomes more contentious. It follows that moral education at the secondary level becomes even thinner, with students on different tracks getting even less exposure to one another. Rather than a single, unitary “common sense,” we have three different managerial subjectivities, each of which operates with its own set of norms.

What do all children still need to have in common? Despite the fragmentation at the secondary level, there is still a consensus that all elementary school children must learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. And so, there is still some scope for moral education based around cultivating the traits necessary to acquire these skills. But this moral education will only grow more limited in scope, because reading, writing, and arithmetic make only modest demands on the human soul. If, once this is done, we are not sure students need to go to college, why bother maintaining the honors kid ethos? Why not send the smart kids out into the real world? But, in our society, the “real world” is a place where the profit motive reigns supreme, where moral values are reduced to so many forms of corporate compliance. It is a place where the truth has no role to play and where only self-interest can be trusted.

Teachers who think seriously about this become cognizant of the limits it imposes on their own practice. You are asked to make children functional, at the level of basic skills. But you are only permitted to bring moral values into it in so far as these can be directly connected with the acquiring of the skills. Anything that points beyond this is too contentious to be sustained and may even be viewed as counterproductive. So, success requires not only that teachers succeed in teaching the basic skills, it also requires that teachers accept the limits imposed by the restricted remit of the public schools.

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Industrious, ambitious people do not so easily contain their industry and ambition to such a narrow terrain. So, teaching attracts two kinds of people:

1. Those who lack the industry or ambition necessary to become dissatisfied with the limits imposed by the profession. These teachers are reliable, but incompetent.

2. Those who have commitment and aspiration but are consequently drawn to exceed their mandates. These teachers are capable, but they do not tend to stick around.

Many school districts exhaust committed, ambitious people with paperwork, so that they are too tired and busy to think of ways to exceed their mandates. But this also leads to job dissatisfaction and burnout. And so, because the schools are only committed to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they eventually become dependent on incompetent people who do the bare minimum. In high school, science and social studies classes have always been taught by sports coaches who don’t care about their subjects and are interested in moral education only in so far as it furthers the competitiveness of their teams. Now even English and math scores begin to slip, as the teaching profession fails to attract and retain capable people. That which departs from what is good only a little will find, before long, that a little has a way of becoming a lot.

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And then, one day, I got food poisoning. Hunched over the toilet bowl at four in the morning, hands gripping both sides of the bowl as though it might run away from me, my face covered in sticky, sweet, smelly sweat, the words of the Saint came into my head: “We benefit greatly from our illnesses, as long as we endure them without complaint and glorify God, asking for His mercy.” Ahh, I thought. Thank you for your comfort, Saint. My shoulders drooped and I took a deep breath and I released the contents of my stomach into the bowl.

Saint Porphyrios was, throughout his life, afflicted by heart troubles, pleurisy, chronic kidney disease that at one point sent him into a coma, a stomach ulcer, cataracts, blindness, shingles, a staph infection, a hernia, and cancer of the pituitary gland. He spent much of his career, naturally, as the chaplain of a hospital in Athens. Born in poverty on the island of Evia, Porphyrios spent the majority of his life between Athens and Mount Athos, the Greek “Holy Mountain” that is believed to have been consecrated by the Virgin Mary; later in his life, he founded a monastery. Much of the interest of the writing comes from the contrast between these two places.

The lengthy autobiographical portion that begins the book could be subtitled “An Athonite in Athens,” so colored by his monastic experience as it is. The motif of the struggle between the urban and the holy isn’t new; it’s the backbone of St. Augustine’s “City of God.” But St. Augustine was worldly (very worldly!) before he was holy; Saint Porphyrios snuck away to Mount Athos at the age of twelve and was tonsured two years later. The heiromonk views Athens through the eyes of a permanent naïf. The reader wonders if he isn’t exaggerating, as all saints exaggerate the extent of their weakness and sinfulness, especially because Saint Porphyrios is given the spiritual gift of what he calls “clear sight,” known in Greek as diakrisis. So our Saint, like a human dowsing rod, can find underground wells, though that’s far from the extent of his gift.

The title “Wounded by Love” makes me think first of St. John of the Cross and his “Dark Night of the Soul” (“The breeze blew from the turret/As I parted his locks;/With his gentle hand he wounded my neck/And caused all my sense to be suspended.”) This Catholic brand of mysticism, which accepts affliction as a way God brings us closer to Him – I find it lovely but I also find it terrifying. The “Dark Night of the Soul” is worthy of contemplation, but it’s not much help during the dark night of an upset stomach.

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But Porphyrios is a different sort of saint. Let’s call him an “urban ascetic,” He lives in a world that is in a very concrete sense populated by angels and devils who are not afraid to get involved with the lives of humans. The “evil eye” is a constant menace. Supernatural events are commonplace; though Porphyrios encountered them first on Mount Athos, the uncanny and the mystical are just as present in the city. So Porphyrios sets his intention to live in Athens “as if in the desert of the Holy Mountain.” Does this make him anti-social? Hardly! Porphyrios the hermit is surprisingly (he himself seems surprised) a social butterfly.

Rather than scorning the world, Porphyrios views it with a combination of curiosity, humor and pity. This is a somewhat ironic view of asceticism. It’s less “be in the world but not of it” and more “be in the world but don’t take it too seriously.” The desert functions not as a safe haven from mortal corruption but as a measuring stick, a way to judge one’s priorities in the life of the city. The best part is, the way the saint speaks makes this perspective very attractive.

“Take delight in all things that surround us,” the Saint says, because “All things teach us and lead us to God.” This is the introduction to an essay called “On Creation” which is actually mostly about how much the Saint liked birdwatching. The back half of “Wounded by Love” is wisdom literature, so it is by definition proscriptive, but it is also… charming. There are old-man anecdotes, exclamations (“You cannot imagine what happens on the Holy Mountain at night!… A mystery!”) and digressions that give the book the quality of human speech.

The book seems to be largely composed of transcriptions of audio recordings and that lends itself to a simple and conversational tone, even about matters that are genuinely wild. Yes, if you have bad intentions secreted in your heart, they will really change the world and hurt people. But it’s not so bad, the Saint tells us. Just say the Jesus prayer and read the Psalms. Try to keep a vegetarian diet, unless your doctor warns you against it, of course. Obey your elders. All of the Saint’s advice is like this.

So “urban asceticism” has a pragmatic character. What does that look like? In his essay on “clear sight,” there’s a fascinating passage in which our Saint “visits” Mt. Athos via two means. The first is a very modern one: the telephone. An elder on the mountain takes a call from Porphyrios and they talk for a half hour. The bell rings for services, and as the elder is about to hang up the phone, he invites Porphyrios to attend with him. And so he does, “seeing” the whole event through supernatural means.

Yet in the next example, the order is flipped. The monk “attends” a lecture by a fellow Athonite and is struck by just how much the speaker is sweating. A phone call to an in-the-flesh attendant of the lecture serves to confirm his account. First phone call then clear sight; next clear sight and then phone call. The reversal indicates that the telephone call is not the key element of the “visit,” but in a modern world neither can it be dismissed. It is not causal, not the “real thing,” but it’s not honest for the saint to pretend he’s not living a contemporary life. For the modern Saint, something as mundane as a phone call can sit comfortably alongside genuine clairvoyance.

