The latest retelling of one of the oldest stories of time begins with a dark screen and a seemingly simple line: a time of apparent magic.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey until I saw that line. But when I did, I knew exactly what I was going to get.

Like many people, I was somewhere in between decently skeptical and cautiously optimistic heading into the theater. Nolan is, no doubt, exquisite at his craft, but there’s always going to be audience apprehension whenever an old or beloved work (in this case, both) gets adapted for the screen. In my case, I was worried that The Odyssey would become some watered-down Marvel imitation of an action movie based on some of Nolan’s interviews. And, to be honest, I wasn’t sold on Matt Damon as Odysseus. Yes, of course, he has a history of playing people who struggle to get home, which makes the casting a fun if-you-know-you-know moment, but I wasn’t so sure he could embody Odysseus, a man of mythic proportions, a man larger than life, destructively so—heck, a man with a little oomph, at least. But, as I would come to understand over the course of three hours, the Odysseus I and many others had come to expect had no place Nolan’s adaptation.

Before I go any further, let me say something important. There is no wholly “right” or “wrong” way to adapt the Odyssey.1 Unlike a Shakespeare play or, I don’t know, a Brontë novel (wink wink), the Odyssey doesn’t have a single authoritative source text to be faithful to. What we call the Odyssey today is the product of centuries of oral tradition—stories sung by bards, passed between communities, depicted on pottery, contested and revised and retold and contested again long before anyone wrote them down. There was no source of truth. There were only characters and stories, perpetually in conversation with each other across time.

What this means is that every adaptation, including Nolan’s, is situated within a long tradition of people making choices about who Odysseus is and what his story means. So before you judge Nolan’s (and I have opinions, don’t worry), first, you need to understand where this story comes from. And second, you need to know one word: polytropos.

Understanding Polytropos

The opening of the Odyssey, as we now have it, begins like this:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…

Tell me, Muse, about the polytropos man.2

Polytropos is the first adjective in the poem that tells us who Odysseus is and what we can expect from his story. The word is a mashup of πολῠ́ς (many, much) and τρόπος (turn, way, manner) and literally translates to “much turned” or “much turn-y” or “many turning”—something clunky, confusing, and altogether imprecise, if you ask me. And that is exactly why the art of translation exists, the literal “carrying across” of words from one language to another.

If you are a translator, you must decide how to interpret polytropos for your audience. Do you take the turns literally, calling Odysseus well-traveled? Or figuratively, painting him as someone who turns things over in their mind, a strategic, hard-to-pin-down, even cunning man? And, as Emily Wilson, the first woman to have published a translation of the Odyssey in English, has pointed out, do you take the turns as an active choice by Odysseus or as a passive consequence of fate or circumstance?3 In other words, “is this a man who manipulates his path through the world, or one whose path has been manipulated by forces beyond his control? Or, perhaps, by some combination of both active and passive turns?”4

What’s so cool about ancient Greek—and why I love learning languages—is that all of those things can be true. In English, we have to pick. But in Greek, the ambiguity and all the possibilities it brings can remain.

And that ambiguity is what’s given us the wanderings of many-turned Odysseus, the ingenious (Butler) and cunning (Lombardo) hero, the resourceful (Rieu) and complicated (Wilson) man, the man of many wiles (Mandelbum), the man skilled in all ways of contending (Fitzgerald), and, my favorite, the man of twists and turns (Fagles).

Now, you might be wondering, which polytropos did Nolan choose? Which Odysseus did he decide to make? At first glance, you might argue Wilson’s “complicated man,” since we know he drew inspiration from her translation. But the man Damon plays isn’t complicated at all (which brings me back to my original critique of the casting). He is hollowed out, going through the motions of a hero but without the spark that makes Odysseus Odysseus. Gone is the cunning, the charm, the relish for his own cleverness. What’s left is a man on autopilot, doing what he has always done because he no longer knows how to do anything else.

And that’s why I think Nolan wrote a new translation of the Odyssey altogether, one darker and deeper, shaped by what we now understand about what war does to a man after he leaves the battlefield.

Walk with me for a second. We’ve established that polytropos carries a lot of ambiguity. It can mean the ways Odysseus moves through the world, the tricks he deploys, the paths he chooses or that are chosen for him. But what if we take it somewhere more interior? What if the many turns aren’t outward at all—not travel, not fate, not strategy, not cunning—but part of his innermost mind? A mind that moves constantly, that revisits, that ruminates, that cannot rest? A mind that turns something over and over and over and over again to no apparent end? A mind, you might say, that is haunted. And once you see that choice, every creative decision in the film makes sense, even if you (or I) wish it were otherwise.

Because Nolan’s Odysseus is a haunted man whose many turns are the relentless rotations of a mind that has seen too much, the Odyssey he creates is a reflection of that intense interiority: haunted, guilty, human. It is a beautiful tale, but one that lacks the grandeur, the scale, “the strangeness and spirit” of the Homeric world so many of us have fallen in love with.5

In its place, we get a land of only “apparent magic,” one siphoned of almost everything supernatural, of any possibility that beyond our world there is something divine, or at least something larger than ourselves. Instead, we watch a haunted man thrust against the backdrop of a larger-than-life myth, which Nolan subtly argues is a fairy tale concocted to distract from the horror of war and humanity’s choices within it. Or, as Travis Scott’s character in the film puts it, “The darkness of victory shrouds the writing of legends.”

