Last week, I talked for two hours with the team at Class Unity, the organization that began life as a caucus inside the DSA and now operates on its own, publishing articles, running educational courses, and hosting a podcast whose recent guests include Brett Christophers on why asset managers own the world and Teesside University criminologist Steve Hall on crime, finance, and the left. If you are the sort of reader who subscribes to this Substack for the labor law and coal-mining stepfather content rather than the autoandrophilia, you should join them or send them a little do re mi. The video is embedded below and the audio is here; I encourage you to subscribe to their YouTube channel while you’re at it.

Because it was a team interview with several voices trading off questions, I’ve collapsed the questioners into a single CLASS UNITY label. What follows is the usual AI-assisted transcript treatment (as noted in the “AI statement” that accompanies all of these posts — nobody sane is “hand-cleaning” transcripts in 2026, though bless those wild-at-heart John Henry types who are): the conversation stripped of its human, all-too-human “you knows” and “rights” and the references hyperlinked so you can learn more about the esoteric topics discussed.

We covered the confusion of the American worker in 2026, the difference between the old left, the new left, the post-left, and the post-post-left new left (post-new left?), why political marketers will struggle to sell a big-tent, Coca-Cola-style product like class unity in an age of social media market differentiation, what academic hiring committees taught me about the importance of aesthetics, how pro wrestling explains capitalism (it doesn’t; capitalism explains pro wrestling), and whether Tucker Carlson and JD Vance believe a word they say (does anyone? it depends!).

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CLASS UNITY: We usually start by letting our guests say a few things about their work before we go into questions. Would you like to start by saying what you’ve been thinking about and working on lately?

OLIVER BATEMAN: I’m working on a whole bunch of things at any given time, some of which would interest your listeners and some of which would not. For people who followed me from the What’s Left? days and before, the Substack is where the most interesting work is. We had a great discussion on there recently with Justin Smith-Ruiu about plagiarism, about the overreactions and underreactions to the Jason Arday situation,[^1] and before that I’ve talked to labor lawyers and right-wing lawyers and people in normal everyday day jobs about what they’re doing and what their agendas are. The thing is about the work, and it ties in directly with what you do here, except you provide a laser-focused view of Marxism and the left and I’m happy to come on and talk about that stuff in a more specific sense than I usually get to. A lot of the rest of what I do is highly specific work for hire, including the day job. I like some of it, but it doesn’t touch the big subject, which I hope we’ll touch on tonight, because I wish more people were talking about it.

CLASS UNITY: As a way of segueing into that, how are the workers you’ve been talking to feeling?

OLIVER BATEMAN: I cover a lot of Pennsylvania politics for RealClear Pennsylvania, and it gets syndicated in other publications, so I know people from the union world and from rust belt politics, and what I sense is tremendous confusion. I did a big data center story for RealClear Investigations a few months ago where the blue-collar people and the blue-collar union officials were charged up about AI data centers. Now there are reservations, as the projects have slowed or haven’t started, and they’re beginning to come to terms with what building these things out in Pennsylvania and Texas might mean. On that one issue you can already see the confusion. What’s our future here in America? Do we want these temporary jobs? What do these numbers even mean for projects that may never launch?

You would think it comes down to solidarity, right? When the left is ascendant, meme words like “solidarity” become things people say, and I’m happy for those periods when it’s happened. The left is rising during Occupy, the left is rising before that during the Battle in Seattle, the left is rising in 2016 and in 2020, but there’s always a moment where it dissipates. Right now there are signs that aspects of the American left are ascending again, but what do people actually think about that and what do they want? As a US historian I’d say there has historically been a tremendous amount of confusion about class, race, and gender in this country, and it has only gotten more confused with the passage of time. When you draw back it seems simple: everyone wants healthcare, money, a basic living, some base level of survival. Then you get down into specifics and everybody has a different opinion. Some of those opinions are informed because the person has had to think about the topic, and some are vibes-driven, and the vibes-driven ones aren’t less important for that. Gut-level opinions are the majority of American opinions. Then you wonder how much of this, when you hear that the left is ascendant or the left is failing, is just a manufactured narrative, public opinion being created one way or the other.

The antidote always seems to be more class unity, but even in a three- or four-person conversation you’ll be pulled in a multitude of directions and watch the divisions form. You mentioned in the intro that I’m a marketing executive, and in fact I’m moving to an even higher-level Silicon Valley role at another startup in a couple of weeks. What you’re doing in that job is differentiating the market and segmenting the market, because it’s more efficient to narrowly attack whatever group you’re selling to. That works in politics too, especially in primary politics, but politics is not sales. I know we play it that way in the US, but deep down it shouldn’t be. It’s always been a tragic thing to me to work in marketing for a decade and to have grown up in a family that owned a car dealership, where sales and marketing was the business, and to go there every day and watch this done. Even my father was acutely aware that something was off about all of it, and yet that was how we made our daily bread. So I’m in a period of deep rethinking of all this, and I’m always a little sad about the whole thing. I’m glad the fight is still going on and the conversation is still going on, but every time I step back I think, Jesus, man, why couldn’t this be easier?

CLASS UNITY: When I’m talking to very different kinds of people about politics, there are things I can say that basically everyone will agree with, and the politics Class Unity has taken as its core tenets tend to be broadly popular. None of it is institutionally represented, though. There’s no political party, including the DSA, that’s focused on it. Are there people you’re talking to who aren’t confused, who seem to know what’s going on and are maybe happy with it?

OLIVER BATEMAN: I report to some people who are very happy with what’s going on every day. I’ve worked for publications funded by people on the left and the right who are happy in some sense with developments that benefit their sides. And I hear one point of agreement across everybody I talk to, including people who are very well off: everything is getting too expensive. It was interesting to spend 17 days in Iceland recently, where food has traditionally been extremely expensive, and to notice that the gap has compressed. You don’t tip over there because servers are paid a wage inside a state-supported system, and the meals still came out close to what I’d pay at home. I was in Canada for two weeks not long before that and noticed the same thing, Canadian-dollar menu prices and American-dollar menu prices reaching parity even though the dollar is stronger. Prices in the United States are wild, and there are good long-term Marxist explanations for why, though that’s the sort of thing people will argue about. The people who feel good are older folks I know who are invested heavily in the market, bosses invested heavily in the market, companies looking at annual recurring revenue jacked up with nowhere to put it but the market. Anybody with a nice retirement fund is benefiting from this strange mismatched economy where the market goes up and everything else stagnates. As long as your retirement vehicle outearns inflation, and the only thing that does is the market, you’re fine. Everybody else, pretty bad. But everybody is feeling prices, costs, root-level stuff that Marx was concerned with.

CLASS UNITY: The obvious position Class Unity has taken is that the failure of the left over however many years has led us here. Do we think the genre of left that’s ascendant today is sincerely interested in and capable of addressing those cost-of-living issues? What makes me optimistic is the phenomenon you described, that the only people who feel things are good are heavily invested in the market. Everyone is becoming aware that things aren’t going well for them, and that’s a form of class consciousness. But leaning into it has had no political manifestation. The DSA doesn’t seem excited about that stuff.

And I think we need to make some distinctions. The word “left” gets thrown around in American discussions in a way where people can mean by it “I voted for Joe Biden,” or they mean the DSA, or, with all the new red-baiting after a few DSA wins, they mean communism. It’s useful to distinguish, as one used to a long time ago, the old left from the new left, and now we have not the post-left but the post-new left. The old left was labor and Marxists and socialists of all kinds, social democrats, Mensheviks, whatever, and its position was: we don’t care what you do individually, we don’t care what you do in the bedroom, that’s all bourgeois stuff, we care about who owns and controls capital, who does what to whom, for whose benefit. Who, whom. All of that got replaced in the sixties by a so-called new left interested in culture and individual liberties, and that’s the one we’ve inherited. The old one was dismantled and destroyed and the new one was nudged and engineered, even gently, into place. So we’ve inherited a thing called the left that isn’t engineered to care about these things. It’s not in its DNA. It does signaling, the fake populist stuff about how folks can’t afford things, but if you go back and read the Omaha Platform of the Populist Party in 1892, that’s homegrown American Marxism. Land reform, debt cancellation, more money to inflate the debts away because the creditors were sucking everyone dry. That was real class politics, and it’s verboten now. The hydra head that comes back every time you hit it is the new left, and right-wingers can point to it and scare ordinary people with “look what they want to do to your kids.” I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Is the left we have just the post-new left?

OLIVER BATEMAN: That distinction is an important one to keep in mind. Pulling it back to nineteenth-century manifestations of organic American populism, pre-William Jennings Bryan populism, those are planks that you could get people behind even in a settler society where you had to assimilate all these people. And you’re right about the rest of it. I’m a product of an old-left advisor who left me alone while I worked on my dissertation, a great six-year period where it felt like the fifties going into the sixties. He was pretty out of it. He’d say, “Foucault? Is that like Facebook? Is that kid stuff?” I enjoyed that. But all the faculty coming up at Pitt while I was doing my PhD were new-left people working on narrow critiques of narrow topics, and I was trained in their seminars in those methods. I thought they were great ways of writing papers. You’re in the gender seminar, you pick a topic, you slap the method on, you do a little archival research, you spend most of your time on methodology and lit review, and you tie it together. That wasn’t my approach. I was a legal historian, a text-and-context historian, somebody who came out of the Cambridge School approach, and I agreed with my advisor that the seminar stuff was junk, but it was great for mass production.

I’ve always been torn between two poles, marketing and the academy, and in the American sense sales and marketing are part of this tradition the same way populism and anti-federalism are. They all come out of the soil here, and sales has been refined into something incredibly effective. The new-left methods, coming out of the old left, were custom-designed to do what you mentioned, which is pull people off the specific issue. I don’t think anybody was thinking about it or masterminding it. But it’s very easy to say, “Yo, in your talk you didn’t mention women specifically,” or “you didn’t mention this demographic, women of this age with this problem.” It’s very good for interrupting, breaking chains of thought, charging the stage with Bernie, making him tongue-tied, getting him to hold space and acknowledge you and have the struggle session. It’s very bad at anything else.

One issue I have tried to adopt, from the left and the right, and nobody liked it: the right wants to tax university endowments. So do I. Use the money to fund student loan forgiveness. Tax all of them, because what they do is fraud on the taxpayer and fraud on the consumer. Tax those fat things, write off the debt, give everybody a clean slate and start over. That’s an American platform idea if there ever was one, and you couldn’t sell it to anybody. It seems like the most salable product, which means it won’t sell, because you’d be pulled apart. You could probably sell a variant using new-left principles: debt cancellation for one specific niche micro-class as a form of grievance redress. You wouldn’t succeed, but you’d win adherents, and if your only goal is to build a little influence bloc, it’s great.

You’re right that there was a period after 2020, after Biden’s descent into senility, where the left questioned itself and the post-left emerged. Some people would call the podcast I co-hosted a post-left podcast, though neither I nor Benjamin Studebaker, who founded it, would call ourselves post-leftists. It was trying to articulate some version of these politics. My co-host was of course on her long day’s journey into the wild right of posting, which shows how people get pulled off in those directions too. Now we’ve entered a period with a vast amount of crude and silly red-baiting, and some of us grew up during the last round of it. I remember Bill Clinton being red-baited, Jimmy Carter being red-baited, deregulation Democrats, and yet red-baiting remained on the menu. We’re seeing a lot of that again if you look in the right spots.

So we exist with a post-new left whose precise contours and leaders aren’t identifiable to me yet. There have been some identity-DSA-type wins and some losses. Wisconsin primaries were closer than they seemed, and we’ll see how people fare in the general. I don’t know where you’d categorize the current mayor of New York on this podcast, and putting these people into classes and types is a big part of the game of discussing this stuff. The thing has changed shape. You all saw the discussion of how to move past what they’re calling Woke 1.0, which I guess is really the transition from the end of the new left through the post-left to the post-new left. One response is to laugh it off, even though it led to breakaways and schisms and me watching a lot of people say, “Well, I can’t be a left-wing operative and I can’t get a left-wing academic job, so I’ll go teach at a civic center and have a right-wing job but still be a left-wing guy.” I want everybody to work and find the jobs they want, but I watched all of that go down.

So what is the post-new left, and what are its third rails? Will candidates be derailed by transgender issues, by foreign policy, or will there be questions about cost and social programs and of what kind? Or is it window dressing for election platforms? History has taught me to expect very little except continued offshoring or de-offshoring or automation, which Americans, even more than Europeans, are conditioned to passively accept. Not the people listening to this, but most people say, “Well, what’s the alternative?” And then you can red-bait them too. Someone is going to have to articulate what this thing is before anyone can move past it, understand it, or transcend it.

CLASS UNITY: Something you said made me think of a question I’ve been carrying around for a long time, about the people now talking about Woke 1.0 and distancing themselves from it. I’ve often wondered whether what people called wokeness was just the latest installment of something that isn’t new: a moralistic, sanctimonious liberalism that isn’t interested in changing anything, that wants to be as Pareto-optimal as possible, tweaks around the edges so nothing substantive changes. Deeply committed to inequality and oligarchy so long as it’s pretty and domesticated with a bow on top. I have vague memories of the nineties, those Parental Advisory stickers on CDs, Tipper Gore and Dan Quayle’s wife agreeing left and right that kids shouldn’t listen to music about real stuff, so we knew those were the cool ones. On its face that’s the opposite of wokeness, because those people weren’t transgressing bourgeois norms. But if the whole thing was just an ideological strategy to silence people, end conversations, and preserve oligarchy, then nothing has changed and it just takes different colors.

I’ll add that as someone who was involved in the DSA for a while and joined expecting it to be focused on socialist politics, or even basic class politics like universal healthcare and housing, my experience and other people’s experience here is that the DSA and the broader institutional left are hostile to class politics and actively trot out cultural neoliberal opponents of it. So why is there any value in the left, as a set of institutions, in promoting what have traditionally been leftist values? Why can’t we say we want to improve the lives of the majority of working people and find allies in that frame? Isn’t it more likely to happen outside the left, and probably outside the right? Steve Hall, who teaches at Teesside, said in a previous session that we basically need to kill whatever the left is. I’m not sure if that means start over or erase all of it and distance ourselves. When people hear “left” or “socialism” or “Marxism,” what comes to mind is so poisonous, the trans issue, what a lot of people consider racism in critical race theory, that I like the idea of killing it and starting over. We’re not going to bring the Democratic Party left, which is another thing the DSA seems to have as a goal. But I don’t know what killing the left and starting over would mean. Is it a thing, or a rhetorical concept that sounds more achievable than the alternative? Marx tells us what the situation is: the job of the communists is to inform the working class about internationalism and help them understand their class position. Until we get an actual workers’ party, I don’t know what hope we have, and we’ve never had one in our lifetimes that has made more than a token effort to accommodate the working class.

OLIVER BATEMAN: All the slogans and buzzwords that float around our political system, but that attach to this agglomeration that gets called the left without being specific about it, are so toxic that if we actually had to make progress as a system, and all of us believe that should be the case, you would jettison all of it and start over. It’s such bad branding. At one point in the history of marketing, Comcast’s brand became so toxic that it had to rebrand itself as Xfinity. That was the whole reason for the name change. The brand had lost so much value from being a terrible monopolist that internally they altered the name. People still call it Comcast, but my God. The left in general, and certainly the two parties in their duopolist position, are so weighted with marketing baggage that only occasions vibes and feels by way of reaction that it becomes very hard to concentrate on something concrete, a candidate whose platform is restrictions on credit card interest rates, cancellation of certain forms of debt, fundamental contractual and social obligations, real pocketbook things. That person would be boring and would be pushed off the stage, because something wouldn’t be included. But that’s only under the old paradigms.

It’s not going to happen inside the left, as you said, and it’s not going to happen inside the right, as some post-leftists assumed. That’s been tried. The Podhoretz types, all those people at the dawn of the original new left who jumped ship from the old left, the Jewish intellectuals from New York who moved over to do yeoman’s work for years advocating for the arming of Israel and other cop issues that were of great concern to them. They found new sinecures and new ways to write essays, and good for them, I want everybody to have work, sincerely. But that route pushed them out.

The stuff is so toxic that when I wrote for RealClear in the summer of brat, the tail end of it, when everyone in the know was predicting that the ridiculous Kamala Harris ascension would produce a presidency, I had a piece that wound up syndicated in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal after two things happened in Pennsylvania. One was Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them, I’m for you” ad, which is dumb but is good marketing. I said, that’s going to land, and I began hearing all my imbecile relatives repeat it, and I want them to be well. Then Kamala ran an ad with an actor playing a Pittsburgher saying Trump isn’t one of us, and the actor was unconvincing. He was an actor. They could have gotten a random steelworker and had him read lines. Instead they got a guy who, and I’m not putting down how anyone speaks, had a lisp and didn’t look the part. As a marketing person I thought, this isn’t going to work, and on those two things I called the state for Trump. I still have a lot of relatives who work for PennDOT or at the mill in Braddock, and their politics are vague. I’ll ask, “Jake, what do you think?” and he’ll say, “Oh, I’ve been hearing a lot about Trump lately,” and I’ll think, that doesn’t bode well. Vibes-based purple shifting. I want a little more or a little less, I need this one to do that. A lot of my RealClear analysis has been texting these people, or going home on weekends, or talking to my mom, whose husband is a retired coal miner. If I sense the vibe shift with them, I know. But we need to move politics beyond that somehow. We have to get rid of these old and unproductive paradigms where you can run a whole campaign in which Hillary Clinton is called a communist and some Republican doofus is called a fascist and nothing is given to anyone at the end of it except a spectacle.

CLASS UNITY: There seems to be a broad tendency toward dishonesty and fraud across the economy and across institutions. You were talking earlier about fraud in the academy. I’m thinking of the article you wrote in 2015 about why you left, and a bunch of us just read Christian Parenti’s review of Theo Baker’s book about how empty these institutions have become. It seems connected to how dishonest our left and our broader politics have become.

OLIVER BATEMAN: One thing I didn’t put in that Vox piece, but that I’ve talked about since and that really convinced me, came back up when I discussed the Arday situation. As Baudrillard said of Watergate, Watergate isn’t the scandal. Everything else is the scandal, and you point to a Watergate and say, “Well, we got him.” With Arday it isn’t sufficient to say this is a fraudulent academic. What does that even mean? He was a product of the system. He could have been helped, he could have been stopped at various points, and he had other issues. But I can speak as somebody who sat on four hiring committees, one at Pitt and three at Texas-Arlington, and I would say, not that I’m special, that maybe two of us out of all those committees ever read any of the materials that came in, the chapters, any of it. People would listen to the job talk and then ask a question that was really about themselves. “How does your research relate to my research?”

The most qualified candidate we ever interviewed had four languages, including ancient Greek, and worked on debt and microfinance in late medieval France. He’d gone to Bowdoin, he was an All-American rower, up and down the line. Unfortunately he had a William F. Buckley look and manner, and he upset some people. I was a Democrat of some kind at the time, I don’t know what kind, but this was 2014 and I said, this is the most qualified candidate I’ve come across in my career, we need a European legal historian as a counterpart to me, and this is the one subject I’m fit to judge. I’d studied with Quentin Skinner and those people. I know the field. He was voted unqualified, and a whisper campaign about him spread through the AHA. I finally told him years later, and I said, this is bullshit, man. This guy was smarter than me. He was to the manner (not manor, as some of you kids might think!) born, so he’d had the advantages and the time to do that kind of work, but I’m a nerd at heart, and when I see multiple languages and paleography and the detailed archival work, I think, this is the model. On top of that he’d been an accomplished athlete. They would have jumped on him in the thirties or forties. Maybe he’d have been a tool of the establishment, maybe he’d have voted for Roosevelt, I don’t care. I’m looking at the work.

On the other committees we’d have a qualified candidate from an underrepresented group whom we wouldn’t offer the job because they’d be called a flight risk. Everyone assumed they were being hired by Harvard. So the committee would offer the job to a more mediocre underrepresented candidate, because that person would stay at a place like Texas-Arlington. That’s how you get the Arday situation, because, as we learned, at the top the emperor sometimes has no clothes when everybody is hired on aesthetics. Every hiring committee. I’m not sure how I got the job at Texas-Arlington. There were enough old men left, it was a close vote, I was the second choice and the first choice turned them down, so I was a flight risk too. I connected with the old men by talking about baseball, and eventually they retired, so my supporters in the department went with them. Just like my advisor at Pitt, when I got the Mellon fellowship it was because of the old men, and maybe there was aesthetics at play there too, somebody coming up from the blue-collar ranks whom they could bring up. But I also think some of those old men were still reading page by page, because some of them were still typing on typewriters. There were underrepresented candidates who were better than the other underrepresented candidates who wouldn’t get a campus invitation because it looked like they’d done too much.

One of my co-authors on the four books I’ve written about pro wrestling, Ian Douglass, is African American, as accomplished as it gets, a great sentence-for-sentence writer and researcher, and he has always been outside the academic system for one reason or another. He works in marketing too, a higher-level corporate role, same as me. The system could find the people who could be fitted into those slots, and the fact that it doesn’t, and the fact that we talk about everything around it, is what drove me out. I’m not privy to DSA candidate selection, but I know that even in local council races people say, “You want this type of person to run for that.” Patronage politics and machine politics have always done this, you need the Irish candidate for the Irish, and so on. But if the goal is to get competent people into roles, this cuts against it, and you alienate a lot of people. You certainly alienated me.

Maybe I’ve imbibed too much of the American vision of merit and ability, but consider that I was the guy giving everyone A’s, and I wrote in The Atlantic that I did it because they were customers at the university. In my mind I did all the things you were supposed to do, and I would have abolished testing too. Now, having to do it in hiring in the corporate world, I give people assessments and watch them do them, and I feel terrible about it, but I’ve had to switch back. I wanted to follow all those first principles, and they led to awful aesthetics-based decisions.

CLASS UNITY: There’s a pandemic of delusion across this country. Another thing we were talking about was the May 1 executive order sanctioning Cuban officials, titled something like “sanctioning those who are oppressing the Cuban people,” as though we’re sanctioning them for their own good. Who believes it? How many people knew Arday was a fraud the whole way through and kept their mouths shut for one reason or another? There’s a huge disconnect from reality that has come to dominate so many conversations and institutions. I know more about its origins on the left, but it’s not clear to me how this tendency came to control everything.

OLIVER BATEMAN: I’m fascinated by it in the American context, because technically America has been, in theory, “if you’ve got what it takes, we’ll take what you’ve got.” We want the best people. But it’s not just the Cuba situation. When the Iran war broke out I was shocked to see as much bipartisanship as I did. You would have thought that being pulled into a war by a preemptive strike from Israel would produce more questioning of the narrative, and instead there was a lot of political support in the early days. People who could have stopped it, or drawn a hard line, or publicized how strange it was, got on board that train. “It’s for security, we’ll deal with higher gas prices for a while, it was now or never, we only had one shot.” It reminded me of the Gulf War, the prior one, and of the divergence that came later on the second Gulf War, when people said, “I got off that train.” Very few got off at the start. I interviewed one of them, Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, a long time ago. I asked him to get me into the mentality of the people voting in the Senate at that time, since he’d been an elder statesman by then, and he said there wasn’t a whole lot of opposition or discussion, everyone went along, and it seemed clear to him that it would be expensive and protracted and lacking in intelligence. So there was a consensus then, and there was more of a consensus this time than I’d have expected, and the administration pumps out weirdly written AI executive orders and foreign policy measures that get less attack than you’d think from something wearing that antique label of the left. If William Jennings Bryan were alive today he’d at least critique foreign adventurism. Now you can’t even get that.

CLASS UNITY: I wonder about the direction of influence, whether it runs from somewhere into academia or from academia into somewhere. It might be multidirectional. You mentioned patronage networks, a topic dear to our hearts. Marxists should read Max Weber on patronage and the politics of vocation, because it’s a chain of payments. Talking about Chicago politics, the people who decide who can run are the landowners. The donors decide who the viable candidate is long before it gets to a primary, and in Chicago the relations have to do with how the land is zoned, and the aldermen decide the zoning, so the contractors and the construction people and the landowners are deeply interested in certain aldermen and not others. When Class Unity was a DSA caucus we thought about running a candidate, a real leftist candidate rather than one of the fake ones. It’s not going to happen, because everything you see is downstream of the landowners deciding who the alderman will be so that decisions prop up their asset prices. There’s a lot of land in Chicago where stuff could be built, and if they zoned it for housing, prices would come down. So I’m tempted to say the direction of influence is academia poisoning politics, but who gets into the race in the first instance is decided by the donors.

OLIVER BATEMAN: My theory, and it’s just a theory, is that no matter what anybody says, the party decides. People talk about whether primaries lead to extremism, and I think that no matter who wins the primary, the way we have primaries set up, they eventually get the talk, because the funds have to come in to run the general. Eugene Debs could win the primary and he’d have to get the talk about how the money is going to flow, and he’d moderate a few positions, so much so that “will he moderate when he runs in the general” is a cliché article. But during Woke 1.0, and during prior periods like the Tom Hayden sixties and the new left, there’s cross-pollination. Can you take certain lines from late-sixties, early-seventies new-left stuff into the McGovern campaign’s marketing? Can you, as Richard Nixon trying to hold your faction together, pull in marketing from the John Birch Society? Not the whole thing, that’s nuts, that’s kooky, but a line or two, “trust your local police,” one of those Birch hits. You don’t take the whole thing.

I’ve always thought academia was raided, even though I believe some of the academics are sincere in what might seem to us like obvious nonsense. The smartest ones realize it, because they end up on payrolls. The rest don’t realize that they’re serving up content that will be pared down into brain-dead clichés and become part of what comes next. Ibram X. Kendi knew how to play the game early on. I met him at the 2013 AHA, and since I’m always evaluating candidates on sheer processing power and how hard the work was, how many archives, how many languages, which admittedly favors privileged candidates because that work takes time, a couple of minutes of conversation on a couple of occasions would have put him toward the bottom of the pile. There were plenty of other underrepresented candidates at any given time bringing a lot to the table. But he understood what the market needed. It’s a very simple dissertation and a very simple book. He got his funds, and whatever happened to them, that center in Boston collapsed, and then he becomes another talking point for the right, “every underrepresented candidate is a failure and a fraud.” No. I’ve written four books with a co-author who would be considered underrepresented. His family is well off financially, so he’s had a lot of privilege in that sense. You’re just picking the wrong guy.

If you put me in the James Carville role for the right, of course I amplify things like this, because my relatives will be immediately confused by them. They’re not like us, able to step back and say, “This person’s very sincere, there are certain needs being met.” So there’s this healthy or unhealthy relationship between the academy and the left. The right doesn’t take much of its language from the academy, because there are fewer rightists there, though they’re opening those civic centers now; Harper’s had a piece about them recently worth reading, and a few friends of mine, old-left people, former DSA comrades, have gotten jobs at them. The right takes its ideas from posting and podcasts and new communication. Since the days of Father Coughlin they’ve been very good with new forms of reaching the masses, even if the masses don’t benefit. When Lyndon Johnson goes down in defeat in his 1941 Senate race, he loses to a radio preacher, a man who’d mastered radio, and it almost pushes him out of politics and surely makes him more corrupt, more result-driven, more ends-justify-the means-of-ascent in the future.1

Personally I don’t think academia should be a place for this. Growing up I was torn: do I want to be a marketer or an academic, do I want to do what my dad did or what my mom did? In my mind the academy should have been kept pure, and I know nothing’s pure, but it should have been about what your research was like and what your sources and methods were like. I know that’s nerd stuff, you could say it’s D&D. I just wanted a space for that, because I thought that kind of production was important for society. Instead, some academics find participating in politics irresistible. Even people whose books were on my comps list and whom I didn’t think were terrible. I think Gender Trouble is a solid cultural book. But to hear Judith Butler talk about politics is moronic. There’s a joke that you take a wise man, get him talking on the wrong subject, and make a fool of him. Why would these people want to be fools? They start talking about politics and they sound like Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert doing the lame vaccine videos. I lost esteem for a lot of academics that way. What I liked about my advisor was that he had no political opinions. Ask him what he thought about the dean and he’d say the only real vote you should ever cast on a dean is no confidence, it doesn’t matter who the dean is, just vote no, which is an old-left opinion. Another was, if anybody’s running for office, don’t vote for him. If they’re trying to have power over you, especially if they’re near your age, why would you accelerate their rise just so they can be your boss? That dovetails with what my dad, a real product of the rust belt, would say: don’t vote for anybody that’s going to be your boss. Don’t help anybody. They’re just going to boss you. Academia has become this place for reliable, crummy marketing for the Democratic Party.

CLASS UNITY: You nailed it. It isn’t easy to be dedicated to the truth and interested in the way things are because that’s the way they are, and have it bottom out there. And it’s the professionalization of intellectual life that mummifies it. But that’s going off in a different direction. I noticed that when we talk about political things your view takes a long historical perspective, which makes sense for a historian, and it’s a different perspective than you usually get among political leftists. So I wanted to ask you, as a historian of America, what your sense is of the moment we’re in. When we were thinking about reaching out to you, your piece in Compact about the post-left had just come out, and at that moment there was this weird sense that whatever happened between 2016 and now was farther away than the Bush years and the Iraq invasion. We seem closer to a time that was 26 years ago than to Occupy, the Sanders wave, the dissident insurrection inside the Democratic Party, the DSA, the post-left. Is that true? What are we coming out of and where are we going? What made it possible for leftists to criticize primarily the left for its deficiencies, and what changed so that it no longer seems possible?

OLIVER BATEMAN: Something did change, and I’ll get to it; one technological change locked a few things in that made dissent more difficult. But going back to the first part, yes, I take a long view. What’s interesting is that as I lived through it, the Battle in Seattle, the WTO protests in Pittsburgh, I still had the youthful idea that maybe I was coming up in a special moment. The news loved that for a while: the stock market will go up forever in ‘98, ‘99, 2000, and it doesn’t. Then, starting in 2015, when I wrote that Vox piece and talked to some of my old confidants, and my wife got the job at Carnegie Mellon and we were coming back here, which greased my transition out because I’d said I’d leave when I could and it became clear I could, I realized I was living through something. Not that history repeats itself. I wrote a piece for Compact about that. The second Hitler isn’t Hitler. It’s closer to Marx’s formulation, that you experience it tragically and then farcically, and the farcical aspect is that in my old age, knowing what I’ve learned from the long view, I’m witnessing aspects of this play out again in terms of human relationships and intraparty relationships and the same mistakes creating the same openings for the continued and largely untrammeled expansion of finance capital.

Both as a historian and a marketer I found it interesting how you get the New York Jewish scene that’s tired of the old left and bullied out, partly by politics and partly by social relations, because relationships had broken up and people disliked each other, and Commentary becomes a right-wing publication over time. And here I am writing for Compact, which emerges as one of the mouthpieces of the post-left, maybe the last one standing, because Geoff Shullenberger is the editor, and he’d also deny the label. That came out of the Bellows split, an attempt at a post-left magazine that fragmented almost immediately, which I addressed in the article and was only peripheral to. It’s all these little fights erupting the same way they did in sixties and seventies New York and in thirties and forties left politics, when people were arguing out their position vis-à-vis the New Deal, then World War II, then the postwar moment when the Soviet Union is suddenly an enemy again and everyone has to sort out where they stand, what team they’re on, who they’re going to work for, in addition to what ideas matter most to them. There are two tracks running that everybody runs along, the career track and the ideas track, unfortunately. And I’m getting to live through this again. Some of the same pressures prompt the same openings for people making perfectly rational decisions, not to me or you but about the use of capital. It’s rational to dump your money into a market and push it up until you can pull it out before everyone else collapses. I don’t think it’s wise, I think it’s bad systemically, but I can see why they’re doing it, and I can see why all the actors play out the way they do. I never thought I’d be a minor part of a historical process I wanted to take the long view on, and here I am in it, and it’s happening again, rhyming rather than repeating, as they say.

The thing that changed is technological, and to explain it I have to say what I always liked about the old left, which, nerdy as it sounds, though probably not to you, was the feuding. What makes this Marxist different from that one, why did this Marxist hate that one, why did this one sleep with that one, who was in an open marriage with whom, but also what were their ideas. There was a long history of dissent within the left, sometimes brutal, in countries where somebody comes to power and represses people, but a tradition of argument, of framing the ideas at the various internationals, of what a popular front is going to be, who’s in and who’s out. It hasn’t worked out for what I’d have hoped for from the old left then or now, which is a stronger social safety net, something that lets people have time to be creative and think about things other than work, basic protections that even the troubled European countries have right now. It’s much harder to fire people in a lot of those countries. It’s amazing how disposable workers are here. I’ve been through so many corporate layoff stretches, and I’ve never been laid off, but I’ve had to play insane political games to avoid it, and the anxiety that goes with that is nutty. Nobody should want that for anybody.

What fundamentally changed that history of dissent was social media, and AI is only enhancing it. The people selling the algorithms of the internet, the Al Gore-rithms, were able to turn everyone into an army of one unable to take the slightest criticism on their feeds and their thin skin. My hope, as a debate coach and then a college debate teacher, had always been to make people ready to argue with each other so maybe we both learn. Somebody might outright correct a fact, and I take it and process it, or the paper was unclear and I need to change something, fine, I’m there to learn. Instead everybody became a thin-skinned perfectionist of opinion who had to have the perfect set of opinions, which could be sold to them by the very technology behind the expansion of these things. So a left resurgence from 2013 on, the Jacobin era, is imperiled by the fact that everybody can be targeted and differentiated. I can drum up trans resistance to a proposal by microtargeting them on social media and inflaming their passions, given the right ad. And nothing is better at this than AI. As the head of AI content for a host of companies, working with this technology from day one, I can tell you AI is a mediocre producer of material unless that material is midwit content right down the middle. The Albanian content farms and the small language models peddling the worst takes from 2012 to 2016 were designed to be supplanted by this stuff at scale, because it’s so bad and so predictable, but you can serve it up like gruel. Slop is the polite word for it. It’s pablum they eat like babies to get fat and soft and round in the mind, and then you can get them really worked up about politics. They won’t be able to have a conversation about the most generic thing, like raising the top tax rate and pairing it with one universal social program, direct checks to someone, nothing controversial. Instead a million pieces of take technology hit them from all sides. You could have the top take-makers at Jezebel churning it out. Someone at the DSA says Lululemon yoga pants are an overpriced manifestation of capitalism, and someone else says, “What about us girls who just need our comfort and our nice things, what’s wrong with wanting beauty within leftism?” Boom, you’ve knocked the thing off the track, and you can do that with every take, and they could never have done it that fast before. Trotsky wouldn’t have come to power. He’d have been out doing a Richard Hanania act on Substack, or a Curtis Yarvin act. That’s where those people get pushed.

I started noticing this on Twitter around 2014 or 2015, when I joked about someone’s synesthesia and a committed leftist said, “Don’t you know that I live with that every day?” and I decided not to respond and let it go. You couldn’t critique AOC’s presentation of self on TikTok. A state senator in Delaware, a very well-built woman, was twerking on the sand, and you couldn’t criticize it as trivial or unbefitting a person trying to win elections, because you’d be coming at her agency, and she was underrepresented on top of that. The marketing brain could predict every response, and I thought, my God, you can’t say anything. To get to a unity perspective you need to be able to shave all this off, and it’s the hardest thing to market. I had a boss, not in politics, who asked what would be the hardest thing to market in 2026 to get it to scale. Coca-Cola. It’s a universal product. The goal is 50 percent market saturation. Just like the Democrats and the Republicans in this ridiculous constitutional system that creates this deadlock, this duopoly, which Baudrillard said was a perfect mechanism, because you release the pressure by swapping one in for the other. If you only had one, you’d know whose head to lop off. If you can keep swapping them in and out, this one’s a little based, this one’s a little woke, and we’re back to family, nothing, it doesn’t matter, you still ensure that the right companies get the right subsidies, the right things get built, the right land, as was noted about Chicago, gets owned by the right developers, and the right assets, real or imaginary, keep appreciating. It keeps working.

What a mix to be operating in, where it somehow became bad to criticize. The old leftists I knew came from the era of mocking the warlike nature of John Ford movies, which are beautiful to watch, or mocking John Wayne as a figure. Today there’d be takes saying you’re a bad customer, and if John Wayne were played by John David Washington it would be worse, because you’re attacking this guy in this role and taking his job. You can’t make any systemic critique because there’s always some BS line of attack that can be amplified. I can’t think of a harder time to sell a universal product. And I don’t want to say “sell.” This is a product everyone should need, like water, which we don’t have in Flint. Flint was a meme. The water’s still not drinkable there. I saw recently that something like a quarter of the piping remains unfinished. Flint doesn’t have drinkable water, and this is a first-world, allegedly, country. That’s why I wanted to come on here. It’s just nutty.

