Perhaps you’ve heard of the difficult case out of Texas in which a surrogate mother fled to that state after the “contracting parents” demanded she abort the baby she was carrying. The baby had a serious but treatable heart condition; the parents did not want to raise this child with health difficulties; they demanded the child be killed; the birthing mother mercifully refused and gave birth in probably one of the few polities in the entire world that was willing to offer both her and her child safe harbor. The biological parents have since seized custody of the child and are suing the mother for “breach of contact,” e.g., not aborting the baby.

I don’t think I need to belabor just how fundamentally this whole controversy highlights the unethical, immoral nature of surrogacy, in which women’s bodies are effectively rented as widgets and used accordingly, up to and including their contractors demanding the women undergo abortions that they don’t want to undergo. The depravity of it is pretty obvious, at least if you’re not already committed to supporting surrogacy come what may. Perhaps the strangest thing about this dispute, however, is the question of the baby’s name. The surrogate mother named the baby “Gabriel;” his parents named him “Rumi.” And nobody seems quite sure what to do about that. Here, for example, is the New York Times reporting on a recent court hearing in the case this week:

The two parties in the case differed during the hearing even on what to call the baby. Ms. Gilkar and Mr. Ahmed gave him the name Rumi, which their lawyer said had been put on his birth certificate. Ms. West’s lawyers used a different name, chosen by Ms. West, until they were told by the judge to stop.

I don’t know, man. It seems to me like in a dispute between (a) a mother who wanted a baby to survive, and (b) two parents who very, very explicitly wanted the baby to die…maybe the former should get naming rights? Maybe tie goes to the parent who didn’t want to kill the baby? Is that naive of me?

I understand that, all other things being equal, the “contracting parents” in surrogacy have naming rights, at least under the terms of the contract that everyone signs at the outset of the endeavor. But, I mean, the parents wanted out of this endeavor, didn’t they? They wanted their baby put in a box and thrown in a medical waste dump. They wanted him dead! So why exactly do they get to name him? Presumably they didn’t want him to have any name prior to his being born, right? I mean not even as a formality? It’s not like you write a death certificate for an aborted baby.

Now, you may have correctly deduced that there is a profound set of ethical implications in this question, chief among them defining what surrogacy actually is, and whether it’s moral at all to ever do it. It’s not, of course. But you get the sense that even stalwart pro-surrogacy types may sort of be feeling squeamish about it themselves. I mean, hey: Even the New York Times refused to use the name of the baby that was given by the woman who literally saved his life! They couldn’t even write the word “Gabriel;” they could only refer to it as a “different name,” as if it were unspeakable, some sort of alien language the human tongue cannot even reproduce.

To identify the baby as “Gabriel,” even secondhand as a line-item in a news report, would be to acknowledge a province and an ethical issue that pro-abortion advocates can simply never bring themselves to acknowledge. If there is one bylaw followed by nearly all pro-abortion types everywhere, it’s that they can never, ever, ever, ever acknowledge the humanity of the unborn human being. It’s the great unbreachable rule. To name the baby “Gabriel” is to directly admit, even obliquely, that the woman who gave him that name saved him from abortion; it would be a direct admittance that a living human person was at risk of being killed (and moreover that someone chose not to kill him). They can’t do that — it exposes the reality of abortion too starkly — and so naming rights go to the people who literally had a death wish for this child, who literally wished him to be dead at one point and who are so mad he wasn’t killed that they’re willing to go to court over it.

Well, it will surely all play out in court. Maybe, as desperately unhappy as this is, it will perhaps contribute to a growing counter-movement against surrogacy, to the point that we might start to see widespread abolition of it throughout the United States. One can hope, anyway. But in the meantime I think it’s okay to call this baby “Gabriel.” It’s what his mother named him, and in this case, without her, he wouldn’t have any name at all.

We recently finished the original Star Wars trilogy in our family. Our kids were watching it for the first time and they loved it from start to finish, and we loved it too. Yes, it’s true what they say: The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the bunch, really a superlative, captivating, character-driven movie. A New Hope is also very fine. Return of the Jedi is also quite good. But I feel like there’s been a lot of dispute about this movie among Gen X and older Millennials over the years. There’s a kind of vague disgruntlement about Jedi, a chafing at what armchair critics argue is the film’s desperate bid for merchandising viz. the Ewoks, those adorable, grunting, squeaking little bears on Endor. The Ewoks actually end up playing a vital role in the Rebellion, distracting the imperial forces on Endor long enough for Chewbacca to steal an AT-AT and turn the tide of battle. In the vast compendium of species in the Star Wars catalogue they are surely among the most consequential: Using little more than stones and crude wooden spears and twisted bark ropes, they manage to outwit several platoons of Storm Troopers and rather directly bring about the destruction of the second Death Star, thus bringing an end to the Empire.

Well, look, the Empire is ultimately pretty good at failing, so I suppose it’s really sort of a relativistic victory. Still, they really did play something of a decisive role in the battle! Beyond that, watching this film on the verge of my 40s, I just want to say this: The Ewoks really aren’t that bad. They’re fine. They’re fine! There’s nothing really wrong with them. I want to settle this debate here and now.

I mean, yes, they’re pretty clearly a shameless attempt at a corporate tie-in. Somebody at 20th Century Fox clearly put the word out that the third Star Wars film needed to go hard on the toy circuit, and somebody else at Lucasfilm really cooked their brains coming up with these fuzzy, cuddly, adorable little bears, creatures that already looked like plush stuffed animals in the movie itself. There’s just no mistaking it. But actually…do you remember very many Ewok toys back then? Like in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, in the Star Wars merchandising heyday? I honestly don’t. I had a fair number of Star Wars toys back in the day — everyone did — but I just don’t recall that many Ewok figures or stuffed animals or anything. The only thing that immediately comes to mind is a Kenner-style Ewok tree hut that I think I sometimes played with at a local doctor’s office. If the Ewoks were supposed to be a cash-grab it doesn’t seem like very many people got the memo. I remember way more Darth Vader action figures than I remember anything having to do with Ewoks.

In any event, look, I don’t want to do a full-court press in defense of Ewoks. They need no defense. They’re a rather corny and perplexing addition to what had been an increasingly deep, profound narrative arc. Remember in the prior film we had witnessed the lead hero get mutilated by a villain and then immediately discover that the villain who had just chopped off his hand was also his dad; in that film we also saw the secondary protagonist get horrifically frozen inside an enormous chunk of alloy; at one point the main character is stuffed inside the stinking carcass of a draft animal and later beheads a facsimile of himself in a cave. It’s dark, turbulent stuff! So the addition of the Ewoks is a bit tonally inconsistent, to say the least. I get it. But, also…they’re fine. They’re kind of funny and they’re somewhat believable as diminutive warriors, at least if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief only a modicum more than you already have at that point. It’s not as if the Storm Troopers are really that hard to beat! They’re a terrible fighting force, just whole squadrons of klutzes one after the other. It is totally credible that a race of teddy bears armed with large rocks and clumsy lassos could win a fight against them. No joke.

I think one of the things that underscores the fundamental amiability of the Ewoks is something that everyone already knows, even if insensately, namely: You actually remember the Ewoks. You can recall them as distinct, identifiable characters; they are interesting, or that is to say they at least generate interest in the viewer, even if the interest in question is somewhat contemptuous. Whoever you are, if you saw Return of the Jedi at some point, you have an opinion on the Ewoks, for no other reason than because your brain marked them as a significant, consequential literary device, a real sign of actual emplotment by human beings who had thought to some extent about the story they were writing. They were part of a story.

In contrast: What do you remember from, say, the Star Wars sequels? You know, those completely Disney-fied movies that served as little more than aggressive attempts to destroy the Star Wars canon and replace it with trash, unintelligible “intellectual property” that looked like literally every single other Disney movie made over the last decade? Those movies sucked quite hard, in large part because they weren’t principally Star Wars movies but rather “content,” a sloppy mishmash of lame tropes and ungainly narrative contrivances mostly meant for you to stream on a smartphone while you do something else. The Star Wars sequels are aesthetically and thematically and narratively indistinguishable from pretty much any other “content” you’re apt to find on a streaming service these days; even awkwardly gluing the Star Wars aesthetic onto it can’t change that.1 The sequels, in other words, suck, and they suck quite badly.

That’s the really broader point here: You remember the Ewoks because you really liked Return of the Jedi. It’s a good movie, you enjoyed it, you have seen it multiple times, and the Ewoks are a meaningful and affecting part of the whole story, even if they’re sort of stupid too. Yet what do you remember from The Force Awakens? Or The Last Jedi? Or (and I can barely type it without laughing) The Rise of Skywalker? Seriously, what do you remember except isolated imagery and sporadic scenes, none of which evokes much of anything in you at all?

Nobody remembers anything from those movies and nobody talks about them anymore because they suck, they were lame and they did nothing for anybody, they invoked nothing in your mind or your heart or your soul. Do you know anyone who saw any of those movies more than once? I don’t think I do. They were just content for you to passively consume without thinking about it. Certainly there is nothing in any of them even so distinct as the Ewoks. The only thing that very dimly comes to my mind is the herd of draft animals that the heroes ride across the surface of an enemy spaceship in The Rise of Skywalker — a scene so uproariously, embarrassingly laughable that it should have been beyond even J.J. Abrams (but it wasn’t). I also think somewhere in one of the movies there was an old, wrinkled female space alien with goggles that made her look like a special-needs person — I honestly cannot recall what relation she had to the plot or what she ultimately did of any note. That’s it.

Which, again, that’s the point: Really bad movies — movies like the Star Wars sequels — are bad and you don’t care about them or think about them or remember them at all. They’re nothing to you. You do remember a good movie like Return of the Jedi, however, and the goodness of the movie is such that you are willing to forgive and even countenance an altogether minor narrative transgression like the Ewoks. A good movie carries with it a great deal of goodwill — the viewer is happy to swallow some ungainly dreck here or there if the overall experience is suitable. And you even remember not-so-good movies if they have a little bit of originality and a little bit of heart, both of which were entirely absent from the Disney sequels. This is the state of most filmmaking these days.

And, look, ultimately, honestly: the Ewoks aren’t even that bad. They’re fine. They really are okay! If nothing else, our kids got a big kick out of them while still appreciating the larger and more consequential storyline. So it’s fine. Give the Ewoks a chance, people!

I still think about the COVID era an inordinate amount, insofar as — like I’ve said before — it really radicalized me in a profound and irreversible way. I don’t mean that it made me more conservative or more antipathetic toward received wisdom and civic authorities (though it absolutely did). I mean that, for me, it just blew the lid off of how authentically exploitable and malleable so many people are. I don’t even mean that as a moral or practical judgment, like that most people who went full-bore on COVID were somehow guilty of some kind of moral failure. I actually think it was just inevitable that most people would fully capitulate to the COVID hysteria. I think that is the default setting for most of our species. This was terrible, terrible news to discover, but it was also profoundly clarifying — in a word, radicalizing!

The hysteria was really a litmus test for society, insofar as the rules that were promulgated by public health officials and widely followed by the public during that time were functionally identical to rules that would be promulgated by mentally ill people—by, say, autistic and schizophrenic people. The great mass of people should have been able to recognize insanity when they saw it, though ultimately they didn’t. I want to say outright that I don’t mean “insanity” in a flippant and cruel way. Mentally ill people — those with acute autism or schizophrenia, say — are among the most suffering and pitiable people in the world. They often if not usually endure pain and misery doing even the most basic daily tasks that you and I have no trouble doing. They are suffering from often-crippling mental illness and they deserve the sympathy and support of society. But for this very same reason we don’t let them dictate the norms and rules and laws of society, because they suffer from what the DSM has called a “clinically significant disturbance in [their] cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior,” one that generally inhibits the sort of rational decision-making necessary for a functioning society.

And yet that is precisely the sort of impulse we surrendered to in the COVID era — let’s call it from about March of 2020 to maybe early 2022. The tone of society was indistinguishable from mid-grade psychosis. The rules put in place made absolutely no sense at all in either concept or execution. And really bear down on that word for a moment: I don’t mean the rules “made no sense” in the way that you might say the directions for an IKEA loft bed make no sense. I mean that both their intent and their results produced no real sensible mental artifact of any kind. Pretty much none of the wild-eyed “public health” rules put in place over this time ever bore any resemblance to either the real or imagined threat of the coronavirus. It was exactly, I mean exactly, the type of response you’d expect from someone whose “cognition, emotion regulation or behavior” had been compromised by some sort of profound and debilitating neurosis.

We’ll get to the examples, though I should stress at the outset that I am not saying this as a way of mocking people who capitulated entirely to the COVID hysteria at the beginning of the decade. To a certain extent I have a great deal of sympathy and pity for such people. Pretty much the entire public-facing world — I mean legitimately almost all of it, including every major government, nearly every single religion, virtually every major corporation, pretty much all of the global media, and even most keystone secondary and tertiary institutions including local governments, local businesses, neighborhood organizations, pretty much every single one of Burke’s little platoons — were 100% in lockstep over COVID-19 from early 2020 on. It was a completely unified wall of sound. Seemingly overnight virtually the entire world had arrived at the same identical set of conclusions, namely that SARS-CoV-2 was one of the most acutely dangerous diseases that had ever existed and that we needed to mount an unprecedented, shockingly aggressive, whole-of-society campaign against it if we wanted to avert tens of millions of painful, horrific deaths and a catastrophic, civilization-ending mass casualty event. Virtually every single trusted institution in the world was saying this all at once.

I suppose in a sense it is not surprising that the great mass of people would just go along with it, not just unquestioningly but in most cases eagerly and proactively. Maybe you were one of the billions that did; maybe you were more ambivalent about it but went along with it anyway just to be safe; maybe you were one of the small handful of genuine dissidents who recognized what was happening and refused to participate. Whatever your response was, ultimately there’s no point in dwelling on it; it is far less important to lament what happened and far more important to fully understand what happened and take steps to ensure that we don’t allow it to happen again. And I think the best way to start doing that is to take an honest look at just how functionally insane the COVID response was, how pretty much none of it made any sense at all, and to really commit ourselves to not doing it again if it should ever arise again, which, honestly, it probably will.

• Masks. Probably nothing sums up the day-to-day insanity of the COVID era like the masks. On a comprehensive level it was easily the most striking example of paranoid, schizoid behavior throughout the entire pandemic. You will recall that there was extremely broad consensus early in 2020 that masks were not a necessary or effective tool against COVID at population level. Here’s a paragraph from a CBS News report on March 8, 2020: “For healthy people, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend they wear masks only when taking care of those who are sick or suspected of having the virus.” So two of the most prominent, prestigious, unimpeachable health organizations on the planet were advising people in March of 2020 that masks were only necessary in clinically significant circumstances, e.g., when you were around someone who had the virus or might have it. By April 3, literally less than a month later, the CDC had flip-flopped and directed people to wear masks, largely to “help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others.” I do not need to tell you how indefensible it is for a major public health institution to completely change its tune on a critical public health issue over the course of like 28 days. A month is not enough time to conduct even a remote fraction of the necessary scientific research needed for making such a determination. You cannot perform the necessary rigorous scientific experiments to make such a major call over the course of fewer than four weeks. It’s laughable and preposterous. In any other context — i.e., in any context where schizoid, mentally unwell behavior wasn’t the guiding principle — we would have immediately recognized this and rejected en masse this absurd advice.
  
  More absurdly still the entire rationale for masking appeared to have been flipped on its head over the course of those several weeks. As noted, health officials were initially advising masks “only when taking care of those who are sick or suspected of having the virus,” e.g., masks were only necessary as a self-protective measure when you were around sick people. In just a few short weeks we suddenly discovered that masks were necessary as a self-prophylactic measure; the rationale went from “protect yourself” to “protect others.” Do you start to see the schizophrenic quality of this discourse? Do you see how unsettlingly disordered it is to go so quickly from “Masks have limited use, and only then when someone else is sick” to “Masks must be worn everywhere in public at all times because you yourself might be sick?” If someone fed you this kind of logic in any other context you would recognize it for the indefensible babble it really is. But it was COVID, so very nearly everyone just went along with it.
  
  This is to say nothing of the actual practical implementation of the masking policies themselves, which were, at best, slapdash and lackadaisical in a way that was regularly comical. Countless people could never figure out if they wanted to wear their masks or not; they would fiddle endlessly with them, put them around their chins, pull them up again, pull them down to talk, leave them on for a minute, take them off — you saw this literally everywhere. Normal, otherwise mentally healthy individuals were constantly seen wearing masks while alone in the middle of large, open-air public places on sunny, breezy days. Hikers wore masks while hiking up mountains. Surfers could be seen wearing masks while surfing in the ocean. An endless multitude of arcane, incomprehensible rules, meanwhile, sprung up around masking: You had to wear a mask when you went into a restaurant but could take it off when you sat down; you had to leave it on when you sat down but you could pull it down to eat; sometimes there were double-masking rules; you had to wear a mask if you approached a curbside pickup table at a neighborhood restaurant, even if nobody was around (you often saw signs angrily directing you to do so); countless other rules, many of them mandated by the government, still many others mandated by whoever was the most neurotic and frightened person standing nearby you.
  
  And of course there were cloth masks — the strips of cotton and/or denim that people wore across their faces that quickly became saturated with spittle and saliva and were manifestly incapable of even the pretense of viral control that masking was supposed to provide in the first place. Even the CDC eventually publicly admitted that cloth masks were of markedly low value in viral mitigation—imagine that, a wet piece of T-shirt or chambray not providing adequate viral filtration! But people wore them everywhere, for hours at a time, sporting damp, spit-soaked pieces of fabric across their faces wherever they went.
  
  Be as honest with yourself as you can: The totality of all of this does sound like rules created by mentally ill people. The sudden all-consuming, paralyzing germaphobia that gripped our society starting in early 2020 really did feel like the kind of mysophobic mania that often grips some people who suffer from severe autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder; the whiplashing directives and incoherent application of masking principles, meanwhile, felt very much like a series of schizoid delusions suffered by an unmedicated person.