What Polytropos Means for Nolan’s The Odyssey

Nolan’s landscape is drained of color, its hazy shores littered with dark pebbles underneath a sky that offers no trace of warmth. If you know your Homer (or if you’ve ever looked at a picture of the Mediterranean at any point in your life), you’ll feel the absence immediately. Gone is the tantalizing wine-dark sea. Gone is dawn with her rosy fingers. In their place rests a stark gray, heavy, unrelenting world. And what animates it is the haunting sound of the aulos (also known as an ancient two-pronged flute), ringing through the landscape much like guilt pangs the heart on a restless night. At the risk of sounding painfully obvious, I must admit, it’s a major bummer. Nolan’s landscape feels like the movie equivalent of marble statues (if you didn’t know, the Greeks and Romans used to paint their statues in vibrant, if not gaudy colors). It’s a bland and sad backdrop for Odysseus to move through rather than a force of nature to (literally) contend with.

Gone, too, is the world where gray-eyed Athena descends from Mount Olympus to help Odysseus at every turn. What I loved most about other translations of the Odyssey, and what I mourned most in Nolan’s, is the way the gods behave. As much as they are incredibly powerful, they’re also petulant children who form relationships with heroes and pick their favorites, not unlike the parasocial relationships we have with our favorite reality TV figures. Before the events of the poem, the gods pick sides in the Trojan War—Athena, Hera, and Poseidon for the Greeks, Aphrodite, Apollo and Areas for the Trojans—squabbling with each other over who deserves to win and inciting chaos at every turn. In the Odyssey, Athena disguises herself to come to Odysseus’ aid while Poseidon nurses a grudge against him, Hermes intervenes whenever he can, and Zeus arbitrates it all. The gods’ distinct personalities and petty rivalries are capricious enough to feel almost human, yet powerful enough to remind us that the world extends beyond human influence.

In Nolan’s film, however, Athena appears merely as a manifestation of Odysseus’s guilt, a young woman whose divinity is deliberately ambiguous and whose fate at the end of the film is left unresolved. Is Athena real: did she take on the form of a young priestess at Troy, only to be killed by Odysseus’s own men in their bloodthirsty sack of the city? Or is her severed head, falling at the same moment as the statue’s, a symbol of how their violence offended the very gods who had been on their side? Or is she simply a projection of a haunted mind, a guilt made flesh that Odysseus can neither escape nor fully face? In what feels like a proudly ambiguous ancient Greek moment, Nolan seems genuinely uninterested in answering. To him, it seems, the divine exists only within the human psyche.

Fittingly, the perilous Sirens have vanished, too. As Odysseus and his crew pass through a maze of treacherous rocks, we expect to hear the infamous Siren song that brings men to the rocky depths, that makes Odysseus, bound to the mast of the ship, thrash around and plea to be untied. Instead, our ears are muffled, just like the sailors whose ears are clogged with wax, and we do not get to hear a thing. This is one of my favorite details in the entire movie. The temptation to know what Nolan would have made the Sirens sound like is only a fraction of the desire Odysseus’s sailors would have felt. Masterfully done.

Our only glimpse into the experience of the Siren song comes through voiceover from Odysseus, who describes it as:

“All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for. It was a delicious itch you want to scratch but you find it under the skin and can’t reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have. and what you most can’t have is what you already had, then lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.”

I found myself moved by the dialogue. It was genuinely stunning, one of the most perfect ways to embody a haunted polytropos tale. But, at the same time, it reminded me that, in this world, there are no monsters luring men into the depths of the sea, only desires and regret that lurk in the mind, inviting us in deeper and deeper to turn and turn again.

The only genuine trace of the supernatural we get is Circe. And even here, Nolan can’t quite surrender to the mythological. Rather than showing the sudden poof of men becoming swine, we watch Circe literally mold men like clay, pressing into animal shapes (and later, back into humans) with her hands. In many ways, I loved this creative choice. It was so visceral I had to look away—and so impressive once I learned that this was achieved entirely thorough practical effects, not CGI. It also, I think, reflects a more modern, feminist reading of the poem, not unlike Madeline Miller’s Circe: that these men were already monsters; Circe just had to rid them of their disguises. It’s also more evidence of Nolan’s haunted polytropos. Because if Circe’s magic is really just another metaphor for human nature, then there is no magic at all. There is only us and what we carry. Only the many turns of a haunted mind, endlessly revisiting what it has seen, what it has done, and what it cannot undo.

What’s Lost in Translation

The beauty and the danger of translation is that every choice opens a door, but at the cost of countless others. What Nolan’s Odyssey gains is a hauntingly interior portrait of a man undone by war, a masterful exploration of guilt and its ripple effects, a gorgeous and unflinching look at what the desire for power costs everyone it touches. It did things I didn’t expect it to do, and I felt things I didn’t expect to feel. What it lacks, however, is wonder. The sense that the world is larger than we are and that somewhere out there, beyond the wine-dark sea, there are forces we cannot explain and creatures we cannot outrun and gods who might, on a good day, be on our side.

Nolan’s film is the Odyssey for a pragmatic, relativistic age. And while it was beautiful, I do think something was lost in that translation. To be honest, I’m so tired of our collective cultural reflex to strip things of their magic in order to be “serious,” as if we’re all small children who need to be told that Santa Claus isn’t real and the gods never existed and everything has a psychological explanation if you look hard enough. This modern idea that we have to choose between gravity and enchantment, impact and awe, myth and moral is honestly frustrating. Perhaps my feelings can best be expressed through one of Odysseus’ lines in the film: “don’t look for gods in men—you’ll just be disappointed.”

Nolan chose a polytropos for an age that cannot hold the many turns of a broken mind at the same time as the many tricks of a cunning hero. I understand his choices. I just miss the magic, both apparent and otherwise.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

Not long ago but in a time far, far away, I sat at the kitchen table with my dad doing algebra. We were working through the even-numbered problems I had been assigned for homework (if you know, you know—only the odd ones have answers in the back of the book), and we had just realized I messed up a word problem. Already in my robe and PJs with my hair piled high into a millennial-messy-bun-gone-wrong, I hurriedly erased my hard work, hoping I’d make it to bed faster. But when I flipped over my pencil to try again, my dad stopped me.