CLASS UNITY: Speaking of things you might have wanted to talk about, you’ve written about professional wrestling, and I was literally ranting to my wife this morning on the way to work, explaining kayfabe and how I’ve seen it used in articles about controlled opposition. As an expert or an aficionado, has professional wrestling informed your politics, and do you have any thoughts from that world on what we’ve been talking about?

OLIVER BATEMAN: I do. I have two long pieces, one on my Substack and one on UnHerd where I reviewed a Vince McMahon biography, and I have probably the strangest position on this. Coming at it as somebody who would teach the history of sales and marketing in the US and does marketing, I believe that everything in the United States, politics, sports, follows the tradition of the carnival tout, the medicine huckster, the pharmacist peddling Coca-Cola. All of it is downstream of American sales and marketing. So what is wrestling but the application of sales and marketing to carnival spectacle? Wrestling matches have been fixed as long as gambling has been around, because wrestling is the easiest sport to fix. This is something people miss. In our books, Ian Douglass and I push the unreal origin of American wrestling back to the 1850s at least. People were always taking dives, organized gambling is always the force in the United States, and so there’s always that fake element, but it’s fake in response to capitalist pressures. How capitalism evolved in the United States shaped wrestling far more than wrestling shaped the US. That’s the key point. It’s downstream of how aggressively everything here is sold.

Politics is one of those things. The great innovations in American politics are the great campaigners who market themselves ever more aggressively and in macho ways, whether it’s Andrew Jackson’s campaign to finally defeat John Quincy Adams in their second showdown, engineered by Martin Van Buren, himself a master of Democratic organizational politics, at a time when the old tradition held that you should never openly run for president. You stood for the office. Anyone running for office was probably a demagogue, and you should be careful of him. That’s the Federalist and Anti-Federalist vision, and they had to get around it with Jackson. From the age of Jackson on, each generation of politicians gives us a new political technology and increasingly demagogic performers. Teddy Roosevelt was a new political technology, an educated demagogue running for office on three separate occasions. Franklin Roosevelt, same thing. Reagan, Nixon, all of them doing the same sort of stuff. Wrestling reflects these trends rather than driving them, because as it evolved it reflected what we always were. It evolves into the attitude-era in-your-face version in the nineties, with the twins in that ad, breasts out. It’s colorful cartoon patriotic wrestling in the eighties, and that’s a reflection of the Reagan era. Vince McMahon was nothing if not totally attuned, and his great innovation was being the guy most attuned to popular culture. He follows the zeitgeist. Hulk Hogan is the necessary companion to Reagan. Steve Austin is the necessary companion to the Gen X era, giving the finger to everyone. The Rock is the necessary next step, the perfect corporate man, an empty vessel. And who fulfills that? John Cena, the absolute perfect entertainer in all respects, right down to teaching himself Mandarin to expand his own international market. All of these men are reflections of their time, and if you watch wrestling with that in mind you see that the politicians aren’t learning from it; it’s showing you lessons society already knew and characters who were already there.

And what is wrestling today? A gigantic, shitty conglomerate owned by TKO that underpays all but the top stars in the WWE and underpays almost everyone in the UFC, all for the benefit of investors, who are always the winners in any pro wrestling, mixed martial arts, or boxing match. So my position is: don’t look at wrestling to learn the secrets. Look at wrestling to see how the fix has always been in, and the fix has always been in because this is a reflection, downstream of the big bosses. Teddy Roosevelt writes about JP Morgan coming in to visit him asking for regulatory help while Roosevelt is trying to push through basic trust controls. Roosevelt is thinking, I’m the president. Morgan talks to him like a fellow businessman: let’s cut a deal. And Roosevelt is left to write that Morgan thought he was just another broker at a firm, because in a way he was, given who held the heavy jack in this country.

One shift does occur from the 1850s into the 1920s, when wrestling becomes heavily owned by promoters controlling arenas and controlling wrestlers on payroll, never with benefits but as people getting checks for showing up. Before the promoters, the guys who decided the fix was in were a pair of wrestlers working the marks to take the gambling take. Like today’s athletes. It brings a smile to my face when I hear about an NBA player missing five shots to win his parlay. I’ve written a lot about gambling, and I’ve talked to some players who were involved in stuff back in the day, and one told me off the record, “Of course I needed to bet on all the games. Why else would I care about them?” I said, well, you were getting paid. “Shit, I got that whether I won or not. But a bet, I could win or lose that. So I needed to miss that free throw at the end of the game.” There’s an awfulness under capitalism where that guy needed skin in the game to feel alive playing professional basketball, and he could only get it by gambling. That’s why I’ve always been so interested in sports history. People say Dave Zirin is the god of sports history on the left, and I’ve read everything he’s written, and I don’t think he has ever gotten to this level of remove. The real story in sports is this far-off vision of how it is essentially a prison of measured time for the workers, in which you can see capitalist exploitation work at scale. There’s a French book called Sport: A Prison of Measured Time by Jean-Marie Brohm that is literally this, and like a lot of French theorists he’s right on the money and the translation is so uninteresting.2 No American is ever going to write this kind of book, certainly not me.

The real lesson from wrestling is that the boss always wins. The boss picks who wins. All the storylines are fake, and they own that sport the way they own every other sport. The Marvel movies are a lesson: they pick who wins those things, who stars in them, who you like, who’s going to be your it girl or guy, whatever they’re pushing out. It’s not organic, and it’s been like that since the thirties, forties, fifties. They’ve just refined it, and now they have you. Trump picked the right words, and of course he did, because he was the one teaching Vince McMahon the business of business, not the other way around. Vince wanted Trump around in the eighties to learn at the feet of the billionaire real estate guru and to hold events in his venues. Trump has known about all of this always. There was a take in the Atlantic that Trump learned from pro wrestling, and no, Trump taught pro wrestling. That man has a certain gross smarts that comes from the whole tradition of billionaire hustlers who made America what it is, for good or ill.

If you hear that and you’re moved by it, dig in and think about sports this way. I still watch sports. As a former athlete, and as somebody who just went to Iceland and lifted with Hafþór Björnsson, the Mountain from Game of Thrones, for a Men’s Health piece, pure competition and seeing people do their best is, like reading a well-researched paper that changed my mind, so pure and so interesting that I’m hooked on it. When it works, when you see a great scholar or a great athlete, you get tricked into thinking the rest of it is like that and the system isn’t all bad, look at the beautiful things it can do. I sometimes idealize it, and that’s why a critical perspective that situates this inside capitalism is necessary, but man, it’s easy to fall for. Watching Ohtani play baseball, you think, this guy’s great, and the gambling story that attached itself to him is a whole other cultural matter, the Japanese and gambling, that I don’t have time for here. I love to watch him. But the wrestlers, the stories, all of it, they’re capitalist puppets too, downstream of the paymasters. Vince McMahon added a cool angle in the nineties where he was the bad boss punishing his employees, and he made money pretending to be the bad boss while being the bad boss. Of all the guys who could have pulled that off, he did it. Part of his life was spent in a trailer park in eastern North Carolina. I lived in eastern North Carolina for a while, and if you’ve lived in that very impoverished part of the state and grown up with some of the experiences he probably had, yeah, you’re getting off on that. Just as he was getting off with the ladies and having his employees have sex with the ladies in the federation, he’s getting off on the objectification of the workers and himself, getting people to pay to see him pretend to be beaten up when he could fire everybody. That’s a level of capitalist psychosis, and he got to monetize it. God bless him, in a way, for putting it on the screen. It’s Shakespearean when you think about it. And that’s why I hate that he’s gone, because what’s in his place is an awful, bottom-line-oriented Ari Emanuel corporation that wants to use AI to write the stories. They’ve cut the writing staff back. We’re going to have wrestlers reading AI scripts. “It’s not the anger. It’s the blah blah blah.” The cheap Claude-y sound of this junk.

CLASS UNITY: I have a question with an eye to what we can expect in the near future. You’ve written about Tucker, and I talk about politics with people of all kinds of views, some of whom say things about JD Vance, that maybe there’s dissent within the Trump camp and he’s the level-headed one. People are nurturing these illusions. I have to admit I never was a Trump supporter, but there was enough anti-establishment energy that a lot of people thought, we’re so screwed anyway, what’s going to happen? Some people still think JD Vance will go on after this and be less bellicose because he was officially more for peace with Iran, and Tucker is cultivating this dissident energy within the right. Then I have this thought, and I think, no, that’s too conspiratorial. Is it just theater to keep people hanging on, the way Trump posed himself as the anti-establishment character to reconsolidate consent? Now that everyone sees that was a load of BS, are they still pretending there’s dissident energy within the right? Is Tucker just political theater? Is JD?

OLIVER BATEMAN: I have an answer to that, and it was informed by one of the first things I ever wondered about. I was homeschooled, so most days I’d go to work with my dad at the car dealership and sit in the back office and read comic books or wrestling magazines or play on the Amiga and later the IBM. Sometimes I’d be out on the sales floor watching him do his thing. He’d strike up these incredible conversations with the local pastor who needed to buy two or three white vans, and afterward I’d ask him, “Dad, I didn’t know you knew all that, or meant all that.” He’d say, “Oh, I don’t give a shit. I just sold a car.” “But you sounded so sincere.” “Yeah, I know about all that.” What he was trying to say to me, I think, is that this is the American mind writ large. You can hold those sincerely held views and be doing your thing at the same time.

Tucker is a great example. I don’t know how he’s had so many shifts, from bow-tied libertarian to whatever he is now, but in the moment I think he believes a lot of what he’s saying, especially when he’s having a better interview. Some of his interviews are better than others. Sometimes he’s clearly read a fraction of the book, and sometimes he was a writer once and has done a little bit of the work. But at the same time he is so saturated with viewer statistics and market data, and he has ads for prepper food on his program. Does he believe we’re coming to the end times? I don’t know. If you asked him, he’d probably say something like what my dad said. Do you believe it? I want him to buy the stuff. There’s a sketch on The Whitest Kids U’ Know, the show whose main player, Trevor Moore, died young (people have a conspiracy about that death too, the Hollywood elite, he knew too much, whatever), a business show where the guy is holding up a book and the hosts say, “You made all this money just from the stuff in this book,” and he says, “I made all this money just from selling this book.” That’s the American approach writ large.

Even to do what Trump did from 2013 to 2016, he had to have those sentiments, or be tapped into them and feel them in the moment, and when your moment passes they go away. I interviewed JD Vance on What’s Left?, and that became a commercial during the Kamala Harris campaign, because he was joking about abortions across borders and George Soros transporting people to California to have abortions. The Harris campaign took the clip and it had no effect whatsoever, as I assumed it wouldn’t. My sense with him was that he’s had a number of passions and interests, but at that time he was falling behind in the Ohio Senate primary. He hadn’t differentiated himself from car dealer Bernie Moreno, who eventually became an Ohio senator, and the rest of the field. He was running behind, and he made a shift. I have some similarities in background with him, and talking to him I started thinking about things in my professional career where I was able to change an approach, or, as my dad would say, go soft to go places, because you gotta have that do re mi, as Woody Guthrie would say. It don’t mean a thing if you don’t have that dough. There’s something in that somewhat-poor-kid head of his: the life you’re living with your wife and kids is one thing, and when you get that chance to get the dough, you just say this thing and not that thing. The brain has a way of getting there, and maybe people who aren’t as marketing-saturated don’t think about it as directly. I think he’s someone who can always get there, but he’s also thought sincerely about some of the positions people find appealing, which is why he articulates them so well. My dad was never religious but could talk a good game if it meant continuing a conversation or building a relationship, and then on another level you’d see him reading about the stuff, and it left me wondering whether he was interested in it or not. In my own life the academic background lets me separate from that, but there was a time running What’s Left?, when it was doing very well month to month and the take was nice, even if it never hit escape velocity because there were too many feuds and I was too resistant to turning it into a Republican show, when I had to ask: could I keep saying this shit? Could I keep interviewing Curtis Yarvin week after week, lobbing softballs? Those were never the guests I was interested in. I was interested in Jeff Bingaman, or an ex-congressman, or a novelist, or some carpenter, and I’ve kept that going with the Substack. I was not interested in interviewing the latest influencer about their bullshit, even after I’d figured out the hustle.

My great innovation on What’s Left? was paywalling the episodes when the influencers were on. That had a twofold purpose. One, my wife and other close friends wouldn’t have to hear them, because they stunk up the joint. They were the worst episodes, because such influencers are dumb or made dumb by the very nature of their work, left or right. Two, all their subs would subscribe. Even if they turned it off after month one, you’d get the quick hit. No podcast had as much churn as What’s Left?. We’d get 500 people coming and 500 going because Anna Khachiyan came on to talk about whatever based and woke clichés were making the rounds on Twitter that week. If it’s a big guest, you always paywall it. That’s how it was successful for a while, and I eventually lost my taste for sitting through those episodes, and we started doing them independently of one another.

Everybody has to think about what their limit is, how much they can swing and how deep they’re willing to go. JD seems like a guy who, very early on, somebody gave the talk. Maybe it was the Silicon Valley folks. As a historian I’ve always been interested in posterity, in how the future is going to be informed by the past, in my grandparents and my parents, in going home and seeing the town I’m from and how it has deteriorated and what’s the same. I care about that, and I know most people don’t. Most people realize, especially in America, that it’s really: how much can I get before I get got? That Marshawn Lynch thing. And JD Vance is not a dumb guy by any means, and he knows how to get his before he gets got. The question is when he gets got and another Republican takes his place. He’s made shifts I didn’t think anybody could come back from. Partly that’s because Trump is so forgiving if you suck up to him. The Dems don’t have anybody like that, which is a big problem for them. They won’t forgive a year’s worth of warring. If you were Team Bernie, you’re not coming back. It’s still easier to get canceled on the left and not come back from a professional managerial class gig. JD is a game player. Tucker is a game player within the media world, and I don’t know that he has the stamina for real retail politics. I’m always rooting for a third party, and he’s not going to run one. They like the idea of one, it’s good for viewership, and it’s good for me, because I’ll write an UnHerd article about how it’s probably not going to happen whenever he announces the next one. He’s not going to run. It’d be too much work. His job is really easy right now. He wears a flannel shirt and talks.

CLASS UNITY: You have a future as the Democratic Party consultant equivalent for the DSA.

OLIVER BATEMAN: It’s my dream to do a James Carville thing for the old left, to help them get past all the junk. It’s the sensitivity of their side. You should just be able to say it. In a marketing meeting you can say, “This is not going to work, this is bad, it won’t reach the right audience,” some orgs more than others, but you can say it, because people’s money is at stake and you can’t screw that up. In politics you can fail indefinitely in a two-party system and always have the funding to run again. Both parties seem to know: we’ll give you this one if you give us that one.

CLASS UNITY: Especially when you’re paid to fail.

OLIVER BATEMAN: You’re going to come back. We’ll put you in this nonprofit for four years and dust you off when 2032 rolls around.

CLASS UNITY: Just like throwing a fight.

OLIVER BATEMAN: They’ve got it figured out far better than any wrestler. You don’t have to take one bump. You can have your pics leak and come back. How many times has Anthony Weiner come back? Hunter Biden’s on the Nick Fuentes show.

CLASS UNITY: People are saying he should be the DSA candidate.

OLIVER BATEMAN: That’s like my friends: get Hunter. He knows.

CLASS UNITY: I feel like we’re close to figuring something out. I don’t know how to put it, but we’re very close. We should probably wrap here. Do you have any last thoughts?

OLIVER BATEMAN: If you listen to these shows and support Class Unity and the issues it’s tied to, think of ways to convince your social-media-brained, Twitter-brained friends to talk about politics differently. The biggest point tonight was that we have to throw away the old clichés, and none of us is going to make it happen alone, but one at a time. A buddy of mine, Nate McDonough, draws comic strips, and he posted one recently where a friend is talking to him and starts with “as a cisgender heterosexual male,” and Nate’s character in the comic says, “No, no, no, no, no.” I want to hand that out as business card. Such things are interesting to know, but I don’t need it as a preface. It’s cool. Just talk to me. If anybody does one thing, make that stuff so deeply uncool that we stop the throat clearing and the clichés.

CLASS UNITY: Not enough wedgies is the real truth.

OLIVER BATEMAN: I grew up with older brothers and younger brothers, and I think that’s probably part of it. You will upset a lot of people if you say that.

CLASS UNITY: See, it’s universal. Curtis Yarvin should have gotten more wedgies.

OLIVER BATEMAN: A hundred percent. Elon Musk, I’m sure he did. He’s got a lot of resentment.

CLASS UNITY: We should call it there before we start listing the people we want to bully. Thank you all for listening, and thank you, Oliver.

OLIVER BATEMAN: Thank you.

Thanks for reading! Go join Class Unity, throw them a few dollars for their trouble, subscribe to their podcast, and if you dug the work, share this post with the humanzee in your life who still thinks the Democrats can be pulled/pushed/poked/prodded/persuaded to go left. Here’s the $64,000 question ($773,000 in 2026 dollars: can someone only be pushed left from the right?.

Suggested Reading

• “The Death of the Post-Left,” Compact, July 2025.

• “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself,” Compact, May 2025. On history rhyming instead of repeating.

• “I Have One of the Best Jobs in Academia. Here’s Why I’m Walking Away,” Vox, September 2015. The quit-lit entry that launched a thousand angry replies.

• “The Work of Failing the Students (and Society)” and “The Work of Saving Higher Education,” on the grades I gave and the ones I should have.

• “The Work of Plagiarism (w/ Justin Smith-Ruiu).” The Arday conversation in full.

• “The Work of the Woke and the Anti-Woke.” The Woke 1.0 postmortem, from December 2024, before the rebrand.

• “The Work of J.D. Vance.” The What’s Left? interview that became a Harris campaign ad.

• “The History of Hulkamania,” The Ringer, July 2025, and “The Ringmaster’s Final Bell,” RealClear Books, September 2024. Hogan as Reagan’s companion; McMahon as the bad boss who was the bad boss.

• “The Myth of Trump and Pro Wrestling,” UnHerd, April 2023. What Trump taught Vince, and why Trump and wrestling takes are usually dumb.

• “Anti-Social Media: A Modest Proposal for Significant Restraint” (with David Inman), American Affairs, Summer 2023. The technological change that segmented the marketplace of ideas.

• Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (1978)

• Jeff Bingaman, Breakdown: Lessons for a Congress in Crisis (2022). He came on the show, too — he’s a great old fellow.

• The Omaha Platform of the People’s Party (1892). Homegrown American left-populism.

The fake news — it’s always fake and gay, plus whatever other thought-terminating lines can be appended to it, turtles all the way down and devil take the hindmost — keeps stirring the drink by telling us that several Democrats and Republicans are jockeying to succeed the current president, allegedly now a diaper wearer (many such cases once you’re “of age,” especially working in the nation’s capital) who “poses an existential threat to the nation.” What could this bit of media marketing lingo mean? Most polities survive their most ambitious and dangerous leaders, whether Stalin or Castro or Mao, and life in “failed states” like ours goes on until it doesn’t. To a historian inclined to the long view, “existential threats” are on the order of the so-called “Columbian Exchange” of infectious diseases, which depopulated North and South America, or the cultural erasure — “Hanification,” if one is looking on the bright side — currently being practiced on the Uighurs in western China. Or whatever is happening with literacy, especially here, which I’ve long maintained is merely a hotly-desired reversion to a pre-literate way of life and the necessary conclusion of an incomplete transition to universal functional literacy (it’s never been tried in the USA, nor could it be!).

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As of today, many of the remaining claimants for America’s grass crown, the boss of the nation holding all those trillions in debt plus what’s left of the heavy jack, are in their 70s and 80s — the POTUS, 36 senators, and 96 members (out of 435) of the House are over the age of 70. Can you imagine any other halfway demanding role, besides Pope (the “new” guy, Leo XIV, is a sprightly lad of 70), which ends up being staffed entirely by septuagenarians and octogenarians? Try to conceive of your retired parents, or dead parents in my case (my father and paternal uncle/legal guardian have both been gone for a decade) , running for the “highest office in the land.” The incumbent — much like his even more senile predecessor — is surely pepped up on modafinil, adderall or some other stimulant, such that his life-sustaining death drive can keep him atop the hemorrhoid-cushioned throne in D.C. on which he decides the fate of stock markets, interest rates, cushy defense contracts, Kalshi bets, and so on. It’s wild. You can’t make this stuff up, and even if you did, no one would believe a thing.

Not that I’d want any of my hard-striving “kid” peers (i.e., all those cool young Millennials in their 40s who are still coasting off their “30 Under 30” recognition) to become president, either. The folks who would be lusting for power at this stage in their lives3 are, almost to a man or woman, predatory empty vessels trying to fill their loving cups with ambition, victory at all costs. I don’t trust these aspiring hacks any further than I can throw them, and even though I can throw many of them pretty far — I’m a “beeeeeeeg boy,” much like the late Rico Carty, blessed with bigness — it’s still not that far in the scheme of things, not when you realize we may have even landed on the moon.

The fact of the matter is that no one who deserves to be president, or to do anything worthwhile, will ever get to do so. These good folks will self-censor and self-regulate and go nowhere fast, much as I have, spilling over the brims of their thinking caps with the kind of USDA Prime4 ressentiment that can only be born of a lifetime spent contemplating thoughts out of season. Too bad for these feckless suckers, who can barely poke holes in wet sacks with two open ends. You hate to see it. You’re not there for it.

But we don’t want it, most of us. We’re not hungry. If I were hungry, I would’ve gobbled down copious amounts of steroids and become a real top-tier powerlifter, meaning someone who actually powerlifts awe-inspiring weights in order to earn upwards of $300 a year while impressing other thousands of subconsciously or consciously horny men on “the Gram,” instead of remaining content to be some half-arsed “natty bro” who pushes admirable but meaningless amounts of weight in a basement he has convinced publicists to stock with state-of-the-art exercise equipment. Alas, I always choose to lose. I’ll go out on my sword, remembered as a man who could crush medium-sized, extra-fancy apples in his bear-like bare hands without ever breaking so much as a single world record (why bother? Just lie and tell people you have, or already did in high school, or some such thing…it’s the oldest performance enhancer there is, as I discussed here). The real lifters take steroids and peptides, all the steroids and peptides, because they’re all-in. They’re going hard instead of going home. But me, I’m a homebody. Just another wide face in that madding crowd of paypig fanboys who are (unlike a press pass-wielding cheapskate like “ya boi” here) willing to fork over top-dollar entry fees to see these he-men and muscle mommies5 lumber around like kegs with legs.

You ask yourself, or at least I ask myself: what does it all mean? While I bless this heroic excess and divine mess, all of it means less and less as my lifespan evanesces (there are some rhymes for you, MC Ren). I’ll cash my checks and keep my peace. I enjoy this writing business, even if I remain on its periphery, even if I’m forever among the uninvited. I suppose I can no more work myself up to get excited about selling a book for a decent advance than I could about landing a tenure-track academic position in the humanities. I did the latter, and almost did the former, and neither moved me one jot or tittle. “Doctor, eh?” goes the timeless New Yorker cartoon punchline. “Is that an M.D., or just a Ph.D.?”

I don’t play the game of doing the work, but even as I remain knee-deep in my real work, I can admire those who do. What does it mean to believe in “moderation” and “compromise” for their own sake? To “position” oneself for something, to tailor each conversation to achieve a specific effect related to advancing one’s career? How might one map the contours of such a canny, opportunistic mind? What is the life of that mind like? Truly these people are the great ascetic icons of our age: to get everything, they embrace nothing. They become like water to win over the great unwashed. They stick their fingers in the air to check the direction of the hot-take winds, and their fingers in the dikes when the dams behind which they have hidden all their Eric Swalwell-style #MeToo skeletons/Chinese honey pots and Justin Trudeau-grade brownface parties threaten to explode.

Such rising stars, who’d sacrifice your lives and the lives of those you love for the advance of a single rung along the great chain of being-powerful-for-its-own-sake, will never cease to amaze me. I can discern the truth of their penny-ante hustles, but I’ve waited too long to get mine before they get got. Now a lot of you other aging “kids” (part of a youth movement grown old, alas) are becoming disillusioned, and I welcome you to the club. You’ll never get what you want, you know. And no one will ever listen to you, not really.

Let me spill some tea, sis (and the thesis): it’s much better to remain here in perdition, thoroughly disappointed in one’s fellow man, than out there pimping your soul for a few likes and retweets. It’s much better to be playing solo on your favorite video game console than sitting in front of some social media account, prompting the influencer groupchat or your preferred AI to craft a take that delivers maximum “impact,” performing like a lifestyle brand or a presidential hopeful for an audience that couldn’t even remember your name if it were “Joe Biden.” And hey, if you didn’t like Joe Biden, vote for that other Biden.6 Maybe he’s still running for POTUS, too.

Alone among the commercial foodstuffs, the McRib sustains itself by reminding you of the presence of its absence. The Twinkie vanished temporarily due to an epic struggle between labor and management, and other beloved brands have faded into history, but the McRib continues to disappear and reappear—usually in the fall, a season that’s fast approaching—with all the regularity of Santa Claus.1

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Its origins are somewhat mystifying: the McRib, which the inventor of the Chicken McNugget engineered to resemble a stack of ribs, has about as much in common with its porcine referent as ol’ St. Nick of Coca-Cola advertisement fame (created by commercial artist Haddon Sundblom, and surely the definitive consumer-facing version of this character) has with the early Christian bishop who helped draft the Nicene Creed. Yet both Coke Santa and the McRib are emblematic of the United States, a magical place where inexpensive,2 insubstantial, and savory something-or-others are forged in a melting pot of half-remembered Eurocentric myths, state-of-the-art preservatives, and scraps of remaindered, USDA-approved pork nothings.

The McRib is a novelty food the way Donald Trump is a novelty president. In each case, overconsumption leaves one mildly disgusted yet hungry for more bites (sound bites and Poasts, in Trump’s case). To eat a McRib is to be part of the joke, which is always on you. The Simpsons produced an amusing parody version of the sandwich, the Ribwich, but it was less funny by far than McDonald’s own “Save the McRib” advertising campaign—a company admitting its product was so mediocre that only the product’s inexplicable fandom could save it from extinction.

An American life lived to the fullest is a #YOLO life. The early Progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong: our frontier never closed, because the illusion of space and the infinite possibility it represents has never vanished So it is when the McRib, which weighs in at 500 fat-laden calories and a relatively meager 22g of protein, returns to store shelves (and ceaseless rumors on the McRib Locator (which I initially typed as the “McRib Lactator,” what a slip!) have it that this will occur soon, if it’s not in some markets already). People like me, who are forever #YOLOing it because we cannot live twice, will rush to purchase and consume 10-12 in a single sitting, consequences be damned—this despite the fact that the McRib now averages about $6 a sandwich instead of the measly $1.89 it cost in 1990 (I mean, think about that…10 McRibs will set you back $70 with tax, and that’s with no sides or drinks).

There’s no good reason to eat the McRib. After all, even its ingredients remain up for debate to the extent that they are now the subject of a recently-filed lawsuit.3 A few years ago, McDonald’s produced a video in which a skeptical, bowtie-wearing high school teacher toured a McRib production factory and became a true believer, but others still claim that the sandwich is comprised of the wretchedest materials native (and in some cases not) to this earth.

Then again, there’s no good reason to eat anything, save to ensure the continuation of one’s nasty, brutish, and short existence. I can’t think of a single meal I’ve ever had—GMO or non-GMO, sans gluten or très gluten, organic or inorganic—that I haven’t instantly regretted. For that matter, I can’t think of a single decision that hasn’t haunted me for hours after I’ve made it. To Prufrock’s meaningless, impossible existential questions—”Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”—one can add “Should I buy a dozen McRibs? They’re seasonal, after all, and Time’s wingèd chariot is hurrying near.”

This, then, is perhaps the most important fact about the McRib: its run at stores keeps ending the way life does, only faster and far more often. The McRib’s time with you, like the time spent with a beloved gerbil or hamster, is finite in duration. Hence the urgency and plausibility of McDonald’s “Save the McRib” campaign. Once it’s gone, what next? The McRib cannot be reproduced in one’s kitchen—no Twinkie or Oreo or McRib is truly DIY, because DIY versions of those mass-produced industrial foodstuffs would ipso facto not be those things—and so, after it has vanished, its like won’t be tasted again until the next round of its eternal recurrence.4

Had we but world enough and time, abstaining from the McRib would be no crime. But ours is not such a perfect, timeless world. I must eat my fat-saturated McRibs while I can, because each one could, and perhaps will, be my last.

(pronounced ROO YOO) is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité and the Founding Editor of , which remains, as I pointed out in the notes to his last appearance on the program, the one Substack to subscribe to if you subscribe to only one (that isn’t this one). He is the author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (Princeton, 2022) and On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (Norton, 2025), with two projects on the way: The Philosopher and the Tsar: Leibniz, Russia, and the Making of a Scientific Empire, under contract with Princeton University Press (a taste of it is here), and the Oort Cloud Review, Volume 1, Issue 1, a collaborative work of experimental science fiction coming this fall from Hat & Beard Press in Los Angeles, with launch events to follow in LA, the Bay Area, New York, Paris, and elsewhere.

We spoke during a banner month for the subject at hand: the Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge, about which Smith-Ruiu had just published “Fabulous”, and the Ross Barkan affair at New York magazine, which ended days later with the magazine updating 67 columns and dropping him and Penguin Random House halting pre-sales of his forthcoming Mamdani book (he’s a longtime Mamdani confidant, so it’s hard to imagine that there’s much plagiarized material in there…but if so, that would be rather lame).

OLIVER BATEMAN

We’re in a season of plagiarism scandals, and I want to lay out the board before you give me your grand theory. The most obvious one, the one that launched a thousand takes, is the Jason Arday scandal in Great Britain. Then there’s Ross Barkan, “fired” from New York magazine, which is always funny phrasing when the person is a 1099 contract columnist rather than a W2 employee. In his case it was factual sentences copied close to verbatim. Then Claudine Gay at Harvard, who plagiarized chunks of her dissertation, and there’s proud precedent there. I remember reading José Moya’s Cousins and Strangers, about Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires, and he describes reading old dissertations there from the 1800s and finding that half of them were plagiarized from dissertations written ten years earlier. Somebody just grabbed one and copied it. Everybody plagiarizing, always, especially lit reviews. I didn’t write one for my own dissertation. My advisor said that stuff’s junk, you already did comps, I don’t want to read it.

And I’ll add one you’ll find very interesting. I’m not naming names, but a mentor of mine, somebody I co-bylined with, somebody whose writing gigs paid a down payment on my house many times over, just released a book from one of the big five publishers that is almost assuredly 100 percent AI. Unedited AI. Now, I’m the head of AI content at my current company, so I have no compunction about taking money to humanize and edit and prompt. But a 100 percent AI book! No clean-up work, no fact-checking…yikes!

Yet all this moral scorn gets heaped on these people, and my judgments of them have nothing to do with their plagiarism, because one of the works I’ve most enjoyed in recent years, which you recommended to me, is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.1 A great toilet book, if you will. And it is essentially a work of creative plagiarism, classical sources dumped together in a very inventive way, and later plagiarized itself by Laurence Sterne (that’s doing the work).

SMITH-RUIU

I’ll give you my grand theory of plagiarism in a second, but let me first say that this is an essential topic for a conversation with you under the heading of the Work, capital W. Your great contribution to history is to have capitalized that word. I find myself constantly thinking about it. I was walking in a park in Paris and there were some crows picking away at a badger carcass, and I thought: they’re doing the Work.

OLIVER BATEMAN

They’re here for it. You love to see it.

SMITH-RUIU

They do. It’s this maximally capacious category that somehow fits everything in a surprising way. But more narrowly, the notion of the Work is essential for thinking about plagiarism in this moment, when all of our output is being funneled, cloaca-like, into a single passage. We no longer have one exit for our real work and another exit for our freely created off-time production, or, dare I use a word I absolutely hate, our hobby work. Whatever you do is your Work, capital W. That’s it. Some people haven’t figured this out yet and are still trying to draw a line between their downtime and their work time, and in between we have this huge gray area nobody knows what to do with. Employers don’t know what to do with the off-color tweets of their employees. Is that extramural speech, or is it speech in your capacity as a professional with responsibilities? All of it is in flux because of our most recent technological revolution.

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This matters for the plagiarism crises because our norms for dealing with plagiarism were shaped under a different technological regime. They made sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and they really don’t make sense any longer. Same for copyright, incidentally. For a while it made sense to attach a creative output to an individual and anchor its future use to that legal person. In the new information ecosystem, where we’re all under a constant BitTorrent, as they call it, people are going to take up and recombine and put back out the bits of information in their own recombined ways. That’s only to be expected.

And I’m not excusing academic plagiarism. I have to be clear about this, because I made it very clear in the piece I wrote about the Arday case, and no matter how explicitly I say it, the response is always: why are you excusing academic plagiarism? I’m not. But the rules governing our writerly and scholarly output are anchored to a particular technological era, and they were never anything more than a particular culture’s rules. They’re a lot more like the rule against driving on the left side of the road than like the prohibition on murder. One is close to an anthropological universal; the other flips to the opposite side when you get to the UK or Japan. Look back at previous eras, or at current intellectual cultures other than academia, and you find very different rules. You cited Burton. In late antiquity, everyone wanted to be Aristotle, so people wrote treatises and signed his name, and now we have this whole corpus attributed to pseudo-Aristotle. Who were these people? Why would they efface themselves to pretend to be Aristotle? Because Aristotle was the greatest, and you aspire to be like the greatest, so you sign his name. In painting workshops you imitated the master, not to pass yourself off as the master in a counterfeit way, but by aspiration. The difference between homage and counterfeit is razor thin. All of these are culturally embedded practices, and the idea that there’s some horrific moral transgression here that exists in an absolute way is incredibly naive. So again: relative to the rules currently on file at Cambridge University, you should not plagiarize. Relative to the history of human literacy and expression, all of this is obviously in flux and urgently needs to be reconsidered in a century with a totally different information infrastructure than the one I grew up in.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I think this is the great question of our time, and for people who want something engaging on it, the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake is fantastic. It goes through the forger Elmyr de Hory and his fake Picassos, and the documentary itself contains several fake-out moments and hoaxes. If you can produce five things that pass as Picassos, could you create a whole Picasso period? If you’re as good as Titian, could you create a Titian? Then there are the names that ring out precisely because we don’t know who they were, like pseudo-Dionysius, and maybe the arguments were great enough to last on their own. So maybe these questions about authorship are going to change, or stop mattering. But they did matter for somebody like Claudine Gay, who was plagiarizing at a time when she would have known the rules on attribution. And by the way, I learned from you right before we started recording that Claudine Gay is the first cousin of the writer Roxane Gay.2 I had no idea. Arday would have known the rules too. So people can do their gotcha things. But whatever is happening there is in flux. We’re transitioning, as you might say, to having a cloaca.

And from the time I was a kid, my dad’s favorite writer was William Burroughs, so we would always talk about the cut-ups. He was a guy who loved Thimble Theatre and thirties and forties pop culture and hard-boiled stuff, and he loved seeing that material mashed up into something new. Or you take the same material and self-plagiarize endlessly, like Burroughs did. Everyone pads the CV. Everyone reads the same talk over and over.

SMITH-RUIU

I do this too, in that I’m constantly developing various strands of thought across pieces. I can’t have discrete projects where each time I say something fundamentally unconnected with everything I wrote previously. That’s not humanly possible, and the idea that we shouldn’t work that way is just a particular cultural norm from a particular time and place. I also wanted to mention that over the years there have been accusations that Martin Luther King plagiarized parts of his work, and there have been defenses of him which, the first time I read them, I thought were absurd, but which I now take more seriously. The defense says: he comes from a particular preacherly tradition. You understand sermonizing as joining up with a kind of community lifeblood that is speech. You take your part of it. Maybe he should have been more careful not to carry the norms of the sermon into his Boston University academic context. But even if you agree on that point, and this is similar to the Arday point, you have to recognize that academic norms are just one set of norms for one specific cultural context, and it’s no longer so obvious to me that it’s a more valuable or noble context than being a preacher. In fact, I’m trying more and more to talk like a preacher. I’ve been watching Billy Graham footage on YouTube recently, and the way he talks is absolutely phenomenal. If I start channeling Billy Graham, am I plagiarizing him, or am I just vibing with him, learning from him? It’s impossible to isolate the absolute, context-independent right way of relating to other people’s speech or writing. As I confessed in my Arday piece, for years I used to copy out texts by writers I admired as a way of learning. You don’t want to pass it off as your own. But when you’re living in a BitTorrent environment, it’s not surprising to see some of that copied material get intermixed with some of your own. Lord help me if it ever leaked out into the public. But if it did, at this point I would just say: ah, sorry, whatever, no big deal, let’s move on. And I hope the world would forgive me.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Even now, sometimes just as an exercise, I’ll take a Jimmy Cannon sports column and rewrite every sentence, keeping the same number of sentences, just for the hell of it. Right next to my desk I keep the Library of America volumes of American speeches, and the American sermons volume next to those, and I steal lines from them constantly. Or I don’t even call it stealing. I just use them. Two of my favorite Kennedy speeches are Ted Sorensen speeches. Is there a Kennedy, or is there really just a Sorensen, or is it the interaction between the two? Even the name of this whole enterprise comes from that 1980 Ted Kennedy speech: “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Which is itself a mashup. Opus Dei is also called “the Work,” so there’s one for the trads. And for the woke, “doing the work” was what people were doing circa 2013, when they would tell me, well, we’re all doing the work of reading this book right now, and I was thinking: I’m also working a job. That polysemy is why I grabbed the word. And coming out of a sales environment with my father, going to the car dealership every day, of course I’m going to reuse words and sentences. In the sermon tradition, the speech tradition, all they do is steal each other’s lines, and it’s not stealing, it’s reinvention. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 convention speech is something I’ll listen to before an interview to get amped up. Charge it to my head and not to my heart. My joy bell has lost its resonance. In the end, all we can do is redeem each other and forgive each other and move on. I’m not going to steal his words, because words are cheap. I’m going to steal his presentation style.