• “Social distancing.” Again seemingly overnight in March and April in emerged that people needed to stay “six feet apart” in order to “slow the spread” of the virus. I doubt most of us can remember when we first heard of this principle, though it seems to have really exploded in the public consciousness, at least in the U.S., around mid- to late March of 2020. By that time we were seeing countless news articles along the lines of this one from Today on March 31, 2020, which offered people advice on “staying the necessary 6 feet away from strangers,” including “keeping to the opposite end of the sidewalk from your pesky neighbor” (and potentially “cross[ing] the street to avoid a passerby”), staying “at least” the length of two grocery carts away from other people, keeping “more than six feet” away from people if you are interacting with them “[for] longer than two minutes,” and only greeting loved ones “from the bottom of the porch,” not any closer.
  
  This kind of advice is obviously informed by multiple crippling phobias; at the very least we would seem to be dealing with dual diagnoses of both mysophobia and agoraphobia, just debilitating fears of both germs and other human beings. But the kicker is the advice wasn’t based off of any meaningful scientific data or research. Anthony Fauci openly admitted in congressional testimony in 2024 that there was neither a “controlled trial” or a “scientific evaluation” of the CDC’s six-foot distancing directive; rather, the government apparently consulted “studies [from] years ago” regarding “droplets” and how they transmit through the air. Yes, the nation’s foremost public health expert is on the record confirming that one of the world’s foremost disease research institutions used years-old studies about “droplets” to craft health policy dictating where you stand while out in public. Again, this is outwardly crazy, mentally ill stuff — the sort of stuff an unwell person creates in a node-link diagram on his basement wall before he blows up a building or drinks bleach.

“Keep six feet away from me or you might get me sick!” is indeed the sort of thing you’d expect a mentally ill person afraid of germs to yell at you in a public space. It is not the sort of thing you expect to inform public policy, even during nominal health crises, particularly when the advice was based off of no meaningful or rigorous data.

• “Contact tracing.” I think most people have forgotten this one, because it was only really a thing in the earliest months of the pandemic, but early on there was a genuine belief that health authorities could effectively “trace” the “contacts” of people who had become sick with COVID-19, isolate those people, and prevent the spread of the virus. Like JNCO pants in the early 1990s or bucket hats in the early 2000s, it can look insane when reflecting on it after a few years. Actually it looked insane at the time! But countless smart and credentialed people honestly believed there was a time when we could dispatch platoons of health workers into densely populated urban areas and effectively “trace” the number of people with whom you had had a clinically significant interaction over the past 48 hours. Perhaps this isn’t really an insane proposal so much as a profoundly childish one: “You just track down all the people you interacted with at some point over the last two days and tell them to stay home.” Actually though most children are at least partly insane, so maybe it comes to the same thing.

• The vaccines. From the earliest days of the pandemic everyone pinned their hopes on the vaccines. It was the only thing that was going to save us — the only thing that was really going to bring us bring us back to normal life. Absent the vaccine we were simply never going to be able to do the things we used to love doing. Many, many people really believed this. At the outset of the pandemic in April of 2020 Anthony Fauci — who more than any other individual established the U.S.’s overall approach to COVID mitigation in 2020 and 2021 — said: “I don’t think [people] should ever shake hands ever again.” Again, this sort of crazy, paranoid delusion would be a marker of significant mental illness in any other context. And yet it was considered normal in 2020! And the vaccine was the only solution to this crisis.
  
  You know what happened next: “Operation Warp Speed,” the full-scale push to develop, test (“test”) and distribute COVID-19 vaccines at population scale. And the effort was a stunning success. The CDC says vaccine development “often takes 10-15 years of laboratory research,” but they managed to drag the COVID vaccine to wide usage in less than a year — in about nine months, really, give or take, upwards of 5% of the time it usually takes for vaccines to be put into distribution.
  
  The subsequent wild-eyed vaccine mania really went through arguably three distinct phases, as laid out below:
  
  Phase 1: The vaccines were deployed starting at the end of 2020. Millions and millions of people eagerly signed up to get them. In a fit of paranoid exuberance, Anthony Fauci grandly predicted that the vaccine would usher in “a considerable degree of normality” by the end of 2021, i.e., a year later.
  
  Phase 2: Vaccine uptake stalls throughout 2021. Most people are getting the shot but many aren’t. People go insane, like functionally insane. People who are “fully vaccinated” refuse to see “unvaccinated” family members and close friends, indefinitely. Media outlets relentlessly trumpet the number of “unvaccinated” people dying from the virus. President Joe Biden says the ongoing health crisis is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Businesses begin requiring employees to get the shot. Some places require you to show a “vaccine card” proving you’re “fully vaccinated.” Somewhere in there the health authorities start authorizing boosters, which sort of perpetuated the whole hysteria: “Fully vaccinated” becomes a moving target, with the bullseye being whatever the CDC had most recently announced via press release. Ultimately about half of Democratic voters say they want “unvaccinated” Americans subject to home confinement and/or imprisonment in “designated facilities or locations” — that’s right, a massive portion of the electorate wants to throw Americans into camps if they don’t undergo a quasi-experimental novel new medical procedure. Nearly a third of Democrats, meanwhile, express support for “temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine.” Once again: This is the sort of thing you expect crazy, mentally ill people to espouse. “A pharmaceutical company just rushed this untested medicine to market. You have to take it or we’ll steal your children and put you in an internment camp.” This was a very common belief just a few short years ago!
  
  Phase 3: Nobody gives a shit about the vaccine anymore. Nobody talks about it, nobody cares about it. Millions of people still get it, of course, but they don’t care if you get it. They don’t care if you’re “unvaccinated.” Millions and millions of Americans whipsawed from wanting to throw you in a camp if you didn’t get the shot to not caring if you ever get the shot. Families that refused to see beloved relatives when they didn’t get the shot now never talk about it. The pharmaceutical that briefly fully defined life in this country is now functionally irrelevant except as a line-item in your annual GP physical. This is the stuff of incoherent mania.

It can be easy to forget all this, even just a few short years later. Part of it may be that many of the people who participated in this insanity are embarrassed and want to move on; part of it, too, might be that the people who were subject to it want to forget it as well. It really was awful!

But we shouldn’t forget it. This was a stress-test for society and society utterly failed it. All of this functional insanity, remember, was over a virus with a fatality rate of about 0.8% or so. We had very good data very early on to demonstrate this — certainly the data we had in early 2020 was more than recognize that we did not need the total shutdown of society and a descent into schizophrenic madness as public policy. None of this was necessary. But it happened, and of course it could easily happen again, with very little trouble at all.

We need to guard against it. I suppose ultimately in cases like this one is preaching either to the converted or to the heterodox — the people who resisted the COVID hysteria understand it, and the people who fully embodied it presumably don’t care. I am not sure where the margins lay on this, and they’re probably not substantial enough to forestall this happening again. But still. If there’s a chance we can avoid this breakdown in sanity we should strive for it. We should not forget what happened and we should not hesitate pointing it out, repeatedly. Insanity is bad and adopting insane rules as government and civil policy is extremely bad. Let’s not do it again!

One of the most persistently repeated assertions of the past few years is that everyone will just have to make peace with AI, that it’s part of the social-cultural-political fabric now and we all just have to get on board with it and figure out a way to live with it and accept it and even use it. Well, no, we don’t. I’m not going to do that. That’s that.

I guess this Substack post could end here and be good. But the advocates of AI are really very persistent and I don’t want them to think that there’s some sort of clever syllogism which would somehow convince me that AI is good and that I should “get on board” with it. News flash, AI people: That is not going to happen. I hate AI, and I always will, and I will never use it in any direct, meaningful, practical way.

Here are my responses to your stupid AI objections:

• “You need to start using AI or else you’ll get left behind in the economy because everyone except for you will be using it.” This is untrue. I’m a better writer than AI and I always will be. And if I’m a better writer than AI then I’ll also, almost by definition, be a better writer than the people who need to use AI to write. In fact my professional appeal as a writer will only increase as time goes on, because the writers using AI will get worse while AI will remain a shitty, boring writer forever. I will always remain above the miserable AI baseline and my advantage over AI-addled writers will only increase over the years as their sad dependence upon it grows. Advantage: Me! I win.

• “The technology is here and it’s not going away. Might as well get used to it and adapt.” Ha ha, no thank you. What a shallow, useless practical and moral paradigm by which you lead your life. “This thing is awful and will make your life worse. Don’t do anything to avoid it or resist it.” What?? I should “get used to” something that sucks, that makes life worse, and that I hate, and that I can easily avoid with pretty minimal effort? Why? Who told you that that’s necessary? How about this: I hate AI and I won’t use it. There, problem solved.

• “AI can be used to supplement your work — like help you do research, and help you polish your writing — without actually replacing you.” Sure! That makes total sense: Having a machine do the indispensable arcana of my profession, the thing that makes me not merely a better writer but a writer at all—that’s a great use of my brain, my soul, and my hard-earned vocation! And right, if I outsource like 70% of the work of writing to a robot, I’m surely not being “replaced!” Ha ha of course it would be like that. It would be like if every time my wife and I got into a fight, I called up some other guy to fight with her, work it out, then kiss her and apologize—after which I’d step back in and resume my place as her spouse. I’m not being replaced as a husband, just supplemented. Gentlemen, try that and see how long your wife is still interested in you! She’ll drop you like a hot potato and go with the guy who actually does the work. How about I just won’t do any of this and I won’t listen to your self-destructive, unhelpful advice about technology and life.

• “AI is already baked into everything — like Google search results, for instance, and increasingly every single online platform — so you’re already technically using AI.” Lame and dumb. This is like telling mega-climate activists, “Well, almost the entire economy runs on fossil fuel, so you’re also contributing to global warming whether you like it or not!” Yes, powerful societal forces often mandate socio-political arrangements that we’d rather were different. This doesn’t change either (a) the basic premise of your position or (b) your ability to exercise your will to a large extent over your own personal circumstances. I mean, hey, if you tell me that AI is already all over the Internet, that sounds like a great endorsement for not being on the Internet as much! Easy enough to do! And in any event this is a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. “You should use AI to do your work for you so you don’t have to use your brain as much” is substantially different from “AI has become a passive and unavoidable part of the digital landscape.” The latter is little more than a truism; the former is advice that will make your life indisputably worse. Don’t try to pretend the two are similar! And in any event, yes, get off the Internet as much as possible. This was true before AI and it’s still true.

• “There’s nothing wrong with using AI to (help you plan out the meals for the week/help you organize your vacation itinerary/help you develop a family scholastic/activity schedule/etc).” Yes, of course there is lots wrong with it. But it has slowly dawned on me that most people just don’t care. Most people are apparently desperately willing to outsource the gratifying, meaningful minutiae of life to Google and OpenAI. But I still care. For instance, I plan out my own family’s meals every week because I love thinking about them, I love doing work for them, I love thinking about what meals they like and what I need to buy to prepare those meals. All of this makes me think about how much I love my family and it makes me love them more. The same is true for any work I might do on behalf of my family. When we go on vacation I want to look up and research interesting places that we all might like to go; I like to think about my children and my wife, their likes and dislikes, their interests, what kinds of ice cream they enjoy, how much tolerance each of them has for walking around, how excited they’ll get if we do something fun; I do not want to type in “Please give me an itinerary for a four-day trip to a small town that would be good for a family of seven.” I cannot imagine doing something with my family and thinking, “ChatGPT told me to do this.” I think my soul would shrivel up if I did that. And I don’t care if ChatGPT can somehow accomplish “more” than me. I think about what St. Augustine said: “He who does little, but in a state to which God calls him, does more than he who labors much, but in a state which he has thoughtlessly chosen.” AI, of course, is the essence of thoughtlessness, a tool that by its very design allows people to think considerably less than they otherwise might have. I want to think to the greatest extent possible. I don’t want to outsource any of that to a stupid robot.

Thankfully, of course, I don’t have to! I can just not use AI. Which I won’t. And I would encourage you to do the same! Don’t outsource your precious, unique, incredible brain to a website. It will make your brain atrophy and ultimately make your life much duller and less happy. Just say no to AI!

I tell you. Earlier this year, when a bunch of medical people came out and said that we should stop violently mutilating and poisoning vulnerable children who believe themselves to be the opposite sex—I mean, I tell ya, I figured it couldn’t get any crazier than that, right? It was like, “Whoa!” Like just totally out of left field. I always assumed that if a young boy suddenly declares he’s a girl after watching a bunch of other boys on YouTube do the same thing, we should immediately pretend as if his delusion is true and do everything we can to ruin the boy’s body and life in an attempt to fulfill that delusion.

Then these doctors came out and said we shouldn’t do that! And I’m like, what?

Now the Supreme Court has said — and get ready, because this is crazy — the Supreme Court has said we don’t have to force girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions.

I mean, what?

Now look here. I’m a pretty reasonable guy. I’m just an average fellow. I’m not a super-smart egghead or something. If you tell me something I’ll probably just go along with it. When they said we should stop carving up young people who want to be the opposite sex, well, I was real surprised by that, but I figured, hey, what do I know? I’m no expert. It seemed to me like young people suffering under a socially contagious LGBTQ delusion should be indulged in that dangerous delusion up to and including destroying their own bodies beyond repair — but I guess if some guy in a white coat comes along and tells me, “Eh, we probably shouldn’t be doing that,” I’ll believe him. You have to trust the experts, right?

But this? This feels like a bridge too far. Letting girls compete in their own athletic leagues without having to worry about mentally ill boys coming along and stealing all of their trophies and all of their accomplishments? You’re telling me I have to sign on to that?

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found that out!

Look, again, I’m no expert. But it seems like it makes sense — logistical sense, scientific sense, moral sense — to allow boys to play in girls’ sporting leagues. I mean, can anyone really argue otherwise? I don’t think so! I’ve never heard it compellingly argued why we shouldn’t allow boys to take part in and utterly dominate girls’ sports, stealing very hard-earned and long-awaited athletic accomplishments from girls who have been working their entire lives toward those goals.

The minute someone proposed allowing boys to do that, I said, “Yesiree! That’s what we’ve been waiting for. What took us so long??” I tell you, sometimes something is just staring you in the face for a long time before you realize it. Then you say to yourself, “Well golly, that was right there in front of my nose the whole time!”

Now, I heard some complaints about this — mostly from hoary old conservative fuddy-duddies who said all sorts of confusing mumbo-jumbo about “fairness” and “sex differences” and “level playing fields in intramural athletic leagues.” I don’t know about you but I recognized that talk right away for what it was: A bunch of hooey! I knew we didn’t need to worry about any of that stuff. I always had the same simple response to any of those objections: “You’re wrong.” I knew we just needed to let boys play against girls in sports. That was really it. No debate necessary.

And by golly, we had it for a while, and it was pretty great! It always brought a thrill to my heart to see a young woman utterly and completely trounced by a mentally ill young man in a criminally unbalanced sporting competition. Sometimes I’d see the young ladies crying on the sidelines after their dreams were crushed and their lifetime of hard athletic work had been squandered and wasted over a popularized autogynephiliac mental illness, and I’d say, “This is how it should be.”

Of course, there were still complaints. Incredibly, the loudest complaints came from the female athletes themselves, who just couldn’t seem to stop grumbling over this new, better state of affairs. Which, I mean — women, right? You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. It’s just the truth. I always thought a pat on the head and some gentle words of encouragement — “Now be a good girl, stop crying, and let the men take your trophies” — would have sufficed. But there were still all these people who insisted that there was something wrong with this setup. And they got all mad, and they organized, and they sued, and they went all the way to the Supreme Court…and they won!

And I tell you I’m just scratching my head over that! I really thought the Supreme Court would recognize the fundamental, necessary fairness of letting males invade and overtake female sporting leagues. I just figured everybody understood that! Now, I’m no fancy-pants judge with a law degree and a set of robes and a gavel, but I thought everyone just knew without having to be told that this is the way things should be done. I guess I was wrong!

It just goes to show — you never know what’s going to happen, right? I tell you.

Herewith, in no particular order, a rundown of certain things.

Things I don’t like:

• Dry cleaning. Don’t understand it. Don’t like it. How do you clean clothes dryly? I gather it’s something with chemicals but even that doesn’t make sense. What do they do, spray a chemical on it and the chemical devours the dirty spots like it’s sulfuric acid or something? How is that possible? And who figured out how to do that, anyway? I realize I could just look this up but the whole proposal is unsettling enough that I do not care to do that. Plus, why does every dry-cleaning joint look like it was built no later than 1971? Are they really not building these places anymore? Or do they just build them like that — all stained and weird and dark and dirty? Also, where do you get those little roller-coaster carousels that carry the clothes throughout the labyrinthian back warrens of the shop? Who builds those? Is it a factory somewhere? How does someone get into the dry-cleaning-carousel industry? I don’t like any of it.

• The word “potluck.” It’s a bad word. It always sounds like it wants to be something else. Honestly, it always sounds like it wants to be “pot roast.” When you say, “We’re having a potluck!” it actually sounds like you wanted to say “We’re having a pot roast!” but you messed up. Or maybe it sounds like the name for a gross meal. “I made potluck for dinner tonight!” Gross. At best it sounds like something you might find in one of those midcentury American cookbooks that showed housewives how to microwave pineapple and ham steaks and then assemble them to look like a Tiki god. “Potluck,” no thanks. If you want to host a “potluck” then just say, “We’re having everyone over for dinner. Please bring a dish!” So much better.

• Feeding food to your lover. I don’t know how this was ever marketed as desirable or sensuous. I’m not talking about giving your spouse a bite of whatever you’re having for lunch; I’m talking about the thing where you feed someone, like, chocolate, or grapes, or a strawberry, in way that’s supposed to be romantic. It’s never romantic. It’s weird feeding someone food and then watching them chomp it up. A grape is a noisy, juicy fruit. A strawberry often stains your lips red. What, I’m just gonna smile awkwardly while I watch my wife eat that? Or she’s going to sit there and watch me loudly crunch a piece of 70% cocoa with sea salt? It’s so awkward. And I’d lay good money down that everybody feels that way. It must stop!

• Bringing your dog into stores. Why is everyone doing this now? Dogs are everywhere. It’s kind of irritating. Who authorized this? We need to look into it.