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This point is reiterated later in the essay. While on a walk on Mount Parnassos with two girls, our Saint comes across a humble chapel. Entering the empty church, he can see its whole past spread out before him and occurring at once: the pain of the worshippers, the solemnity of the celebrants. He sings the hymns he knows and is transformed:

“I felt an ineffable joy, my voice became as I had never heard it before, as if from a multitude of a hundred people, sweet strong harmonious, heavenly… In an instant the sky become a cathedral vault and the pine trees with their branches brazen candle stands…”

The girls have a cassette recorder and, naturally, want to record him. But Porphyrios came of age on the Holy Mountain and has a fetish for secrecy: the tape recorder is put away. The thing to pay attention to, however, is Porphyrios’ admission a few days later: he has had a change of heart. We should have recorded my singing after all! he tells them. How great would it be to hear it again? Ah well. So it goes.

And as I’m rereading this passage, I’m drawn to a footnote I had neglected. In fact, the two girls from that story, Vasiliki and Panayiota, are the compilers of the material that forms “Wounded by Love.” If the singing wasn’t recorded, there was a lot that was. That tape recorder that Porphyrios was so ambivalent about is what makes the book possible! Elsewhere, the saint struggles against a phonograph machine, and a St. Monica-esque woman prays for her son to mature, and has her prayers answered in the form of a car accident.

All through contemporary culture (“the world”), we observe people who are at odds with the world as it is and yet anxiously find themselves reproducing its dynamics. Some of their criticisms may be valid! But having no idea of life in the desert, they just merely act in opposition. Like Camus wrote in “The Rebel,” mere doubt can lead us into blind alleys. Without a sense of the transcendental, we can become stuck in these alleys.

The anti-feminist podcaster Andrew Wilson went through a wave of internet humiliation when an interlocutor pointed out that he was “not a traditional man.” What she was referring to was the reality that Wilson’s wife had previously been married; what was clear to audiences was that a career spent mocking OnlyFans models for short-form vertical content is no one’s idea of “traditional.”

In other words, his schtick relies so completely on the modern dynamics he seems to be raising objections to, he can’t conceive of a path out, and no path is offered. (By taking him seriously, I’m probably giving him too much credit as an earnest person.) If you think TikTok can be useful, as Saint Porphyrios thought the telephone was useful, that’s fine. But don’t let it change you. Saint Porphyrios uses the phone; many of our contemporaries seem to be used by our devices.

So Porphyrios is operating with a degree of irony. Don’t struggle too hard with temptation, Porphyrios says. Just turn your back on it. Nothing can harm you if you have your eyes set on the Mountain, on God.

The other day, it was Fat Tuesday, I was standing outside of a Houston Street bar. A brass band was playing Mardi Gras music on the sidewalk and a woman was coming up to me on a Rollator. Did she want a cigarette? No, she didn’t smoke anymore, since she had diabetes. She wouldn’t mind some cash though, and a conversation, too. Her name was Francine.

It was hard, she was telling me, she used to have a place to live and a job, for decades it was like that, but now she had neither, and, if I was following correctly, she would need a birth certificate to get assistance, but she was born in Charleston South Carolina, and somehow the birth certificate couldn’t make it from there to here. I told her I was sorry, and we both bemoaned that there were powerful people out there who would put someone in the cold over old pieces of paper. “But it’s not so bad,” she continued. “I have a lot of time to read.” What does she read? “I read my Bible,” she said and smiled big. “My favorite part is the Psalms. I can read them all day long. When I read them I think: that’s just how I feel!”

And I thought of Saint Porphyrios again, who loved the Psalter as much as anything. Listen: it’s troubling, I think, to compare someone who hasn’t chosen to be on the street with a monk who desires wholeheartedly the desert. It’s a nasty little American tradition to pretend the dignity of victims of injustice obviates our duty to remove that injustice (“Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless.”). But I think what Francine was saying was that when she was reading the Psalms she could turn her gaze somewhere else, and maybe even go there.

My friends joined us on the sidewalk, Francine told us some more stories. She kissed my friend’s hand, and told us good night, then she turned her Rollator around and went off down the street, back into the city.

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announcements

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Stephen announced that he will be dropping his first book with the Image Books imprint of Penguin Random House.

Since he’s tired of explaining what it’s going to be about, he’s resorted to just telling people this:

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joins the pod to talk about Orthobros, internet Orthodoxy, Charles Taylor, cradle ethnic Orthodox, and other Orthodox things. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

pomo people elsewhere

• argues that the boldest part of Pope Leo’s encyclical is not about AI—it’s about war, in Commonweal.

• on the skeptics of medicalized psychiatry in The Lamp.

• on

  • how politics infiltrated the World Cup in UnHerd

  • on why ‘responsible’ liberals coddle the irresponsible in UnHerd

• Stephen

  • wrote a work of cultural anthropology [hot takes] about his EuroTrip 2026 in no pomo.

  • joined and on the podcast to talk about the evils of air conditioning, Baudrillard’s preference for America over Europe, the Worldwide Latina Belt, and other riveting topics. Listen here.

from the archives

Over the last few weeks, people have been debating the ethics of air conditioning. If you couldn’t already tell, I think air conditioning is evil.

Surely, I’m only doing this as a bit. I don’t actually think you’re in a state of mortal sin for using AC. But I personally prefer fans over AC, and if you’re going to use AC, I’d prefer you put it on very lightly and don’t blast it. It’s bad for my respiratory system and my intestines. I truly enjoyed getting a respite from AC while traveling in the Motherlands, where an open window and fan get the job done.

For more about why I hate AC, check out this throwback from The Blaze:

Baudrillard goes so far as to say that we seek nothing less than the “air-conditioning of life,” a state in which everything is processed, consumed, and “at last digested and turned into the same homogeneous faecal matter.” Cory Doctorow’s memorable term for this is “ens**ttification.” Perhaps that explains my volatile digestive system.

The late Pope Francis singled out our obsession with climate control in his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’.”: “People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity,” he notes, “but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.”

It’s a shame that Pope Francis didn’t go farther in his condemnation of air conditioning, choosing instead to focus on vices like tobacco (the sale of which he banned in the Vatican) and the Tridentine Latin Mass.

In our podcast discussion with , I mentioned the phenomenon of the migration of Greek Orthodox parishes from the urban ethnic enclave to the suburbs, which I wanted to briefly expand on here.

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Like many other southern European immigrant groups, Greeks started coming to the United States in the late 1800s looking for economic prosperity. After having come out of 400 years of Ottoman Occupation and facing political instability in the immediate aftermath of winning their independence, the vast majority of Greeks were poor and lacked opportunities for employment. When they came to the US, they gathered mainly in urban (and a few rural) enclaves with other Greeks. On top of aiming to establish businesses of their own (like diners), they made it a goal to build Greek Orthodox churches.