SMITH-RUIU

Every actor does that. But now individuality is prized above all else. If you look at a proper classical education in the nineteenth century, English schoolboys took exams that said: write about India in the manner of Herodotus, in Greek. Write on a given topic in the manner of a given classical author. Their education was about subordinating yourself to someone else’s voice, and showing you were educated meant, primarily, being able to ventriloquize. Then in the twentieth century everyone starts thinking, no, we’re all irreducibly ourselves, we’re all unique and special and free to be you and me. And ironically it’s that same individualist liberalism celebrating our capacities and our dignity and our rights that also creates this absurd expectation that everything that comes out of us is going to be copyrightable. Which is just not realistic.

OLIVER BATEMAN

And we forget that the great individualists did the work first. Oscar Wilde, the great personality, the artist as individual, was also a guy who earned first-class honors. He did the work, and only having done the work could he determine where to deviate. A lot of the great modernist painters learned their craft first, then deviated. Then we get to a point where you don’t have to learn the craft at all. You can be bad at your instruments. You can Velvet Underground it, and then you can Sex Pistol it later on, and then you can go even further, until all that’s protected is the individual expression, when for all of us, life is an imitation game. And that’s really what poor Arday suffered from. He had invented a persona, kind of cheesy and clearly itself borrowed from a sitcom he liked, and it resonated, but it too was imitation, and it created this individual who, when they found out he was fake, left every midwit enabler brokenhearted on main.

SMITH-RUIU

If you’re going to plagiarize, plagiarize something beautiful, man. I was at the heart of a major plagiarism case at my own university a few years ago, big enough that it filtered out into English-language academic media coverage, and at least that one was about medieval philosophy. Not whatever slapdash field Arday was supposed to be a part of. I just don’t understand it. It’s essentially the same thing, to me, as copy-pasting your colleague’s disclaimers onto your syllabus. Of course you’re going to copy-paste it. It’s totally empty language anyway.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I saw that up close. During my time at the University of Texas at Arlington, I sat on a bunch of educational-leadership dissertation committees because a colleague always needed a third person, and we would joke, and I’m being harsh here, that neither education nor leadership was much in evidence. It’s extremely empty page-filling material, and that’s fine. You do it to become a superintendent of schools. You’re not stepping into the place of Charles Darwin. I used to think: let’s just let these people be themselves, hand them their degrees, and let them be. You do you.

SMITH-RUIU

You’re saying out loud what I’ve noticed from inside. I’m at the heart of the institution of academia, for better or worse, a prisoner in the tower, so to speak, and many people watching from the outside are much more insistent on upholding standards, and they’re horrified when I say such things. But honestly, I think these standards are in any case the result of a long perversion of the true mission of education, which is cultivating flourishing human beings. So I really don’t care. And the AI situation makes the perversion visible. There was just that manuscript that got a seven-figure advance and then was rejected when the publisher decided it was AI. But the big trade publishers are already using AI to scan submitted manuscripts to determine marketability. In effect they’re already creating the conditions in which AI-written texts are the only viable ones. For them to then turn around and reject an author for turning to AI is the same point I’ve been making about plagiarism, mutatis mutandis. You, the institution, whether academia or trade publishing, imposed the perverse standards that incentivize AI writing or plagiarism in the first place. So it’s your fault.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Oh, it’s absolutely the case. In my day job, the writing I oversee, and “oversee” is probably the best word now, is curated so that it hits all the criteria for discoverability and authority, and then we track how it gets used in AI search. I recently paid a firm in Kyiv to handle our Wikipedia presence, since that feeds the authority score, and I’ll use the same woman at the place I’m going next. Only a thousand dollars, Justin. And what she does is a digression, but you’ll find it interesting, because it’s how paid Wikipedia works now, with all the checks built in. She and her group pay some of the most dedicated Wikipedia editors good money to make one small edit. Then they have them, because Wikipedia is so firmly against paid editing that exposure means a permanent ban, the end of the hobby. You geek, you will never get to do your autistic hobby again. We have you dead to rights. So these king nerds become the firm’s editors on retainer, ten dollars for this edit, twenty for that one, and many of them are still publicly decrying paid editing while they make Wikipedia pages for corporations. And you know what? They do very good work. The pages meet the notability standards. They pass review, and review today is far more rigorous than it was in 2010, when a corporate flack could throw up a page and it would just sit there. When I asked Dara to explain her model, I told her: this is absolutely brilliant, I need to record it somewhere. So I’m putting it here. It’s no outing of them. They don’t think they’re doing anything illegal, and neither do I. Like the plagiarism question: it meets the standards, it goes through the review, it goes up. The people who figure out how to work the systems are geniuses.

And speaking of working the systems: when I was teaching, I found that when an honor-court proceeding actually went forward, it was usually a way to get rid of a disliked student, pushed by a committed faculty member who enjoyed the tension and the game. Institutions don’t want to expel their paying customers. Me, I was the home for the international students. I was known for the A’s. I wrote it up in The Atlantic in 2014 (and returned to the scene of the crime here), the alumni magazine highlighted it, and the short version is that the school was poor, the students paid, and I had better things to do than determine whether a history paper was a 90 or an 80. What the hell does that distinction even mean? Then AI comes along, and I have a friend who still teaches, who’s much harder about it than I ever was, checking for AI, and he tells me: they all want to use AI and they all want 93s. They’ll say, how many papers do you need? I can do another one for you. And he says: no, what does this one say? They just want a 93. Not a 90. A 93, to be safe. It used to be a C. It’s the gentleman’s 93 now.

I told my friend: just take the paper and grade it with AI. Academic autopilot. I even wanted to build the software. The professor pays more to give a C, the student pays more to get an A, and they pass the money back and forth in an escalating series of bets, like chicken, while the AI conducts the whole negotiation and both humans stay out of it. The university exists solely as a rubber stamp, credentialed by an accrediting body from the Stone Age, and at the end you get a piece of paper about as relevant as a flintlock musket. Part of me hates this, because I enjoyed the old practice, as you did, as the odd people who read us probably did. But we confuse what we got out of it with what the great majority ever wanted from it, which was always instrumental.

SMITH-RUIU

You know Feyerabend was prohibited from giving grades to his own students, because he gave them all A-pluses.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Against Method is a phenomenal book. I didn’t know that. I did the same thing.

SMITH-RUIU

Same thing with Whitehead, more or less. And as for me in 2026, when your A isn’t going to get you anywhere in the world anyway, the way I can help my students is with lengthy qualitative accounts, for future graduate advisors or employers, of how worthy they are. The grade isn’t going to do anything. It’s my narrative addition that makes the difference. Which is why, in the present moment, I’m interested in para-academic constellations: people like me getting together with, what should we call them, I don’t want to say disciples, let’s say young people on the Internet who are interested in the kind of work I’m doing. At this point it’s all the Work, capital W, because it doesn’t matter whether they’re institutionally my students or not. I’m giving advice, sometimes writing letters of recommendation, in a situation where there’s no mechanism for credentialing or grading. More evidence for the cloacalization of the Work. It’s self-selecting, but it’s real.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Henry Adams laments, in The Education, that during his time teaching at Harvard maybe one out of ten students was worth his effort, and he taught to them. Today, with something like Substack, you’re going to beat one in ten, because coming to it is 100% voluntary, especially when you cover, as we both do, a variety of unusual topics whose connections a reader has to puzzle out. Anyone who has followed you across that material for years is somebody about whom you can produce exactly what you described: a narrative of their quality. Which I assume is all anyone could do in antiquity, among the students gathered around a teacher. Not “I gave him a 95.” Though I suppose there was this: this guy is actually good at thinking, this geek is good at getting the classical equivalent of grants or patronage, and that one over there is mostly good at brown-nosing.

SMITH-RUIU

And it’s silly, in the wake of something like the Arday case, to take the well-functioning of these institutions for granted. What it really exposes is the urgency of rethinking how we come together as human beings, talk about ideas, inquire into deep problems of science or philosophy or humanity, and make some progress in our individual lives as a result. That’s what matters. The rest is institutionalist bookkeeping. And I’m always shocked, I was talking to my friend Marco Roth about this, one of the founders of n+1, and I hope I’m not revealing a confidential conversation, at how institutionalist the younger generations are. People under forty, let’s say, to keep it safely younger than you, are ready to go to the appeals board, to the arbitration committee of their institution, to resolve what are in the end human problems best addressed as human problems. You should wait until someone pulls out a knife before you appeal to an authority. That was always the sensibility of my generation. I’m decidedly Gen X, born in 1972, and we took it for granted that whenever someone spoke with the authority of an institution, the proper response was to roll your eyes. Somehow, even though the Internet is in some respects an anarchic place, it has transformed its native generations into very loyal institutionalists. You see that clearly in the response to the Arday case too.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You’re right on the money. There were those Laura Kipnis pieces about Title IX at Northwestern, and my wife was at a similarly prestigious school and saw the same thing from her side: relationships didn’t break up anymore, they went to Title IX proceedings. In the Old West you’d both be running to the land office to stake a claim first. By 2016 you’d both be running to the Title IX officer to break up first, because getting the first accusation in was critical. I’m somebody with a brother in his mid-fifties, a true Gen Xer, and I admired that whole some-things-suck-but-most-things-blow counterculture and internalized it. But the young are eager to tattle, and they know exactly whom to go to. They arbitrate emotions through systems. It’s like everybody figured out mandarin society without mandarin abilities, and they even want to cheat on the mandarin exams institutionally correctly: I get my eight hours of extra time because I’m double dyslexic, I need my Adderall for this test, I need a reader, and the whole support apparatus assembles itself around some upper-class twit who needs his 93 to get to the next thing. There’s a joke in The Simpsons where Homer becomes an astronaut by default and calls “dee fault” the two sweetest words in the English language. Everybody wants to win by default. Which is fine, I guess. That’s a way to do it. But there’s no performance in there, and none of it, to come back to the word, is the Work as you or I might see it, the work of thinking and arguing. It’s certainly not debate in the formal sense, where you give reasons to advance a position and ideally both people learn from it, or at minimum nobody is wounded by it.

And the Work isn’t whether you plagiarized a couple of sentences either, which brings me to something I’m curious about. The Ross Barkan situation, the borrowed lines: most of that was written behind a paywall. I have friends who put a lot less of their best thought into the paywalled work, the non-prestige political commentary. I wouldn’t say I do it myself, but it’s not as neatly constructed as the Substack, not as intricate as the stuff done for one’s own edification. You’re not vetting it. You’re pumping it out, coming out of the cloaca, as you said. Meanwhile I’d bet The Metropolitan Review, which he edits, has no instances of it, because he gives a damn about that.

SMITH-RUIU

Well, I haven’t followed the details of Ross’s case, so let me just say: I love Ross. I think he’s a wonderful person. And from a distance it looks like a malicious campaign.

OLIVER BATEMAN

He got targeted, and there’s a ton of people doing the same thing, as I mentioned at the top of the show. Nobody watching can see it, but I’m holding the book right now: the one from a big-five publisher that is almost 100 percent AI. It’s 152 pages, an essay on someone who died recently, and it’s the crudest AI at that, probably a one-sentence prompt with the output copy-pasted in. The person makes errors in it they would never make, because I used to write with them. I grew up on their writing. They were a good writer. I think they’re just grilling now, and they needed to get it done, and it’s a boring topic. I ran it through Pangram, because detection and humanization are part of my day job, that authority score again. I have a series of scripts in Claude that find, adjudicate, and pull suspect passages for me to review, and then I change them myself.

SMITH-RUIU

When there’s something I really want to write, it has to be written by me as a human being. But I have a method for the stuff I don’t want to write. I’ll let the AI get things going, then I have it translate the text into French, and then I translate it back into English myself, and because I can translate from French very fast, as I go I’m saying, no, no, I’m going to rewrite it this way and this way, so that what comes out is a completely different text. I only do this with things that don’t matter to me. When it matters, it’s all my own.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s brilliant, and you’re also testing the model’s own language skill as you go, seeing what traps it falls into. I have my version of that. If I need a block of informative text, the last six World’s Strongest Man winners, four stats from 2026 with hyperlinks, I’ll have it generate the paragraph and then rewrite the paragraph myself. I can put TKs in for hyperlinks and dates and it fills and checks them, and then I check them again, which I would have done anyway. This is moron work. Low-level writing, lit reviews, filler, the transitional paragraph that slows down your fast thinking. You’re assigning low-value work to the thing. And some people say, how could you, you’re pulling all the water from Sudan. I don’t recycle either, because it’s well established that recycling is a hustle and they throw it all away anyway. Well, I recycle the big Amazon boxes…otherwise they fill up my trash cans.

SMITH-RUIU

And the norms will keep shifting. I’m quite certain that in a few years we’re going to look back on the current academic prissiness about AI the way we look back on my university blocking Facebook on its computers. That was a thing places did.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The way people will remember this era of AI is books like the one I just described, where the problem isn’t the tool but the cheap output. That’s what upsets me, whether it’s a hack writer doing it for dollars or a press doing it at scale.

SMITH-RUIU

The offensive thing is not necessarily the use of AI. It’s being so sloppy about it, and expecting other people to pay real money for something that probably cost a few dollars to produce. What those academic publishers are doing is bilking libraries. No sane individual would buy this stuff.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Your book will be 90 pages, it’ll cost $900, and it’ll somehow have 60,000 words in it. It’s an amazing system. And the more expensive the book, the worse the formatting: bindings that are essentially hunks of glue on the back of a tongue depressor, pages that look like Xerox copies shoved together. Meanwhile the four books I’ve done with my friend Ian Douglass, through Amazon’s print-on-demand, look fine. Better than Palgrave. And we keep eight bucks a copy. When the right wrestler holds one up, it sells thirty, fifty copies at eight bucks a pop, for something that’s already done. People may not know this, but a book that sells 5,000 copies in the real world is a runaway hit. Two thousand is solid work. If you can motivate 500 people to buy a physical copy of anything, you’re a great salesman. My friend Brad Balukjian, who’s been on here, did The Wax Pack with Nebraska, then got picked up by a major publisher for The Six Pack, interviewing wrestlers on a cross-country tour instead of baseball players, got a nice advance, and they didn’t recoup. That’s the other part of the game: you get one crack at the piñata, and after the one thing hits, there is a vast emptiness that follows its reception.

SMITH-RUIU

There’s a cartoon somewhere of the aspiring author waiting for good news from his agent, and the agent calls and says, I’m sorry, I just can’t make this work, we’re going to have to drop it, and he goes and drinks some wine. If that’s how you’re thinking of your writing career, you are a stooge. That’s just not how things work anymore. The agent is professionally obligated to work only the traditional route, and if that’s all you’re doing, it’s almost certain you won’t be a successful writer. Self-publishing, the AI-optimized genre novel aimed at the demographic that trade publishing already handles that way, all these different channels: they’re all good if they work. You just keep trying them.

OLIVER BATEMAN

A lot of people are extremely trad about this. No touching the AI, going entirely through the agent, writing the great book, getting the one score. And I’ve known people who got the score, and talked to them afterwards, and you need to be differentiated, because the vast emptiness is real. Which brings us to James Frey, who hit big with A Million Little Pieces, a made-up memoir, and was brought down for it, and has now, if I understand the recent interviews right, come all the way back around to making it up with AI under his own banner. I was proud that he got that bag. Something happened to him, he had an addiction problem, he capitalized on it, he got his before he got got.

SMITH-RUIU

I was always a defender of James Frey. It’s just philistine nonsense to think there’s a clear distinction between memoir and autofiction. A memoir is your subjective, intimate account of your life, which is not going to match what the security camera and the drone hovering over you would have reported. Of course it’s historically nonsense. Only a philistine would demand that you put the label “memoir” versus “autofiction” on it. My wife and I actually drove to the Atlantic coast of France a few years ago in the hopes of visiting Balbec, the resort town where young Marcel goes. So we were the suckers. We got suckered just like the people who got suckered by James Frey. And if I had to choose the greater writer, it’s clearly Proust, not because Proust told the truth and Frey lied, but because Proust is more compelling.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Frey has moved more units, though. If all a publisher wants to do is move units, find these guys, because they’re incredible self-marketing machines, and don’t go digging around in detective-story writeups to see if they used a little ChatGPT. Just read the text and edit it so nobody can tell. Hire a pro. I’ll do it. I can get anything down to Pangram zero percent if you want. Which is all madness, but here we are. And what’s funny is watching people smart enough to know better weigh in on these controversies, and you can sometimes force them to admit: well, yeah, it’s my team, we need to get them out, and this is a wedge, because they would do it to us. Coming from that Gen X approach, my reaction is: you guys are corny as hell. There would have been no Gen X debates over half of what consumes us.

The philistinism about memoir gets at something bigger, though. I’ve written, what, 900 essays involving my dad at this point, and my mom always asks: did he really say it like that? Is that how that happened? Well, no. I structured this one like this and that one like that. If I wrote the documentary-true version of essays about my dad, it would mostly be him asking me to pull his finger, or sitting around in his underwear, which is what he did most of the time. That might make an interesting film, ten hours of it, slow, like Béla Tarr, forcing the public to endure it. But we structure things. Memoirs are structured understanding, and they’re mostly made up, and so is a lot of history. The conceit that we’re going to get history “as it actually happened”: compared to what? The only way would be to rig up every flock camera in the world and then hold your eyes open like Alex the droog in A Clockwork Orange and force you to watch all of it unfold, like the angel in Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history, blown backwards into the future. And even then you’d have no idea what you were seeing. You couldn’t process it fast enough. It’s the imaginative act that does the work.

SMITH-RUIU

This gets us to narrativization: what is it to study something in a scholarly way? Consider Diogenes Laertius, who thought a biographer should inquire into whether the manner of a philosopher’s death reflected the nature of his life. The famous one is Pythagoras, chased by a mob, who stops at the edge of a bean field, because beans were either taboo or so sacred you mustn’t trample them, it’s hard to interpret, and gets killed because he won’t cross it. That’s Diogenes Laertius’s great example of a death that reflects the life. We think this is silly, but go back a couple thousand years and it makes perfect sense. If you’re Diogenes Laertius, scholarship is appreciating the narrative elegance of the life.

OLIVER BATEMAN

There’s still something profound about that, and I can prove it from my own family. My father died when he stopped taking the blood thinners that had been prescribed to him, because he was worried about losing his hair. He had always been obsessed with the fact that his younger brother was bald and he was not, despite an eighteen-year gap between them. And I think it was a good death, as these things go. He died in his bed at 74. He had run his race. But then, almost to the day a year later, his brother drops dead of a heart attack at the Moscow embassy, mid-workout, doing an overhead press, before the Marines could get to him with the defibrillator. He is bald at the time of death. My father, who was cremated, so it hardly matters, went out with a full head of hair, and it later emerged from my own older brother, who lived through it, that my father had spent a mint in the early eighties on some of the first hair plugs, because his hairline had receded to the middle of his forehead. He took that one to the grave, or almost. Diogenes Laertius would have known exactly what to do with these two deaths.

And there’s a coda. My dad spent a lot of my childhood trying to train my hair with Brylcreem, because he believed in the training of hair. The boy has reached an age, he said, where he can start training it. Being homeschooled, I had no idea this wasn’t standard practice. I took the training wheels off my bike and began to grease my hair; both were things that one trained.3

SMITH-RUIU

What a pleasure this was, Oliver.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Before we go: people should subscribe to The Hinternet, which is one of the most unusual publications on Substack, and I’ve been glad to watch it take off, because it’s one of the ones I wouldn’t have bet money on. A lot of your stuff is paywalled, it’s esoteric, and it grew anyway.

SMITH-RUIU

There’s no formula, and you never know what’s going to work, even when there’s no market research to explain why it’s working. So it’s a bit of a small miracle for me. And I got in early. That helped.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You were one of the ones who moved over from Patreon and then worked hard at developing the thing. I was on Patreon at the same time, when and Katie Herzog were telling everybody they were moving over and going exclusive, around 2020, and then got pulled over for a megabucks advance, and it all kind of worked out for those of us with a going concern. What I want, and I saw some fairly high-profile woman say a version of this about you recently, is for someone to mention the show and say: here’s this unusual publication I read, there are essays on here I can’t get anywhere else, not the guy always has the right election predictions.Not here’s where I get my takes.

SMITH-RUIU

For me it’s very heartening. You cut out the traditional expectations of what people supposedly want, and you prove there’s a voluntary appetite for other voices, and you realize that all of that accrued institutional wisdom isn’t worth a thing. What matters is speaking in your own voice, and people come for that. That’s been the best discovery of these past six years. The best thing that’s ever happened. Well, almost.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s the great anti-black-pill. There’s no better thing to know than that somebody went to the end of an essay or a conversation and commented on it, that it spoke to them. Because as bad as all the numbers are, and coming out of the texts-and-contexts tradition in history I’d argue we never achieved full literacy in this country to the point where we could lose it, functional literacy was always the real metric and the US was always poor at it — we’re a violent, disorganized settler society, after all — there are still, in any generation, these characters who seek out writing and engage with it. Who are these people? And sometimes you get to meet them! It’s great that they even exist. The world as we know it isn’t going to stay what it is, and in ten years nobody is going to be poring over somebody else’s term paper from 2030 to determine whether he plagiarized. To heck with all that. Continue doing things that are interesting to you.

In case you’re wondering, the outro is Roy Orbison’s “Workin’ for the Man.” Pick up your feet. We’ve got a deadline to meet.

Suggested Reading

Smith-Ruiu, “Fabulous (On Jason Arday),”

The Hinternet

Fabulous — On Jason Arday

1. There is a silence these past 24 hours that must surely be explained by the power of shame. Nearly everyone who until early yesterday had delighted in the feeding frenzy on Jason Arday, triggered when Nathan Cofnas pricked first blood, has gone mum. I…

Read more

17 days ago · 111 likes · 8 comments · Justin Smith-Ruiu

“The Philosopher and the Tsar,”

The Hinternet

The Philosopher and the Tsar

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School…

Read more

5 months ago · 44 likes · Justin Smith-Ruiu

The Oort Cloud Review, Volume 1, Issue 1

On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, https://www.smith-ruiu.com/books

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Not-What-You-Think-ebook/dp/B09GN6H9N3

Bateman, “The Work of the Internet” (the first Smith-Ruiu episode), https://oliverbatemandoesthework.substack.com/p/the-work-of-the-internet

Bateman, “The Work of Failing the Students (and Society),” https://oliverbatemandoesthework.substack.com/p/the-work-of-failing-the-students

Jesse Moynihan, 48, grew up outside Philadelphia in the Delaware County orbit he and his brother would later diagnose as cursed, studied film at Temple, spent five years behind the counter of an art-house video store, and drew comics the whole time. He ran a strip in the Philadelphia Weekly, won a Xeric Award for The Backwards Folding Mirror, played in the band Make a Rising, and then spent six seasons writing and storyboarding for Adventure Time, where he was responsible for the show’s headiest episodes: “Sons of Mars,” “The Mountain,” “Astral Plane,” and “You Forgot Your Floaties.” He was art director on Netflix’s The Midnight Gospel, made the animated shorts Manly (with his brother Justin) and Jesus 2 (which screened at Sundance), and recently storyboarded on Adventure Time: Side Quests.

Through all of it, Jesse kept returning to Forming, the cosmic epic he serialized for free on his website from 2009 to 2024, painstakingly painting the pages. VICE (they used to be a big deal — I worked there!) called the collected volumes “a big crazy Jodorowsky-style reinterpretation of Bible tales and mythology mixed in with lots of funny swearing and pretty colors.”

On October 6, Fantagraphics publishes the complete Forming as a 448-page full-color hardcover. You can support Jesse’s independent work, including an in-progress animated adaptation, at his Patreon.

Get 80% off forever

OLIVER BATEMAN

Folks, welcome to another episode of Oliver Bateman Does the Work. Today we’re back on the comic book beat. We’ve had Aubrey Sitterson and Alex Graham on here before, and ’s hopefully going to come on at some point. Right now I’ve got Jesse Moynihan, who a lot of you know from Adventure Time, great episodes like “The Mountain” and “You Forgot Your Floaties.” But today we’re here to talk about what happened when my friend Tucker Stone sent me this amazing compilation of your long-running comic Forming. I was blown away. Anyone listening who sees that Fantagraphics is putting this out should just buy the book. It’s 450 pages of incredible color and religious imagery, and I went in not knowing what to expect. The scale is epic, but it has that intimacy people who watch Adventure Time might recognize. There are actual friendships in the book that feel oddly real. There’s also wild imagery, lots of sexual imagery. A real work of id. What’s the story behind this thing?

MOYNIHAN

Before Forming, I was doing autobio-style humor comics. They were surreal, almost me talking to myself, diary stuff, but everything spoken through symbolic, poetic jokes. I was trying to make people laugh, but in a really insular way. I had a comic strip in the Philadelphia Weekly for a while. A small publisher put out one graphic novel of mine, which was basically a documentation of a breakup I was going through, told through the lens of this gnome-looking character I based on the Nation of Islam’s mythology of Yakub.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Oh yeah. Big head.

MOYNIHAN

Yeah. I had heard their mythology and thought, wow, that’s really fascinating. So my headcanon was that this character had gone through all that, creating the white race and everything, and now he was living a normal life, trying to be a domestic, normal Philadelphia indie rock kind of guy. I never talk about that, but that was my canon. I was always interested in fringe mythologies. And I loved the old undergrounds, Robert Crumb, and Peter Bagge’s Hate was a huge influence on me. Confessional underground stuff.

I was doing conventions, self-publishing, and my friend Dash Shaw, who doesn’t even remember this, told me about my last graphic novel. I’d said, no one bought it. People pick it up at conventions, flip through, put it back down. It’s like speed dating, you get rejected over and over, because unless someone big advocates for you, no one’s willing to read navel-gazy black-and-white comics in good faith. And Dash told me, I’m paraphrasing, that I was stuck in this old underground paradigm, and I should try to move forward aesthetically, do something besides that tradition of confessional comics.

So I said, okay, I’m going to make my blockbuster book. I’m going to work in color. I’m going to put it out on the web for free so anyone can see it, and it’s going to be the most thematically ambitious thing I can think of. But because I come from that background of confessional, personal autobio comics, that’s always going to be in there. All the characters are based on something I’ve experienced or witnessed up close. It’s all grounded in some emotional truth from my life, and then I turn that into sci-fi, mythology, religious exploration.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That shift between the high cosmic register and low personal communication makes you care more about the characters. There will be this huge cosmic fight, and then it’s “dude, come on, man, I’m just lonely, how are you doing?” It seems odd at first, but it’s consistent throughout the book, and you realize these are bros, these are friends, you can tell why Rhea’s mad. And so does the color. The color is phenomenal.

MOYNIHAN

Oh, thanks.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You don’t get that level of color in an indie work, generally, due to resources.

MOYNIHAN

Right, well, webcomics blew that up. I was doing black and white early on because printing color was cost-prohibitive. But as soon as I could put my stuff on the web, I could start painting, and I hadn’t painted since high school. I had a really good high school art teacher who taught me color theory, and everything after that was black and white for years. So I bought a gouache paint set from the art store, and at first I treated the color like watercolor, putting down washes, filling space. Then once my confidence came up, I got more expressive. A tree doesn’t have to be brown. A tree could be emotional. It can be purple or red depending on how I’m feeling. The color became part of the symbolism of the book. That’s why I put that color chart at the end, to explain my thinking about the symbolism. It started happening later in the book, and I got way more into it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Did you have this whole cosmic journey in mind from the start? Some of the elements sync up very well.

MOYNIHAN

I did a fair amount of pre-planning. I was writing outlines and researching for months before I started. Then my process was to storyboard maybe 10 to 20 pages at a time based on the outline, and as I storyboarded, I’d riff within its confines. I didn’t want to get bored. But riffing starts morphing the outline, so I’d have to rewrite it. I probably fully rewrote the outline five times. I’ve got huge stacks of notebooks of storyboards and notes in my studio.

There’s a lot of synchronistic stuff happening in the book. It’s a fifteen-year project, so there’d be chunks where I’d take months off, come back, and have to remind myself what the story was even about. Luckily I was posting it on the web, so I had people correcting me in the comments section: “that guy’s green, why did you draw him this color?” But thematic connections would develop, and I’d think, oh, this connects to this. I’m forming connections as I write and draw. I always think in a circular way when it comes to story. Everything is constantly moving forward and looping in on itself, and I trust that’s going to work because it’s all coming from my own real way of thinking. I’m not trying to construct the ultimate external spiritual sci-fi Dune world. It’s all coming from within, basically. So I can trust my intuition and not have to be so organized about it. These synchronicities are going to pop up. Whether that works out in the next batch of shit I do, we’ll see, if I’m still in touch with myself when I decide to do another epic thing.

OLIVER BATEMAN

There’s a type of work that’s just lore-saturated, lore on the page footnoted with more lore, and that’s fine. But here there’s a balance between the cosmic and the personal, with hints of larger lore you never linger on. There’s probably a ton of headcanon behind each character that you don’t need to share. Like why it’s important that Michael has a beard at this point and the mustache at that point. It’s clearly significant.

MOYNIHAN

Well, the beard and mustache thing, this is actually bad because I’m on video right now and you can see I’ve grown my beard out. But I used to always say, if you saw my mustache growing out, you knew I was depressed.

OLIVER BATEMAN

A lot of guys can get that. If you’re letting it go one way or the other, you’re in a bad way.

MOYNIHAN

And I was connecting it a little to my memory of the Samson story. I always loved that story as a kid, so it’s probably something to do with that too.

OLIVER BATEMAN

What were some of the visual inspirations you were taking? The characters’ heads are great. One guy’s got a gemstone for a head, and the Nomo heads in book two, green and red. Where’s that coming from?

MOYNIHAN

At that point I was definitely being influenced by Mat Brinkman, the whole slimy Fort Thunder scene, everything grippy and psychedelic. When the Kramers Ergot anthology came out, probably Kramers Ergot 4, not all of it was Fort Thunder kids, but a lot of it was Brian Chippendale, Ben Jones, CF, Mat Brinkman especially. I saw that stuff and realized I could be more abstract, push my character designs in more fun directions. Some of my design ideas from the early 2000s I’m still doing today. I draw lots of goopy, intestine-looking creatures. I’ve been doing that for thirty years.

And the Fort Thunder people were coming down from Providence, even the noise scene, Lightning Bolt and all those guys playing shows in Philadelphia, where I was living. Everything got really patchworked, super loud, neon. That had a heavy influence on me and on a lot of people. I realized I could pick from all the colors in the paint bucket. And there were people like Yuichi Yokoyama appearing on the scene doing really cool character designs. Everybody showing up at the Brooklyn indie conventions at the time, there was so much interesting, energetic stuff happening. You couldn’t help but be influenced by it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

What’s amazing is that with all of that in mind, you keep pretty tight narrative control. Not that it doesn’t sprawl, but when you read something like Puke Force, there’s less narrative direction there, and it doesn’t have to be one to one. You keep the line together.

MOYNIHAN

My one issue with those guys, and even with people like Jack Kirby and Jodorowsky’s books, The Incal and everything, well, Jodorowsky could tell a story, but everything for him is archetypes. And for people like Brian Chippendale and CF, they were following stream of consciousness. Their narratives are navel-gazing, almost talking to themselves, but the artwork is so explosive and cool that you forgive it and go along for the journey. But I’m a film guy. I wanted to be a filmmaker.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s what you went to school for, right?

MOYNIHAN

Yeah, I went to film school. And when I was in film school I worked at an art-house video store, whatever Tarantino-adjacent origin story, I worked at this video store for five years, watched every movie, studied film, and wanted to be a live-action filmmaker. But I was drawing comics the whole time, my whole life. And one day it clicked: I’m not going to make films, I’m going to make comics. It costs ten bucks for a pad of paper and some ink instead of $10,000 for a student film. Being a struggling college student, I couldn’t do it. So I gave up on the live-action dreams, but I still had that structural screenwriting DNA in me. I wanted to tell coherent stories.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s what makes this thing so remarkable. It’s an enormous book in its finished form, but it’s paced like something that could be filmed. There are some great fights, like when Rhea’s fighting the gnome guy. The bodies are elongated and strange, but just like in Adventure Time, you can clearly track what’s going on.

MOYNIHAN

I’m mostly using film rules for tracking action, screen direction and stuff like that. I think that’s why I got hired on Adventure Time. When Pen read my stuff, he could see I understood film language, so I could transition to being a storyboarder pretty easily. With comics there’s so much forgiveness from the reader. You can jump time, read Scott McCloud. Every single panel can be a completely different way of viewing a scene, and only the most avant-garde filmmakers work with the form that way. A Marvel film is never going to do the things a lot of comics do regularly with narrative structure and staging. But because I came from film, that part of me is a little more conservative. I stage things in sequences that have logic to them. I’m basically a storyboard artist, and I’ve been one for most of my life.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Which means a reader like me can sit down and read the book in a sitting, because it plays out like a film over a set amount of time. Anyone who sees it and thinks it’s intimidatingly long for a color book: not really. It keeps pulling you toward the next thing, lots of cliffhangers across the plot lines. I find it interesting when I see that balance in any art, where somebody has imposed controls through their training but is cutting loose here and here and here.

MOYNIHAN

I think it’s just easier for me because my whole childhood was Marvel Comics. Superheroes, X-Men, even the extreme era, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane. Spawn was the tail end of my interest in superhero comics, but I loved Spawn. And those are meat and potatoes: tell a story, make a quote-unquote great drawing. I’d say I’m still influenced by people like Simon Bisley.

OLIVER BATEMAN

His Lobo stuff is the platonic ideal of a mainstream comic. I can’t believe that came out pre-Vertigo. And Keith Giffen plotting those books, an artist who could really plot and storyboard.

MOYNIHAN

Those are just candy. You munch them down and you’re never confused about what’s happening. The most eye-catching drawings, told within a story that flows. So I have that comics blockbuster storytelling in me as part of my childhood, not just the heady indie stuff. Highbrow, lowbrow.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You figured out as well as anybody how to do that. Adventure Time as a collective project reached way more people than you’d think, and then you watch it and the stories are coherent across the runtime. The art is odd in parts, but the stories cohere.

MOYNIHAN

The Adventure Time writers’ room, especially early on, was: everything’s got to be three-act structure. You’ve got executives giving you notes if you divert from it. What’s the story about, what’s the engine. A pretty conservative style. You’re part of a machine and a tradition of kids’ television that everyone follows, the same at Nickelodeon or Disney, and there were people put in place to make sure Pen wouldn’t veer too far, because Pen wanted to make episodes with no plot, just hanging out and doing random shit. No structure whatsoever. If he could have done that, he probably would have been happiest. But early on there were veterans installed who knew story structure and would say, no, you can’t, this joke is unnecessary to the plot. And the artists within those writers’ rooms keep pushing against the edge of that. Eventually nobody was watching or giving notes anymore, but we had all been trained up that way. There’s a reason those things exist. Three-act structure is really useful for short-form television. It keeps a viewer engaged. But it’s fun to mess with it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

A lot of times the endings would be quite poignant. You’d have madcap stuff and then this unexpected poignancy, and it seems like only the format allowed that to happen. The great children’s cartoon of my childhood was the John Kricfalusi Ren & Stimpy, and he was always battling Nickelodeon, and the art that comes out of that conventional structure is great. Though you’re probably right that fewer people would watch characters just hanging out. I’d sit through it, as a fan of artsy stuff, but the numbers would drop.

