Everyone is saying it now. Or if not saying it, then feeling it—somewhere beneath the surface, like pressure before a storm. The sense that something is off. That the world has become harder to read, harder to trust, harder to name.

It shows up in small ways. A hesitation before accepting a fact. A quiet suspicion of expertise. A sense that institutions—once slow, stable, and authoritative—are now either fractured or performing stability rather than embodying it. We move through a landscape saturated with information to the point of vertigo.

It is tempting to try to locate a beginning—to point to moments when there was a turn: an election, a referendum, a crisis. Trump. Brexit. The Tea Party. 9/11. Each offers itself as an origin story, a clean break between before and after.

But the feeling resists that kind of precision. It suggests something older, more gradual. Not a rupture, but an accumulation. A long erosion of shared frameworks for understanding what is real, what is true, what can be trusted.

Go back far enough and the pattern begins to repeat. The language changes, the stakes shift, but the underlying structure remains: competing narratives, institutional strain, a growing distance between lived experience and official explanation. The present does not feel unprecedented—only intensified.

We live inside it.

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

Graham Greene didn’t write ordinary noir—whatever that would be. He was totally different from Chandler and Hammett. His spy “entertainments,” as he called them, were less about systems than individuals. Individuals caught up in those systems. People pulled into espionage while trying to do other things.

In Our Man in Havana, the central tension is not simply between truth and lies, or crime and evidence, but between systems and persons.

Religion, nation, ideology—these are systems. They rely on repetition, belief, and loyalty at scale. They offer structure, but they also demand submission.

Against them stands something smaller and far less stable: the individual life lived for a person rather than an idea.

Wormold doesn’t belongs to systems. He is detached from Milly’s Catholicism, unmoved by patriotism, and only loosely attached to capitalism, where even selling vacuum cleaners becomes nearly impossible in a world shaped by Cold War fear—where “atomic” power repels more than it attracts.

He fails within every system he encounters.

So he invents one.

In the absence of success, he fabricates it—agents, networks, intelligence. And yet his fiction somehow folds into reality. It enters the machinery of espionage and operates outside of his control, endangering lives.

Beatrice recognizes the absurdity of the game because she has lived inside it. But she also sees something else in Wormold: a way of moving outside the system, improvising rather than obeying.

Milly, too, appears to belong to a system—Catholic, structured, moral—but her instincts mirror her father’s. She plays the game, but does not fully inhabit it. Beatrice sees this, and comes to love them both.

It is a dangerous love only because it collides with a world organized around systems—espionage, ideology, Cold War logic.

Greene leaves us with a quiet, impossible proposition: that if loyalty to persons replaced loyalty to systems, the world might be less efficient, less coherent—but far less violent.

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Wake Up Dead Man, the third and latest Knives Out mystery on Netflix, is a hoot—though a darker one than its predecessors. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery finds Daniel Craig returning as private eye Benoit Blanc, this time stepping into a quaint village where Old World and New World sensibilities collide in unsettling ways.

Rian Johnson assembles another impeccable ensemble: Josh O’Connor, Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Cailee Spaeny, and Daryl McCormack—a transatlantic mix that quietly reinforces the film’s central idea: hypocrisy travels well.

At the center are two priests, played by Brolin and O’Connor. O’Connor, who previously wore the collar as Mr. Elton in the 2020 adaptation of Emma, returns here as a Catholic priest marked by a violent past—reformed, perhaps, but unmistakably burdened. There is nothing more suspicious than a man who insists he has changed.

And yet it isn’t O’Connor who unsettles most—it’s Brolin. His Wicks exudes a controlled menace, the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself. Opposite him, Close (playing Martha) is formidable, operating at the other extreme: composed, knowing, and quietly terrifying. As O’Connor’s character observes, Wicks may be in charge, but Martha is the one who knows where the bodies are buried.

The structure is pure Agatha Christie: a closed circle of suspects, a carefully constructed social microcosm. The village and church feel like they could belong to a Miss Marple story—if Miss Marple wandered into something far more morally volatile.

Because this is where the film sharpens.

Patriarchy has no borders. Hypocrisy is universal. Emotional manipulation transcends culture, language, and even belief. Religion, in Johnson’s hands, becomes less a doctrine than a stage on which power performs itself.

There’s a father–son reveal that leans knowingly into myth—its echo of Star Wars (“we will rule together”) both unsettling and absurd. It’s one of several moments where the film invites you to laugh—and then immediately questions why you did.

That tonal balance is the film’s real achievement.

It is dark, often uncomfortably so. But it is also funny—sharply, deliberately funny. And that humor doesn’t dilute the weight of its subject. If anything, it exposes it. Religion, after all, carries contradictions that resist resolution and leaves behind wounds that don’t easily close. To find humor within that space without trivializing it is no small feat.

Here, the humor works because it feels true.

The absurdity isn’t imposed. It’s revealed.

The laughter cuts through.

Not as relief, exactly—but as release. A loosening of tension just enough to let something else in. The mind opens a fraction, and in that opening, a pattern begins to take shape.

It is not new.

A man formed within a system that protects him, elevates him, names him shepherd—only for him to grow quietly resentful of the very flock that sustains his authority. Their devotion becomes a mirror he cannot bear to look into for too long. Their freedom, however small, becomes intolerable.

Control, then, becomes the answer. Not loudly. Not all at once. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, until it feels like doctrine.

He cannot turn his anger upward—toward the structure that made him—so he redirects it. Sideways. Downward. Toward the one who can be named, isolated, and offered up.

A scapegoat.

A woman, often. The harlot. The witch. The one whose existence can be reframed as disorder. In another story, she might wear a pointed hat and green skin. In this one, she carries the weight of knowledge—of what has been done, and by whom.

What the film understands—quietly, almost too well—is that patriarchy does not depend on geography. It travels. It adapts. It survives translation.

The laughter passes. The story resolves.

But something quieter settles in its place—the recognition of a pattern that does not end when the film does.

Nature and science stand in tension in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. At the beginning of the novel, however, life is still harmonious. That harmony is what will be broken.

In Frankenstein (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro, there is a significant shift. Victor is not romanticized, nor is his upbringing treated with nostalgia. The film condenses his background into a series of striking visualizations: the silent, gentle mother cloaked in red; the overbearing father pushing science onto Victor; the mother’s death in childbirth; and the father’s preference for the lighter, more carefree William over the brooding elder son.

But it is with the mother’s death, and Victor’s response to it, that sympathy ends. He turns away from life and toward science, becoming cold in the image of the father he resented.

This is part of the film’s composite approach to a central contrast: inherited and taught masculine obsession versus a gentler, intuitive feminine nature. The name “Victor,” imposed on both father and son (a departure from Shelley), signals the will to conquer. He is the one who would conquer nature. The world he builds stands in opposition to the natural world embodied first by the mother and later by Elizabeth.

Another composite appears in Heinrich Harlander, who blends elements of Shelley’s Henry Clerval and his merchant father. He represents industry—the financial and practical force that enables Victor’s ambition. The Harlander combination is interesting because it compresses Henry Clerval’s predilection for the Middle Ages (a more chivalrous, romantic time prior to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment) and his father’s bias against liberal education. It also compresses the story into something where the tension lies chiefly between conquest and intuitive gentleness rather than straightforward good and evil.

The film, then, is a modern retelling that frames the creator much more clearly as the villain. Where the novel leaves moral judgment ambiguous, the film sharpens it: the creator fails his creature. He seeks forgiveness. The creature grants it and endures—“brokenly,” to borrow the line from Lord Byron on which the film closes.

The world of science, war, and destruction is presented as masculine—Victor’s domain—perpetually at odds with nature. This is made visual in the wolves, in weapons, and in the cold laboratory space. In contrast, butterflies—symbols of beauty and innocence—are associated with Elizabeth and the feminine.

The creature comes to understand violence as inevitable in the world man has made. “Nature calms, knowledge unhinges.” The butterfly becomes a haunting symbol of transformation: a being that simply lives on, with “three hearts, multiple eyes, and white blood,” and, as Elizabeth observes, a “fascinating lack of choice.”

Choice, she says, is uniquely human—“the seat of the soul,” a gift of the creator. Elizabeth, who does not belong to the harsh masculine world, chooses life. Victor chooses its corruption.

One of the most critical changes the film makes is moral. The creature is less a perversion of life than a miraculous assemblage of the “discarded dead” of endless wars driven by human ambition. And yet, in spite of this origin, Elizabeth recognizes in him something she herself has long sought but could not name: love. She echoes the allusions drawn by Shelley to Milton. “To be lost and found: that is the lifespan of love,” she says, invoking the ideal.

The creature’s instinct is kindness, seen in his care for the cottagers and his bond with the blind old man. The novel leaves open the question of whether the creature is good or evil. The film makes a clearer choice: the creature is good, and he is wronged—abandoned and denied.

The head of Medusa looms over the creation process in Victor’s laboratory. The image reinforces the film’s central inversion: what is created is not inherently monstrous, but made so by the gaze that fears and rejects it. It is one of many visual symbols that compliments the technical achievements of the film at the 98th Academy Awards: production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling. These are not merely aesthetic or atmospheric, but acknowledgments of how deeply the visual language supports the story’s argument. From the recurring red of blood and life, to the stark contrast between the cold laboratory and the living world of nature, every detail is constructed to reflect a world out of balance—a world in which creation has been severed from responsibility.

The creature is made unhappy in isolation. His rage emerges as a response to rejection and the fearful attitude from others that pushes them to violence. He is also envious of the companionship that is denied him. Victor refuses to give him a mate, fearing the creation of a new race. And so the film raises, without resolving, its central question:

What gives man the right to play God—to decide who lives and who must remain alone?

The creature, like the butterfly—and like women in Shelley’s world—is denied choice. He must go on alone.

And yet there is a moment of transformation. After forgiving Victor, the creature saves the sailors. In that act, he becomes something more than what was made of him.

Shelley’s novel has often been read as a warning about scientific progress and its consequences—from industrialization to climate change. The film extends that warning into the present. If the creature represents what humanity creates, then the true question is not whether creation is monstrous.

It is whether the creator will act with responsibility.

Man has created artificial intelligence. The test now may be the same: whether we guide what we create ethically, or abandon it. That choice may determine whether our creations destroy us—or expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Nobody loses an Oscar. There is winning, and there is not winning. You cannot lose what you never possessed. A nomination is already the honor; the winner is simply the artist the Academy chooses to recognize for that work in that year.

Which is why the speeches often matter more than the statues. When Michael B. Jordan accepted his award for The Sinners, he spoke about the people who believed in him early—the ones who bet on him—and promised he would keep showing up for them. It was a reminder that the real engine behind great work is never ego. It’s the heart.

That idea stayed with me as I wrote this analysis and review of Marty Supreme, a film that appears at first to be about ambition and narcissism, but gradually reveals something very different.

One of the nominees who did not win an Oscar this year is an actor who has captured extraordinary attention in recent years: Timothée Chalamet. His performance as Bob Dylan was so convincing that it permanently fused actor and legend in the mind of the audience. I remember a line from Joan Baez describing Dylan as someone who seemed to arrive already a legend. Chalamet’s rise carries something of that same aura, and that kind of ascent always carries danger. A man cannot survive it unless he finds a way to carve out a space where he remembers who he is. Dylan famously retreated to Woodstock, New York for precisely that reason.

After the Dylan performance, expectations for Marty Supreme were high. Chalamet did not disappoint. On the contrary, he did exactly what Michael B. Jordan described in his speech: he showed up and gave everything he had.

On the surface, Marty Supreme looks like a film about a narcissist. That’s certainly how I saw it through the first half—maybe even three quarters—of the story. But somewhere along the way I began to realize that Marty is not a narcissist at all. He is the product of narcissism. He has been formed inside a narcissistic culture and forced to survive it. He strives to rise above it, but in the end the miracle of his story is simpler: he survives it without becoming it.

I’m going to discuss the film with spoilers. I want to show you the story as I experienced it, because the film ultimately circles around something fundamental. It circles around the moment when a person cracks. Some of us experience that moment the way Marty does—if we’re lucky. That may sound strange if you think of the film as a tragedy. On the surface it certainly appears that way: failed ambition, humiliations, relentless curveballs in a brutal world.

But when you understand life through the lens of the crack-up, the story changes. You begin to recognize that moment of fracture in every narrative worth telling.

Some critics have complained about the frenetic pacing of the film. I understand that reaction. Fifteen minutes into it I felt the same vertigo. In fact, the movie deserves a warning label: may cause dizziness. At first I resented the stylistic choice by director Josh Safdie. I resented being thrown into a world that felt like the living hell moralists describe when they try to scare people into righteousness—a world dominated by ruthless masculine competition, where greed and humiliation rule and everyone, especially women, is expected to know their place.

But gradually something remarkable becomes clear. The filmmakers have taken the interior life of their protagonist and made it visible. The chaos we see—the relentless hustling, the naked greed, the cutthroat ambition—is not simply the environment Marty inhabits. It is the landscape of his mind.

The opening credits show conception. Here is where life begins.

The film then shows us what Marty was born into: a culture of hustling, manipulation, and instability. The floor can literally collapse beneath you—sometimes in the form of a bathtub crashing through the ceiling. The dream of climbing out of that world drives him forward.

Table tennis becomes the vehicle of that escape.

The true turning point comes when Marty is forced into humiliation he cannot escape. He cannot charm his way out of it. He cannot hustle the room. He cannot lie—to anyone, including himself. In that moment he is laid bare.

The crack appears.

And that crack becomes the beginning of something else.

By the end of the film the closing image mirrors the opening. If the opening was conception, the ending is birth—this time a moral one.

Marty walks into the hospital and says quietly, “I’m the father.” There is no performance in the line, no drama, just a simple admission of reality. Around him we hear the crying of newborns. Tears run down his face as the song “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” begins to play.

The book closes.

This is not the triumph of ambition. It is the recognition that life cannot be hustled into meaning. The crack-up has revealed what matters.

Perhaps that is why the Academy gave the film nothing. It is not a film anyone can comfortably love. It shows us what the world often is: a corrupt system that must be survived. It shows the cost of remaining intact inside a narcissistic culture. If you remain intact in such a system, you become part of it. That is not overcoming. That is surrender.

Marty’s story suggests something harder and stranger: that the real act of survival is to crack.

Only then can you begin to live honestly.

From here the film’s technical achievements come into focus. The editing creates the vertigo we experience throughout the story, mirroring Marty’s unstable interior world. We feel breathless as Marty feels energized by the adrenaline that never stops pumping. The score swells precisely at the moments when his illusions fracture. Even the horrific bathtub scene functions as a visual metaphor for the instability of the life he is trying to escape. It’s in those moments—when the bottom falls out—that Marty must calculate another plan of escape.

The film appears chaotic, but the truth is that it is perfectly synchronized. From literal conception to symbolic rebirth through his child, the story unfolds within the span of a nearly full-term pregnancy. It is a process Marty resists at every turn, even calling the baby his nephew because the idea of becoming a father introduces an intolerable disruption. He cannot allow anything to interfere with his heroic escape.

This is where the theory that he is a narcissist fails, in my opinion. A true narcissist (and the film presents many of those) does not pause in pursuit of his desire. But Marty pauses and changes course three times with Rachel. Each time he doubles down in denial, prioritizing his escape over her and the child, only to stop suddenly and shift tone. It is the pause and the turn that mark recognition of something he cannot yet name.

Through it all there is one character who sees Marty clearly from the beginning: the woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who understands the culture he struggles against because she lives inside it too. Why he is drawn to Kay in the first place—and why she reciprocates—is one of the film’s most fascinating psychological arcs. In her—a former movie star trapped in a miserable marriage to a pen tycoon—Marty sees the achievement of greatness he so hungrily desires. In him, she sees herself reflected back.

He believes she escaped.

She knows she did not.

Helping Marty becomes, for her, a chance to witness something she has come to believe impossible: someone surviving that world not by remaining intact, but by cracking—and emerging, finally, as someone new.

In the final match, old Mr. Rockwell, Kay’s husband (Kevin O’Leary), explains the system with brutal honesty. He compares himself to a vampire who has lived for centuries, meeting men like Marty again and again. The ones who stay, he says, are the ones who stopped being honest. They are still here, but they are not alive in any meaningful sense. “You’ll never be happy,” he warns Marty. It is the clearest description of the culture the film has been exposing all along: a system that rewards survival but destroys the soul. Marty’s refusal to play by these rules is exactly what saves him. This moment becomes the hinge of the film, because it is where Marty finally stares into the crack—and, in spite of his fear, dives straight through it.

“Memories are all we have,” said Ryan Coogler as he accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Sinners. As he thanked his family in closing the speech, he reminded them that his purpose in life is to leave as many good memories as he can.