Christianity was part and parcel of being Greek. It wasn’t really a choice, a matter of personal belief—it was part of the air Greeks breathed. Sure, plenty of Greeks were (and still are) deeply pious people who genuinely are convinced that Jesus is the son of God and that the Orthodox Church is the original church. But the vast majority are Orthodox by virtue of their culture: if you’re Greek, you are categorically Orthodox.

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But as Greeks started to establish themselves and make more money, and their urban enclaves became more impoverished and dangerous [and less “white”], they started following the other ethnic whites into the newly-constructed suburbs. Many continued to commute to the parish in the old neighborhood, but as it got more dangerous (cars robbed during church, the priest getting held up at gun point) and as the Greeks came into even more wealth, they decided it would be better to uproot the parish from the hood to the burbs.

These new churches were infinitely more ornate and opulent—the church building itself was bigger, more elaborately designed, and full of professional byzantine iconography (unlike the cheaper, Westernized icons they had in the old urban parish)...but the “campus” also had lots of space for offices, classrooms, an event hall, and athletics, as well as a spacious parking lot (since nobody walks to church—or anywhere—in the suburbs).

This happened to several parishes in New Jersey (much less so in NYC). The Greeks who orchestrated this upgrade were extremely proud of themselves: these new, gigantic churches were a testament to how Greeks reached the apex of the American Dream and established themselves in American society. And yes, these beautiful edifices with their awe-inspiring iconography were a tribute to the Orthodox faith—the amount of money and labor poured into it were sacrifices made in the name of God.

Yet as a kid, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing here.

The empty promises of the American Dream

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In Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, an earnest young woman heads to Brown to study literature. Once there, she finds that novels are MIA. In their place: the poststructuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Her peers are bewitched. “Derrida is my god!” one declares.

This satirical scene frames Emily Eakin’s The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, about the author’s own misadventures in a theory-crazed, Ivy-league English department. Eakin, who dropped out of Columbia’s doctoral program in the late eighties and now reviews books for The New York Times, asks why she and so many others fell under the spell of a program with an anti-humanist bent—that is, with so little interest in personal identity or human intention as signifiers of meaning. Mostly, she concludes, it was the yearning to feel smart and transcendent. “The allure of poststructuralism was precisely its abstraction, which…I associated with rigor and purity of thought—with truth.”

There’s much to admire about this book, especially for others of us who caught the bug—in my case, as an English doctoral student at University of Maryland in the 2010s. The Frenchmen presents dense theory in plain prose, and it recognizes how American academics haphazardly uprooted theory from its French context. It’s also colorful. Readers find Derrida at a urinal smoking his signature pipe and an eleven-year-old Jean Paul Sartre disavowing God at a bus stop. In these moments, the book succeeds in humanizing the men who tried to disappear into arcane ideas, mostly about the instability of language and other signifying systems.

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The Frenchmen’s major shortcoming is that Eakin simultaneously disembodies her subjects. Time and again, she ignores their theological inheritances. Portraying Sartre and others as having left religion behind, rather than transposing religious language into a philosophical register, she fails to apprehend theory’s moral valences. This turns out to be a consequential mistake. By confining herself to ideas about language, authority, and power, Eakin concludes that theory broadly failed to improve society—or worse, paved the way for Trumpism. In reality, theory has flourished in the very realm arguably giving Trump the greatest fight: the Church.

From the very first page, Eakin writes religion out of the story. Here, we meet a sly Derrida christening his signature style of reading—which forsakes authorial intent to look for textual contradictions—deconstruction. “Everyone had a notion of what deconstruction was and all the wonderful or terrible things it could do,” writes Eakin. “Everyone, that is, except Jacques Derrida.” The handsome, pipe-smoking theorist could not define deconstruction except as a set of “non-concepts” or, even more enigmatically, as “the experience of the impossible.”

Two hundred pages later, Eakin admits that Derrida didn’t pull the word out of thin air, instead adapting Martin Heidegger’s destruktion, which describes the clearing-away of metaphysics from Western philosophy. But even this etymology falls tellingly short. As philosopher John Caputo has emphasized, Heidegger took his cues from Martin Luther, whose destructio refers to a method of dismantling medieval doctrines to recover their authentic Christian truths. This is to say: Deconstruction has exegetical roots. It’s a project of holy unveiling.

This wasn’t lost on the Jewish Derrida, especially in his elder years—which get short shrift here. To deconstruct is to say yes, Derrida wrote. It is to open the door for the one who is coming, the one whose arrival we cannot foresee.

David Dudrik on Foucault ont he pod

Curiously, Eakin mentions Derrida’s Judaism only to accentuate childhood ostracization. Never does she ask how Judaism’s messianic hope may have structured his thought.

She is no more interested in the first language of Catholics-turned-philosophers. But these one-time communicants are so numerous that they haunt the text. Readers learn, for instance, that George Bataille considered becoming a monk before turning to philosophy. Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser hailed from Catholic families before they, too, took to philosophy. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan horrifies his Catholic parents “by renouncing religion and reading Nietzsche in his original German.”

These details may be true, but they have the cumulative effect of setting theory against religion, sometimes even confounding Eakin’s narration. We’re told, for instance, that Lacan is so repulsed by the Church that he recoils when his younger brother becomes a priest. Only a few chapters later, we find the psychoanalyst giving lectures at the Catholic University in Brussels. (One of these actually began with his praising religion’s treasury of truth.)

Derrida spoke about Holy Communion the sole time Eakin saw him. Still, she never pauses to ask: Beyond promising total knowledge, might religion and theory share a grammar? A sacramental or messianic one? Why were so many Jews and Catholics drawn to poststructuralism?

By the time I entered a doctoral program in 2011, I’d given up God, the idea of a strongman in the sky was too much a strain on the intellect, especially one yearning to be absorbed by academia. I was ashamed of having grown up in an insular Catholic charismatic community, beginning each school day praying for the Holy Spirit’s descent. But I can see now that I was drawn to Derrida precisely because the verb he associated with deconstruction was so strangely familiar: come.

As a child, I’d heard adults speak of the Spirit “pouring out over the earth.” However, it wasn’t until I read Derrida that I could imagine the divine as an event, as someone or something that happens. This theorist gave me a way to think about the futural in terms that both resonated with and revealed the fractures of my childhood faith. He also made me want to outrun the long shadow of fundamentalism. Whereas many peers spoke disparagingly of belief, Derrida had me feel around for a pulse. I eventually took deconstruction to mean that nothing and no one is totally turned to stone, which is the opposite of nihilism, of which he’s often accused.

Eakin does write that even if theory failed to materially change society, it gave people an intellectual burst. For me, it was more of a moral burst—one whose aftershock I still feel.

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It’s because of this that I’ve returned to many of the theorists studied in graduate school, finding them hardly as profane as I once believed. Lacan was entranced by the Holy Spirit, viewing it as the manifestation of language and the unconscious—the “entry of the signifier into the world.” Sartre famously argued against God’s existence, but he later clarified that he felt God’s absence, which was quite a different thing. “He is dead,” Sartre wrote in a 1943 essay. “[H]e used to speak to us and he has fallen silent.”

