Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody

[ed. What the hell are we doing here?]

Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.

Still, nothing prepared us for today’s Washington Post’s revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2.

You’d expect rogue militias or failed–state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.

What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.

After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.

They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.

And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart. (...)

Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”

That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.

The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the United States is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.” (...)

And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. It was the beginning of a campaign.

The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.

The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.

This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers last week when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.

Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.

by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report |  Read more:

Images: via BBC/Joe Raedle/Getty Images

[ed. Another day, another atrocity (more so if you count Republican spinelessness and knee-jerk support for anything this administration does, including committing war crimes). See also: November 29, 2025 (LFAA); and,  Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all (WaPo):]

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As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. (...)

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

[ed. Want to guess Hegseth's response to such serious allegations? "As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland." Um no, Pete. The news is focusing on you, not our "incredible warriors" who are currently - at your command - deploying battleships, drones, missles and more to destroy random fishing boats. At least he was sober enough to make a statement, but then couldn't resist reminding everyone of how a dignified cabinet secretary should respond by posting this on his X account). At least he correctly identifies as a cartoon character.

This all prompted me to look at his Wikipedia entry, something I haven't had the stomach to do until now. What a piece of work.]

The High-Romantic Nightmare That Wasn’t

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story. It has next to nothing in common with the spirit of Shelley’s High-Romantic nightmare, and far more to do with del Toro’s own interests, especially his perennially unilluminating and often ponderous dedication to the tone of fable and fairy tale.

It’s no accident that the only great Frankenstein films — James Whale’s two immortal Universal classics, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — didn’t even worry about the scaffolding. They are of course the bases for the Frankenstein of modern popular culture, films which jettisoned all but a few garbled scenarios from the book and erected the rest from a pure Hollywood riff on a century of other vague Gothic imagery and literature. Two of the funniest movies ever made — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) — are themselves riffs on the Universal films, and only those films. And while there have been a few attempts to stage the proper Shelley version, nearly all of them, such as Kenneth Branagh’s awful and characteristically self-important 1994 film, have seen fit to mangle whole sections of Shelley’s work, and invent others from whole cloth.

So now we get the long-awaited version from the man who would seem the most obvious choice to make it — and yet, once again, here is a Frankenstein that finds nothing worth saving from the original besides that basic scenario. In the first, authoritative 1818 version of the text, Victor Frankenstein was a man from a happy family, betrothed to his cousin Elizabeth, who finds himself reading the works of alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus while getting caught up in the fervor of late 18th-century Enlightenment science. This precise setting and period are key to the original story’s brilliance: Shelley evokes an almost beatific time in her own recent history where faith in medical, technological, and social progress was just beginning to achieve its modern velocity — a time in which the center of scientific study was shifting from physics to chemistry and biology.

English Romanticism was the great inheritor of this new concern for biological science, and thrived on metaphors of botany and organicism, just as it fed itself on the new psychology of the German philosophers. Frankenstein gets its power from this — and from its mordant, haunting sense of the old fairy tales furiously spinning into new, wretched life at the birth of the industrial world. In a way, to read Frankenstein is to read what the Romantics thought of the Enlightenment — and their thought was, in brief, that the new scientists had better read Paradise Lost. In fact, one could sum up the ambiguity of the original Shelley novel simply by saying that, in her Frankenstein, it is the Monster himself who reads and understands Milton, not his creator.

Del Toro, as expected, avoids almost all of Shelley’s original material. His primal obsession has always been the feeling of fairy tale itself, united with the trappings and settings of old Hollywood horror films. Even the subtler, Promethean horrors of the original are absent. Instead, he grafts all the whizbang technologic set-dressing of the old Universal films onto an even more overtly-Romantic, maximalist vision of the Shelley story; updating its setting to the mid-19th century — presumably to get in a few dull stereotypes of Victorian squalor and a tinge of punk Darwinism in the reanimation presentation to the Edinburgh Dons, who revoke Frankenstein’s qualifications in horror.