“Olivia, erase fully and completely.”

At the time, this comment—which I had become quite used to during many late-night kitchen-table math sessions like this one—annoyed me to no end. While my dad and I share many idiosyncratic (and perhaps borderline neurotic) tendencies, proper erasing technique was not one of them. Now, I think back to this moment (and my annoyance) fondly because it led to one of my favorite DuCharme family jokes. Unload the dishwasher fully and completely! Wipe Seamus’s paws fully and completely! Say what you really think fully and completely!

As I’ve been working on my return to Substack, I keep coming back to this memory. Because, whether my dad knew it or not, he was teaching me about perfection.

Like a lot of us out there, I have a perfection problem. When I do something, I want to do it “the right way,” which basically means I want it to be the best something that’s ever somethinged. Unsurprisingly, that high—and paralyzing—standard is not so good for creativity, and I’ve found myself avoiding writing for Symbolon lest my output be anything less than immaculate.

I know I’m not alone in this mindset. Even if you’re not a writer or don’t consider yourself to be a particularly creative person, you have that thing. That childhood hobby or pipe dream that comes out at night when the lights are off and your head hits the pillow, that crazy idea you can’t get out of your head that terrifies and exhilarates you all at the same time. And with that thing, whatever it is, comes a fear of being anything less than perfect.

Whenever I’m up against a challenge like this, I look at the word attached to it. Because more often than not, I find that understanding what a word means reframes my entire mindset. “Perfection” is no exception. After all, the way we think about it isn’t what it actually, literally means at all.

In the year of our Lord 2026, we’re all well acquainted with the modern idea of perfection: the state of being without flaw. Just take a look at Merriam Webster’s definitions.

Freedom from fault or defect. Supreme excellence. Saintliness?! That’s a tall order right there. And yet, none of these definitions are what perfection means at its most basic level. The word comes from the Latin verb facere, which means “to make” or “to do.” When paired with the prefix per- (“through” or “thoroughly”), you get the definition “to make or do thoroughly.” So then, by that logic, something “perfect” is simply something finished, complete, or carried through to its intended end.

Something that my dad would say is done fully and completely.

Our modern definition of perfection keeps us trapped in fear and self-doubt and self-obsession, too terrified of results to put ourselves out there, to try something new or old or different, or (the horror!) to stumble along the way. How ironic is that? The pursuit of flawlessness is what’s keeping us from doing anything “perfect” in the first place.1 But if we embrace the old definition—finished, not flawless—we’d find that perfect is much easier to come by.

In a way, this reframing of perfection points us back to childhood, not only my late nights working on math at the kitchen table, but also the advice many of us heard long before we worried about being perfect: Finish what you start. When you commit to something, see it through.

Is there an old hobby you’ve wanted to get back into? Something new you’ve wanted to try? Or, less fun, but still real: is there an important task or project you’ve been avoiding, waiting until you feel ready enough, good enough, certain enough that the outcome won’t disappoint you?

For me, that means writing. Playing my favorite piece on the piano. Picking up Latin again (more on that soon). Texting an old friend. As a matter of fact, texting the many people I’ve been meaning to text…

Whatever you choose, all you have to do is start and have the courage to finish, even if the final product isn’t exactly as you envisioned. I’ll go first: here’s a finished (dare I say perfect) essay and my official return to Symbolon. Proof that I’m taking my own advice. Fully and completely.

P.S. If you’re reading this, hi Dad! Who knew your math instruction would turn out to be so wise.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

About Symbolon

A symbolon was an ancient Greek token split between two people, and when the halves were reunited, it was believed to gain its full meaning. That’s the idea behind this Substack: pairing something modern with something older and unexpected to see what becomes visible in the overlap.

I’m Olivia, a writer, former Classics PhD student, and someone who is perhaps too online for her own good. I believe the ancient world has more to say about modern life than you might expect, and that sometimes, the most illuminating thing you can do is ask where something came from.

I am a creature of routine, and routine is both my anchor and my albatross. When I need grounding, I go to the basics: nine hours of sleep (yes, sadly, I function best with nine), morning gratitude, writing, exercise, calls with loved ones.

But I am, in many ways, an insatiable person, always wanting to be better tomorrow than I am today. That’s where the routines I use to ground myself become gateways to self-improvement. How can I get my nine hours of sleep and say my morning prayers and listen to my podcast and exercise and do my skincare, hair, and makeup? Should I spend my evening reading, writing, or calling loved ones? Wear sweats or actually put together an outfit? Go to a workout class or save my money? When’s hair wash day? Should I do a hair mask? Do I have time for a blowout? And I really should be writing…and also seeing friends…and booking that plane ticket back home—and, and, and. The list multiplies endlessly.

The more I try to improve myself, the worse I feel. And then, of course, all it takes is a few scrolls on TikTok before I see someone else doing it all better than me—a better face, a better outfit, a better social life, a better writing practice.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Last week, Vogue ran an article asking whether we’re all “protecting our peace” too much. In theory, the phrase is about boundaries and self-care—filling our own cups so we can keep going in a world that demands so much of us. But in practice, Vogue argued, “protecting our peace” often looks like fixating on it.

In other words, the very culture that encourages us to “protect our peace” may be making us miserable. By shielding ourselves from outside stressors, we invite new ones in the form of self-obsession: comparing, measuring, tweaking, optimizing, opening the door to a culture that constantly whispers: you are not enough.