• People who say, “We really need the rain!” When it’s a particularly rainy day, someone will inevitably be heard to remark, “Well, you know, we really do need the rain.” They say it like they’re an 18th century potato farmer rather than a cubicle worker with no real ecological sense. In any event I’ve never heard someone say, “You know, I think we’ve had enough rain. That’s really enough rain for now.” Just never heard that uttered, ever. I think there has to come a time when we’ve had enough rain, right? I’m not saying it’s right now, I’m just saying there has to be a point where it’s enough.

• Plastic wrap. I really can’t stand plastic wrap — you know, Saran wrap, that sort of thing. To be sure it’s an extremely useful kitchen tool, mostly for food storage. But — and I’m not making this up — I have never successfully ripped a length of plastic wrap from its roll. Never been able to do that. The little zipper slider never seems to work. Or the strip of teeth glued to the cardboard becomes unglued. Or it only tears half of the square, ripping it down the middle like a piece of chicken skin. Or it doesn’t get electrostatically charged when I put it on the dish, so it just sort of sits there, limp, looking like a sad piece of useless plastic. Plus when you rip the wrap off the dish and leave it on the counter it looks kind of like a used condom or something, it’s just gross. I just prefer to get lids for Pyrex and whatnot. In a pinch I use tinfoil.

• People who sleep without white noise at night. I realize that I could easily and more sensibly move this to the “things I like” category, e.g., “I like white noise.” But no, it’s not that simple. Sleeping without white noise at night — a fan, a sound machine, etc — doesn’t just feel like a choice to me, it feels like a character defect. I am suspicious of you if you do this. How do people sleep without some constant, humming noise going on in the background? How do you sleep hearing only the ephemeral creaks and groans of the building you’re in, underlaid by the irritating drone of your own running thoughts? How did cavemen ever get to sleep without fans, for that matter? It’s a wonder we ever survived as a species without white noise.

• Referring to people as “bodies.” I guess this isn’t really popular anymore but for a while it was all the rage: Instead of calling people “people,” everyone started calling people “bodies,” e.g., “This nation has always been cruel to black bodies.” “White people do not understand the reality of being a brown body.” It was really, really weird. I think it all started because Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that way in his much-hailed memoir “Between the World and Me.” Everybody absolutely loved that book for a few years and everybody started referring to human beings as “bodies.” It was extremely strange. It’s all over now, of course, thankfully, but I never got the chance to really register my disgust about it at the time, so I’m doing it now.

• Those videos they play at gas station pumps. So many gas station pumps these days have screens with videos playing on repeat. I hate this. First of all, another screen? Was that what was missing in my life — another screen? No. Second of all, it’s just depressing. Who are these people, how did they come to star in a gas station pump movie? It’s very sad. It used to be that as an up-and-coming actor you did the theater circuit, the bit part, maybe a soap opera or two. Is there where actors get their start now, though? At gas station pumps? Brutal.

Things I like:

• Elevators. I realize that this makes me sound kind of autistic. Actually, looking it over, I guess a considerable portion of this post makes me sound pretty autistic. Ah well. Yes, I love elevators. They’re great. I just love em. I can’t really describe it. They’re just fun. I love the action on the buttons, I love the dinging sounds. It’s all very fun. I love the weird thrill of finding an elevator in some random downtown building that plainly hasn’t been updated since the mid-1970s, the buttons are all outdated, it feels like it’s a Three’s Company set piece. And I’m not alone in this: There is a whole community of “elevator enthusiasts” out there who just love elevators (I am closed to 100% certain that all of those people are autistic). You can’t overstate just how unfathomably recondite the whole sub-culture gets. Some of the titles from one elevator enthusiast YouTube channel: “ULTRA RARE!! AWESOME Schindler M-Series Traction Elevators - Montreal QC.” “ULTRA FAST Otis Elevonic 411 Traction Elevators at Trump International Hotel - Las Vegas NV.” “QUIRKY MOD! Northern-West (mod. by TKE) Hydraulic Elevator at an apartment building - Vancouver BC.” I love it! Elevators are great, and the people who love them are also great.

• Water fountains. You just can’t beat a water fountain for drinking water. Drinking water out of a bottle, a glass, a straw, a sheepskin — it’s all fine but none of it comes close to a water fountain. With the push of a button you have unlimited cool, clean drinking water, delivered directly into your mouth, coming out of a fun machine that is, however briefly, yours and yours alone to use. How can you not love that?? As I wrote elsewhere, my favorite type of water fountain is called a “dial-a-drink,” where the flow is dictated by a lovely turn-knob regulator with a little tail on it. You can’t beat that action. One thing I love is being in some municipal building or office complex in the suburbs and finding a water fountain in some absolutely remote, disused corner of the facility — it’s like finding a treasure chest somewhere, full of water, your own personal oasis. It’s great stuff! I refuse to believe I’m the only non-autistic person to feel this way.

• Mini-golf. Okay, I haven’t been to mini-golf in I think well over a decade. But there was a time in my life when I used to do it with some regularity, and I enjoyed that, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. It’s a fun pastime. I especially like that a lot of mini-golf places are like 80 years old and mostly un-updated. They’ll slap a new coat of paint on a fiberglass buffalo or a statue of a giant rabbit in a farmer’s overalls or something, and it’ll be good for another few years. It’s a fun little niche economy.

• Hotel continental breakfasts. I feel like these aren’t as popular as they used to be. It seems like it used to be that every hotel you went to boasted a breakfast spread where you could just stuff your fat face on everything — bagels, English muffins, bacon, sausage patties, lots of cereal options, maybe a waffle machine. There was usually a juice bar with several juice offerings — orange, cranberry cocktail, what have you. The seating area felt really outdated, kind of liminal, but also full of this weird energy. Maybe there was a TV on blasting CNN’s latest reporting on the Middle East. Man, you could pig out, I mean really get your money’s worth. And I just feel like you don’t see that as much anymore. Maybe I don’t spend as much time in hotels anymore. I will say I was in a hotel a few years ago around Thanksgiving and they had a continental breakfast and I just went to town on it, as did my wife and our at-the-time four kids. But I do feel like it’s kind of vanishing. Actually CNBC reports that hotel operators increasingly see the free breakfast as “a money pit eating into the thin margins of the business.” Which, I mean, yes. I get that. I really put the hurt on a lot of those breakfasts in my heyday — I might slam five of those rubbery little sausage patties, a fat stack of pancakes, assorted bowls of cereal. It was great. Definitely a money-loser for the hotel on the days I dined there. But anyway I hope the continental breakfast survives the current economic landscape.

• Barnes & Noble. This really is a great store. True, it’s changed somewhat since its heyday in the late 90s/early 2000s. Seemingly 1/3 of the store these days is taken up by woke young adult slop novels, weird vampire-erotica books, Rubik’s cubes, and nostalgic action figures for grownups. Still, though, it’s a great shop. It smells fantastic in there — so many new, clean books, it’s a great smell. I love the smell of the Starbuck’s too. At some locations you can still find a few of those robust Windsor chairs at the end of some aisles, and you can sit in those and read for a bit amid all the crisp-book smells and the coffee smells. The children’s section is actually pretty good; you do have to police your kids to some extent to make sure they don’t get transgender propaganda slop, but it’s easy enough to do and the store really does stock a fair number of classics and decent picture books. It’s a good store, a relic from a time when people read a little more, when we didn’t have these toxic little screens in our pockets and in front of our faces all the time.

• French bulldogs. These dogs are ridiculous and hilarious. They look like Jim Henson creations, every one of them, and they snort like a degraded two-stroke engine, and they always have a surprised facial expression, like they just woke up from a 10-year coma and have no idea where they are. I love to see these dogs, they always make me laugh.

• Custom bookshelves in people’s homes. I really love the ways people build bookshelves into their homes. It’s one of the most endlessly interesting and creative aspects of the domestic ambience. More than most anything, a bookshelf is built into the surrounding home landscape rather than on top of it. People will build bookshelves into limitlessly creative spaces. It reminds me of Wendell Berry’s definition of a path (as compared with a road), which he described as “a form of contact with a known landscape,” and “the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity…it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” The next time you’re in someone’s house take a look at their built-ins and you’ll recognize it. It’s so great to be able to see, very visibly, why someone opted to build something the way they did. It’s a marker of placeness, uniqueness. I love it.

• The smell of rain. Okay, maybe this doesn’t make me sound autistic; maybe it makes me sound gay or something. But I don’t mean “the smell of rain” like in the Hallmark sense, like I’m leaning on a windowsill in a chunky tan sweater, smiling and gently inhaling the fragrance of the clouds or whatever. I mean taking a deep, visceral snootful of that weird, metallic, ozone-y smell just before the rain lets loose. Ahh! It’s great. But what the hell is that smell? I don’t know, and I’m not going to look it up now, because I don’t really want to ruin the mystery. But I love that smell! It’s really enjoyable and I’ve never gotten tired of it.

Subscribe now

I recently got into a somewhat protracted debate on this platform with a couple of writers on the topic of stay-at-home parenting. As ever, the value of Internet debating is effectively zero; it’s a tedious, silly process that almost never generates any discourse of any real value. I was told, moreover, that Substack was a thinking man’s platform, one that would eliminate the tiresome fracas of normal Internet arguments in favor of something more refined and genteel.1 I guess on a long enough timeline every Internet forum becomes a Facebook note.

The substance of the debate was this: There is a very small but vocal element of the mommy discourse that urges women to simply lose themselves fully in the 24/7 arcana of motherhood, to surrender completely and totally to the vocation of mothering while abandoning or otherwise ignoring any of your own interests or pursuits or even really your own id, your own psyche. “You aren’t for other things. You don’t have anything better to do,” one commentator told mothers. Understandably this worldview receives a great deal of pushback from women who believe that mothers shouldn’t sacrifice every last vestige of their brains and their personalities to motherhood.

For the record, I agree with the latter assessment. There’s no reason for a mother, even a very busy mother — even a stay-at-home mother with lots of little children — to just obliterate her own personality and her own desires for years on end while caring for children. It’s just not necessary! Yet still, there are a fair number of mothers who claim that this is the way it should be. And I think that instinct springs from a very specific place, as I wrote:

I will argue that this impulse mostly comes from the somewhat pervasive female tendency to become completely overwhelmed by fairly manageable tasks. I have heard it from enough SAHMs: “We did homeschool today and I needed to do two loads of laundry and it was just madness all day, I couldn’t get anything else done.” … So I don’t think it’s surprising that so many mothers just conclude that there is no time left for anything else in the day.

I received a great deal of pushback for this argument from several women who argued that being a stay-at-home mother (or really a stay-at-home parent more generally) is in fact a difficult job, that being overwhelmed is a normal and routine part of the endeavor, and that mothers who are regularly swamped by the job are simply in need of more help and more resources, not a normal and focused and more vigorous work ethic.

I think this is untrue. Being a stay-at-home parent is, in the main, a really simple and arguably easy job. I’m not saying that it doesn’t involve work, sometimes a lot of work. But the work does not overall bear the normal markers of “hard” work, and it shouldn’t be labeled as such.

We’ll get to that, but I want to first stipulate something here that will doubtlessly seem somewhat controversial: I think the reason we’re having this discourse at all — at least in the way we are — is that the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are mothers. I think the discourse is being driven largely by a distinctly female set of impulses, and moreover I think our present discursive culture is apt to incentivize and reward those female impulses very strongly. A stay-at-home mother who stands up and says “This work is hard” will be by-and-large validated and commended for making this statement, while a man who stands up and says “It’s actually pretty easy” will be lambasted and sharply criticized for saying so. It’s a real incentive structure that produces a particular type of dialogue.

There are broader gender dynamics in play here too, instincts so unconscious that even the most progressive-minded people are likely unaware they hold them. Put it this way: Imagine you have a woman friend who works a demanding job in an office somewhere while her husband is a stay-at-home dad minding their two or three small kids all day. Imagine your woman friend tells you one day over brunch:

“I go to work for ten hours a day and come home tired and worn-out and find the house a mess, a day’s worth of dishes in the sink, no laundry done, other chores barely touched, the kids a mess, dinner not even started — and when I ask my husband what he did all day instead of all the housework, he gets mad and says, ‘Look, this job is really hard.’”

What would your response be? I think you’d tell your friend that her husband was mostly being silly, that the job isn’t that hard, that even the vagueries and difficulties of stay-at-home parenting — even with multiple children around! — don’t mean you can’t load a dishwasher and throw a load of laundry into the washing machine and maybe sweep up a little at some point over the course of 10 or 12 hours.

But I suspect most people would be far more comfortable telling a father this than a mother. I think that on these sorts of issues most people are considerably more willing to hold women to lower standards. I’m not sure why. It’s a funny world.

That incentive structure, where this tendency toward female overwhelmedness in the domestic sphere has become the de facto norm, is so pervasive that it seems to be increasingly normal for men to speak in this way. One of my debate partners referred me to an essay written by a man describing his experiences as a stay-at-home father. One of the phenomena he described as a stay-at-home dad was “a distinct loss of a sense of momentum,” a loss so strong that on some days he “didn’t even get the dishwasher started.” And, I mean, look, come on. I cannot stress how absurdly easy to run a dishwasher. It is a machine that takes about 92% of the work of washing dishes out of your hands. If you cannot load dishes into a rack and press a button at some point over the course of your waking hours — a process that takes about five minutes, max — then you are doing many, many things very poorly.

But that’s the norm now — to act as if this vocation of being a full-time at-home parent is uniquely, cripplingly difficult. It’s what the mommy bloggers mean when they say, repeatedly, “Being a stay-at-home parent is hard.” But it’s not. It’s, in the main, really quite easy. I’m not saying the vocation is perfect; it’s not. I’m not saying there aren’t times where you will feel more stressed out or more stretched thin; but then again that’s true in every endeavor. There are some things that can make the job harder; there are blessings that can make it easier. But in general this is not the type of role that need be described as “hard” in a truly defining way. Here are some reasons why:

• You cannot get fired. This is an absolutely major aspect of why this job is really not that hard: You can’t get shitcanned from it! This is a huge burden from which to be relieved. It is actually much easier to get fired from a paid professional job than it is to get “fired” from a stay-at-home parenting setup, whatever “firing” means in that context. The provider of the family—man or woman—has a considerable burden to perform at someone else’s level of expectations, all the time, every day, under threat of possibly losing that job and throwing their family into potentially debilitating chaos. There is no such day-to-day risk with stay-at-home parenting. Some days you might be better at parenting and some days you might be worse; you might lose your temper one day, maybe get breakfast on the table a little late the next, make a sub-par school lunch the next day or not vacuum as well as you should the day after; maybe you miss the laundry and your kid has to wear the same shirt two days in a row, etc. None of those mistakes means that your family is at risk of losing the home or going without health insurance or being without enough money to fill up the gas tank. Try making a similarly consistent series of mid-level mistakes at your job and see how long you last at the company. The pressure to do well at a job, every day, is vastly more omnipresent than the pressure to do well as a stay-at-home parent. Even the more pointed failures of parenting are considerably more forgiving. If you lose your temper and shriek at your children for five minutes about how they never clean up their Legos and how they need to stop throwing yogurt at the wall, you eventually calm down, take a deep breath, apologize to your kids, promise to do better, and move on. If, on the other hand, you lose your temper and shriek at your boss for five minutes about what a pigheaded mismanaging idiot he is — or even if you do the same thing to a coequal coworker! — you will lose your job, immediately, and your daughter will not get to go to ballerina camp that summer even though she’s been excited about it for six months, and your family won’t get to go on vacation for the year and maybe even next year, and maybe you have to eat beans and rice for several months to make ends meet. Which sounds like the more psychically and emotionally demanding endeavor? Which sounds like the endeavor that’s way, way more easy to be relaxed and non-stressed about?

• Domestic work is not difficult. I will add a caveat here that I actually really enjoy domestic work, I always have, I like cooking and cleaning and all the other stuff. It gratifies me in a particular way. Still, even those who really aren’t drawn to this type of labor shouldn’t overstate its difficulties. It’s pretty easy! Running a household is really not hard. This has never been more true than in the modern era, when machines have removed unthinkable amounts of hard labor from our lives. Washing machines and dryers, for example, have all but eliminated the brutal demands of clothes-washing that humanity has known for most of our existence. Here’s one description of how hard it used to be to wash clothes:

Before electricity, people washed clothes by hand using watercourses, communal wash-houses, or large tubs at home. The process involved soaking garments for 24 hours, heating water in metal cauldrons over fires, scrubbing with soap and brushes or washboards, beating fabric with wooden implements, and wringing by hand. A single wash could take an entire day or span multiple days, requiring enormous physical effort and stamina.

“A single wash could take an entire day.” Now you can easily wash and dry six or even seven full loads of laundry in one day; if you move quickly you can get it all folded and put away in the same day, representing maybe a couple hours’ worth of undemanding active labor that might have represented nearly a week’s worth of work in the preindustrial era. This is not hard! It is just not hard. Dishwashers have further eliminated much of the grimy, dirty, greasy work that used to define so much of the human domestic experience. A vacuum can make your home beautiful and appealing in about 20 minutes. A car takes you to the grocery store and back in under an hour for a full week’s groceries. Ovens and stovetops give you unlimited cooking energy literally whenever you ask for it. It would take too long to list the myriad other ways in which nuts-and-bolts domestic work is just absurdly easy these days. Keep lightly on top of the work on a day-to-day basis and it should be extremely rare for you to feel “overwhelmed” by any of it.

• Caring for children is really not that hard. Admittedly this is the area of domestic work, of stay-at-home parenting, that has the most variables associated with it, because you are dealing with other human beings who are often unreasonable and who have their own limitless desires and impulses that you have to control. There’s a lot of room for this part of the job to be “hard,” but — and this is key — about 90% of that “hard” factor is within your control. If you are finishing up each day as a stay-at-home parent thinking, “Wow, that was really hard,” then — barring extreme examples — it is almost certainly something you are doing wrong.
  