French theory, like phenomenology before it, was not a secular project. This is true even if certain of its practitioners formally disavowed God. At moments, Eakin seems to intuit theory’s theological register, writing, for instance, of the “Derridean gospel” and of Deleuze and Felix Guitarri’s “liberation theology for the unconscious.” Notwithstanding these metaphors—and for all her claims to have come to her senses—she is unable to measure theory’s legacy except in abstract ideological terms.

Focusing on attitudes about language and authority, for instance, Eakin repeatedly claims that theory “wasn’t really good for much.” But theory has revitalized the Church. Derrida and his peers are routinely taught in seminaries, which form people for pastoral work. Countless Americans claim to be “deconstructing” religious fundamentalism, some explicitly nodding to Derrida. There is even a Protestant denomination, the Emergent Church, whose mission is to apply the broader insights of poststructuralism to Christianity.

It’s not just progressives. Pope Benedict dialogued with poststructuralist Julia Kristeva and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Bishop Robert Barron, the most popular living Catholic evangelist, has lectured on Derrida, whose writing on “the gift” he perceives to illuminate the radical, unearned nature of grace. (Barron is critical of other of Derrida’s ideas.) Just because The New York Times wrote off theory, as Eakin tells us, it doesn’t mean that others did.

In her denouement, the woman so dismissive of her younger self has a moment of positive feeling. Eakin, who has all along “blushed” to remember her love of theory, references Mark Taylor, the philosopher most famous for questioning the religious-secular binary. Taylor, Eakin tells us, understands theory as “a ‘kind of belief,’ a way of living with uncertainty, complexity and difference.” This, she says, “has undeniable appeal.”

Reading The Frenchmen, I kept wanting Eakin to lean into such feeling. I kept wanting her to take her former self seriously, asking if, for all its pretenses, theory had once allowed her to dream. The arc that she traces—from aloof undergrad to knowing-better journalist—is just too neat, especially for a book that purports to re-physicalize its subjects and author. People are strange and contradictory. Like texts, they speak with many voices. This book tries to tell a grand narrative only to crack open. That’s the thing about deconstruction: It happens with or without the author’s permission. But never, as Derrida once said, “without love.”

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My grandmother was many things.

She was not a “good” person. She did not “contribute” to society. And was not “useful” to others.

She did whatever she pleased and used people’s resources to do so.

Leetsa had paranoid schizophrenia. They medicated her until she was more paranoid than schizophrenic, which — they told us — was the best we were going to get.

Leetsa claimed that she saw the Virgin Mary.

The Virgin first appeared to her after a labor and delivery gone bad. The doctor (who later lost his license for malpractice) left her to bleed to death after mangling her uterus with forceps. That’s when Jesus’ mom paid her a visit, notifying her that a better doctor would be with her shortly.

God doesn’t lie. I guess neither does His mom.

She was ever-suspicious of those who were “out to get” her. She accused my mother of being a troublemaker for trying to help clean the kitchen.

She trash-talked people at church for what they wore and the way they did their hair. She mocked women for being overweight as she sat in her car in the Whole Foods parking lot, scarfing down a tortilla chip loaded with organic guac.

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She ate all of my Jacques Torres chocolates while I was sleeping, and upon being found out, complained about their mediocrity.

She ate what she wanted, and didn’t care about being what she called “jolly” (obese).

She told my aunt off at New Year’s Day dinner for talking too much. And she criticized her “stupid sister” without respite.

Leetsa claimed that she saw “the man” lurking around in the basement, and leaving the stove lit. She also claimed to be too frail to do the laundry, but seemed to have enough strength to create a blockade with outdoor lounge chairs on the balcony to keep “him” out.

Leetsa did what she wanted. She went on her daily trip to Bloomingdales to “make the returns.” She gloated about putting the manager at the Bloomie’s restaurant “in his place” after he told her she couldn’t take popovers from the salad bar in her to-go box.

God is not your therapist

We would often go early in the morning to buy muffins at Wegman’s and eat them in the market’s small eating area. After completing the rest of her food shopping, I reminded her that we forgot to tell the cashier about the muffins.

“You keep your mouth shut and you don’t tell no one. You know how much money we spend in this place? And they never give us nothing for it!”

She decided, on a whim, to open up a gift shop, and enlisted my grandfather’s assistance. The shop’s opening and closing hours were contingent upon Leetsa’s mood that day. There was a “gone for lunch, will be back later” sign perpetually taped to the door, as she would often leave for lunch and not come back until she felt like it.

Needless to say, Leetsa’s first and only business venture was short lived.

She loved driving in her Acura because — as she put it, swooshing her hand forward in revelry — it “glides.”

Leetsa one day took a ride to the shore in her beloved Acura and happened upon a new townhome development on a small island. “I loved the water since I was a little girl.” She bought a house on the water that very day, and told my grandfather about it with joy.

“And who will be paying for that?”

“You, of course.”

Leetsa sat on the deck of that new house, observing the island’s wildlife. She taught me to appreciate nature and take pleasure in just watching.

some saints were mentally ill

She insisted on walking around the house in her bra and underwear. When her “stupid sister’s” grandson came over and saw her, we told her to put some clothes on.

“Who asked him to look? This is my house. I do what I like. I don’t remember inviting him here.”

Leetsa was also fabulous. She loved her “pink palace,” where every couch, chair, and wall was covered in her favorite color. She selected only the most chic and vibrant of the selection in the plus-sized department. She was photogenic, but scoffed at the prospect of posing as a plus-sized model, which required “too much work.” Just like the prospect of using her luscious singing voice in the church choir — even though she used it to serenade us at home with Greek oldies and Frank Sinatra hits.

Making the returns and eating guac can be quite exhausting, don’t you know?

my gorgeous fat grandma

Leetsa was fiercely maternal. She made a fuss anytime a cute baby crossed her path, and found joy in babysitting me when Mom started working full time. When she wasn’t busy criticizing my mother’s “conniving” ways, she was cooking her dinner and telling her how much she loved her.

Leetsa was generous with her time and (with other people’s) money. Leetsa also babysat friends’ and family members’ kids when they had to go off to work, and did so with joy. After finding out her hairstylist was suffering from a vaginal infection, she gave her $100 and told her to go to the doctor immediately.

Leetsa was a faithful godmother. She brought me to church, and when she wasn’t whispering in my ear about what the woman in the pew in front of us was wearing, taught me to say my prayers, and told me about the miracles born of asking the saints’ intercessions.

She memorized all of the hymns of the liturgy while also dabbling in folk witchcraft. She insisted on reading everyone’s fortune after dinner using the grounds in our coffee cups. Her “stupid sister’s” daughter called the next morning in disbelief, proclaiming that the fortune came true.

“Of course it came true. She thinks I’m a liar?”

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When my grandfather’s health started to decline, she would spend minutes at a time staring at an icon of the Virgin and child, obsessively crossing herself over and over again. When he was admitted to the hospital, she would finish all conversations with doctors or nurses by telling them, “God bless you.”

By the standards of a society that measures people by what they can do or contribute, Leetsa’s life was unremarkable.

But Leetsa’s life was exceptional — simply because she existed. And in her own way, she made an offering of her existence to her Creator.