MOYNIHAN

It becomes a thing you have to engage with in good faith, and that’s the upper tier, the small percent of media consumers. Everyone else, it’s like that movie Sullivan’s Travels. It’s about a highfalutin, artsy screenwriter who wants to make message films, so he goes out to experience life, be homeless, ride the trains, figure out what life is about. And at the end he’s in a movie theater secretly watching a crowd laughing at some dumb get-kicked-in-the-balls comedy, relieving themselves of the burdens of life. Mostly we’re just here to entertain. People want to chill after a long day of work and watch something they don’t have to do academic research to understand. But then you add this extra layer of something poetic or meaningful, just in case, and they’re sitting in this passive state and they wake up: wait, what just happened? To me that’s the two things working in tandem, not against each other. Hopefully.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s the message of Barton Fink too, where the Clifford Odets-style leftist meets John Goodman’s character, and what kind of movie does he want? The Wallace Beery wrestling picture they want him to make.

MOYNIHAN

I think the Coen brothers are one of the great examples of making something most people can get into, entertaining films that are also elevated auteur films at the same time. Barton Fink is one of their more difficult ones, but then you have No Country for Old Men, a crazy, straight, gripping thriller, and Fargo. I try to do that. Though I’m describing my ideal state of mind. I also have my resentments toward doing mainstream stuff, hand-holding and things like that. So I’m always wrestling with how to tell a story in a way that’s artistically satisfying while still tracking. Because art and storytelling are mostly about communication. I’m trying to connect with the audience, not alienate them. I’m not trying to be pretentious, or classist, where only a certain echelon of people gets what I’m doing. I want everyone to get what I’m doing. But at the same time, I’m not trying to make slop.

OLIVER BATEMAN

We need people grappling with that, because that grappling is the only limiter on this stuff. Especially now, with the pressures of the format and the streaming options, when it’s easy to just stamp out another one.

MOYNIHAN

As far as the indie creators’ work mill, you constantly have to be putting something out, reminding people you exist. So you kind of have to downgrade the quality of your work to output something every other day. It’s like we’ve become our own sweatshops.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Which stinks, because sometimes the thing needs fifteen years. And I read the end product in a day.

MOYNIHAN

Hopefully it percolated. That’s the goal. It is funny. A page would take me anywhere between eight and twenty hours depending on the detail, and early on, when I had lots of energy, I was posting three pages a week. Crazy amounts of work, busting my ass. And then you post it and people read it in about thirty seconds. If they read it at all. So the hope is it resonates, that they read it in thirty seconds but they’re thinking about it later.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The shock for me wasn’t that the story grips or even that the art is good. It’s that there’s this longer-term resonance in scenes where a character is feeling pitiful or wondering what the hell is going on, and it lingers with you. That’s what the time the creator takes with a work imposes on it.

MOYNIHAN

There were long stretches where I didn’t work on it, especially in the latter third, because I was a very different person than when I started. When I started, this is 2008 or so, I was on a rocket ship. I was going to disappear into the forest and become enlightened. Do all this research, figure out the correct way to think, the correct way to meditate, do my spiritual practice to the point where I just dissolve. Basically the character of Michael. And the character of Noah. That was my headspace.

OLIVER BATEMAN

They’re both leaving the world. The Noah saga is great, and eventually he gets the bee ring, and that finger getting gnawed away is a nice creepy little visual. Those things stick with you. That, and the fact that just about every character has genitalia. The animals, the people. The secret base has genitalia.

MOYNIHAN

Early on, when I worked at that video store, I used to watch this Philip Glass opera documentary all the time, about Akhnaten. There are interviews with Glass about why he was interested in the story, and basically, Akhenaten might have been intersex, might have had both genitalia, and that’s part of why people considered him a god. And that dovetails with the mythology of the angels being both men and women, the androgyne, all that stuff in alchemy.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Jodorowsky loves that stuff too.

MOYNIHAN

So then I started thinking, okay, Adam created Eve from his rib, so Adam and Eve are basically the same being, and the further back you go, the more the genders combine. It’s like Dragon Ball Z, the same Rob Liefeld combos. The more comboed out you are, the more power you have. That’s the whole theme with the Assassins Guild. So I had to show the genitalia to show what’s going on with that idea, which all stems from me watching a Philip Glass opera documentary.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You’re adapting this for animation now. You’re going to have to cut some of that, probably?

MOYNIHAN

The guys helping me make it don’t want to cut it. I don’t know where we could air it. It’d be rated X.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The secret base where the assassins live has genitalia. That’s Adventure Time on steroids right there.

MOYNIHAN

Sometimes when I’m making stuff in my room I’m not thinking about the consequences later. I’m just rubbing my hands together: this will be cool. And people say, there’s so much dick in your book. I’ve never counted.

OLIVER BATEMAN

One of the best jokes in the book is also part of the secret base, where getting in is handled like a call center.

MOYNIHAN

I was trying to replicate this idea of prostrating yourself at the gates of the temple. I heard some old Buddhist story where, to get into the monastery, you have to be outside on your knees for weeks in the rain. How would they keep him from getting in, and how would they make it as miserable as possible? For me, that’s being on a phone call with my insurance company.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That was a great bit. And there’s the other bit where a character is trapped in the center of the earth and all he cares about is doing crunches. Getting a little jacked. Then he points out that even though he’s done that, he’s not really strong, the muscles are just for show. That’s the kind of tossed-in dialogue that sets up the really profound moments, like the character who transforms into a lion man by the end of the book and eats his father. If you had that whole angle plotted out, that’s when it gets really trippy.

MOYNIHAN

I have lots of notes on that. And when I go back and read my notes on why I came to that conclusion, I barely understand it. At some point in my life I understood what I was getting at. A lot of it is dreamlike, in the moment. I’m doing all this research on symbolism and world religions, and I start putting pieces together, this connects to this. Doing my own mini Joseph Campbell research. That’s really where it all started, me being into Joseph Campbell.

OLIVER BATEMAN

This is the hero with many genitals. For me it reads like the weird mythology of my generation mashed up, everything from The Infinity Gauntlet to indie comics wedged in with all this other stuff pulled from the background. And it’s the kind of thing, and I want your opinion on this because you’ve worked in all the media, that I don’t think AI could do. I say this as someone whose day job is head of AI content for a company. I make rules all day to keep this stuff at bay. But I don’t see how on earth AI art could do this book. I don’t see how it could do Adventure Time, even.

MOYNIHAN

I used to have a theory, but my theory got disproved, basically. My original thought about generative AI art was, okay, even if you could replicate Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and generate your version of it, what you don’t have is the story of the person making it. To me, art is human aspiration. There’s a narrative that has to exist. Van Gogh. Even in sports: Kobe Bryant. You watch sports because you want to see the extent of human potential. It’s similar to punk music. You see the Clash play and think, I could do that too, though maybe I couldn’t write a song as good as London Calling. You see yourself in someone like Van Gogh, and you see his story, he was depressed, he got through it enough to make these paintings that are now eternal. You need the John Henry story behind the art for people to resonate with it. Otherwise it’s forgettable. The image has no meaning.

And then I’m seeing these AI Banana Fruit Love Island things get a billion views on TikTok, and I go, okay, there goes my theory.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Those ones, yes. Amazing stuff.

MOYNIHAN

But I still collect vinyl. There are always going to be people that matters to. There are always going to be art heroes and sports heroes, any human occupation where people at the top are looked up to by people coming up, and that has deep meaning for them. You can’t get that from AI. There’s no aspiration involved except the aspiration of developing it. Nobody who grows up watching the Fruit Island stuff is going to be talking about it in twenty years the way people talked about Nirvana.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You’re totally right. Nirvana’s songs have faded for me, but the moment of Cobain on MTV Unplugged lingers way longer. I grew up on Henry Rollins, and his music’s just okay, his voice was pretty much shot after a certain point, but his persona in the eighties and nineties was cool.

MOYNIHAN

And the story, the fan, and all that. There are so many Rollins interviews that are very entertaining. I think generative AI stuff is useful for topical, in-the-moment social media parody, basically. It’s disposable. It gets the idea across and people move on to the next thing. I don’t think purely AI-generated stuff in vertical reels is capable of having resonance.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’ve seen some now reaching five and ten minutes, the blue laser things. They shoot the blue lasers. Okay, great. I’m not going to watch that.

MOYNIHAN

I haven’t seen anything that hooks up. On LinkedIn, I don’t know why I doomscroll LinkedIn, you see people who were fairly successful indie filmmakers making AI films. “I made a full five-minute AI thing with this grant I got from some AI company.” Okay, I’ll watch it. Bro, this shit is not holding together.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You would know better than anyone, because you came up in the storyboard world. AI is not going to do an Ozu film where the exits and entrances follow his rules.

MOYNIHAN

Even the stuff my friends love, I look at it and it feels like it’s diminishing my soul. Sometimes it’s a curiosity, like the Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fight thing that came out, which was pretty convincing. From a technical standpoint, that’s interesting. But I don’t get anything beyond that. And maybe I’m looking for something beyond that and a lot of other people aren’t. Even before AI, that’s been true of media. One of the reasons I wanted to be a filmmaker originally was seeing Evil Dead 2 and the camera flying through the house. You could tell there were two dudes with a dolly running through a house. You knew it was two guys holding a camera. But it looked so cool. You feel the tactile filmmaking. That movie is about the people behind the camera making it. So I got a VHS camera and ran around my house trying to mimic Evil Dead shots. For me, looking at other people’s art is inspiration to make art. Maybe I just don’t understand the point of view of someone who loves the entertainment and doesn’t care where it comes from, because I’ve been drawing my whole life.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Right, and there was always mid, even before the word existed. Sometimes my wife will be reading one of those throwaway books everybody’s reading, and I ask, do you think it’s good or bad? Do you like the main character? “Well, she’s a little pushy.” So why do you read it? “Passes the time.” I’ve never approached anything that way, so it’s alien to me. But I get it.

MOYNIHAN

I’ve gone into that mode here and there. I watched the first two or three seasons of Emily in Paris. I’m not innocent of consuming slop. And in some of the lowest forms of art you can find something. I have a bad movie club. My friend Jeff curates god-awful movies every Wednesday, these outsider films you can barely sit through, and there’s always something in there where you can feel the passion of the creator, something that meant something to them. Even the guy who made all those video game movies, the German guy, considered the worst filmmaker in the world for a while.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Uwe Boll. Those movies are shit, but there are good elements to them.

MOYNIHAN

There’s always something in there where you think, that’s kind of interesting. When I was younger I was the opposite. I’m not consuming anything that isn’t the highest-caliber art, I only watch the best movies, I only read the best books. Which now borderlines on some sort of fascist thing. I’m a lot more forgiving about media these days than I was in my twenties.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Speaking of finding something in the low forms: I’ll watch old, bad pro wrestling, and there’s still a moment where you go, this guy’s kind of a sublime actor in a weird way. The aesthetics are perfect. You couldn’t do better camp. And you grew up going to the shows at the Spectrum.

MOYNIHAN

I have memories of how affected I was as a child when Shawn Michaels threw Marty Jannetty through the window on the Barber Shop set.1 It ruined my day. And then Jannetty just never came back, and you find out later it was because he was such a fuck-up that they fired him. But I didn’t know that. I was just, how could he betray his tag team partner? It was such a resonant storyline for me. The Macho Man wedding stuff too. I did think Miss Elizabeth was the most beautiful woman in the world.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Wrestling could make you believe that. Who could be more beautiful? And I’ve covered those guys, my books are about those guys. They were consummate pros even at the bottom of the card. You meet them today and they can still lay out a two-minute radio promo telling you where the show is, who they are, and why they’re fighting. A pro at something with no insurance and no money, but a pro.

MOYNIHAN

I used to listen to Roddy Piper’s podcast for a while. His stories were gnarly.

OLIVER BATEMAN

He came up as basically a carny, and he loved the scum world of pro wrestling. When It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia brought him in, he nailed those roles because that was the character. But back to AI for a second, because in my day job I handle the work of an entire content team that would have existed once upon a time. And it’s not like anyone liked writing corporate white papers. We all hated it, so it got consolidated into somebody.

MOYNIHAN

I don’t know what the endgame of our current capitalist structure is, but it seems like all these companies are running on debt, hemorrhaging millions of dollars every day. None of them are profiting, as far as I can tell. At what point can we not afford to sustain any of these companies? I’m not an economist, but I think they’ll all have to downscale big time, and it might just end up being one of those things where they help you with spreadsheets.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s actually their best use. A more functional version of what Copilot was promising. You’ll be able to run teams with fewer people. That’s how we use them. And AI transcription is useful. I was reading the Elephant 6 book, and Adam Clair typed out all those interviews by hand in 2020. Two more years and there would have been tools to at least capture the text. But at most, that’s what they can do, and they’re being sold on the promise of curing all the cancers.

MOYNIHAN

I follow a lot of video game stuff, and even the idea of upscaling video games with AI is causing the cost of games to triple. Their desire to have the best AI technology is undermining their own business. No one is going to buy a $1,500 PlayStation. I’m holding on to my computer setup for as long as I can. A $600 hard drive? What the fuck is going on, dude?

OLIVER BATEMAN

None of it makes sense. In 2015, 2016, you could build incredibly powerful systems with parts, then this rush for parts happened. And the funny thing with games: my daughter is six, and what she likes is a pixel-art game where she can walk the sprite around the map, 2D, no transitions, the old Pokemon FireRed. And I’ve moved back into that too. I’m still playing emulated GBA games. The art is great. All I need are the symbols and the representation. I don’t need to walk through GTA 6.

MOYNIHAN

I really think people have started to figure out that it’s all about gameplay and not graphics. Graphics are cool, but number one is gameplay. You can have the most lo-fi art.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Like Undertale, which is a great game.

MOYNIHAN

Amazing game. And that poker game that came out, the roguelite.2 Like Slay the Spire. You understand the gameplay, it’s addictive, and it doesn’t matter that the art is whatever. I’m personally not interested in Grand Theft Auto 6. I bounced off Red Dead Redemption 2. I’m carrying a bear pelt around for an hour. That’s not for me. There are open-world games I like, but ones where the gameplay is immediate. Elden Ring is one of my all-time favorite games. I played through it twice. You don’t get into scrolling through a book of items rendered as if you’re flipping the pages of a real book. Red Dead, I go to a general store and I’m like, do I need nails? I don’t know.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s the same as Skyrim. That’s when I first started noticing I was done: there are so many books in Skyrim, all that lore. I had a friend reading all of them. I wrote a piece for the Paris Review about how I don’t read the books in the video games.

MOYNIHAN

You don’t need to pick up books and read more. You can world-build through the environment. I really think that’s a lazy game-design conceit, books.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s fun for the writers, but that’s something you could easily assign to AI now. Tell me the Legend of Krillandia.

MOYNIHAN

Well, a lot of those guys are doing that. I worked on a show for a tech company for a while, and they were so into generative AI, building a lot of the lore around their world with it. I was writing for them, so I had to go in and read all the AI lore they’d generated and plus it up, because this stuff is meaningless. You’re just filling space. It’s not interesting or fun or funny. So I’m pretty skeptical even of that. Maybe if you’re building a huge open world and you need character archetypes that respond in real time, procedural dialogue, because you can’t hire enough people to write that many dialogue trees. Maybe something like that. But I’m always thinking, maybe just scale down. Some game designers’ North Star is the ultimate simulation of life. Okay, that’s a goal some people have. But if you want to make a fun game, you don’t have to make the biggest game. There are decades of great games that were smaller scale.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I basically need the minimum amount of lore. Even with Forming: if there’s more lore that book needs, I’ll just make it up. I can shove it in there in my own head.

MOYNIHAN

Exactly. That is the relationship between the author and the audience. If you leave it open enough, the audience starts to connect the dots. They build their own headcanons, and that’s part of the relationship. If you have all the lore dialed in and every question covered, there’s nowhere for the reader’s imagination to go. They’re just passively experiencing the thing. In film, it’s just moving pictures and your brain ties them together to make the illusion of motion. It’s the same in storytelling. You have these gaps, and not filling all of them is part of what makes the world feel lived in.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I came up off Final Fantasy 6 web rings, writing fan fiction and fantasy e-wrestling by email in the nineties, and that stuff was shit writing, but I needed the reps, and I was filling in the gaps. Only later did I learn there were cartridge limitations that led to the text being so spare. The writer made it open-ended because he couldn’t tell you. Now you go to a Final Fantasy game and they lock it all down.

MOYNIHAN

Their lore is schizophrenic now. You play a Final Fantasy game and you’re like, what are you talking about? And the opposite side is anime lore, which is so thoroughly thought through. That’s the opposite of the way I think about storytelling, but sometimes it works, and that proves to me there are all sorts of ways of doing things. I don’t know if you ever watched Hunter x Hunter. That show is the prime example of tell-don’t-show. It’s a lore fest, episodes of internal dialogue, and I fucking loved it. Okay, this breaks all my personal rules about storytelling, but it still works. You can find a good way to do the wrong thing, quote unquote.

OLIVER BATEMAN

So what’s the timeline? The book drops October 6. Do you think an animated movie could come out at some point?

MOYNIHAN

I’m going to go on tour for the book, and I just finished storyboarding an adaptation of the first section, basically up to the point where Mithras lands on Earth. I do it slightly out of sequence, because the creation of the universe comes a little later in the book, and I thought it would be cool to start an animated adaptation with the creation of the universe. Good hook. So it’s 22 minutes, and the first 15 minutes or so are just Michael and the devil fighting each other.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s great stuff in the book, too, for fans of that kind of thing.

MOYNIHAN

So I’m going to tour the book and screen this rough animated version, black-and-white drawings timed to sound effects, and read it as it goes, to see what kind of response it gets. I’m working with this company called Bardo, and I think they’re going to animate bits and pieces of it, and then we’ll try to find financing. We’re talking to Europeans. The Europeans still care.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s what everybody tells me. The European folks I work with at my company still aren’t using AI, by and large. They’re not bought in.

MOYNIHAN

Europeans still like experimental animation, and they love comics. In a lot of ways that’s where the financing is, so we’re trying.

OLIVER BATEMAN

And Adventure Time is rolling along with the Side Quests thing.

MOYNIHAN

I don’t know if they’ll get a second season. We’ll see. I did some storyboarding on that, and there are still episodes they haven’t released. Luckily, Adventure Time keeps making spinoff shows and they hire me to help, because the animation world is extremely sparse when it comes to jobs right now. I was really lucky. The first show I ever worked on went ten seasons, which doesn’t exist anymore. So I’ve been focusing more on my own stuff, like a lot of other cartoonists, which is nice because I always just wanted to do my own stuff. It’s just that now I’m doing it because there’s no choice. There are no cushy union jobs anymore.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’ve talked about this with other people who’ve come on the show, but I increasingly feel like Dave Sim of Cerebus fame, crazy man that he was, had the right idea all along. Just pump out your own stuff.

MOYNIHAN

He wrote that pamphlet about how to self-publish. I bought that book and I studied it, and that’s how I got my start in comics. He was probably the first really rigorous comics author-artist I noticed, early nineties. I had all the phone books. They might be in a box in my parents’ house.

OLIVER BATEMAN

They’re all on the Internet Archive for anyone listening, downloadable for free, every one, and not pirated. I think it has something to do with the way he distributed them. Boy, did he do great work on the Chief, him and his collaborators. The bang for your buck in those graphic novels is insane.

MOYNIHAN

I had all the phone books up until a certain point. I lost interest when it started becoming all text blocks.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Reads is the one that slowed me down. Melmoth was still really good, because that Oscar Wilde character was really good. And he’s a great letterer, the lettering is excellent, but there gets to be a lot of letters.

MOYNIHAN

And then he’s beefing with Dark Horse at some point, and I’m like, what are you doing, dude? But I did come back for the end. I bought the last issue.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Cerebus pulled up into the light. That’s a bang finish, even if the bottom half of the middle is bizarre.

MOYNIHAN

I was definitely keeping track of the spectacle of his life through the Comics Journal, the proposed boxing match with Jeff Smith and all that. Free social media. That might have actually happened at this point. Jake Paul might have hosted it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’ve got to give Jeff Smith credit, though. Much more economical drawings. Dave Sim was grinding, and then his Alex Raymond book, his hand became arthritic. I’m not doing all that work. God bless him.

MOYNIHAN

That’s another reason I switched to color. My early stuff was so heavy on crosshatching that I was destroying my hand. And Jeff Smith, early on. You know, I used to go to this comic book store called Showcase Comics in the Granite Run Mall outside Philadelphia, and those guys were super into me and my buddies showing up, and they’d recommend stuff. They got me into Cerebus, they got me into Bone, Jim Woodring, all that Tundra stuff, because of these dudes at the comic store.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Those people are the unsung heroes of art. Record store people too. The generation coming up behind us may not know these people existed.

MOYNIHAN

I was a mall rat. Every Friday, arcade, comic book store, making the mall cops mad. And those guys just loved sharing what was new. We had our boxes, our subscriptions. The idea that you’re a middle school kid coming in and there’s some guy in high school or college working at the comic book store cluing you into the cool shit, I wonder if that dynamic still exists.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Looking back, it was steroids. An extra edge. I could go to Second Foundation in Chapel Hill and some old bearded guy would tell me, you’ve got to read The Mote in God’s Eye, you’ve got to read The Demolished Man, and I had my dad, who was into the Beats, Burroughs, all that. Cheat codes. Now you can go look at the wikis and pull everything, and it doesn’t feel real. When you had to search for it, you were like a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter, and there were these people who would tell you where to get the nuts. Richard Corben, now there’s an artist, grab all the Corben stuff, he draws these weird-looking people.

MOYNIHAN

I love places in LA like Secret Headquarters, and they stock hip comics. But I’m not in the suburbs anymore, and it’s a bunch of hipster people, and I’m an older unc now. When I walk in, they’re not saying, hey kid, let me clue you in on some cool shit.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That was a kind of grooming that was acceptable: being groomed in what the good art was. There was a video rental store next to my dad’s business, and the guy there introduced me to what a JRPG was. This is Dragon Warrior 3, look at this thing, you can save your game. Whoa. Those guys deserve medals for their service.

MOYNIHAN

I used to be that guy at the video store. The culture there was people coming in and chatting you up for an hour, hanging out, talking about movies. The first girl I really dated was a customer.

OLIVER BATEMAN

All my early relationships came out of those milieus.

MOYNIHAN

Public-facing places where people are consuming some sort of media, comics or movies or books, and the culture was to talk with your customers about the shit you were into. That was the relationship I had with the comic store guys when I shopped there. There’s a game store down the street from me, and sometimes I walk in and there are twenty people playing Magic: The Gathering, and I know they’re chatting and hanging out and that’s their place. So that probably still exists, just less, because there were double the brick-and-mortar places or more. It’s a dying thing. The village feeling is a pretty lost thing. But I’ll still see people on social media working at record stores making videos recommending their favorite album of the week, so there are still record stores with people excited to recommend shit.

OLIVER BATEMAN

There’s an indie bookstore my wife likes in Delaware where the writeups are still super detailed and the employees chat you up. So it exists. Probably less of it.

MOYNIHAN

It’s hard for me to tell, because I’m so isolated now. Like you said, a prison of my own making. I stay in this one room and draw. How do I talk about socializing when I barely do it? It’s not like my younger days, always at the cafe, someone walks up, we’re going to the party tonight, my girlfriend worked at a bookstore. That’s not part of my life anymore. But I was talking to a kid who’s sixteen, and they were mentioning all these bands I grew up with, underground bands from 2000. I’m like, why do you know about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, a super obscure prog metal band from 2000? And it’s Rate Your Music. Some kids just go deep on Rate Your Music, Last.fm, Letterboxd. That’s their way of discovery. Kids always investigate. It’s just a shame it’s not as IRL as it used to be.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The numbers of people as invested as you were may shrink, but the need for this type of art will always be there.

MOYNIHAN

I’m seeing a wave of kids getting into really out-there stuff, especially in music. I was talking to some people about this last night: it might be a reaction to the flattening of culture from the internet, and from being able to generate samey stuff with AI. You can make a Taylor Swift song now. So what holds novelty is the band in cardboard costumes playing microtonal prog rock [Angine de Poitrine]. For the past ten years it felt like the worst timeline, permanently stuck in this mid yogurt-land-soundtrack existence, riding in Ubers listening to the driver’s Bieber playlist thinking, you can’t actually like this song. But now I’m starting to see rays of light. Everything swings. People are getting sick of it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

For a while the take was that it was classist to push back too hard on pop. You had to be poptimistic.

MOYNIHAN

That’s my trigger word, man. Poptimism. And that was the millennial reaction to Gen X, to the hating everything and calling out posers. I’m a Gen X cusper, basically a Gen X guy, and that whole “you’re not cool enough, you don’t know the underground thing” energy, the millennials responded with, dude, I like Taylor Swift and Marvel superheroes, and if you don’t, you’re a fascist, or a bummer, and actually you’re not cool for having taste.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It flipped around to where you had the New Yorker writing in praise of mid, and eventually Pitchfork writing almost in praise of mid.

MOYNIHAN

I remember the tide shift. Pitchfork was the snootiest, that’s what gave them clout, and then at some point it was, nah, actually we like everything, and our rubric for not liking something is very mysterious now. If you don’t know what you don’t like, what’s the value of you being a critic? I don’t really value critics anymore.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I only wanted a critic to criticize things, and I don’t care if I agree. I grew up on Armond White, who hated everything everybody liked. Granted, that’s kind of a bit, but it fired people up.

MOYNIHAN

You have a consistent personality you can measure yourself against. You might not agree, but you can say, okay, he liked this, so I probably won’t. I used to read all the Leonard Maltin books. Now it’s the flat-movies curve, no standout critics. I follow some video game critics who at least have tastes and stick to their guns. The only music critic with any cultural cachet currently is probably that Fantano guy, and he triggers me really hard, I had to hit “don’t recommend.” But at least he’s got his thing. He’s the last critic standing. Everyone else is closer to a PR agent, and then it’s just charts averaging out to a B-plus for everything.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s a world where Black Panther wins the Oscar again, executed well enough, but what does that even mean?

MOYNIHAN

There’s no taste or rigor, and I think everyone senses that. Who’s watching the Oscars or the Grammys? And when you know how the sausage is made. When I saw behind the scenes how Emmys get handed out, on Adventure Time we’d wonder, how do we get an Emmy? Eventually it won one, after many seasons of always losing to Robot Chicken or something. Nothing against Robot Chicken, but you find out it’s basically lobbying. How many bodies can you get in there to advocate for your nomination, because only these old heads show up to the panels, and they’re sitting there saying “I like the Simpsons,” and you have to strong-arm them into liking something new.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It has always struck me, especially as you get older, how the New York Times picks books of the year. Most people don’t read many books in a year, even critics, and I know these people. Then everyone says, this is the book we’re all reading now. Who’s we? When was this decided? I’m reading a book from the eighties.

MOYNIHAN

A lot of it is handshakes, friends of friends, PR people who know PR people, and stuff gets pushed through. Sometimes real stuff makes it through, but it’s how much money is behind a thing, or what established distro company is handling your art. The film festival circuit works that way a lot. And in the music world it’s always been payola. Now what they do is hire clip farms. They’ll put a hundred thousand dollars into clip farming, so all these accounts across the internet are clipping your videos and posting them as if they’re just fans, and your media saturation becomes inevitable. No one can avoid seeing someone like Clavicular. No matter how much you try to avoid it, eventually you’re like, what the fuck, who’s Clavicular?

OLIVER BATEMAN

This is a society that primed itself for AI anyway. The small language models before the large language models.

MOYNIHAN

That’s how you get that indie band Geese, or whatever. The story, as I heard it, is that people found out they were clip farming themselves, that they had a big PR agency behind them using this to make them inevitable. It’s basically the modern version of payola. And I’m like, fair enough? That’s advertising, they just figured out a new way to do it. If I had $100,000 to drop into clip farming, would I do it? I don’t know. Is it different from buying a commercial during Seinfeld back in the day? A mom-and-pop beer company couldn’t pay for ads on Seinfeld either. The cards are always stacked against people trying to grind it out and do honest business. It feels kind of scummy, and it makes me not think very highly of Geese, but it’s not illegal.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s scummy the same way it was scummy if you knew somebody who could get you booked on SNL and somebody better didn’t.

MOYNIHAN

And there were a lot of New York bands coming up, and I knew they had rich parents, so they didn’t have to work day jobs.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The Strokes were famous for that. A famously air-filled band. Lots of air.

MOYNIHAN

Vampire Weekend and stuff like that. Rich kids who could afford to rehearse all day, play shows, never worry about buying a tour van. It’s not their fault they were born into a rich family. I couldn’t really hold it against them, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain way.

OLIVER BATEMAN

There were rich kids in grad school with me, and I thought, man, if I had all that leisure to take my time, it’d be awesome. But plenty of rich kids have had long runs, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of writing and music and art from rich kids.

MOYNIHAN

In the end you have to work hard and be good. Generally, you can be a rich nepo baby kid, but if you have zero talent, it’s not going to pan out.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Paul Giamatti was the son of the baseball commissioner and a Yale professor, and Giamatti’s still a good actor. Or Wallace Shawn. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a billionairess out of the Louis Dreyfus commodities family, and I did think she was good on Seinfeld.

MOYNIHAN

She’s great, man. It’s just that they’ve got a safety net and connections, so they can keep failing until they succeed, and there are people without those resources who might be equally talented and can’t get in the door. And depending on how you grew up, if you grew up around lots of mental illness, I’ve known very talented people who were mentally ill with no resources to help them, constantly self-sabotaging. You’re so talented, but failure gravitates toward you. No matter how many opportunities you get, you’re going to fuck it up. I call it the Delco curse. There are so many people I know from the Delaware County area with really dysfunctional backgrounds who might be super talented, and the ones who manage to get out are rare. It’s like a shadow hanging over the outer regions of Philadelphia. I didn’t notice it until I was older. Why are so many of my friends from Delco fucked up? Me and my brother started calling it the Delco curse.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Those are the people I truly feel for, the ones I grew up with in southwestern Pennsylvania who, if they’d just been moved up to that next level, would have made it. It’s worthwhile to acknowledge that they could have. You probably saw them in film school, comic artists who did the best book and then vanished.

MOYNIHAN

It’s the Joe Matt thing. Joe Matt complained about being extremely poor, but he also seemed to have some sort of curse around him, a mental illness thing. I think he was developing a show at one point and self-sabotaged it. I used to hang out with Joe Matt a little here and there, because he lived in LA for a while and I met his girlfriend, who was a barista at a cafe I worked at. Joe would come in and talk to me about trash-picking lottery tickets, spending all day riding his bike around on some weird lottery loophole. Joe, you’re spending all day on this and making five bucks. He thought he’d gamed the system. And that’s somebody with the talent to legitimately be up there with the indie stars who regularly get things made. When I first met him I was like, oh, Joe Matt, Peepshow, holy shit. I loved Peepshow. I thought it was hilarious. But the people who cared about him couldn’t get through to him. He was stubborn, set in his ways, seemingly pretty OCD, and he had something preventing him even though he was really talented. I got coffee with his girlfriend after he died and we talked about her relationship with him, how frustrating he was. Someone recently came out with a 45-minute documentary about him on YouTube. It’s nice that people are recognizing his work after his death. I just wish he could have self-actualized a little more. But he died at his drawing desk, which is kind of cool in a weird way. Maybe it’s weird for me to say that, but I think of dudes like Tezuka on his deathbed, still grinding.

OLIVER BATEMAN

God only knows what that bibliography is. The man wrote a medical dissertation while grinding out comics, for the hell of it. How do you get to be the Walt Disney and Jack Kirby of your country and also a medical doctor? I just read the huge biography of him by Toshio Ban, one of the guys who worked with him. It’s 800 pages of him being endlessly productive, trying to get an animation studio open, films made, books out, drawing on airplanes while people chase him for pages. What a great man.

MOYNIHAN

I love that documentary about him. The fact that he wouldn’t let the documentary team into his studio, so they had to set up mirrors to film him. The only people allowed in were his inking assistants. I just love seeing that hyper-dedicated lifestyle stuff. I geek out on it, the sacrifice and the insight into the dysfunctional lives of some of these guys. I don’t quite look up to it, because I’m trying to live a more balanced life, theoretically. But I’ve watched multiple Miyazaki documentaries, and there’s maybe one shot of his wife in the whole thing. In the latest one you see his house cleaner way more than his wife. He’s got this pretty deep friendship with his house cleaner, and I’m like, where’s your wife, dude? Why do you hate your son so much? That’s what’s fascinating. This guy has done a crazy amount of stuff that affected the world, he’s a deep philosophical thinker, and yet his home seems cold, empty, something missing. And why do I keep seeing it? In the David Lynch documentaries: okay, how many times have you been married?

OLIVER BATEMAN

I read Room to Dream thinking about that the whole way through. Stuff is just happening around him, with his daughter and everything. And the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary, where he wants his son in Dune, so he trains him as a martial artist for years.

MOYNIHAN

That’s at least heartwarming. A different sort of mild abuse. He was actively involved in his children, whereas Lynch seems to treat them almost like strangers. I’m not in his life, this is just from the documentary. And at the same time, David Lynch is like a god to me.

OLIVER BATEMAN

He delivered stuff that resonated with people on a deep level, and maybe you have to go that deep to do it. You become nonfunctional in other ways.

MOYNIHAN

You have to shut off some parts of you to excel at other parts. Maybe the brain is only capable of so much. There are people who prove different, but why do so many people I look up to have this personality type that neglects the people in their lives? And then I’m like, well, I don’t want to be like that. But why do I look up to so many of these guys?

OLIVER BATEMAN

I do find that I envy them, because when my daughter comes home, I want to spend time with her. I could be doing something to advance my own career, but I’d rather play Pokemon with her on the weekend, help her with her card game, help her do her art. I just love that shit. I can’t help myself.

MOYNIHAN

That’s the healthy response to having a child.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I feel guilty about it, though. Tezuka wouldn’t be messing around with that. He’d be working on his nine millionth graphic novel.

MOYNIHAN

He’d be building twenty years of resentment in his daughter. I think about Goro, Miyazaki’s kid, and Tales from Earthsea.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The Le Guin adaptation. It looked like a Studio Ghibli film, but bad.

MOYNIHAN

The kid killing his dad in the opening. That’s not in the book, man. He just killed his dad in his movie. And I know Miyazaki walked out of it. But The Boy and the Heron is my favorite.

OLIVER BATEMAN

When the guy comes out of the heron suit, some of those shots are profound. It lingers. It has that same resonance.

MOYNIHAN

Things happen in that movie where you’re like, what are you getting at right now? The scene where the boy finds his mom in the bed and she rejects him and the whole place catches fire. Who would put this in a family cartoon? Kids watching that would be, I mean, I felt traumatized by it. There’s a deep anger and regret in that film that’s so indirect. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It puts it out there and says, just fucking deal with it, basically. And he’s so old. Doing that at the end of your career is super rare. Most people lose their magic. I was talking about this recently: who keeps getting better as they get older, and who loses it. People like Terry Gilliam, sad to say.

OLIVER BATEMAN

He definitely lost it. CGI was the death of him as a creative.

MOYNIHAN

But then you get too old to have the energy to do all practical effects. He doesn’t know what to do with CGI and doesn’t have the budgets to do good CGI. He should be making $10 million films with all practical effects.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The constraints he had in the Time Bandits and Jabberwocky era. And Brazil is a masterpiece. You could retire on that, quality-wise.

MOYNIHAN

Brazil was life-changing for me. Just having made Brazil, he’s a legend. And I loved Megalopolis because it’s so bad. Really, really bad ideas. It’s a sloppy Ayn Rand surrealist movie. But at the same time, you can feel the passion, and I’m glad it got made. I was happy for Coppola that he blew his winery on it and tried to make one last thing that was his poetic vision. And it’s not good. A lot of it is practical effects, surprisingly, but composited in a way that looks terrible, like a cheap Neil Breen movie. Maybe if he’d made that same movie around the time he made Dracula, it would have had that analog quality. I love his Dracula. Rumble Fish, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Cotton Club, those are bangers. Even Peggy Sue Got Married. Nicolas Cage is awesome in it.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Has anyone ever had a stranger career? I do like when the older guys get their last crack. Terry Gilliam hasn’t died. Maybe he has one more swing. Just let him go all puppets or something. But let’s talk about the economics here, because the animation world you described is dire.

MOYNIHAN

Right now, you’re lucky if you work a seven-month gig, and then you’re out of work for five months. Some people I know haven’t had jobs for two years. Even if you get a show and become a showrunner, you’re making pretty good money for about two years, and then there’s no guarantee anything happens after that. You’re living off your savings. I’ve been living off of: make a little bit of money, go on unemployment for as long as I can, live off my Patreon. Well, I don’t live off my Patreon, but my Patreon keeps my bank account from hemorrhaging. Then I find little ways to make money. I might work a storyboarding gig for four months, and that’s good money for that time, so I’m good for the next three months.