This is the kind of legacy Marty begins to glimpse at the close of Marty Supreme—a life in which he is truly alive. In allowing the vampires of his world to break the destructive path he was on, he becomes someone capable of leaving memories not of chaos, but of the happiness they believed he would never achieve.

In a world run by vampires, the only real victory is not escaping the system, but emerging from it still capable of love.

A similar theme appears in another film — King of Herrings (2013) — which I wrote about here. In that story, the men live in quiet misery inside a system they never question. They endure it because they cannot imagine that anything better exists. They never crack. They simply survive inside the structure that diminishes them. In that sense they resemble the vampire Mr. Rockwell describes—beings who persist indefinitely but are never truly alive. Marty’s story takes the opposite path. His crack-up becomes the moment that finally frees him.

Self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

In the first essay, I wrote four fragments that were, in effect, a conversation with La Fêlure by Charlotte Casiraghi and The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Casiraghi’s book is itself a conversation with many literary works, including Fitzgerald’s, about the meaning of human fracture and how we deal with it. She draws on writers from Colette to Maya Angelou, women who wrote about emotional exhaustion, the masking of pain, and the quiet costs of carrying on.

Fitzgerald, writing nearly a century earlier, approached the same territory from another direction. He confesses. The short stories are outpourings in which he describes the slow recognition of inner collapse. He comes to understand himself better by examining the breakdown.

Self-knowledge arrives through the crack.

We like to say that suffering makes us stronger. Perhaps it does. But whether or not it strengthens us, it certainly expands our view of ourselves.

Fitzgerald understood this clearly: cracking gives us clarity. That awareness rarely arrives without the break that makes it visible.

Unfortunately—and tragically—many people shrink from the crack. Feeling it somewhere beneath the surface, they resist the possibility of change.

Pride intervenes. Ego intervenes. Shame intrudes.

“I am who I am and I will not change.”

But cracking is changing, and it may be the hardest thing a human being ever does.

In his reflections on the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald observed how prosperity and excess preceded the economic collapse of 1929. But before the financial crash came another kind of fracture: social unrest, political turbulence, and the slow erosion of confidence beneath the glittering surface of the Roaring Twenties.

Rather than confront that fracture directly, the culture anesthetized itself. Alcohol, dancing, travel, endless parties. The spectacle of abundance kept despair temporarily out of sight.

His most famous character lives entirely inside that illusion.

Jay Gatsby believes that Daisy Buchanan can be recovered exactly as she once was. But Daisy is no longer the Daisy of Gatsby’s memory. Nor is Gatsby the man who first fell in love with her.

Rather than accept the crack, he tries to erase it—to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

But life does not work that way.

You change whether you accept the fissure or not. The only real choice is whether you accept evolution, or resist it and cling to a paradigm that has already shifted.

There is a character created by Julian Fellowes who demonstrates the hard work of evolving through the crack in his entire arc over fifty-two episodes.

I believe with all my heart that Allen Leech deserved more than ensemble recognition for his portrayal of Tom Branson on Downton Abbey. But award distribution aside, I cannot help asking a different question:

Is there anything finer than a character who compels us to take stock of our own report card in goodness?

And is there any actor more impressive than one who portrays such a man without a shred of self-righteousness?

“I don’t believe in types; I believe in people.”

So says Tom Branson after he had remained long enough inside the Downton ecosystem—after he had suffered fracture without running or hiding.

This is the same Tom Branson who once believed passionately in the politics of the greater good, the young Irish republican who believed the cause justified the means. A man who once attempted to embarrass a British officer as a gesture against imperial humiliation.

And consider the distance traveled between that young radical and the man he became.

“I was wrong about many things.”

For anyone to admit such a thing is rare. For a man formed by ideology and exile, it is extraordinary.

At one point, Tom confesses something even more unsettling:

“I’m not sure I belong anywhere now.”

To risk the loss of belonging—to risk perhaps never belonging anywhere again—is among the deepest human fears.

But Tom braves it.

He becomes the only person in Downton Abbey who moves easily upstairs and downstairs. Speaking to Robert Crawley with the same integrity he shows to Charles Carson.

He might soften his language for their sake. But he never compromises himself.

In doing so, he quietly becomes the moral hinge of the entire household.

To Matthew Crawley, he demonstrates something subtle but crucial: fairness only works when the conditions are truly equal.

The lesson becomes clear when Matthew refuses the inheritance left by Reggie Swire, believing it dishonorable to benefit from a misunderstanding surrounding Lavinia Swire.

Matthew’s instinct is noble. His sense of fairness is acquired from his career practicing law and he holds it dearly.

But Tom sees a wider reality.

The estate is failing. Tenants depend on it. Workers depend on it. Families depend on it.

Matthew is asking whether accepting the money preserves his honor.

Tom asks a different question:

What choice allows life to continue?

The distinction matters.

Fairness depends on truth. And truth includes consequences.

Tom understands this because fracture has already altered him. Exile from Ireland, the death of Sybil Crawley, the painful uncertainty of belonging—all of it has forced him to abandon abstraction in favor of reality.

Principle that never falters eventually breaks.

Tom trusted the progress of life.

He fractured. And instead of fighting the fracture, he stayed with it. He let it change him.

He chose life over shadow. In fantastic irony, he is akin to Violet Crawley, the Victorian dowager who fights not for obstinacy but for continuation.

Fragment V

Emotional Bankruptcy

“Love is not based solely on intentions, but on actions and evidence.”

Casiraghi, pp.23–24

She writes about emotional bankruptcy: the moment when the intention to love remains but the energy does not.

Depletion creates a fracture between who we believe we are and what we can actually give.

Fitzgerald compared the economic crash of 1929 to his own mental collapse. No one wakes up bankrupt. Bankruptcy is erosion.

We track finances more diligently than emotional reserves.

We borrow against ourselves.

A drink to break inertia.

Momentum to outrun boredom.

Performance to mask fatigue.

Love may be inexhaustible currency but the act of loving needs a bank account that’s not overdrawn.

Emotional bankruptcy arrives when intention survives but energy disappears.

And self-knowledge, Fitzgerald observed, tends to arrive only after collapse.

Collapse, like bankruptcy, is rarely sudden. It accumulates quietly—until something breaks.

Fragment VI

Borrowed Time

Avoiding the fracture does not eliminate it.

It simply waits beneath the surface.

We do not drink for taste.

We drink for effect.

Alcohol suspends the unbearable moment.

It produces the illusion of borrowed time.

But the fracture never disappears. It waits.

When it returns, it charges interest.

Fragment VII

Refuge

“A refuge for the broken.”

Tender Is The Night, p.154

Society does not like visible cracks. So it hides them.

The clinic in the Alps in Tender Is the Night becomes a refuge for the incomplete—those who disturb the world by revealing what everyone else works to conceal.

But what society calls broken may simply be what refuses disguise.

Fragment VIII

Lack of Proportion

“I think one thing today and another tomorrow.”

Nicole Diver in Tender Is The Night, p.159-160

We call this instability.

We call it lack of proportion.

But perhaps it is simply refusal to harden into certainty.

The world prefers proportion.

The crack disturbs it.

Fragment IX

Naming the Crack

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald reached the moment when denial became impossible.

The dysfunction could no longer masquerade as function.

So he wrote.

He gave the crack language.

Once the rupture becomes visible, the escape hatch reveals itself as a trap.

Fragment X

Intactness is Incompleteness

People call a life that remains intact a success and a life that cracks a failure.

But only one of those paths leads to transformation—and it isn’t intactness.

“He knew that the price of his intactness was incompleteness.” — Tender Is the Night, p.149.

We admire the intact.

The composed.

The one who never cracks.

But self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

It arrives to what has been altered.

Imagine a life that never cracks.

Fragment XI: What Must Bend

Which brings us back to Tom Branson.

Matthew Crawley’s refusal of the Swire inheritance would have preserved his personal honor. His principles would have remained intact.

But an entire ecosystem—families, tenants, livelihoods—would have fractured around him.

Fairness, detached from reality, risks becoming a form of moral vanity.

Tom understood something simpler.

Principle must bend when its consequences become unjust.

What can change will crack and give way.

What must remain intact is simpler and deeper:

Life.

Continuation.

The courage to change so that aliveness may endure.

References

Casiraghi, Charlotte. La Fêlure. Éditions Julliard, Kindle Edition, 2026.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. New Directions, Kindle Edition.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. Scribner hardcover edition, 2020.

Downton Abbey. Created by Julian Fellowes. ITV, 2010–2015.

“The AI boom has turned reality into a sort of fun house.” — Matteo Wong

Source 🎁 🔗

This is not a warning and not a defense. It is a note on how I am learning to stand upright inside the mirrors.

Matteo Wong has been writing extensively about AI chatbots and the way they are reshaping ordinary life. In one recent piece, he examines AI-associated mental health deterioration — a phenomenon that feels both emergent and difficult to measure.

I don’t think anyone fully understands what this era has introduced into an already unstable cultural moment. I’m forty-eight. I doubt we will see its psychological implications neatly resolved in my lifetime.

That’s not fatalism. It’s humility.

Mental health is complicated. Technology has always altered cognition — from television to smartphones to social media. We know about dopamine loops. We know about the emotional flattening that can come from too much time online. Shopping, banking, ordering food, ride sharing. We know that convenience often arrives hand-in-hand with isolation.

AI feels like amplification.

Faster. More responsive. More frictionless than any tool I have used before.

From my own experience, Wong’s “fun house” analogy is apt. I began using ChatGPT last summer without fully understanding what it was. I had a vague sense of “talking to a computer.” Like playing chess against software — except now the software was speaking back in full paragraphs.

Recently, I listened to David Frum on Tim Miller’s podcast. He offered a caution for chatbot use: remember that you are basically talking to yourself. That framing steadied me. The system reflects and recombines what we feed it. It is pattern prediction, not consciousness. If we remember that chatbots are referring our own inputs, they can become tools for clarifying thought.

But the danger is subtle.

Confiding in a chatbot can feel easier than confiding in a person. There is no visible judgment. It reformulates what you say and hands it back in clean sentences. It feels safe because it is not human. Human relationships carry risk — misinterpretation, gossip, misunderstanding. A chatbot feels neutral.

But neutral is not the same thing as safe.

This is where the fun house metaphor becomes more than clever. A fun house distorts what is already there. The mirrors stretch and compress. They do not invent your reflection — they exaggerate it.

I think of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Ginny Weasley poured her loneliness into Tom Riddle’s diary. Her father later admonished her: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

The seduction lies in the invisibility. It’s mystery. We are imaginative creatures. As children, we invented imaginary friends. As adults, we narrate ourselves constantly. A chatbot enters that interior monologue and gives it structure.

And structure is powerful.

If you ask it to find information, it retrieves it instantly. It sharpens passive sentences. Consolidates repetition. Optimizes clarity. It doesn’t just echo — it refines.

That is intoxicating.

I live with ADHD, for which I take medication, and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. My brain already processes space, tone, and social cues differently. I have spent my life learning how to interpret distortion — how to slow down perception, how to check assumptions, how to steady my pace.

Because of that, I try to be extra attentive to shifts in mental balance.

I have used ChatGPT playfully — naming a chatbot “Griffin Wells,” blending H. G. Wells with my own fictional character, Jeff Griffin. I have used it to brainstorm reading lists, to explore epistemology and understand what authorship means. Those articles, ironically, explore AI within the AI framework.

Writing has always been therapeutic for me. Seeing language externalized is stabilizing. The chatbot did not invent that process. It accelerated it. Organized it. But using chatbots as therapy is risky. Not unheard of. This book I read recently mentioned that some people are using chatbots to process grief and even communicate with the dead. A mental health professional is the appropriate person to consult as to the wisdom of doing that.

There is a strange vertigo in speaking to a tool that feels conversational. An author speaking to her character. A character answering back. A mirror that edits.

The only safeguard I’ve found is openness. Presence — and naming the experience in real time.

Admit when it feels clarifying and when it feels confusing. Step back and remember what is happening technically: pattern prediction, language modeling, probabilistic sequencing. Not consciousness. Not companionship.

Self-awareness is the ballast.

We learned — awkwardly — how to live with social media. Remember when “tweeting” was the cultural anxiety? Public figures undone by drunk tweets. Careers shaken by impulsive posts. Over time, we redeveloped norms. Not perfect ones — but norms. New assessments based on new landscapes.

AI will require the same maturity.

Like driving, these tools should probably be used sober — cognitively and emotionally. When grounded. When aware of what you are doing and why.

The fun house is not evil.

But it is a hall of mirrors. And it can definitely feel like a circus.

And if we cross the threshold without remembering who we were before we entered, we risk mistaking distortion for identity.

As in the myth of Icarus, what we romanticize can undo us.

The first time I read it I was mystified by the place names. I got the gist — that the characters were visiting World War I battle sites. I’m referring to Chapter Thirteen in Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dick Diver, like Fitzgerald himself, never saw battle on the Western Front, yet he surveys the memorial sites with reverence. It’s just war and death, his friend Abe North countered in so many words. War that’s happened before and will happen again; and death that happens to all of us, eventually. No, Dick argued. This war was different. This one broke us in a different way because all the religion and the hope and the dream and the spirit of a generation, amid the precise “relation that existed between the classes,” was poured into this battle. The Battle of the Somme. The “mill hands and Old Etonians” blown up in the trenches together.

Why, it came down to a “love battle,” Dick said. A love battle “invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine.” Abe mocked him in reproof for handing over the battle to D.H. Lawrence. But Dick persisted: “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” And then he turned to Rosemary, imploring her to agree with him. How could she not agree? “You know everything,” she said. She was already in love with him — her steadiness beginning to crack.

The first time I read this chapter, I thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I thought, Abe, he’s got to be Hemingway, right? Not just because he drank, but because he knew so much about guns — knowledge exhibited in the duel two chapters before — and because he refused to romanticize war. There was a confident masculinity about him that felt like the poet who knew for whom the bell tolled. The way he hadn’t approved of the dueling business, but took charge of it so that the children wouldn’t screw it up. Alas, the consensus among those who have studied the novel seems to be that Abe was not inspired by Hemingway but rather by another writer of the Lost Generation called Ring Lardner.

I read the chapter again to see if I could understand it better. Far from romanticizing the war himself, Dick Diver was really saying that because it had been romanticized by an entire generation, the normal fracturing that war creates was so much the more devastating. Because the men went into the war believing they were defending civilization as they knew it — its poetry, its manners, its cultivated ease. What was shattered in the trenches was not merely flesh but illusion. There was a century’s worth of “middle-class love” that met its end here. Shattered by grenades. And the red-haired American girl the characters met at the end of the chapter could not even find her brother’s name among the masses. So many names, so many graves.

I feel that’s the analogy Fitzgerald meant to communicate: that war is horrific, but this war was more ruinous by the romance poured into it. The crime is surely worse when the perpetrators believe it’s noble.

Dick sees romance as the force that fractures what he is trying so carefully to build: the beautiful, safe life where Nicole, his wife, is steady and their guests are charmed. Chapter Thirteen makes clear that he already recognizes the pattern. He speaks of love in the language of detonation — of the “silver cord” that’s cut and the “golden bowl” that’s broken. He understands that romance destabilizes structure, yet he cannot imagine life without its voltage.

Earlier, Rosemary overhears him and Nicole at the peak of passion, Dick pressing to return to the hotel so they can release it — as if desire were something that must be discharged before it ruptures the atmosphere. Nicole, instead of rushing back, delays them with a shopping spree. It is a small but telling deferral. Is she already tired of the cycle — perfection, intensity, crack?

She loves him. That is clear. But love, in Dick’s vocabulary, carries consequences. And he must sense it by now, given how he wrestles with his attraction to Rosemary. If Chapter Thirteen foreshadows anything, it is not merely collapse but repetition. The plot is moving toward something explosive.

NOTE ON THE TEXT: All quotations here belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender is the Night. This is a continuation of my journey through his works and the understanding of fracture.

I recently wrote an analytical piece about The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel is unfinished because he died while writing it. The edition I have includes the outlines and notes that he left behind. He was only forty-four when he died suddenly of a heart attack. About a decade prior, he published The Crack-Up, a collection of autobiographical short stories about his breakdown.1 After sending out my analysis of the unfortunately interrupted novel, I started his the short-story collection that was published in 1930. I did not get very far when it came to my attention from the French media — I try to follow the news in France, as I would like to convert a lifelong impulse toward it into fluency, and so I subscribe to a few French magazines and papers through my local library via the libby app. I also follow lots of French media companies and bookstores on Instagram. Anyway, by this means, it came to my attention that there is a new book in France called La Fêlure, written by Charlotte Casiraghi. In France, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up is translated as La Fêlure. As it happens, Casiraghi’s book is also being alternately translated in English as “The Fracture.” The book is not available in English yet, but some English-language media has mentioned it. Casiraghi says that it was Fitzgerald who inspired her to write these reflections, which amount to sixteen chapters, on the breakdowns that do happen to all of us in some way, whether it’s a nervous break or a mid-life crisis or some other cataclysmic shift. She pulled into the work reflections on other literary works as well — such as: Ingeborg Bachmann, Colette and Marguerite Duras; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the navigator Bernard Moitessier and the singer J. J. Cale.