She may have drained the time, money, and patience of others. But her shortcomings, handicaps, and idiosyncrasies didn’t stop God from making good use of her. She was unapologetically herself, and — perhaps without even trying — became a tool with which God reached me. Through her, I learned to love beauty, to love creation, to love leisure, and to love the way I was made.

Leetsa’s offering to God may not be worth much according to society’s standards. Some may say her ways were mysterious, even insane. Jesus himself was no stranger to such criticism. But those who weren’t confined by the logic of this world were able to recognize the truth of that man. Leetsa saw it, too.

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My friend is a priest of a church in New York City that is wonderfully out of place as a Gothic Revival church sandwiched in the middle of an avenue block, just around the corner from the assault-of-the-senses that is Times Square. When you step out of the craziness, away from the all-you-can-eat breadsticks at Olive Garden, and into this hallowed place of prayer it feels almost like a sensory deprivation tank at first.

Now this church is not some whitewashed, iconoclastic cave. It was built in the glory days of the revival of medieval architecture and high ceremonial that followed the Tractarian movement in the Anglican tradition. It is filled to the brim with shrines and chapels and vaulted arches and gilding — what was (and still is to some) viewed as excess and esoterica. But as elaborately decorated as this church is, it has an orientation, unlike the chaos of the LED brain rot of Times Square.

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When your eyes adjust to the relative darkness of this church you begin to be drawn in by a subtler light. The flickering candles at the votive racks. The seven sanctuary lamps. The use of light and shadow and the devotional structure of the space lifts one’s eyes to the Rood, where our Lord, flanked by our Lady and the Beloved Disciple, is emblazoned in light, remarkably high over the sanctuary.

The motif of darkness and light in Christian theology is not an on/off switch any more than damnation/salvation or judgement/mercy are. These are terms of pilgrimage. That are descriptors of the reality of a fallen world that God has entered into in obscured humility.

For us in our limited vision, light is not complete knowing. Unadulterated, unfiltered light is iris searing, it is blindness. God knows this. The Uncreated Light of the Transfiguration was just plain confusing to Peter, James, and John. It made no discernable sense to them until they approached Jerusalem with their rabbi, till they saw him dragged away in the night, till they witnessed his trial and crucifixion. The light of the transfiguration only made sense in relation to the understated, confusing, wonderful, life-giving encounters that the disciples had with their risen Lord: touching wounds; bumping into the gardener; eating broiled fish on the shore. It was through the darkness that the disciples encountered the light of Christ, not by way of spotlights or firework shows.

Fr. Jameson review Paul Kingsnorth

What does this mean for us in our worship? It’s said that Fr Hope Patton, the restorer of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in England, loved dimly lit churches so much that he built the shrine church in such a way that when he got older he could barely read the words in the missal for lack of light.

Maybe this is a bit of overkill, but I’d still much rather worship in a dim church where I can barely make out words over a halogen-lit warehouse of a church any day.

Stephen on pomo's Anglopals

Churches tell the story of the faith. They point to the reality of our pilgrimage from the darkness of the fallen world — the darkness of our own sinfulness, of our own tendency to move toward nothingness — into the light of Christ.

This isn’t to say churches need to all be medieval to be “authentic.” But it should make us think about the ways in which we use our buildings. Do priests really need Madonna mics? We made it 2000 years without them. Do the lights need to be so bright that sunglasses would be reasonable?

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We live in a world of blaring sounds and images, of streaming video and rapid-fire information. Can we just let church be a respite from all of this? Can we let it point us beyond ourselves — even beyond itself — deeper into the mystery of God in Christ?

The world is looking for a subtler beauty, a confident simplicity, a space for devotion that is alluring instead of assaulting.

Let’s let Christ be the light and turn down the LEDs.

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As we all know, black culture played a very important role in my spiritual journey—especially during my transition from high school to college. As a lonely, nerdy freshman, I decided to get involved in student clubs—and naturally, one of the first I checked out was the black cultural club. The club hosted discussions about topics touching on black culture: is Nicki Minaj the new Hottentot Venus?; the future of the black church; Chris Rock’s documentary on black hair. They also hosted screenings of Spike Lee movies and Pan-Caribbean dance parties, as well as outings to Broadway plays and restaurants.

Toward the end of the first semester, the club’s secretary (a child of Tamilian Indian immigrants) asked me if I wanted to do PR for the club. She noticed how regularly I came to events, and thought I’d be good at promoting the club’s events/meetings via making fliers and posting on socials.

I truly enjoyed that first year. It was wonderful to engage in such riveting conversations and participate in such lively cultural events with such cool people. But at the end of sophomore year, all of the other people on the e-board decided to get internships or study abroad…leaving no one to take over the club as president—other than me.

“Stephen, I was thinking you should be president,” said the out-going president, a black American girl with Guyanese roots, at the final e-board meeting of the year.

“Uhhhh…yeah, I mean. I’d do it, it’s just…ummm. I think there’s a problem though…”

“What?”

“Uhhhh….I’m not exactly, you know, um…black.”

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The ghost that haunts Hamlet, his father of the same name, disappears as soon as the cock crows in his first appearance in Shakespeare’s play. A prophecy is fulfilled in that moment, or rather a truth unveiled. The ghost cannot be seen in the light of day. It tells us what it is, and where it remains: purgatory.

It’s in the despair of what cannot yet be seen that we find ourselves in Ghostcreator, the latest play by Karina Pooran Majewski. This same ghost, whether materialized as an onstage presence, a voice recording whispering behind curtains upon curtains, or some other entity that is captured in the mysticism of theatre, is given a voice to air its suffering. Rather than giving advice, or asking people to perform a seance to bring it to life, it lays where it must be for the sanctity of its salvation.

I had seen the play mere hours after attempting some form of theatrical catharsis myself after my father’s funeral, which had been earlier that day. The Mass went as unremarkably as it should; a Memorial to a Man who had never lived as a Catholic; rain poured endlessly on the apathy of the day. I tried to muster the courage to eat Korean food and do karaoke to no avail. Nothing reminded me that something had happened to the state of my Father’s soul. I took the immediate next train to Park Slope to the dilapidated, formerly functioning Catholic chapel to see Ghostcreator.

To call Ghostcreator an acknowledgement of the healing fires behind purgatory would be a little off. I would be neglecting the Holy Spirit’s very visible, tangible and obvious presence in the play. Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. But He will come towards the end, once this muck in our own sentiment had been dug up and frightfully frisked for any loose ends that would deny our eternal home.

Ghostcreator begins with its nameless cast digging endlessly towards a corpse holding onto another one. “Dig like Adam, get in there,” the progenitor of Man, whose lie created our corpse(s). The corpse they eventually dig up, that of Ghostcreator‘s director James Majewski, inverts Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” into “Too late to be, or not, that Is.” The ghost of Hamlet comes and goes with an unholy request for revenge. The temptation of fulfilling it is succeeded by a greater desire: to be ghosted. That is, every member of the six-member cast eventually puts on white face paint, based on their own accord or at the hand of someone else. Stage makeup becomes the anointing of the actor to the vocation on the stage. When each member of the cast becomes “ghosted,” they’ve come in agreement to meet the Holy Spirit in some type of way.