I was reminded of this paradox while helping a student answer a medical school admissions essay from the University of Florida. The prompt, which is notably different from most secondary essays (Why do you want to go to our school? What challenges have you overcome? What are you doing with your gap year?), draws from Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to ask applicants how they will find “joy and fulfillment” as a physician:

In [Frankl’s] view, self-protection is counterproductive, and only by “self-transcendence” can we find true meaning and purpose in our lives. To quote him, “The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself…self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

This assertion fits our experience and has led us to the belief that focusing on ourselves beyond common sense self-care will be counterproductive in our quest for wellness. We call this the “Paradox of the Self.” Stated briefly, The more I think and worry about myself, my shortcomings, struggles, unfulfilled desires or unwanted circumstances, the more anxious and miserable I will become. While the more I focus my attention outward and live with a graceful self-forgetfulness, the more I can serve others with joy and find fulfillment.

The prompt perfectly captures my journey from self-protection to unintentional self-obsession. It’s simple, really: my discontent with myself stems from too much time thinking about…myself.

With a little distance, though, all that discontent feels hollow—because, all things considered, I’m doing just fine. I have a wonderful apartment in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. I spent my summer with friends and family in new cities. The New Heights episode announcing Taylor Swift’s new album is coming out any minute now(!!!). And, in just a few short weeks, I’ll see my brother for the first time in over a year.

When I get out of my head and into the world, I find a steadiness I can’t quite realize by trying to better myself. As the prompt says: “the more I focus my attention outward and live with a graceful self-forgetfulness, the more I can serve others with joy and find fulfillment.”

If I reflect on experiences when I focused my energy elsewhere—helping a student find the right words to express why they want to be a doctor, listening to my brother talk about his vocation on a podcast, watching tourists as I take a long Sunday walk past the monuments—I feel satisfied. That, I think, is the “graceful self-forgetfulness” the University of Florida references: choosing to give myself fully to a moment without thinking about whether it’s making me better.

I’m not suggesting we toss out our boundaries or routines (after all, as Aristotle wrote, virtue is the mean between two extremes). But I am starting to believe that my efforts to protect my peace are only making it that much harder to find. In a way, I guess, peace is like a cat: the more you chase it, the more it runs away. But if you turn your attention elsewhere, soon enough, you’ll find it’s right there in front of you.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

Long distance relationships are bound by time and travel. Countdowns and calendars, arrivals and departures. There’s always a date you look forward to and a date you dread.

Those in-between moments—the time you have between your arrival and your next departure—often feel like squeezing out the last bit of toothpaste. You want to make the most of what’s left, fully aware of how little there is. That pressure gives everything weight, especially everyday moments.

Over the past three and a half weeks, I’d been in Texas working remotely and helping my boyfriend move into his new Corpus Christi apartment. In the many small moments together—hanging a sketch of his Austin apartment drawn by my little brother, building a bar cart to display sake he’d brought back from his deployment to Okinawa, eating Chuy’s on the sofa after a long day of unpacking—we were happy to be together doing wonderfully mundane things. And even though I knew I was setting up his place, not ours, I felt both excitement and peace knowing this would be the place I would visit over the six months or so (whatever the military allows).

But as soon as I acclimated to Texas July Heat (it deserves capitalization), I found myself on the way to the Corpus Christi airport for my departing flight. And, like most goodbyes in long-distance relationships, it was a hard one. I hate the transition from the airport terminal lobby and TSA for that reason.

As my goodbye tears dried, we began to board the plane. And then we sat there…for a while…with little air conditioning. At first, the pilot’s announcements were just ambient background noise: route changes, weather, the usual. After close to an hour, though, I started listening more carefully. Houston, my connecting airport, had a ground stop. No planes in or out.

So we de-boarded the plane and I explored all of Corpus Christi Airport’s six gates to find myself food. Earlier, United had changed my connecting flight because they thought I’d miss it. Now, it was obvious I’d miss not only that one, but the next two connections as well. When I finally arrived in Houston, hours later than expected, every gate had its own line of tired, sweaty, and frustrated people.

For my troubles, I was given a microplastic-laden United water bottle along with two individually wrapped mints and a smattering of toiletries. My new flight to DC would leave on Monday.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend Lynn had driven to Houston that day to pick up more things from his parents’ house. We agreed this would make our goodbye easier. I’d do some writing for Substack on the plane (ha); he’d spend time with his family. Neither of us expected that as soon as he arrived home, he’d be getting back on the crowded Houston freeways to come get me.

Normally, when we greet each other in airports, it’s like a big orchestral swell, however corny it sounds. These are the moments we look forward to for weeks—if not months—at a time. That night, however, surrounded by seven or eight hundred people in baggage claim, Lynn took my hand without many words and led me to his car. When we arrived at his parents’ house, we were greeted by glasses of wine and a small plate of charcuterie, which his family was snacking on as they prepared a very late dinner.

Everything in Houston was normal, the familiar rhythms of family life. We blew up an air mattress for me in the office, made up with the same pink sheets and blanket I had grown used to when I came to visit. Their cat, Riley, slinked around and between my legs wanting attention. I had only seen him a weekend prior; to him, clearly, nothing was different.

Lynn and I spent the next day working together, each of us locked into our laptops. The day passed quickly (as all normal days do). But something felt different. Usually, on our last day together, every passing minute feels heavy. That day, I felt light, even happy.

The goodbye was different, too. This one had much fewer tears, along with a long hug and a pair of soft smiles. Nothing about our situation had changed—we were still long distance, I was still leaving Texas—but we were both grateful for the gift of more time. And not just any time, but time we weren’t technically supposed to have, which somehow made all the difference.