Victor Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac, in an uncharacteristically hammy and misjudged performance) becomes, to all effects, like a grown-up Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon: he’s a sour brooder with a tyrannical father (Charles Dance, in a Charles-Dance-type role) and a doomed pregnant mother (Mia Goth, who also pulls Oedipal double-duty as Elizabeth). The nature of Frankenstein’s work is changed from accidental discovery to lifelong attempt at making up for the loss of his dead mother. Cousin Elizabeth is no longer the saintly pen pal and future wife, but a foil and an object of envy destined to marry Frankenstein’s brother (and, in a peculiar turn, a sort of angel for the Monster). She’s also the niece of the man who wants to bankroll Frankenstein’s experiment (Christoph Waltz). The private, tortured space of Frankenstein’s chambers in the book is transplanted to a huge, vertiginous castle on the edge of a sea — if we had any doubts before about just what height of Gothicism del Toro is going for.

The point of all this, of course, is not only to amp up the opera, but to give del Toro a chance to dream up a thousand gnarly details for the making of the Monster. Shelley herself barely spared a moment to describe the actual process of making the creature. But for del Toro, that’s the whole point. He delights in playing yet another turgid, whimsical Alexandre Desplat waltz while he lingers over Frankenstein’s vivisections, and makes sure to show us all the minute aspects of the building of the electrical apparatus, as well as the construction of the attic and underbelly of the tower. This sequence of the film is entertaining, even if his incessantly roaming, unfixed camera quickly grows exhausting. When it comes to the camera, del Toro is no great director: his Frankenstein has moments of beauty, but even the most arresting images are frequently undercut by the film’s waxy, shadowless look and by awkward framing that makes every other shot feel as if it’s coming from the corner of a too-wide room. (...)

In the end, there’s one main reason to see Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that is Jacob Elordi, who here proves himself to be what was mostly hidden underneath the pure exploitation schlock of Saltburn or Euphoria, and could be briefly glimpsed in his Elvis from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla: that is, a great physical actor trapped in the body of a beautiful man. Has any contemporary heartthrob so totally embraced such a complete privation of his trademark physique? There’s no room for vanity within the Monster. Elordi surely saw his chance to free himself of the burden of his looks — and yet what he chooses to do is pretty magnificent. His elegantly awkward, Butoh-inspired performance is the real glory of a film that would be a rather hollow experience otherwise. After its overheated Freudian first half, the film finally comes alive when it leaves behind Frankenstein the man and follows the Monster — a section which comes closest to following the finest section of Shelley’s story. The middle of the film, wherein the Monster leaves to hide and watch the family of an old blind man, is also the finest part of the film. And, thank god, this time the movie Monster actually does read Paradise Lost.

As the film goes on, and the Monster returns to wreak havoc, del Toro’s Frankenstein almost comes close to the heights of a tragic fairy tale. Though the contrivances del Toro takes to get himself there are ridiculous, the pietà of Elizabeth’s death in the Monster’s arms is lovely (so sincere that there were snickers in my theater when I saw it), as is the Monster’s return to the ruins of the tower to discover the site of his creation. Even at the ending, when the Monster and Frankenstein have met out on the ice and come together in the cabins of the Scandinavian ship — the resolution of this particular father-son/God-Adam story is moving. Still, del Toro doesn’t quite earn the weight of the climax he worked so ponderously toward. It rests entirely on Jacob Elordi’s broad shoulders, and he does his best. Yet where Shelley’s Monster chooses to burn his creator and end his own life — del Toro, big earnest softy that he is, can’t help but let his Monster stare off into the sunset, ponder his apparent immortality, and conquer his desire to die.

by Sam Jennings, Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about a year or so ago, and it's true, much of the power and nuance (and tenderness) of that book is lost in this film. That said, it's still the best adaptation that I've seen to date. Did you know that her monster developed a deep literary and philosophical intelligence (from reading so many books in isolation), and that his main objective in pursuing and tormenting his creator was simply to have him create a female companion to share his life (which the doctor initially promised to do, then refused after having second thoughts)? Great book that really should be read to get a full appreciation of all its many themes (including technological hubris). See also: Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Literary Theory and Criticism):]

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The work and its monster-hero became such a popular subject for film and stage, in serious, comedic, and parodic productions, that many acquaint themselves with Victor Frankenstein’s monster long before encountering it in Shelley’s book. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker. A second, stronger shock may occur when readers realize that the monster, in great contrast to the bumbling, murderous, wild-eyed, grunting, crazy-stitched object of film, proves the most rational and also the most eloquent of any of the novel’s characters. (...)