  There’s no universal prescription here for parents. I can’t tell you in minute detail how to manage your day-to-day childrearing in a way that makes it not hard. But I can say that, very more often than not, when I hear of a stay-at-home parent being “overwhelmed” by children, it’s often because they’re just doing too much with and for that child. That’s really at the root of maybe most of these objections. I’m not sure when this got started but seemingly the vast majority of modern parents seem to think you have to, like, always be doing stuff with your kids — always entertaining them, sitting with them, thinking up activities for both you and them to do, playing with toys alongside them, etc. Many homeschool parents, meanwhile, seem to think you have to homeschool your kids for, like, seven hours a day, which is so laughably inflated that I struggle to even know how to respond to it. The point being, yes, if you are just devoting hours and hours and hours of time to directly interacting with your children every day, you’re going to not be able to get anything else in your life done — chores or hobbies or anything else — leading quickly to you feeling “overwhelmed” by it all.
  
  The fact is, children don’t need that much interaction from their parents. This is true even for individual children with no siblings, but in general kids who have siblings really don’t need you to be hovering over their lives, micromanaging their pursuits and desires and interests. Now, Mrs. Morris and I really, really love spending time with our kids; she homeschools them and I work from home so we have a lot of time together and we just love it, it’s such a profound blessing for us. But our kids absolutely love playing with each other, and we absolutely love to see that — we love to see them forging lifelong bonds with each other, inventing games, reading side-by-side, building block towers together, playing video games together. Sometimes they fight, too, but it never comes to anything. They have a great time just being with each other. And they also very frequently play by themselves apart from the wider group, as well. In both cases we have a wonderful healthy family dynamic and my wife and I are able to do other things throughout the day. It’s a full and rewarding life!
  
  Again, if as a parent you’re feeling just completely burnt out day after day, you need to ask yourself very sincerely if you’re just investing way too much time in parenting your kids. This includes activities — if you’re shuttling your kids around to 12 or 15 different sporting events and recitals and whatnot every week, well, look, that’s almost certainly too much and you just need to pull back a bit. If you’re teetering on the brink of collapse you just need to re-assess and do something different! This is true in every area of life.

  There are, of course, other things that can push you to the brink as a parent — if your kids are being particularly ill-behaved, for instance, or if they all get sick at once, or if it’s been a stretch of rainy days and they’re at loose ends with too much energy. Thankfully these periods are more or less entirely transitional and/or, in the case of behavior problems, often just require a modicum of discipline and direction from you, the parent. Nothing you can’t handle, so long as you keep yourself even moderately composed and don’t give in to anger or despair (or “being overwhelmed”). So much of this is just training yourself to have a little more patience, calmness and generosity of heart— not the easiest thing in the world, to be sure, but very, very far from the hardest. It can be done with not too much effort! It’s not “hard,” in other words.
  

• Homeschooling is not that hard. I will reiterate this again because this is a lynchpin of so much of the parenting ecospheres in which I often find myself: Homeschooling does not need to be like regular school. You do not need to do it for hours upon hours a day. You do not need to supervise your children relentlessly throughout the day in the same way the school machine does. I myself was homeschooled for all but a few years of my primary and secondary educations and it consisted of just a few hours a day of schoolwork every day. Mrs. Morris is doing it the same way with our kids. I don’t mind saying that I myself turned out positively brilliant, erudite and really quite charming, and more than a little handsome, and I am pleased to say that our children are turning out in much the same way: well-read, desirous and excited about learning, associative, clever, creative. If, as a homeschooling parent, you are teaching your children for legitimately like 1/3 of the day, that’s, well, it’s ridiculous. That schedule is a byproduct of the shortcomings of institutional education; it is by no means necessary or even desirable in most cases. Free yourself from that paradigm! Teach your kids for a few hours a day and then shoo them away from the dining room table so you can do your calligraphy, which is what you really want to do.

It might not surprise you to know that many stay-at-home parents — okay, mostly stay-at-home moms, because that’s most of them — would object strenuously to these assessments. The objections usually run something like this: “Sure, tell me it’s not hard when one child is throwing up, the other has stopped the sink up with sourdough starter, the dog has diarrhea, your husband is away on a work trip, and it’s 8:30 pm and you haven’t even begun dinner yet.” Which, yes, sure, that does sound hard. But is that really the entire color of your life? Is that what your life looks like, you know, all the time? Do you really expect tomorrow, or next week, or next month, to look identical to that? Can you control for anything in your life? Can you not just put the sourdough starter up on a shelf?

The frustrating part of objections like these is that they are so granular. It takes a chaotic snapshot of a unique moment in time and treat it as if it’s (a) unsolvable and (b) permanent. But, I mean, most of us have suffered chaotic episodes like that in our lives. I feel like we can all pretty easily figure out how to avoid them in the main and just deal gracefully with them when they do arise.

Which is part of the mystery here. There are many, many stay-at-home parents who just insist that it’s a hideously difficult enterprise with no readily available solutions. But…there are also many stay-at-home parents who don’t feel that way! Assuming these people aren’t superhuman freaks who have tapped into some inexplicable well of psychic energy, it’s worth considering that maybe such people just have some approaches and ideas to family life that, you know, work better than yours do. Sometimes you’re doing things not all that great, and sometimes somebody else is doing it a little bit better, and sometimes you can learn a little from that person!

It’s certainly odd that in an era of unparalleled connectivity and information — i.e., the Internet — so many people have become so incurious and uninterested in seeking out ways to make their own lives easier and better and instead just seem resolved to being unhappy and stressed out. I don’t like to live that way which is why I’ve tried as best I can to build my life so that I’m reasonably happy and stress-free. It’s possible to do this! It’s not even, well, you know, hard!

There are just too many street festivals these days. It’s too much. They happen all the time. It’s overdone. I think everybody sort of senses this but we don’t really want to admit it. There’s something unsettling about all of it. I’ll get to the unsettling part in a bit, but first we have to just admit that there is a problem here. There’s just too many festivals.

Years ago this wasn’t the case. Years ago the average city or town might have just a handful of such festivals. A few ethnic food fairs, maybe an Oktoberfest celebration, some sort of summer thing with an odd name, like the Peach Pit Festival or the Corn Shucking Fair or something like that. Now, I swear, every weekend if I go out in my city—well, I guess I try and avoid doing that as much as possible, but when I do do it, it feels like there’s always some city street blocked off with a bunch of tents and a food truck or two and maybe a live band or maybe just a woman in overalls with an acoustic guitar doing Brandi Carlisle covers. Well, I’ve had it! I’m sick of it.

The first problem with these festivals is that they’re sort of aimless. You just kind of wander and look at stuff. There’s no rootedness to any of it. All you can do is sort of walk the length and breadth of the festival a few times. Maybe there are some craft vendors there selling hand-stitched cat toys or clumsily carved wooden butter knives. You might awkwardly look at that stuff for a bit, and then feel bad that you’re not buying anything, and then you walk on, because it’s all obscenely priced and you don’t want it anyway. It’s all just really a drag. But that’s most of what there is to do at these places—just kind of meander. Do people find this fun? Why? Why not walk in a park instead, or by a river?

Of course many people go to such festivals for the food. But, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but over roughly the past decade, and certainly since the COVID pandemic or whatever, street food and fair food have become considerably worse in quality and shockingly elevated in price. Street food, food trucks—it’s all just overpriced and mid-quality at absolute best. You might pay $17 for five chicken wings that are not very good. Or you might drop $18 on a dry falafel with a 1oz bag of chips and half a tablespoon of sauce in a tiny ramekin. (Bottled water is $3 extra.) Barbecue is the worst; it’s generally the most expensive and the least enjoyable. Very few people know how to cook barbecue well! And even if you can get out of the experience with your finances and your gut microbiome intact, it’s honestly just unpleasant eating stuff on the street. It’s a bunch of crinkly foil and too-thin paper napkins and crunkly plastic water bottles, and you have to eat it on your lap or else standing up, and—again—it’s really not very good. Do people really enjoy paying lots of money for mid-grade food eaten in a very frustrating way? Maybe some people are gluttons for punishment, while others are just gluttons. (Sorry, it’s just the truth though.)

If you have children and you bring them to these festivals it’s even less fun. The meandering and walking is difficult because kids often run in lots of different directions and it’s very easy to lose them in these crowds. I understand this might not be a source of anxiety for many parents. The average Gen X parent, for instance, seems really determined to not care if their small children are, say, at risk of getting kidnapped. I don’t know why that’s the case, but oh well. But most of us parents don’t want that (though I suppose most of the parents at street festivals are probably Gen X). So you have to manage your kids in a big crowd, which is not really fun, doubly so if the experience itself is not all that fun. And if you want to buy your kids some street food, well, there’s 1/4 of your grocery budget for the week: Instead of $18 on the lame falafel you’re dropping $54. Wait, I’ve forgotten your wife. So that’s $72! Also, vendors at street festivals love to give kids free, breakable, crummy shit—toys and junky little puzzles and whatnot. This is true of almost all business owners everywhere, but it’s doubly true at street festivals, where every single wooden butter knife vendor will give your kid a bunch of stickers and trinkets, which you will have to keep track of for your kid or else he or she will lose it and begin freaking out. So that’s not fun either.

Also, I’ll just say this: Most of these street festivals are going to be pretty gayed up. It’s just the way it is. Most of the festivals are taking place in walkable neighborhoods in city centers, where a huge concentration of LGBT residents and/or LGBT activists live. So there’s going to be lots of gay shit there. If you’re supportive of, or ambivalent about, LGBT stuff, then I guess it doesn’t matter. But if you don’t particularly relish explaining to your children on a Saturday afternoon why some men want to dress like women and use women’s restrooms, well, you’re just going to have to deal with that, if you go to a street festival that is, which of course you shouldn’t.

There’s also always a few informational booths at these things — some kind of community organization or free medical clinic offering information about their programs and community undertakings. There are always lots of pamphlets and papers on their tables being held down by paperweights; maybe a stress ball or a free pen or two. I just want to note here that I always feel really sorry for these folks, who at least in this capacity have to be some of the most ignored people on the planet. Nobody ever stops at their booths. Who wants to learn about safe needle disposal at a street festival? It’s already pretty depressing. Plus these people are always having to chase the papers that the wind blows off their tables. I’m just saying, I have some real sympathy for these people, who obviously really do believe in their mission and who are just trying real hard.

Now: As I said, this all feels sort of disquieting. I don’t mean just because it’s universally a mega-expensive, boring, mega-gay experience, though those factors do make it psychically unappealing. I just mean the entire meta-factor of the street festival as this seemingly ubiquitous things in our society now. It just feels like it’s everywhere and I am disturbed by it in a way that’s hard to quantify.

I think it’s because it feels like we sort of don’t know what to do as a society anymore. We’ve become so chronically fragmented and atomized and apart from each other, and the multitude of commons we used to enjoy have been so denuded over the past few decades, and even when we do follow the old modes and go to the old places — a playground, a concert, a bar, a park — we’re all just looking down at our stupid ass phones 90% of the time. I think the really robust and vibrant communal models humans built up over the past few hundred years have just been strip-mined — by the phone and all its attendant dreadfulness, of course, and by our own stunted communal impulses that have just made the problem even worse. And I think the street festival is sort of our way of trying to claw some of that back — I think many people think to themselves, “Hey, this sort of looks like how we all used to live — this is fun, it feels good, I want to do it.” Except it all sucks, it’s expensive and clumsy and unfun, so the empty feeling inside you just gets even worse.

The solution, as ever — as ever, as ever — is to get off your phone. Throw it away and be done with it. Start to reclaim the life it took from you. And also, don’t go to these stupid street festivals. They suck!

I took my kids to the pool the other day and on the way back we were stopped at a light next to a sandwich shop with some tables outside. There were three people eating outside; all of them had smartphones on the table., ever within reach. In the window of the shop I could see a woman eating alone, scrolling on a smartphone. A guy walked into the shop; he had his smartphone in his hand. It is everywhere, omnipresent, out and being used relentlessly. No other thing, or activity, or undertaking, unites modern humanity as compulsively and completely as this.

I don’t even really want to write constructively about this right now. I really don’t. I am increasingly convinced that none of my feelings or writings about this will ever come to any constructive benefit. The best I can do is to raise my own children to despise the smartphone as comprehensively as I do, and to encourage them to seek out wives and husbands who feel the same way about smartphones that they do. I think of that grim but resolved line from 1984: “At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little.”

I just want to mope about this. That’s all. It saddens me so greatly to see how our lives have been so completely overtaken by this awful little device. If I had predicted this 20 years ago — “One day these things will dominate virtually every aspect of social life at every level, all the time, I mean all the time” — you might have called me crazy. At the dawn of the mobile era nobody really could envision such a thing happening, except maybe the people who made smartphones in the first place, who saw the future when we couldn’t or wouldn’t, and who licked their chops thinking about all the money they would make off of us.

Remember there was a time when you didn’t used to whip out a smartphone every time you came to a resting place? Remember that? It really wasn’t that long ago — it was mere years. It’s nothing you can’t get back if you just try.

I flatter myself that I have gotten very good at not looking at my phone when I am out with it. For some professional reasons and a scant few personal ones I am regularly obliged to carry a phone with me — it is a work phone — but my usage of it is limited almost exclusively to brief texts messages when necessary. Even then I feel embarrassed while using it, like it’s some sort of dirty addictive substance — like I picked up smoking again and am having to sneak a quick butt while hoping my kids don’t see me and hoping even more fervently that they don’t pick up the habit themselves. It’s never anything good. Still, as little as one can use a smartphone and still derive some limited practical benefit from it, I have managed to do so. I just checked my '“screen time” on my iPhone: My “daily average” is 26 minutes per day. The running adult average throughout the U.S. these days is somewhere around six hours. I do not know what people are spending six hours doing on their phones. I feel the same way when looking at morbidly obese people, or people who smoke two or three packs of cigarettes per day — I just don’t know where you find the time to do it.

But I guess I do know what people are doing on their smartphones — they are doing…nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is just a howling emptiness on there. Oh, doesn’t it fill you with a psychic dread to think of it? The human mind is such a wonderful thing and it is being so callously wasted on all of this. I was on a public bus the other day and a fellow got on and sat down some rows ahead of us and of course he immediately got out his phone. He began scrolling. He spent a considerable amount of time flicking his thumb at some sort of sparkly, neon-lit gambling game of some kind. Maybe he was gambling real money, maybe it was fake Internet money, I don’t know. He’d do that for a bit and then swipe out and scroll through his apps, open up a browser of some kind, flick through a feed, close that out, go back to the gambling game—an endless, pointless recursion that added nothing to this man’s life and in fact actively detracted from it. It was just depressing on a level I find hard to articulate even now. This was quite plainly a lower-class man, with dirty clothes and an old backpack and a bunch of flabby, washed-out tattoos coating his unhealthy-looking skin. I felt sympathy for him for a number of reasons but none more so than his obvious addiction to his stupid smart phone. Addictive, destructive pathologies have generally always struck the lower class harder than the upper classes, of course. And yet this man’s behavior was functionally indistinguishable from the thing that everyone does everywhere, all the time. Even the furtive, compulsive Internet gambling has become ubiquitous. The smart phone has democratized the pathology of digital addiction. We are all in the gutter and we are all just looking at our phones.

If I had pitched this idea to you twenty years ago, not as a grim warning but as some sort of excited salesman’s pitch, you would have recoiled in disgust. Do not deny it. “Twenty years from now, everyone will carry around wallet-sized supercomputers, and they will be on them constantly, like for 25% of every day, basically a massive portion of their free time and leisure time, everywhere they go they’ll be on these little computers, and they will use them for virtually nothing other than fleeting stimulation that adds nothing to their lives and which they won’t remember even just minutes later. These devices will stimulate massive levels of antisocial behavior, it will make people more neurotic, less sociable, less interested in the world, more insular. People will largely cease simply pausing and sitting with their thoughts; that ancient activity, one of the great and precious hallmarks of the human experience, will more or less vanish. The time that people used to devote to daydreaming, to thinking, to looking at their surroundings, to striking up conversations with loved ones or even with strangers, to reading, to working out puzzles and quandaries and riddles in their mind — the great minutia of the beautiful human mind, the arcana of consciousness, it will all virtually disappear, to be replaced by endless fleeting stimulation on little computer screens. One of the few times that people will use these devices in any practical sort of way is by taking pictures with them—but that will mostly serve the function of just putting another screen between people and the real world, convincing everyone that the only way to witness something interesting or exciting or unexpected is to look at it through the little screen. These devices will become moderators between ourselves and our own psyches.”

And so on and so forth. If I sold you this horrific dystopian vision in 2006 you would have rightly balked at it. But it’s real! It actually came to pass, this is the world we unquestionably live in now. And it’s awful!

We don’t speak of this; we don’t talk about it. Everyone is uncomfortable about it and nobody wants to acknowledge it, principally because pretty much everyone is in on the addiction and doesn’t want to give it up. But don’t ignore it! The next time you are out and about, look around. Probably the vast majority of people that you will see will have a phone in their hands. Very likely close to 90% of people you see in any sort of sedentary situation will have their phones out. The worst is looking into romantic candlelit restaurants as you walk by. We have one like that in our neighborhood and when you walk by you can see people sitting at their tables and looking at their phones instead of each other. It’s like a scene from a techno-horror movie. Look around you. Don’t be in denial about this. This is the world as it exists in 2026 and it sucks very bad! We should stop doing this, we should want something better than this!

Our dishwasher recently broke, by which I mean it suddenly began spewing end-cycle water through the subfloor and into the basement. Now, we have five children, and those of you with five or more children know exactly what I am trying to convey when I say “Our dishwasher broke and we have five children.” Those of you with no children at all, who can’t quite conceive of the sheer logistical horror of it all, can picture it this way: Imagine you’re on a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, someone has diphtheria, someone else has malaria, a third has a broken bone, there’s no fresh water, your yoke just broke, two of your oxen just died, there are hostile Indians on the horizon…and then, to top it all off, your dishwasher breaks. That’s about it.

We obviously went out and bought a new dishwasher right away; we sprung for the fancy Miele, which is apparently equal in cleaning power to the top-of-the-line Bosch but is rated for 20 years of service. We need a workhorse. Now, as it turns out, “20 years of service” for Miele is based on an annual load of around 280 cycles, which is just patently laughable for a family of our size. That breaks down to about three-quarters of a cycle per day. On most days our family goes through three-quarters of a cycle before 10am alone. There are some days that we’ve done four loads of varying sizes. But in any event it appears to be a durable machine that I’m sure will serve us and our five children and at least some of our eventual 30 grandchildren well.