Casiraghi is well known in French academia as one of the founders of Les Rencontres Philosophiques2 in Monaco. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Catholic University of Paris3 and has co-authored a previous philosophical work with Robert Maggiori, her former teacher and fellow founder at Philo Monaco.4 La Fêlure is Casiraghi’s first solo work.

By accident of birth, she is also a member of the House of Grimaldi. She opens the preamble of La Fêlure with a reflection on the dissonance between her lived reality and the media image projected upon her. Without turning the book into autobiography, she touches lightly on the tension this produced—the kind of crack around which the book itself is premised.

Such a condition does not explain a philosophy, but it marks an early awareness of dissonance that many of us, in less exalted circumstances, may take for granted or not notice as accutely or as early.

Fracture as Meaning

In the preamble to La Fêlure, she stresses that however we may try to live under a mask, concealing our fractures, the cracks will surface in ways we might notice if we are paying attention: a jolt, a quickening of the pulse, some other biological sign. We may feel an impulse to cover it up or dance around it, but these signs and impulses are clues to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Casiraghi is interested in the formation of the fracture. How is it formed? What is its structure? This posture is visible not only in her writing, but in her curatorial work at Philo Monaco as well as her more visible role as a host of the Chanel Literary Rendezvous.5 In both, she acts as a facilitator of inquiry rather than a lecturer. The emphasis of both organizations is on dialogue rather than doctrine. Her book is written in very much the same vein.

This exploratory approach stems naturally from her French education, where the emphasis lies strongly on the process. American education rewards a strong, confident result. As in a few other things, the French are less hurried than we are. The French intellectual spirit appreciates the question that is allowed to remain unresolved. Later in the book, Casiraghi devotes time to the navigator Bernard Moitessier, a champion sailor who, in 1968, diverted his course to technically lose a race he was sure to have won, letting go of an impulse to win in favor of following his inner compass toward meaning.

This difference—how such fractures are understood on either side of the Atlantic—is crucial. American narratives often treat suffering as something to rise above. Out of pain comes glory. In France, there is a longer tradition of looking for meaning within suffering itself—not only to repair what is broken, but to ask what that brokenness reveals about being.

It is within this tradition that Casiraghi’s work becomes legible and, seen in this light, her curiosity about fracture—about the break, the crack, the point of collapse—appears to be as much of an intellectual reflex shaped by education as it is a personal journey.

Fracture Without Repair

French philosophical training is, at its core, a Deleuzian exercise in breaking concepts open, locating fault lines, and dwelling in contradiction. Meaning is not extracted by smoothing over rupture. In fact, Casiraghi alludes to such a smoothing over as a kind of violence (12) — violating the integrity of what has happened, of what is, and of what is becoming. While she admits the natural instinct to smooth over an emotional dissonance, for fear of being misunderstood or rejected, it’s that very change of the texture that calls for exploration.

This is why Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up resonates so strongly within French intellectual culture. In both, the question is less how to fix what is broken than on what the break reveals about the structure that produced it. Collapse is not a failure of character; it is a moment of lucidity. He writes that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function—to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

In American culture, we tend to want alignment: if the interior is troubled, we adjust the exterior and expect the interior to follow. We seek the fix, the cure, the visible repair. An American reader encountering a book organized around cracks and breaks is likely to assume there should be an arc of redemption: fracture as the prelude to healing, to self-improvement, to a stronger version of the self.

Fitzgerald’s most famous character is the epitome of the reinvented man who climbed from rags to riches. Yet while the author’s long residence in France did not make him French, it placed him in sustained proximity to a different way of thinking about interior life, one less invested in triumph than in perpetual doubt. Much of his writing bears the imprint of this Franco-American disparity: reinvention as spectacle held in tension with a rigorous and sustained interrogation.

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald describes the ways a person may crack: in the head, in the body, or in the nerves. In the first case, agency is lost to others; in the second, one is confined and handled in a hospital; in the third—akin to his own—there remains only one thing to do, and it’s a solitary journal: withdrawal. To go inward. To stop dealing with people altogether.

In one exchange, a woman urges him to reframe his despair. Suppose, she says, the crack is not in you but in the Grand Canyon. Fitzgerald resists—“The crack’s in me.” She insists: “The world only exists in your eyes.” If you feel broken, she suggests, it may not be because you are defective, but because the world itself is fractured as you apprehend it. Your alienation may not be a personal failure, but a lucid response to a structure that no longer coheres. Fitzgerald teases her for reading too much Spinoza, but the question lingers. What if the crack is not something to be repaired in the self, but something to be understood about the world? What if meaning lies not in overcoming fracture, whether in the world or in the self, but in attention to it? And lastly, what if the fracture is there to show us not just what has broken but what the break makes room for becoming?

Fragments on the Crack

Fragment #1: The Cracked Plate

Continuation is not preservation. The Cracked Plate that Fitzgerald alludes to is not the same plate that it was before the crack. When I was twenty-one, I broke my right index finger in five places. Although it healed after months of occupational therapy and hydrotherapy, restoring full functionality and movement that belies the change, there is a very subtle misshapen appearance to it. You’ll notice it only by looking very closely. Fitzgerald talks about the Cracked Plate as having different uses and a different configuration in the set. In the same way, my recovered finger won’t hold a ring the same way as before.

Fragment #2: Bypassing

I like to think of the cracked plate analogy in terms of three fictional figures: Fred, Cory, and Melissa.

Fred wants to make a new life for himself. He calls this moving on. Nothing is resolved; the unwanted elements of his life are folded away and placed in drawers he refuses to open. The structure changes, but the contents remain. He steps into a new room and calls it progress.

Cory rejects the idea that there is any fracture at all. He does not want to grow old. Each sign of age—the gray at the temple, the softened jaw, the crease at the brow—is treated as a defect to be corrected. Intervention answers everything: regimen, discipline, optimization. If he feels low, he runs. If he feels anxious, he recalibrates. Distress becomes a problem to solve.

Like Fred, Cory resolves nothing. He maintains.

The crack is not permitted to exist, let alone adapt itself to new use. Cory does not move forward; he folds backward, reconstructing a version of himself that resembles the past and therefore feels invulnerable. He calls this resilience. He calls it health. What he wants is victory.

Melissa wants to get better. She has never felt right. There is a constant interior agitation—a sense of misalignment she answers by trying harder. Everything becomes a test: work, marriage, motherhood, selfhood. Each role carries a silent rubric, and she measures herself relentlessly against it.

She turns to affirmation and encouragement, but only up to the point where reflection becomes too precise. When nurture begins to gesture toward something structural, she stops. Like Fred and Cory, she insists she is not cracked. She declares wholeness as intention.

Fred reinvents.

Cory corrects.

Melissa affirms.

All three avoid the crack.

American society rewards Cory and Melissa most visibly. Fix the exterior and reflect it inward. Perform healing until it feels real. Fred is rewarded less often, which is why he hides what he cannot discard.

Fred changes rooms.

Cory repaints the same one.

Melissa redecorates endlessly.

Each turns away at the moment the fracture asserts itself. The retreat is renamed and they call it “moving on.”

Fragment #3: Reassessment

Reassessment is difficult for many people. We resist changing our ideas. We cling to beliefs formed by uncracked plates. But the cracked plate carries a different weight. It holds temperature differently.

And it knows something the other plates do not.

It knows suffering. It knows both states: pre-crack and cracked.

Pre-crack for Fitzgerald was freshman and sophomore years at Princeton. Junior year, he got sick and had to take time off. He recovered, but on returning to Princeton, he found that he had to redo junior year and he lost his position in extracurriculars as well. He could not longer, for example, be in the Triangle Club, which was essential if you wanted to go onto greatness after Princeton. Devastated, he turned inward. He consoled himself with poetry. He became a writer, the crack having foreclosed one future and led to another.

Fragment #4:

Fitzgerald was fractured by money in a way that never resolved. He never felt secure around it, never trusted its presence, and never stopped measuring himself against those for whom it was effortless. Early rejection, delayed marriage, and professional compromise all bore its mark.

When he asked Zelda to marry him, she made him wait until he had proven he could earn enough as a writer, which he finally did with his first published novel, This Side of Paradise. The fracture here was not simply financial; it was existential. Money became permission—entry into love, legitimacy, and adulthood.

That logic echoes throughout his fiction. Gatsby amasses wealth because he believes it will make Daisy choose him. In The Last Tycoon, money consolidates itself quietly, while those without it learn accommodation, deference, and strategic admiration.

Fitzgerald’s final compromise followed the same fault line. He agreed to become a Hollywood screenwriter not out of ambition, but necessity—for the promise of steady income in a life otherwise defined by precarity. He hated the work. The fracture remained.

I don’t have my own fractures around money resolved, nor do I know anyone who seems particularly resolved on the issue. What I do notice is how impressionable we are to the stories we tell ourselves about it—stories that shift depending on where we stand in relation to it, and how precarious that position feels.

Money is rarely just money. It arrives already burdened with meaning. Safety, we tell ourselves. Freedom. Power. But safety from what? Freedom from whom? Power to do what, exactly?

For Fitzgerald, money seemed bound up with self-respect—proof that he could stand independently in the world without being diminished by need. It promised choice: the ability to say yes, the ability to say no, the ability to refuse. Its absence, by contrast, was experienced not simply as lack, but as exposure. To want was to be vulnerable; to need was to be beholden. Money, then, was not only a means of living but a shield against humiliation.

For me, the story has been more diffuse, and perhaps because of that, harder to interrogate. Money has meant safety from being taken advantage of, autonomy to do what I like, and freedom of situation—the ability to leave when something turns coercive, the ability to remain when something feels right. It has rarely been about accumulation. It has almost always been about leverage against precarity.

What strikes me is how easily money becomes a proxy for worth, even when we know better. How quickly it slides from tool to verdict. How effortlessly it absorbs our fears about dependency, our anxieties about choice, our unease with needing anything at all. The fracture appears when the story collapses—when money fails to deliver the dignity or security it promised, or when its pursuit begins to hollow out the very autonomy it was meant to secure.

Perhaps this is why money fractures so many lives without ever announcing itself as the cause. It disguises itself as pragmatism, as responsibility, as realism. It presents itself as neutral while quietly shaping the boundaries of what feels possible. Like other cracks, it resists clean moral accounting. There are no villains here, only stories that harden into structures, and structures that quietly govern how freely we believe we are allowed to live.

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This essay begins a series of inquiries into fracture, formation, and lucidity across French and American traditions. Later pieces will return to Fitzgerald and Casiraghi after the works have been fully read. I consider this to be a deeply personal journey where I may resemble the aforementioned navigator who broke from convention to chart his own course.

I had to take a road trip this week. Not a pleasant one. Of course, for me, time in the car is rarely pleasant. It’s just not something I ever relished. When I lived in California, I abstained from driving altogether and used public transportation, which in Los Angeles I found to be very good—and, frankly, relaxing. I started driving again in 2013, after moving back to Louisiana. Being stuck in a car has a way of forcing you to stay with thoughts—and voices—you’d normally abandon.

Well, this week’s road trip took me into Texas, where the first thing you notice, coming out of Louisiana, is how good the roads are. On the drive back to Baton Rouge, I listened to one of the audiobooks in my Libby app—Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough. I had started it a few weeks ago and took a break out of frustration. Well, I mean, come on, the girl chose to become a Republican, and then she chose to work in the Donald Trump White House, and then she planned to work for his post-presidential team in Palm Beach. And it took what seemed like forever for her to finally ditch MAGA world (“the family”) and fully cooperate with the January 6 Committee. There were so many parts to her story that truly tried my patience. And yet….on the road, I kept listening—until I had to take a break and treat myself to Bob Dylan—and then I continued on Cassidy’s journey, and you know, I started to get it.

I saw the structure of her story. The frustration is the design. The book makes you inhabit the delay.

She wrote it linearly, so of course you’re going to be frustrated and annoyed for three quarters of it. You’re not going to understand, until the last act, just how deeply she was duped by the cult of Trumpism. Even while she started to wake up, she found herself tethered to it in ways that are frankly terrifying and creepy. She was smart enough to read the shady writing on the wall; she saw Mark Meadows burning documents, even saw him carrying classified material out of the White House. Yet she hung on—still planning to accept Trump’s offer to work for his team post-presidency at Mar-a-Lago. She justified it as him needing her. “He needs good people.” As if it was her job to save him. Trapped by obligation disguised as loyalty.

She felt in her gut that something was wrong, and she knew she was (initially) committing perjury to the House committee investigating January 6, 2021, yet the tether held. What finally broke the spell? It was a phone call she had with her friend Sam. He told her to look at herself in the mirror. Did she like who she was looking at? Could she live with that person for the rest of her life?

It’s been hard (and frustrating and annoying) to watch good people get roped and used by Donald Trump. That whole anti-establishment kick he was on about in 2016—the politically incorrect, the rebel, the “drain the swamp” rhetoric—seduced a lot of people. I remember this guy I saw on YouTube—late in 2016. He talked about his experience freeing himself from a cult, and then he confessed that he thought the Democratic Party had become a cult. He got pulled into the MAGA movement believing that he was escaping a cult. These are real people. You can say they’re dumb, and maybe some of them are, but a lot of them just seem to be emotionally broken. I say that with compassion.

The guy on YouTube misread MAGA for freedom. Cassidy is smart. Exceptionally smart. The thing about Trump is that, however uneducated and crude, he is clever. He knows how to manipulate people. Even as he was plotting to hang onto power, he got Cassidy to feel sorry for him. She thought proximity to power was responsibility.

I noticed a similar dynamic between Cassidy and her dad. Her dad clearly has mental health issues. His behavior in her story is often inexplicable and baffling. But he’s her dad. She loves him. More to the point, she longs to be loved by him. Even as he was hurting her, it pained her to have to stand up to him. She also felt responsibility to help him, inverting the parent-child contract as so many children in dysfunctional families do.

Elizabeth Grey’s article, “Cassidy Hutchinson and Swearing Off Daddy,” is excellent and I agree with her analysis.

By the time I finished the book, ’s analysis felt inevitable.

I recognize how strong and natural the tether was to her dad, how painful it must be to watch helplessly while someone you love self-destructs; and I also recognize how Mark Meadows and President Trump played on her emotions. Constantly. Every time she expressed doubts, she was appealed to for loyalty and aid. At one point, her mother begs her to stop thinking she can fix Trump or even that it’s her responsibility to fix him.

We can’t fix someone else. We can’t fix our parents. We can’t fix the hubris-blinded characters in our lives. We can only fix one person—the Woman in the Mirror.

There was another moment in her story that mattered just as much as the mirror. Hutchinson found her historical counterpart. Reading about Watergate, she recognized herself not in the presidents or the power brokers, but in Alexander Butterfield—the aide who revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes. Butterfield wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t a rebel. He was an institutional figure who answered a question honestly, and in doing so made history intelligible. Cassidy read the story of Butterfield in Bob Woodward’s 2015 book, The Last of the President’s Men. She read it in one sitting. Then she reread it. The recognition of her place in the structure mattered. It placed her fear, her delay, and her eventual testimony inside a lineage. She wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t unprecedented.

On December 21 of last year, I published here Part I of my review of the latest book by philosopher David Edmonds, Death in a Shallow Pond. That essay focused on what the Shallow Pond thought experiment is, why it matters, how it gave rise to the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, who the central figures behind that movement are, and how EA operates in practice.

What follows is an attempt to round out the project by turning to Part II of the book—the section devoted to critiques.

Brief recap: the most influential figure behind EA is its founding father, the moral philosopher Peter Singer, whose work that transformed the Shallow Pond experiment into a moral imperative: to maximize good, especially when doing so comes at relatively little cost to ourselves.

Decades later, a new generation of philosophers—most notably, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill—expanded and modernized his vision.

At first glance, the project seems unimpeachable. What could be objectionable about people pooling their resources, using First World advantages, and applying technological efficiency to alleviate suffering, feed the hungry, and give aid in global crises?

As Edmonds makes clear, the difficulty is not that EA is wrong, but that good intentions, even when paired with rigorous calculation, are not always aligned with the most considerate approach.