OLIVER BATEMAN

What a way to have to think about it.

MOYNIHAN

And I’m spending all the money I make on trying to make my own stuff. That’s the other thing.

OLIVER BATEMAN

That’s nuts. It’s not sustainable. And at least in Europe there’s a better dole, the middle class is protected, you have some time.

MOYNIHAN

The creative classes in certain European countries are protected, which is nice. I always thought about moving to Berlin, though I don’t know if I’d get along with Berlin culture. No hate to the people of Berlin. I’m so American in a lot of ways. But I lived in France for about four months, doing a residency, and my personality really worked for France. They love comics and animation there.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Crumb has gotten decades out of that.

MOYNIHAN

I lived in a town, Angoulême, that was all about it. They have a comics museum, people come to do comics residencies. I worked on Forming there for a while, and I could feel the ambient support system that just doesn’t exist here. I don’t think the US has ever really understood the long-term value of art. They understand it from a consumer perspective, but as a culture, Americans don’t give a shit what would happen if art ceased to exist. It’s short-term thinking, transactional: what can you do for me now? And Americans output tons of amazing art, forever. But culturally we don’t take the bird’s-eye view. Though maybe that’s everything from health insurance on down.

OLIVER BATEMAN

It’s the whole culture. We don’t honor artists, we don’t honor the sick, we don’t honor the old. If you’ve got what it takes, we’ll take what you’ve got, and when you’re done, hit the road. But there’s a benefit to doing it the other way, where older artists and workers are held up, because on the front end you might feel more comfortable doing something experimental.

MOYNIHAN

Yes. That is not a thing here. I’d say I got this much done because my parents were basically my support system. They said, do what you want, make the wildest thing you can imagine, as long as you believe in yourself.

OLIVER BATEMAN

And stuff has come out that a lot of people have enjoyed as a result. My show is all about working and people’s work, and I keep thinking: there have got to be ways to make work for people so it’s not just a crushing waste for billions of them.

MOYNIHAN

I guess we’re going to find out. Desperation is reaching a fever pitch. Because of the increasing desperation to survive in the US, pay rent, buy fucking groceries and gas, since around 2017 stuff has doubled. It’s this increasing paranoia, needing to win a lottery to survive. I’ve got to be a millionaire or else I’m fucked, that’s basically the mentality now. So everyone’s extremely transactional, desperate, willing to bet the farm.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I just finished the Elephant 6 book and kept thinking, why would anyone do this today? Why aren’t they trying to become millionaires immediately? I’m glad the music happened, but that is the mentality now. You have to become a millionaire. You’re not safe.

MOYNIHAN

The cost of housing by itself. The average house in LA is like $800,000. I crunched the math. I’d have to be making over $300,000 a year to afford a house in LA.

OLIVER BATEMAN

And they’re still not paying at that scale for a lot of jobs there. I know what my company lists jobs at, and even someone making 800 grand in a year, half of that goes to the tax man, and it varies year to year. How many Bay Area jobs can accommodate a $2 million house?

MOYNIHAN

All those guys are getting fired all the time. It’s super unstable. It could get to the point where we have a French Revolution-style thing happen, which seems like the most unlikely thing America would ever do, because we’re so individually focused. But if it doesn’t turn around in ten years, it’s going to be gnarly.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’ve been on some of these Future of Work webinars for my day job, and you’ll hear people asking, how can we have customers without workers? Because they’re getting rid of the workers. And nobody’s even suggesting a UBI. They’re like, we’re post-salary now, we don’t want to think about worker salaries, but how do we keep the economy going? You have to have something to keep the wheel turning.

MOYNIHAN

If you build a whole country around sweat equity, and you have to use money to buy food, and you can’t fucking make money, the futurist utopia doesn’t work within the American capitalist setup. And those are the same people fear-mongering about communism. No one’s allowed to work or make money, but you can’t have communism. You’re going to have 10,000 Luigis pretty soon.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You don’t get the sense here, like you do in Europe, that there’s any social contract at all. We don’t carry anybody. And people are catching up to the idea that they’re disposable. The PMC is disposable, the workers are disposable. If we’re all disposable, who buys your stuff? They’ve got to solve that one.

MOYNIHAN

What’s the endgame? It seems so apocalyptic sometimes. Even the CEOs of these companies are building bunkers. Is that what you want? You want to live a Fallout existence? That’s your ideal future? It sparks my conspiratorial brain: maybe they got some message from an alien. Listen, there’s a meteor coming, you can’t stop it, move underground, all this is a waste of time anyway, focus on automation and AI, and tell everybody I was never here. That’s my only conclusion.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Run it to failure, Jesse. We’re just going to run it to failure and then get on the yachts and into the bunkers.

MOYNIHAN

It dovetails with all the alien talk. And the transhumanism, uploading to the cloud. You’re describing purgatory. That’s the story of the vampire. Why do you want that? Have you thought this through? You want to fuck yourself into eternal hell underground on a server? If I had billions of dollars, maybe I’d be so mentally twisted, because I got everything I ever wanted and everything’s boring to me now, that the only interesting thing left is being tortured for eternity. Some sort of sadomasochistic thing.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You read a book like 120 Days of Sodom. What are the rich guys doing? They go to a castle and torture each other. That’s the whole thing. My dad handed me that book when I was 19 and said, this is how the rich do it. When you have nothing else to do but indulge your worst impulses.

MOYNIHAN

If you can get anything you ever wanted, the joy button disappears. You can’t even have the joy of being good at something.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Elon Musk pays guys to play Diablo for him and makes AI videos of himself in Roman armor. He can’t even make his own AI videos of himself halfway creative and cool. To me the joy is still, I read your book, I genuinely enjoyed it, it was resonant, and I’m glad someone did that. They took the time. All it ultimately did was entertain me, and I took stuff from it, but someone did that. You’d think people would want that in the culture at scale, that many people would have the chance to make something and then to experience something.

MOYNIHAN

Not to keep rambling, but I think some of these rich guys are like the children who, they’re mega wealthy, and I think they’ve been abused. They don’t have the perspective because they’ve probably been ritually tortured as children by their billionaire dads. So now it’s all mine, I control all of you, and now I am just like my father.

OLIVER BATEMAN

There’s a lot of resentment for creators in it. The desire that you’ll never need an artist again, never need a writer again, never need a musician again. A long time ago I did a story for a magazine on these guys in the 2010s who were muscle morphing women, making Photoshop morphs of female bodybuilders. I talked to them on DeviantArt, and a lot of the guys said, well, I’m not really interested in women, and I’m not really interested in muscle, but I like controlling the image. Making them do what I want.

MOYNIHAN

Muscle morphing.

OLIVER BATEMAN

A female bodybuilder I knew, Vanessa, tipped me off. She’d been morphed in an image, and she said, you’ve got to talk to these guys, find out what makes them tick. This is pre-AI, so you had to have a little Photoshop skill to do it. One guy told me, I do this, and then I drink a Monster and I can sleep at night. And I recently reran a version of the piece on the Substack, and it was great, because one of the guys from that era reappeared in the comments to say another person in the article had stolen his images and was photoshopping his photoshops. I remember both of you! You’re still fighting this out! And a couple of them said, look, man, you need to update this. The age of AI has ruined our community. You can make these in five seconds. All the skill is gone. We’re all depressed now. They took our joy.

MOYNIHAN

AI has destroyed the muscle morph community.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Some of these morphs were terrible, Jesse. One guy said, I can only get off to bad Photoshop jobs. Not interested in men, not interested in women, just in shop jobs. That’s what they called them, shop jobs. So whenever you think you’ve gone weird enough in your book, there’s another level below. I thought I’d hit the motherlode of the strange, but there’s something below that too. And a lot of them said the same thing: I can finally control the men and the women, I can make them how I want. So imagine a billionaire. I can control everything. I’m the artist now. I can make my own movie. And the thing that comes out is terrible.

MOYNIHAN

Oh yeah, like Elon was going to make his AI version of the Odyssey.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’m sure he still might. He has the budget. He could do a two-hour AI Odyssey, and I’m sure it would be unwatchable. Anyway, I appreciate you coming on, Jesse. I’ve got to go grab my little one. Everybody go snag Forming when it comes out. It’s awesome.

MOYNIHAN

Cool, man.

The complete Forming arrives from Fantagraphics on October 6. Read the whole webcomic free at jessemoynihan.com, support Jesse’s animation work at his Patreon, and catch him on the book tour, where he’ll be screening the animatic with the 15-minute Michael-versus-devil fight.

(A Lot of) Suggested Reading

Forming (Fantagraphics, October 6) | Forming, the complete free webcomic | Jesse’s Patreon | Jesse on the fifteen-year process at Broken Frontier | “When Lore Bores,” my Paris Review essay on not reading the books in video games | The Work of Video Game Storytelling | The Work of Muscle Morphing | The Work of Comics | The Work of Comics, Part 2 | The Work of Comics, Part 3 | Dave Sim’s Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing | The Cerebus phone books, free at the Internet Archive | Toshio Ban’s The Osamu Tezuka Story | Room to Dream

PS: The Rockers broke up on “The Barber Shop,” Brutus Beefcake’s interview segment, at the end of 1991: superkick, then headfirst through the breakaway window. I have argued at length elsewhere that this remains the finest betrayal in the history of American scripted entertainment, Fredo Corleone included, because eight-year-olds like Jesse carried it for life while The Wrestler-in-real-life Jannetty carried it to the unemployment line and then eventually the amputation line.

PPS: The poker roguelite is Balatro. It has sold five million copies — now that’s doing the work!

The preliminary fighter on a typical UFC card works 30 hours a week at a gym and maybe spends another 20 posting on Instagram.1 He fights three times a year if he’s lucky and clears $100,000 if he’s good, though it’s always way less after his considerable expenses. But he thinks of himself as a “cage fighter” and that’s how he describes himself when asked about his occupation. He trains constantly in the evening and posts photos of those workouts to social media to drive engagement, whatever that means. It doesn’t mean much, and it doesn’t drive anything anywhere. He tries to get up at six in the morning to do his road work, but he usually doesn’t. He lives alone in a rat hole of an apartment near the gym and recently was jilted by some CrossFit Games girl who left him for a tren-powered fitness influencer who can get the real endorsements.

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The preliminary fighter tells his friends he’ll quit everything else as soon as he gets on the main card. He knows it’s a lie, but he thinks it’s a disgrace that he has to hold a regular job, teaching normies how to perform keylocks and forward rolls, because his work as a fighter doesn’t afford him a life of leisure. He enjoys the gym and will grapple with his boys all the livelong day, soaking up the sweat and staph infections from the mats. He hangs around the place after he’s through with training to watch the other guys work out. He’s proud of being a fighter and thinks this makes him a spectacular man, someone who sees more and further than other men. He doesn’t dissipate but instead reveres his muscular body; it’s both temple and tomb.

He’s easily offended when people don’t recognize his name. He has never even had a feature about him published on one of the clickbait MMA websites. In fact, he has never shown up anywhere outside of the UFC website. He has never appeared on regular cable, only ESPN+ streaming. He has a Sherdog fight results page, not a Wikipedia page. In the old days of print media, the results of his fights would’ve been carried in agate type after the descriptions of the main events he supports. Today, they’re buried on the barely-functioning parts of ESPN.com where nobody bothers to scroll. He believes the reason he gets no publicity is because the blue-check journalists2 are a bunch of vaccinated sissies.

Once he was in an emergency main card fight, the first fight of the real show. He was primed to fight, even though he took the bout on short notice, but instead ended up sitting in the locker room when his opponent got sick during warm-ups. That was one of the best nights of his career. On the worst nights of his career, which are many, he gets beaten badly but always manages to go the distance. He was a wrestler in high school and knows how to stretch things out. He’s a 3-round, 15-minute kind of guy, typically losing 29-28 on two scorecards and 30-27 on the other.

The preliminary fighter has been working at this honest trade for 12 years and is growing old in it. He dreams of earning six figures in a single night but has never gotten close to that. He’s never been knocked out and is understood to be a durable, game fighter with little skill. What skill he has reflects the state of MMA in 2012, when he debuted on the regional circuit. He fights with a wild gladness and tosses little patty-cake punches when he’s not clinching and dirty boxing. He seldom knocks anyone out. Fighters with speed cut him up with jabs—he’s one of those early 2010s zombie fighters who never bothered to learn how to defend the jab—and he gets work whenever a rising star or great [insert demographic group here; the Indian subcontinent desperately needs a non-Sikh fighter who won’t get knocked out in the first round] hope needs experience. He isn’t considered dangerous, but his stamina and competitive fury give an opponent a good evening’s work and his thin, easily-pierced skin impresses the crowd with a bloody fight even when it’s a boring one.

His nose is flattened and there are scars along the edges of his eyes. The left brow is disfigured by the bald slash of a healed cut. He talks thickly, as if his tongue is swollen, but his mind hasn’t yet been impaired. He has never become accustomed to losing. He’s depressed when he’s beaten and weeps afterwards. Once he broke the knuckle on his right hand when he hit the shower stall. He doesn’t believe he has ever been beaten cleanly. He considers the judges who vote against him to be dishonest. He dislikes the new scoring system, which prioritizes damage above everything else and hurts him because he bleeds so easily and thus always looks damaged. He’s positive that the top guys in the company, many of whom beat him on the way up, have mysterious political connections or get by solely on social media juice, of which he has little because he is old and not particularly charismatic. He has won as many fights as he has lost, which is why the UFC hasn’t cut him yet. He likes to say he’s a 50/50 bet, just like the lottery—either you win or you lose. The guys he beats are like him but worse.

He was never a prospect. He fought a lot in school when he was a kid. He joined a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym in a strip mall in a nothing place like Portage, Indiana and started winning local tournaments. Soon he was getting regional fights. He won his first pro fight and knew an ecstasy that has never been duplicated. He believed that a famous promoter would come to the dressing room and give him an immense bonus to sign a contract. When no one appeared, he went home to his parents’ basement.

The preliminary fighter finally left home after he racked up back-to-back professional wins, which took a few years. He eventually got to the UFC after stints in the LFA and Bellator. He won his first UFC fight, too. He returned to his ho-hum Hoosier hometown and hung out with some old friends. He was amazed that they weren’t impressed by him. He fondly remembers Pat Miletich, the first UFC welterweight champion, who’d been a Midwestern fighter they all admired. But his friends paid no attention to his stories about fighting. He’d told them all who he was fighting—a small-name guy on the way out of the UFC—and the only one who showed up was an old wrestling teammate who worked in his corner as a favor. He moved from his original rat hole apartment to one closer to the gym the next day.

He took the job at the gym coaching MMA when his parents refused to lend him any more money. He owes mom and dad about $40,000. It’s a debt that will never be paid although they’re supposedly taking it out of his purses in installments. But the preliminary fighter is a gifted actor when it comes to playing the part of a good son, so his folks never receive their fair share.

Once he thought he’d drive a sports car and live in a penthouse. He was going to be a champion and make the girls in high school sorry they’d ignored him. Now and then he wonders why it never happened. He talks about breaks, but he isn’t specific. Good breaks? Bad ones? He’s had a few. He still gets a kick out of carrying his bag on the way to the fight. He thinks everyone knows who he is and where he’s going. No one cares, and he’s sick in obscurity. But he will fight in the preliminaries as long as he can. He’s a fighter like they used to be, a real man of which there are now vanishingly few.

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As ever, I find myself grappling with ebbs and flows in my own freelance business. I’ve kept going, as one does, because I’ve got a solid day job and this income often amounts to nothing more than $2-3k a month for work I can do from the comfort of my home office.

That said, after two decades in the game, it’s hard to keep generating fresh or unusual topics — and doing so is essential for an “out-of-cite” figure like “ya boi” here. This is because my stubborn refusal to pander by writing the same content over and over for an audience of parasocial simps and haters has meant that I’ve had to keep reinventing myself and my work simply to bring in the do re mi for the our savings account. Each article written in this fashion lives or dies on its own merits, and each “blank page problem” is another puzzle to be solved — especially when a myriad of editors and their even more numerous demands are in play (I’m no Orson Welles, but the exasperation he expresses here — “whatever it is you want, I just can’t give it to you” becomes more relevant with the cruel and ceaseless passage of time).

Based on my own vibes-based market projections, I can’t imagine selling anything to publications well past 2029-30 — and even that is quite late, especially given the rapid progress of AI-generated content (thankfully, my day job involves overseeing the production of AI content at scale… “but only for now,” as the Avenue Q song goes) — so it’s incumbent upon me to justify the perpetuation of the creative output that’s most meaningful to me.

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With that in mind, I’ve decided to republish and expand this article, which appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review more than a half-decade ago.1 At the time, I was dealing with a profound crisis of faith2, pondering my gradually-diminshing workload in publications such as VICE and The Atlantic while listening to Mickey Newbury’s “Nights When I Am Sane” and Johnny Paycheck’s “The Old Violin” on repeat.3

After it appeared, business picked up, even if much of that work is forgotten or memory-holed4: I landed the obituary beat at the Ringer, I labored on a crummy podcast that was somehow making $3-4k a month5 after leaving a (largely unpaid/volunteer) administrative role at Payday Report, I discovered a number of other regular outlets, and I started climbing the actual 9-to-5 corporate ladder from the aforementioned comfort of my home office.

Alas, it seems the “real writing” world is winding down even as I’ve matured as a writer and developed a better understanding of what I do and don’t want to do with my work. Thus I’ve reached another impasse — “we’re always coming to ****ing crossroads,” as the Professors Brothers told an aspiring teaching assistant. What does the future hold? I suppose it’s impossible to say; my upbringing was so chaotic that the brute beast in me is happy merely to be “sucking wind for another 48,” as my father would put it, content with little more than “two hots and a cot.” It is only for my daughter that I worry, but I worry ceaselessly.6 How much longer, I wonder, will I live the creative life “sin vivir en mí,” in the words of Teresa of Ávila? Yet one must keep making moves until they’re all out of moves, because they can.7

During the summer and fall of 2016, I began to experience a kind of social death common to freelancers: Many of my commissioned stories, several of them multiple months and drafts old, were getting killed by the publications that had commissioned them. For any unfamiliar with the parlance, this meant that instead of invoicing publications for the agreed-upon rate after a story had been published, I would be invoicing for a fraction of that amount. The post-mortem inevitably ended with the “loop around,” a process that involved checking in with editors and billing departments until I was paid, a timeframe that was also sometimes in the order of months. Essentially, I was being paid to go away.

Kill fees are just one of the banal indignities attendant in the writing-for-pay world: Kafkaesque editing tests that lead nowhere; ceaseless competition between writers, some of whom are satisfied with producing content in exchange for exposure; and the simple act of collecting any promised money at all. The bottom line: If you’re a freelancer, you are left adrift in a world in which no one can afford to care about your plight. As someone who grew up in a multi-generational union family involved in coal mining, I recognize it’s hard to organize a group that is by nature spread out, across the country and around the globe, typing away in coffee shops and libraries dedicating the free hours we have to all that goes into make a living piece-by-piece—or, as it may be, not making a living. Without an ongoing public conversation about these indignities, how can we build the sense of solidarity essential to demanding improved treatment from our employers?

Like many unwary, soon-to-be hacks who stumble into this so-called “profession,” I embarked on writing for pay in a fortuitous but decidedly unsystematic way. I had spent many years toiling in graduate school, and although I harbored a desire to write for a broader audience, I had written little that I thought fit for public consumption. However, on the heels of one surprisingly viral Salon essay about my time working at Abercrombie & Fitch, editors invited me to pitch, and I soon earned enough, in addition to my salary as an assistant history professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, to make the down payment on a house during the fall of 2014.

That same year, I also got my first kill fee—for what was pitched as a simple explainer on the merits of electing Supreme Court justices based on work I had done in grad school. The idea of a story “dying” like this was new to me, as was the importance of agreeing to a kill fee in writing prior to submitting a draft. I had studied journalism at the University of North Carolina and worked for a pair of college newspapers, The Daily Tar Heel and The Pitt News, yet knew next to nothing about the actual business of freelancing. I did know, however, that the editor who axed the story was overwhelmed and the publication where she worked restructuring. Without looking at the first draft, she offered me $100 on a $400 story and told me to take it elsewhere. I eventually sold it to Mic for $150. At the time, $400 was a hefty sum for online-only pieces, since legacy publications like The Atlantic were paying $100 to $125 a story for digital work, often regardless of word count or required reporting. I was broken up about it at the time, but I came to realize it was the best-case scenario for a killed piece: An editor quickly passes on a story they can’t give the proper attention to so that the writer can take it elsewhere.

Other stories died a slower death. One I wrote for Vice in 2014 chronicled my exploits as a debt collector; not long after I found myself hounding publications for money I was owed. Once, after several months and a dozen emails, a story was killed with a single sentence: “Hey dude, so I do believe the Cindy piece is getting killed so bill me for 1/3 of your usual rate as a kill fee.” I netted $83, and I never worked for that particular editor again.

When I left both Texas and higher ed in 2016, I thought I had secured enough work to freelance full-time. By then, my piece on the pain of leaving higher ed in a story for Vox netted me representation at a literary agency8 and solicitations from still more editors.

I was sorely mistaken, and it was a mistake that would dent my pocketbook and eventually break my heart. 2016 and 2017 were bad years for the journalism market, much like every other year since people began writing stories about the “death of print” and the “pivot to video.” Commissions dried up as publications like Vocativ closed their doors. Between March 2016 and the end of 2017, I earned a measly $27,000 from selling my work to mainstream publications—a wage that would be unsustainable for someone who didn’t live in an affordable city like Pittsburgh, and whose partner did not have health insurance and other benefits.

Around $4,000 of these earnings came from fees for killed work, roughly a quarter of what I would have made if those stories had been published. My Google Drive folder became a graveyard of dead drafts. I started joking on Twitter with other freelancers that my byline should read “The Ghost of Oliver Bateman.” That term had arisen, oddly enough, in an essay that was killed by one publication before eventually being published elsewhere. This was a story that had mattered a great deal to me, a personal essay that dealt with the adolescent pain and loneliness of my difficult high school experience. “The ghost of Oliver Bateman, like the ghosts that wander through a mystery train the heroes board during the first half of Final Fantasy VI, has lingered behind…in an old future that had once seemed far beyond the horizon but now was history,” I had written of coming to terms with my past spent locked in the bedroom, playing the same video game over and over while my soon-to-be-divorced parents went all Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on each other. It was a story that meant something to me, and I gave everything I had to its composition. In this case, that everything wasn’t enough, and the sense of selfhood I had put in essay form wound up on the cutting-room floor.

Most prior killed pieces had felt like business—the story wasn’t timely anymore, the friendly editor had quit—but this unkind cut seared. Deep down, all I had ever really wanted from my career was to write, and each time a meaningful story like that died, I felt like I “wound up missing happiness by a few minutes at some appointed location,” as I had written in another long-dead but heartfelt piece eventually republished in a significantly revised form. “What does it mean, you have to ask yourself, to be so close to something that you can taste it, yet still so far from it that nobody would believe you were ever there?” I asked at the conclusion of this second story. In that piece, I had somehow managed to express how the deaths of important essays had left me feeling: “You always believed you were lying to people when you told them you had almost done something great, like you were fudging the record merely by reporting it wie es eigentlich gewesen, ‘how it had really happened.’”9

By the end of the year, a trail of killed pieces and dead dreams followed me. At many outlets, freelancers are the bottom of the barrel, serving as a source of cheap reporting and potentially viral but exploitative personal essays10—which are stressful to write, and even more disappointing to have killed. Editors are there to bring your stories to life, but endless slash-and-burn reflows related to one’s own traumatic personal experiences can trigger all kinds of painful emotions. “It just wasn’t coming through the way we’d envisioned,” one editor wrote—a kiss-off familiar to any writer who has received such classic publishing industry blow-offs as “love the content, hate the writing” or “hate the content, love the writing.” It was only my life, after all; it’s a shame it hadn’t come through the way the editor and I envisioned.

The biggest disappointments, though, the kills that threaten your livelihood most dramatically and directly, are the features.11 Given the hours invested in their creation and the money paid for them, these pieces are often make-or-break propositions for both writer and publication. But that didn’t stop a recent story about drug testing and drug deaths in professional bodybuilding I had sold to a popular new publication for $1,500 from spiraling out of control. The project reached 20,000 words across two drafts and a separate “interactive story” file, totaling roughly 75 hours of work and many screens of yellow Google docs revision notes. It was killed for $30012 when a new editor took over the section and did what almost all new editors do, requesting that I write a completely different story that suited their tastes instead.

Many jaded veterans of the industry accept this as a fact of life. One longtime colleague sold a story to a Hearst publication in December 2016, submitted a draft in January 2017, and was reassured every three to four months that this editor was “digging out of [his] email” and “so excited to make this work” before concluding in January 2018 that he didn’t “have the bandwidth” to proceed and so was killing the $800 story for $200. “How much email do you think he was dealing with?” she asked me. I shrugged, wishing that I had this problem since, at least at the time, so many of my pitches went unanswered.

I knew others might be in a similar boat, so at one point I created a Google doc with notes about editors and the rates their publications paid. I shared it with dozens of freelancers, but many wrote back saying they believed this was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” business; nobody wanted to tell me, or potential rivals, about their meager pay from a prestigious publication or the times they misinterpreted an overeager editor’s signals and submitted work “on spec.”

What I learned from the Google doc experiment was that freelancer openness and solidarity are critical in an industry that takes advantage of its most vulnerable members. As such, I felt I had to disclose this information, as well as information about my earnings. The freelance field was assumed to be competitive and cutthroat, but it was more like we were scattered to the four winds and scared to talk about our experiences for fear of coming off like losers unworthy of publication. Even in a best-case scenario, however, many of our most important stories were dying, and it ate at me to think that these piddling kill fees were all some of us might have to show for it. The doc still exists, but it, too, has joined the Google doc graveyard.13

Eventually, I “quit” full-time freelancing and took a full-time job so that I could pay my bills, although I haven’t stopped selling my writing (hence, the article you are reading). I just have to be smarter and safer about it, as should other freelancers, since many of these fees we are trying to recover are too small to justify paying the fees associated with going to small claims court; and local laws such as New York’s Freelance Isn’t Free Act aren’t likely to prod a reluctant and perhaps failing publication into sending you the $50 you’re owed for services rendered.14 There are a variety of best practices one can follow to avoid having their writing killed or forgotten, such as working on edits over the phone rather than via marathon Google docs comment-resolving sessions, and working as much as possible with outlets that have always been reliable about payment.

My ultimate hope, as a person from a family with deep roots in organized labor, remains that one day freelance writing will be sold through a kind of union hiring hall, similar to the hall utilized by unions in the building trades.15 But such a goal would entail a lot of self-help: holding other writers, particularly academics writing solely to burnish their “brands,” accountable for writing for exposure; sharing information about pay rates and editorial practices; and ensuring that all commissioned stories, however small the offered rate, come with contracts that specify detailed procedures about kill fees. Now, with AI ascendant, it seems unlikely that anyone will pay for anything, except reporting (which remains valuable, and for which AI can help greatly with transcription…AI-assisted transcription is a wonderful thing, as these sometimes-useless business tools go).16

Without the kind of genuine candor that paves the way for solidarity and cooperation, freelancers will remain easy marks for exploitation by their bosses, and the powerful stories they wish to tell risk becoming so many tombstones to what might have been.17

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On September 17, 2024, forty-five minutes after Governor Gavin Newsom signed a pair of bills restricting AI-generated political content, Theodore H. “Ted” Frank was in the Eastern District of California filing a complaint against them. Frank, 57, runs the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, the nonprofit public-interest firm he co-founded at the end of 2018 with Melissa Holyoak (now an FTC commissioner), and its Center for Class Action Fairness, which he started in 2009 and which has since knocked more than $650 million off excessive attorney fee requests.

Frank came out of Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, earned an economics degree at Brandeis, finished at the University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with Order of the Coif and a seat on the law review, clerked for the legendary Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit, and spent a decade defending class actions at Kirkland & Ellis, Irell & Manella, and O’Melveny & Myers before taking a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute to study the Class Action Fairness Act.

Adam Liptak of the Times calls Frank the leading critic of abusive class action settlements; the American Lawyer called him the indefatigable scourge of underwhelming ones. In 2018 he argued Frank v. Gaos at the Supreme Court on his own behalf. Find him and his work at hlli.org and @tedfrank, among other places.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Before we get to any of it: somebody told me you had a hand in the early days of Baseball Prospectus. I loved those guys. Is that true?

FRANK

Absolutely true. Back in the old Usenet days. Gary Huckabay, Christina Kahrl, Clay Davenport, all of them. Rec.sport.baseball started up something called the Baseball Prospectus, and I wrote the Chicago White Sox chapter for the very first one, which was just samizdat, photocopied and passed around. Then when they got a real publisher they forgot I was on the team and stopped asking me. So I was never a huge contributor. I wrote some essays for a few of the later editions, but I was gone by the time Nate Silver was there and the other people who made it famous.

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OLIVER BATEMAN

I came out of rec.sport.pro-wrestling, which is how I ended up on the sportswriting side of my career. Some of those guys landed at places and gave me work.1 Kindred spirits. Those were good days to be on the forums.

FRANK

Absolutely. Usenet. Some really great names.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I told a bunch of people this was going to be the topic and got the same answer every time. Oh, class actions, I see those on Instagram every day. The fruit drink one, the Roblox one. I fill them all out. Which seems like a strange way to run public enforcement, and yet the ads are everywhere.

FRANK

Those ads mostly just sign you up to receive money the defendant is going to pay out anyway. There is a pool, and it gets split among the people who sign up. And some of those ads are not even for class actions. There are people signing you up for mass arbitration, threatening to file ten thousand arbitration claims instead of bringing a class action, and because the defendant does not want to defend ten thousand arbitrations, they agree to a group settlement that looks a lot like a class action. Which is ironic, given that they put the arbitration clause in to avoid exactly that problem. The lawyers are creative enough to say, fine, you have to give us a remedy, and we will go find people who want that remedy. There is a lot of that about.

Our innovation was recognizing the shape of the system. The lawyers are trying to get paid. The defendant is trying to get out as cheaply as possible. The way you accomplish both is to structure a settlement where the class does not actually get anything, and then, to get it past the judge, you pretend the class is getting something. In the American system you do not ask to be in a class action. You are just in it unless you affirmatively opt out. The lawyer shows up with one class member and says, this person represents everybody else, I now represent everybody with your permission, Your Honor, and look at this great settlement I won, so please appoint me as counsel for the entire class. Twenty years ago especially there was a long history of attorneys structuring settlements so the attorneys got all the money and the class got nothing, while pretending there was real injunctive relief, or coupons, or something that was not actually worth anything.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Was there any public good coming out of that at all?

FRANK

You have law professors arguing that it causes deterrence. The corporation has to pay, it does not matter who they pay, and therefore they will not act badly, because they will be punished by having to pay. The fact that consumers are not getting the money does not really matter.

I think that disregards the incentive structure for the lawyers. Say it is a really crummy case, but it will cost millions of dollars for the defendant to defend. The lawyers can say, hey, give us three million to go away. If you can build an imaginary settlement where the class gets nothing and the lawyers get the full three million in settlement value, now it is profitable to bring that case. They get three million, their clients get nothing except illusory injunctive relief or a promise not to do it again, and the defendant gets out of litigation without spending five million defending it. Win, win for everybody except the consumer. And because the crummy case is profitable, you get more crummy cases, which hurts deterrence. If everybody gets punished whether they did something wrong or not, that is the opposite of deterrence, because deterrence is the cost of doing something wrong versus the cost of doing it right.

Our argument is that if you force the attorneys to share the money with the class, they no longer have the incentive to bring the bad cases. If they get twenty-five percent of settlement value instead of a hundred percent, that rinky-dink million-dollar or three-million-dollar settlement no longer pays them enough to take the case and carry the risk. So they can only take the good cases, the strong cases, the ones that might actually collect money for a class. We are deterring bad class actions through a rule that requires class members to get paid, and I think that is a feature rather than a bug.

OLIVER BATEMAN

How unique is the American class action?

FRANK

Completely unique. Every time I talk to European lawyers or Asian lawyers, their jaws drop. How do you do this? To the extent those systems are starting up collective litigation, they require licensing by the state to bring the case in the first place, and they require the class to opt in, so the defendant cannot buy up all the claims at once and the attorney cannot use the prospect of disposing of all the claims to extract settlement value. Different protections, different costs, less benefit to the lawyers. The gigantic contingency fees we see here are also unique to us, and there is less incentive to be entrepreneurial elsewhere because you cannot make your fortune in that kind of zero-sum scenario.

And then you have places like France, which has no jury trials, where the judges do not come up out of the bar. They are trained separately, and they are used to being inquisitorial. In Anglo-American systems it is adversarial. Our judges do not run investigations. They rely on what the parties put in front of them. You could talk for hours about comparative law, but on class actions the American system is absolutely unique, and very little understood. There is a generic sense out there that a class action is a big lawsuit, so every big lawsuit gets called a class action even when it is nothing of the kind.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The defense I hear is that the government gets spared all this enforcement work, so who cares where the money lands.

FRANK

Maybe, maybe not. Many of these class actions are follow-ons to something the government is already investigating. It would be one thing to say the government got there first and therefore we do not need your class action, but that is never the case. The government announces it is going after some company for doing something bad, the stock price drops on the announcement, and then the stock price drops again in anticipation of the securities litigation that is coming. As Matt Levine jokes in his newsletter, everything is securities fraud. Any time you get that stock drop you get the lawyers glomming on, and what are they adding? It is a pure transaction cost. The lawyers take thirty-three percent. About that much money gets spent by the defendant or the defendant’s insurers, which gets passed along into future insurance costs.

And small shareholders do not have the capacity to pull together the claim forms. So it is ironically a wealth distribution upward. The big shareholders, the pension funds, the hedge funds, they get the notices and they have dedicated staff to track them and file, and it is worth it to them because they might collect a hundred thousand or ten thousand or whatever. A small shareholder getting thirty or forty dollars often finds it is not worth the time. On the consumer settlements, where you are talking five or six dollars, it may not be worth the postage.

OLIVER BATEMAN

When does this become an industry? It is a twentieth-century innovation. At what point do firms work out that they can run it as a chop shop and process them at volume? Our legal system is very good at finding those seams.

FRANK

With the expansion of tort law in the sixties, people started to recognize the class action as a procedural device for aggregating smaller claims, especially once you had the consumer fraud statutes coming in through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. At first they tried to run class actions for asbestos claims, and the Supreme Court policed that and shot it down. The class is supposed to be similarly situated, and you are gluing together all these people with different claims and different defenses who are not sufficiently similar. There were attempts at large-scale employment class actions, most famously Wal-Mart v. Dukes, and the Supreme Court shot down certification there too.

So it takes off in the eighties, nineties, and 2000s, especially as lawyers learn you can find magnet jurisdictions. You sue in Madison County, Illinois, and the court certifies the class before the defendant even shows up. Then the judge is willing to enforce really, really expensive discovery, and the defendant has basically no recourse in a jurisdiction where the judges and the lawyers are a very serious good-old-boy network. There were a few other places like that. Parts of Texas before Texas had tort reform, Alabama, California. You had nationwide class actions being settled in tiny state courts with elected judges, the lawyers walking away with millions, the class getting nothing, and the defendant with very little chance to defend itself.

Then in 2005 Congress passed what I think was the primary legislation of the Bush administration’s second term, the Class Action Fairness Act, which moved most of these cases into federal court with a handful of exceptions. That ended one set of problems and made things much better for consumers, for defendants, for everybody except the worst of the lawyers. It also made it possible for my organization, which started doing this in various predecessor forms in 2009, to come in and object in federal court. It is procedurally a lot easier. There are better protections, and the judges will actually grapple with it when you show up and say, this is not the way class actions are supposed to work.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Give me a recent one. Something that has done nothing for anybody and a great deal for the practitioners.

FRANK

We have a case pending right now in the Ninth Circuit. It was a privacy lawsuit against Google. A journalist, not a trial lawyer, determined that you could turn off tracking in Google Maps and it was not supposed to share your data, and then learned that Google was sharing it anyway, whether you turned it off on your phone or turned it off in the app. State attorneys general came in, fined Google a bunch of money, and forced Google to stop. And simultaneously there is a follow-on class action built on the journalists’ research, and that has settled.

