The week before last was marked by a rather cataclysmic event for a very particular niche of online Christianity — the beloved meme page I Need God In Every Moment Of My Life was deactivated by Instagram.

The ostensible reason was “copyright violation”: but this is a perplexing charge against a meme page — and, more generally, a paradoxical claim in a moment when generative AI is radically destabilizing concepts of authorship, self and creativity. Since there’s no one at Instagram to appeal to, but more bots — to whom does one appeal? Ultimately, to God: or specifically, one could sincerely pray for the intercession of Carlo Acutis, the saint of the digital, that against all odds the account might be restored.

At its height, @ineedgodineverymomentomylife had over 136,000 followers, and was — and remains, though now with fewer followers — a go-to place of encounter for expressions of faith that are alternately, or simultaneously, ironic, provocative, comforting and bizarre: from reposts of glib yet bracing tweets (“divine intervention is real. ❤️ God is making my life harder”), to an inventory of “biblically accurate Sanrio characters”, to an image of a crucified minion (which can be purchased as a bikini — “were you there when they Gru-cified my Lord?”)

Depending on one’s theological disposition, cultural context, or relationship with religion, these may seem like irreverent, or at least odd, “expressions of faith” — but to a subset of Christians with a particular array of aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities, myself included, I Need God’s strange and charming intersections of faith, pop culture and internet absurdity have often tended to feel more honest, sincere, and spiritual than many of their unsatirical counterparts in the Christian and Catholic algorithms.

Hence, its deletion is not just a blip on the subcultural radar: these accounts, and their influence, matter — because they shape the way people actually experience their faith. It is an age in which religious content is not just an ancillary means of transmitting religious ideas, but a principal space in which religious experience unfolds. Digital Christianity is Christianity, at present, as much as any of its other domains of discourse.

And, as someone who’s been examining these things, and whose feed is therefore flooded with myriads of Christian influencers who often blur the line between evangelization and self-branding — when I Need God has popped up in my feed, it has almost always come as a moment of spiritual relief: a moment of God actually breaking through the algorithmic religiosity, in the playful inscrutability of a given image, witticism or gag, rather than another talking head talking about Him. Amidst all the ideologically motivated content in this space — trads, libs and all in between telling you what to believe or performing faith in a certain way — it has often shone through as a kind of theological interruption, offering a little digital nugget of the irreducible mystery of things: “here’s this”.

I recall a favorite of mine: a pic of a pensive young goth sitting next to a statute of the Virgin Mary in a Puerto Rican cemetery. I remember scrolling across it and being like: well, whatever else is going on — whatever culture wars and identitarian inanities contort the collective spirit and the body of God — at least there’s this goth, and Mary, in a cemetery. Simply captioned “mood today”, it was at once a striking juxtaposition to whatever the hell else I was scrolling past, an implicit nod to the complexity of Christian subcultures, and a genuinely stirring image of prayer. In a medium where traditional piety can become performative vanity, the ironic detachment of a wordless image can paradoxically be more sincere than the most devout digital proselyte, because it makes the viewer aware of the contingent nature of the medium itself.

And yet, among all the many Christian accounts that are currently crowding digital space, this is the one that Instagram chose to take down. For a company that calls itself “Meta”, it exhibits relatively little meta-awareness.

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For more than 8 years, familiarity with I Need God has been something of a shibboleth for a certain continuum of contemporary Christianity, one marked by self-awareness and reflexivity — or one might say, a “metamodern” sensibility of being at once “ironic and sincere” — a faith that delights in beholding, in the curated meme, the variety, strangeness and occasional paradoxicality of religious expression in the hypermediated age.

The account was the creation of curator Kyle Hide, and was originally born of a group chat between him and his friends Melanie, Amanda and Yaki. They realized that they were sharing a very particular type of experience that might as well be a public thing. What began as an image-sharing page went on to spawn a podcast (= godcast), merch and other media.

@ineedgod on cracks in pomo

There are many other Christian meme accounts, but I Need God does what it does with a rare warmth amidst its tongue-in-cheekness, a reflection of the personality of its curator — kind, phlegmatic, and genuinely curious about the faith expressions of others. As he described in our recent chat, the project allowed him to ask “without judgment… what do you believe in? Why? Like, you believe X, Y, and Z? …That might sound schizophrenic or crazy to someone else who may laugh, but like, no … I would never laugh at that. …To me, there’s always some truth in it.” On the epitaph for the original page he notes, “there was never a goal beyond posting things that resonated with me in whatever way. The politics were all over the place, and that was kind of the point.”