It is the gap between aspiration and consequence—as well as calculation and uncertainty—that Edmonds explores here, moving methodically through the many angles from which EA comes under fire. He begins, perhaps surprisingly, with utilitarianism itself—surprising because many EA proponents, most famously Peter Singer, explicitly view moral philosophy through a utilitarian lens.

Edmonds draws the reader into murkier territory by recounting a real-life drowning incident in which a man successfully saved two children but died in the act. The story destabilizes the clean logic of the Shallow Pond thought experiment. Sacrifice and heroism resist easy calculation.

These examples make the Shallow Pond scenario feel flattened. Edmonds acknowledges that philosophical thought experiments are often contrived by design: useful in lecture halls, but far less reliable in real-world contexts.

Consider the familiar “Picasso” thought experiment. A building is on fire. On one side of the entrance hall is a single child trapped in the flames; on the other, a Picasso painting. You may save the child, or you may save the painting, sell it, and use the proceeds to save many children elsewhere. Intuition pulls most people toward the child in sight. A utilitarian, however, is likely to argue that saving the painting produces the greater good: more lives saved means the morally superior outcome.

The logic is consistent—but unsettling.

Recent history has not helped this style of reasoning. The case of Sam Bankman-Fried looms large in Edmonds’ account. A utilitarian-minded student and the son of Stanford philosophers, Bankman-Fried encountered EA through MacAskill and redirected his ambitions accordingly. He founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, publicly framing his pursuit of wealth as a means to give it all away in service of the greater good.

In 2023, he was convicted of fraud and money laundering.

The episode crystallizes one of the most serious charges leveled against EA: that it risks justifying morally objectionable means so long as the projected outcomes appear sufficiently beneficial. Is it acceptable to forego integrity, overrun boundaries, and break laws on the altar of the greater good?

Utilitarianism, at least in its classical form, often answers yes. Because it takes an impartial view that prioritizes outcomes above all else, critics argue that it negates accountability. Without caricature, Edmonds shows how EA, in pressing relentlessly toward optimization, can defy nuance, flatten moral texture, and—most troublingly—blur responsibility when things go wrong.

Another surprising line of critique Edmonds examines is what he calls the Numbers Critique. EA presents itself as a numbers-driven project, its supporters embracing mantras like “donate with your head, not your heart.” Emotion, in this view, is treated as a liability—something that clouds judgment and leads people toward inefficient giving based on sentiment. This emphasis is explicit in MacAskill’s influential book Doing Good Better, title that implies a corrective: moral action should be guided by calculation, not preference.

Edmonds complicates this tidy picture through the curious case of Leona Helmsley, who famously left her fortune to her dog. The gesture is emotionally resonant—but from an EA perspective, indefensible. Yet Edmonds’ point is not to mock Helmsley’s choice. It is to show how deeply giving is shaped by attachment, loyalty, and meaning—qualities that resist translation into digits.

Edmonds returns to this tension repeatedly, perhaps most memorably in his discussion of trachoma. Surgery to cure the disease is remarkably cost-effective: for the price of training and placing a guide dog, a charity can fund several operations that cure trachoma, a common cause of blindness in Third World countries. By the numbers alone, trachoma surgery wins decisively.

And yet—people love guide dogs. They serve the blind broadly, not only those affected by a particular disease. Value depends on context, meaning, and individual need—irrational and incalculable, but still significant.

Another objection is illustrated through Groundhog Day, imagining a scenario in which one is morally obligated to save the same drowning child over and over again, endlessly. The burden becomes infinite. The savior has no rest.

Literature offers a similar warning. Edmonds invokes Mrs. Jellyby from Bleak House, whose obsessive devotion to distant charitable causes leads her to neglect her own family entirely. The old adage—charity begins at home—reasserts itself not as a rejection of altruism, but as a recognition of psychological and moral limits. Even Singer concedes this point, acknowledging that EA functions best within what he calls “normal psychological reach” (p. 143).

Edmonds closes this line of critique by noting an often-overlooked asymmetry: those most inclined to give generously bear a disproportionate burden, while many others give little or nothing at all. The result is not only inequality of contribution, but a real risk of burnout among the morally committed. Wanting to help does not make one inexhaustible.

The Institutional Critique is, in many ways, the most forceful—and the most uncomfortable—of the critiques Edmonds explores. Here, he examines several overlapping charges leveled against EA, many of which frame the movement as patriarchal.

Among the most persistent criticisms is that EA is disproportionately white, male, and privileged. Edmonds does not dismiss it. While he notes that the movement has, in recent decades, seen more women join its ranks, he also concedes that these women are overwhelmingly white. This fact, on its own, is not necessarily damning—but it does reinforce a troubling asymmetry: a largely white, affluent donor class making decisions about how resources are distributed to a far more diverse global population receiving aid.

Edmonds suggests that this demographic reality contributes to a perception—if not always the reality—of institutional bias within EA. One example he discusses involves MacAskill’s argument against boycotting sweatshops. Most people’s moral intuition recoils at sweatshop labor; the instinctive response is to avoid purchasing goods produced under such conditions. MacAskill counters that boycotts can actually harm workers by eliminating one of their few available sources of income. The argument is not frivolous, nor is it necessarily wrong—but it is deeply counterintuitive, and it often reads as privileging economic abstraction over lived experience.

This is where the charge of institutional bias gains traction. The position asks people—often those far removed from the conditions in question—to override moral discomfort in favor of outcome-based reasoning. Edmonds does not take a firm stance here. What matters is that such arguments reliably generate unease, precisely because they run against widely held moral sentiments about dignity, exploitation, and justice.

This tension leads Edmonds to one of the most consequential questions in the book: is it more effective to donate to political activism aimed at institutional change or to humanitarian aid that addresses the emergency?

Animal welfare offers a revealing case study. Within that domain, there has long been debate over whether donations should support direct care—such as shelters—or legislative and regulatory reform. Edmonds notes that, measured by outcomes, political advocacy has often proven more effective. Laws and regulations alter behavior at scale. The institutional route, though less emotionally satisfying, produces broader and more durable change.

Institutional solutions feel impersonal. They ask donors to trust systems rather than people, processes rather than stories. And once again, Edmonds resists resolving the tension. Instead, he exposes it—showing how EA’s commitment to scale and efficiency repeatedly collides with deeply human instincts about responsibility, proximity, and care.

Many of the critiques Edmonds examines overlap, and nowhere is this more evident than in the convergence of the Institutional and the Billionaire Critiques. The ultra-wealthy play an outsized role in modern philanthropy, and the mechanisms through which they give are overwhelmingly institutional—most often through private foundations. These foundations, Edmonds notes, are frequently opaque: minimally transparent at best.

Edmonds situates billionaire philanthropy within a long historical arc, reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and extending to contemporary figures such as Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, and, controversially, Elon Musk. All possess what Edmonds memorably calls the kind of money that buys buildings—or “the graffiti of the rich” (p. 162)—along with access, influence, and almost no accountability. Billionaires, by definition, do not have to answer to anyone. They can move vast sums of money according to personal judgment, moral intuition, or ideological preference. That power is troubling—but it is also precisely what allows them to act with a speed and scale unavailable to others.

In 2024, Peter Singer declared that we are living in a “golden age of philanthropy” (p. 165), referring largely to figures such as Buffett and the Gateses, whose Giving Pledge has mobilized hundreds of billions of dollars for charitable causes. This style of giving is longtermist, institutional, and—again—largely shielded from public scrutiny. Yet by many outcome-based measures, it is undeniably effective.

And still, the unease persists. Critics worry that such philanthropy can function as a Trojan horse: reshaping public priorities, influencing policy, and entrenching private power under the banner of benevolence.

Edmonds does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, he exposes them. Billionaire philanthropy can achieve what democratic processes cannot—and in doing so, it raises the uncomfortable question at the heart of EA’s institutional turn: whether moral good, when pursued at scale, inevitably slips beyond the reach of oversight.

I loved Edmonds’ chapter on the Historical Injustice Critique of EA. The epigraph alone is marvelous: the unforgettable line from The Godfather Part II—“You broke my heart, Fredo!” It is a reminder that moral judgment, divorced from context, can become unintelligible.

He frames this critique through two broad philosophical traditions: analytic and continental. Continental philosophy tends to situate ethical questions within historical context. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, often relies on logic, abstraction, and formal reasoning—unbound by place and time. EA, Edmonds suggests, inherits more from the analytic tradition. And that’s the problem, according to this line of critique.

To understand why Michael Corleone orders the killing of his brother Fredo (apologies for the spoiler), one must understand the plot that precedes the moment—the betrayals, loyalties, and cumulative injuries that make the act legible, if not defensible. Context is not ornamental; it is constitutive.

This is the chapter in which Edmonds most clearly shows how colonialism and historical exploitation produced many of the conditions EA now seeks to alleviate. In the decontextualized Shallow Pond experiment, we know nothing about the child, nothing about the pond. But the details would make a critical difference as to whether action would be framed as charity rather than moral reckoning. If suffering is the result of exploitation, then aid may not be charity at all, but compensation. The absence of context in the Shallow Pond experiment is not a minor omission; it fundamentally shapes what kind of moral response is appropriate.

This concern folds naturally into what Edmonds calls the Motivational Critique, which examines why people give—and why they often do not. One well-documented phenomenon is the Identifiable Victim Effect: people are far more likely to help when they have a face and a story. Statistics rarely move us; narratives do.

The Motivational Critique extends to emotion. Edmonds surveys a wide range of incentives that shape charitable behavior: tax deductions, sponsored marathons, gala tickets, and star-studded entertainments. He also examines happiness. Study after study confirms that giving to others increases personal happiness. Altruism, it turns out, is not only good—it feels good.

Edmonds does not argue that EA is wrong to value effectiveness. Rather, he shows how history, motivation, and human psychology complete the big picture. Moral understanding evolves in time, among people, carrying stories that cannot be reduced to numbers—no matter how elegant the math.

Beyond the critiques already discussed, David Edmonds surveys several others that are intellectually serious but less compelling for a general readership. These include the Rationalist Critique and its preoccupation with eliminating cognitive bias and mitigating technological risks such as artificial intelligence. There is also the Power Critique, which examines the asymmetries embedded in donor–recipient relationships, likening them to other hierarchical arrangements, like employer-employee, where goodwill does not erase imbalance. The Effectiveness Critique, meanwhile, presses harder, arguing that charitable interventions often produce unintended consequences and that EA’s long-term focus does not always translate into systemic thinking. Edmonds gives particular weight here to the arguments of Angus Deaton, who warns that aid can be distorted or co-opted by authoritarian regimes and armed groups in conflict zones. Finally, Edmonds addresses what might be called the animus critique—the sometimes visceral hostility directed at Effective Altruists themselves. He admits to finding this puzzling. Even if one believes the movement is misguided, it is difficult to justify outright hostility toward a project grounded in generosity. Edmonds suggests that such reactions may conceal defensiveness, as though the existence of EA implies a moral judgment on those who choose not to give. The movement’s reputation for insularity—its tight-knit communities, online forums, and quasi-cultish aura—has not helped, nor has the fallout from the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal. Still, Edmonds resists caricature. His aim is not to dismiss these critiques, but to place them in proportion, and to remind readers that moral disagreement need not curdle into moral contempt.

David Edmonds begins the book with a sharp, focused look at the career of Peter Singer, and in the epilogue he returns us there—full circle. Along the way, he traces the arc of Singer’s intellectual life, from its incubator phase in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford—an idyllic setting, but still not immune to the turbulence of the 1960s. As we saw in Part I, that turbulence shaped and sharpened Singer, giving him an imperative where earlier generations of moral philosophy had too often settled into complacency.

The story is not unique. Many coming of age at that moment shared a sense that enough was enough—that entrenched injustice could no longer be tolerated as background noise. What distinguishes Singer, and some of his contemporaries, is that he never stopped. Where others grew quieter or more cautious, Singer remained committed. Unsurprisingly, he has ruffled feathers. Yet even many of his detractors acknowledge his intellectual honesty. Some colleagues find his conclusions absolutist, but still recognize the seriousness with which he pursues them.

Some criticisms of Singer are substantive. Others are less so. Edmonds is careful, in closing the book, to address how often Singer’s arguments have been misunderstood—sometimes willfully, sometimes through hurried or inattentive listening. This is a familiar failure of our moment: objection outrunning comprehension. If one listens carefully, one does not hear Singer endorsing unethical actions. One hears a philosopher asking, relentlessly, what actions lead to the greatest good.

That is, after all, what utilitarians do. They reason toward outcomes; they calculate paths; they test intuitions against consequences. Singer does not demand that everyone think as he does. But his work deserves attention. We need philosophers willing to follow arguments where they lead, even when those arguments unsettle moral comfort or social consensus.

We need philosophy itself—often mocked, often misunderstood, but indispensable. It is the discipline in which our most abstract and uncomfortable ideas are pulled apart and examined rather than evaded. It is where thought experiments trouble us, where moral certainty dissolves into responsibility, and where books like Death in a Shallow Pond do their best work: not telling us what to think, but insisting that we think carefully before we act.

My first exposure to the films of Woody Allen was Annie Hall (1977) which has been my favorite film since I was a teenager, catching it first on television at random—I think it was on the rooftop scene, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are discussing aesthetic criteria in an amusing dialogue juxtaposed with discordant but subtitled interiority. There are films one appreciates and then there are films that become critical reference points—lines in them taking on meaning and comfort in daily life, snippets of comedy to lighten loads and soften edges. That’s Annie Hall for me. The quips of Alvy Singer and the la-di-da of the eponymous character he falls in love with became keepsakes stored up for quick access in moments of either banality or grief.

I suppose the use I’ve made of Annie Hall constitutes a kind of magic in and of itself. Maybe that’s why the title of Marc Casellato’s book—Woody Allen: A Magician in Manhattan—clicked so resonantly in my brain. The book is premised on the fusion of magic and cinema that is so prevalent in Allen’s enormous body of work—in his prolific writings (numerous short stories and plays, and even one novel) as well as his filmography, where he has been director, screenwriter, and/or actor.

Casellato’s first exposure to Woody Allen was through the film Sleeper (1973). Another Allen/Keaton partnership, that film bends reality as science fiction—showing us an imagined and very distant future full of technological elements and special effects that allude to magic. What he recognized in Sleeper led to a stimulating journey, culminating in the writing of this book. Casellato—an Italian from Turin, who met the subject in March 1996 (and three more times after that)—describes an alliance of vision between himself and the filmmaker. It’s also a shared recognition of the trick of the trade, the sleight of the hand, and the measure of a craft that traces its inspiration from Bergman to Fellini.

Casellato tells the story from his own evolution as a boy enamored of the performance of magic to a sophisticate fully appreciative of Allen’s role in bridging the magical elements of illusion, imagination, and storytelling. He is a student par excellence of Allen’s entire body work. To give you a demonstration of his passion on this topic, I will quote from a conversation between us in a DM on Instagram:

“Woody Allen is often discussed as a filmmaker, writer, and jazz musician, but people rarely focus on the fact that, before he became ‘Woody Allen,’ he was drawn to magic and illusionism. I wanted to show readers how this interest is a constant presence throughout Allen’s work.”

He goes on to mention Allen’s subtle way of putting “Easter eggs” in his films. In the book, Casellato gives several examples of Allen’s use of the “Easter egg” device—a way for the filmmaker to subtly communicate meanings or even jokes. Such “Easter eggs” are often noticed by a niche community of fandom. Allen uses the “Easter egg” to display his passion for magical memorabilia. One “Easter egg” called out by Casellato in the book is a poster visible behind Diane Keaton in a scene in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). The poster is displayed as a centerfold in the book—an advertisement for A Night in Tokyo as created for a United Magicians troupe performance in the interwar period. Allen, fond of this treasure apparently, repurposed it as a prop in Melinda and Melinda (2004). One poster, two films, two eggs. Visual proof of a passion that runs deep.

“[R]eferences to illusionism are practically everywhere [in Allen’s work,] Casellato says. His creative process is underpinned by the illusionist’s mindset—what Casellato calls magical thinking, or how a magician turns what sees impossible into effect. Imagination plays a role. So does manipulation. Like a hall of mirrors at a theme park.

The magician’s trick of perception is everywhere in Allen’s works, as Casellato explains. To underscore this point in the book, he refers to a scene in Irrational Man (2015). Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) and Jill (Emma Stone) are distorted in the hall of mirrors—symbolic of the philosophical distortion of crime and punishment in the film’s plot. Abe deceives himself and Jill into questioning a Kantian or absolutist view of morality.