The upshot is, the new dishwasher was backordered for a week. And so for a week we have done dishes by hand. We have six eaters in this family (the baby is mercifully not on solids yet), I work from home, and we homeschool; that means this entire family is taking three meals per day at home, every day. That’s 18 settings to wash by hand, every day, plus incidental dishes, to say nothing of cooking implements and pots and pans. And yes, before you ask: We tried paper plates. But I hate them with a passion I cannot easily articulate. A paper plate is an evil, nasty, hateful, vile thing, and I refuse to serve dinner or any other meal on a paper plate. This is absolutely one area in which I will stand unabashedly on Hyacinth Bucket principles: “I have to hold my head up in this community.” The end result of this is a seemingly endless line of dishes. Given that it is my own sense of propriety that is partly responsible for so many dishes, I have not asked Mrs. Morris to help out with the hand-washing. This is not her fault; it is not her battle.

It’s all only for a brief period, of course. But I have to say that in less than a week I have come to understand and sympathize with the disaffected-housewife-turned-radical-woman’s-libber of midcentury America. It is true that the unpleasantness of washing dishes by hand was doubtlessly only one component of the burgeoning feminist movement of the era, and in any event residential dishwashers were coming into vogue at the time so the era of handwashing was on its way out anyway. Yet still. After washing dishes by hand for a large family for even a few days, you can understand how this sort of thing could make a housewife vulnerable to suggestion—how daily dishpan pans could make that old battleax Betty Friedan seem positively oracular by comparison.

Washing dishes by hand really is a grim, unpleasant task. There are people who claim they enjoy the gnomic simplicity of it all, but quite honestly I think these people are lying. Unlike many of the other really pleasant domestic tasks — and I really do love the domestic work — dishwashing is both endlessly messy and gratingly laborious. It demands a degree of neurotic precision that the other jobs, the vacuuming and laundry-folding and dusting and even washing windows, really don’t. It is quite easy to leave specks of food on dishes, all the moreso if you have a lot of them to wash. Your hands get wet and waterlogged. Your clothes or your apron get damp and maybe even wet. You have to either dry them by hand or else have a drying rack handy, the latter of which takes up valuable counterspace. The dishwasher is just an unbelievable time-saver. A family our size, that cooks the way we do, might spend 90 minutes to two hours per day washing dishes by hand; with a dishwasher handwashing is reduced to maybe 20 minutes or less, with the rest of the dishes just loaded in the dishwasher and forgotten about. (And no pre-rinsing required!)

If I had to guess then, I would imagine it was the dishwashing that helped spur the average midcentury housewife to embrace Mary Tyler Moore-style feminism. Home laundry machines were already being widely embraced prior to World War II; by the early 1950s most house had a vacuum; much of the grinding domestic work of decades past had been subsumed by the Machine. Dishwashing was arguably the last great manual domestic task of the 20th century. Wash dishes by hand for a week and you can appreciate why second-wave feminism must have seemed revelatory at the time.

That’s my thought, anyway. But I guess I have a little more dishwatery appreciation for what drove so many women to adopt such ruinous politics. Maybe if dishwashers had been adopted earlier en masse, we wouldn’t have seen such a shift toward a toxic political ideology the fallout with which we’re still actively dealing today. Or maybe it was always sort of inevitable. But all of it underscores something which has been well-known for centuries: Unhappy, unsatisfied people are easily exploited by poisonous ideologies. It is true that every act of political exploitation ultimately requires some assent from the exploited — a willingness to be used, one supposes, and an inclination to not consider any alternatives. But one cannot deny that dishwashing by hand is really deeply unpleasant and that one can appreciate the intense, burning desire to not have your hands red and soaking wet for hours every day. The good news, of course, is that we now have modern dishwashers that take care of all that unpleasantness for you. So there is now no longer any need for the spiteful, deestructive, abortion-driven political crusade of feminism. Ladies, it is safe to return to the kitchen — get a dishwasher and you won’t spend very long in there anyway!

Subscribe now

I first saw Meet the Parents in, I think, 2001, and it is sobering — in that stupid, familiar way in which Millennials these days are constantly being sobered — to reflect that I am older now by a significant degree than Ben Stiller was when he filmed this movie. Looking back on a quarter-century past, I can recall thinking that Ben Stiller seemed really old in Meet the Parents, yet almost ageless at the same time, existing in some ethereal parabolic plain — a place of salaried work, driver’s licenses, having a girlfriend — to which I, as a mere pre-teenager, could never aspire. He was 35 when he made that movie.

Meet the Parents is really funny. The two films that have followed have all been quite bad. It is incredible to write that there have been three films in this series — it’s a trilogy! This is a series where the primordial entry was a fairly conventional yet really well-done stress comedy about meeting your in-laws and screwing it up and coming out okay in the end. What possible further message could another movie hope to impart? What did they leave unsaid in the first one? Apparently a whole lot. Apparently every time they make one of these movies they say, “You know, I feel like there’s a lot we could have included in this movie, so much so that we can legitimately make another movie out of it. So let’s do that.” Doesn’t it make you depressed to think of that? It definitely makes your own simple, honest life seem positively idyllic by comparison, almost agrestic, certainly happier and more honest.

Now a third sequel is being made — the fourth movie in the series. The fourth. It’s the sequel to “Little Fockers,” a 2010 movie in which the principle characters had a few kids; now, in this latest sequel, the kids are grown up, and one of them is getting married, and the conflict apparently stems from that pairing, sort of like it did in the first one. I guess. Here’s the trailer for the movie, which is called Focker-in-Law, continuing a more-than-two-decade trend of titling these movies with “Focker,” because the joke is it sounds like “fucker,” which was funny 25 years ago and is simply, bloodlessly unfunny now:

Doesn’t it make you sad to watch this? Doesn’t it make you feel like our best storytelling days are behind us? Maybe they are. Maybe as a species we have simply peaked creatively. It’s entirely possible. Why would it be impossible?

We should be prepared to accept that. But before we do we should at least understand how we got here, and part of that is recognizing just what is going on in this transparently miserable, stupid movie. To wit, some explication:

Everyone and everything looks like weird shit in this film

I do not understand why mainstream cinema insists on making 99% of its movies look like this. None of this feels relational at any level of human existence or experience. The people themselves, the atmosphere, the motif, the color scheme, the lighting, none of it looks remotely recognizable as something or some place you’ve ever inhabited. Robert De Niro, who was at one time — even in his old age — a pretty handsome fellow, now looks like, I’m just going to say it, he sort of looks like a cross between a mannequin and an elderly mannish lesbian. Ben Stiller, who was never all that handsome but was never ugly either, now looks like a divorced Baby Boomer who used his newfound single-life money to stretch his face out into a synthetic mask and make his hair look like a frightened hedgehog. And he’s not even a Baby Boomer, he is Gen X! Ariana Grande looks like, well, she looks like nothing, like nobody. She could be anybody; like an agent in the Matrix, she is everyone and no one. I think I vaguely remember Ariana Grande being pretty at one time but she has adopted the mien of late-stage Millennial celebrity and stamped her features with nothing at all. She is a ghost, a whisper of a performer.

I want to belabor this point here: None of this is criticism directed at any sort of intrinsic feature of these people. It is no crime to look like an elderly mannish lesbian if you happen to stumble into it. The flat, ghoulish unappealing-ness here is certainly part of the synthetic vogue of celebrity culture, but it’s also very much a product of the deliberate, conscious, aggressive choices of filmmakers and producers, who now only create in a style that flattens and smooshes all the interesting and appealing features of humanity and makes everyone into nothing, all of it overlit and oversaturated and overpolished and over-makeup’d, wholly devoid of the normal, familiar, comforting flaws and markers of humanity. When that happens you get this creepy, otherworldly effect where everything and everyone is effectively anonymous and unrecognizable except for vague, eerie glimpses of humanistic pastiches emerging in the weird visual soup. It’s awful!

I want to provide a counter-example of how it’s still possible to make compelling, affective movies in part just by using normal people in a normal palette with no Netflix-style mishmashing of optic reality. Mrs. Morris and I recently watched The Taste of Things, one of the rare latter-day movies I will enthusiastically recommend. I have never seen another movie like it in my life; it is beguiling, deeply moving, strange, puzzling, delightful, profoundly human, beautiful to watch, at times breathtaking — just an incredible film from start to finish. It stars the French actors Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche, who are seen below in a still from the movie:

These actors are well within the same age range as Ben Stiller, certainly within what we might call the same “life stage” as him, and yet it is striking at once how much realer and more human they look than he does in the new garbage movie he’s currently headlining. I’m not saying they look entirely normal but they certainly look real enough for my preferences. There are wrinkles in their clothes and on their faces. There are hairs out of place. These bodies look lived-in, worn but well-loved and -cared-for. The lighting doesn’t look like it’s coming from the anus-probing room of a malevolent alien spaceship. The Taste of Things is worth watching for any reason, but certainly because it demonstrates that it is still possible to make movies that look, and feel, very human.

Note that it is not merely the human actors in Focker-in-Law that feel divorced from reality. Consider a side-by-side of the mirrored scenes from the 2000 original and the 2026 sequel, in which the principle characters arrive at Robert de Niro’s home in Oyster Bay:

The first image looks normal, both in movie terms and in how we generally see the material world, which movies like this should reflect. The second is weirdly, uncomfortably saccharine, a product of overlined digital film and a filmmaking aesthetic that is simply uncomfortable with making anything look normal. It all has to look like an Instagram photo or a travel brochure, an advertisement for something, a signifier rather than a signified. It’s the optical equivalent of a flat affect. There is nothing here to interest you, nothing to make you feel recognized as a human being.

Garbage Gen Z / Millennial humor

It is immediately apparent that this movie is going to be saturated by the kind of grating, deadpan non-jokes that have come to define so much of the present cultural moment, at least in comedy. There’s such an exchange in the first minute of the trailer itself:

Olivia: You call him Wee Wee? Wee wee? What is that? Like a joke about his wee wee?

Greg: Oh, nope. No jokes about Henry’s little penis. I mean, not little. You probably have more up-to-date info on it. I haven’t seen it for a while, so…

Henry: Dad, please stop talking.

Greg: Eh — all right.

For whatever reason this specific type of exchange really seems to permeate Millennial and Gen Z culture — I mean the specific trope of a character sort of prattling on in an embarrassing way, well past the point he should have stopped, and then another character says something along the lines of, “Um, dude, please stop talking.” I am not sure why this is such a common joke among people about my age, though maybe it has something to do with these generations having spent the past two decades marinating in the rancid soup of social media, where “Um, you need to stop talking right now” is sort of the default comeback if you don’t like what someone’s saying. It’s smugly performative, and condescending, and distinctly unpleasant. It is also profoundly unfunny. And this genre of joke can take a lot of unfunny forms, such as this bit later in the trailer:

Henry: I’m going to ask Olivia to marry me.

Greg: Hey, you sure she’s the one?

Samantha: Dad…why?

This is not funny. It’s lame and tepid and elicits nothing from the audience. It’s also de rigueur for so much comedy these days; like most creative enterprises these days, comedy movies have largely forgotten how to be funny and have instead lapsed into the same sort of pallid social media dreck that defines most of our culture. Just brutal.

Where is the conflict?

What story is this movie attempting to tell? How does it conforms to Freytag’s Pyramid? What, exactly, is the conflict that this movie is supposed to demonstrate, and navigate, and ultimately resolve?

If you recall, the first film in the series featured Greg Focker making an ass out of himself around his in-laws during a miserably chaotic wedding weekend in Long Island. It is hard to overstate just how thoroughly Greg ruins everything. He breaks his sister-in-law’s face with a volleyball; shatters the urn containing his girlfriend’s grandmother’s ashes, which the cat then pisses in; floods the family’s yard with toxic raw sewage; sets fire to a hand-made wedding gazebo; loses the family cat and replaces him with a stray, whose tail he spray-paints to cover his ruse, after which the cat proceeds to destroy the family home, including an expensive wedding dress; he finishes this good showing by ruining a honeymoon surprise for the newlyweds-to-be.

The conflict, in other words, is very clear: Greg is an overall decent guy who is trying to have a relationship with the family of the girl he wants to marry, and he is just making an enormous mess of things, very often literally, and so of course the family — and maybe even his girlfriend — ends up hating him even when he doesn’t precisely deserve it. The emotional stakes are low since it’s a comedy movie and you know everything’s going to turn out okay, but you can at least sort of suspend your disbelief — or maybe turn your disbelief inward on itself a few times — to believe that it might not turn out okay.

What is the conflict in Focker-in-Law? What is at stake here? The character dynamics seem to come to nothing at all except maybe a shallow running series of tropes. The character of Olivia does not appear to have any sort of crisis or strife to which the audience can relate even tangentially. She is apparently immediately loved by the entire family; she has an incredible career that everyone is really impressed by; she’s “adorable,” “so smart,” a “powerhouse;” she can immediately subdue large German shepherds simply by voice command; she can save Ben Stiller from choking to death; she is apparently confident in handling a gyuto while cooking an entire lamb rack; she is, by the lamentably wan but still widely acceptable Millennial standard of the day, very beautiful; there appears to be nothing wrong with her, nothing at all — she is highly capable, smart, successful, attractive, liked and loved by all. So, movie over. I mean, what’s the point?

I think — though I stress that I am uncertain about this, as filmmakers increasingly don’t really know how to make movies that conform to any standard of dramatic structure — that the conflict in Focker-in-Law is supposed to stem from Greg Focker himself, who has sort of, kind of, been elevated to the status that Robert de Niro held in the first film: He’s the suspicious father-in-law-to-be who thinks that his child’s lover is not good enough for the child in question, and the hijinx will ensue from that fundamental tension before it’s ultimately resolved. But you can really only pull off that kind of dramatic irony if it’s plausible at face value. I mean, in the original film, Greg Focker really did screw things up. He was a total mess the whole weekend, he told some small lies and a few big ones, he destroyed valuable family property, he spray-painted a cat…these are big transgressions! Even if we know that Greg himself is ultimately a decent fellow beset by a colossal sequence of bad luck catastrophes, it was entirely plausible that everyone else saw him as a malevolent freak destroying a family legacy. But everyone already loves the interloper in this new movie! Olivia is already perfect and beloved! And there’s really no clear or meaningful sign as to why Greg shouldn’t feel the same way. The movie is already telegraphing that it will be unenjoyable by dint of being unconvincing.

And I want to stress here that the movie itself already seems to grasp its own shallow, uninteresting implications; it can’t even create an effective complication to drive the plot toward some meaningful catharsis. I mean, it bears repeating that in the Meet the Parents, Greg’s situation was truly abysmal; he literally filled a wedding venue up with shitty poop-filled water, poopy water that was then sprayed all over the rest of the family while he watched. He was in really dire straits! And the movie was so confident about its own merits that it showed that scene in the trailer. The biggest crisis that we see in Focker-in-Law, on the other hand, is…Greg accidentally knocking a young woman off of her bike, leading her to suffer what could at best be described as a minor abrasion.

We’ve gone from a movie about the horror of filling your father-in-law’s back yard with literal stinking human feces to a movie about the brief embarrassment of gently knocking a woman off a bicycle. Yes, this promises to be a stellar comedy film, sure to delight your funny bone.

It was Teri Polo all along??

This really isn’t a strike against the movie, just an aside, but: I was surprised to realize that Ben Stiller’s wife in this movie is, in fact, Teri Polo. In the years since I saw the first movie I’d apparently become convinced that it was Christine Taylor. But that was totally wrong. And yes, I get why I made that mistake: Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor are married in real life, and they were also in Dodgeball together, so it all just got mixed up in my head and I replaced the one prominent-early-2000s blonde actress with the other. Ah, well, that’s neither here nor there, though I will happily note that Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor have been married for 25 years, which has to put them in the top 1% of Hollywood marriages, and they even reconciled after separating briefly, which is just wonderful. That makes me happy.

It’s all the same jokes but they’re lame now

I get that this is a sequel, indeed it’s the third sequel in this series, and inevitably, and by necessity, a lot of the material in a fourth film is going to be warmed-over, which is, I guess, what audiences are paying for. Sure. But that sort of cynical dramatic laziness only works well in movies that fundamentally don’t matter in any artistic way — think the great slasher series of the 1980s, which just rehashed their own absurdist bloody conventions over the course of about 12 years, or the current cholesteric glut of superhero movies, which are functionally indistinguishable from one another and which nobody, absolutely nobody, cares about in any way at all. These are movies meant to satiate you at a base, insectile level. But a decent comedy is, or at least should aspire to be, something more interesting, intellectual even if in a low sort of way. Here’s one of the jokes near the beginning of Meet the Parents, for instance:

Jack Byrnes: What are you driving there? Ford?

Greg Focker: Yeah it’s a Taurus. Yeah, we were going to get a mid-size, but I figure, hey, we pull down decent bucks. Might as well go all out, and pop for the full-size.

Jack Byrnes: Sure. Interesting color. You pick it?

Greg Focker: Oh, no, the guy at the counter. Why?

Jack Byrnes: Well, they say geniuses pick green. But you didn’t pick it.

It works well on all levels. The joke is good at its most elemental because Jack has slightly humiliated Greg, bested him both practically and intellectually, teeing up the rest of the film’s central conflict. But there’s also a deft bit of interplay here, some cerebral parrying, and also the funny sort of setup-countersetup in which Greg attempts to impress Jack with the size of the car, only to learn that Jack wants to be impressed by the size of Greg’s intellect, only to immediately learn that he has failed to impress Jack in such a way. It’s quick, sharp, fun, not overthought, it’s good — and, again, the filmmakers were so confident in the comprehensive quality of the movie that they included this joke in the trailer, too.