Then, sure enough, just as I made it through TSA, my new connecting flight was cancelled. This time, I was in one of the largest airports in the United States, so I had no trouble finding a burger and a perch for my laptop to get me through the next few hours. And, once more, my fourth and final connecting flight was delayed (they had overbooked us).

Here's what struck me about that unexpected day (beyond my new and profound disdain for United). I lived it differently than I'd lived any of my planned time together with Lynn. During our regular three weeks, I was constantly aware of the countdown. But that Monday? I just lived it.

It's a strange paradox: the very pressure that makes limited time feel meaningful can also prevent us from fully inhabiting it. But when unforeseen time arrives, we receive and treat it differently.

Maybe that’s the unexpected connection for today. Not the revolving door of connecting flights, or even the bonus time itself, but what happens when time is briefly freed from the pressure to be meaningful. The kind of time you can simply live in without squeezing it for all it’s worth. You just have it. And then, like all things, it’s gone.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

I’ve spent the last few weeks catching my boyfriend up on the latest season of Love Island UK. And while I’ve been a fan of the show for over six years now, I’ll be the first to admit that the past few seasons have felt increasingly lackluster. Part of the problem, I think, is that the show became too aware of itself. As Love Island became a proven launching pad for influencer careers—Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury being the most famous example, now with a baby and an Amazon Prime documentary to their names—the show began attracting contestants who treated the villa like a brand accelerator, performing with one eye on the audience and the other on potential sponsorship deals. Last summer, Love Island USA briefly filled the void, but this summer’s flop of a season made me realize just how much Love Island UK has always been the real thing.

For the uninitiated, Love Island is a British reality show in which conventionally hot singles are “dumped” into a sun-soaked villa in Mallorca to flirt, sunbathe, and compete for £50,000. The rules change slightly each season, but the core remains the same: every week, islanders “couple up” and whoever is left single is at risk of being dumped from the island. Along the way, contestants complete silly challenges, suffer engineered twists, and scramble to convince the public (and each other) that their relationships are real.

What makes Love Island so addicting—apart from the fact that it enables our collective binge-watching addiction with new episodes six days per week—is its reliable cast of character tropes. There’s the Day-One Couple who (more or less) stays together from start to finish (Season 8’s Tasha and Andrew, Season 9’s Shaq and Tanya). The “Nice Guy” (Season 4’s Dr. Alex, Season 5’s Curtis). The Fiery Girl who holds the men accountable (Season 5’s Amber, Season 7’s Faye). The Playboy whose head always turns (Season 7’s Toby, Season 9’s Casey). And then, of course, there’s the Bombshell—an even more conventionally attractive single sent in to “blow up” established couples, usually armed with a killer walk and even better one-liners (Season 5’s Molly-Mae and Maura, Season 8’s Ekin-Su).

These character tropes are what give Love Island its familiar rhythm—and, as of late, they’ve also made it feel stale. This season, though, things are finally feeling unpredictable again. And, as it turns out, the key to understanding that shift lies in the word trope itself.

Before trope became a television term, it was a Greek one. It comes from the verb trepein, to turn (literally, to change direction). But even in ancient rhetoric, the noun tropos also meant a figure of speech—something that “turned” the meaning of a word from literal to figurative (that’s where we get “turn of phrase” from). Over time, this idea of “turning” grew broader: in literature, a trope was a stylistic flourish like metaphor or irony; in medieval religious drama, a trope was a musical or textual addition that turned a piece of art in a new direction. Eventually, “trope” denoted any person or event that turned a story in a way we recognize.

In fiction, tropes help us understand who’s who and what’s what without spelling it out. In reality TV, they make messy, unpredictable people feel legible. And the more we see them, the more we start to anticipate them—which is exactly what makes shows like Love Island so fun to watch.

But when the tropes start to fall apart? Well, that’s when things get interesting.

Which brings me back to this season of Love Island UK, where the tropes are alive and well, but no one is playing the roles they’re supposed to.

Take Meg and Dejon, for example. On paper, they should be the Day-One Couple. She picked him first and has never wavered, closing herself off to any other romantic connections in the villa. But Dejon’s head just won’t stop turning. He’s flirted with four different bombshells (Malisha, Caprice, Bilikis, and Andrada), made distasteful sexual jokes with other women, and left Meg to play defense while he explores his options. Meanwhile, Meg’s bullied any girl who’s tried to come close to Dejon, as if her behavior could secure what his lack of loyalty couldn’t. And even though Dejon returns to Meg after every flirtation, their Day-One performance is falling apart at the seams.

Or look at Tommy, who’s set up as this season's Nice Guy. After his day-one partner Megan called him a “golden retriever” and dumped him for rugby player Conor, Tommy coupled up with Emily (appropriately, this season’s Nice Girl). But then Casa Amor arrived—the mid-season twist where boys and girls are separated, new singles are introduced, and everyone is tempted to explore new connections. While Emily and the other girls confidently declared they weren't worried about Tommy, he was busy cracking on with another girl, a move straight out of the Playboy’s playbook. And, when the villas reunited and Tommy chose to recouple with Lucy instead of sticking with Emily, he rendered her single, and therefore, dumped from the island.

Then there’s Harry, this season’s designated Playboy, who has indeed flirted with anything exhibiting a pulse. He’s “wife-swapped” throughout the villa, leaving Shakira for Helena, Helena for Yasmin, Yasmin for Shakira, then Shakira for Helena (again). But here’s the twist: despite canoodling with another girl during Casa Amor, he returned to the main villa alone to recouple with Helena, a move that signals genuine (or, in his words, “undeniable”) feelings.