The monster was not “born” hating others; his hate was taught him by people who refused to see beyond his external appearance to the brilliant warm nature existing just below its surface. While science might be expected to lack compassion, the same could not be said of religion, which should have prepared the public to be more accepting. That the monster possesses a quick intellect and a natural warmth and goodness that is corrupted only by his exposure to humans remains an indictment of shallow social values and a rigid class structure.

via:

We Had a Long, Mostly Good Marriage. It’s OK That It Ended.

When I got married, more than three decades ago, I did not want to promise to love my husband until death do us part. I did want to try; Dan was my soul mate and sweetheart, and I felt lucky and excited to start a life and family with him. But death — we hoped!— was light years away (we were 29), and a part of me rebelled against vowing my entire life to a monogamous, cohabitating partnership. I’d lived alone in my 20s and loved it; I’d always needed private space to fully unfold. I’d also enjoyed dating and sleeping odd hours; I’m an obsessive thinker and writer. Love or not, I worried marriage might suffocate me.

So I told Dan I couldn’t swear to what I couldn’t predict. He countered: People won’t come to our wedding to hear, “I’ll give it my best shot, but….” He had a point. I said the vows.

We were both right — he in his confidence, me to think twice. Now 33 years later, I’m proud of our long, loving marriage: nurturing children, homes, friendships, pets; collaboratively writing and editing books and articles. We laughed and learned and lived, first struggling financially (but together! as artists!), later finding our footing. We were a connected, compatible team for a charmed, exciting, mostly happy chunk of our lives.

But every marriage has its issues, and the empty nest catapults them to the surface. We had different ways of feeling and expressing intimacy. Dan was working harder than ever, but now with a new team that didn’t include me — and the more he (understandably) devoted himself to that world, the more I both escaped into my own projects and expanded into the sweet peace of autonomy again. When we did hang out, we didn’t want to do or talk about the same things. A couples therapist suggested we might not make it. “No!” we said, stunned.

Still, we drifted further, each feeling less loved and less loving. We had always laughed, and now we didn’t. At least, not enough.

No one was cheating, swearing, slinging plates. We could’ve tried to put Band-Aids on our issues until they healed, or didn’t-heal-but-whatever. Instead, we made an increasingly common choice: We hugged, apologized for our shortcomings and freed each other. To me, it was — and still is — less a failure than the end of a long, productive, good marriage.

But the decision we made inspired pity, judgment and confusion from those around us. Our parents, all forever wedded, bonded in bafflement; when I shared my (vanilla) dating life with one long-married friend, she called my enthusiasm “unhealthy.” Rates of “gray divorce” — couples 50 and older — are surging (numbers for the over 65s have tripled since the 90s) and more than two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. Even so, people routinely said, “I’m sorry,” when they heard about us. I get it; change can be scary and sad. I often responded, “Thanks, but it’s OK. We’re good.” (...)

I love living alone again, now in a modest city apartment: choosing my surroundings, knowing the fridge contents, sleeping uninterrupted. Feeling pared down but efficient. Coming home to solitude and, yes, unfolding.

I’m certainly not pro-divorce, nor do I think everyone should go our route. (Note: We haven’t legally divorced, for health insurance and tax reasons, but are otherwise fully separated.) A lifelong good marriage is beautiful, admirable, beneficial in many ways. And parting in midlife can devastate the unhealthy — or alone-averse. I’m neither, but tromping single around Paris or Maine, I’ve sometimes wished for someone to dine or hike with. I’ve spent hot Augusts and holiday weekends solo in Manhattan, watched divorced friends endure Christmas isolated and missing their kids. I needed my daughter to retrieve me post-colonoscopy, and I worry about injury or aging alone — though ultimately most women age alone anyway, since we live an average five years longer than men. (...)

I feel guilt about the children, who of course initially hated our separation. But kids are happier when their parents are happy — and they’ve seen that we still help each other and remain a family in many ways. We share a dog, and spend major holidays and occasional weekends together, often with Dan’s mother, whom I adore. (Dan’s girlfriend understands — after all, she has kids and an ex, too). My parents and sisters still consider him family. We text often in several family chats.