I don’t see any evidence of that kind of low-key wit in this new film; indeed there is certainly no evidence at all that the deuteragonist Olivia will ever be put into any situation where she has to prove herself in any meaningful way to anyone at all except to Greg, briefly, maybe, which she’ll obviously succeed at. What I do see is mostly a cheap reheating of the jokes first established in the first movie, literally more than a quarter-century ago, the microwave reheating of what is at this point ancient material: The pointing-at-the-eyes thing, Owen Wilson knowing Yiddish words that Ben Stiller doesn’t know, the polygraph thing. There’s even a green car in there, so maybe there will be another green car joke. Probably it will turn out that Olivia picked out the green rental car, and Jack will point out that Greg once again did not pick the color of the car — 25 years later and he’s still not a genius, you get it?

We used to be better than this!

I suppose it might seem like I’m belaboring something minor here. I get it. It’s one movie in one franchise, it’s a comedy, it’s unimportant. But these are simply examples of systemic problems that are affecting the whole of the system itself. As I've written, the current crisis in movies is “system-wide and the solutions are necessarily going to be systemic, which means any one illustration is always going to seem demonstratively insufficient.” You can shrug off Focker-in-Law as just a lame movie, and in that you’d be right, because that’s what it is. The problem is that we largely have only lame movies these days, where in years and decades past we used to have considerably more good movies.

Case in point: Meet the Parents, which is just a really funny movie, well done, enjoyable, rewatchable, memorable. It’s not the greatest comedy ever made, but it doesn’t have to be; it’s just a good movie with creative writing, funny jokes, a great cast, a good director, it’s convincing, fun, original in all the right ways, derivative in all the ways a decent movie should be. Don’t overthink it. A good movie is just a good movie, and that’s enough.

A bad movie, on the other hand — like Focker-in-Law, which, I guarantee you, will suck — should never be enough. We should reject movies like this and demand something better. I understand that after about 120 years of making movies, on top of centuries of creative literature and epics and mythology, there’s never anything that’s going to be truly “original” in the sneering Carl-Sagan-apple-pie-from-scratch sense of the world. That’s fine. But we should absolutely expect movies more original than this, and moreover movies better than this, movies that try harder to create worlds and characters that are recognizable and affective and interesting and human. It was at one point way more common for filmmakers to do this! It really was, I promise!

Anyway I guess the point is, don’t go see this movie. It’s going to suck. You work hard for your money and you shouldn’t give it to creators with such contempt for you and your artistic sensibilities. The only way this miserable epoch of movies is going to come to an end is if we stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars rewarding the people who make bad movies. So let’s do that!

I continue to believe that the 2024 murder of Unitedhealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (allegedly) by Luigi Mangione represents something of a watermark in U.S. history; it functioned as a sort of “Big Sort” in miniature, an example of what the economist Paul Samuelson called revealed preference. Some people were horrified at the murder of Thompson — an innocent father and husband — and correctly marked it as an instance of cold-blooded, lunatic violence by a mentally ill killer. Others, a large number of them, were either tacitly or openly enthusiastic about the killing, heralding it as a righteous act of retribution and a populist strike against a corrupt, evil healthcare system. If you were in the former camp, congratulations: You are a relatively normal, healthy human being. If you were in the latter camp, well, for what it’s worth, your “revealed preference” is for low-grade but still very real psychopathy, like Ted Bundy levels of psychopathy: You are okay with sadistic, pointless violence as a means to gratify your own desires.

I thought about this again this week after a trio of stars from the latest Mario movie had themselves a raucous chuckle over Thompson’s murder while doing an interview for an Italian podcast. You can watch the sequence here, in which actor Charlie Day says accused killer Luigi Mangione is his second-favorite Luigi “in recent American history.” Everyone has a real belly-laugh over that, a gut-busting guffaw over — and I need to remind you of this again — the cold-blooded headshot murder of an innocent father. That’s funny, you see! It’s really, really funny when people are shot and killed for no other reason than because they work in the health insurance industry. Excuse me, worked.

It is true that killings like this sometimes bring out the worst among the worst of us; there were certainly those on the fringe who praised Scott Roeder after he shot and killed abortionist George Tiller in 2009. Yet the sheer mainstreaming of murder in the Thompson killing — the tacit political support of it, the pro-murder yard signs that sprung up across Middle America — feels like something different, a radical shift presented as a hipshot kind of progressive sensibility. I cannot, in any event, recall any A-list actors at the time praising Scott Roeder and laughing merrily about it.

Part of this is that the Left is in general just more comfortable with political violence and always has been; part of it, too — maybe a bigger part — is a lurch toward a culture in which violence over political disagreements is simply more tolerated, and more celebrated, and more highly valued, and more acted upon.

I think that sort of thing can only be really countenanced in a society where violence is more of an abstraction than a reality. Charlie Day presumably has security details; he presumably lives ensconced in an enclave either where violence is rare or he simply doesn’t have to deal with it when it happens. Most progressives who have been enthusiastic supporters of Luigi Mangione are presumably in similar situations (minus the security detail). You can giggle about brutal, homicidal violence, and playact at supporting it, when you don’t really have to worry about it. But there actually are places in the present world where violence — both political and pedestrian — is extremely common, far more so than in the U.S. in general. You do not have to look very hard to find countries and regions where assassinations, robberies, assaults, stabbings, shootings, beatings, murders and other acts of violence are very much daily parts of life. It is hellish to live in such places. The threat of harm is omnipresent and the sense of stability is nonexistent. The mind and the soul wither and rot under such circumstances. These are terrible places to be. To borrow from Orwell, we have become too civilized to grasp the obvious: The state of violence is abjectly miserable and leads to mass suffering and misery and death. It’s bad. We shouldn’t want to go there. We should resist it. We certainly shouldn’t tolerate a political class and a celebrity class that is apparently intent on dragging us there.

I suppose one could make a clumsy defense of Charlie Day and his castmates by claiming that Charlie Day himself was sort of caught off-guard by an inappropriate interview question and responded as he did in the hopes of avoiding an awkward on-camera exchange. But the conclusions from that are still grim, almost brutal: One must accept that it made more career sense for a celebrity to publicly celebrate the murder of an innocent man rather than briefly appear uncomfortable during a media appearance. Even if this man was only responding to incentives rather than speaking from the heart, it still signals that the broader culture has embraced violence and has made it profitable for others to do so as well. Violence, wrote Solzhenitsyn, “demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit.” Men must only “resist in the smallest way” to avoid this outcome, he said, and if we fail to do so we “do it to ourselves.” Can anyone see clearly what we are doing to ourselves? Doesn’t anyone see how this sort of thing inevitably ends, and how terrible it will be?

Another Duggar man has been arrested on charges related to child sex abuse. It is a worthwhile question to consider whether or not a compulsion to commit child abuse might be driven, at least in part, by some sort of genetic factor. Certainly it would seem to be long odds to have two child sex abusers in the same patrilineal generation; a hereditary component might be at least considered, if for no other reason than that it could point the way toward possibly addressing this sick, violent inpulse. But we certainly know it to be true that the Duggar family is spectacularly bad at addressing family sex abuse, that they ascribe to a weird socio-political ideology that treats child sex abuse as some sort of cosmologically ordained phenomenon, and that such a maladjusted and unserious worldview is virtually guaranteed to make child sex abuse more likely to occur.

Among the many political slipstreams that have emerged in the wake of this most recent Duggar scandal is the claim that the larger crisis is homeschool, not the Duggars. The Duggar family, of course, is a homeschooling family. The commentary has gone something like this: “This is why homeschooling is so dangerous. This sort of thing can and does happen all the time in homeschool communities, and it gets covered up because there’s no oversight of homeschooling families. We need lots more regulation of homeschool.” Well, according to police, Joseph Duggar allegedly committed the sex abuse while on a “family vacation,” which, the last time I checked, has nothing to do with homeschool. I think most people, homeschooling or not, take vacations! Have you ever noticed how singularly uninformed most people are? How often people know almost nothing even as they opine at length about it? People will refuse to learn about even the most basic, incontestable facts of a thing before they get it all spectacularly wrong.

That is somewhat beside the point. It sounds like Joseph Duggar did in fact commit the sex abuse — police say he confessed to it, anyway — and if so he deserves to be in prison for a nice long time, just like his brother. That is the proper response to child sex abusers — imprison them for a long time and then keep them far away from children once they’re released. But in any event the critics using this incident as an excuse to criticize homeschooling are quite obviously unserious about it; that is to say, they are unserious about confronting child sex abuse and stopping it. They just hate homeschool, that’s all. They do not like homeschool and they will seize upon any pretext to denigrate it and proscribe it in any way.

We know this because the same people never talk about child sex abuse in public schools. And child sex abuse in public schools happens all the time. It is endemic. Here is a recent smattering of headlines that from the first page of results from a Google news search: “Former Delaware teacher charged with having sex with a student a decade ago.” “Ohio teacher, 28, charged with carrying out twisted sexual relationship with student.” “N.Y.C. Teacher Is Accused of Having Child Sex Abuse Images and Meth Pipe.” “Former STEM Highlands Ranch teacher sentenced after sexual relationship with student.” “Married teacher admits having sex with 16-year-old student in school closet — and even in the bushes.” I cannot overstate how easy it is to find these stories. There are new headlines about child sex abuse in public schools virtually every single day. It happens all around the country, constantly. Why does nobody talk about it? Why does nobody care? Seriously, why do you very few people seem to care at all?

It can be tough to develop raw numbers on this sort of thing, as is always the case with any sort of sex abuse, but one 2023 survey cited a 2004 Department of Education study that found “9.6% of K-12 students in the U.S.” has experienced some form of sex-related abuse. (In the intervening two decades, the researchers noted dryly, “there have been few large-scale studies examining the extent of the problem.”) Ten percent is quite a lot. There are, what, around 55 million school-aged children in the U.S.? So five million abused kids, give or take? That’s a lot of abused children that — again, it cannot be overstated — very few people seem to care about at all, at least at a systemic level. That number actually exceeds the total number of homeschooling children in the U.S. by about 60%. It is amazing, utterly amazing, how selective the righteous anger around child abuse can be.

Some critics might argue that the very lack of data on homeschooled abuse is in fact the problem — that the nature of homeschooling is such that abuse is considerably less likely to be reported out of homeschooling families, while public school, with its built-in oversight mechanism, is much more likely to actually catch and punish sexual abusers, leading to overrepresentation in the data. I think this would be marginally more compelling if public school abuse were regularly exposed through official reporting mechanisms. But that really doesn’t seem to be the case. Read the stories above: In one, an abusive teacher was outed after the victim’s aunt found them having sex in a car. In the New York case, the FBI discovered the abusive material being held by the teacher. The “married teacher” was turned in by the victim’s mother, as was the STEM teacher in Colorado. There seems to be a popular perception that public school officials are effective, efficient watchdogs about this sort of thing. But oftentimes they are apparently completely clueless about the sex abuse being carried out by their own employees. In many if not most cases it appears that the family uncovers the abuse and reports it to authorities.

All of which is to say that the people who allege that homeschool is a unique locus of sexual abuse don’t seem actually all that interested in stopping sexual abuse; at least if they were you’d expect them to be more vocal about the regular, repeated, sustained, relentless abuse happening at schools around the country every day. Somehow I think there’s a double standard at play!

There is, of course, an uncharity at work here — the presumption is that homeschooling families are uniquely prone to abuse, and that they are unhealthily secluded, invidious, toxically secret, and overly willing to commit or countenance abuse against their children. In fact, homeschooling families, now more than ever, are overwhelmingly exceedingly normal, decent, moral people who would no sooner abuse their own children (or cover up abuse against them) than they would do any other sick, depraved thing.

The bigger issue here is this: Many of these critics — not all of them, but maybe most of them — really, really don’t like homeschool and just want to inveigh against homeschooling families and target them for special penalties. This is not hard to recognize. It was ever thus, of course; homeschooling has always been rather broadly hated and there have always been many people who want to see it either outlawed or else regulated to the point of strangulation. They have always seized upon any pretext to paint homeschooling as bad or dangerous or uniquely worthy of heavy government oversight. Would that they felt that way about the places where abuse is happening on a genuinely industrial scale.

One of the strangest cultural conventions, of any era but particularly this one, is the tendency for people to debate things that are quantifiably objective — things which are not only not really open for debate but which are easily provable as not open for debate. One example: Pre-rinsing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. This is one of the most oddly heated debates of modern civilization. People get very mad about it, I mean legitimately, inexplicably mad. The Washington Post reports that husbands and wives have fights over pre-rinsing; one journalist said it was “bullshit” to suggest someone could skip pre-rinsing. And yet you…can skip pre-rinsing. There’s no mystery. There’s no trick. Unless you have a bad dishwasher or a frying pan with carbonized oil on it, you simply don’t have to pre-rinse your dishes. Modern dishwashers just wash the dishes, no rinsing necessary. And yet the debate continues!

Another one: Homeschool. Anti-homeschool advocates regularly claim that homeschooled students are inherently disadvantaged in various ways. They argue that such students are socially maladjusted, that they’ll be unable to function socially unless they sit in a classroom for most of their waking lives between the ages of six and 18. Or they claim that homeschooled students can’t get an adequate education if their parents are the primary overseers of most of their primary and secondary schooling. All of these things, of course, are very easily provable as false. It is very, very easy to find extremely sociable homeschooled children who are highly intelligent and well-educated. They are everywhere. They are just so easy to find. I cannot overstate how common it is for homeschooled children to defy every stupid preconception of the anti-homeschool crowd. And yet so many people continue to insist that homeschooling produces innate, unavoidable deficiencies that it very obviously does not. You can’t sway these people. They will just argue false things as if the false things are true.

Something similar often happens in debates about family size. Here’s one representative opinion from a British writer, whose tweet on the subject “went viral” this week:

Of course this is very wrong. And I think there’s a rather explicable reason why she got this so wrong, which we’ll get to in a minute. But at the outset it is worth stressing that lots of big families, including many with eight or nine children, chimed in to tell this woman that she was wrong. And I just feel like, you know, that has to count for something! I’m going to assume Rebecca Reid does not have nine children. But the people who do have nine children reported in on this topic and they all pretty uniformly said that, yes, you can indeed give “adequate” parental resources to nine children. Unless the contention here is that every one of these parents is lying, that they are all just lying through their stinking, nine-children-having teeth, I do feel like if you make some grand pronouncement about a specific demographic, and the demographic in question tells you, “That is not true,” it might be worth revising your thesis!

The issue here, of course, probably hinges on the word “adequate.” This is sort of a sticking point for a lot of modern parenting discourse. Many, many parents in the modern era feel like they have to constantly pay attention to their children. The impulse is to just absolutely inundate your children with “time, attention and connection.” One dataset showed that, between 1975 and 2010, the “average number of hours parents spent with their children each week” rose 200% for fathers and 87% for mothers. The general thinking seems to be that parents need to be constantly attentive to their children in a very active, purposeful way, to ensure that every one of their physical and mental and emotional needs is met and fulfilled by the parent whenever necessary at all times, and if you cannot do this, your child will end up greatly disadvantaged and maladapted.

This is, again, very untrue. Big families will happy testify to this. Children of big families, whose parents can’t immediately and intimately attend to every one of their needs—well, they’re fine. Really. It’s fine. I don’t really know how else to put it. Everyone gets along just fine. Lots of times in a big family, a parent can attend to a child whenever he needs it. Other times, something else — another kid, a chore, a conversation — might briefly take precedent. In many cases a sibling can provide the necessary factor: Entertainment, technical help, advice, company. This modern mode of parenting — the hyper-attentive, hyper-focused parent who has a relentless fixation on “connecting” with their child at all times — is based on a fallacy. It’s not necessary. The need for this neurotic style of parenting is just profoundly overstated. Parents with lots of children are absolutely capable of meeting the needs of their kids and of raising happy, healthy, well-adjusted and capable children and young adults. It happens, literally, all the time. It is just so common.

Again: All you really need to do to resolve this question is seek out a few big, loving families—not perfect families, to be sure, but families built on and sustained by love and respect and generosity and service, all the markers of a good, stable family. Observe the children: Are they happy? Do they seem like good, nice, decent little kids? Do they seem secure and confident and capable? In other words, do they have all the signs that they’re normal and happy and that they’re not lacking some critical mass of “adequate attention” from their parents? I can assure you that big families like this are absurdly easy to find. I’m not saying every big family is like this. But it is just obvious to anyone who even halfheartedly investigates the matter that, yes, you can raise a family with many children, and you can give them all that they need and more to succeed by every reasonable metric, and everyone will be happy, and it’ll be fine.

I guess, like pre-rinsing your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher, there are just some people who will always refuse to accept this. It becomes clear at that point that the problem isn’t “Parents can’t give nine children enough attention” but “I am aesthetically repulsed by big families.” I think that’s the primary objection for a lot of people. Which, you know, everyone has tastes. I’m not going to expend a lot of time and energy trying to change the odd minds of weird people who are innately disgusted by families with lots of children. But at the very least we should admit that’s what’s going on here. Weird and maladjusted as it may be, you can far more easily defend your dislike of big families more than you can defend the claim that big families are innately dysfunctional. Pick your battles!

It seems obvious at this point, like glaringly obvious, that the overwhelming majority of AI’s effects are going to be negative, like something on a scale of 98-to-1. Very few people will admit that at this point. There are a small number of tech bros and industry leaders who think AI is going to transform the world in a uniformly positive way and who are singing its praises like it’s the second coming of the Lister Protocol. The great masses, meanwhile, seem to have taken to AI like they’ve taken to virtually every other negative tech advancement of the last 20 years—i.e., unquestioningly, without hesitation or any consideration of what is to happen, of what is already happening. The “top” three uses of AI in 2025 were reported as “therapy and companionship,” “organizing life” and “finding purpose.” These are massive, critical, foundational, intimate concerns that people are now outsourcing to computers en masse in a way that’s simply never been done before. Very important things that used to occupy a considerable part of a person’s brain and mental energy in a good way — human things, some of the key things of being human — are now being given over to machines, partially or totally. Of course this is going to be very bad.