Hide describes the project as a form of performance art, enabling him to give a complex and nuanced expression to his own faith. He was raised Catholic, and served as a cantor in his parish when he was young — even at a time when he didn’t believe in God — but it laid the groundwork for his understanding of how faith is experienced through aesthetics and performativity.

Stephen on the ineedgodpod

Building a page like this is hard as hell — the thing I’m most struck by after talking to Kyle, is the simultaneous investment and personal detachment with which he’s approached it. I certainly pretend to care a lot less about the little following I’ve scraped together than I actually do — if I suddenly lost it, I’d be devastated. But while Hide has admitted to being still in a grieving process over losing an account he spent nearly a decade building, he’s accepted it as a kind of liberating grace, since it offers him the freedom to pursue new kinds of performance: to find other ways to bring God into every moment of his and others’ lives.

There may be something inherently kenotic — self-emptying, in the Philippians 2:7 sense — in the nature of a meme page, and its lord: in the anonymity of its offerings, it empties both the original creators and the curator of their authorial identities. It’s less like a modern art museum, where the author’s identity is clearly placarded, than a cathedral, where the architect matters less than the Creator to whom the icons and stained glass point. But unlike the authorial destabilization of AI, here there is no simulation or instrumentalization of the appropriated image for an ulterior purpose; it simply is what it is.

Even if the account hadn’t been deactivated, Hide notes the culture of social media may have already been moving in a different direction. The page’s growth had been slowing, because “the internet is different now… it’s like it’s another layer of ‘meta’ now because people already have that sense of like, complex irony/sincerity going into their creative act in the first place… Because they’re influenced by this gesture of curation and others like it, which creates this whole sort of nested series. It’s like rage bait, you know?” The page had captured the magic of a less self-conscious era of content creation, religious and otherwise — but now the very aesthetic that meme culture examined and sublimated has influenced the culture of original content, in the endless feedback loop of digital media.

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Since the arrival of its current CEO Adam Mosseri, Instagram has retooled its algorithm to prioritize “original content” creators — which on the surface may sound positive; but it’s difficult to define what “original content” really means now, as predictive algorithms come more and more to form the consciousness of users, and as AI harvests its raw materials from any and all creators everywhere with impunity. And, in the context of religious content, this shift has the effect of foregrounding religious creators who often seem to be more about the cult of personality than the religious principles they represent.

Viral Christian and Catholic creators — like Anthony Gross, who visits and ranks churches, or Aubrey Corrigan, who in a recent reel models “outfits based on different denominations” (the victor is the Catholic lace mantilla), or even influencer priests like Fr. David Michael Moses — may be doing a lot to re-popularize religious devotion, and I don’t mean to cast down on their authenticity as natively digital expressions of faith. But ironically, such “original” Christian content feels less original than the supposedly “unoriginal” content of a meme page, which in its very irreverence actually makes you think and has something to say to your soul.

Hence, in this context of increasingly self-promotional, and at times narcissistic pop-digital religion, strange as it may sound — we need memes. Religious memeing is a critical apparatus of religious meaning: memes are theology.

The message of faith always travels through some medium — and in the infamous dictum of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message” — hence the fabric of faith itself is shaped by the contours of the media that convey it; and this has important consequences for faith in an era where our main modes of communication are in one sense democratized, and in another sense corporatized and commodified.

The more religious culture becomes a digital commonplace, a constantly encountered artifact designed to conform to the algorithm, the harder it becomes for us to encounter it as sacred. This is the crux of Benjamin’s critical stance in the The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — long before the era of AI slop Jesus — that the automated reproduction of artifacts causes them to lose their “aura”, their unique “presence” or authenticity.

But I think one way to understand Kyle’s work is that it reinvigorates aura, because by placing even the strangest and most “cringe” religious content in such arresting juxtapositions, it re-enlivens their mystery and strangeness, and cuts against the presentation of religious content as reproducible brand. Meme-curation as theological aura-farming.