So overall, my experience has cemented my view that when wedlock no longer feels right or healthy later in life — and if, like us, you’re fortunate enough to have careers, adult kids and a willingness to do the work of a good split (not unlike being in a good marriage!) — then unlocking, becoming separate again, can be a fine option.

by Cathi Hanauer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Julia Forrest
[ed. It's interesting. I've found out in the last year or so that three couples I know have divorced - all in their late-60s and early 70s. I'm beginning to think this "gray divorce" thing might really be a thing. There's a saying that as couples age men get more sentimental and women more resentful. I don't know about that, but the splits in my small sample size have all been initiated by the wife (for what that's worth). Maybe financial security has a lot to do with it, maybe a feeling of time running out, or just a yearning for independence after a lifetime of compromise and negotiation.]

Logan Maxwell Hagege (b. 1980), Days Like This.
via:

Robert Glasper

K-Beauty Boom Explodes

On a recent Saturday at an Ulta Beauty store in midtown Manhattan, Denise McCarthy, a mother in her 40s, stood in front of a wall of tiny pastel bottles, tubes and compacts. Her phone buzzed — another TikTok from her 15-year-old daughter.

“My kids text me the TikToks,” she told CNBC, scooping Korean lip tints and sunscreens into her basket, destined for Christmas stockings. “I don’t even know what half of this does. I just buy the ones they send me.”

Two aisles over, a group of college students compared swatches of Korean cushion foundations. A dad asked a store associate whether a viral Korean sunscreen was the one “from the girl who does the ‘get ready with me’ videos.” Near the checkout, a display of Korean sheet mask mini-packs was nearly empty.

Scenes like this are playing out across the country.

Once a niche reserved for beauty obsessives, Korean cosmetics — known as K-beauty — are breaking fully into the American mainstream, fueled by TikTok virality, younger and more diverse shoppers, and aggressive expansion from retailers such as Ulta, Sephora, Walmart and Costco.

K-beauty sales in the United States are expected to top $2 billion in 2025, up more than 37% from last year, according to market research firm NielsenIQ, far outpacing the broader beauty market’s single-digit growth.

And even as trade tensions complicate supply chains, brands and retailers told CNBC the momentum is strong.

“We have no plans of slowing down and see more opportunities to penetrate the market,” said Janet Kim, vice president at K-beauty brand Neogen.

In the first half of 2025, South Korea shipped a record $5.5 billion worth of cosmetics, up nearly 15% year over year, and has become the leading exporter of cosmetics to the U.S., surpassing France, according to data from the South Korean government.

“The growth has been remarkable,” said Therese-Ann D’Ambrosia, vice president of beauty and personal care at NielsenIQ. “When you compare that to the broader beauty market, which is growing at single digits, K-beauty is clearly operating in a different gear right now.” (...)

The ‘second wave’

Over the past decade, there’s also been a rise in Korean entertainment in the U.S. — from pop groups such as BTS and Blackpink to this year’s Netflix hit “KPop Demon Hunters” —which has helped push South Korea’s cultural exports to unprecedented popularity.

“Korean culture has exploded on every front, and that has really shown up when it comes to K-beauty,” Dang said.

K-beauty’s “first wave,” which hit the U.S. in the mid-2010s, was defined by “glass skin,” 10-step routines, snail mucin, cushion compacts and beauty blemish creams. Most products catered to lighter skin tones, and distribution was limited to small boutiques, Amazon sellers and early test placements at Ulta and Sephora, beauty experts said.

“The first wave had some penetration, but nothing like today,” Horvath said. “It was mostly people in the know.”

The second wave has been bigger, faster and far more inclusive. It has spanned color cosmetics, hair and scalp care, body care, fragrances and high-tech devices.

TikTok is the central engine of discovery, especially for Gen Z and millennial shoppers, who account for roughly three-fourths of K-beauty consumers, according to a Personal Care Insights market analyst report. Posts tagged “K-beauty” or “Korean skin care” draw 250 million views per week, according to consumer data firm Spate. And viral products with sleek packaging often vanish from shelves faster than retailers can restock — particularly those that combine gentle formulas and low prices, Dang said.

“TikTok has changed the game,” Horvath said. “It’s easier to educate consumers on innovation and get the word out. Brands are deeply invested in paying influencers, and TikTokers talk about textures, formulas and efficacy.” (...)

The trend is visible across the Americas: 61% of consumers in Mexico and nearly half in Brazil say K-beauty is popular in their country, compared with about 45% in the U.S., according to Statista.

“Traditional retail and e-commerce remain important, but TikTok Shop is the standout disruptor,” said Nielsen’s D’Ambrosia. “It’s not just about the direct sales on that one platform; it’s about how it’s changing the entire discovery and purchase journey.”