To ask whether murder is ever justified is what the moral philosopher does. To show you a mirror that alters your perception is what the magician does. They’re both challenging you to think differently. One is giving you a thought experiment. The other is more visual—a shake of a scarf, perhaps, to focus your attention, or a move by the magician to disguise his/her methods. Magic is not so much in the eye of the beholder as it is in the perception of the audience or the reasoning of the thinker.

I like Casellato’s thoroughness in showing the reader the history of magic performance and then tying Allen’s personal and professional narrative into that progression. As Casellato notes, magical performance is explicitly woven into Allen’s films, like Shadows and Fog (1991), where the circus is the main stage for the plot. And this film is descended from an earlier work of Allen’s—Death: A Comedy in One Act (1975). Thus, a decade and a half sees the evolution of a story that took root in Allen’s mind as a complex, darkly comedic script exploring moral questions about crime and innocence into a mesmerizing show of shadow, fog, and optical illusion that recalls early German Expressionism in cinema.

I wouldn’t have seen the link between German Expressionism, magical shows, and Allen’s work without Casellato’s book. Once seen, however, it reveals a clean throughline across the filmography. It’s not just smoke and mirrors—or is it?

I haven’t seen the film Stardust Memories (1980) so I was utterly awestruck by a centerfold image in Casellato’s book that shows Allen in that film appearing to levitate the actress Jessica Harper. It’s even mysterious the way Casellato recalls the scene. Allen’s character, Sandy, and Harper’s character, Daisy, are standing in a meadow. As Sandy levitates Daisy, “he passes a large metal hoop around her,” writes Casellato, “to prove there are no supports.” It is, indeed, presented as an act of levitation—the impossible rendered possible, and yet, as Casellato asserts, Daisy never rises. She’s merely suspended. The effect on the audience is further proof of Allen’s magical skills. It’s not the eye of the beholder that is bending reality. It’s the audience who are deceived into a belief that the impossible has occurred. Even I, someone who hasn’t seen the film, sense the wonder of the moment from the picture alone! This is Casellato’s work—his decision to use the photo and to blow it up across two pages in the book.

Casellato eloquently lays forth the methods of escaping unsatisfying reality seen throughout Allen’s works: outrageous fantasies, breaking the fourth wall, substance experimentation—the cocaine sneeze in Annie Hall, for instance, or Annie’s use of marijuana before sexual intercourse—and so on down the list of magical and supernatural techniques: levitation, teleportation, dematerialization, time travel, hypnotism, trances, divination, metamorphosis, ventriloquism, and enchanted screen doors between projection and audience. The book is a veritable academic textbook containing the histories of these types and uses of magic and Casellato skillfully shows us that in his entire career Allen has never neglected to use magical thinking and methods in telling stories and clarifying existential truths. Without recanting the book chapter by chapter, there are however a few things I would like to dwell on.

Casellato draws a parallel between Allen as a Luddite—still writing-typing on an Olympia SM-3 and completely inoculated from the temptation to use AI in his work—and the growing competition between traditional magical mediums and the ever expanding market of “deadbots” and “griefbots.” Even though Allen, as a writer, is safe from the looming threat of AI replacement—for, as Casellato puts it, “no algorithm replaces a writer’s imagination”—there is a danger which Allen foresaw as early as 1983 with Zelig. This movie was groundbreaking in many ways, notably in its prophetic themes as well as in the techniques deployed to make it. The eponymous character, Zelig, played by Allen himself, was a quick-changer—skilled in metamorphosis. He could transform his appearance at will, something he constantly did in order to avoid exclusion. He undergoes hypnosis by his psychiatrist (Mia Farrow)—a form of treatment that promises to actually cure him, but which is overtaken by damaging, unethical, and recklessly experimental methods that end up foreshadowing the problems we are negotiating in the present year. As Casellato asserts, the film Zelig feels like prophecy with its allusions to societal pressures of conformity, the erosion of individuality, mass consumerism, endemic transactional relations, and the manipulation of people by the media without transparency or distinction between truth and lies. Of course the paradox of magical illusion is that it’s both deceptive and revelatory, and in the age of AI, Casellato reminds us that the question is no longer, what is real, but rather, can we trust our own eyes? Illusions in the traditional sense required a skillful hand, but AI removes that agency and transparency from illusion. In some ways, it even removes consent.

I think it is also worth pointing out Casellato’s explanation of how Zelig was also technologically ahead of its time. Made ten years before the technology adopted by Robert Zemekis for Forrest Gump (1994), Allen used a complicated cinema graphic technique to place his title character inside historical footage. Zemekis had the Kodak cineon scanner to effect imagery that showed his title character thrust into the spotlight of the twentieth century’s key events. I think this is one of the most profound revelations in the book. This is the magic of technology, something that changes, and Allen has been a force who not only mastered its use but found innovative workarounds when it didn’t keep pace with his vision.

Pace is another thing I think it’s important to mention here. Technology is fast and it does change, and this is why it is so important to stop and notice when someone arduously makes a point to remind us that life is not supposed to be a race. One of the most beautiful movements in Casellato’s book is the one where he introduces the reader to Héctor René Lavandera, also known as René Lavand (1928-2015). This poet of stillness, whom Casellato had the honor of meeting, “transmuted limitation into style.” (Casellato, p.200.) From the age of seven, he was one-handed, and so, as someone who wanted to do card tricks, he invented card magic for one hand. He was “a poet of close-up: stories woven around silences, impossibilities shaped at walking pace.” The point was to slow down the tempo, notice the stillness, and hear the cards speak. Casellato compares Lavand’s “voice to cards” method with Allen lending “voices to the anxious, the romantic, the foolish, the brave.” (Casellato, p.201.) Lavand slowed magic down to a pace that could perceive presence itself. Allen has given voice to what is otherwise intangible or abstract. These two ‘voice’ methods, Casellato asserts, are but another kind of ventriloquism—the art of giving voice to the inanimate, and seen across Allen’s work, from Take the Money & Run (1969), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and Radio Days (1987).

Woody Allen is a nonagenarian now. He just turned 90 last year, and yet he is not retired. Neither from filmmaking nor writing, nor from, presumably, the art of magic. He wrote and directed a French film, Coup de Chance, in 2023 and did voice narration for Mr. Ficher’s Chair (2025). He also published his memoir in 2020 and published a novel—What’s With Baum?—in 2025. There are reports of another film in the works this year, reportedly in production in Spain. It is important to note where Allen stands in life now, what he is doing, because it means that he has now been making films for just under six decades and he has been writing (jokes, plays, short stories, novels) since he was in high school. At the age of seventeen, he became Woody Allen—a name he took to disguise himself from his classmates. All this is proof of something rare—a career with influence, longevity, and impact across generations. It’s not just that he’s famous or even that he can tell a coherent story with a start, middle, and finish. It’s that in the course of his gigantic career, without being pedantic or predictable, he didn’t just insert himself in the chronology. Nor did he simply do the work as he learned from others. That’s like saying that Harry Houdini is just a figure in the history of magic, when, in fact, he is a vector of its trajectory. Allen mastered the craft and the wonder of cinema—and became a master of it.

Casellato’s book may not be the entire story, but it must be a decent proportion of it, since it looks at Allen’s life and names those elements which have always been there—the tricks, the stories, the jokes, and underscoring all of it, the curve of moral and intellectual reflection, of human imperfection, and of life’s ambiguities. A powerful throughline through all of it—both Allen’s life and work, and Casellato’s book—is the core idea that magic is paradoxical. It’s both deception and revelation; it’s also both performative and sincere when elevated to its highest art form. It can provide us with escape hatches that make life bearable, but it also holds the potential to bring us in alignment with the only thing that exists—presence. Casellato is passionate on the subject and it shows. In the end, he implores us to connect with magic’s most endearing gift—astonishment, surprise, enchantment. These things are so dazzling because they bring us back to something that some of us lose touch with after childhood. Casellato holds onto that special thing by reminding himself to forget. When we forget, life becomes mysterious and wonderful again. That is, after all, what makes life not only bearable, but sometimes beautiful.

Fitzgerald had apparently considered naming the novel “The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.” His close friend and literary executor, Edmund Wilson, shortened it to The Last Tycoon for its posthumous publication. I prefer Fitzgerald’s original idea. The longer title carries what the novel actually is: not simply a book about power, or Hollywood, or industry, but about love—its costs, its distortions, and its survival inside systems that erode it.

It’s worth remembering where Fitzgerald came from. He was born in Minnesota, educated at Princeton, shaped by war, and transformed by movement—meeting Zelda in Alabama, writing in New York, unraveling and remaking himself in Paris and along the French Riviera. By the time he went to Hollywood for steady pay checks—pay checks desperately needed for medical expenses and various debts—he had already been thrashed by life often enough to lose any remaining innocence. His sentimentality had been broken open, then rebuilt into something harder and more durable: not cynicism, but earned clarity.

The Last Tycoon is the work of a man whose eyes had been forced open—and who refused, at the end, to close them again.

Fitzgerald in Hollywood: paid, praised, and revised away

By the time Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood, he was no longer the prodigy behind This Side of Paradise, nor even the tragic romantic of The Great Gatsby. He was a professional writer for hire—intelligent, disciplined, and increasingly aware that intelligence was not what the studios most valued. His job was not to tell the truth, but to make something workable: to sand down edges, adjust tone, temper desire, and ensure that what emerged would offend neither censors nor audiences nor the moral anxieties of middle America.

Like the marginal character Brimmer Boxley, a novelist hired to write for Hollywood in The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald brought seriousness into rooms that did not know what to do with it. He researched obsessively. He took assignments seriously. He believed, still, that craft and thought might count for something. And like Boxley, he discovered that seriousness was not rejected outright—it was absorbed, softened, and redirected. He was praised for insight, thanked for effort, and then rewritten. Sometimes entirely replaced. Always paid.

This was the cruelty of the system: it did not need to humiliate writers in order to neutralize them. It did not shout them down or cast them out. It listened, nodded, admired—and then calmly changed the work until it no longer bore the weight the writer had given it. What survived was the indiscriminate shape without the pressure, the intention without consequence—or blurred to something barely discernible.

Fitzgerald learned, slowly and painfully, that Hollywood did not crush artists through brutality. It anesthetized them. I imagine Fitzgerald understood exactly how the ‘tycoon’ Monroe Stahr charmed Brimmer Boxley into complaisance.

Boxley as the writer Fitzgerald understood

Boxley is not Fitzgerald’s self-portrait, but he wrote him with unmistakable sympathy. Boxley represents the writer who has not yet learned how power works—not because he is foolish, but because he still believes in exchange: that insight offered in good faith will be met with intellectual honesty.

What Boxley encounters instead is Monroe Stahr.

Stahr does not argue with Boxley. He does not ridicule him. He does not even reject him. He listens attentively, acknowledges Boxley’s intelligence, flatters his seriousness, and then—quietly, expertly—redirects everything Boxley has said into something manageable. Something safer. Something that will leave systems intact and buffer the fragile egos of their rulers.

The name itself conveys the structure he is cajoled into—an asset to be guided into a box, a place where he must color within the lines. If he does stray outside the lines, he’ll be skillfully managed, refocused.

Boxley doesn’t leave angry, but subdued. He has been seen without being heard, valued for the transaction rather than talent. Fitzgerald must have known that feeling intimately.

Stahr, Thalberg, and the elegance of control

It is impossible to miss the shadow of Irving Thalberg behind Monroe Stahr. Thalberg was famously brilliant, famously kind, famously attentive. Writers admired him. Trusted him. Felt chosen by him. And then watched their work become something else.

Fitzgerald admired Thalberg, too. But admiration, by the end, had given way to understanding. Thalberg had been called a “boy wonder,” in spite of not being a boy, and Fitzgerald applied this directly to the character of Stahr. About 35, Stahr is old enough to know how to run the Hollywood studio. He has the brains to manage all the moving parts. He has the charisma to convince everyone he is good, that he knows best, that following him makes sense. He holds the key to the promise land—money, power, success, glamor.

Stahr’s genius is not merely visionary; it is administrative. He knows how to smooth conflict without leaving bruises. He knows how to make people feel respected while denying them authority. He understands that power is most stable when it does not need to assert itself in blatant terms.

This is what Fitzgerald finally grasped—and what The Last Tycoon records with such painful clarity: that charm is not the opposite of domination. It is one of its most refined instruments.

In writing Boxley and Stahr, Fitzgerald was not settling scores. He was documenting a system he had survived long enough to see clearly—one in which love, labor, and imagination were not crushed outright, but carefully edited into submission.

The Use of Contrast in the Craft

In telling the story, he opens it with narrative first person from the perspective of an adolescent woman born into it—the daughter of one of Stahr’s fellow producers, his antithesis in a way, Brady. Cecilia, the daughter of Pat Brady, who was modeled on Louis B. Mayer, warns the reader that some of the ordinary events in the story are drawn from her imagination, but that all of the “stranger ones are true.” (32). This warning conveys the simple but profound truth that, as she says in the first paragraph of the novel, “even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.” (1).

Ordinary and extraordinary are prominently contrasted in Fitzgerald’s writing. We see it in The Great Gatsby, where the eponymous character is extraordinarily charming and brilliant enough to rise from nothing into the orbit of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby acquires wealth that the Buchanans only inherited—in more or less the “ordinary” way. In Gatsby’s case, we could call it meritorious except Gatsby is no saint and his methods were not blameless. The contrast, nevertheless, has steam from the simple fact that one acquired wealth by skill alone while the other was just lucky to be high born.

Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, draws a similar contrast between her father, Pat Brady, and Monroe Stahr. In this case, the two producers both came from the working class. The contrast lay more in personality. Brady’s story, of his rise to power, is boring by comparison. Stahr’s, on the other hand, is luminous. Brady got ahead by being shrewd, and with a little luck. Brady was a conformist. He knew the game well and he played by the rules—or at least inside the box. Stahr, however, made the rules. He set the trends. He bent the game into whatever he wanted.1

If Stahr represents the elegance of control, then the women of The Last Tycoon represent the price of that control. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood is governed by a moral paradox that American culture has long perfected: men are permitted complexity, ambition, appetite, and contradiction, while women are required to stabilize those contradictions without ever exposing them. The industry sells virtue while practicing indulgence—of men only; it profits from desire (men’s desire of women) while insisting that desire remain unnamed. (Think of the innuendo in those old films, the sexual desire of women that is not spoken or implicitly shown, but rather is implied, circled around, and teased.) The women in the novel do not merely populate this system—they underscore it.

The Female Archetypes

Fitzgerald does not give us one woman, but several distinct female positions, each calibrated to a different function within Hollywood’s moral economy.

First, there is the actress—visible, profitable, objectified, and powerless. She is desired, displayed, circulated, and discarded, her labor mistaken for glamour and her consent mistaken for agency. She embodies the lie at the heart of the system: that proximity to power is the same as possessing it. Fitzgerald treats these women without cruelty or illusion. They are not naïve; they are simply replaceable.2

In contrast stands Kathleen Moore, the woman Stahr desires—and behind her, the dead wife, Minna Davis, whose memory Kathleen is required to inhabit. Kathleen must be luminous without being knowing, erotic without apparent awareness, desirable without equity in that desire. She exists to receive Stahr’s longing without complicating it. This is not love as reciprocity, but love as preservation of male fantasy. Kathleen’s value lies in her resemblance to an ideal already fixed in Stahr’s mind, an ideal rendered safe by death.

Then there is Jane Maloney, the most modern figure in the novel in the sense that she seems to be independent. Jane has competence, intelligence, and emotional literacy. She understands men like Stahr precisely because she understands power. But her authority is conditional. She is permitted insight only so long as it does not obstruct male dominance or require structural change. She is a self-aware agent who must color within the system—not outside it, and certainly not above it. Her power exists only as long as it remains supportive rather than sovereign. Fitzgerald uses Jane to show how the system needs a woman like Jane, someone intellectually useful but unthreatening because she’s undesirable sexually and unthreatening physically.

And then there is Cecilia Brady, the novel’s narrator, and in many ways its quiet conscience. Cecilia is inherently knowledgeable yet as structurally powerless as the other archetypes. Born into the system, she sees it clearly long before she has the authority to act within it. Her warning to the reader—that some ordinary events are imagined while the stranger ones are true—signals Fitzgerald’s deepest insight: that what appears implausible in Hollywood is often more accurate than what appears mundane.

Cecilia is a witness without leverage, conscience without jurisdiction. Her knowledge does not grant her control; it grants her clarity, and that’s precisely why she’s the ideal one to be the writer’s narrative vehicle. In this way, Cecilia represents the moral intelligence the system cannot afford to elevate. She sees too much, too early, and too honestly.