But the biggest role reversal belongs to Toni and Helena. Toni—the first-ever American islander and this season's first Bombshell—was supposed to flirt her way through the villa, stealing boys and stirring up drama. Instead, she's become a narrative catalyst and moral compass. Her directness, charm, and unwillingness to play by British social codes have not only earned her favor with viewers, but also created actual shifts in the villa’s dynamic. She’s helped other girls—even girls who have bullied her—find their voice, confronted boys for bad behavior, and formed a loyal friendship with Shakira that runs counter to the show’s typical passive aggressive female competition.

And the person who’s actually playing the Bombshell? That would be Helena, a regular (“OG”) islander who’s been dubbed “Hideaway Helena” by fans and islanders alike for her string of stolen boys and bikinis. She’s gone after every boy Shakira and Toni have shown interest in (while literally wearing Shakira’s clothes!), taking Harry to the Hideaway (the villa’s private romantic suite) for a kiss, then Harrison, then Harry again. And while she pretends to be a loyal OG girl, Helena has turned into the villa’s chief troublemaker.

All of this role-swapping has given Love Island the one thing any stale franchise needs to survive: unpredictability. Normally, at this point in the season—a little over halfway to the finale—viewers would have a general sense of which couples are strong and who’s just playing a game. But now? I genuinely have no idea. And that’s what makes things so exciting. When the nice guy betrays, the bombshell builds community, and the OG becomes the villain, there’s no telling what could happen.

And, ironically, that’s the most faithful version of a “trope” there is. By turning from their expected roles, this season’s islanders have given us what made Love Island—and the very concept of tropes—so compelling in the first place. It’s not the familiarity that excites us; it’s the moment when that familiarity pivots into something we didn’t see coming. So while this season might feel like something new, it’s actually pulling from the oldest trick (or turn) in the book.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

Two weeks ago, I visited some college friends in Boston. It was my first time in the city, and I was looking forward to exploring a new place while spending time with people I hadn’t seen in a while. And, like most reunions with people who knew a younger version of you, it made me reflect on where I’ve been and where I am now—how much has changed and how much never really will.

On Sunday, we visited the Museum of Fine Arts to see the new Van Gogh exhibit. Afterward, we drifted through the maze of galleries until (shocker, by my request) we entered the Art of Ancient Greece and Rome section.

If you’re not an ancient art person, I don’t blame you. There are a lot of pots (seriously, a lot) and a seemingly endless collection of men in marble. After the twentieth vase or statue, it’s easy to feel like you’ve seen it all. I used to feel that way too—until I became a teaching assistant for a class called Women in Greece.

In antiquity, there aren’t many records about real women’s lives, just myths of terrible monsters and villains and mercurial and vengeful goddesses. So we have to turn to the pots to piece together what we can. Decorative scenes painted on clay become our archive: glimpses of weddings, funerals, domestic rituals, priestesses, mythic heroines, and anonymous girls caught mid-gesture. I spent a semester learning how to read them so I could present their stories to a lecture hall of a hundred some-odd students, some of whom cared deeply, most of whom just wanted to fulfill a core requirement.

So when I found myself standing in front of dozens of vases in Boston, I realized I was seeing it through two lenses at once: my current self, a writer visiting friends, and the former version of me, the PhD student with a two-hundred-square-foot apartment who used to live in these artifacts. I wondered what she’d think of the sight in front of her.

One vessel in particular—a krater, a large bowl for mixing wine and water, particularly at drinking parties called symposia—showed Athena triumphantly holding Medusa’s head in her right hand without making eye contact with it. The staring is the most important: legend has it, if you stared into Medusa’s eyes, you’d be turned to stone. To her left stands Perseus, his shield reflecting Medusa’s head near his feet, which are wearing Hermes’ winged sandals. To her right stands Hermes, casually resting on a wooden pole, which the Museum of Fine Arts’ collection site says is a barren tree (although that feels dubious to me).

I could feel my old instincts waking up as I scanned the scene for narrative, composition, mythic cues. Even more so, I was struck by the quality of this vase—how something so old (the MFA’s archives estimate that it was crafted between 400 and 385 BCE) was still intact enough that I could observe it thousands of years later. Seeing the krater through that lens, I felt something shift from reverence to recognition. I had once been fluent in this world. I wondered if I ever would be again.

The next day, we drove out to the beach (I feel embarrassed to say I had no idea Boston had beaches). After a few hours lying in the sun, the three of us crossed the burning sand and rock-lined shore until the icy bay took over our legs. With our calves sufficiently numbed, looking out at a cluster of boats playing in the water, we let the quiet linger for a while until we began talking about what would make us feel “settled.” It was the kind of moment that folds time in itself, present and brief yet already becoming a memory.

As we spoke, I kept thinking about how I used to have such a clear sense of who I was becoming. Graduate student, academic, maybe professor. And when I left that path, I felt both relieved, because I knew I’d made the right call, and unmoored, because I no longer had a built-in structure to lean on. Suddenly, the work of figuring out what I wanted to say, how I wanted to show up, or just what I wanted, period, was entirely my own.

All three of us were trying to reconcile the futures we once imagined with the realities we were living. We were, undoubtedly, in new chapters: different cities, different careers, different concerns. But none of us could quite define what it meant to be “settled,” let alone how or when we’d recognize it if we got there.

Maybe that’s what I’d been searching for the day before, too. As I stood among the ancient vases, I looked at them with a kind of distance, like I was walking through the ruins of a life I’d left behind. But our beach conversation reminded me that the past isn’t something sealed off. It moves with you.