The inclusion of traditional hymns, by the anonymous chorus of sinners turning saint, embodied the cramped space of the chapel and expanded its potentiality. The world of their seclusion, acknowledging a perfumed presence on its way to rescue them in their darkness, becomes larger. While the cast spins, stomps and runs about the chapel, the viewer’s land expands. You’re part of their benevolent suffering, too. You should pray for them, too.

This pained chorus commits to vignettes of repetition, where the individual players acknowledge their inner rot, or the impending light illuminating their hopeful anxieties. In one poignant scene, Lydia Brinkmann and Sharbel Habchy share a dance, trapped in a kitschy music box. Lydia, drenched in water and sopping wet, approaches Sharbel, who holds onto the mask of a mannequin. Their exchange and methodical spinning, trying desperately to reach a lover who refuses to believe in their own goodness, is punctuated by the surreal audio of an Amazon review of a music box that plays “Fly Me to the Moon.” The audio punctuates the artifice of creating the set, bridging together the sparse economy of the play within the confines of the chapel. There has not been a luckier coincidence of setting and script.

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It was by this point in Ghostcreator that the encroaching inevitable, a certain moonlight, a Lady, had begun to spread her veil across the play and invite you to meet her spouse. The journey to introducing her friends to Him is heartbreak upon heartbreak, realization that someone is coming but the patience is unbearable. What are we doing, as the viewer, to alleviate their struggle? Do they choose to writhe for us?

During the Q&A after the performance, I brought up the place Ghostcreator took me, the harrowing Hall of Champions of the Bosom of Abraham. I had placed myself there, where Christ had descended to take the prophets before Him to Heaven in the time He lay in the tomb. Until the image of the Light is complete, one could not possibly understand what lies before them. You leave with exhausting, fanatical respite.

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HOT OR NOT

Hot: Henry VIII energy. Big appetites, big voices, big ideas, kidnapping the rulers of neighbouring kingdoms then forcing their courtiers to hand over national treasure, maybe also gout?

Not: AGI. Mechanical pattern recognition is a tool, not an alternative to consciousness, and people are beginning to figure out how to use it for what it’s actually good at (making money, and inventing new ways to kill each other).

Hot: The anti-hero. We live in darker times.

Not: The influencer. The hustle is old.

Kyle of @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife

Hot: Going to the movies multiple times a week. The healthiest screen time is the kind that requires leaving your apartment.

Not: Creating short-form video content. Endless self-documentation is not the same thing as self-expression.

Hot: Calling everything “fascism.” It’s going to look really stupid when the Democrats regain control of the House in 2026 or whenever, but hey, The Atlantic will pay you to do it.

Not: The World Trade Organization. It needs to be reformed, for sure, and the process of reform is too slow, for sure, and these days it’s not even dependable or reliable, but when you know the rule of the game is just a rule of law that—well, actually, that isn’t really making much of a difference right now.

Hot: Age-gap relationships where the woman is older. And I am not just saying that because I entered my 30s.

Not: Dimes square. These guys have made even being a heterodox lame.

Hot: Slopulism. War is actually “peace,” according to the White House. Fast food is “goyslop,” according to James Fishback, the Groyper running for Florida governor. “The Epstein class” (why not just “the establishment”?) is responsible for all that ails society.

Not: Jestermaxxing. Texting girls is so over. Now we go to the club and talk IRL. Now we jestergoon.

LOCALS ONLY

Pomo pals tell us their favorite spot that only locals would know about.

Lou Nicastro:

Used to be Sly Fox. Where you could get an $8 pitcher of beer. You’ll be sitting next to an ex-Soviet physicist, a crust punk with a neon green Mohawk, and an alcoholic babushka who barely spoke English.

Steve Cerulli:

Sìcily Best in Bushwick. It is the last of the Mohicans for Bushwick Sicilians. And how I got into a social club. The family is always hanging out there. It’s like a pizzeria that’s also a living room. And that’s a good thing. Also Gaspar and Big Gisuppe “Joe” have tons of stories about old NY.

:

Mars will give you an oyster in a martini. You can also have a martini (or any number of other drinks, or food) without the oyster if you’re not an oyster kind of a guy.

Rose Tomassi Carroll:

Silvana in Harlem. Fantastic Middle Eastern/North African food and tea with live music and hookah in the lower level (free if you get there before they start to charge a cover). It’s a cozy place to read or study with a great day to night transition. Also there is a lovely little artisan gift shop in the cafe.

Emilia Tanu-Chornay:

La Morada in Mott Haven. They gave Ellie (my daughter) some homemade broth complimentary because they love taking care of their community. They also will sometimes give free samples of new recipes they are working on.

Also Orwashers on UWS. Bagels in NYC can be a scam (beware of Tal or any other bagel shop where you end up paying $15-$20 for two toasted bagels with cream cheese)—but Orwashers has normally-priced bagels, amazing cookies, great pastries, and the best playlists in the background. It is next to the St. Agnes NYPL branch which is a great combination for my family. Laptop friendly!

Stephen G. Adubato:

KGB bar. It’s only the best place to host events in NYC, of course! Shout out to Lori, Vonnie, Carrigan, T, and the rest of the staff who make sure we always have the time of our lives every time we go. Plus that disco ball tho.

As you should already know by now, cracks in pomo has gone out of its way to promote based Jesuits. And top of having published content by and interviewed several Jesuits, numerous young based Jesuits have expressed to us how cracks in pomo has given them hope—as we are a refreshing alternative to both the cringe ones they have to deal with on a daily basis in their own Society and their obnoxious trad peers who prioritize ideology over Jesus.

It has become commonplace in conservative Catholic circles to mock Jesuits for being “liberal” or “heretical.” Sometimes, this is (sadly) the case. For too long, Jesuits who are very out-of-touch have been giving the Society a bad name. I encountered these kinds of Jesuits at Fordham. But thankfully, the young ones are swinging the pendulum back to the middle, and are prioritizing Jesus and their mission over all other (cringe) things.

In honor of the feast of St. Ignatius, I thought I’d flesh out why I value the Society/Ignatian charism so much on a personal level.

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Finding God at/in spite of Fordham

My relationship with the Society began at Fordham. I had no intention to attend Fordy. I think I only applied because my advisor suggested that I do it. When I showed my Spanish teacher (who was writing my recommendation) the list of schools I was applying to, she said, “you’re going to Fordham.” And I was like, “yeah definitely not.” “No,” she said. “You’re going there, I just feel it.” My plan was to go to a school nearby in NJ so I could live at home. Said school gave me a huge scholarship, and Fordham gave me a very tiny one. Even more of a reason to stick to my plan.

But after I got an accepted students day invitation in the mail, my mom suggested I go just to see it. During the visit, something caught me. I don’t know what it was, but I felt that I was meant to go there. That meant foregoing the bigger scholarship and having to live in the dorms. Despite not being very religious at that point in my life, I decided to pray on it, asking God to give me a sign. Soon after, something in me said, “just go to Fordham.” So I obeyed.