Very, very few people are willing to admit this. The tech bros won’t, for obvious fiduciary reasons. The masses won’t for reasons that are less obvious but still implacable—part of it is that people just like the lazy option, that has always been the case to some degree, but more subtle is this: Very, very few people are willing to openly criticize popular new technologies. Nobody wants to get on that bandwagon. Saying “this new hyped-up tech that almost everyone is using is, in fact, very bad, and we shouldn’t use it, we should just stick with what we have” is just a bridge too far for most people today. Saying something like that makes you sound old, conservative, like a hoary old luddite—things that our present culture has taught people to hate and despise and revile. The most you might get out of someone is a thoughtful stroking of the chin and a rumination along the lines of: “Well, you know, it is important to consider some vital safeguards in some areas of AI tech. We need a federal study to examine this.” Meanwhile millions of people are increasingly using chat websites for “companionship,” deadening their lives and shriveling their souls, more and more every day. But you must really not criticize it! That would be bad.

I do not think anything can meaningfully be done to stop this, at least not before the bulk of the damage is done. I think it’s locked in. I think change moves too quickly today, and course-correction far too glacially, for any of this to be averted. I think we’re all set to what’s coming on AI. Here is a small selection of what I think is coming, in no particular order:

• Porn. Obviously AI will be a major driver of the current porn crisis—the crisis, I mean, in which millions of people have become chronically addicted to pornography, in which porn has poisoned the healthy sex drives of countless people and turned countless more into consumers of violent, degrading, poisonous filth. We have been reckoning with this crisis for some time, though — again — most people simply do not want to deal with it, they do not want to confront it head-on, for fear of sounding conservative and prudish. “Internet pornography has had a catastrophically negative effect on at least two generations of Americans so far, it’s bad, people shouldn’t watch it” is just not the thing most people want to say. And of course AI is going to accelerate this problem: It will turn every porn consumer into a porn creator, allowing addicted porn users to create bespoke smut films, catering to fantasies that will, inevitably, become darker and more degraded. We know, statistically, that Internet pornography drives a high subset of the population to ever-more-depraved consumption of porn, to increasingly deviant genres and fetishes. Do we think people being able to create their own porn movies will not amplify this illness to a shocking degree? Why search for videos of men slapping and spitting on women when you can create similar footage precisely to your liking, including making it even more violent? Why deal with Pornhub’s nominal ban on incest when you can simply manufacture your own incestuous smut? This is to say nothing of the effect this technology will have on pedophiles — the effect it is doubtlessly already having on pedophiles — who will now be able to manufacture and share child sexual abuse material in ways that will undoubtedly deepen and intensify their violent, dangerous sex disease.1
  

• Thinking. AI is going to make people think significantly less than they do now. There will be just hugely less thought on a civilizational scale. That is inescapable. It is true that a great deal of tech over the past few decades has sort of ossified our thinking brains in quantifiably negative ways. Television certainly took a great deal of thinking out of our recreation, starting decades ago. The smartphone, too, has rendered obsolete countless opportunities to think critically and thoughtfully: Virtually every dispute, every debate, every uncertainty over an historical fact or a scientific principle or a geographic question, is now solved by whipping out a phone, doing a Google search, and quickly reading out the summary of the top result (or, increasingly, the AI summary provided by Google itself). Countless opportunities for careful thought are now neutered with a 12-second Internet search. Phones have also made it so that people feel incapable of reading a map, or memorizing simple ordinal directions given by someone else; they instead just use their phone’s map feature to guide them on the road, rendering many people functionally strangers in their own metro regions. We could go on for hours about this—the uncountable lost opportunities to think, to stretch and flex the beautiful human mind in all its wondrous and miraculous glory, even if it’s just to remember where to turn right at Thigpen Road. But the advent of AI will obviously, unquestionably accelerate this decline in unthinkable ways. Already people are using it en masse to outsource significant critical thinking skills. Writers and journalists and researchers and students are using it to “summarize” massive tomes of material, abandoning the workaday but vital task of carefully learning comprehensively about a text or a subject and instead essentially fabricating bespoke CliffsNotes. People are using it to do creative tasks that until very recently were considered extremely basic: In a how-to guide on using chatbots, for instance, Forbes urges users to “ask [AI] to write like you, but better,” to “ let AI help you say hard things,” and to “ask AI to explain complex concepts in plain English,” all indispensable, hugely important cognitive tasks that millions of people will now cease doing more or less permanently. The effects on student work, of course, will be catastrophic—anyone who denies this is just desperately foolish. Millions of young people will outsource their schoolwork almost entirely to AI. American education is already a washout at best; AI will, in the main, be its death knell. AI will inevitably result in just hugely less human thought, a sharp and brutal decline in it. It’s already happening.
  

• Feeling. AI will cause people to feel less. Thinking, of course, is a prerequisite to feeling, so any reduction in the former will necessarily see a decrease in the latter. But beyond that people will also use AI simply to do things that in the past would have made them feel. It is now becoming somewhat common — of course it is — for people to use AI to write eulogies; one of the deepest and most intimate modes of writing, of work, that someone can engage in, outsourced to a computer that auto-completes it for you. No real time spent reflecting on a dead person’s life, death, worth, love, legacy — just plug-and-play, content generation, no feeling at all. As noted above, many people, possibly millions of people, are now using AI for “therapy and companionship.” Some surveys indicate high numbers of high school students are using AI for “romantic relationships.” To the extent that anyone writes letters anymore, or I guess long e-mails, you can be doubtlessly sure that AI is already regularly composing countless instances of the sort of routine intimate correspondence that we used to take for granted. All of this outsourcing of feeling to digital generators will unquestionably have a profoundly negative effect on the human condition. Emotional thoughts, reflection, grief, sympathy, mirth, empathy, joy—all of these are just indispensable feelings for human beings to experience on a regular basis. Allowing a computer to undertake and manage many of the tasks that generate such feelings will be deadening. And to the extent that people are using AI for “companionship” or “romantic” interactions, the crisis will deeper even further. You cannot have a robot for a “companion.” Human beings desperately need other human beings, not fake algorithms. Pouring your emotions out into a website instead of another human being will produce none of the affirmation or the reciprocal intimacy that we crave. Many people will go mad doing this. Many, many others will just grow cold and gray.
  

• Insularity. A cumulative effect of these factors is that huge numbers of people will become even more insular and inward-focused than they are even now. The toxic double-edged sword of the modern media economy — smartphones and streaming services — have combined to turn people into functional shut-ins or recluses. Current data indicate that Americans on average watch about 45 hours of streaming per week, or about six hours per day. That is a staggering number, not least when you consider it in relative and not absolute terms: If during the average workweek most of us spend around seven hours sleeping per night, another nine or so hours on work including commute, less than an hour eating, maybe a few minutes here on incidentals, that means during the week the vast majority of what used to considered our “free time” is now occupied by staring at “streaming content.” The remainder of one’s free time is largely consumed by other screen-staring activities, even if it’s just swiping at one’s phone meaninglessly through unimportant social media ephemera. Hours and hours a day staring at screens: it’s very bad. AI will unquestionably make it worse. Every single media company and app service and streaming platform will be deploying very sophisticated, very subtle, very relentless technology to capture the last few scraps of free time the majority have not already devoted to screens. That’s to say nothing of the ways people will use AI to outsource what they once did in analog fashion, or at least by their own hand. Everything you hate about the modern screen era — the endless screen consumption, the way everyone is always looking down instead of up, the way every single social interaction, every single stopping point, every moment of every day has become a delivery device for the phone screen — will be exacerbated and aggravated by AI.
  

• Creativity. At present the creative impulse is already at a nadir. Of the top-earning U.S. movies in 2025, virtually all of them were sequels to exhausted franchises, reboots or otherwise dreary entries into established “IP.” This has been the case for years. Television consists of an endless slog of overthought, overdramatic, uninteresting series on Internet streaming websites; the top streaming program in 2025, Stranger Things, finished its run indistinguishable from the joyless Marvel slop that regularly dominates the box office. Music, like virtually every other media endeavor, is uniformly geared toward social media algorithms and “viral moments,” which is why most popular music now feels uniformly gimmick-y, songs that are either responding to Internet memes or aspiring to memedom themselves. Omnipresent media and ever-present Internet have collapsed the artistic milieu, squashed it, to the point that it all seems to look and sound and feel too similar: All of the TV shows are overbright, all the popular music too Twitter-y, all the movies just bloated with trash CGI and too much makeup. This is the kind of thin, denuded pop cultural landscape absolutely made for AI: The most popular, most celebrated artistic works are so narrowly conceived, so shallowly valued, that AI — when it is inevitably, inevitably adopted by the great mass of creators — will barely have to expend any effort, whatever that might mean, to meet the culture’s expectations.
  

• Human relationships. All of this combined will have a devastating, if quiet, effect on human relationships. Picture the crisis of the smart phone — people spending literally hours per day staring at screens, ignoring each other, looking down at every opportunity, doing the same exact thing wherever they go and whatever they’re doing — and multiply that by ten thousand. AI will be used to dramatic effect to make people even more chronically addicted to their phones and to screens and to streaming, and even less interested in the sort of regular, familiar human connection that has defined our species for thousands of years. Everything you hate about the modern smartphone-induced world — the isolation, everybody ignoring each other, the incuriosity, the stunted social fabric, the public spaces and bookstores and grocery stores and restaurants that have to a large degree become simply staging grounds for phone usage — will get considerably worse. It will be very bad. The only solution to all of this, of course, is to not use AI. But that seems extremely unlikely.

I gotta tell you, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons this week revealed that we shouldn’t perform irreversible surgeries on children to make them appear to be the opposite sex—I mean, wow, right? Who knew? I don’t know about you but I myself was just completely surprised by this bombshell information. I started the week thinking one thing—that it’s fine to cut off the healthy body parts of children who delusionally believe themselves to be the opposite sex—and halfway through the week I’ve been told this isn’t true. I tell ya.

I mean, who would have thought it? Not me. Am I right?

Maybe everyone else has just been clued into this for years and I’m the only one who missed the info. But honestly, for decades now I’ve believed that when, say, a boy comes to his parents and tells them that he is in fact a girl, the parents have a duty to ensure that everything possible is done to accommodate that delusion, up to and including cutting off the boy’s genitals, constructing a fake vagina for him out of his guts, giving him breast implants, cutting his face up so it more resembles a girl’s face—the whole nine yards. Of course I believed this! Who wouldn’t?

I mean, really: Look around yourself. Turn to the person next to you. Now turn to the person on the other side. You’re going to tell me all of you didn’t feel the same way? Didn’t we all believe that children should be carved up, sterilized and mutilated by medical professionals if they’re suffering from a self-evident psychosexual social contagion? Who among us doubted this??

I tell ya.

I mean, tell me this: Where was the evidence to the contrary? If a 14-year-old girl came to her parents and told them that she’d been watching TikTok videos and realized that she was actually a boy and that she wanted to chop her breasts off, remove her ovaries, inject testosterone into her body, and grow a bread—what were the parents supposed to say? “No honey, you’re wrong?” Again: What evidence could the parents cite to back their assertion up? What studies, what medical trials? All signs — every reasonable sign — pointed to the conclusion that the girl in question needed to be “transitioned.” The only logical response to such a claim from your daughter was to enthusiastically agree and to put her on the fast track to being chopped, sliced, sewed, sterilized and made a permanent lifelong medical patient in service to a sick psychological crisis. That was honestly the only reasonable response.

And now you’re telling me it’s not? Really? They’re just going to pull the rug out from under us, after we’ve made all these logical, well-reasoned conclusions for years? Really?

Frankly I’m just stunned. I listened to all these objections from these nay-nay-naysayers over the years—"Boys can’t become girls,” “girls can’t become boys,” “transgenderism is a delusion,” “we shouldn’t cut off the healthy body parts of children in service to a sick LGBT fantasy”—and in response to all of them I said, “Hooey!” I knew I was right. We all knew we were right. It was so obvious: If young children—children not even old enough to have a learner’s permit—declared themselves to be the opposite sex, you just went full steam ahead. Damn the torpedos! Am I right? The choices were clear: You could listen to the people who had a full grasp of science, logic, reason, biology, ethics, psychology—or you could listen to the 12-year-old boy who’d immersed himself in Reddit posts for seven weeks and decided he was a girl named Adelaide and that he wanted to start taking estrogen so he could have a period.

Weigh it out: Which choice sounds better to you? Which one would you have picked? I think you know.

Yet now we’re being told that we’re, what, just not supposed to create fake vaginas for young boys out of bloody gashes and fetid scraps of small intestines? We’re supposed to believe that boys shouldn’t be brutally, psychopathically mutilated in this way? I say again: How were we supposed to know this? Explain to me how we normal, reasonable, well-educated people were supposed to conclude it!

I mean, I’m really just at a loss for words!

Now people are saying that this is only the beginning—that more and more medical organizations and leaders are going to come out against these procedures. Well, let me tell you true: I’ll be even more surprised if that happens. If a huge consensus of doctors eventually concludes that we shouldn’t be permanently and hideously disfiguring children in response to an obviously contrived and debilitating social hallucination—I mean I feel like the entire medical industry will have bought the farm at that point, right?

Remember how on the X-Files, Fox Mulder used to say, “Trust no one?” Or was that Deep Throat? Well, in either case, that’s what it’ll feel like, right? If a majority of doctors suddenly start telling us that it’s a bad idea to cut off the breasts of girls in 8th grade because they think they’re boys, or to castrate boys because they believe themselves to be girls…who will you be able to trust??

This whole thing has just thrown me for a loop, I can say that much. I don’t know about you but it is going to take some time for me to adjust to this new information.

Subscribe now

I love to cook—I just love it. I love every part of it. I even like cleaning up the dishes. I love chopping onions, I love pouring what Jamie Oliver calls “ a glug of olive oil” into a Dutch oven and heating it up, I love dry-brining meat with kosher salt 12 hours in advance, I love making fresh masa tortillas, I love smashing burgers on the flattop grill, I love breaking down chuck roasts for beef stew or chili, I love making fresh pasta and I love opening boxes of dry pasta, I love making meatballs and kofta and kebabs—I love all of it. I also love serving my family, I love the mere act of it, and also the technical details, like portioning out the correct amounts for the eight-year-old relative to the two-year-old, ensuring my perpetually pregnant wife always has the right amount of protein, and so forth. I even love setting the table. Actually we’re now assigning the older kids rotating nights to set the table, and that’s good for them, a necessary part of the domestic economy, and they’re getting better at it—but honestly I’m sort of disappointed too, because I do love setting the table and having them set the table means I don’t get to do it. The things we sacrifice as parents.

So when the New York Times explains “how food delivery is reshaping mealtime,” I have to admit I despair. It would be hard to overstate how joylessly grim this all is, how utterly devoid of joy. One young woman spends upwards of $15,000 per year on food delivery, a habit which has “eaten away at her savings … and led her to socialize less,” but she keeps doing it. Two gay dads who “can almost never find the time to make dinner” spend even more, dropping upwards of $30,000 per year on delivered food, so much so that a four-year-old son who can’t read “can [still] put together an order” on a Chick-fil-A app. One older woman was already getting groceries delivered and decided “if I am going to order groceries I may as well order the whole meal.” One Uber Eats driver says he works for the delivery app “to pay off his debt from ordering too much food delivery,” a circle of consumerist hell and misery that I am simply at a loss to expound upon.

Part of this is part and parcel of the mobile economy, the smartphone lifestyle, which has made the vast majority of us lazier, more antisocial, less eager to simply do things. Indeed, in the Times’s report, nearly every photograph features a human being either looking at a smartphone, holding a smartphone, or keeping a smartphone a few inches away. These phones have debased us, unquestionably—they are just so terrible for us, they have enriched a small number of wealthy and powerful people while transforming hundreds of millions of the rest of us into grayer, unhappier, quieter, lonelier, poorer people. It should go without saying that without the phone you simply wouldn’t have anything approaching this level of dependency and addiction to food delivery services. The phone makes everything bad easier to do, and disincentivizes almost everything good. Why cook when you can simply swipe, why serve when you can simply swipe? Why clean when you can simply—swipe?

The phones are very bad. Bad too, maybe worse, is the dislike of cooking—something that predated the phones but has been exacerbated greatly by them. I cannot understand why more people don’t love to cook; I cannot understand how so many people could be so easily pulled away from cooking by these expensive, depressing, isolating smartphone apps. This is the stuff of life, and of unique joy. There “can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself,” says M.F.K. Fisher: “When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.” It is astonishing to me that people have such carelessness about the food they cook and eat, if they cook it at all; it is a mystery how so many people fail to appreciate that from the weird dirt and substrata of this planet can come something as gratifying as a pork shoulder or a leek, and that through the application of heat and salt and oil—again, more or less all of it from the dirt—you can turn it into something good to eat. And it’s fun to do it in the process. What’s to lose? What is not to love?

Apparently for many people the answer is “a lot,” so much so that they’re willing to literally go into debt to avoid cooking. We should be mindful that in many cases there might be something more chronic at work here—depression, laziness, agoraphobia, compulsive spending, what have you. The smartphone has enabled and aggravated these tendencies in large swaths of the population and it should not be surprising that cooking, that most daily and intimate of chores, has suffered greatly for it. For others the issue is more quotidian: They just don’t like to cook, they find no value in it, and they’re taking the functionally easier way out, even if it’s ultimately ruinous on multiple levels.

This is a terrible thing to see. And the most terrible thing is that it is unquestionably going to get worse. I’ve made the point elsewhere that the less social stigma there is for a behavior, the more people will do it—and there is, apparently, no social stigma at all to people spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars every week on the delivery of cold hamburgers and limp Reuben sandwiches. Of course people will continue to do it. Then, too, many young people today aren’t having any children at all, teeing themselves up for homes and lives that are either empty or mostly empty, meaning one of the great impetuses of cooking—feeding a family!—will, for millions of people, simply never exist. I suppose when given the choice between (a) cooking a pot of stew for a family that never was and (b) ordering another pad Thai made and delivered just for you, well, one of these choices is more likely to remind you of the existential loneliness, and another will help delay it for a little while longer.

One solution, of course, is to get married, make babies and have a family. But even those without families can still find joy in food. It’s right there, right in your kitchen, perhaps the most easily accessible vocation in the entire human catalogue: Cooking. It’s gratifying and rewarding in its own unique and vital way, and brightens your life so much more than swiping on an app and eating another lukewarm pork chop sandwich ever could be. Please, for your sake, if you haven’t already, put down the phone and give it a shot.