Speaking of farming: much of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas is devoted not only to A.I., but to the broader theme of “ecology of communication”. Hence creators, Christian and otherwise, have a moral responsibility to participate in digital spaces in an ecologically-minded way — not just in the sense of opposing data centers because of their water usage etc. (though that’s important), but in the sense of treating their informational offerings as part of an organic web of media relationality (for instance, in the responsible recycling of images).

My own emerging media theology — as I continue to be on the internet, but also often dislike it, and realize that God has something to do with that tension — is that spiritually “good” religious media are those that bring us back to original medium: the mysterious im-mediacy of our material being, of Presence — the re-realization, even in the midst of scrolling, that we’re actually here, whatever this is. That’s what an icon does, looking at you as much as you look at it — and, strangely, that’s what a meme can do too, when it makes you laugh, or otherwise pause.

The way out of hyperreal Christianity is not to simply “go to church” — that’s the Christian equivalent of the equally ineffectual “go touch grass” as a solution to informational excess — but to move through the complexities of our layered digital meanings on their own terms, which is what a meme page does in its act of curation. In this often toxic media ecology, we need guides and gardeners like I Need God.

But this is not a eulogy — Kyle Hide’s work continues, as is taking on new kinds of media and embodiment. Right as the page was getting banned, Kyle had just gone viral in a new form by creating a TikTok dance to Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc”. As if it were the commissioning of a new kenotic identity just as the previous one is laid to rest, “someone came up to [him] on the street and said, ‘You’re the Wilco dance guy’”.

To go from being the “ineedgod” guy to the Wilco Dance guy, to whatever other performances — is precisely the kind of liberation from personal identity and brand that can be hard for an artist to spiritually navigate in the age of digital self-representation; but Kyle seems to be doing so gracefully.

As Hide reflects: “one of the most bracing things to think about is that even if it’s not reinstated, the impact of the account is not erased.” If the trap of digital media is to align the self with the virtual, to let representation take precedence over Presence, the way out of the trap is to remember that the experiences themselves — both of the creators and their sometime followers — will always have been real.

I can say that in my own experience there’s something about I Need God in Every Moment of My Life that has always felt like when I encountered it, God was returning to my moment, rather than it estranging me from Him — and that amidst all the informational chaos that inundates us, the Holy Spirit is moving too, with a wink, with a warmth toward even what is cringe, and is present in every moment of my life.

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Welcome to the new and improved version of ‘no pomo’—where Cracks in PoMo’s curator (Stephen i.e. me) posts his unpolished, unhinged hot takes.

Cracks in pomo is proud to bring you nuanced, thoughtful commentary on topics of pop culture, media theory, and religion by a variety of authors—ranging from scholars like and to based Jesuits like and journalists like and overall cool kids like , , , Jonah Howell, , and .

But every once in a while, Stephen just has to unleash a random, off-the-dome hot take that may or may not be completely logical, but which is certain to provoke and possibly entertain.

Past topics have included:

• in praise of feminine hysteria

• why I like getting old

• the shortsightedness of both pro-lifers and pro-immigrationers

• why Pride Mass is more cringe than it is heretical

• why you need friends who are richer and poorer than you

• why you shouldn’t bulk

• why you shouldn’t convert to Catholicism

Initially, we launched no pomo as a separate “sister” Substack page. But after a trial year, we decided to merge it into Cracks in Postmodernity’s main page, but as a separate section.

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Buckle up for the ride!!!

Recently I spent an hour stranded in a bus shelter as a large storm passed through my city. I had forgotten my umbrella and was travelling back from a work event, so there was nothing to do but wait. Three of my colleagues were with me, so after a few minutes of mindlessly tapping on our phones, we started chatting. All of them were around ten years older than me and had kids, and as I am a new parent, the conversation naturally drifted onto kids and childrearing. The conversation was a fascinating microcosm of the kinds of discussions I’ve been hearing lately, showing a marked divide between elder millennial approaches to parenting. (For the sake of their privacy, I’ve changed their names to something more thematically appropriate: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar).

We quickly got onto the topic of toddlers using phones and tablets, and how bad it is for kids.

“You are so lucky,” Eliphaz says. “There’s finally research that tells us how bad it is. We didn’t have that when we were raising our kids.”

I’m not sure how to respond. Why would you need a scientific study to tell you giving your two-year-old a smartphone is a bad idea?