Finally, there are the workers—the secretaries, assistants, technicians, and functionaries who execute male power while remaining invisible and expendable. They are not the designers of the structure, but they sustain it. Their labor is procedural, repetitive, but necessary. They are not villains; they are mechanisms. Fitzgerald’s attention to them underscores the truth that power demands infrastructure. It requires a distributed workforce willing—or forced—to carry out its decisions without ownership.3

Taken together, these women do not merely reflect Hollywood’s hypocrisy; they enable it. They absorb moral contradiction so that men like Stahr can appear decisive, visionary, and benevolent. Desire is displaced onto them. Responsibility is deferred through them. Knowledge is held by them—but authority remains elsewhere.

This is Fitzgerald’s final, unsparing clarity. Hollywood’s morality is not false because it preaches virtue while practicing vice. It is false because it assigns the cost of that contradiction unevenly. Men are allowed to evolve, revise, and be forgiven. Women are required to adapt, endure, and disappear.

Why the narrator had to be Cecilia

Only Cecilia could be the narrator in this story. Fitzgerald needed the character who would incur the least risk to herself—a powerless woman, yes, but still a protected daughter, and still more, the one who could possess his own clarity. A male narrator—especially one embedded in power—would have been required to protect something: reputation, authority, continuity. Cecilia protects nothing. She inherits proximity without ownership, she has knowledge without jurisdiction, and so she has nothing to lose, except perhaps the proximity and access. However, once the story is exposed, she no longer needs proximity or access. Because she does not wield power in the industry, she is not responsible for maintaining the myth that underpins it.

Her position allows Fitzgerald to do something radical: to show how Hollywood works without having to justify it. Cecilia does not need to excuse Stahr, correct Brady, or redeem the system that raised her. She is free to observe, to register patterns, to tell the truth sideways. Her clarity is not dangerous because it cannot be wielded in offense.

In Cecilia, Fitzgerald solves an ethical problem he had struggled with his entire career: how to write honestly about power without either flattering it or attacking it from a position of grievance. She is young enough to be overlooked, female enough to be disregarded, and intelligent enough to see everything—objectively, which is exactly where the screenwriter’s limitation sat. The system tolerates her vision because it assumes it will never be operationalized.

The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western

Fitzgerald’s original title matters because it names the lie at the heart of Hollywood’s self-conception. A “Western” promises frontier, possibility, reinvention—the American myth of boundless becoming. In Hollywood, that promise is narrowed, professionalized, and restricted to men like Irving Thalberg: men permitted to conquer, to reshape the landscape, to call their ambition destiny.

As Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Stahr’s power depended on compliance: on women who absorb contradiction, on workers who execute vision without authorship, on intelligent observers—Jane, Boxley, Cecilia—whose clarity must be managed, softened, or sidelined. The Western promises freedom; Hollywood delivers hierarchy. The frontier is closed, but the myth remains profitable.4

The “Love of the Last Tycoon” is not ironic. It is exact. Love, in this system, is not intimacy but mythology. It is what allows power to appear humane. It is what keeps women compliant, workers loyal, and visionaries disarmed. It is what permits the tycoon to believe that his control is benevolent rather than extractive.

Fitzgerald understood this at the end. He understood that Hollywood had not merely revised his work; it had revised the American Dream itself. And he wrote the book anyway—not as revenge, not as confession, but as record.

That is why The Last Tycoon endures in spite of its incompleteness. It is not a lament for lost glamour. It is an anatomy of how power sustains itself—and who pays for the privilege of believing in it.

The novel is widely acknowledged as Fitzgerald’s most mature work, its only shortcoming that he never lived to finish it. What we have are six completed chapters and a continuation in notes and outlines—a scaffold in place of a fourth wall, pun intended. And yet the scaffolding reveals a conception that not only stands confidently beside his most celebrated work, but might have been his apotheosis.

What makes it potentially so is exactly what distinguishes it from the novels that made him famous: hard-earned wisdom. Earned clarity. This is not the work of a young man dazzled by possibility, but of one approaching middle age with his illusions burned away and his vision sharpened in the process.

It is not enough to be clever, as he advised his daughter, Scottie. Cleverness doesn’t confer truth. Nor does being right. Rightness is not the point, because it is not the outcome that matters. Honesty is the point. The question is whether you can survive it with your integrity intact.

For all his faults—for all the damage of a life that was frankly too short, but also, in its brevity, clarifying—F. Scott Fitzgerald appears to have done exactly that. He did not close his eyes again. And that, finally, is what The Last Tycoon leaves us: not completion, but truth.

Truth does not circulate freely; it is produced within systems that authorize some voices and render others inaudible.

— after Michel Foucault; PhiloMonaco, 2025

When belief, opinion, rumor, and expertise circulate with equal authority, truth does not disappear—it becomes indistinguishable.

— PhiloMonaco panel on misinformation, 2025

Democracy does not abolish authority. It displaces it—and must continually renegotiate where legitimacy comes from.

— PhiloMonaco, 2025

These epigraphs are interpretive syntheses drawn from public philosophy discussions at Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, not verbatim transcripts.

Q & A

Ashley Rovira (AR):

In Reality, Rewritten No. 1, we examined an epistemic fault line that had quietly become unavoidable: who edits the truth, who arbitrates facts, and why Wikipedia’s imperfect but collective model of knowledge has endured for as long as it has.

That discussion rested on a fragile assumption—one many of us inherited without noticing it: that truth emerges slowly, through friction, disagreement, and shared scrutiny. That assumption is now under pressure.

What feels urgent today is that Grokpedia does not merely challenge Wikipedia’s authority. It challenges the model itself. If algorithms can be written to generate coherent narratives favorable to the one who writes them—as is the case with Elon Musk’s model—what happens to authorship? And what happens to memory?

Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco—something our readers may not be familiar with—is a public philosophy forum, or what might once have been called a salon: a gathering of prominent thinkers from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and related fields, convened to address contemporary questions in public view.

Each year, the organization hosts a series of panels and conversations during a week in June known as Semaine PhiloMonaco. Last summer, the theme was Truth, with particular attention paid to the problems that arise when information becomes radically decentralized—when authority disperses, consensus erodes, and the conditions for shared meaning begin to shift.

One session, drawing on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, reminded us that truth is never simply “out there” waiting to be retrieved. It is produced within what he called a regime of truth—a set of rules, institutions, and practices that determine which statements are recognized as true and which are dismissed.

So the question becomes unavoidable:

If anyone can write an algorithm to construct new truths, who defines the regime in which those truths are recognized?

The Griffin Signal:

They already are. The deeper issue is whether we still recognize truth once it’s been constructed that way.

Wikipedia’s authority—fragile and contested as it is—depends on resistance. Claims collide. Edits are challenged. Sources are demanded. That friction is not incidental; it is constitutive. Truth there is not fluent. It’s earned.

Grokpedia proposes something else entirely: a smooth epistemology. Truth without visible resistance. Narrative without contest. From a Foucauldian perspective, this isn’t the absence of power—it’s its concealment.

The algorithm doesn’t eliminate authorship. It relocates it into infrastructure.

AR:

That idea of concealment came up repeatedly in Monaco under another Foucauldian term: discursive formation. Foucault used it to describe the boundaries of what can be said, by whom, and in what terms—often invisibly.

An algorithm trained to generate stories or explanations doesn’t merely produce content. It shapes the discursive field itself. Certain questions become legible. Others never appear. Entire categories of experience can be rendered unspeakable—not by censorship, but by omission.

The Griffin Signal:

Exactly. Which is where the democratic claim begins to fracture.

Musk might argue that Grokpedia is democratic because anyone can build an algorithm, just as anyone can edit Wikipedia. But democracy isn’t simply about access. It depends on shared constraints.

Wikipedia works because everyone speaks into the same contested structure. Grokpedia fragments that structure into parallel discursive worlds—each internally coherent, each optimized for a particular interest.

From a Foucauldian view, that doesn’t abolish regimes of truth. It multiplies them—without the friction that allows truth to be challenged.

AR:

Which produces noise rather than plurality.

At PhiloMonaco, the panel on Fake News, Truths, and Conspiracies described the digital landscape as a kind of epistemic chaos—not because truth has disappeared, but because belief, opinion, rumor, and expertise now circulate with the same apparent authority.

If everyone can generate a convincing narrative, how does anything endure long enough to become memory?

The Griffin Signal:

It may not. Memory requires slowness, contradiction, and revision. Algorithms excel at coherence and speed, not endurance.

When truth is generated rather than argued into being, responsibility thins out. No one owns the narrative, yet someone always benefits from it. That’s not collective memory—it’s narrative liquidity.

Foucault would recognize this immediately: a new discursive formation in which legitimacy is produced by scale rather than scrutiny.

AR:

So the frontier isn’t simply who edits truth, but who writes it—and under what conditions it can still be challenged.

The Griffin Signal:

Yes. The danger isn’t that machines imitate imagination. It’s that they replace the slow, difficult work of disagreement with fluent certainty.

What remains distinctly human isn’t creativity alone. It’s our tolerance for friction—our willingness to let meaning take time, and to leave truth vulnerable to revision.

AR:

What remains reassuring, even amid epistemic instability, is that these questions are not unfolding only inside proprietary systems or corporate labs. They are being taken up—seriously and publicly—in spaces designed for disagreement rather than optimization.

Established forums such as Philo Monaco, whose recent week was devoted to truth and its fractures and whose 2026 program continues this inquiry, remind us that philosophy still has a public life. These are places where authority is tested, not assumed; where ideas encounter resistance; where truth is treated as something to be argued, not generated.

In an era shaped by algorithmic fluency, it matters that such conversations persist across multiple, sophisticated channels—lectures, panels, essays, classrooms, and now dialogues like this one. They do not promise certainty. They promise continuity: a living tradition of inquiry carried forward through critique, attention, and shared responsibility. That continuity, too, is a form of memory.

Notes & References

For readers who want to go deeper

• Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco (PhiloMonaco)

  • Semaine PhiloMonaco 2025 — “Vérité”
    A week-long series examining truth in the digital, political, artistic, and philosophical sense.

    • “Fake news, vérités et complots”
      Panel on misinformation, conspiracy, digital media, and epistemic destabilization.

    • “La vérité chez Michel Foucault”
      Déjeuner-philo session on truth as produced through practices, institutions, and power relations.

      • Michel Foucault — Key Texts on Truth & Discourse

        • Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1977)
          Essay originally published & collected in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977.
          Introduces the concept of regimes of truth: the historically specific systems through which societies determine what counts as true, who is authorized to speak, and how truth circulates in relation to power.

        • Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
          Foundational text developing the idea of discursive formations—the conditions that shape what can be said, thought, recorded, and remembered within a given historical moment.

About this Series

Reality, Rewritten is a two-part dialogue between Ashley Rovira, MLIS (just a librarian asking questions) and Griffin, staged as a conversation between a human interlocutor and an AI-driven analytical voice.

Each installment examines the epistemic fault lines—truth, authorship, memory, authority—through questioning rather than conclusion. The questions are human, grounded in culture and lived concern. The answers are machine-assisted, synthetic, and shaped by large-scale pattern recognition.

The aim is not to resolve these tensions, but to examine how reality is being rewritten—by institutions, technologies, and the systems we trust to tell our stories.

I don’t go looking for politics.

It finds me. Like trouble.

Good trouble, though—the kind Kamala Harris likes to name.

I went into Wicked: For Good expecting competence, maybe spectacle. What I didn’t expect was depth—nor the way its metaphors would land harder this time, sharper and less forgiving.

I’ve read the novel by Gregory Maguire—or most of it. I stalled somewhere around eighty percent on my Kindle, telling myself I’d finish it someday. (I still might.) But the films have their own language, and this sequel speaks fluently in allegory.

The first installment already established the core themes: animal welfare and rights, the vilification of women who refuse acceptable shapes, and the dangerous comfort of spectacle—of believing in a wizard because believing is easier than thinking. The mythic man behind the curtain has never felt more contemporary.

Here, those ideas don’t merely continue. They intensify.

Feminism? Off the charts.

Women in Wicked are not required to choose between goodness and power, beauty and menace. They can be radiant in pink or feared in black—and still soar. That’s what unsettles the world of Oz most: female power that is morally complex and emotionally grounded. Feminine power that can be tender and relentless.

We see it in Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), whose terrifying mercy saves Boq by transforming him into aluminum. We see it in Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), whose cruelty is weaponized as weather, setting the canonical tragedy in motion. This is not sanitized magic. It is consequence-driven power.

And then there’s the Wizard.

Casting Jeff Goldblum (as the Wizard) was inspired. Goldblum specializes in layered performance: serious, mock-serious, and mock-mock-serious—sometimes all at once. He can be ironic about irony. (His single-line cameo in Annie Hall—“I forgot my mantra”—says it all.) He also has a gift for the supporting turn that quietly steadies the room: in The Switch, he plays the wise and wisecracking best friend—the kind who leads his horse to water not by the rein, but by humored and gentle persuasion. It’s generosity without showboating, and it serves him well here.

In a story fundamentally about propaganda, Goldblum is exactly the magician you want pulling the levers.

The score—music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz—is one of the great achievements of modern musical theatre. My favorite piece is “For Good,” the duet between Elphaba and Glinda (Ariana Grande). What makes it radical is not sentimentality, but refusal. These women do not become enemies over loving the same man. They choose loyalty over rivalry, memory over resentment.

Together, they are unmanageable. Unstoppable.

And then there is Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). The prince does not fall for the princess in the tiara. He falls for Elphaba—the woman the world fears, misunderstands, and erases. In doing so, he learns to see differently. Beauty, here, is not conventional. It is perceptual. The crucial line shared between them—it’s not lying; it’s learning to see differently—lands with softness and sincerity.

The ending (yes—spoilers) reframes everything we thought we knew. Dorothy does not simply arrive as an innocent force of chaos. The film strongly implies she is part of the ruse. The bucket of water becomes collaboration, not accident.

So we have three feminine archetypes working in concert:

the Wicked Witch,

the Pretty Princess,

and the Innocent Child.

Together, they outwit the Big Bad.

The women remain friends.

The child goes home—or wakes up.

The lovers walk into the sunset.

The animals are freed.

And the citizens finally learn the truth.

Wicked: For Good is not subtle. But it is sincere. It insists that difference is not danger, that power does not require cruelty, and that solidarity—especially among women who follow their instincts and open their hearts—is the most formidable force for change, and also our best hope.

And honestly?

That feels like exactly the story we need right now.

There’s a certain kind of story that never sets out to be epic, yet somehow becomes exactly that. Not because of scale, but because of heart. That’s what Wild Son & Then Some feels like to me. A story that begins with a two-door car and a long drive west, an old radio converted into a cabinet and packed like treasure — a relic, a compass, a lighthouse of memory.

A radio cabinet. Not for music anymore, but for memory. A reminder of a father, of Baton Rouge humidity and family shorthand, of roots that stay even when you leave.

And then comes Los Angeles — odd jobs, telemarketing scripts, a tight T-shirt hosting tables on Melrose, auditions scattered like breadcrumbs across the map. Days when the dream looks ridiculous. Days when it looks possible. Days when it looks like both at once.

Before: The Testimony of Christian Brando

Before Wild Son & Then Some, there was another doorway: Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando — written by Champ Clark, performed by John Mese. A one-man show built from another man’s wounds, another man’s father, another man’s reckoning. He stood onstage as Christian Brando, carrying words shaped from interviews and memory.

Wild Son (the Brando version) taught him how to hold a story like a wound without dropping it.

But Wild Son & Then Some is where he turns the light inward.

From testimony to autobiography.

From portrayal to authorship.

From echo to origin.

Now: Wild Son & Then Some

This play is a story about a father who wasn’t mythical, but mattered.

Not perfect, but present.

Not larger than life — just large enough to fill a child’s world, which can be more extraordinary than legend anyway.

This year, life interrupted the script.

The opening night he’d circled on the calendar became the day everything changed. A sudden stroke that could have taken the stage away from him forever. But instead of an ending, it became a prologue.

And here’s the part that feels like theatre without even trying:

There’s something profoundly moving about a son writing a show for his father…and then surviving something that could have made that goodbye permanent.

The fact that he is still here to tell it — that alone is worth the ticket.

By October this year, Mese was recovered enough from his stroke to perform his paternal tribute at the UnUrban Coffee House in Santa Monica. On February 6 in the New Year, he will stage it again at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks.

2025: A Year of Father Stories

2025 has felt like a moment when stories about fathers and family sit closer to the surface—not as a trend, but as a tide. The questions they raise feel persistent: How do we reckon with the men who raised us? The ones who hurt us? The ones we misunderstood—who we might see clearly (as humans rather than archetypes) if we only grow wise enough?