Of all the terrible effects of social media — the way it has turned so much of modern life into performative dreck, the way it spreads hysteria so easily, the endless hours of peoples’ lives it sucks into its gaping, endless maw, lives people could be spending with their friends and family spent instead on the same old pointless, stupid scrolling — perhaps the most psychically discomfiting for me is how it has rendered so much of modern life more or less devoid of all context, especially for so many young people. About 40% of social media now seems to be random movie clips being narrated by robotic computer voices. These clips serve no purpose and fit within no larger frame of reference other than just being another thing on the feed, another weird, unsettling low-grade dopamine hit for someone to gaze at, slack-jawed, before moving onto the next thing. You’ll see a movie clip and hear a droning voice narrate the action on-screen: “He found a man killing his wife. He attacked the man, but the man got away, and then he was convicted of his wife’s murder. Then the bus he was riding on got hit by a train…” and suddenly you’re realizing that it’s a chaotic series of smash-cut clips from 1993’s The Fugitive, one of the all-time great movies, maybe the greatest thriller ever made, and it’s been reduced to a meaningless, bleary-eyed sludge of content on Twitter for someone to briefly linger on before continuing to swipe—a monumental cinematic achievement chopped up into 20 seconds of immaterial slop, something for a 22-year-old to dumbly glare at for a few brief seconds before forgetting about forever, not that he ever knew it at all in the first place, and certainly not that he will ever actually sit down and watch this near-perfect movie from beginning to end.1

This kind of society, in which the interpretation and consumption of art, artistry, film, music, literature, creation—in which engagement with the rich stuff of civilized life has been reduced to the most passive, least intelligent, most rootless and irrelevant form of wasteful intellectual expenditure imaginable—scares me tremendously. It is a life devoid of the real stabilizing and enriching parts of culture: The things that ground us in our humanistic impulses and desires, the shared aesthetic and intellectual institutions and endeavors that are so richly pleasurable to take part in and discuss with others…all of it denuded to 20-second clips that mean nothing, to anybody, ever, that only serve as minute deliveries of revenue to algorithm-driven, largely human-less enterprises. This is such a terrifying vision of a grim, grey, joyless world.

I think about all this too in the context of AI, which I genuinely believe is going to make our society much, much stupider in ways that we cannot easily comprehend. I stay “stupider” to refer not to native low intelligence—which is never anyone’s fault—but rather the coarse, aggressive, boring, comprehensive lack of intellectual curiosity and ability that people can and often do willingly cultivate in themselves. AI is going to exacerbate this tendency in the general population by several orders of magnitude, and it’s going to do this in large part by a very specific mechanism, the AI-driven “summary” that now pervades much of the Internet.

AI “summaries” of Internet content are so pervasive and so widely adopted that they can cause traffic drops of up to 80% on top-tiered websites: People would rather read a computer-generated paragraph of Simple English text at the top of a Google search instead of clicking through a website written by an actual human to read things that stimulate your mind slightly more than a computer-generated paragraph. Even Google’s AI admits, embarrassingly, that AI summaries are “now a foundational component of how information is retrieved,” and that a summary “often replaces the need to visit original sources.” Of course it doesn’t replace the need to visit actual, real, human-gathered and -written information, but it does replace the impetus to do so, giving readers instead a much more intellectually mollifying, low-effort opportunity to consume computer content rather than something that might actually help them learn a thing.

This is not unique, nor is it limited to passive discovery atop Google search results. Increasingly large numbers of people are using ChatGPT to “summarize” large swaths of text or information; the robot spits out a parched, bullet-pointed, spitefully uninteresting pseudo-synopsis of whatever it is you need, fooling you into thinking that you’ve learned something, tricking you into believing you’ve actually gained more insight and knowledge about something important when in fact you’ve just been divorced a little more from the context that makes life good, you’ve been separated from a vital human thing and brought closer to some soulless, sterile, awful digital culmination. You’ve been made a little less human. You’re now stupider.

“Summaries” have even invaded personal e-mails, one of the last really and truly normal parts of the Internet, one of the few remaining portals of simple, unadulterated information for which the early Web was known. A while ago I e-mailed an elderly neighbor asking if he needed help with a small household task; we shared a few emails back and forth about it, and by the time we were done Google’s Gemini AI had helpfully “summarized” our exchange into four bullet points, feeding our pleasant human conversation through a digital grinder and spitting out something utterly devoid of the normal friendly markers of human interaction. I got dumber just looking at it. This is everywhere now.

You might argue that the AI summary is just that—a mere abstract, something meant to just give you a little boost in reading comprehension—and that the majority of users will still consume the totality of human content available on the Internet. Sure, if you want to believe that, go ahead, though—and I muss stress this—you are being very stupid about that, I mean willfully, brutally ignorant. “The vast majority of people would never take the easiest, least-effort, low-intellect route presented to them free of charge by a willing computer!” you say, aghast. “It would never happen!” Sure! What on earth was I thinking making such a claim?

There is simply no question that this will become the dominant form of information consumption in the very near future, if it hasn’t already. Probably it has. The technology is readily available, easily accessible, more or les ubiquitous at this point, and most importantly there is absolutely no cultural or societal pushback to using AI in this way—nobody cares, everybody does it, it’s just a part of the fabric at this point, and it took no time at all to get there. But it’s going to be terrible. It already is terrible. It is going to create generations of people who are incapable of interacting with human creation without the help of a comprehensive digital moderator, who simply cannot process and understand movies and literature and music without AI help and who are thus unable to actually enjoy any of these things, much less make any of their own in turn. Doubt it if you want—and do please come back here and read this again when I’m proven right. Maybe have ChatGPT summarize this for you!

The solution, of course, is to reject all of this. Reject it completely. Never use AI to “summarize” something you should just be consuming in its entirety. Read. Listen. Watch. Learn. Make your life one of rich, rewarding context instead of free-floating, chaotic emptiness. Teach your children to do the same. Take part in the human tapestry; do not outsource your thoughts and your feelings to a stupid computer that doesn’t care about you or the thing you’re interested in. Live a full life. You will be smarter, happier and better-off. There’s no downside and only everything to gain.

I don’t have a whole lot of thoughts about the ICE shooting in Minneapolis beyond concluding that it appears very simple: It looks as if a very progressive woman wanted to make a highly politicized demonstration against the Trump administration’s immigration policy, so she inserted herself into the middle of a major law enforcement operation, behaved erratically and dangerously, and paid for it with her life. Newly released footage appears to bolster that conclusion to a considerable degree. The situation is as depressing as it is unremarkable. If the incident is indeed as self-evident as it appears to be, then I don’t think anyone is surprised that “deliberately blocking federal traffic with your car and then speeding away dangerously and crazily as armed federal agents surround your vehicle” resulted in the driver getting shot. I mean…really. I’m not glad it happened but who exactly is feigning shock here?

More salient an issue here is the larger question, which is: Why are liberal people so crazy about illegal immigrants? What is it about this particular demographic that seems to drive them nuts? Short of abortion, I can’t think of an issue that has so comprehensively united all of the Left into a unified, wild-eyed outrage. It’s just a craze at this point. There is something about illegal immigration that just flicks every one of the progressive switches.

Why? I’m not sure. There is definitely a really manic, schizophrenic quality to this whole thing. I’m not sure that this needs to be said—I suppose at this point it might need to be said—but: It is very, very, very historically normal for countries to have immigration laws and to enforce them. This is a thing. It has been done very regularly, for thousands and thousands of years. There seems to be a general vibe these days that the U.S. having and enforcing immigration rules is somehow ahistorical, abnormal, dangerous. You get the sense that the Left en masse is just gobsmacked by this thing called immigration policy. It seems to have hit them completely out of left field, like they’ve been blindsided by it and it has driven them insane.

I mean there really is a need to figure this out. One of the principle arguments that liberal people seem to make is that illegal immigrants are uniquely vulnerable and thus the government’s targeting them is uniquely unjust, or depraved. Of course, the question remains: Why are illegal immigrants uniquely vulnerable? And the answer is inevitably, of course: Because they are illegal immigrants, because they are here in violation of our immigration laws and exist in the U.S. only in a state of lawbreaking. I don’t think I need to point out how profoundly circular this reasoning is. The message seems to be, I think: “It is cruel to enforce immigration laws against illegal immigration because their illegal immigration has made them uniquely vulnerable to immigration laws.”

There is something of a bitter intransigence at work here. If pressed, I think the average left-wing person might acknowledge that it’s technically legitimate for countries to have some sort of immigration law. Yet I am not aware of any broad progressive support for secure borders, i.e., a border secure enough to keep out most of the roughly 500,000 illegal immigrants that come into the country every year. Most liberals seem perfectly fine with high levels of illegal immigration. But they’re also universally opposed to mass deportation, as we’ve seen over the past few months. The overall opinion on the left seems to be that it’s fine for immigrants to come here illegally and it’s indefensible to force them to leave. In effect the position seems to be that immigration laws shouldn’t exist at all, or if they do then they should only facilitate the status quo of immigration, e.g., hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the U.S. every year, and that any other law or policy that results in less immigration is illegitimate.

Perhaps the broader question then is not “What is it about illegal immigrants that makes liberal people so crazy?” but “What is it about immigrants that makes liberal people so crazy?” I cannot think of any issue other than abortion (again) in which progressives are loathe to consider even the most minimally functional of laws. The next time you speak to a liberal person on this, consider asking them: What kinds of immigration laws do you support? What sort of border policy are you in favor of to stem the tide of illegal immigration, and what measures do you think should be taken to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants here? This could be clarifying—for you certainly, and maybe even for the liberal to which you are talking. But we probably should figure this out quickly, because at present people are getting shot over this issue, and everyone should want to avoid that to the greatest extent possible.

Home Alone turned 35 this past Christmas, which gives me the sinking yet dizzying feeling that Macaulay Culkin may be in his mid-40s right now. But aren’t we all? Perhaps more destabilizing is the realization that as of this year I am officially older than eternal 90s mother Catherine O’Hara was when she made this movie—older, and yet I don’t own a $5 million house in the Chicago suburbs nor my own wildly successful seamstress business. At some point along the way everyone compromises.

Its iconic status notwithstanding, Home Alone is not ultimately a movie about a precocious young boy’s foiling a home invasion by a couple of cat burglars. The beloved screwball sequence doesn’t take place until an hour and fifteen minutes into the film, and then it lasts only for 15 minutes. The movie is almost over by the time the Micro Machines start flying, in other words, and then blink and you’ll miss it. It is rendered almost as an afterthought; indeed, canonically, within the movie itself, Kevin McAllister himself almost forgets about it until it’s too late.

Home Alone is actually more accurately interpreted as a movie about empty homes—about homes emptied of families, of entire neighborhoods devoid of the stuff of meaningful domestic life. It is not such a stretch to see it this way, coming as the movie did at the dawn of the 1990s after several decades of exploding rates of two-earner households and homes sitting silent for most of the waking day. In the mid-60s about half of mothers with young children did not work outside the home; by the time Home Alone was made that number had fallen to about 25%. The decline was spectacular, and not in a good way.

The implied motifs are really very stark, at least maybe to those of us who, like me, grew up homeschooled in a rather densely populated U.S. suburb. Most children, after all—and most adults—leave their homes every morning and don’t come back for eight, nine, sometimes 10 or 11 hours. The average U.S. neighborhood experiences a mass exodus every 24 hours, a great denuding. Those of us who have ever stayed behind know what that emptying looks like: Empty houses, empty streets, all of it underlaid by an odd, unnatural kind of silence: All of this human civilization, all of this build-up, purchased so dearly, and it’s all so quiet, so devoid of human life.

Home Alone takes place against that sort of backdrop. Kevin’s portion of the story largely plays out on his own street, which is hauntingly empty, every single one of his neighbors having fled the neighborhood for their respective Christmas vacations, their homes marked by nothing more human than, as Aunt Leslie puts it, “a bunch of answering machines.” It is easy to miss it as a child, but as an adult one cannot help but be struck by the grim, grey quietus that has blanketed Lincoln Boulevard. It is a pictorial depiction of Robert Frost’s “blanker whiteness of benighted snow:”

With no expression, nothing to express. …

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

It is no mistake that the protasis of this whole haunting wasteland is in the form of the family rushing madly to get out the door, a perfect encapsulation of the daily madcap morning scramble experienced by most American families—the desperate, sometimes bitter effort to get the kids fed, dressed, on the bus; to get the parents into work; to do anything and everything other than stay at home. Those of you who were never homeschooled may not be aware of this, but it is entirely possible for weekday mornings in the modern United States to be really quite calm and relaxing, unhurried, easy, pleasant, more-or-less stress-free. This is attainable, though most families will opt for something more like the McAllisters, barking at each other while scrambling around to the tune of “Holiday Flight.”

So the McAllisters go, and Kevin stays—and as we all know, initially he is overjoyed. He has freedom. He can eat whatever he desires, do whatever he wants. Money is suddenly abundant. With an empty home, Kevin suddenly seems to be living the life promised by the modern mode, by the two-earner household: Lots of cash, freedom, opportunity, independence. He has it all—including a big house in the suburbs! He even recognizes at one point, correctly, that he is the “man of the house,” at the apex of the personal domestic economy. It’s everything a little boy might ever want.

But of course, this is a little boy’s vision of desire—a childish, immature idea of freedom and happiness: An empty house, no responsibility, no conflict, lots of money to do anything he wishes at any time. This is the vision heralded by the modern economy, which has taught nearly everybody that the secret to happiness is to earn as much money as possible and to employ the entire family to that end: To put all children in schools and all parents in the workplace—to pursue liberation and earning power, and to empty your house out, all day, every day in pursuit of it. It’s an endless vision of empty houses, empty neighborhoods: Your home, alone.

To his credit, in just a little over a day Kevin realizes the hollowness of his newfound independence. He begins pining for his family, for a full house again—for all the frustration and consternation it brings, yes, but also the joy and the togetherness and the purpose and the placeness it provides. Looking at a picture of his massive family—mother, father, and what was even then a staggering five children—he vows to be better, to make the home a better place if only they will come home again:

I didn’t mean it. If you come back, I’ll never be a pain in the butt again. I promise.

It is worth pointing out at this point that Kevin still believes that he has magically wished his family away into oblivion—he thinks that he magicked them out of existence, that they have been obliterated into the ether and have ceased to exist. He’s still living in the fantasy, in other words—the fantasy of the empty home and all its empty promises.

That fantasy is only broken after the back-breaking, face-crushing hijinks of the film’s final act, in which Kevin pulverizes his two dimwitted assailants to a pulp and gets them thrown in jail. (My personal favorite trap is the feather fan, which serves no tactical purpose other than to make Harry look stupid.) Harry and Marv might reasonably be seen here to represent the plundering economy, the lifestyle that demands we empty our homes and turn our neighborhoods into eerie ghost towns—the system that asks us to strip our domestic spheres of all signs of vitality, all day long, forever. It makes no difference that this mode of doing things is particularly destabilizing to children, who are uniquely vulnerable to rootlessness and cultural frailty. Indeed, Harry himself is so desperate for the plunder of the home that he is apparently willing to risk the high likelihood of violence against a child to get it:

Marv: What? You wanna come back tonight?

Harry: Uh huh.

Marv: Even with the kid here?

Harry: Uh huh.

Marv: I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Harry: Look, that house is the only reason we started workin’ this block. Ever since I laid my eyes on that house, I wanted it.

This is a remarkable scene because you can hear not merely the criminal intent in Harry’s voice but the personal greed, the avaricious desire. And none of it is moderated by the fact that this is a family’s home. Indeed, the first time we see Harry “lay eyes on” the McAllister home, it is full of children, full of life—and yet he is simply utterly consumed by the greedy ambition to possess all of it, to take it all away, to plunder and profit from all of it—after it’s been emptied of the family, of course.

Eventually, of course, Kevin repels the bad guys—with a little help from Old Man Marley’s snow shovel, of course—and his family returns. And the movie is absolutely unsubtle in showing the value of that—of showing the preciousness of a full house, and the emptiness of a home alone. Prior to the big showdown, Kevin seeks out a local Santa and asks him to please bring back his entire family. Shortly after, walking alone, he witnesses a warm family scene, a house full of family, love, togetherness, a house so full of people that the gathering spreads across three or four rooms of a large Winnetka home. Kevin stands outside, apart—at this point not even home, but still alone. It is a testament to the implacability of the message that the movie twists the knife so cruelly in Kevin’s gut at this point: He has fully realized he wants his family back, he understands it, he has made repeated entreaties to that effect, and yet still he gets another icy dose of loneliness, another reminder that he is home alone, that everyone he loves has left his home.

All turns out well in the end, of course. The family comes home to Kevin, not easily but dramatically and with great effort: His mother flies to multiple cities and hitches a ride with an annoying polka band to get home; the rest of his family spends Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in airplanes. (In a subtle nod to the dizzying effect of being away from one’s home without letup, Kate McAllister at one point looks around the Scranton airport and asks: “Where the hell am I?”) And even Buzz McAllister, the consummate 1990s turd big brother who at times seems to struggle with basic brain functions, seems to have developed a newfound if unconscious appreciation of the home to which he has returned:

Hey, Kev. It’s pretty cool that you didn’t burn the place down.

Home Alone suggests there is a better way to doing things than making our homes into empty shells for most of our waking lives. Homes were made to be lived in—they were not made to be left vacant, much less become battlegrounds in which the broader, greedy culture scrabbles to possess the scraps we’ve left behind. At the apex of the film’s action, Kevin himself realizes the sacredness of the home, its worth and preciousness. And he doesn’t call the police to help him—the police, who are so comically inept in this movie that they can’t even locate an eight-year-old boy in his own home; the police, who are so bad at their jobs that they allow an entire city block in the richest neighborhood in the United States to be plundered by two noisy burglars. Kevin knows there is no help coming from without; he needs to be the man of the house, to protect his own home. “This is my house,” he says. “I have to defend it.” Go and do likewise.