At Fordham, I had several encounters that radically changed my life. The first two were in my required Intro to Philosophy and Intro to Theology (Faith & Critical Reason) classes. Those two professors were the first people who ever took my existential questions seriously (most other adults would just dismiss them and tell me to focus on “real” issues). Then I met a Jesuit who became my spiritual director of sorts. Then I met a classmate who invited me to a lay movement in which I’m now “heavily” involved (ie sold my soul to).

On top of these encounters, I was deeply formed by the intensive core curriculum which aimed to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of life and the world, as well as by the focus on social issues and accompanying/serving the poor. I had the opportunity to engage in several charitable works and go on mission trips while I was there.

Yes, a lot of the classes, professors, and programming were cringe (and sometimes straight up heretical). Campus Ministry hosted dumb stuff like discussion groups for people who were “spiritual but not religious,” Ignatian yoga in the chapel, and Qatholic Mass (Q stands for Queer). Few of the theology professors actually believed in the Magisterium. There was lots of virtue signaling about flavor-of-the-month social justice issues and sycophantism over Foucault and Butler. And basically everyone—including several Jesuits—was gay (which caused serious issues for friends of ours like poor Sebby).

But in the broader scheme of things, my Jesuit education enabled Jesus to find me…and really has shaped my spiritual and professional lives (which is why it’s such a shame that on top being being so fake and gue, Fordham is becoming increasingly globohomofied, as I wrote in Compact).

Nick Leeper SJ isn't pissing on Christ

The Ignatian charism saved my soul

Over time, I’ve come to deeply value the Ignatian emphasis on conscience and discernment. It’s helped me to understand what true obedience to God, the Church’s teaching authority, and more immediate authority figures really means—that in order for it to be true, it must engage all of my freedom, reason, affectivity, and humanity.

Further, it’s helped me to see that Jesus respects my freedom, and is patient with my weak flesh—which is to say that he doesn’t demand perfect, immediate adherence to every moral ideal. This is also why I think Pope Francis’ attempt to accompany people in irregular circumstances (like divorced-and-remarried people and gays in unchaste partnerships) was important, as much as they were executed in a rather sloppy, imprudent manner.

Yes, some Jesuits over do all of this. Too many of them arrive at the conclusion that conscience can operate without remaining in tension/dialogue with any form of objective authority…or that the law of gradualism means that you’re in a state of grace when actually you’re still in a state of mortal sin. I think that many of these Jesuits are trying to compensate for the moralism that many of them faced growing up (especially if they are Irish!!!).

I also think that the deeply American spirit of entitlement and “fairness” has caused them to lose sight of the category of the Bad Catholic (that you can still be “accepted” in the Church even though you don’t follow all the rules…you just have to abstain from receiving communion…and can’t demand that we change the rules to make you feel better about yourself). The American Protestant either/or mentality—which has propelled the impulse to “normalize” everything, including sin—has clouded Jesuits’ ability to embrace the great Catholic both/and.

Anyway, I found this emphasis on conscience and discernment overlapped with aspects of charismatic Christianity and the charism of Luigi Giussani1—both of which played a major role in my spiritual path. While Jesuit “open-mindedness” and emphasis on subjectivity can be misinterpreted as a kind of relativism, when done right, it is lived as an openness to God’s creativity, to how he may choose to surprise us in ways that transcend human logic. While it’s a mistake to say that “the rules” and doctrines are unnecessary, Jesuits are right to place an emphasis on our subjective experience, because it is there that I discover God’s initiative in my life—which saves me more than any of my attempts to follow all of the rules.

When done right, the Ignatian emphasis on conscience and discernment can do wonders for your relationship with Jesus. Many thanks to a particular Jesuit who helped me use these principles during a very crucial crossroad in my life.

Fr. Martin on the pod

What pomo & Jesuits have in common

This desire to remain open to how God might surprise us in “irregular” circumstances that—on paper—are “against” him (or his rules) is ultimately what unites cracks in pomo and the Jesuits. Our agenda of looking for Truth in the cracks of postmodern culture—in Lady Gaga’s music, Baudrillard’s critical theory, the dirty skreetz of NYC—is in fact quite Jesuit-coded. We strongly believe that if you go to the depth of something that is conventionally considered “bad,” God might surprise you there.

Of course Gaga is against God. Most good Christian’s should not listen to her. But someone has to be willing to go to the depths of the abyss of postmodern culture and find God there…to try to find grace slipping through Gaga’s narcissistic attempt to garner more applause from the public. This is cracks in Pomo’s job. The Jesuits have a similar job—which is why I don’t get totally enraged (well, maybe a little) when I see them doing cringe things like rainbow Masses. Sure, that example goes a lil too far, but the Jesuits aren’t wrong to look for the glimmers of good hiding in “irregular circumstances.”

Again, someone’s [but NOT all of us] gotta do it. The same way I told Nick Leeper SJ to stop being such a Jesuit when he said Andres Serano’s Piss Christ might not be sacrilegious, we need the Jesuits to be “such a Jesuit”…just like we need cracks in pomo to be so edgy and controversial. Someone’s gotta be willing to piss people off by challenging them to call into question what they take for granted to be true. [This goes back to my quasi-Hegelian thesis about how we all have different pieces of the puzzle.]

In a similar vein, I respect how the Jezzies’ openness to “the world” inspires many of them to work their ways into high places. The only person who seems to recognize the value of this is Rusty Reno, who wrote about it in his post-mortem on Pope Francis. This is another reason I still have respect for the cringe Jesuits who espouse whatever elitist social justice position du jour.

Throughout history, the Jesuits have recognized the need for members of the Church to be present among those with the most influence and power in the world. This is why they often will “play the game,” saying and doing all the things that the elites do…in order to gain credibility and access into elite circles.2

Cracks in pomo uses a somewhat similar method of subversion from within.

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Jesuits are ballzier than [most of] you

And lastly, and most importantly, I know many missionary Jesuits who risk their lives to bring the Gospel to those who are actually on the margins of society…for whom social justice is much more than virtue signaling about bourgeois-people problems. These Jesuits are anything but cringe…they are more based, virile, and holy than I [or you trads] will ever be.

The charism of St. Ignatius is one of the greatest and most powerful in the Church. Thus, when Jesuits get things wrong, they always get it really wrong. But when they get it right, there is nothing greater than that! This is why you can’t just dismiss them as “heretics” and call it a day. It’s too easy! The impulse that leads them to extreme heresy is the same one that leads them to extreme sanctity. [It’s the same with the gays!]3

Also shout out to America Magazine…I may not agree with every single thing they publish. But they have some of the greatest editors I’ve ever worked with…and some of the greatest people I’ve ever met.

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It’s nearly a full month since the end of June, which means that Fortune 500 corporations, civic leaders, and cultural tastemakers have already retired their Pride-themed social media avatars and advertisements. I’m old enough to have experienced a Pride parade in the mid-1990s, at a time when the corporate adoption of gay-friendly policies was in its infancy. The most lasting memory of the event was seeing several booths at the festival site staffed by employees of several local Fortune 500 companies that were touting their employers’ progressive (for that time) views and policies.