The settlement is that Google creates a fund of sixty-two million dollars. The lawyers get nineteen million and the class gets zero. The rest is a big slush fund for a set of left-wing groups. Nothing requires the recipients to be left-wing other than that being what the attorneys chose to present to the court. They do it partly because some of these organizations are clients of the law firm, some of them have lead partners of the firm sitting on their boards, some of them are the attorneys’ alma maters, and some of them are just left-leaning outfits that are promising to do left-wing things. The class is two hundred million people. Maybe a hundred fifty million of them would not like what is being done in their name with their money.

And the judge decides who gets paid. This judge was very excited about getting to stop being a judge and start being a grant administrator with a big pot of philanthropy. We said, why are these unrelated organizations, which are not even unrelated, they are affiliated with class counsel, getting the class’s money? If the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to support the ACLU, it should come out of their pockets and not the class’s pockets. It is perfectly feasible to distribute that money to the class. Much smaller settlements get distributed to similar class sizes all the time. You can complain that if you divided it evenly among every single class member it would be a tiny amount and not worth paying out, but you do not have to do it that way, and most class actions are not done that way. Most class actions settle for less than a dollar per class member. You create a claims process, let class members sign up if they want the money, and divide it that way.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Is it common now to see outside groups earmarked in a settlement, or is that rare?

FRANK

It is a doctrine called cy pres. It used to be much more common, and we took the vanguard in fighting it, because it was a way to take money from consumers and give it to left-wing groups, or friends of the attorneys, or in one case relatives of the attorneys, or friends of the judge. There was a lot of corruption in that process. It was never going to go to, say, the Federalist Society, or to an organization like mine that actually fights for class members. It went to organizations that fight for lawyers and for left-wing causes.

There was a case involving Citibank shareholders where they were going to give a million dollars to organizations that help mortgage holders sue banks like Citibank. That is not what shareholders want. That is hurting the shareholders. At that point you are not litigating for the class, you are litigating for a group of lawyers you are friendly with. We eventually got that money distributed to the class. And with the challenges we brought, the tactic of settling so that the class gets nothing while the lawyers’ favorite charities or nonprofits or activist organizations or universities get the money largely dissipated. But there is one big law firm out in California that thinks it can still get away with it, that thinks I cannot be everywhere at once, which is probably true. They will keep trying, because they get to hand out tens of millions of dollars to their favorite nonprofits and then get paid a commission for fundraising they could not otherwise have charged for. These are involuntary donations by the class.

OLIVER BATEMAN

When you see those earmarks in a settlement, is there some argument attached? Some document explaining why the funds cannot go to the class and why they have to be substituted out to these organizations?

FRANK

They usually sell it as, look how large the class is.

OLIVER BATEMAN

You can’t reach them all. Pennies.

FRANK

You cannot reach them all, and this is better for the class, and the class would prefer this to getting a twenty-five-cent check. Except that is true of every settlement. Every settlement is settling for less than a dollar a class member. Every once in a while you get a really big one and it is five dollars a class member. And the way it actually gets distributed is you have a claims process, somewhere between half a percent and ten percent of the class signs up, and suddenly those twenty-three-cent checks are twenty-three-dollar checks, because so few class members bother. That is far from optimal, but at least the money is going to the class and everybody in the class has a fair shot at it.

The argument on the other side is that the attorneys know better, and they would rather see the money go to the ACLU, and the ACLU will do more good with it than the class would. It is a very paternalistic view of what class members want. Give the judge the power to be a grant administrator instead of telling him he needs a claims process where class members sign up and get very small checks, and the lawyers are going to prefer handing the money to their favorite nonprofits. They get ceremonies. They get to stand there with the oversized check.

My alumni magazine ran a class action attorney, an alumnus, who distributed money from a settlement to the university. The law school was very, very excited and featured him. They are not featuring me in the alumni magazine for winning money for consumers. They want the money to go to the law school. So on the one hand you get the ceremony with your alma mater and the oversized check and the gala dinner, or maybe your friend works at a nonprofit and you can help your friend out. On the other hand you can send four million ten-dollar checks and not even get a Christmas card. You get a ten-dollar check, you do not feel grateful to the class action lawyer. You are a little annoyed that he is getting nineteen million and you are getting ten dollars out of the forty million they won. So the incentive is for the lawyers to do that.

OLIVER BATEMAN

For the record, I’m always happy to get the ten-dollar check. I sign up for every one that comes our way. There was one from a juice company, some natural juice thing, and I think that came back twenty-five dollars.

FRANK

I once got a two-hundred-dollar check.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I’m genuinely happy about it. It should go to the class.

FRANK

I agree it should go to the class, and the lawyer has an ethical duty to do the best thing for the class. The lawyer self-justifies by deciding the best thing for the class is for the ACLU to have more money, or for Harvard to have more money. Harvard only has a multi-billion dollar endowment, so obviously they need it more than the class does! So you have these fights, and we will see what the Ninth Circuit does with our appeal. The district court was happy to approve the settlement because he likes being a grant administrator. The Ninth Circuit judges do not get to be grant administrators, so maybe they will be more neutral about it. But there are some very bad Ninth Circuit precedents where they have signed off on similarly bad settlements.

We took it to the Supreme Court once. They threw out the settlement on a technicality and did not reach the question of whether you can have settlements like this at all. That was also a Google case, a much smaller settlement, with the same sort of corruption, the lawyers getting paid and the class not getting paid. Maybe it goes back to the Supreme Court. Maybe there is an appetite for it if we lose in the Ninth Circuit. But this law firm has given out tens and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars at this point to its favorite left-wing nonprofits instead of to class members, and has suffered no consequences, no discipline. Why are you breaching your fiduciary duty to a class? And the courts have let them get away with it, sometimes without class members even having an opportunity to object. So we shall see. We shall see what the Ninth Circuit does with this Google settlement.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Is the tide turning your way? Over time, does this get recognized as ridiculous?

FRANK

We have won these cases in several jurisdictions and lost them in a couple. The Supreme Court took it up once and declined two or three other times. We had one case ready to go to the Supreme Court, and the week before the Court was going to consider it, the defendant declared bankruptcy. Whoops, automatic stay. The Court would not hold it in abeyance, and now we will never know.

I think this is the big one. If the courts sign off on a forty-two-million-dollar slush fund to friends of the attorneys, to organizations that say they are going to use the money for things the class will not like, and to organizations that say they are going to use the money in ways I think are illegal, to discriminate on the basis of race, then you are going to see a lot more of these. This is the test case and it is now or never. And if it gets to the Supreme Court there will be a big fight, because you will have a great many organizations saying our nonprofits really need this money, and the class should not get it, and we should.

OLIVER BATEMAN

This is one of those issues where the weight of the world is against the United States, like voter ID. Plenty of other countries mandate it and here it is a knife fight. But even taking the politics out of it, this looks like bad policy and a bad future for the legal system.

FRANK

There are lots of things in the legal system that are bad public policy for the public and very good for lawyers. And wouldn’t you know it, the lawyers are the ones creating the rules for the legal system. To the extent the rest of us countenance that, there is going to be a lot of rent-seeking and wealth extraction out of the productive parts of the economy.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Speaking of rent-seeking and new frontiers, you have taken on AI work. There is going to be an enormous amount of litigation and confusion around AI, and I think especially around speech. How did you get into it?

FRANK

We do not only do class actions. We do regulatory challenges, and lawsuits against disruptions of public order. We have a couple of our own class actions pending on behalf of drivers trapped in their cars by illegal demonstrations by pro-Hamas activists. But when we bring free speech cases, what often happens is the government says, oh, do not worry, this law does not apply to you, therefore you have no standing in federal court, please throw the case out without addressing whether the law is legal or not. So we are very cognizant of needing the right plaintiff, somebody actually facing a threat for their speech or already punished for it.

There was a viral video that came out when Vice President Harris got the nomination. It was AI-generated, a mashup of an AI version of her voice with real clips of her speaking, saying all sorts of self-critical things about herself and Joe Biden. It was very funny and very clearly fake. The YouTube caption said parody. But Elon Musk reposted it to X, where it got millions of views, and because it was Musk, and because it was against Vice President Harris and therefore by implication in support of Trump, the media went nuts. The line was that Musk was trying to deceive people into thinking Harris had actually said these things. Everybody was very disingenuously pretending it was not just a joke. You can complain the joke was offensive. I do not think it was. It was parody and satire, and people say things at least as nasty about Donald Trump.

Then Governor Newsom quotes the Musk tweet quoting the video and says videos like this should be illegal, and we are going to pass legislation to ban it and criminalize it. Now you have the government saying it is going to prosecute the guy who made this video, except the legislation has not passed yet. So we went to the creator, a fellow who goes by the YouTube name Mr Reagan, like Dr Pepper, no period after the Mr, and said, Governor Newsom is threatening you, we would love to represent you pro bono if you do not already have a lawyer, we can sue and block this, and you will get some more publicity for your videos. We want to bring good First Amendment cases vindicating the right to free speech and to make fun of politicians. We signed him up, got a retainer, and waited for the legislation to pass. We waited for Newsom to sign it. We had the complaint written and the briefing ready to go, and forty-five minutes after he signed the bill we were in the Eastern District of California in Sacramento filing, and shortly after that filing a motion for a preliminary injunction, before anybody else had their shoes on.

We got a judge who immediately understood the First Amendment implications and enjoined enforcement. Then a lot of other people sued and joined into our litigation, including X itself, and all of us together got a permanent injunction against laws that either sought to ban the use of AI to make fun of politicians or to penalize social media companies that did not immediately take down and censor these videos. That is now pending before the Ninth Circuit. The government of California has appealed for the right to ban these parodies. Other states are doing it too, Minnesota and, surprisingly, Montana, and we have litigation pending in those states as well.

OLIVER BATEMAN

This is bad legislation whatever your politics, in the same family as a lot of the hate speech sentencing add-ons. Everybody should want to post parodies. I think the worry people have is that they will see the deepfake likeness and register it as real even though it is labeled, which at that point strikes me as buyer beware.

FRANK

You can imagine the worst case scenarios of deepfakes, putting people in scandalous situations or saying plausibly offensive things, as opposed to out-and-out parody. Somebody imitated Joe Biden’s voice and called people during the New Hampshire primary telling them not to vote. But when you are actually defrauding people, or trying to, there are existing laws against that, and that person is facing federal prosecution for those phone calls. When you are talking about parody, that is a different thing. And the California law had no exception for parody. The only exception was a disclaimer, and the disclaimer had to be so large it took up essentially the whole video and made it unwatchable. We posted a mockup of what it would have to look like. It is a giant block of text over the picture.

If you are not creating exceptions for parody or for other legitimate uses of a deepfake, you lose things like the Spencer Pratt campaign, which made very effective use of them. He is in a jurisdiction that is not going to vote for a Republican tied to Trump, so he came in third anyway. But they were entertaining videos and they showed the possibilities. And Governor Newsom himself has posted AI-created images, not videos, but portraits. I believe one was Trump in a dunce cap. Things that would be outlawed by his own legislation. These are effective communication tools. The fact that it is AI doing it does not make it different from other kinds of speech, any more than photography should be treated differently from painting, or radio differently from speech.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The right has pushed a lot of these issues by being fast on new technology, and I’ve spent years writing about which politicians can and cannot meme. They have used AI more than left-wing politicians have, and Pratt is a good example. He became visible on the strength of good memes.

FRANK

I do not think there is anything inherently right-wing about going to the technology. What is happening is that it is hard to do humor on the left now, because nothing can be offensive. What more moderate liberals call the everything bagel problem. You cannot raise one issue, you have to raise all of the issues, and that makes humor and communication more difficult. Also it is a guerrilla technology, and the left already has eighty or ninety percent of the late night hosts pushing.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The Jimmy Kimmels of the world.

FRANK

Right. So somebody adopting a new technology is competing against very well-funded comics with big platforms and really great writers. There is not that ecosystem on the right, or a mainstream media that lets people bubble up from below and make these things.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Anybody listening knows that political cartoons in this country have always been nasty. The 1780s, the 1820s, all the moments of great importance in American history. Pretty rough stuff. So of all the areas where there has been openness, it is political parody. People have been brawling over that one for a long time.

FRANK

Absolutely. As bad and as partisan and divisive as things are now, you can find stretches in the first hundred fifty years of the country where it was much more bare-knuckled, much more violent, much more libelous and defamatory. I do not think AI is anything but a new tool in the system. It is like inventing a new color or a new musical note. At the end of the day you still need the message.

OLIVER BATEMAN

In 2026, looking toward 2028, what else is on the table that people should know about?

FRANK

We are going after other bad things in the class action space. We are challenging a settlement now in the Second Circuit where the attorneys are getting three million and the class is getting one million. We have won this principle in other courts, that you cannot have these upside-down distributions where the lawyers get more than the class. We have always argued the class should be the primary beneficiary of any settlement. If the Second Circuit does not agree with us you will have a circuit split, where the courts disagree about the appropriate standard for judging class action settlements, and we would like to take that to the Supreme Court too.

We have those class actions pending against left-wing NGOs that are using civil disorder to punish everyday Americans in the name of, as one of the demonstrators put it, no more business as usual. Can everyday people harmed by actions designed to harm people, intended to harm people, hold them civilly accountable? Or do you have to rely on politically motivated prosecutors who do not believe in punishing this sort of thing? In San Francisco the prosecutor is actually putting people to criminal trial for it. That is not happening in Chicago, it is not happening in D.C., it is not happening in New York. Which leaves the possibility of civil recourse, and we are hoping the courts recognize it. We think tort law is that flexible. A couple of judges have disagreed with us so far. We will see what the appeals courts say.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Where should people find you, and what do you need?

FRANK

We are the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, hlli.org. If you have a class action settlement that seems unfair, that seems like the attorneys are collecting all the money, drop us a line. You have legal recourse. We can represent you pro bono as an objector. See what your options are.

And we need attorneys. If you are a good attorney at a big law firm, come take a pay cut and work for us and get to do interesting stuff. Work from home. And if you are a millionaire listening to Oliver Bateman and you want to donate so we can hire more attorneys, we would love to have that money. We are a 501(c)(3) and we rely on the generosity of people who agree with what we do.

OLIVER BATEMAN

Last question, and I think it’s the interesting one. Who wins the World Series?

FRANK

You have to think that as deep as the Los Angeles Dodgers pitching staff is, they have to be the favorites when you have that level of pitching. People are joking now that the Astros have gone on this thirteen-and-ten tear to take the lead in the American League West and might win the division at eighty-four and seventy-eight, so maybe we get a rematch of 2017. The Astros will save baseball. I will root for that to happen. But the Dodgers’ fifth-best pitcher is better than the Astros’ ace, so it seems unlikely.

The way baseball works in the new playoff format, with twelve teams getting in, it is whoever gets hot in late September. In a seven-game series, even the best team in the world against a mediocre team, maybe they have a seventy percent chance. Lots of opportunities for upsets. Right now the prediction markets have the Dodgers around forty-four percent, so they are not the odds-on favorite even now, and forty-four is better than three consecutive coin flips. They are not fifty-fifty coin flips, they are maybe seventy-thirty or sixty-five thirty-five, and that still does not get you to forty-four percent.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The White Sox just need a couple of pitchers to get hot.

FRANK

I love the White Sox. You just need two pitchers to get hot. You need one team to get hit by injuries at the wrong time, and then the bounces of the game in October. The best baseball teams in the world are going to lose fifty times a year. If they lose the wrong four out of seven, they are out of the playoffs. Which is one reason I think the regular season should count more and the playoffs should count less.

OLIVER BATEMAN

I miss those days. I miss them a lot. There were some great pennant races when it was two divisions. Ninety-three, the Braves and the Giants. What a pennant race.

FRANK

I absolutely agree. I miss the races. Now a pennant race is five teams in the American League West fighting to be the first one to eighty-three and seventy-nine. It is ugly. And even then that only gets you to the three seed, and you have to win four straight rounds. Insane.

OLIVER BATEMAN

The one thing I like is that we might get a year where three of the top home run hitters are Japanese. I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime. Pitchers, yes. Home run hitters, no. The White Sox have a guy, the Blue Jays have a guy, and Ohtani is in the mix. I’ve been a fan of Canadian football and Japanese baseball for a long time, so this one is personal.

FRANK

You have Alvarez, who has a shot at a Triple Crown. I never thought I would see the day an Astro contended for the Triple Crown. We shall see. We shall see.

Suggested reading

By Frank

• “The Economic Interest Test and Collective Action Problems in Antitrust Tie-In Cases,” 61 University of Chicago Law Review 639 (1994). Written while he was on the law review and posting on Usenet.

• “A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation,” 28 University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 427 (2006). Where he calls the fast-food suits rent-seeking vehicles that are neither good law nor good public policy. Also on SSRN.

• “End Open-Ended Litigation,” Washington Post, September 7, 2006. The op-ed that got the head of the trial lawyers’ association to write in and accuse him of attacking the Constitution.

The cases we discussed

• Frank v. Gaos, argued October 31, 2018. The docket is public, as is Frank’s Oyez page.

• In re Google Location History Litigation, argued in the Ninth Circuit June 11, 2025, with an amicus brief from twenty state attorneys general.

• Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark, the Second Circuit flushable-wipes appeal.

• Kohls v. Bonta and Kohls v. Ellison, the AI parody cases in California and Minnesota.

I’m 12 years old and sitting amid the white sands on a narrow, jagged stretch of beach. In front of me, blue water limns an infinite horizon. Behind me lies everything else, a dried-out, dead landscape seemingly devoid of other people. The world has already ended in a big bang, and all that’s left for me to do is gather fish for my sick grandfather’s dinner. The quest I undertook to save the world had stopped abruptly after that disaster on the floating island; the villain had won, he blew everything up, the screen faded to black, and now I was marooned alongside an unwell old man and made to participate in a seemingly pointless fish-collecting exercise. Some fish were good and made grandfather feel better; others weren’t, and his condition appeared to worsen. Here I was at the end of the world, only it wasn’t the end of the world: one story was about to unfold, which would set aright a world gone wrong; and another, which would fill in all the gaps in that story, would be left to my imagination.1

The story I’ve just outlined occurs in the middle of a video game I’ll always know as Final Fantasy III, but which was the sixth release in the Japanese series. The game I played was a translation, prepared by a guy named Ted Woolsey, that seemed sparse and esoteric and challenging, but was only apparently so. See, Woolsey had limited space on the cartridge to include the dialogue he was translating; re-releases of the game have expanded the English script but also compromised it, much as swapping the gorgeous 16-bit sprite art for flat, cartoonish images and high-definition backgrounds has forever defaced a landscape that would otherwise have remained intact until about 20 hours into the main plot, when the bad guys blew it up. That forced economy of dialogue, those gaps in character backstories and exposition, stole my heart. This fantasy didn’t have to be final; my mind — and the youthful way it danced in those days — could make it last forever.

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Final Fantasy III’s main plot is simple enough. A thousand years after wars among magic users had reduced the planet to a smoldering ruin, the Gestahlian Empire rediscovered magical technology and began using to power its economy and its war machines. As the destructive power of this technology increased, a few important people in imperiled regions teamed up to stop it. This resistance group, the “Returners,” caught a break when extremely powerful imperial agent Terra Branford is knocked unconscious in the caves behind a small industrial town after an attempt to acquire additional magical resources backfires. Branford awakened in the house of a resistance sympathizer, who removed the mind-control device that kept her bound to the Empire, eventually escaping with Locke Cole, an Indiana Jones-style thief, from the soldiers who had been sent to recover her. In classic quest style, Terra and Locke traveled from place to place, evading enemies while recruiting other good guys to launch a final assault on the Empire.

Unfortunately — and this was a first for me, as a consumer of playable stories — the heroes failed and the world actually was destroyed, leading to the game restarting on a beach seemingly in the middle of nowhere and leaving you there for a solid 30 minutes of playtime. Because Terra went missing in the disaster, the player is put in control of one of her allies, former imperial officer Celes Chere, who’s been left to care for her creator and “grandfather,” the dying scientist Cid whose magical research had caused all of these problems.

That’s the summary, anyway. My attitude regarding this particular bit of nostalgia has, of course, been inflected by feelings of intense loss: you can’t really go home again, at least not to the old stories you used to own. I once lived inside Final Fantasy III, perhaps for thousands of hours after accounting for all the unshared fan fiction saved on the hard drive of my Compaq computer. I’d never written fanfiction before and never would again — it would be lost, along with the Compaq computer, after my parents’ final and most enduring separation in 1996 — but something about this narrative burrowed its way into my brain and ordered me to script my own prologues and epilogues. These bits of literary ephemera spawned their own prequels and sequels, leading me further down a rabbit hole of world-building that went much deeper than the sandbox that the designers at Square, the company that produced the game, had given us. I’m 44 now, as far away from 12 as my 12-year-old self was from my then-46-year-old mother, and yet I still long for a lost world that can’t be recovered— not today, not ever again.

The animator Hayao Miyazaki, writing in his memoir Starting Point: 1979-1996 about the conclusion of his sprawling, decade-long manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, refused to see a mere ending as an end: “Ending a story doesn’t mean that everything has come to a conclusion... I ended [that] story at the same point as we are now, the starting point of an incomprehensible world.” Nausicaä, like Final Fantasy III, lacked finality. Only the main plotline was resolved; everything else was left hanging. The story was strangely similar: only a super-powerful girl, in this case Nausicaä, can stop two powerful empires from fighting one another and wreaking ecological disaster in the process. Over the course of a long, meandering quest, she succeeds, but the fates of the kingdoms she saves and the people she meets are left largely unresolved. Miyazaki just stops after a thousand pages, with Nausicaä left standing amid the wreckage of an ancient temple that had once contained the seeds of her world’s undoing. By then, most of her old enemies had seen the light and sacrificed themselves for her cause, even the leaders of the two feuding empires, but readers are deprived of an epilogue that informs us all’s well that ends well. Instead, Miyazaki withholds the happy assurance that most of us crave from escapist literature, the point when the author draws back the curtain and announces: friends, this will never happen again (and it certainly can’t happen here!).

In fact, as he explained in Starting Point, Miyazaki believed that not only had great destruction already taken place in our world, such catastrophes — like the two atomic bombings of Japan that occurred four years after his birth, bringing an end to World War II — could happen again. He wanted to give readers an opportunity to ponder that, to provide an opening through which they might perceive our shared world through the lens of Nausicaä’s.

But it wasn’t just that Final Fantasy III contained openings that allowed for further exploration. It also had to do with the nature of the video games I played, which had evolved considerably from the 8-bit Nintendo of the 1980s to the 16-bit Super Nintendo of the 1990s but were still in their infancy as storytelling vehicles. Planescape: Torment was five years away, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion even further off, Fallout 3 the stuff of another lifetime entirely. Games in 1994, particularly cartridge-based games, had small stories or no stories. Mario rode a dinosaur and chased coins; Sonic hustled after his rings; Street Fighter bore witness to two-dimensional street fighting. But Final Fantasy III was big, so much bigger than anything I had seen before: 14 playable characters, each with a backstory as twisting and open-ended as Yoshitaka Amano’s impressionistic concept art, and a huge world to explore... twice, because it gets blown to bits halfway through.

Prior to this, I wasn’t a kid who collected things, re-read books, or had favorite movies. Every leisure activity was one and done, a task to complete, “the work” if you will. Video games were no different. I played my way through the challenges, then took the cartridge or CD-ROM to Electronics Boutique and traded it for store credit. But that began to change: in 1993, I played Final Fantasy II (i.e., Final Fantasy IV in Japan), the previous US release for the Super Nintendo, and got hung up on it. Instead of challenges, you could “level” the playable characters in a mindless, relaxing way, winning one turn-based battle after another and thus making your final, world-beating party of heroes impossibly strong. In other words, your characters started on level 1, and with each fight, they edged closer to level 99, at which point they were exercising godlike powers.

To level up, no button-mashing skill was required — fast-twitch reflexes were the sort of thing you needed for punching out Mike Tyson, not beating Final Fantasy II’s last boss, Zeromus — only a willingness to walk around, taking turns in pitched battles against randomly generated groups of monsters, slowly but surely becoming unbeatable. You didn’t have to do any particular thing exactly right, like jumping on a box a certain way or hitting buttons in a certain sequence; you merely had to devote many hours to fighting monsters, which you ended up doing with metronomic regularity as you wandered around the map. Since Final Fantasy II’s accompanying narrative wasn’t fleshed out and its translation was basically incomprehensible, I didn’t really care about the game — only the act of leveling, during which time I immersed myself in whatever story that leveling allowed me to tell. In other words, I could sit back and relax, putting the first-order part of my brain, the part actually playing the videogame, on autopilot while I amused myself with daydreams about the characters I was using.

Final Fantasy III offered much more: not merely a tabula rasa but a series of gorgeous character sketches left for me to ink and paint with my own embellishments. I had something to go on, unlike with the sui generis case studies I undertook of Final Fantasy II characters such as the wise sage Tellah and the Lunarian elder FuSoYa — both magnificently bearded and each quite adept at using Meteor magic, but with little else to go on. Admittedly, even Final Fantasy III’s improved dialogue was constrained by text boxes to such vague remarks as this game-ending line from madman Kefka, the primary antagonist: “Life...Dreams...Hope...Where do they come from? And where do they go?” Yes, it was clichéd, the sort of thing any Joker-style chaotic evil character might say at an opportune dramatic moment, but there was the hint of something deeper there, something great and universal about which I could speculate endlessly.

And I suppose that’s how it works for every new story, as well as the ur-stories, the peasants’ tales and sailors’ yarns, from which they had sprung. Characters are archetypes that fast become stereotypes, and quests are essentially the same; ripeness is all. What distinguished Final Fantasy III was the fact that there were so many characters, resulting in a surfeit of side quests that obscured the main narrative thread. Sure, the planet was in danger from the exploitation of a long-buried magical power and the evil Gestahlian Empire was... well, doing something to increase that danger. But at its essence, Final Fantasy III concerned the chance interactions of a bunch of oddballs with troubled pasts — gambler who has lost it all, thief whose heart is stolen by a beautiful lady, assassin who kills to fill the gaping void in his soul left by abandoning his daughter — thrust into a world that crumbles beneath their feet, eventually separating them for an entire year amidst the ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. As a pre-teen, I had plenty of time to meet these people on their terms, and everything that happened to them seemed exciting and new.

Theirs was an incomprehensible world to which I labored to make sensible, tangible, real to me. I spent hours triggering the assassin Shadow’s dream sequences, sleeping in as many beds as it took to learn that he was actually the father of a young girl named Relm, another playable character, with a talent for painting. But even that bit of knowledge — an Easter Egg at a time when such hidden novelties genuinely meant something, if only because they were not discoverable via a quick Google search or AI query — availed me nought, since the relationship was never acknowledged by either character and Shadow seemingly decided to commit suicide when the final stage of the game collapsed around him.

Nearly every sub-quest concerned matters of the heart. Lost lovers, dead lovers, a lust for love, a reluctance to love... these were the principal motivations animating the decisions of Final Fantasy III’s heroes, along with a shared love for rehabilitating a world that they had already failed to save. Terra — half-human, half-Esper — was the game’s protagonist as well as the first female protagonist in any Final Fantasy game: she’d been raised in captivity and wanted desperately to know what the writer C.S. Lewis characterized as “the highest form of love, charity,” discovering it by chance when she began raising a group of orphans in an otherwise-abandoned city. General Celes, the deuteragonist initially portrayed as a heartless, butt-kicking “Magitek knight” who was “forged by the Empire and tempered in battle,” develops an erotic bond — the experience of being in love — with thief and outlaw Locke Cole, who wins her over by bantering with her in classic rom-com style. Others, such as womanizing king Edgar Figaro and noble Cyrano de Bergerac-style swordsman Cyan Garamonde, develop bonds of friendship. And the entire cast, forced together by fate, develop the kind of empathetic love for one another that so many ad hoc families do, shooting the breeze in a casual, friendly manner on the deck of an airship that ferries them around the world.

If there’s any single theme that distinguishes this game, otherwise loosely plotted and thinly written, it’s love emerging from loss. The haunting score by Nobuo Uematsu, best experienced today in piano form, alternates ragtime pastiches with wistful, minor-key melodies, imbuing the act of wandering around and fighting monsters in turn-based combat with a kind of darkness and sadness I had never experienced in a video game narrative. Zelda II: The Adventures of Link probably came close, with bleak pixelated visuals and a misery-inducing MIDI score, but I was too busy coping with the game’s many difficult dungeons to care much about its grim mise-en-scène.

That was it, I think: this was the first game I ever loved, and it was fundamentally a game about love. I took to WordPerfect to extend these stories. How could I leave things, as Hayao Miyazaki had said of Nausicaä, at the “starting point of an incomprehensible world”? Echoing the villainous Kefka, I wanted to know where the characters’ dreams had come from and where they were going. So, for the first and only time in my life, I began to write my way into someone else’s universe. Page after page of Shadow’s backstory was poured out into a password-protected document on the Compaq’s hard drive: I wrote these stories so that I could forget them, then re-read them later as if they were new novelizations I’d purchased from the indoor mall’s Waldenbooks. This was the fiction I craved, at least as a 12-year-old, as well as the fiction I couldn’t stop reading — but to get it, I had to write it, as one thankfully couldn’t prompt such work (because I surely would have, and at such cost!). In retrospect, that job of writing for myself was the best one I’ve ever had.

Then in early 1996, I stopped. I never played Final Fantasy III again, never wrote another word about it. My family, as I knew it, was finito and the Compaq was apparently off to the junkyard. I soon built a new computer to replace it, my first attempt at ever doing anything like that. Public high school, which I entered in the eleventh grade after a decade of homeschooling, proved a competitive and confusing time, and this central story of my pre-adolescence had no bearing on it. It was an abrupt and confusing break. I had lived in this story; could I perhaps live in others? The answer was no. There would be more stories, to be sure — and many more video games, yet they all felt like work. Work was work; leisure was work. While I had been writing fan-fiction, other students — top students, future competitors for a grass crown that, we have learned of late, signified nothing — had been reading the Great Books and steeling themselves for brighter tomorrows. Nothing could be the same, for the pace of life had accelerated. Few concepts lingered in my mind beyond the time it took me to become inured to them. I was running out the clock, stalling for precious minutes when I could, but it didn’t matter. The future had once seemed far beyond the horizon, but now it was history.

Yet the ghost of Oliver Bateman, like the ghosts that wander through a mystery train the heroes board during the first half of Final Fantasy III, has lingered behind. That ghost is the part of me that shrugged as Uematsu’s score played during the composition of this essay. “You can’t put your arms around a memory,” cautioned the singer Johnny Thunders, “[so] don’t try.” But I’m not sure that’s right. Final Fantasy III wasn’t a video game, but an actual landscape I’d inhabited. It had meant something to me, although I can’t quite remember why, and it’s a place I’ll always enjoy missing, even if I can never go there again. Memories of this old story are all I have, yet somehow they’re enough.

Do you know what will save us, fellow kids? Solidarity! Or so Duke law professor Jedidiah Purdy, who burst onto the scene at 24 with the remarkably moderate (and dull1) book For Common Things, told us in a hot take for Jacobin. Purdy, who shifted leftward over the past two decades, is probably kicking himself that he didn’t produce some kind of Hillbilly Elegy-esque tale of his West Virginia boyhood — it might have been more interesting because he was supposedly some sort of homeschooled-until-high-school child prodigy2 — and is now just another tenured, scabbing elite-school academic sometimes working the DSA-adjacent content grift.3

These days, I don’t care much about Purdy, who now hyphenates his surname (presumably to signal virtue to other elite mandarin members of the cathedral, but I could be wrong!), but I do care about how “solidarity” rhetoric is utilized in a society like this one. For Common Things was a book I read in law school, a sophomoric and now risible attack on “irony,” a pseudo-problem posited for laughs in the pages of magazines like Spy. Even then, Purdy could tell which way the take winds were shifting: David Foster Wallace4 and Dave Eggers and their logorrheic epigones were pushing the “New Sincerity,” so why not pile on? The 1990s were a simpler time, certainly. But now Purdy’s going after real big fish: kids, we must come together and do what has to be done.

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Enough ad hominem (even if it’s rad hominem), though. He means well, whatever that means, which is meaning enough in this desert known as life. That said, the “solidarity” one finds amid the virtual pages of a low-paying take site like Jacobin (have they raised those $150-a-pop rates since the 2010s? I’m struck by how almost nothing has budged since I began writing for do re mi in 2007) — essentially an aesthetically repackaged HuffPo or XOJane (remember this tempest in a teapot?) for those “kids” who believe that liking and sharing tweets is doing the work—is worthless. Those oh-so-rare moments in American history when “solidarity” was exhibited, like when my Grandfather Bateman was given the choice of prison or the Navy during the Second World War, came at the barrel of a gun. That’s how solidarity happens, the only way it happens — ask the Cultural Revolution-era or COVID-era Han people of China. An entity or individual not in the habit of obeying other people threatens said people in order to make them do something, and if they fail to comply, that entity or individual exacts punishment. Purdy has surely read the minimalist but precise explanation of sovereign power in John Austin’s The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, or at least would claim familiarity with it (as academics living “the life of the mind” are wont to do), were I to reference it.

But all these individual calls to solidarity, like his, are mostly calls for “solo-darity.” “I’m telling you, kids, that I’ve got the best solidarity in town,” says the podcast pitchman, angling to pick up some fresh Patreon subscriptions. “This is artisanal solidarity, with hints of young trans and BIPOC [or perhaps the “based right” / “dissident right” alternative, with a soupçon of volk, trad, MGTOW, whatever else people on that team guess they want to vibe with], and a mouth feel that practically drips with upper-class condescension for them and for you. This is the good stuff, and you can only get it from me. I’ve got the answers, and the answer is that you need to pay me for the answers, or at least retweet my answers, or otherwise build my clout, my brand, and my special online presentation of self.”

Because this is America, kids. The only “common thing” we share in this country is an obsession with the personal: a personal relationship with Jesus for the Ted Haggard/Jim Bakker set, “the personal is political” for folks who believe canceling a WaPo staffer for watching a Louis CK comedy special or retweeting a Catturd post5 is the ticket to social justice, and a hunger for personal power among those ghoulish wonks and cadaverous career politicians whose canny machinations determine whether our grandmas and grandpas will go to the death camps or merely end up “disappeared” from the general population. Why should our activist and slacktivist calls for solidarity, powered at base by a spirit of voluntarism that has been absent from this violent, never-gonna-be-prosocial settler society at least since the Lost Colony residents ate each other and likely far before, amount to anything more than hot air? Not that I don’t love to see it, because, believe you me, if anyone enjoys seeing you kids do the work of blowing hot air, it’s “ya boi” here.

So, listen up. Let me slide into your DMs and lay a take on you here. I’ve got some real sweet solidarity tucked away in my Substack bunker. Some of the best solidarity you’ve ever seen. This solidarity is so rare, so fresh and so clean, that I can maybe share it with five other kids, tops. This is platinum-tier solidarity. This is the solidarity Elon Musk has with the five other people he is taking to Mars with him. This is the solidarity of the suicide pact that all the “millionaires and billionaires” made when they decided they needed to kick the economy’s tires and prime the consumption fires with pandemic subsidies (later called “BidenBux”) one last time before they turned on the “good enough” AI generation tools, used that to prop up their out-of-ideas investments and jettison all those humanzee labor inputs, and reality went the way of a J.G. Ballard story. What I’m telling you is, this is primo, S-tier, pharmaceutical-grade solidarity. There’s a reason that the smart set is calling it “the best.”

Interested? Well, let me share something first. Let me get personal here, perhaps uncomfortably so. I’m going to tailor this bespoke content especially for you because you’re the only you reading this right now. So here’s the tea, sis (and the thesis): I really like the work you do. You’re out there fighting the good fight, and I’m here for it.6 I know a lot of people just say that, but I mean it. A lot of people, these scam/sham/wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am leftists like “Dr.” Purdy (see, he doesn’t have a Ph.D., but “ya boi” does!), are trying to get you to boost their brands. Well, screw them. They don’t have your best interests at heart, those grifters. Now, look me right in the eye. My thousand-yard stare is completely devoid of all tension. I’m not thinking at all, but what work I’m doing! What fantastic work! Such eyes wouldn’t sell you up the creek. They couldn’t sell anything (hence this article being free to all) or buy anything (hence my hitting up the publicists for freebies 24/7/365). Heck, you could spit your cyclosporiasis in my eyes, and I’d call it God’s divine dew.

So how about it, true believer? A little solidarity, shared between you and me, and let the devil take the hindmost? Gamble a $5 subscription stamp, and I’ll give you enough solidarity to make you a real man.