Bildad seems to be coming from a similar perspective. “Trusting the science isn’t always best, though. It keeps changing all the time.” She exhales a heavy, performative sigh. “We were told to sleep-train our kids by letting them cry it out, but now all the studies say that it spikes their cortisol and causes attachment issues. So we’ve basically damaged them both.”

Never mind, Bildad is a doomer. Not a helpful attitude when it comes to kids.

“It’s just a matter of how you approach the science,” Zophar chimes in. “You need to be looking at meta-analyses of the studies.” The other two nod while Zophar shifts her tote bag to the other arm. “I got both our kids a psychologist when they started school. It felt like the responsible thing to do.”

And there you have it. The orthodox elder millennial approach to parenting. An overreliance on expert opinion which hobbles them from doing the very thing every single generation of human beings has done before them — raise children.

“It’s crazy how people used to just trust their family members or religious leaders about how to raise kids,” I say, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Thank god we have science,” Eliphaz says with no trace of irony. “I would hate to have raised kids back in the day. Imagine some priest telling you want to do.”

“I do wonder though,” I say slowly, keeping my voice even, “if there’s a point at which you have to just trust your own gut? Decide what seems right to you and your partner. Science is great, but no study is actually about your kid. It’s all extrapolations from things observed in other people’s kids.”

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Zophar scoffs and crosses her arm. “No I don’t trust my gut instinct, actually. That’s what my parents did and do you have any idea how much therapy I needed because of them?”

“I don’t want to pass down generational wounds,” Bildad concurs.

I shrug. I have some sympathy for them, I really do. But it’s fascinating to me how similar they sound to the people from ‘back in the day’. The reliance on a class of clerics they trust implicitly. The belief in generational curses. The desire to assign responsibility to anyone but themselves.

Eliphaz tries to break the tension. “It’s crazy you’re even allowed to have a kid without passing some kind of test. Like, we make people get a license before they drive a car but anyone is allowed to have a kid? I’m basically still a kid!”

Eliphaz is a forty-two-year-old middle manager who likes to play Elden Ring once his kids have gone to bed. He’s a poster boy of the worst aspect of elder millennial men — the never-ending Peter Pan syndrome. This kind of thing drives me up the wall. The feigned helplessness of calling the tasks necessary to preserve a very comfortable existence ‘adulting’; being the victim of your life even as you cross into middle age; viewing your kids as a burden to overcome in your already super difficult life. And then the inevitable descent toward the nadir of victimhood — discovering your deep-seated childhood trauma.

“I get wanting to do better than your parents,” I say. “But I don’t think anybody is a perfect parent. Will doing what some study says make you better than them?”

Zophar frowns. “So you’re saying we should ignore research and just guess?”

I hold my tongue. My nature is to keep arguing until I’ve said something I regret, but I’m really trying not to do that anymore. I do understand the utility of science to the human race. I get that we learn from the past and develop our knowledge. But I also don’t think research is some hermetically sealed truth machine. Studies can be biased and funding dictates what gets researched. The replication crisis shows how junk much of the ‘science’ really is. And even if the studies were all exemplary, no scientist will ever know your kid like you do. Aside from me and my wife, nobody else is my son’s parent.

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What’s struck me most about this conversation with my elder millennial colleagues is how passive they render themselves in the course of their own lives. Once you believe that life is coming at you instead of coming from you, you’ve already lost half the battle. Thanks to our complex and wondrous minds, we have the incredible ability to make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. How you view the world really does determine what kind of world you live in.

Etymologically, the word ‘world’ is a funny one. It gets used interchangeably with ‘earth’ or ‘universe’, but its origin in Old English was ‘wer-ald’, with ‘wer’ meaning ‘man’ and ‘ald’ meaning ‘age’. It was a personal term. Your ‘wer-ald’ was the lengthy and breadth of your life, much more temporal than spatial. So the ancients knew what we tend to forget, that each of us does have a large say in determining the nature of our existence. We can, as my colleagues demonstrate, create a world for ourselves in which everything is too hard, kids require experts, and scientific studies are our only life raft on the stormy seas of parenting. Or we can create a world in which I am perfectly capable of raising kids, of raising my son, and it’s a world in which my son will raise me in the process. I can choose to believe that I will become a good father through the process of fathering. I can seek advice and expertise, of course, but not out of a fear of ‘screwing him up’ or out of a desire to abdicate my responsibility. Instead, I can raise him out of a desire to love him. And I can also be loved by those who are giving me advice on how to do so.