But the second wave brings its own risks. A heavy dependence on virality could expose brands to sudden algorithm changes or regulatory scrutiny, D’Ambrosia said.

“When you have so much growth concentrated on one platform [such as TikTok], algorithm changes could significantly impact discoverability overnight,” D’Ambrosia said. “We’ve seen what happens when platforms tweak their recommendation engines. ... There are definitely some caution flags we’re watching.”

Rapid innovation

K-beauty’s staying power, Dang said, is rooted in an intensely competitive domestic Korean market. Trends move at breakneck speed and consumers spend more per capita on beauty than in any other country, according to South Korean research firm KOISRA.

South Korea had more than 28,000 licensed cosmetics sellers in 2024 — nearly double that of five years ago — creating a pressure-cooker environment that forces constant experimentation, said Neogen’s Kim.

“We develop about hundreds of formulas each day,” Kim told CNBC. “We build the library and we test results with clinical individual tests. ... Everything that’s very unique and works really well for skin care, we develop.”

Korean consumers churn through trends quickly, fueling a pipeline of upstart brands that can go viral and, in some cases, get acquired. For example, when gooey snail mucin, a gel used to protect and repair people’s skin, took off globally, skin care brand Amorepacific acquired COSRX, the small Korean brand that helped popularize the ingredient, for roughly $700 million.

The next wave of products, analysts predict, are likely to be even more experimental.

Brands are betting on buzzy ingredients such as DNA extracted from salmon or trout sperm that early research suggests may help calm or repair skin. They are also expanding into biotechnology.

“K-beauty is very data-driven. [Artificial intelligence] helps us get fast results for content, formula development, and advertising,” Kim said. “In Korea, they started talking about delivery systems. They’re very good with biotechnology.”

by Luke Fountain, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Avila Gonzalez | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images

The Average College Student Today

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.” So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Reading

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok. (...)

Writing

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

You probably think that’s satire. Either that, or it looks like this:

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this, Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.

That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen. (...)

What’s changed?

The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.

What has changed exactly?

• Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”

• Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”

• They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting their phone fix.

• They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine. I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class.

• Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.

• Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.

• It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

by Hilarius Bookbinder, Scriptorium Philosophia |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Matthew Reed, just checkin'
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Speed Negotiations

[ed. Funny. Never seen this clip before (NewsRadio). Finding the right one takes time (the wrong one, not so much).]

CEO Dinner Insights: November 2025

I am still buzzing from our last Wildfire post. With so many new subscribers, I thought it helpful to provide context. The CEO Dinner is a monthly gathering of leading Silicon Valley CEOs. We’ve been meeting for 16 years to exchange entrepreneurial experiences, discuss technology trends and support each other professionally and personally. Each CEO takes a turn hosting, inviting guests and often posing a Jeffersonian question for us to answer.

Our discussion follows Chatham House rules, allowing us to share what was discussed while keeping speaker identities confidential. The combination of 1) an abundance mindset to share these discussions and 2) a new phase of empty nesting where I have more time yielded The CEO Dinner substack. It’s thrilling to see the response. You can look forward to regular insights from our dinners as well as special pieces we’ve considered for years. With a meaningful audience, 2026 will be the right year to begin sharing more resources and frameworks with aspiring entrepreneurs! (...)

The table at the end of the report captures the full range of positions discussed. It’s important to note that most of these are individual opinions, not group consensus. The results revealed wide ranging commentary: Waymo was a favorite long, appearing multiple times. Perplexity was the biggest short, with multiple attendees citing distribution challenges and ethical concerns. In the model wars, Google’s timely Gemini 3 release indicates they’re heading in the right direction with model quality joining their other formidable hyperscaler assets. Positive sentiment around Anthropic was equally matched by concern for Meta. OpenAI is still king but sits under the Sword of Damocles.

Outside AI darlings, Apple is ready to pop once they have something worth popping about. Netflix got shade for being a pick ‘em, not platform, story. Microsoft is well-positioned for the AI wildfire aftermath. Robinhood is ready to steal from Coinbase and give better experiences to their customers. Disrupting innovation still abounds at every level, especially with startups, and BigTech will need to stay on their toes with acquisitions being critical to stay relevant.