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A couple months ago, I was standing in a complete stranger’s backyard with a paper plate of Giant Eagle sheet cake tilting toward me when I realized that four generations of one family were referring to the same man as “dad.” All the kids referred to him as dad. Both parents did. His wife would refer to him as such from across the yard when the propane tank needed to be refilled. And the man himself — a pleasant, well-tanned paterfamilias seated in the one special lawn chair with the beer cozy arms — replied each time as if he were a judge responding to “your honor.”

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I was there because Cleo, my six year-old daughter, has a busier social calendar than I do. As the mothers ran the arts-and-farts-and-crafts table on the patio, I did what I’ve done at every function like this since I lost my last parenting brain cell (many such cases): I stood next to the food and followed the Boomer money. The person everybody was calling “dad” told me who had paid for that moon bounce house.

You see, there are two types of family structures you’ll encounter at children’s birthday parties. First are those with that ur-dad. There is typically a grandfather somewhere in the org who is the one that all members of the family have decided will be called dad. Not grandpa. Not pap. Just plain dad. Right down to the babies who’ll eventually think it’s this man’s Christian name. These men are the patriarchs — the men with their hands on the heavy jack, the do re mi.1

Second are families where they give everybody in the family a new, private name. The names float free from plain aunt and Grandma. When you ask a child who someone is, they give you a genealogy using only a dialect that only they speak. “That’s meemaw…that one’s meems…and this here’s meemer.” Three women with monikers all based on the same root word and one six year-old who remembers which is which. Add another language and it multiplies. Now the nonna isn’t necessarily the babcia and one Pop-Pop seems to outrank both pap and pappy. Great-aunt Sissy is no relation to the others, or so it seems.

Things get much worse the longer you’re around. Divorced and remarried dads pile up like unread books of lore in your Skyrim inventory: the original dad…the step-dad, he’s Gary but they call him “Gares”…the biological dad who must not be named who sends cards at Christmas…the mom’s boyfriend that the kids start calling by his first name plus an adjective, either as an insult (“Little Johnson,” because some other real man of the family is already “Big Johnson”) or as a compliment (“Jim Da Boss”). At least at the cornhole tables, I could find out who was originally responsible for these rugrats. After all, I grew up in Scenery Hill, where half of us are married to half of us (and half of us have already divorced half of us; there’s some Steiner Math for you), so I thought I could handle this. Then I was introduced to a man who was “our other dad,” in the same flat manner you’d describe a non-Heinz brand of ketchup. After I learned that he was the new (the latest?) husband of a fella who had divorced the original dad, I realized that I was not.

My own broken-down family never operated under such a model. Though he was four divorces deep into a life that saw my biological mother rack up two, my father was simply “dad.” After he passed away in 2014, there wasn’t a fight over who was next in line for that nom de guerre, because men in my family tend to check out mentally and physically long before aging into anybody’s ur-dad chair (the only reason Grandpa Bateman wound up an unlikely war hero was because he’d skipped out on his child support obligations, only to be apprehended and given the choice of the submarine service or the slammer).

Thus my request: try to keep the names simple wherever possible.2 I know you won’t always be able to. People get divorced or simply vanish into the ether quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, and it gets late early out there nowadays, what with all the wildfire smoke beclouding the Least Coast. But where you can relax, please do. One kid trying to track in her head moomoo, moose, mamadon, two levels of Poop-Poop, and one other-other-dad has more late night accounting than the unfortunate soul tasked with tracking the swiftly-shifting pronouns in a polyamorous line family.3

In any event, Cleo doesn’t care. On our drive home from the party she gave her own assessment of meemawland — similar to what she delivers to kids who can’t remember which Pokémon type beats which: some people just don’t know what they’re talking about.

Survey says…

About 41% of American grandmothers answer to an invented nickname rather than plain Grandma, and roughly 28% of American grandfathers answer to an invented nickname instead of plain grandpa. Preply (surveying 1500 Americans) placed Papa, Granddad, and Pop-Pop at #’s 1–3 on the men’s side; everything listed below earned its spot on the chart without getting a specific ranking. Geography divaricates it yet more. Mom-Mom rules the mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania through South Jersey). Bubbe (Yiddish) leads in New Jersey. Nebraska likes Oma (German); New Mexico likes Opa (also German). Massachusetts goes with Dedushka (Russian for grandfather). Iowa says Grand Mama for some reason. Only Alabama puts Granny #1.

Here are some private monikers given by individual grandchildren that stuck: Babu…Boba…Bopie…Grambi…Grando…Gopa…Hona…I-E…Glamma…Woo-Woo…GrannyOFive…Duchess…. My favorite entry was Tranchie — given to a Colorado grandmother after she caught a live tarantula barehanded in front of her grandkids.

Moms beat dads 2-to-1 on how many times Americans mention them in conversations. The top dad state is Nebraska and the Dakotas. Southern adults still refer to their moms as Mama and their dads as Daddy — without sounding overly juvenile to northeasterners; Daddy is king in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Old money Georgia said Mother and Daddy…Appalachian money said Mama and Daddy.

Aunts and uncles mostly get a first-name tag slapped onto them: Aunt Kimmie & Uncle Kyle…sometimes reduced to a flat Unc (though preferably not, because AAVE has given “Unc” a helpful general application, namely to out-of-touch and middle-aged, yet still kind-of-cool men). Heritage names imbricate like the scales of a fish: Tía & Tío…Titi…Zia & Zio…Tita & Tito…Khala & Phupho. Many South Asian families consider Mama to mean your mother’s brother (i.e., your maternal uncle), so make sure you know who you’re talking about before you start calling people Mama. Lots of the aunts/uncles at many African-American gatherings are not biologically connected; anthropologists call friends elevated to such uncle status fictive kin…while others may refer to them as play cousins/aunties/etc.

Cousins are easiest — basically nobody knows what they’re supposed to be called. You meet a random dude at some great-uncle’s funeral — shake hands with him — and then both of you stand there trying to figure out whether you’re second cousins…first cousins once removed…step-half-whatever…even though you both just met an hour ago. I suppose it passes the time between the work of pressing the horseflesh, making small talk about how “natural” the deceased old-timer looks, and planning your Irish goodbye.

“Feelings, nothing more than feelings,” goes the titular line from the hit Morris Albert single. “The personal is political,” claimed a host of second-wave feminists (its origins are unclear). And though some scholarly types might argue there’s more to it, when these two phrases are bundled together, they characterize the bulk of the “Discourse” produced by the “Extremely Online,” a passel of forgettable branded hack selves using their surplus of empty feelings to make it personal and take it personal, to stir the drink, to chase that clout. Which is fine, I suppose, except for the damage it has done and will continue doing to civil society.1

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“But civil society is pretty freaking un-civil these days, and common sense is pretty freaking uncommon!” joked the hot college comedian, who was canceled a few minutes later when it was discovered that he had liked a mean tweet from some alt-right UFC fighter. Too bad for him, though: he probably felt terrible about the whole thing. He felt terrible, felt it in his heart, felt it in his soul. All the feels, you see. The only thing he couldn’t feel was the prophylactic he had removed when he was “stealthing” the “mouthy 5” female college comedian who would cancel him after his initial rehabilitation, when he and his bro-tastic podcast had become the great white male hope of the Democratic Socialists of America.

For now, let’s take this hypothetical hot college comedian and go a bit further with his original, pre-“stealthing” plight. Perhaps some page or intern fires off a personal essay about how he slid into their DMs, an essay that runs above the virtual fold on The Guardian and launches another part-time millennial media take-writing career. Perhaps our hot college comedian, seeking redemption, pens a personal essay about how he was abused as a wee lad by the stereotypical pedophile (priest, teacher, Roblox mentor) and now realizes he wasn’t a harasser, just sexually confused. And perhaps both of these people outsource the writing of their essays either to AI (which will be sure to describe them in “small, quiet ways”) or, better still for my pocketbook, to someone like me, an unfeeling mercenary with a poison pen and the ability to type 125 words a minute.

I’ve written so many personal essays: mine, theirs, and maybe yours, if the money’s right. These are easy-mode projects. I can have any feelings at any time. I had mine beaten out of me as a kid, but that’s okay—I still sold (and continue to sell; see this banger) a bunch of essays about that wild and crazy period, in order to get that pre-Elonbucks blue checkmark (2015!) by my Twitter handle. However, one thing I never said in those essays is that I didn’t mind the beatings and rantings and brainwashing one bit, not really. They kept things interesting, truth be told. I knew my father’s madness was the product of structural forces and material conditions beyond his control, and because of that, I didn’t take it personally. It didn’t hurt that, as the tomb grew much closer than the womb, he urged me to find ways to monetize this mistreatment.

In other words, I don’t take anything personally. As I wrote in an essay about “Solidarity, Just for Me,” “You could spit your COVID-19 in my eyes, and I’d call it God’s divine dew.” Humans make innumerable horrible and instantly regrettable choices within the frameworks of the material conditions they find themselves inhabiting, and more’s the pity because they either descend into unbearable self-hatred or begin whinging about others. One thing I learned from my dad is that anyone can break your heart, if you let them. But once you realize they can’t hurt you after you’ve built a firewall to keep these careless boobs at arm’s length, you’re okay. The American founding fathers, those bewigged slave owners and tax-avoiding molasses smugglers, understood that loud and clear—intellectual historian J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment concerns, among other things, their careful (one might even say cynical!) attempts to limit corruption and promote classical republican virtue.

But they’re not the only ones who knew the score. Martin Luther, that stubborn old blowhard, believed that the secular legal system was in place to bind the wicked during their lifetimes on earth. The put-upon protagonist of Tolstoy’s short story “God Sees the Truth, But Waits” tells the man who framed him and ruined his life that God will forgive him, and it’s entirely possible that he—the protagonist—“is a hundred times worse” than the man who framed him.

The fact that my father beat me like a government mule (in Ol’ JR’s melllifluous phrasing), then, provides no basis for a series of legal reforms, much less the construction of an entirely new political system. It’s just something that happened, a sorry occurrence on the face of a planet that has experienced billions of them. It was never personal when I sold those essays, Dad—heck, you’re the one who urged me to do it, to cash in, because it’s “just business” and when you were dead and gone, “deader than dead,” who cared? It was “just business,” “just words.”

The idea that words spoken in anger can hurt is one thing; words spoken in a serious argument hurting is another matter altogether. Here’s where “feelings” and “personalizing the political” bog down genuinely helpful debate. Getting mad or “triggered,” in anything resembling a serious discussion— there are vanishingly few of those nowadays—is an easy out, a way of asserting strength through weakness. People spend lifetimes learning ways to evade or shut down serious conversations: hiding behind degrees and credentials that mean nothing, behind ferocious displays of assumed vulnerability, behind tattletales told to the teacher wielding the paddle of the ideological state apparatus, the based dissident wielding the ban hammer in the smoke-filled groupchat. You love to see it, except you don’t, because it sucks.

Yet so many of you feed your feelings right back into the marketplace of ideas, one tweet or post at a time. It might as well be the marketplace of feelings at this point (not that it matters; what matters is that it’s a marketplace, that ineluctable meeting-point of human minds and bodies). Everything that’s happening, all this death and loss and love, matters insofar as it happens to you. You’re a small language model, a veritable mattering-machine, running your feelings through a hot take maker like so much fresh copypasta.

And that’s okay, I guess. The whole world, which is a harsh and unforgiving place, will always “feel” impossibly parochial, insignificant in comparison to the branded self that roams cyberspace in pursuit of attention. “Everybody wants to feel loved and liked,” my dad used to tell me. “So if you say that to them, and sound like you mean it, they’ll believe anything else you say.” What he meant, I think, is that feelings are an insincere, perhaps even counterfeit, currency. Most of us, when we desire something, actually desire to be desired. The personal essays we share, whether written by the name on the byline or by me or by your LLM of choice (which is hopefully writing just like your SLM poster of choice—Freddie da Boor, Project 1619 Jones, Rocks and Gay, the Brass Epoch Poivert, Rawegger, Matty Ice Yglesias?), obviously speak to some feelings we believe we feel. But do we really feel those feelings, or did we see them in a movie? Did we skim them in a magazine article?

It doesn’t matter! What matters is that you or the hot college comedian or the intern he harassed thereafter paid me to write the personal essay outlining these feelings, the check cleared, and I did the work of writing it. I honored my end of the contract. You got your story. We will never speak of it again. That’s just business, blunt and impersonal, and that’s why your feelings will never matter as much as the grinding of the gears, the profit motive, that undergirds the true organizational structure of this society. Amazon has no feelings, even if juiced-up Jeff Bezos is probably feeling pretty swole these days (but still a baldy baldo, true hair being the one thing money can’t buy, hence that fancy straw woven into Trump’s scalp being worth its weight in gold). It just is. The same goes for your rental company, which only wants your cash on the barrelhead within five days from the first of every month.

So many smol, all-too-smol beans feel like we need a better world. They feel for all of the other acceptable-to-their-team victims out there who are suffering, like the girl I once dated who told me she was “really into social justice…you know, Katrina and Darfur.” They feel big mad that anyone would dare to disagree with them online. They feel so much it hurts, so much it hurts all the sick-unto-death Eastern European warzone amputees and pygmies being skinned and eaten alive in Central Africa who surely want (or at least wanted, back when they were among the living) action, genuine relief, anything but your “feels” or, if you’re vintage boomer-Facebook right-wing, your “thoughts and prayers.” Unless you’re a big-time poster and they’re among the ever-diminishing number of hot take publishers looking for circa-2016 hot takes, no one will give even one red cent about your much-vaunted feelings, nobody but you, the most important nobody who ever lived. But me? Well, I’m here for it. You might even say I love to see it!

Precisely nobody ever asked how they can be more like me. Perhaps they would if they could, but they can’t. I reside far behind the on-camera scenes set in the putative taste-and-take-making “scene,” remaining out of sight and cite. The work of anonymity pays far better than one might expect.1

The one thing I’ve enjoyed more than anything else is showing up. Some folks “dream in colors” and some “dream in red,” to quote Eddie Vedder as well as a bizarre conversation about “styles of thought” I recently overheard—“I’m more of a lavender horizontal, you’re more of a vermillion vertical” (sure, why not?)—but I perceive the world as nothing more than a big to-do list with boxes underneath that I must fill with lorem ipsum content. Each day is the same as every other day, a repetitive “running out of the clock” during the third period of a tedious high school heavyweight wrestling match between two big slow fatties that’s forever tied 1-1.

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How, some might wonder, did I end up writing the long wrestler obituaries for The Ringer, co-hosting What’s Left? for a few years, running content and editorial for a big SaaS company, or even publishing this surprisingly popular Substack that bears a Christian name most people cannot remember (Oscar? Orson? Ohvuh?). To be sure, I was never a pro wrestling superfan, merely a careful observer of the sport, and I certainly wasn’t someone who emerged from whichever subsection of the “extremely online” cut their teeth listening to “post-left podcasts” back in 2019. Do I care? Nah, it’s all about mind over matter: I don’t mind and the nattering nabobs of negativity don’t matter for as long as the checks keep clearing.

To live like a deer tick, embedded in the desiccated, sandy flesh of a world not so much angry at your existence but indifferent to it... that’s truly living your best life, kids. How can you lead such a best life of laughing, loving, praying, and submitting those pay-on-arrival invoices?

I see no harm in disclosing how I got here/why I’m here for it/why a few of you love to see it (or love to hate seeing it). To paraphrase the 4 Non Blondes, 44 years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill—a “Scenery Hill,” like my hometown—that remains obscured behind clouds and clout. “Wherever you go, there you are,” as Buckaroo Banzai opined decades ago. Here, then, are my 12 simple rules for going there while remaining here for it, rules I’ve lived by and perhaps even died for, if one happens to believe in reincarnation. The truth is out there, as they say. Who are they? Try a better question: who are they not?

Rule #1—Feign ignorance under all circumstances: Always listen, especially when someone is bloviating. Few things are better than sitting through an extemporaneous ex cathedra discourse. You’ll benefit in one of two ways. If the speaker’s a liar and a fool attempting to impress you with a bunch of two-dollar words and three-dollar claims, consider this useful information about their character and file it away. If they happen to know the subject they’re discussing, enjoy the free lesson. The latter is less common, to be sure, but when it happens, appreciate that they’ve decided to save you the trouble of learning this stuff on your own. Time is money, except they’re not making any more of the former.

Rule #2—Take credit for nothing: When someone tries to thank you or tell you that you did a fine job, dust them off like a knee-length coat after a long cattle drive. “Oh no, that was all so-and-so,” you should say. “They were the heart and soul of this. I just did the work, which is the easy part.” Unless they’re extremely shrewd people, always keeping an eye out for the emergence of another gray eminence or cat’s paw, they’ll recognize that you’re someone they can trust—someone who’ll do the work and do the job, no questions asked. And if they do happen to be on high alert for rising gray eminences or cat’s paws, avoid them at all costs, because they’re the competition.

Rule #3—Do all the work but pretend you’re doing no work: Sometimes people will nose around to determine how you’re completing all your work. These folks might seem like flatterers, but they’re actually looking for intel. Bat them away as surely as if you were an old pussy playing with some worn-out catnip bananas. “What’s that? Busy? More like hardly working than working hard! I keep my options and my Outlook schedule open. What do I do with my spare time? Ha ha ha, wouldn’t you like to know! Heck, so would I. It’s a blur. Gets late early out there when you’ve got a kid, you know.” This is even more important now that we’re in the age of AI processes. I’ve baked mine into the corporation’s operating procedures—everyone has to follow my rules for writing with AI, thank the lord—but I’ve never documented all of my own tricks (such as writing or editing quickly and pretending the output is AI, then having AI make a “changelog” indicating that my superior code base/project instance/markdown rules/etc. were responsible for the elevated material. Often imitated—project instances are shared across the org—but never quite duplicated, because the secret sauce is still just doing the work. “Teach them everything they know,” my old man would remind me, “but stop far short of teaching them everything you know.”

Rule #4—Let others sell you their ideas, then make them your own: Aside from my essays here and in Splice Today, I almost never write an unsolicited story. I wait for an editor or boss to tell me they’d like to read a piece on X topic, whereupon I prepare something along the lines of ~X. Superficially speaking, I’ve given them what they want—lorem ipsum to insert below the headline—but what I’ve written in fact was exactly what I hoped to write in theory. The best editors know this and provide only the vaguest instructions. Those editors also leave the copy intact, which is why I prioritize working with them (the speedy, reliable payments don’t hurt, either…I’m a worker at heart).

Rule #5—Downplay any discussion of your work by saying something along the lines of “Oh, someone else already did it better”: Never boast about your accomplishments. As soon as you mention you squatted 600 pounds past parallel, someone will tell you they know dozens of 14-year-olds who are doing this for reps (many will blow out their knees before they can be filmed doing so, but still). The same goes for anything on the literary or creative end. Mention you have an agent and expect to hear shaggy-dog stories about publishing deals and projects way out beyond the horizon, particularly if you’re in Brooklyn or another one of those wretched “creative clusters.”

Rule #6—Consume raw eggs, raw milk, and “Pittsburgh rare” steak: Diet matters, but not to me. There are innumerable kooky theories, many of them mystical or spiritual in nature, about man being or becoming whatever it is that he eats. I couldn’t care less about any of that humbug. I care about time. Unlike the beloved super hero Time Man, who has all the time in the world, I sense “time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” I eat raw eggs because I can swallow them fast, six to 12 at a time mixed with desiccated liver powder, and I drink raw milk because my mom brings me gallons of it from my aunt’s farm. I suppose I do have a taste for the cream, much as “Macho Man” Randy Savage did, but that’s neither here nor there. And steak seared or very nearly charred on both sides yet left purple to dark red on the inside goes down quicker than a wink, ideally in huge chunks that can be forced up through my esophagus at a later time and thereupon masticated like so much meat-flavored gum.

Rule #7—Get your sleep: A simple rule, and fun to boot. Introduce your eyes to the backs of your lids as you enjoy seven to eight hours of uninterrupted, dreamless slumber each night. Aside from never letting a drop of alcohol pass my lips, “sleeping it off” has played the biggest role in keeping me younger than my 44 years. I rise and grind for 16 hours of work, working out, parenting, “emotional labor,” and various other projects, then collapse in my blackout curtain-festooned sleep chamber like Dracula entering his coffin or a mummifieds pharaoh being entombed in his pyramid.

Rule #8—Watch events unfold in your life as if you’re your own ghost: Here’s a good one, especially if you’re tired of those boring premium TV shows starring half-pretty minor league actors still awaiting their call to appear in a money-losing superhero movie franchise. If you’re looking for a gritty, true-to-life series that ambles along in a directionless manner, look no further than your own miserable existence. If you watch the day’s banalities unfold like a Flannery O’Connor or Donald Barthelme story, even the most inane encounter becomes infused with the sublime.

Rule #9—Small talk? Put it on autopilot: If you can make polite conversation with acquaintances and colleagues, you’ll have an easier time making the long day’s journey into night. Such mindless conversation can unman the unwary, insistent as they are upon either experiencing incessant passive stimulation or being feted via a torrent of timeline notifications like some virtual sheik. Small talk comes much more naturally once rule #8 has been put in place, since you can watch from far away as your meat suit engages in empty banter about the issues of the day. This will save you the time you might have once devoted to reading the news—unless commissioned by an editor to address a specific topic, I make a point of not consuming the news in any format whatsoever, much less listening to any podcasts up to and including my own—because it’s easier to respond to whatever is being said merely by “feeling the takewinds” and speaking accordingly. “Trump, huh? How about that? Doesn’t that beat all? And what about what’s happening over in Iran and/or Israel? Not to mention the weather! There’s always the weather, and it seems like there’s more and more of it with every passing day. I know we didn’t have weather like this back when I was a kid, whenever that was.”

Rule #10—Laugh into your smile and smile into your laugh: I’ve appeared in my share of minor TV productions and attended plenty of unsuccessful auditions—even turned down an opportunity to appear in that Netflix Abercrombie documentary because my wife correctly assessed it would be “bad for business”—and the best advice a casting director ever gave me was to “laugh into my smile.” He didn’t talk to me long enough to explain why this was necessary to do this, only that a “big smile sets everyone at ease.” And since setting people at ease can conserve time you might otherwise spend yelling at them or choking them unconscious (an old neighbor learned this lesson the hard way during a dust-up over a street parking spot), flash those pearly whites and watch as the whole world smiles with you!

Rule #11—When appearing on Zoom, maximize your window and hide all the other ones: Since 2017, I’ve hosted hundreds of hours of virtual meetings. An old boss gave me a chicken nugget of wisdom I’ve since taken to the food bank and cashed: to guarantee “perfect attentiveness” in an inattentive world while also ensuring you’re never caught “Toobining” during a key Zoom moment, enlarge your own camera and spend the entire meeting dead-eyeing yourself, adjusting your facial expressions to fit the mood of the conversation. Don’t nod, though, because that may cause your video to lag if you’re on a weak connection, and the other attendees will become as passive-aggressive as they do whenever someone “replies all” to a message full of people marked “cc:” rather than “bcc:”. Ah, the petty frustrations of the corporate world... grist for so many mills, from Dilbert to Office Space, at least until AI (cited as pretext but rarely true in fact) precipitated round after round of headcount reductions.

Rule #12—Don’t slow the spread of your scope of work: Here’s the big one, the one rule that has defined all my careers and struggle sessions to date. Unless you’re in a workplace with clearly-defined union labor rules of long standing, grow your scope of work with the care and tenderness you’d show the Garden of Eden itself. Modern workplaces are messy and confusing, especially in large companies with unclear organizational charts and vast numbers of supernumerary, soon-to-be-reduced white-collar workers “floating” around performing no or at least very ill-defined tasks. There’s no way to guarantee permanent employment in such a place, but a plodding mediocrity embedded in dozens of departments and holding vast amounts of hard-to-find institutional knowledge will last a long time because the cost of replacing him is too high to bear. My brother, for example, has survived a half-dozen RIFs because his paymasters have been forced to fill his size-13EEE shoes with multiple employees whenever he goes on leave…and even then they typically fail to complete all the work he does. In theory, AI will eventually automate all white-collar work, since these next-word-prediction machines can have compile all the most adequate first thoughts without any of our conscious, all-too-conscious second ones. That said, AI will take the longest to replace those jobs that don’t have a straight line into any functional area but instead spread across all of them, with each boss thinking their colleagues don’t know that the employee in question is doing their work, too. Typing 125 words per minute doesn’t hurt either, especially during a period in which keyboarding skills, like functional literacy (never high at any point in our not-so-glorious national history—you can’t be post-literate if full functional literacy was never tried outside of some homogenous, prosocial heckhole like Finland or Japan) and basic computer skills more generally, have declined after years of fat-fingering (and now just mumbling into) handheld devices.

My parents each harbored many odd theories, and I’ve written about his at length, then at greater length, including for The Point, but the two of them shared an aversion to sitting down, drinking water, and micturating3 on the job.

The old man thought salespeople should only be seen smoking or drinking coffee, two activities that suggested alertness. They were only allowed to sit at the dealership’s solitary showroom-floor desk when writing up a sale. He ran Bateman Chrysler Plymouth Dodge (“We’ll make a believer out of you,” went the radio jingle) with almost no help, standing on his sockless, rancid-smelling 4E flat feet, six days a week. Bathroom use was nigh-verboten for workers and customers alike; he kept the restroom under lock and key, policed even more tightly than the Bunn coffee maker,4 and he bragged, often, about urinating just once or twice a day.

The science behind all this came from his playing days at West Virginia University,5 where no-water football practices were routine in the 1950s and early 60s. Then-conventional wisdom in the sport backed him up. In 1954 Bear Bryant hauled 115 Texas A&M players out to Junction, Texas, in triple-digit drought heat, and allotted them two wet towels, one for the offense and one for the defense; the 35 who lasted the ten days would get a book, a TV movie, and some reunion rings out of it.6 Gatorade arrived by way of the University of Florida in 1965, and football’s intelligentsia (such as it was or is) slowly came around on fluids, though none of the new science ever crossed my father’s disorganized desk, which he would’ve been standing next to anyway (“on my toes, not my heels”). He couldn’t believe that pro teams now kept water in dugouts and on the sidelines, that well-compensated grown men were being allowed to sip instead of suffering for their public art.

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My mom rarely sat at her desk during a 30-year teaching career, and certainly never while students were present. “Only fat, lazy teachers do that, and the students ‘cut up’ in their classes nonstop.”7 As far as I can recall, she never drank water, never ate anything (lunch included), and never excused herself to use the restroom during the school day, and she detested the increasing laxity around hall passes for “pottying,” as she dismissively called it. She refused to teach in anything but high heels, despite hating how they felt, until the year she retired, after which she endured back-to-back hip replacements.

At some point during my Ph.D. work in history at Pitt, I read E.P. Thompson’s classic “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, which describes preindustrial workers who kept no fixed mealtimes and called the clock “the devil’s mill,” and the two centuries of bells, fines, timesheets, and banned “Saint Mondays” it took to adjust the internal clock inside the laborers themselves. My mother — daughter, granddaughter, and so forth of punch-the-clock coal miners of the old school, and now currently married to a retired miner — had arrived at the thesis unassisted. Industrial time-work discipline of the sort she practiced (and believed others would have to learn, or else) demanded intense control of the body, and the students needed to learn it from someone who had mastered it.8 So did I: during my homeschooled years, she ran me through the actual lessons from six to eight in the evening, a second shift she never billed anyone for, conducted on her feet after nine hours on her feet — though thankfully never in heels.

Unless I’m taking a meeting while on the walking pad or using the elevated monitor for some standing work, I sit for a living now, at the day job and when I’m writing freelance content like this newsletter. The culture around me has completed its swing to the other pole regarding the consumption of water: the Stanley Quencher and other overpriced emotional-support water bottles mostly left half-full, the $9.99/month hydration apps crappy direct-to-consumer SaaS companies are hoping you forget to cancel, the coworkers who announce their gallon-a-day/10k steps goals in Slack. Perhaps some of you readers are nursing a 40-ounce tumbler right now. Meanwhile, I must set alarms on my calendar to ensure that I remember to drink anything at all, so strong is the force of embodied habit.

Fifteen years into her retirement, my mother drinks water as needed and laughs at her old self-imposed discipline. My father has been dead since 2014. My daughter, who goes through 48-64 ounces a day (along with about 16 ounces of whole milk), would laugh at such restrictions . When I get around to explaining these old rules to her, I already know the defense I’ll offer on their behalf, because it’s the same one every self-respecting, non-judgmental, non-Whiggish historian must offer the past: it was a different time…an alien country, really. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

The action and horror films were of varying quality, mostly bad yet occasionally transcendent, but my father and I watched them all — everything our local video stores, then referred to as “rental clubs,” kept in stock.1

The 1980s were a strange time: more alive, more honored, more real in historical memory than the forgettable, Bill Clinton-and-Beanie Baby-dominated decade that followed. It was, I suppose, a terrible time for cinema, particularly during the second Reagan administration when movies were increasingly shot with VHS release in mind, but also a great time, because production standards were so marvelously low that a fair amount of creative schlock slipped through the cracks.

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For reasons that remain mysterious but likely had to do with his involvement in various illicit activities throughout the 1960s and 1970s, my father worked sparingly from 1982, the year I was born, until 1989, the year he purchased a franchise car dealership. During that span, he did almost nothing except consume brainless fare, televised sporting events throughout the day and “rental club” Betamax and VHS tapes that ensured he would be entertained until well past midnight. Since my half-brother went to high school and had some kind of social life outside our home until he was yanked out in the 11th grade to run the dealership’s parts depatment by his lonesome, it fell to me — a lost-in-his-own-head child who would not be enrolled in either public or private school until the tween years — to watch with him.

Even beyond the ethical implications of forcing a small boy to sit through the likes of Creepshow, RoboCop, Aliens, Predator, To Live and Die in LA (some nice bloody headshots in that one!), and — heaven forfend! — Body Heat,2 the practice had an impact on me. While a film’s plot would resonate from time to time, or a certain compelling scene, often tied to a Brian De Palma movie, would become blazoned in my memory, mostly my little unformed baby brain wondered about the artifice of it all.

I knew that what I watched was fake, because my father unfailingly pointed this out. “That blood looks like spaghetti sauce,” he’d say. Or, “Christ, he’s wearing more makeup than Dame Edna.” On and on in this manner, a naive but incessant critique of material he viewed as existing solely to please him. His knowledge of great directors — of cinematic history generally — extended no further than an encyclopedic obsession with whatever leading men were allegedly in the closet (often accompanied by an equally strange remark about how such a man’s man, say Rock Hudson or John Travolta, could “do whoever or whatever the hell he wants”3), but my father cared deeply about craft and performance, in his own idiosyncratic way.4

The realness was all. When the two of us watched professional wrestling, he enjoyed matches in which men such as Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes willingly gouged their own foreheads with razorblades, since he felt that blood gave the viewer his money’s worth. And, perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who had loved The Thief of Baghdad as a child and esteemed it well beyond The Wizard of Oz (”it looked like a bad high school play…I only liked the monkeys and the rest could shrew (sic) off,” was his one-note, oft-repeated criticism of that studio classic), he watched films for directorial money shots: an amputation, a head smashed like a cantaloupe, a body riddled with bullets, hopefully staged in such an evocative manner that he couldn’t possibly forget it. If a payoff scene failed to pass muster, he’d shake his head and mutter about being ripped off.

As near as I can place it, my father’s love for the movies began to wane when we saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day at the theater. Since we lived in a rural area, getting to the movies in Greenville (NC) or Elizabeth City was no mean feat — schlepping 30 or so miles, as the crow flew — and so he undertook this pilgrimage only when he assumed he was certain to be entertained. Arnold Schwarzenegger had entered my father’s tough-guy pantheon at some point during the 1980s, catchphrase-spouting his way into the old man’s heart, and so he expected the sequel to his beloved The Terminator to be nothing short of a masterpiece.

We hadn’t seen The Abyss, so I don’t suppose my father was familiar with James Cameron’s growing infatuation with computer-generated imagery. Cameron’s use of CGI to animate elaborate reconstructions of actor Robert Patrick’s T-1000 terminator body thus proved a bridge too far. All the way home, my father complained about how jarring those moments had been, comparing it to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?5 but noting that, at least there, animation was acceptable because the characters kept acknowledging the obvious unreality of it.

I had enjoyed Terminator 2 in my superficial, childlike way, so his criticism struck me as unfounded and I put it far out of mind. But as time passed, the essential rightness of it became manifest. Along with the pressure to release films as bloodless PG-13 blockbusters to recoup enormous production costs and an unwillingness to look past intellectually bankrupt “franchise properties” like those created by Marvel and DC, computer-generated imagery has created a flat, barren cinemascape about as aesthetically pleasing as a strip mall parking lot in a Metroplex suburb (it’s all suburbs). Sure, there are plenty of spaces available, but who’d ever want to go there?

Such work has diminished the value of good directors. Although my father saw neither Meet the Feebles nor the first installment of The Hobbit, he surely would’ve been shocked to discover that the same Peter Jackson who had produced the ribald puppet scenes in the former was responsible for the lamentable high-resolution “Dame Edna” makeup fails in the latter. And what good is the work of a few hand-painted Studio Ghibli productions when set against a billion iterations of The Boss Baby, a CGI film so insipid in conception that it may as well have been playing in theaters since 9/11?

And never mind these toothless, spineless PG-13 “spandex” hero films. Marvel Studios, with its consequence-free multiverse of interlinked narratives, has crafted cornball stories far more disgusting than anything served up in Re-Animator or Dead Alive. In Marvel’s world, where bad guys fall dead without bullets lodged in their chests and half of New York City can collapse without overtaxing a single ambulance, we viewers encounter the ultimate vulgarity: a world in which violence not only doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t matter to us or to the thousands of technicians who helped simulate it.

These developments might have caused my father to roll over in his grave — that is, if his remains hadn’t been incinerated in a cremation furnace, his body reduced to a very real pile of ashes like some doomed boss bad guy in one of those beautiful, dumbass movies both of us loved.

This piece on role-playing video games ran in The Paris Review back in 2017. I was surprised it did, since unlike my prior pieces for that publication, it wasn’t responding to any “felt need” of that cultural moment.1 As a result, it was a decent, if little-read,2 long essay — one I’d like to revise and expand here.

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My first video-gaming memories are clouded by Amnesia. That game, which comprised nothing more than white text on a black background, haunted me for years. My father bought it for the PC because he saw it on sale at Sears, brought it home, installed it via the command prompt, and then abandoned it. My brother had no use for it, either. They both played Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 3.0, for which we had purchased a joystick, and Tetris, which appeared on the home computer long before its popularity exploded on Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy.

Tetris and Flight Simulator were “real” games, you see. Push the buttons in a skillful way and you would win. You could trump your high score or perfect your landing at Meigs Field. But Amnesia was just a story, a playable story, and from a game-play standpoint it wasn’t even a particularly good one. Like most text-based games, it relied on commands like “eat pizza” (always a favorite of mine) to advance the plot, and like most poor text-based games, it didn’t recognize many of the commands that the player typed. 

But it was atmospheric and moody—at points unforgettable, even if it was all about forgetting. You start by describing your facial features—then your character looks in the mirror only to discover that he looks nothing like that. Decades later, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain did the same thing after the character awoke in a hospital bed. Now, as then, it seems like a smart way for the designers to exert narrative control.

Then there was the “environment.” The game is set in New York, vast amounts of it. Some 4,000 Manhattan locations and 650 streets were modeled, with stores opening and closing, night coming and going, and so forth. It’s unclear why the designers at Electronic Arts went to such lengths—at any rate, the gameplay is so clunky that you’re forced to proceed along a more or less linear path anyway.

“It seems familiar,” wrote the developer Thomas Disch—who was, I’d discover years later, a poet, the author of The Brave Little Toaster, and the man behind the sci-fi masterworks Camp Concentration and 334. “But only in the general way that a famous postcard is familiar. You don’t feel as though you BELONG in this city, as though you are a New Yorker.”

This was a story to play, an hours-long story at that—and at six years old, stories were all I wanted.

In a 2011 piece for Grantland,3 Tom Bissell took umbrage with video games that, owing to nearly infinite Blu-Ray storage space for written and spoken dialogue, had become bloated with “expository narrative.” “The next Elder Scrolls game … would benefit from radical distillation,” he wrote, contrasting the vast Skyrim world with the streamlined and challenging Dark Souls, a notoriously difficult role-playing game that was sparse on story but heavy on atmospherics.

Bissell’s point came during a larger shift in game design. Big-budget games like Skyrim and Fallout would always be overstuffed with written content, the result of too many cooks scribbling their recipes into the voices of characters and in-game reading materials. Many in the industry, including the designer Jonathan Blow, viewed these AAA offerings as something entirely separate from games qua games.

Bissell attempted to offer a solution to the “Skyrim problem,” rooted in this understanding of game design. “Why,” he asked, “make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments?” The world itself, in his opinion, was “gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore.”