Despite this “welcoming” effort, I recall overhearing some leather-clad gay men and some butch lesbians complaining about the presence of large corporations inserting themselves into a space intended to be outside the mainstream. The ensuing thirty-plus years have made that memory quaint and almost unbelievable: the old “deviant” counterculture has been overcome by corporate promotions and middle-class narratives. Pride, once defiant (“We’re queer! We’re here!”) has become, well, fake and gay.

It’s an especially fitting time, therefore, to read Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual, the 2025 collection of essays by men that examine the cultural and political experiences of homosexual men in the wake of gay rights victories in the realm of mainstream politics, business, and legal victories such as the Obergefell decision.

These provocative essays serve a clarifying purpose by separating out the experiences of gay men from the broader and ever-expanding alphabetical listing of sexual identities on offer through the academic-cultural-economic pipeline. This is crucial because the broadly inclusive LGBTQIA+ identitarian umbrella can be used to obscure the very real differences among and between the many people under it.

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By focusing on the concerns and experiences of men who experience attraction to other men (regardless of whether or not they seek out or engage in physical intimacy with them), the book presents the reader with insight into a specific reality: the success of the gay rights movement for social, cultural, and legal acceptance has left homosexual men in a crisis of identity and purpose.

“Gay men, the former foot soldiers of sexual and social liberation, today find themselves paralyzed by their hard-won freedoms,” write editors and in their introduction. Out of this observation arises discussion of how the notions of “homosexual,” “gay,” and later “queer” developed throughout history, and how the institutional victory of “queer theory” in academia, NGOs, and big business has helped to “side-step fleshly realities.” In response, the essays return to these central, fleshly realities.

Pierre & Amir on the pod

A recurring theme throughout is the victory of intersectional queer theory over the older gay studies approach in academia, where “queerness” would shoehorn all whose sexual lives and identities fall outside a narrow “straight” paradigm into an uneasy and incoherent alliance of opposition.

Among the highlights were Roger Lancaster’s “Being and Having in the Gay World,” a pungent reflection on the economic and social class issues underlying the gay-queer divide. The proliferation of “queerness” is found, he writes, not in the social world of gay bars and clubs, but rather in academic conferences, corporate diversity programs, and the bureaucratic structures administered by the Professional Managerial Class. In this setting, “identity is everywhere, while sexuality–once the center of the gay enterprise–is met with ambivalence and sometimes outright hostility.”

In his essay “The Deception of Orientation Essentialism,” Cracks in Pomo’s own Stephen pushes back against the “love is love” notion of gayness as a “valid” and “natural” sexual expression no different from heterosexual expressions. The mainstreaming of this viewpoint, as illustrated by Lady Gaga’s 2011 “Born This Way” video and subsequently legally enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015, stems from a “mystification of sodomy,” wherein the realities of sexual acts between men are left undiscussed in favor of the nebulous and sentimental “love is love” narrative.

read an excerpt of Stephen's chapter

By turning away from an older tradition that focused on the gravity of acts rather than inclinations or orientations, the consensus view handed down through 19th century psychology turned into one of homosexual pathology, a clinical diagnosis of hopeless abnormality. The pathological homosexual was a pervert, marginalized and condemned to act on his desires without agency to change. The final evolution away from act and toward orientation came in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, when activist groups such as ACT UP steered discussion of the disease away from the potential dangers of homosexual acts.

Stephen, as a Catholic and a realist, calls the reader back to a more hopeful view found in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger (the late Pope Benedict XVI), one in which the distinction between homosexual persons and homosexual acts are restored. There, the freedom, dignity, and autonomy of the person are reaffirmed.

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The “born this way” narrative of orientation propagated by pop stars also drives the work of NGOs, including those operating in regions throughout the “Global South” of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. This work, Stephen notes, represents the sort of “ideological colonization” condemned both by Pope Benedict XVI and his successor, Pope Francis, both of whom saw its antecedents in Robert Hugh Benson’s apocalyptic 1907 novel Lord of the World.

Inversion’s focus on the fleshly realities and the self-examination of the place of homosexual men in a “fake and gay” world is a fascinating read, perhaps especially for someone on the “outside” of the target audience. In the “conservative-leaning” Catholic world in which I reside, work, and worship, too often issues of human sexuality are oversimplified and caricatured, particularly when discussing the growing alphabet of sexual identities. This caricature affords no room for discussion of differences within and tensions among the various groups falling under that identitarian umbrella.

For all the focus many Catholics place upon the ontology of sexual difference, for example, there is little to no discussion of how the experiences of homosexual men might be different from the experiences and desires of other varieties of “queer.” The fresh perspectives presented in Inversion counter that caricature and illuminate real issues that remain conveniently hidden in mainstream narratives.

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As I hinted in my essay for America Magazine the other week, as the [half] only child of an only child, I had to play a big role in both of my maternal grandparents’ funerals…as well as years taking care of them while their health was declining. I’ll always remember when my grandfather’s health took a turn for the worse 11 years ago. My having to spend time taking care of him (and later, my grandma…and later on, my paternal grandparents) made it so that I couldn’t spend as much time as I used to hanging out with friends.

It was providential that Pope Francis released Amoris Laetitia around that time.

In it, Francis condemned the “throwaway culture” that discards the least productive and most vulnerable in our society, especially the poor, the unborn, and the elderly. He insisted on the importance of learning from the gifts and wisdom of their elderly family members, and that we go out of their way to care for them—even if that required us to make considerable sacrifices. Our use of time is fulfilled not by the pursuit of efficiency, pleasure, or personal gain, but in sharing our life with others and giving to them. This flew in the face of the cult of youth and ephemeral pleasure that I had gotten trapped into. I decided to test out the Pope’s proposal through the time I was spending with my grandparents.

I soon started to discover that, although I often got impatient, the time I was spending with them brought out a tenderness and gentleness in me that I didn’t know myself to be capable of. And while it indeed required a sacrifice, I slowly started to find myself more fulfilled by spending my time making a gift of myself than by “living it up.” On top of that, I was learning from my grandparents’ wisdom about my family roots, my culture, and life in general. Caring for them on their death bed and planning the funeral were some of the most dignifying, formative moments of my life.

But at a certain point, I started to wonder why I had to choose between the two: Why couldn’t my friends hang out with me (and perhaps even help me) while I was taking care of my grandparents? Like, what was stopping them from just coming to chill with me while I was at my grandparents’ place? They didn’t even have to do anything…they can just watch TV and eat free food out of my grandparents’ fridge. It just would’ve been nice to be accompanied, and to integrate all the parts of my life, without having to choose between fun and my “duties.” (Part of it has to do with living in NYC while my family lives in NJ.)

I felt this way especially while planning my grandparents’ funerals—the last of which took place 2 years ago TODAY. Plenty of people sent me their condolences and prayers. Some even said they would come to the funeral. But while doing the tedious, emotionally exhausting work of planning the funeral with my mom, I couldn’t help but feel like it would’ve helped to have some friends—again, not necessarily to help with picking the casket, designing the prayer card, arranging the repass, etc…but just to hang around, to accompany us so we wouldn’t be alone.

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