More broadly, we discussed how labor economics have as much focus today as during the Industrial Revolution - - virtual machines squeezing out human costs while improving quality. (Note: I’ve always enjoyed em dashes and am reclaiming them with the traditional typewriter solution, two hyphens.) (...)

Executive Summary

Eighteen technology leaders gathered for a long/short stock game that revealed five critical insights about market positioning and competitive strategy:

Waymo is Driving Away with Autonomous Transportation

A strong consensus long position emerged immediately: Waymo’s product superiority combines with devastating unit economics to create an unassailable moat. At $21 for rides that cost $105 in Uber Black, Waymo demonstrates 75-80% cost reduction by eliminating labor. Leaders who’ve experienced the product universally prefer it to human drivers, citing safety, consistency, and price. The training data advantage (millions of miles weekly) creates a flywheel competitors cannot match. Tesla’s full self-driving lags significantly (2x the accident rate in Austin), and the training data narrative is false. Tesla sends back only intervention data, not general mileage. Uber and Lyft face existential threat.

“The most shocking thing about Waymo isn’t that it drives itself. It’s the price. A 20-minute ride from the wharf to the Four Seasons that would have been $105 in Uber Black cost me just $21.” (...)

Nvidia’s Margin Structure Is Unsustainable

Multiple leaders questioned whether 80% margins on semiconductor infrastructure represent a durable advantage or a temporary bubble. The comparison to Cisco’s dot-com era dominance (expensive hardware with high margins that got commoditized rapidly) surfaced repeatedly. As AI models become capable of chip design at human expert levels (expected by decade’s end), the moat in chip design evaporates. Fabrication becomes the only remaining bottleneck, potentially benefiting TSMC while threatening Nvidia’s margin structure. The certainty: some player will find a way to attack that margin at the infrastructure layer.

“The amount of money going into depreciating hardware with high margins is the exact same story as Cisco. Somebody will find a way to eat that margin.”

The Legal Tech Disruption Finally Arrives

Leaders identified a major shift in legal services: companies providing outcome-based pricing by owning law firms and powering them with AI platforms. Rather than helping law firms become more efficient (which creates perverse incentives against adoption), these platforms acquire 300-person firms, empower attorneys with AI tools, and offer flat-fee pricing to Fortune 500 companies, promising 90% cost reductions. The billable hour model prevents traditional law firms from capturing AI productivity gains, creating vulnerability to disruptors who align incentives properly.

“Traditional law firms are facing a conundrum. Why do you want to be 300% more efficient? Now you have to bill 3 times as many hours. AI-Native law firms like Eudia are killing the billable hour.”

Strategic Themes

Theme 1: The Labor Cost Revolution Creates Winner-Take-All Dynamics

The Problem: Labor represents 75-80% of costs in most service businesses, and AI’s ability to eliminate those costs is creating unprecedented pricing power for early adopters.

Waymo’s pricing advantage illustrates the magnitude of disruption. A $21 ride replacing a $105 Uber Black ride represents an 80% cost reduction, precisely the labor component eliminated by autonomy. We’re seeing order-of-magnitude transformation here. One leader observed: “75 to 80% of every business is labor. All these things are coming and taking labor out. Everything’s going to start just collapsing.”

The implications extend beyond transportation. Zipline’s drone delivery captures 3% of DoorDash’s business in Dallas alone by eliminating driver labor. Sierra and similar enterprise AI companies provide “shovel ready” customer service automation that companies can deploy immediately. Legal tech platforms cut costs 90% by eliminating attorney time on routine work.

First movers in labor automation can underprice incumbents so dramatically that competitive response becomes impossible. Uber cannot match Waymo’s $21 price point with human drivers. DoorDash cannot compete with drone delivery’s 15-minute coffee delivery economics. The winner-take-all dynamic isn’t about slightly better products but about fundamentally different cost structures.

The Insight: Labor cost elimination creates moats so deep that late followers cannot compete on price, quality, or experience simultaneously. The first company to achieve reliable automation in a category can price at levels that make the entire existing industry unprofitable while still maintaining healthy margins.

Leadership Implication: Identify your labor-intensive processes and attack them with extreme urgency. The first mover advantage in labor automation is more durable than typical technology advantages because it’s structural, not feature-based. Once a competitor eliminates 75% of costs, you cannot gradually catch up. You must completely rebuild your business model. In categories where automation is viable, assume you have 12-18 months before a competitor makes your entire cost structure obsolete.

by Dion Lim, CEO Dinner Insights |  Read more:

Image: Christian Waske on Unsplash
[ed. See also: The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy. (CEO).]