Soon after I returned home, I opened my inbox and found out that an article of mine—one where I coined the term heirloomcore—had been featured in Casey Lewis’s Substack, After School, which unpacks the latest trends capturing young people’s attention. Heirloomcore was a term I’d come up with to capture Gen Z’s longing for beautifully crafted, sentimental items that would actually stand the test of time (a real luxury in a culture obsessed with disposability).

Seeing my work featured felt surreal. For so long, I had studied meaning as something you uncovered then recovered from things like fragments, pottery, or “dead” languages. Now, I was covering it—even creating it—in real time. It was a different kind of scholarship, but maybe not all that different.

If I take my own words as advice and “turn to the pots to piece together what we can,” I guess I could say that I haven’t left that life behind. I’ve just found new material to work with. I still search for patterns and try to make meaning from fragments (there’s a reason this place is called Symbolon, after all). The difference is that now the fragments are mine: a coined term like heirloomcore, a conversation on a beach, an old vase seen with new eyes. The tools I once used to decode ancient lives are the same ones helping me shape my own.

We carry all our past selves like little vessels. Whether it’s walking past an old apartment, picking up a sweater you haven’t seen in ages, or visiting longtime friends, every now and then, one surfaces and fits right back into our hands. And when that happens, it’s wild to see how far you’ve come—and how much of you was always there, just waiting to be picked back up.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

A famous blonde woman once sung, “We hereby conduct this post mortem.”

But I’m not writing about Taylor Swift.

I’m writing about another blonde singer, Sabrina Carpenter—you know, the internet’s current topic of fixation.

Last week, along with the now #1 chart-topping single “Manchild,” Grammy-award winner Sabrina Carpenter announced her latest album, Man’s Best Friend, complete with a particularly divisive cover.

The cover discourse has been recapped to death across every platform imaginable, from The New York Times and The Cut to countless TikTok deep-dives. Is it provocative? Surely. Voyeuristic? Most definitely. But whether it’s ironic or earnest, empowering or degrading, progressive or regressive—well, that’s sparked the kind of heated debate that ranges from disgust to defense to Swiftie-conspiracy-theory-level speculation.

@nottsummermarie“you’re setting women back 50 years!!!” babe I fear our government is doing that enough. “she is for the male gaze!!!” which is why she unalives them in almost every video the last 5 years? okayyyyyy 😭😭😭 #fyp #fypシ #foryoupage #sabrinacarpenter #teamsabrina #manchild #mansbestfriendalways #greenscreen

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@maisiejoneslike she called men pigs in her music video just 1 week ago are yall okay??? god forbid a girl makes a joke about how men see woman more as pets than people and people take it the complete wrong way😭😭😭 #sabrinacarpenter #shortnsweettour #sabrinacarpenteredit #emailsicantsendtour #shortnsweetdeluxe #emailsicantsend #shortnsweet #eicstour #fangirl #manchild #mansbestfriend

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@brittonraeMaybe there’s more to the image (final theory I’m sorry I’m goin in hahaha) #sabrinacarpenter #manchild #mansbestfriend #trending #fy #greenscreen

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

When you scrape away the extremes of the discourse, what remains is a quieter, thornier question: not just what this image means, but who we believe is behind it. What we’re really circling around is the idea of authenticity—that slippery, often weaponized word we use to measure how closely someone's choices align with the version of them we've come to expect.

Sabrina has spent the past few years carefully crafting a personal brand that relishes in subverting expectations. Since the release of her hit “Nonsense,” she’s leaned into hyperfeminine irony, crafting aesthetics and writing lyrics that play with sexual innuendo, performance, and control. Her fans have come to see her as someone who knows how to walk the line between clever and cute, cheeky and subversive—someone who can be both the butt of the joke and the architect of it, someone who’s palatable while poking fun at “palatability” itself.

For some fans (namely those who discovered her through "Espresso"), the Man’s Best Friend album cover represents the logical extension of her knowing, wink-wink persona. They see a joke now taken to its natural—albeit extreme—conclusion. But for others, especially longtime listeners, this cover feels provocative—even extremely uncomfortable—because it seems to signal a departure from who they thought they knew.

And when that illusion of authenticity cracks, we start digging. We rewind interviews, compare lyrics, scrutinize every image and caption in search of clues. What changed? Was it always fake? Were we ever right about her?

That impulse—to investigate, to “see for ourselves”—isn’t new. In fact, it’s ancient. Which is why I’d like to bring in a dear old (like, really old) friend: Herodotus.

Herodotus, a historian from the fifth century BCE, is often credited as the “father of history” for his work The Histories, a sprawling account of the Greco-Persian Wars that I had the pleasure (and pain) of reading in Greek and English. The Histories spans nine books and chronicles the rise and fall of leaders, ethnographies of distant peoples, and intrigue ranging from myth to murder (lots of murder), all with this supposed goal in mind:

“So that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds…may not be without their glory.”

However, Herodotus's methods were controversial even in antiquity. His tendency toward mythical storytelling, his clear favoritism toward certain figures, and his sometimes credulous acceptance of fantastic tales led the later historian Plutarch to dub him "The Father of Lies."

But that controversy is precisely what makes Herodotus relevant to our Sabrina Carpenter discussion. Central to his entire enterprise was the concept of autopsy (and no, not that kind).

The word autopsy comes from the Greek pronoun autos (self) and opsis (sight), and it’s where we get the term “eyewitness testimony.” But in Herodotus’s world, autopsy meant the practice of personal investigation—“seeing for oneself” to make a judgment rather than simply accepting received wisdom or secondhand accounts. (Incidentally, the word "authenticity" shares the same Greek element: autos plus hentes, meaning “doer”—literally, being the author of one's own actions.)