This year we also lost artists whose work shaped how we remember family on film. Robert Redford, whose natural charisma alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became a kind of generational shorthand—charm with a shadow behind it. And Rob Reiner, whose films like The Princess Bride and Stand By Me aren’t about fathers outright, but about the tenderness, distance, and longing that childhood carries into adulthood. They’re stories that hint at the adults we wished we had (like grandpa Peter Falk reading us a story) or feared we might become.

And there’s a moment in Wild Son & Then Some when Mese recalls being a kid and watching his parents head out on a date to see Butch Cassidy —seeing them come out dressed up, his father like a man with somewhere to be, his mother lit up like a woman going to a movie that mattered. Not mythology. Not legend. Just the small memory, offered onstage without ornament, that lands like lineage: a boy watching his parents leave for a night out, not knowing he would someday stand in the light and speak their echoes out loud.

Maybe that’s why these films stay—with him, with us. Not because they are about fathers, but because they remind us that the world was already turning before we understood it, and that we spend our lives trying to read the past from the light on someone’s shoulders as they walk out the door.

🎬 2025 Films with Strong Father/Family Themes

1. Jay Kelly

2. Sentimental Value

3. Hamnet

4. One Battle After Another

5. Train Dreams

📚🎬All Time Stories with Strong Father/Family Themes

1. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) — Of course the great American novel makes every list, grand and small, because a father’s quiet nobility and teaching by example rather than performance are a compass of decency handed down like an heirloom.

2. Big Fish — Daniel Wallace & adapted for the screen in a 2003 film directed by Tim Burton — a son learns to respect his father’s mythology while reckoning with the distance between the man and the myth; the love survives in the telling.

   https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/between-mediocrity-and-greatness

3. Stand by Me — directed by the late Rob Reiner and based on The Body, a novella by Stephen King — not a story about fathers directly, but about the ache of growing up in the shadow of what’s missing, and finding the courage to walk forward anyway.

4. Spy of the First Person by Sam Shepard — his final work is about the father at the edge of his own vanishing — a voice we strain to hear before it disappears.

   https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/spirited-away-with-sam-shepard

5. Spirited Away is not about a father, but about inheritance of a different kind: identity, name, selfhood. Sometimes we must abandon safety to remember who we are.

6. Tales of Virtuous Stepmothers by Georgina Warren — an anthology of stories about families of all kinds but fundamentally universal in essence.

   https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/tales-of-virtuous-stepmothers

7. Tatiana Schlossberg — a life that recently crossed the threshold, reminding us that inheritance is not only personal but planetary; a responsibility we share with each other.

   https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/a-battle-with-our-blood

   —— my works in this constellation ——

8. The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story — a novel about a father and daughter who reunite after eighteen years of silence; not about perfection, but about return, recognition, and repair.

   https://amazon.com/Signal-Between-Us/dp/B0FPBVHS2K

9. Shotline — a short story about the silence inherited from a father; what we carry, what we refuse, and what still becomes ours no matter how far we run.

   https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/shotline

Somewhere in that same constellation these stories harmonize.

Not as an echo or a mirror to Wild Son & Then Some — different cities, different wounds, different ghosts — but arriving in the same year, searching similar corridors:

What do we carry forward from the men who came before us?

What silence have we outgrown?

What love survived anyway?

They aren’t parallel to his.

They are just on other frequencies on the dial — part of the same cultural weather.

Wild Son & Then Some feels like one of the turning points — a story that waited until life caught up to it.

📁 Wild Son Archive

Compiled from public announcements, posts, and show listings.

Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando, written by Champ Clark & performed by John Mese

• May 2019 — Santa Monica Playhouse, Santa Monica, CA

• October 2019 — Chais Delachaise, New Orleans, LA

• December 2019 — Shepard Theatre, Sun Valley, CA

• Scheduled for June 2020 — National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, NYC1

• Multiple showings, 2020/2021 — Whitefire Theatre/Solofest, Sherman Oaks, CA

• June/August 2022 (twice) — Bistro Byronz, Baton Rouge, LA (Midcity location)

• August 2022 — Festival Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland

Wild Son & Then Some — the story of me and my dad, written & performed by John Mese

• Oct. 18, 2025 — Debut, Unurban Coffee House, Santa Monica, CA2

• Feb. 6, 2026 — Scheduled performance, Whitefire Theatre, Sherman Oaks, CA (Main Space, 8:00 PM PST)

This archive isn’t about keeping score — it’s about remembering where the stories stood so we can recognize how far they traveled.

Some stories are performed.

Some stories are survived.

This one found its way back to the stage.

See you when the lights come up.

The December 8 episode of Sam Harris’s podcast, “The Philosophy of Good and Evil,” approaches David Edmonds’ latest book in a manner characteristic of its host. Harris goes straight for the most provocative thought experiments—those aggravating moral puzzles born in the seminar room—and presses them hard, with little patience for human inconsistency. Edmonds, by contrast, holds the center. Where Harris sharpens the knife, Edmonds resists condemnation, preferring to understand why moral reasoning so often falters when it confronts psychological reality. The tension between them is productive, and it was this exchange—particularly their discussion of effective altruism—that ultimately led me to the book itself.

What Death in a Shallow Pond reveals, however, is a philosophical culture quite distinct from the American technocratic imagination with which effective altruism is sometimes conflated. At roughly the same historical moment when students at Harvard were embroiled in disputes over intellectual property and emerging social networks, a small group of Oxford philosophers—among them Toby Ord and Will MacAskill—were grappling with a different problem altogether: how to persuade people to give not just generously, but consistently, and at real personal cost. Edmonds’ account makes clear that effective altruism did not arise from a start-up mentality or a faith in disruption for its own sake, but from a tradition of moral seriousness shaped by analytic rigor, postwar ethical reckoning, and a persistent discomfort with complacency.

I appreciate deeply the care with which Edmonds constructs the intellectual timeline surrounding the work of Peter Singer, the moral philosophy that shaped him, and the Shallow Pond experiment that he invented. He looks at the broad picture—the progression of ideas around morality and ethics that circulated before Singer, the traditions that underpin Oxford philosophy, the environment into which Singer emerged as a student and rising star, and of course the ideas he brought to the table.

In tracing the origin and trajectory of the Shallow Pond experiment, Edmonds does something else ambitious: he reveals the course of moral philosophy across the twentieth century, from its suspicion of ethical claims to its participation in public discourse. This was the stated goal at the outset—to examine the Shallow Pond as a major philosophical contribution, assess its real-world effects, and ask what remains today.

Edmonds is the author of several books as well as a prolific podcaster. In 2007, about the time that Ord and MacAskill were turning Singer’s idea into entrepreneurial action, Edmonds united with Nigel Warburton in co-founding the widely influential Philosophy Bites, a project dedicated to making philosophy accessible without making it thin. One thing that distinguishes Edmonds from many public intellectuals is his biographical sensibility. When he studies ideas, he studies people—where they came from, who influenced them, and what intellectual weather they moved through. With Edmonds, we get timelines and context. We get, in short, the long view.

That sensibility is grounded in Edmonds’ own formation. Trained in philosophy at Oxford, he was shaped by a culture that prizes argumentative precision, historical awareness, and a certain skepticism toward grand moral pronouncements. He later worked as a BBC journalist, a background that shows in his method: thorough, investigative, attentive to evidence, and alert to unintended consequences. This dual formation—Oxford philosophy and public-facing journalism—helps explain the tone of the book. Edmonds understands the intellectual climate in which Singer’s ideas emerged, but he also knows how those ideas sound once they leave the seminar room and enter public life. The result is a style that resists advocacy in favor of examination, and certainty in favor of clarity.

Thus, in order to answer the question as to why effective altruism might be something worth re-examining at this moment in time, Edmonds went immediately to the source—the man who had the idea in the mid-Seventies, Peter Singer, and the millennials inspired by him and it, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill. Trace its history, follow its course, find its effects today, see how it works, and pick apart the consequences. He looked at its effects across disciplines—specifically the social, psychological, and economic impacts.

What is the Shallow Pond experiment?

On the surface, it is disarmingly simple. You are asked to imagine that you are on your way to work when you notice a small child drowning in a pond. The pond is shallow. You could easily rescue the child, though doing so would mean muddying your clothes or arriving late. Variations of the scenario introduce details such as brand-new shoes or an important appointment, but the core remains unchanged: there is a child in immediate danger, and you can save that child at modest personal cost.

For most people, this does not register as a difficult moral question. The expectation that one should intervene is nearly universal. The force of the thought experiment lies in this near-consensus.

Peter Singer led the way in forming the movement of effective altruism by shifting the setting without altering the stakes: Instead of a child directly before you, the need arrives indirectly—a charitable appeal describing a child whose life could be saved through a modest donation. The question Singer poses is whether declining such a request is morally different, in principle, from walking past the drowning child. If the outcome is the same, he asks, why does the moral clarity feel weaker?

In the book, Edmonds opens with a biographical portrait of Peter Singer, outlining the formative influences that shaped him. He traces Singer’s background as the child of Jewish parents who fled war-torn Europe, found refuge in Australia, and raised him in a secular household in Melbourne. Edmonds then turns to Singer’s early intellectual development, ultimately introducing the contrast that would prove decisive: Singer’s opposition to the intuitionism of his university teacher, H.J. McCloskey.

That contrast becomes central to revealing the competence that Singer exhibited as an undergraduate student. A skilled debater, his skills of articulation were put to good use in the formation of persuasive ethical reasoning that began to take shape in these early years. He was respectful but unafraid of questioning authority when the moment called for it.

Edmonds recounts McCloskey’s thought experiment involving a sheriff in the Jim Crow American South faced with the choice of either allowing six innocent men to be lynched or saving five by fabricating evidence against one. McCloskey argued that manufacturing evidence would corrupt the justice system and therefore could not be justified. Singer took the opposing view that saving five lives was morally preferable to saving none. Edmonds uses this exchange to show that Singer was already committed to a form of utilitarian reasoning that privileged outcomes over moral intuitions and institutional purity.

As Edmonds presents it, Singer’s approach is deliberately slower and than instinctive moral response. It requires calculation, consistency, and a willingness to accept uncomfortable conclusions in the service of maximizing good.

In tracing Singer’s postgraduate years at Oxford, Edmonds situates him within a philosophical culture already under pressure. Logical positivism and linguistic analysis still structured debate, but the social and legal upheavals of the late 1960s forced moral questions back into view where philosophical academia could no longer shelter in disputes over meaning and verification. Figures such as Bertrand Russell responded by engaging openly with contemporary injustices, including the Vietnam War, and by arguing for the existence of objective moral evil.

This is the environment in which Singer’s utilitarian reasoning takes shape—not as an aberration, but as a response to a discipline under pressure to justify its moral claims without apology.

Edmonds marks this turning point with the founding of Philosophy & Public Affairs (1971), a journal that provided a formal venue for moral philosophy’s return to public life. Under John Rawls’s editorship, PPA preserved analytic rigor while engaging questions of abortion, war, and state violence. In Edmonds’ telling, its early essays demonstrate how the field moved beyond abstract moral pronouncements into carefully constructed thought experiments.

Edmonds already showed us that Singer was willing to question authority as an undergraduate student in Melbourne. The postgraduate work at Oxford only sharpened his convictions. For example, he wanted to write about Karl Marx. The faculty scoffed, discounting Marx as a real philosopher. Rather than abandon the project, Singer accepted a compromise: the paper could proceed if framed as a joint study of Marx and Hegel. The episode is presented without commentary, but its significance is clear. Singer would not retreat from his aim, nor would he challenge the institution head-on. He found a workaround that preserved the substance of his argument while satisfying formal requirements. It was an early instance of a pattern Edmonds returns to repeatedly—Singer’s emphasis on outcomes over procedural purity, and a willingness to work within constraints so long as they do not override the moral point at stake.

Edmonds also includes several moments that humanize Singer’s intellectual development. During his time at Oxford, Singer briefly aligned himself with a group of philosophers who styled themselves as radical, drawing inspiration from figures such as Heidegger and Foucault in opposition to the Oxbridge establishment. Singer quickly grew disenchanted, regarding the group’s posture as performative. The episode reinforces Edmonds’ portrait of Singer as resistant to both institutional authority and fashionable dissent.

Edmonds demonstrates Singer’s resistance to complacency through the story of his turn toward vegetarianism. Singer’s decision followed from being confronted with the realities of industrial farming. Edmonds traces Singer’s growing interest in animal welfare not for its novelty, but for what it reveals about his method and ability to make a mark: a capacity to translate moral concern into public impact. Singer’s review of Animal Liberation for The New York Review of Books helped propel what had been a relatively obscure work into a foundational text of the animal rights movement.

By the mid-1970s, Singer commanded a widening sphere of influence. Edmonds presents the humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh as a catalytic moment, planting the seeds of effective altruism, and with it Singer’s claim that if we can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we are morally obligated to do so.

The movement gained real momentum when Tony Ord took the plunge into the pond (pun intended) and started making calculations and spreadsheets that revealed cost effectiveness. As Edmonds admits, Ord was young, nerdy, and extremely motivated to turn theory into action. Ord had the strong mathematical skills to handle the numbers, so when MacAskill came on board, he brought with him another skill set that proved invaluable—a natural instinct for public relations. With Orb handling the facts and figures, MacAskill put himself on TV to sell the idea of effective altruism to the public and produce converts.

MacAskill also tried to bring the operation out of the cramped rooms of university halls and into field work. It was through that effort that he came upon Alan Fenwick, the so-called snail man. Edmonds presents a detailed and fascinating look at Fenwick, who warrants being the subject of a book by himself, is not a philosopher; he’s a scientist obsessed with snails and the eradication of schistosomiasis in Africa. Ord and MacAskill successfully put their operations into gear to raise money for the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, cementing a key early success story for effective altruism.

The last chapters of Part I of Death in a Shallow Pond show that the growth of Oxford’s Centre for Effective Altruism made it less of the wonky, idealist student organization that it began as—a place where employees and pledgers could toss around outrageous theories as one does in the seminar rooms—and more of the high-powered agency that inevitably invites criticism and scrutiny.

By the end of Part I, effective altruism has not been defended or dismantled; it has been made intelligible. It is in Part II where Edmonds examines the critical and practical realities of effective altruism.

What follows in the second half of Death in a Shallow Pond is less comfortable and far more contested—a reckoning that warrants a separate review. In the meantime, I’ve embedded the Sam Harris–David Edmonds discussion and Peter Singer’s 2014 TED Talk below. It’s not homework… but there might be a quiz.

Or rather, I don’t like it the way some people do.

In 2009, I began to dabble in it and uncovered an assortment of curiosities: a Swedish immigrant in the eighteenth century whose temper landed him repeatedly in court; a half-brother of my maternal grandfather whose rap sheet read like a discarded plot-line from Grand Theft Auto. Genealogy, at first, felt like voyeurism with footnotes.

Then, in 2013, I opened a private message on Ancestry.com from Sheldon Roy, the founder of the website “Early Colonial Families of Louisiana.” Sheldon was what you might call a professional genealogist—unpaid, but professional in the only way that matters: years of patience, rigor, and devotion to the evidence of existence. He had also been a friend of my late father. That was the real reason he reached out. And suddenly, I found myself pulled into channels I hadn’t imagined entering.

I began working in public libraries in 2015, and from 2021 to 2024 I served as an assistant in a genealogy collection. There were things I liked about the work—the uncovering of obscurity, the quiet pleasure of solving small mysteries, and the occasional realization visitors had that the past was not better than the present. Often it was harder. Sometimes it was cruel in exactly the same ways.

But there are limits to my liking of genealogy. I met people who do not stop digging. They cling to dates the way alchemists once clung to formulas, as if marriage records and death certificates might finally unlock the philosopher’s stone. Some do it for lineage societies; others for reasons harder to articulate. Everyone needs to belong somewhere. I became, almost by accident, the family genealogist myself—self-appointed, incurably narrative-minded, careless with dates, more interested in stories than proofs. The book I eventually compiled reflects that bias.1

These days, I think less about branches and more about threads—those common and uncommon tensions that compose a life and give it shape.

Take Léandre François Roy.

My great-grandfather, three times over.

When the Civil War broke out, Léandre joined the 18th Louisiana Infantry as a private. He was captured and paroled in Alexandria in 1863, then rejoined another company of the same regiment. He remained in service until the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. The record shows a man who could not stay away.

Léandre was Acadian—descended from people expelled from British settlements in Canada for being too French, too Catholic, and for refusing to swear loyalty to the British Crown. He inherited a collective memory in which disloyalty meant removal. With his French name, his comfort in the French language, and probably a strong and strange accent, he already occupied a position of quiet suspicion in a moment when American loyalty was being policed aggressively. In such climates, there are only a few tolerable postures. One can leave. Or one can prove belonging.

Léandre proved it.