Why So Many Book Covers Look the Same

At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashy prints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule.

If books have design eras, we’re in an age of statement wallpaper and fatty text. We have the internet to thank — and not just the interface but the economy that’s evolved around it. From the leather-bound volumes of old to lurid mass-market paperbacks, book covers were never designed in a vacuum. Their presentation had everything to do with the way books were made, where and how and to whom they were sold. And when you look at book covers right now, what you’ll see blaring back at you, bold and dazzling, is a highly competitive marketing landscape dominated by online retail, social media, and their curiously symbiotic rival, the resurgent independent bookstore...

Left with blunt tools and fuzzy math, book marketing and design departments resort to instinct and look for ways to produce the most visible proof of concept: publicity. And where do we go for publicity in this age of tech disruption? Social media.

Books that are designed to render well on digital screens also look great on social.

by Margot Boyer-Dry, Vulture | Read more:
Image: uncredited/via:

[ed. Followup to the post below (Decline of Deviance). I have a strong aversion to any book that looks like this, which to me translates as 'unserious', 'hyped', and, (unfortunately) 'chick lit'.]

The Decline of Deviance

Where has all the weirdness gone?

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before

b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and

c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History |  Read more:

Images: Author and Alex Murrell

[ed. Interesting thesis. For example, architecture:]

***

The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:

Every new apartment building looks like this:

Arlo Guthrie: Alice's Restaurant - Illustrated

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”

We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version.

by Open Culture | Read more:

[ed. Never gets old (maybe a day late : ) We've got tons of Christmas songs but this is the only Thanksgiving song I can think of.]

Kiyoshi Saitō, ‘Winter in Aizu’, 1907-1997.
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Joni Mitchell - Joni's Jazz

[ed. What a welcome surprise. A new archival release focusing on Joni's jazz evolution, dedicated to Wayne Shorter who died in 2023. So much good stuff here - 61 tracks (full album). See also: Joni’s Jazz Reviewed: Short on rarities but steeped in a love of the genre (Mojo).]

Job Hugging and the Ten-Year Trap

The Bullshit Job Is Real. Leaving It Is Almost Impossible.

The career confusion I usually write about involves people in their early twenties trying to figure out which direction to go. But there’s a different kind of confusion that sits with people who are ten or fifteen years into something. They already chose. They’ve been executing that choice for over a decade. The question now is whether to abandon the investment.

This is the person who spent twelve years qualifying for a role that might exist for five more. Who’s watching their industry consolidate, their company restructure for the third time, their colleagues get made redundant in waves. Who makes decent money, holds seniority they earned, and knows that both might evaporate in the next round of cuts.

The question sitting with them: whether the last decade was preparation for obsolescence.

The Ten-Year Trap

Ten years into anything builds three locks simultaneously.

The economic lock is straightforward. A decade of progression means a salary that supports a particular life. Mortgage, school fees, the lifestyle that assumes this income level. Your household budget depends on it. Your partner’s career decisions factor it in. Leaving means accepting a significant pay cut or starting over in a field where you’re competing with people ten years younger who cost half as much.

The psychological lock runs deeper. You’ve been a senior whatever-you-are for years. The title is how you introduce yourself, how your parents describe you, how you think about your place in the world. The identity has fused with the person. Starting over means becoming junior again, and that feels like regression even when it’s rational movement.

Then there’s the skills problem. You’ve spent ten years becoming excellent at navigating a particular regulatory framework, or marketing a channel that’s dying, or accumulating institutional knowledge of systems that won’t outlast you. The expertise might not transfer anywhere else. You won’t know until you try, and trying means leaving.

Each year adds weight to these locks. The salary increases. The identity solidifies. The skills specialise further. You’ve optimised yourself for one context, and now that context is uncertain.

Why This Hits Different

This has happened before. Miners watched pits close. Typists saw word processors arrive. Factory workers watched production move overseas. Entire industries disappeared, often rapidly, leaving people with skills that had no market.

But those were working-class jobs. The middle-class professional path was supposed to be different. University degree, graduate scheme, steady progression, pension at the end. The bargain was: get educated, specialise in something professional, and you’ll have security.