But here's the crucial insight that Herodotus understood, even if he didn't always admit it: the act of "seeing for oneself" doesn't necessarily bring you closer to objective truth. Instead, it often reveals just how subjective and limited any of our perspectives really is. His Histories are filled with contradictory accounts, competing narratives, and stories that strain credibility precisely because he strove to understand complex events and motivations from an outside perspective.

In the age of TikTok and parasocial intimacy, we are constantly performing little “autopsies” of our own. We study, analyze, compare. We zoom in on celebrities’ choices and try to reverse-engineer intention from image, searching for that capital T truth, which we call “authenticity.”

But “authenticity,” as we've come to understand it, isn’t grounded in anything fixed; in fact, it’s just whatever lines up with the version of someone we’ve decided is real. So when our personal image gets disrupted, it can feel like a betrayal.

That’s exactly what happened with the Man's Best Friend cover. Fans who had constructed their own mental model of "authentic Sabrina" suddenly found it—as well as their ability to know her at all—called into question.

In this context, Herodotus's approach feels oddly reassuring. His work shows that our desire to pin down the truth by seeing for ourselves is both necessary and ultimately futile.

So yes, we hereby conduct this post-mortem. Not to pronounce authenticity dead, but to understand what it really means to look for it. This post—my own attempt to see for myself while acknowledging the limits of what I can actually see—is the most honest autopsy of this album cover I can offer. Maybe it's also the most “authentic” one, in the original sense of the word.

And if nothing else, Herodotus would probably agree: the mess is worth documenting.

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (And, if you’re wondering about the emoji, read my first post to find out why it’s my favorite.)

Subscribe now

Remember those BFF necklaces you could buy at Claire’s? You know, those sterling silver (if you were lucky) heart pendants that you’d break in half to share with a friend: you’d wear best, she’d wear friend. And when you’d wear them to school on Monday, everyone would know what those necklaces meant: a real best friendship.

The Ancient Greeks had something like that, too. It was called a symbolon. Much like the BFF necklaces of our youth, a person would split a symbolon—usually a coin or some other token—in two, keeping one half for themselves and giving the other to someone else as a sign of relationship, whether a ritualized friendship, a union between two families, a contract, or even an inter-state agreement. If one person needed to send a message to the other, they would also send their half of the symbolon. The messenger would only relay the message if the pieces perfectly fit together.

Over time, the meaning of symbolon changed: the word became a signifier for a token, sign, or pledge of any kind. Centuries later, the early Roman Catholic Church took up the word to represent its creed of belief. Eventually, the physical origins of the word drifted away entirely, bringing us our modern understanding of the word symbol: a present object evoking something abstract—or even absent.

But I like the old meaning better: symbol as reunion—and recognition.

I’ve always felt split in two, a writer and an amateur translator. In high school, I spent just as much time studying Latin as I did writing short stories I never showed anyone. In college, I pursued a double major in creative writing and ancient Mediterranean studies—even going as far as to write an interdisciplinary thesis bridging the two. During semesters, I explored etymology in my workshop essays and translated texts from Ovid and Cicero while thinking about their applications to my writing. (Like how the Roman god of doorways helped me contextualize the pandemic in real-time, or how the difference between the Greek imperfect and aorist tenses can illuminate the nuances of our emotions—what lingers and what ends.)

As graduation approached, I felt pressure to “pick a lane,” as so many of us do. So, while working as the blog editor of Southern Bride, I decided to apply to Classics PhD programs and began teaching myself German that summer. The next fall, I entered graduate school with the hope that translation might give me a sense of direction—or at least the credibility to finally write for myself.

But something was missing. As I continued with Latin and Greek and added Italian to the roster, I abandoned writing entirely. I started to wonder whether I was using language as a shield, immersing myself in translations to dodge the hard work of articulating my thoughts—and the even harder work of sharing them with others.

When I left the program and began working at a creative agency, in some ways, I felt like myself again. I wrote about etymology and AI, kintsugi and social media fragmentation, a French meme and “weaponized absurdity.” But when I found myself trying to shoehorn Herodotus into a business article, I realized that picking the other lane didn’t quiet the nagging feeling of wanting more.

I resolved that I was too “online” for the academy, too esoteric for the creative world—destined for breadth across experiences, not depth in expertise. So when I heard the word symbolon on a podcast a few months ago, something clicked. As I’m wont to do, I went down etymological alleyways, chasing the word’s meaning through Ancient Greece, early Christianity, and to this passage from the American Numismatic Society:

The ancient Greek term symbolon reveals the ambiguity between something complete and something incomplete, which searches for its other half to become a whole.

The word felt more me than anything else had in a long time. It united the parts of my life whose connections I worried were tenuous. My background in classical languages. My years in academia. My obsession with pattern and ritual and why people believe what they believe. Even my upbringing in the Catholic Church—where symbolum (the Latin transliteration of symbolon) still means creed. It explains why my language classes made me want to write or why writing made me want to translate.

I used to see myself as two separate halves. Now, I think that’s the point. When the halves come together, you get Symbolon—this Substack: a place where I can fit what’s happening right now with something older, deeper, unexpected.

It’s where essays can begin with TikTok and end in Renaissance Italy, or dissect social media “authenticity” with a little help from Herodotus. It’s where pop culture, fashion, and TikTok trends—things often dismissed as “not serious” by serious people—help us think through deeper questions of belief, purpose, and meaning. It’s where personal essay meets cultural commentary, algorithm meets etymology. Not every essay will visit the ancient world, but every essay will feature unexpected pairings that (hopefully) reveal something deeper.

I’ve always said that language is how I make sense of the world—and myself. Maybe now you will, too.

x,

Olivia

💔 Thanks for being here. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one. (In light of this post, I’m reclaiming the broken heart emoji. It’s empowering.)

Subscribe now