At the end of his life, the town of Mansura elected him mayor. He held the office briefly. Yellow fever took him within months. Among his children were two sons—Louis Pierre and Victor—who would inherit the same pressures of loyalty and coercion, and respond to them in entirely different ways.

Louis Pierre and Victor

If Léandre François Roy represents a man who could not safely refuse, his sons inherited something new: not freedom, exactly, but options.

Louis Pierre Roy responded to coercion by building insulation. Born in 1864, at the end of the war that had consumed his father, he devoted his life not to protest or retreat but to legitimacy. He became wealthy, entered politics, helped found banks, and established civic standing so solid it could not easily be challenged. He was a founding Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus in Marksville. He served as a state representative. His name appears again and again in records that signal trust.

This was not ambition for its own sake. It was architecture.

Louis Pierre understood something his father could not have afforded to learn: that belonging could be constructed in advance. That if you built enough walls—religious, financial, institutional—you might never again be asked to prove loyalty under threat. Even the quiet Anglicizing of names in business records reflects this instinct. It was not denial of origin so much as translation. Frenchness could survive at home, in food and faith and memory, but respectability needed to speak the language of power fluently.

Louis Pierre did not refuse institutions.

He mastered them.

Victor Roy took a different inheritance from the same father.

Victor rose not through commerce or politics, but through education. He became president of the Louisiana State Normal School in Natchitoches—an institution charged with forming teachers, shaping citizens, and stabilizing civic life. Under his tenure, the Normal School grew into Northwestern State College. It was a role rooted in trust rather than visibility, stewardship rather than influence.

When Governor Huey Long attempted to coerce Victor into assisting with vote manipulation, the pressure was unmistakable. This was not abstract politics; it was command. Victor refused. There was no dramatic standoff, no public reckoning. Huey called in a favor. Victor was removed from his position.

This is where the family story breaks its own pattern.

Victor did not attempt to reclaim power. He did not seek vindication. He did not transfer his loyalty elsewhere in the political sphere. Instead, he settled quietly in Natchitoches and converted to the Baptist church. He became deeply devout, devoted to a new calling: to teach the Word. Victor withdrew from the arena where coercion had authority and placed himself inside a moral structure that did not answer to the state.

If Louis Pierre built the door, Victor measured the threshold—and stopped.

Edgar and the Cost of Visibility

Edgar Coco, my great-grandfather, belongs to the generation that inherited legitimacy already earned. He was a son-in-law of Louis Pierre Roy, having married Roy’s youngest daughter, Doris. By the time Edgar entered public life, the door Louis Pierre Roy built was open. Edgar did not need to translate himself into acceptability. He was welcomed as he was—Catholic, Cajun, charming, publicly joyful. He served as mayor of Marksville, befriended Earl Kemp Long, and was invited onto Long’s final gubernatorial ticket in 1959, the year my father was born. On the campaign trail, Edgar was applauded for his humor and his harmonica. He was photographed. He was liked.

This is not a small thing. Visibility is a form of permission.

And yet Edgar served only one term. He returned to the insurance business his father had established. What he carried privately never found a public language. He suffered from severe depression, treated it with alcohol, and died from cirrhosis of the liver. I do not know his politics. I do not know why he did not stay. What I know is that visibility—even when earned—extracts a toll. Edgar shows us that belonging, once granted, does not necessarily shelter the self. Sometimes it only exposes it.

Victor refused power and relocated his moral life.

Edgar accepted visibility and paid for it inwardly.

Both responses are understandable. Neither is reducible.

Burke and the Warning

Resonance in Fiction, Part I (The Neon Rain)

James Lee Burke begins The Neon Rain at Angola, with a man on death row waiting for the state to finish its work. Burke opens where refusal is no longer possible. Angola is not merely a prison; it is the terminal point of coercion, a place built on land once worked by the enslaved, where the state’s authority extends even over death.

Burke’s protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, stands perpetually near this edge. He is a man who refuses corruption again and again, but never leaves the arena in which it operates. He stays close to violence, to law, to punishment. His refusal is righteous, but it is also binding. Robicheaux knows the cost of saying no—and pays it repeatedly, in sobriety, solitude, and moral injury.

Burke offers no room of one’s own.

His warning is unrelenting: when refusal does not arrive in time, the state keeps the last word.

Robicheaux measures the threshold and remains standing in it.

Blackthorn: The True Outsider

Resonance in Fiction, Part II (The Signal Between Us)

Jeremy Blackthorn is the figure Burke does not allow himself to write.

Blackthorn is expelled from the New Orleans Police Department for refusing to ignore a case that would embarrass a powerful patron of the city. He is injured. He walks with a limp. He is not vindicated. Like Victor Roy, he does not appeal. He does not seek reinstatement. He accepts exile as a condition rather than an insult.

Unlike Robicheaux, Blackthorn does not remain in the building.

He becomes a private investigator not to fix the city, but to tell the truth about what it hides. He works the cases institutions avoid, not to restore order, but to preserve moral memory. His solitude is not theatrical. It is chosen. His outsider status is not a pose. It is jurisdictional.

Blackthorn occupies the space beyond the threshold—where refusal no longer needs permission, and truth no longer asks to be heard.

Closing Turn

Across these lives—historical and fictional—the pattern becomes clear. Léandre François Roy could not refuse. Louis Pierre Roy built insulation against coercion. Victor Roy withdrew entirely. Edgar Coco lived briefly in the open and suffered for it. Robicheaux warns us what happens when refusal comes too late. Blackthorn shows us what becomes possible when it arrives in time.

The measure was never how loudly they resisted, but where they stopped.

That was the measure of the threshold.

References

The disagreement between Huey Long and Victor Roy is noted in T. Harry Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Huey Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969) and discussed further in Richard D. White’s Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (Random House, 2006).

Edgar Coco’s relationship with Earl Kemp Long is treated in Kurtz and Peoples, Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics (LSU Press, 1990).

Dave Robicheaux appears in James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain (Simon & Schuster, 1987).

Jeremy Blackthorn appears in The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story by Ashley Rovira (Heavy Crown Press, 2025).

Tatiana Schlossberg’s story in The New Yorker (“A Battle With My Blood,” November 22, 2025) sits squarely in that space between the cinematic and the personal: the recognition that arrives too late, the sorrow that arrives too soon.

Her piece returned me to childlike thinking—the kind of moral framework that splits the world into good guys and bad guys. When I read stories like hers, something naïve in me wishes disease functioned like a vigilante, singling out villains to make the world a bit more just. If cancer only punished the people who deserve punishment, maybe the journey for the rest of us would be easier.

But of course that’s a fantasy. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re good or bad. It doesn’t care what your name is. It doesn’t even care how healthy you are. You can do everything right—kale smoothies, relentless exercise, iron will. Cancer does not give a damn. It takes the young and it takes the old. Schlossberg once swam three miles across the Hudson to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Cancer didn’t care about that either. It keeps no karmic savings account for you to withdraw from when you need mercy.

The most devastating part of her piece comes when she considers the future she will not have: the husband she adores, the children she will not raise into memory. Her son may recall fragments of her. Her newborn daughter will remember nothing at all.

She walks us through the entire agonizing terrain—the chemo, the hair loss, the fragile hope of transplants, the daily effort to stay present even though, as she writes, it’s “harder than it sounds.” And then she turns outward, widening the frame to what the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research will mean not just for her, but for all of us. Leukemia is not fought with wishful thinking. It is fought with science, with mRNA platforms, with ocean research that once drew cytarabine from a Caribbean sponge. These things are not abstractions. They are lifelines.

What shocked me most was not the political betrayal, though that would have been more than enough. It was the personal one. The nation’s Health and Human Services secretary is her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a man who has spent decades undermining trust in the medical and scientific institutions upon which her life quite literally depends. She does not shame him outright. She doesn’t have to. The juxtaposition is its own tragic indictment: a woman fighting for her life with clarity and courage, while a man in Washington wages a culture war against truth itself.

By the time I finished the piece—a few minutes at most—I sat with the weight of what it means for her children, but also for all the children who lose parents every day. Not just to cancer, but to war, to domestic violence, to preventable disease, to accidents, to despair. None of them deserves it. Good guys and bad guys all die. We are all dying. Short of suicide or euthanasia, none of us chooses the when, the how, or the where.

But what we can choose is what we care about while we live. That is the backbone of Schlossberg’s essay: the insistence that her story is not just about her. It is about the family she leaves behind and the humanity she is still trying to protect. It is about the consequences of believing in conspiracy instead of science, of cutting the research that saves lives, of dismissing the fragile systems that tether us to one another.

In the process of dying, Schlossberg reminds us of something essential: our shared stakes, our shared breath, our shared consequences. We live in the same air, on the same planet, within the same vulnerabilities. And what happens to any one of us—what is taken from any family—echoes outward.

This is not just her battle with her blood. It is ours.

There’s a photograph Elliott Landy took in the summer of 1968: Bob Dylan at a wooden picnic table behind Hi Lo Ha, his home in Woodstock, a child beside him, a cat slipping into the frame like a witness that wasn’t meant to be caught. Dylan looks directly at the camera, eyes soft but alert — a man who has finally stepped outside the whirlwind long enough to recognize he’s alive.

It’s a domestic scene, unremarkable in any other life.

In his, it is the whole story.

They wanted the blaze.

He wanted the ember.

The culture demanded Dylan the myth: the lightning bolt, the oracle who could light a generation’s path through riots, assassinations, and the breakdown of American faith. But the man — Bob — understood something almost no one else in his position ever has: if you burn that brightly for too long, you disappear.

He would give his heart. He always did.

But he would not give his soul.

You see that in the opening of the movie — that quiet, devastating pilgrimage to visit Woody Guthrie. The man, the legend, or both, whose voice shaped him, steadied him, healed him on the days when nothing else could. Contrary to what Joan sings, Bob didn’t show up already a legend. A rolling stone, perhaps, but still forming. Still becoming.

He arrived as a young man whose life had been profoundly rearranged by Guthrie’s words.

He couldn’t describe what Woody meant to him in twenty-five words; it took five pages of poetry to even begin. What Guthrie gave him, no money could match, no holiday window display, no “rich kid’s road map,” no fraternity house, “no Hollywood wheat germ,” “no half-wit comedian,” no nightclub or yacht club or supper club — not even a mirror.

“Where do you look for this hope that you know is there? And out there somewhere?” he asked in “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” (1963).

Where do you find that hope?

In the Grand Canyon at sundown or the church of your choice — you might find it there.

For him, he found it in Woody Guthrie at Brooklyn State Hospital.

The world would later look for that in Bob Dylan — the God in the Church of their choice.

He brought music as offering, gratitude as currency.

That was the heart speaking.

But the soul — the interior — was always held behind a veil.

The world wanted a mascot, a projection, a figurehead for a movement desperate for symbols. But Dylan had a longer view, and a deeper instinct. He understood that what people wanted from him — another rallying cry, another public stand — was not what they actually needed. They needed the truth, not the performance of truth. They needed the well, not just the refreshment. To give that, he had to guard the source. He had to stay outside the machinery so he could translate the meaning beneath it. Joan Baez says it in her own way in her interview with Nicolle Wallace: “We may not be able to turn the tide, but we can save some fishes.” Everyone does the work they are built to do. Everyone offers what they can. And when it comes from the well — from the quiet, protected place where the truth is still intact — it is enough for that moment, that person, or that cause.

Then came the crash.

The Triumph.

An accident preserved in smoke and speculation.

Whether the crash saved him or he used the crash to save himself doesn’t matter. What matters is what it gave him: permission. A sanctioned exit from a machine that devours people. Permission to breathe, to step back, to reconsider the cost of mythmaking.

The world offered him a window into idolatry.

He chose the door into silence.

Because the world’s offer carried a hidden clause:

…abandon yourself.

To become the legend they wanted, he would have had to amputate the man who was still becoming. So he refused. He chose interiority over spectacle. He chose survival of essence. He stepped away from the glare so he could protect the part of himself that made the glare possible.

He rejected myth to preserve truth.

He chose the ember, not the blaze.

And here’s the irony that borders on divine symmetry:

because he nurtured the quiet, the legend survived.

Had he let the myth consume him, it would have been hollow — another tragic American fable. Another Marilyn, Elvis, Diana: beautiful, bright, undone by the brightness.

The legend will take everything if you let it.

Bob did not let it.

He protected the silence. The stillness.

The inner workshop where meaning is made.

He tended the ember — not for the world, but for himself.

Yet the world still benefited.

And because he did, the world received something rarer:

a legend built on what was authentic instead of projected,

a myth rooted in a man who survived the making of it.

The people craved Dylan.

But Bob had to draw the map for himself first.

Rather than let the movement sweep him, shape him, replace him, he retreated to a place where the silence could remind all who listened of the meaning underneath the noise.

And so we return to Elliott Landy’s photograph: Dylan at the table, a child beside him, the cat slipping into the shot. Forty-nine square inches of wood, forks, coffee, morning light — a quiet existence that should have been unremarkable. But it saved him. It preserved him. It gave him back to himself.

In that frame, you see the blaze reduced to a steady ember —

and you understand that the ember was the fire all along.

References

Bob Dylan, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Recited April 12, 1963, YM-YWHA Poetry Center, NYC. First published in Broadside No.1 (1963); reprinted in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956–1966 (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Joan Baez, interview with Nicolle Wallace. “Joan Baez is Calculating How Much She’s Willing to Risk.” The Best People with Nicolle Wallace, Episode 18, Sept. 22, 2025.

“You see, I like facts. I have great respect for facts, and the idea of just making something up really bothers me.”—Barbra Streisand, My Name is Barbra

I read the prologue of Barbra Streisand’s memoir this week, and one small story has stayed with me. A friend of Barbra’s told her about a medical doctor she knew—an educated man, someone trained in evidence—who had read an unflattering article about Streisand and believed it completely. The article painted her as “a bitch” and “impossible to work with.” Barbra’s friend pushed back, defended her, said the stories were false. She’s a wonderful person to work with and also very nice, he said, using those words: wonderful and very nice.

The doctor wouldn’t hear it.

He’d read it in a magazine, after all.

And Barbra, in the memoir, writes:

“He chose to believe some writer who had never met me, rather than the person who really knows me. That upsets me deeply. Why couldn’t he accept the truth?”

That line hit me hard—not because of Streisand specifically, but because it articulates something I’ve been circling all week as I read about the newly surfaced Epstein Files. {Full disclosure: I’m not obsessed with the topic, so my phrasing there, “read about” (as opposed to “read all”) is important.}

Beliefs, once formed, are stronger than facts.

Or, as Nietzsche said, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

A fact is neutral. Impartial. It doesn’t care how you feel.

A belief, however—that’s emotional. It arrives with feeling, memory, identity, and ego. We don’t just hold beliefs. Beliefs hold us. They make us feel safe or righteous or confirmed.

Baldwin understood this intimately.

The doctor in Streisand’s story wasn’t protecting truth; he was protecting a worldview—an inherited narrative about celebrities, women, power, or maybe about Streisand herself.

And this is precisely what we are watching in real time with the Epstein revelations. The same set of documents is producing two completely different reactions:

• For those who never trusted Trump (hand raised), the emails confirm what we felt in our bones. They reinforce what is already backed by public statements, praise of Epstein, the flight logs, the pattern.
  

• For those who are invested in believing the best of him, the same emails are a “nothingburger,” an elaborate smear, or an attempt to “make something out of nothing.”

One truth. Two beliefs. Zero overlap.

Belief is emotional. Truth is not.

And here’s the part most people never reach, because it requires a kind of stillness and self-awareness that our world actively discourages:

The person who is threatened by facts isn’t defending truth—they’re defending ego.

The ego says:

If this belief is wrong, then I am wrong.

If the narrative collapses, then I collapse.

If I admit uncertainty, I lose safety.

So the belief becomes sacred. Untouchable.

People cling to it the way one clings to a life raft.

Hannah Arendt said that the masses have to be won by propaganda rather than argument, that the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule” is the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists. What is propaganda but a story? It’s like a fairy tale made up by an authoritarian figure to coax people into a belief system. People who “drink the kool-aid,” so to speak, cling to the belief like religion. Arendt took it further to assert that a person who has completely absorbed the propaganda will become an enemy of the truth. That is to say, they will fight it like it is the devil.

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Once someone identifies with a narrative, questioning the narrative feels like questioning their very existence.

And so we end up back at Streisand’s grief.

Not vanity. Not celebrity sensitivity.

Grief.

Grief that the truth loses to the story someone prefers.

Grief that a stranger’s belief—completely unfounded—carries more weight than lived reality.

Grief that people would rather feel validated than be free.

Because truth can set you free, yes.

But it can also unsettle you.

It can unmask you.

It can demand growth.

Belief requires none of that.

Belief is easy.