That bargain is breaking for a different class of worker now. The comfortable middle-skilled roles, the ones requiring degrees and years of training, are the ones getting automated or consolidated. People who did everything right by the old rules are discovering their expertise has an expiration date.

The decline happens fast enough that you can’t pivot gradually, but slow enough that you keep thinking you have time. Restructures happen every eighteen months. Colleagues disappear in rounds. The company says it’s about efficiency, about staying competitive, about the future. You watch the org chart shrink and know that your highly paid, highly specific role could be next.

The Recognition Point

Something specific triggers the realisation. Someone five years younger gets made redundant and you understand that seniority makes you expensive to keep. You see your exact role automated at a competitor. You’re in your third restructure in five years and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You try explaining what you do and realise you’re describing institutional knowledge of a dying system rather than a transferable skill.

The recognition makes everything worse because now you know you’re trapped and you’re still not leaving.

The questions that follow have no good answers. How severe is the decline? Is this slow erosion over another decade or rapid collapse where half the roles disappear in three years? Industry analysis is always backwards-looking. By the time consensus forms that a sector is dying, it’s already dead.

What transfers? You’ve become excellent at something specific. Maybe it’s risk assessment and it works everywhere. Maybe it’s navigating particular regulations and it works nowhere else. You discover this in job interviews, explaining why someone should hire you for work you’ve never done, competing against people who have.

The financial calculation involves variables you can’t control. How long could you survive without income? What pay cut is survivable? These depend on your partner’s salary, your savings, your mortgage, your tolerance for uncertainty. They have to be assessed without admitting you’re considering blowing up the household finances.

Timing becomes impossible to judge. Leave now and you preserve some career momentum. You’re choosing to go rather than being pushed. But you’re walking away from salary and seniority you might keep for another three years. Wait for redundancy and you get a package, but you’re also older, in a market flooded with other redundancies, and you’ve lost time you could have spent retraining.

The worst question sits underneath everything: what if your skills are too specific and you genuinely can’t transfer? What if the last ten years made you excellent at something nobody else needs? What if you leave, burn through savings trying to pivot, and discover you’re competing for entry-level positions against twenty-five-year-olds who’ll work for half what you need?

None of these have answers because they all depend on information you don’t possess. You can’t know your skills transfer until you’ve transferred them. You can’t know when redundancies hit until they hit. You can’t know if you’ve waited too long until you’ve already waited too long.

Some people can move with incomplete information and accept they might be wrong. Most people can’t. The uncertainty paralyses, so they wait for certainty, and by the time certainty arrives, the decision has been made for them.

by Alex McCann, The Republic of Letters | Read more:
Image: istock/Getty via
[ed. ed. See also: Confessions of a job hugger: Still at my desk, still in denial (ADN):]

"Job huggers — employees clinging to roles long past their expiration date — lurk in cubicles in many workplaces. According to Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report, 48% of surveyed employees say they stay in their current role for comfort, security or stability.

For these employees, job hugging is the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. They don’t love their jobs but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen.

Behind many “grateful to have a job” smiles sits quiet dread. Sunday nights hit like sentencing hearings. Job huggers run mental marathons of justification: Maybe my boss will retire. Maybe next quarter will improve. Maybe leadership will finally hire that extra person they promised back when TikTok was new.

Spoiler: They won’t.

The truth: Job huggers don’t cling to jobs; they cling to security, identity and even social connection. Letting go of a problem job before an employee finds a new landing spot feels like jumping from a plane without a functioning parachute."

Nazaré, Portugal

via:

Fiiiiiiish
via:

The Fall of the English Department

... and rise of new stewards

A decline in public interest in reading literature corresponds to the decline of the English department. By all accounts, the state of public literacy has only gotten worse with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted over the past 40 years. Fewer than half of all adults read at least one work of literature in 2015, a concerning statistic that was described as “the lowest percentage . . . since NEA surveys began in 1982.” In 2022, less than half of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year.

And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.

Looking out on the state of things in 2025, it is clear there are major changes afoot. A major cultural reorientation is underway. The 2020s promise to be a big decade for the revival of reading the classics. Online initiatives such as The Catherine Project and my Versed Community (now with 600 members) demonstrate a renewed desire for encountering works of literature in conversation and with rigor.

Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”

On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.

The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.

This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.

Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.

What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.

by Adam Walker, Substack |  Read more:

Image: William Shakespeare, The First Folio, 1623 via