If one assumes Skyrim is first and foremost a game qua game—an experience like Street Fighter that demands certain finely tuned skills to win—then this makes sense. But Skyrim, like Fallout 4 and the recent4 Mass Effect: Andromeda, is a pretty boneheaded game—it’s not especially demanding to navigate its world. The chief function of its lore, for the child I was and the person I am now, is as a cure for loneliness. Because I never played games with my brother—eight years older than I am and thus always better at everything—I spent my formative years in the company of these interactive stories. Fantasy novels and comics seemed empty enough even then, though I read my share of them, but those same risible, clichéd plots, when chained to something that forced me to sit in front of the PC and click around with the mouse, took on an epic scope.

Roberta Williams, the developer of the software company Sierra On-Line, loomed large in my imagination. Given the high-profile push to remedy “male overrepresentation” in computer science,5 it’s a strange quirk of history that the best point-and-click adventure games—as interactive stories were known—came from Williams, a high fantasy bricoleur whose King’s Quest series combined lighthearted rearrangements of sword-and-sorcery tropes with puzzles and other challenges. “King’s Quest was a compendium of many of the most common fairy tales,” she explained in a 2006 interview. “It was really was nothing but a big fairy tale that someone could directly experience in a very interactive way instead of in the old passive way of books, movies, or oral tales.”

The gameplay was simple enough: you’d move the cursor around the screen and one of the heirs to the Kingdom of Daventry would follow your clicks, performing tasks and talking to people. Given their linearity, these games lacked replay value, but I revisited them anyway, because I attended what my oddball parents euphemistically called “home school” and thus possessed seemingly infinite time. I finished King’s Quest V a dozen times, and King’s Quest VI, arguably the best in the series, at least twice that many. King’s Quest VI raised the bar when it appeared in 1992: it had relatively big-budget production values and, like many CD-ROM and even some 3.5″ floppy-disk games, boasted impressive casts of voice actors. Robby Benson, the voice of the Beast from Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, lent his singular, troubled-good-guy sound to that game’s protagonist, while the character actor Tony Jay gave gravitas to a host of distinguished personages.

Games like King’s Quest VI marked the start of the narrative bloat that Bissell would complain about years later, but at the time I couldn’t get enough of it. The early 1990s were a boom period for point-and-click storytelling experiences. LucasArts, the software arm of George Lucas’s production company, churned out quality offerings such as Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Everything was in flux, with companies doubling down on oblique games like Myst, which had become an improbable best seller. Teams of programmers hurried to accomplish as much as they could with casts of eccentric characters and bizarre scripts limited only by the storage capacity of floppies, cartridges, and CD-ROMs. Developers were afforded the space to hammer out their stories Tin Pan Alley–style, without being crushed under the weight of four decades of game design orthodoxy and the expectations of a multibillion dollar industry. This was hackwork, to be sure, but like much of Irving Berlin’s hack songwriting, some of these games have stood the test of time.

In an interview about Day of the Tentacle—a charmingly comical game in which a trio of nerdy teens uses time-traveling Porta-Potties to vanquish a fascistic purple tentacle—the developer Dave Grossman recalled, “Nothing was in argument with the central aesthetic,” which had the vibrant, gonzo look of an indie cartoon. “It felt like all the parts were working together to create this thing. As a result, it’s stronger and better than it would’ve been if, say, it looked like a cartoon but was written like an Umberto Eco novel. The cohesiveness is a big part of it.”

For Williams and Grossman, that era favored creators over corporate profits, if only because no one knew how much computer games could earn and thus the financial stakes were significantly lower. “There is now too much of the same thing,” Williams complained, “and not much creativity put into today’s computer games because the publishers and marketers are afraid to go there.”

*

Once developers discovered how profitable games could be, their narrative strictures began to tighten. The King’s Quest series changed forever after King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, a whimsical animated adventure in the style of LucasArts’ successful point-and-clicks. King’s Quest VIII, released four years later in 1998, was beset by controversy and control issues, with Roberta Williams’s vision curtailed by executives who pushed for the inclusion of sword-fighting mechanics that felt out of place in the King’s Quest series. Those games themselves were increasingly at odds with a new universe of adventure games, such as Metal Gear Solid and Tomb Raider, in which pointing and clicking had given way to button-mashed chokes and kicks. There were stories in these games, too, sometimes good or at least ridiculously overwrought, but the way players experienced these high-octane narratives was different: the storytelling filled in gaps between the action, instead of being the action.

As a historian, I’m obsessed with identifying slightly discernible shifts and fleeting moments of maybe. For me, the shift in interactive storytelling came between two installments of the popular Final Fantasy series: III6 (1994) and VII (1997). The former was a melancholic steampunk experience with a spare script translated from the Japanese; in it, the main character is a half-human girl who happens to be sad, confused, and the most powerful person in the world, only that world gets blown to bits halfway through. It was near-perfect from a storytelling standpoint, a game with brightly colored pixel art and beautiful Yoshitaka Amano concept illustrations, and I lived in it for thousands of hours—maybe longer. The script, as it turned out, was so spare because of space restrictions on the cartridge, and it contained a bunch of mistranslations, but that changed nothing: it was maybe the last story I loved in a naïve way,7 the last story where I could hide out and be myself, which in gaming terms meant being someone totally different.

Then came Final Fantasy VII, a game that’s much more renowned and yet much uglier, with bad 3D graphics, interminable load times, computer-generated cut scenes that have aged poorly, and a very bad English translation. Playstation’s success had normalized the role-playing game, in both its Japanese and American variants, and Final Fantasy VII benefited from this expanding audience. Lots of tweens and teens were now killing time this way, and this was the big, stupid interactive story that awaited them. I played it, played it until I could kill its ultimate bosses, but I don’t suppose I was ever the same again.

I still play the bulky interactive stories that developers put out today—still await their arrival as both a time-killing blessing and a time-killing curse. Mostly they’re terrible in conception and tolerable in execution: the pressures to create AAA-budgeted hits has meant that the protagonist is almost always an amoral hard-ass, gunning down his or her fellow humanzees in the lawless, libertarian paradises that obtain in, say, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout. Or the hero’s an amoral imperialist, slaughtering aliens and fantasy creatures in the lands of Mass Effect and Skyrim. There are also precious indie trifles, like the point-and-click throwback Kentucky Route Zero, where the clicks accomplish nothing in terms of game play but the dialogue is smart and, my, how its designers can work a mood!

These are the games that have claimed my time. I’m reminded of the song from Chuck Jones’ adaptation of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth: “time is a gift, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” I spend mine in the time-killing fields with, say, the boring, well-coiffed imbecile heroes of Final Fantasy XV, a part of my mind always wandering from the flashing screen, wondering why there won’t be another The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask or Secret of Mana—something on a cartridge and thus not burdened with lengthy load times, something rendered in splashes of vivid primary colors, something that was almost but not quite the perfect fusion of gameplay and story. That golden ratio eludes us, but we may still find it. Maybe it’ll become some other little kid’s Final Fantasy III, the ne plus ultra of moving stories that also possess the power to move us, too.

“These things go in phases, but a good adventure story has timeless appeal,” Roberta Williams8 told Adventure Classic Gaming. “It just takes a good adventure-game designer working with a game company willing to go out on a ledge and support that designer and give them the desired tools to create such a game.”

During my half-decade as a professor, I gave almost everybody an A because I couldn’t give almost everybody an F. As I wrote in The Atlantic way back in 2014, you can’t fail a room full of paying customers and keep your job, and at a regional state campus aka the “ol’ diploma mill” a paying customer is mostly what your half-asleep room consists of.1

I quit the full-time teaching business a decade ago, but the grades kept climbing without my help. Between 1990 and 2020, average GPAs at four-year colleges rose more than 16 percent, and “A” turned into the single most common grade awarded in the country, which the Department of Education blames, in its own flat phrasing, on professors responding to “consumer demand.” Harvard’s last graduating class averaged a 3.83 (even Lake Wobegon wasn’t that far above average!). Sticker tuition at public four-year schools doubled across those same decades (the work of premium prices…why, it must be good, the George Washington University $100k-a-year model) while the families paying it watched their income tick up only 16 percent. The customer pays a lot more than his father did, and the customer, as I’ve written elsewhere, would like his A, thanks and you’re welcome.

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The deal, the way the customer sees it, is that a 93 comes with showing up. The paper is a present you bring the professor, the professor says thank you via that 93, and the lunch line keeps moving. Friends of mine still teaching tell me the nature of the gift has changed lately. These days, the papers come from a chatbot, and while the kids can’t read them let alone explain them (most don’t even bother pretending to, given that their universities are all-in on various risible AI initiatives and the assumption is submitting prompts is all what’s left of work will consist of), they’ll happily reprompt the thing until it spits out one the instructor might love. How many lamb-on-the-altar papers do you want me to donate to you before you are propitiated, the customer asks. I can make as many as you need. Few give any thought to the notion that the paper exists as a vehicle for improvement, perhaps because most overtaxed, underprepared, and 100%-contingent instructors are themselves using AI to grade (some are even ordered to do so by the likes of their University of Phoenix/Western Governors University online diploma mill2 employer) and had long before stopped offering any meaningful feedback.

In that Atlantic essay from 2014 I called grades a sorting machine for a meritocracy that doesn’t actually run on merit (how could it? It’s always come down, as my father never tired of saying, “to who you know or who you blow”) once the initial sorting is through. I also expressed a firm personal conviction that every student in my room stood an equal shot at an A — a belief, I was careful to say, and not a testable fact (the facts are clearly otherwise). I made the same case again in Splice Today and in Pacific Standard, propping it up with reference to Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster, the man (19th-century French pedagogue Jean Joseph Jacotot) who taught what he didn’t know to students who were equally ignorant of the subject at hand. What I’ve gotten more candid about since is that the grade most of my students earned on the merits, most of the time, was an F, and a professor who flunks 48 out of 50 humanzees will not teach a second semester, let alone earn tenure. The student fills out the nasty evaluation (note how many of these mention that I’m an easy A), it lands on some lost-in-the-sauce administrator’s desk, and said administrator has to hassle the professor that the students hated.

Most of my students worked 30-40 hours a week on top of school, and since this was Texas, a lot of them drove an hour each way in heavy traffic to sit in a history elective they’d wedged between shifts. They were exhausted, and plenty of them had reached my classroom without anyone ever telling them arguments depend on reasons or that a sentence is a thing you go back and edit for clarity rather than the solution to an equation that automatically yields a 93 grade. Hand that kid an F on a first draft, with the grade making its way onto a transcript and a loan balance swelling alongside it, and you’ve done more harm than good. So for the worst offenders, the authors of utterly incomprensible gibberish (the sort of thing you got to read pre-AI, full of curious turns of phrase like “vassals were a staple of feudal kings,” “the Sunbelt: also known as the Rustbelt,” and “slavery pounded out the slaves for a little too long”), I usually wrote “B+, come see me.” Few of them ever came to see me.

None of this would have bothered me if the F carried no stigma with it. My father, the Paul Smith-as-Bluto man I’ll never tire of writing about, used to read whatever I’d type on the IBM Selectric or Commodore Amiga 500 and tell me the story I’d cranked out that afternoon in the car dealership finance office was lame. This was a real snoozer; come back after you’ve written something that hooks me. Nothing was riding on it: no transcript, no rank, no scholarship to lose, no parent on the phone to the provost or in my office pleading they’ll “do anything” to get their kid an A (this strange offer happened before I had even graded work from this guy’s son, and he refused to believe I was going to give the lad an A sight unseen — but reader, I sure as heck did because I sure as heck didn’t want to find out what “do anything” meant).

Beloved failson Henry Adams tried his hand at teaching at Harvard, his alma mater, and titled the chapter about it “Failure,” which is, as something of a failure myself, it remains the section of The Education I reread most. Teaching, he decided, was as far past him as learning was past the well-meaning boys in front of him. “The number of students whose minds were of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in ten,” he wrote; “nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.” He had no faith in the lecture hall: “any large body of students stifles the student,” and “no man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once.” The one thing he thought worth offering was talk, since “the only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor,” and his whole difficulty, he admitted, was getting “them to talk at all.” Behind it one finds the banger of all bangers: “The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.”

Here is the school I’d build. Don’t worry if you don’t like it — nobody listens to me, so nothing will come of it. Call it “liberal arts,” whatever those words still mean after the administrators and education influencers get through with them: hard, slow, genuinely flunkable, open to anyone who wants the room and shut to him the second he doesn’t. You’d fail constantly but it would trail you nowhere. The best teaching I ever did happened off the books, coaching a moot court team that consisted of six or seven students arguing a case with me for days on end because something far more important than a grade was going to come of it (and did — those kids wound up in law school at Harvard, Virginia, Texas-Austin, Texas A&M, and elsewhere).

Even so, don’t kid yourself that anybody’s lining up for such a thing. The going promise is that “critical thinking” will be the one thing the machines can’t take, the last dry patch of human ground. I don’t believe it for one half of a split second, and I doubt those of you who’ve graded a real stack of papers do either. Most people never wanted to think and surely have no intention of starting now. They were small language models (SLMs) a long time before the large language models arrived, with each SLM trained on the detrital leavings of pop culture, guessing the next agreeable thing they guessed their “frens” on the same “team” or “fandom” liked (guessing the guesses, Family Feud style), feeding on the hot take slop until the slop began to run out. It was the future they were sold, and like good customers they paid full freight for it. There’s only so much Marvel, romantasy, sexy serial killers, and cringe reaction video that even the vastest SLM hard drive can accommodate, and now many of these old, empty souls are reaching the end with nothing to show for their emotional labor.

This is why a doughty handful of us should keep at the thinking game regardless. For such living fossils — horsehoe crabs being bled dry for their precious blue goo, quite literally in the case of AI vendors buying our old pre-AI work for their “models” — using one’s mind, reasoning, arguing, dancing a concept around the floor until a plank in reason breaks, is the only thing left that makes us feel human, until we aren’t. It doesn’t pay, it won’t save the republic, and it won’t let you John Henry this Temu version of Skynet the rich boys are building when they’re not paying $6,000 a minute to talk to nerdy escorts. It just feels like the thing we were born to do, and we ought to want to do better, until we can’t.

The F I never gave anyone but would’ve given nearly everyone wouldn’t have been personal, not one bit.3 It would only mean that the work in question was dull, and because it was dull it would’ve me sad because this person had more in them than that, that they were something more than an SLM or a humanzee.4 Go “build back better,” “go be best,” or — if all else fails — go do the work of something else entirely with what’s left of your so-called life.

Now once upon a time, not too long ago, there was the Tubcat. The Tubcat, a real fat cat that became an even realer meme due to its bizarre tribute website, first appeared during the era of the Almost-Old Internet (the Really Auld Internet that existed before it consisted of how-to guides for using CD-ROMs, bulletin boards for arguing about fanfiction,1 and a budding market for arbitrage in Beanie Baby securities).

I encountered the Tubcat site in 2003 and became obsessed with it.2 The Almost-Old Internet of 2003 was all garbage, just as our current Internet is, but it was — to its credit, I can now safely say — poorly curated garbage, a social media-free rubbish heap of pages among which one could occasionally find rare gemstones. I stumbled upon and thereafter treasured my little pockets of life and hope: Mark Prindle’s record reviews, Homestar Runner, the Thorax Corporation, mIRC chat wars, Soulseek, and my friends’ half-hearted efforts to relaunch the e-wrestling that flourished during the time of the Really Auld Internet. Tubcat entered the mix and quickly became my everything, though I have no idea why.

In 2003, I was lonely, living in my dad’s basement, alternately underemployed or funemployed, and always grasping at straws. This Almost-Old Internet, which was new to me back then, became a place of refuge. Most people still didn’t go there; most writing that appeared there remained separate from real discourse. Today, the IRL/URL barrier is gone and the Internet (or, more to the point, the various apps that mediate the Internet experience — few “kids” (i.e., people under 45) are sitting in front of hulking desktop computers and typing on loud-as-heck mechanical keyboards, as I am here) is a first home for most Gen-Z’ers and their younger siblings; for me it was as well, but 15 years ago, you had a choice. You could live on the URL frontier, a Never Never Land of snarky boy masterminds you’d probably (and hopefully) never meet, or you could live among the grown-ups, the people who seemed to know better, yet were dead inside (many of them are now dead on the outside as well, the cruel passage of time being what it is).

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So what did the Tubcat do for me? Well, I spent hours poring over the site, which existed to commemorate an actual fat cat but wasn’t maintained by the cat’s owner, because there was something to the cat’s fatness that transcended mere language. The Tubcat site captured an aesthetic, the Almost-Old Internet aesthetic, that wasn’t quite like anything else: it was trash and it was humor, but it wasn’t necessarily laugh-out-loud funny or vicious. “i too wish for TUBCAT a lng and happy life!!! pls don’t say i am cruel i just love this fat pussy k\ittie!!! okay?! no more hate male!” wrote the author of the site, in a style that foreshadows later work by social media meme manufacturers such as @dril and @dasharez0ne, both of whom have faded in relevance themselves over the past few years — as such things do, as everything does. These were words that made sense only in the context of an ad hoc world in which people communicated with each other through a developing medium every bit as clumsy and gross as we were.

The fatness of the Tubcat, which would be a bad thing in real life because real non-depressed cats (like real non-depressed humanzees) want to gambol and frolic, worked perfectly on the web. The Internet was made for static shots of “fat pusses”; they were plush, pillow-bodied creatures with expressionless faces every bit as vacant as the vast, empty realm for which they served as de facto mascots. Tubcat, of whom little was actually known, paved the way for the emergence of subsequent tubcats such as Meow the Obese Cat, Sponge Bob the Obese Cat, and Skinny the Obese Cat. These cats were big news — Meow even found his way onto Anderson Cooper’s narrow lap — and in my days as a blogger, back when people blogged instead of twerking in the driver’s seats of their cars on TikTok, I duly chronicled their comings and goings.

I’m a historian by profession, and perhaps that’s why I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve lived my life entirely in retrospect. The Tubcat is gone from our active imaginations now, the way everything else that isn’t the crisis du jour seems to be (it all goes the way of the Szechuan sauce contretemps in an ongoing culture war against something or other, us vs. them and you’d better want us gone because we sure as heck want to destroy you — the quintessence of posting!). The site’s disappearance from view, then, is as much a fait accompli as the rest of it.

Today I’m 44 and writing about the legacy of the Tubcat, but I might as well be 20 and whiling away my lonely hours staring at the pink background of the Tubcat site. The past is both an alien world and an old shoe; yet how can it be both? I wrote essays in 2003, which were just “blog boy stuff” to the grown-ups who thought me full of hot air, and I’m writing this essay on Substack right now, yet perhaps it’s no different. Then, as before, I was reckoning with the truth of the 21st century using rhetorical skills better suited to the 17th.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Nobody that matters, that is.” So the Tubcat website somehow lives on, an undying and unchanging relic of my childhood, maintained by no one in particular for not very good reasons at all. The passage of time from 2003 to 2026 occurred in an eyeblink yet took an eternity. There was more to life than Tubcat, but that life — of ballfields and running tracks and powerlifting gyms — happened offline, somewhere else, to a person a who looked much like me but wasn’t. Meanwhile, the ghost of Oliver Bateman remains tangled amid the gossamer zeroes and ones of the world wide web, lost in space and meaning.

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One thing you folks always ask me for is muscle-related reading recommendations. What follows here began life as a long email that I would send to these inquiring minds, customizing it to their needs, before I turned it into an article at the behest of MEL Magazine1 editor-in-chief Josh Schollmeyer. The piece is now a few years old, and I’ve read many physical culture books since then, so I’ve decided to update it via footnotes.2 Aside from those updates, I remain satisfied with this effort, though I’ve made the usual minor revisions and corrections that accompany the Substack republication of these articles. Enjoy!

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Once upon a time, aspiring meatheads had limited options when it came to muscle-building literature.

They could read Joe Weider’s line of fitness magazines (Muscle & Fitness, Flex and Men’s Fitness), which mixed useful tips with heavy-handed pitches for Weider products (weight gainers, weight gloves and weight sets).3 They could talk to the veteran lifters at their local gyms, in the hope that they’d be given proper instruction about form and performance-enhancing drug use. Or, if they really wanted to commit themselves, they could relocate across the country to a bodybuilding mecca, such as Vince’s Gym or Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, and learn at the feet of meathead masters such as Vic Tanny and Jack LaLanne.4

Unfortunately, none of these were options for me. First, I lived in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from even the nearest magazine rack. Then, when I was 12, I inherited a well-worn copy of Bill Pearl’s Getting Stronger from my older brother. The book featured a picture of Pearl, the aging but still-massive bodybuilding champion, on the cover and loads of useful, if somewhat misguided, advice between the covers.5 And although the book contained tons of exercises, most were variations on a handful of signature bodybuilding movements, such as a million different types of the biceps curl (swinging “cheat” curls, hammer curls, concentration curls, isolation curls, EZ-bar curls, wide-grip barbell curls, alternating curls, palms-up curls and cable curls on a universal machine, to name just a few).

But I had to start somewhere, so I started there. The rest of my literary education in lifting happened gradually. Only in retrospect did it take the shape of a syllabus, a process that more or less coincided with my body taking the shape of an experienced lifter’s. Over time, I had gone from lumpy preteen clay to solid brick poophouse, right down to my thicker bones and my protruding calluses. And while my brain didn’t bulk up accordingly, as the Leader’s does in those Hulk comics from the 1960s, it did get pumped full of bodybuilding lore, legend, and learning thanks to the books below — a true master’s course in physical culture, the work of heavy reading (as opposed to heavy YouTube fitness influencer/guru watching) that, at least for me, make the work of heavy lifting worthwhile.

Part I: The Inescapable Arnold

First up were Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (1985) and Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (1977). The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding is a useful enough work, with a richly-illustrated section on the history of physical culture that was just about all I knew until I pursued that subject in greater detail in graduate school beginning in 2007.6

It seems unlikely that Arnold wrote most of the text — co-author Bill Dobbins probably deserves the credit and criticism for that — but the New Encyclopedia’s nutrition advice (eat thousands of calories), recommended exercises (do lots of reps) and demonstration photos (which feature some of the top bodybuilders of the 1980s comically trying to properly front-rack weight with their hypertrophied T-Rex arms) have all aged somewhat less than gracefully.

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder might be the autobiography that launched a million bodybuilding careers, but in retrospect, it’s a heavily bowdlerized, ghostwritten story that provides a basic overview of budding egomaniac Schwarzenegger’s career in muscle and little else.7 Bodybuilding star Bob Paris, author of a much better memoir that is discussed below, told me that Education of a Bodybuilder was the only “muscle” book he read cover to cover, but even then, he “read it as a quasi-propaganda piece and poorly ghostwritten at that.”

Folks looking for a better understanding of the young Schwarzenegger would be better served to watch him in 1977’s Pumping Iron, where he saves the documentary by overacting his heart out in the role of an unbeatable douchebag.

In contrast, writer Charles Gaines and photographer George Butler’s original book Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding (1972) is a revelation. Though it gave rise to Butler’s movie (about which I spoke at length on NPR here), which centered largely on Schwarzenegger and his mock-rivalry with Lou Ferrigno, the original book is a minor masterwork, with stark black-and-white photos by Butler of a number of early 1970s stars and a series of interesting interconnected essays by Gaines. It was, in fact, Gaines who coined the term “pumping iron,” noting that an acquaintance of his in Alabama was fond of using the colorful term “iron” (“ahrn,” in that man’s words) as a metonym for “barbells and dumbbells.” Gaines’ 1972 novel Stay Hungry (made into a film starring Schwarzenegger and Jeff Bridges) was also the best fictional treatment of the subject until another Southern novelist, Harry Crews, wrote about an aspiring female bodybuilder in his trippy 1990 book, Body.

Part II: Formal Investigations

By my mid-20s, I was trying to fix all of the movement inefficiencies and strength imbalances that resulted from a few half-hearted stabs at taking the bodybuilding stage. The first book I read in that vein was Mark Rippetoe (interviewed by me at that link) and Lon Kilgore’s Starting Strength,8 then in its second edition but now in its third. Rippetoe, a highly opinionated trainer who has made occasional sallies into the world of red-pillers, had equally strong opinions about the back squat (low bar, if you please) and deadlift (conventional stance, not sumo). The book was long-winded in extremis, much like Rippetoe at one of his seminars, but it had the happy effect of curing major movement dysfunctions in my squat, where my knees were a bit of a mess, and in my power clean, where I simply hadn’t developed the proper biomechanical pathways for front-racking weight.

But if I’m being honest here, readers looking for similar powerlifting advice coupled with easy-to-implement programming advice would be better served to check out Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1. Wendler, once a supersized powerlifter, had dropped tons of weight and improved his overall health by streamlining his strength programming into a system for beginning and intermediate trainees that operated on a progressive sequence: a week with 3 sets of 5 reps; a week with 3 sets of 3 reps; a week with sets of 5, 3 and 1 rep; and a “deload” week. My best progress as a powerlifter occurred while following 5/3/1 to the letter; today I still rely on a modified version of it to guide my training.

Wendler’s treatise will probably “meat” the needs of aspiring meatheads, but two other books warrant notice, too. The information about rest and intensity found in Mike Mentzer’s High-Intensity Training is useful (very condensed summary: rest a heck of a lot, and make the handful of reps that you do choose to lift as intense and perfect as possible). And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention ’s work (click here to listen to the interview I recently did with him; there will be more), including Intervention: Course Corrections for the Athlete and Trainer, which gave me a better sense of what I was trying to accomplish in the gym, and From the Ground Up, which is how every clean and press ought to start.

In terms of overall stretching and movement mechanics, there’s nothing as good on the market today as Kelly Starrett’s Becoming a Supple Leopard, a well-deserved bestseller that turns the reader’s attention toward such simple but necessary mechanical issues as properly screwing your feet into the ground, sitting in a braced neutral position to avoid lumbar pain at work, and a million other little tweaks. The book, which is admittedly a bit overstuffed and impossible to comprehend in full (you’re always forgetting something, at least physically — one correction leads to two more faults), also provides great information about powerlifts, body-weight movements, and Olympic lifts.

And for those looking to take the true next step, there’s Dan Duchaine’s Underground Steroid Handbook, a work of biochemistry light years ahead of anything else when it first appeared in 1981. Subsequent authors such as Anthony Roberts9 (Anabolic Steroids: Ultimate Research Guide) and William Llewellyn (Anabolics, currently in its 11th edition) have added to Duchaine’s research on performance-enhancing drugs, but such authors stand on the shoulders of that gone-before-his-time giant. Nevertheless, users looking for anabolic solutions would be well-served to consult a knowledgeable coach or physician to ensure that they don’t turn into some kind of tragic recreational user like the late Rich Piana.

Part III: Body Image Problems

The reason I began lifting was because I was a big boy.10 There’s nothing wrong with being big, and at 5’11” and 230-235 pounds depending on whether I’ve sat atop the porcelain throne that morning, I’m far from svelte even today. I came from a family of big people, 300 pounders to a man and woman, and they were all strong as hell. I really didn’t want to be weak — weakness was mocked by these 300 pounders, even if fatness was regarded as acceptable/desirable — and it was this compulsion that drove me to the gym.

At the time, I had no sense of vanity (as I discussed here), and no real understanding of my body in the world. I wore baggy T-shirts and baggy Jnco pants; who could say what weighty secrets hid underneath? And yet, I suppose on some level I was trying to become attractive, or at least presentable.11 Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (2000) covered a lot of this ground in far more exquisite analytical detail than I could ever hope to bring to the subject, and Lynne Luciano’s Looking Good: Male Body Imagine in Modern America (2002) offered a fitting historical accompaniment to Bordo’s more literary criticism-oriented approach.

The best personal account of a body-image crisis came in the form of Samuel Fussell’s Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (1991). Fussell, the son of legendary literary critic Paul Fussell, responded to a sudden rush of urban insecurity — like many New Yorkers of the Bernie Goetz era, he had a considerable fear of being mugged — by casting off his Ivy League and ivory tower persona. Suddenly in possession of a modest inheritance from his grandparents but with no real master plan in mind, he drifted into bodybuilding and steroid use, first as a curious novice at a New York gym, and later, as a promising, Zubaz-pants clad meathead bound for the muscle mecca that is L.A.

Muscle is a phenomenal book, gripping in its exploration of the author’s deep, inexplicable loneliness and competitive failures. Despite packing loads of mass on his previously frail frame, Fussell comes up short at both a bench-press competition12 and a low-level bodybuilding show. These failures underscore his contempt for Schwarzenegger’s better-living-through-bodybuilding model: Like most of us, Fussell had no desire to be great, only to remain hidden from the world, and when he decided to stop hiding, he lost his will to discipline his body with exercise.

“Everything I’d done for the last four years had been an effort to keep the world at bay, to find a place in which I wouldn’t have to react or think or feel,” he wrote regarding his transformation from muscle zero to muscle hero. “Because as big as I’d gotten and impressive and imposing as I looked ‘standing relaxed,’ I felt that if you could somehow find a chink in my armor and pry apart a muscular pauldron from a gorget, you’d find nothing within that vast white empty space but a tiny soul about the size of an acorn.”

Fussell had gotten close enough to grasp the truth of this world, but — perhaps to his credit — he lacked the fortitude to continue. Bob Paris, by contrast, was among the sport’s rising stars throughout the 1980s, a fixture on the covers of Muscle & Fitness and Flex and a top contender at several Mr. Olympia contests. He looked beautiful, spoke eloquently, and appeared destined to follow in Schwarzenegger’s footsteps by crossing over into other media. Except he, too, eventually decided he didn’t want it, a renunciation chronicled in his memoir Gorilla Suit: My Adventures in Bodybuilding (1995). Like Fussell’s Muscle, it’s the tale of a life partially devoted to bodybuilding, but it also follows Paris before and after he exploded onto that scene. “I fought against that subtitle,” he told me. “It wasn’t just a bodybuilding story; it was about coming of age, as a catawampus outsider, who looked on the surface like a total insider.”

Also like Muscle, Gorilla Suit is the fruit of a single author’s mind: It’s the only such ghostwriter-free memoir written by a competitor of Paris’s caliber. “He’s the only writer on bodybuilding who doesn’t lie for a living,” Fussell wrote in a review of Gorilla Suit, referencing the “kayfabe,” or willfully fictional, tone of much of the rags-to-riches motivational material that has constituted the sport’s literature since Eugen Sandow, the first supposedly perfectly built man of the 20th century, sold impressionable boys on the benefits of a salubrious, abstemious lifestyle he not only didn’t follow but openly flouted.

Despite excelling in the classroom and on the football field in rural Indiana, Paris had an unhappy home life and a fraught relationship with his father. “I hated myself; that simple,” he wrote. “My limbs were all in the wrong places, my teeth were weird, the hair on my head from outer space, the hair sprouting on my chest embarrassing. And I was a fag.” Or as he once explained to me, “What’s the old saying? ‘Show me a bodybuilder and I’ll show you a guy with dad issues.’”

If it’s men and women with “dad issues” that one is looking for, look no further than Alan Klein’s Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction (1993), which devotes an entire monograph-length treatment to their travails. Anthropologist Klein fashioned a composite study of life at a bodybuilding gym, studying the goings-on of lifters prostituting their likenesses and their actual bodies to pay for their steroid use. This venerable book is also starting to show its age, lumping all these people into the Susan Faludi-esque category of hyper-manly cartoon people responding to a crisis in masculinity, but many of the observations remain sound.

The same could be said of author Paul Solotaroff’s frequently anthologized 1990 Village Voice article “The Power and the Gory,” which also focuses on the seamier side of the sport. “Gory” follows ex–Mr. America Steve Michalik, an abused boy who grew up to become a heavy steroid user, as he goes on a wild, drug-fueled ride from the top to the bottom of his profession — and back again. The article is gripping: Who wouldn’t want to read about horned-up bodybuilders attempting to have sex with Coca-Cola machines or running out into traffic to face down approaching cars? But it also seems exaggerated, at least from my perspective as someone who has interviewed hundreds of “normal” performance-enhancing drug users13, and the story is shoehorned into a conventional redemption arc that ends with a clean-living Michalik repenting for the error of his ways. (Spoiler alert: he committed suicide in 2012.)

Readers interested in a truly sad tale of a failed female bodybuilder would be well-served to read the late Joanie “Chyna” Laurer’s autobiography If They Only Knew. Released in 2001 to capitalize on her fleeting pro wrestling fame, the book tells the story of a super-sized amateur bodybuilder who dated abusive men, finished last in fitness pageants, spent hours staring in the mirror and obsessing about her jutting jaw and large nose, got scammed out of a bodybuilding trophy by a competitor, had a father who stole $40,000 in student loans from her, and got bounced from the Peace Corps. The book seemingly ends on a happy note, with Laurer briefly established as a WWE star, but as I wrote in this VICE article, it’s about as gloomy a bodybuilding read as one will find anywhere.

Part IV: History and Tradition

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become interested in how the gym serves as a repository of history as well as a place of practice. Each barbell lift we perform connects us with a long tradition of people who performed that lift before us, much as how each pose we strike in the mirror calls to mind, however imperfectly, the great bodies of yore.

Although it sports a whopping $100 price point, author Randy Roach’s sprawling, shambolic self-published two-volume Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors (2008) remains the finest comprehensive history of physical culture as well as one of the best self-published books available on any subject. Nearly everything pertinent to physical culture is covered across its 1,000-plus pages, and while there are plenty of typos and numerous solecisms, the book is such an awesome resource that one is more than happy to overlook all of them.

History professor John Fair’s two major books on strength sports, Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell (2008) and Mr. America: The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon (2015), cover a lot of specialized ground. Muscletown USA looks at York Barbell magnate Bob Hoffman’s dominance of weightlifting culture in mid-century America, and Mr. America takes us through the early days of muscle pageantry before Joe Weider’s International Federation of BodyBuilding seized control of the sport in the 1960s. Weider’s signature Olympia pageant and the bodybuilders who starred in it is the subject of former bodybuilder Gordon LaVelle’s surprisingly detailed Bodybuilding: Tracing the Evolution of the Ultimate Physique (2011), which takes the story of professional bodybuilding deep into the 21st century.14

As far as pure picture books go, David Chapman and Brett Grubisic’s American Hunks (2009) features excellent black-and-white and color reprints of some of the best male physique photography, covering a time frame ranging from the Civil War until Schwarzenegger’s emergence as a bodybuilding icon. (Chapman’s Universal Hunks (2013) promises a similar treatment of bodybuilders around the world, but I’ve yet to peruse it.)15 And the omnibus edition of Tom of Finland’s beefcake comic imagery, Tom of Finland XXL (2009), which features essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia and Armistead Maupin, is a must-have, if NSFW, coffee table book (Taschen does the work of making great books of this sort). My good friend Broderick Chow’s Muscle Works retails at $38 in paperback — academic presses FTW! — but if you can snag a copy, you’ll find that it’s a short, engaging read that addresses everything from the philosophy of early 20th-century wrestler/strongman George Hackenschmidt to the martial arts work of Bruce Lee, alongside Chow’s own later-life adventures in olympic lifting.

Pumping Iron author Charles Gaines’ charming little illustrated Charles Atlas biography, Yours in Perfect Manhood, Charles Atlas (1982), offers a nice stopping point, at least temporarily, for any self-taught course in physical culture. Gaines focuses on how Atlas transitioned from perfectly-built immigrant posing champion to American fitness entrepreneur through an examination of Atlas’ “Insult that Made a Man out of Mac” cartoon advertising campaign. The cartoon depicted an undersized pubescent male deciding to try Atlas’ patented “Dynamic Tension” isometric course so that he could gain the strength needed to beat up a bully and impress his sweetheart.

For young men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Atlas’ leathery torso, leopard-spotted bathing suit and aging matinee-idol visage were inescapable. He gleamed at them, the very picture of virility, from the backs of their comic books and pulp magazines. Inside those volumes, they would read about impossibly hard men doing impossibly hard things; Atlas tantalized them with the promise of their own bully-beating hardness, merely one self-addressed stamped envelope away.

It’s this process of transformation into something new, something better, that still tantalizes all of us. With the right mixture of sets and reps, we too might become so big that people would hear us coming long before they ever saw us. But as Paris and Fussell realized in their own transformation tales, our most desirable state of being will always remain a postage stamp away. Instead of being born anew within cocoons of musclebound manhood, we will simply remain ourselves, albeit older and wiser — heirs to a fertile tradition of bodybuilding that won’t end until we no longer have bodies to build.

There you have it, true believers. Now go and do the work!

My father, for all his faults, built himself almost from nothing, out of the jetsam and flotsam of the polluted sea he metamorphosed in, “from tadpole to totem pole.” I can point to no obvious reasons for this emergence, except maybe some salutary side eef…

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