Raising a child can be communal, not in the sense of abdicating responsibility to the faceless commune, but in the sense of creating thicker and deeper cords of relationship with those around you. Childrearing is incredibly vulnerable, and so it offers one of the best opportunities for building true community. Recently, a friend who is a pastor (and also an elder millennial) expressed that I may be fathering my son out of fear instead of love. He noticed that my approach with teaching my son right from wrong had an overlay of anxiety, as if I was scared my son would grow up to be a bad kid if I didn’t teach him this lesson as soon as possible. It was not an easy thing to hear, but nor was it an easy thing for him to say. But he said it in a caring way, and I took it to heart. Our friendship has never been stronger or deeper.

The instinct to defer your personal discernment, and forego relationships with people who actually know you, in favor of following the advice of some random scientific study published somewhere is a dangerous habit. Parents are meant to parent their own kids, that is their responsibility. They are not called to be generalists but specialists, particularly focused on the wellbeing of their own child. And, as I am still learning, they are called to parent from a place of active love and not out of fear or passivity.

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• Fr. Geno Baroni and Steve Adubato’s urban ethnopolitics against “White Flight”

  My personal esteem for Father Geno’s legacy is a “family matter”: He played a key role in shaping the social vision of my grandfather, Stephen Adubato Sr. Working since the 1950s as a history teacher in the city’s public high schools, Grandpa Steve and my grandmother were among the few Italians still living in Newark, New Jersey’s North Ward in the 1960s. The city’s population — which still consisted of a handful of Irish, Polish, Portuguese, Greeks and Ashkenazi Jews — was dominated by Black Americans, with a rising influx of Puerto Ricans. 

  After the riots (or “rebellion”) of 1969, whites started leaving in droves. The Italians tried desperately to cling onto the few political positions they had left in city government as their population was dwindling. Thus, their outrage was kindled when a Black man, Kenneth Gibson, ran for mayor against the incumbent Hugh Adonizzio in 1970. 

  Big Steve, as my grandfather was affectionately known, made the “treasonous” decision to back Gibson. He claimed that his decision was not for the sake of promoting racial equality, but instead had to do with integrity: Adonizzio was infamous for his corruption. “I wasn’t ‘pro-Black,’” said my grandfather. “Frankly, Gibson was the better man.” Despite frequent death threats and an eventual attempt on his life, Big Steve campaigned for Gibson among the city’s ethnic whites. After Gibson’s victory, my grandfather decided to open the North Ward Educational and Cultural Center. 

  Following the model of Msgr. Baroni (a close friend and confidant), “The Center” provided job training, social services, cultural and religious celebrations and recreational activities, all with the aim of keeping the neighborhood’s working-class Italians from leaving for the suburbs and encouraging them to get to know and collaborate with their Black and Hispanic neighbors. 

  As much as he acknowledged the ways that certain racial groups faced greater structural disadvantages than others, he was skeptical about purely identitarian approaches to social justice, highlighting the need for a realistic attitude toward the concrete needs of all working-class inner-city people. “I’m not a white liberal,” my grandfather told me years ago. “I’m a practical guy who wants to live in a society that gives people of all kinds, of all backgrounds, a chance to share.”

  All ethnic groups, Big Steve believed, “had a vital role to share,” with the potential to enrich and be enriched by others. “A [multiethnic] situation promotes better race relations. A multiracial city is what America is all about.”

  He was also skeptical of forms of government aid that minimized everyday people’s agency. “There is no program that the government can ever set up that can duplicate a neighborhood, with its responsibilities, its communication, the feeling of belonging that it imparts. If you put buildings and people together,” he continued, “it’s still not a real neighborhood. It will not be right because there is no common interest or responsibility.”

• Michael Novak on Steve Sr.’s ethnopolitics

For four years now, Adubato has worked with Mayor Gibson. Each takes pains to fulfill any word he gives the other. Neither has yet given the other cause for mistrust. It is a plus that they also like each other, visit each other often. And that they do not talk liberal talk. They do not appeal for brotherhood, morality, or other fine sentiments. They try to talk about concrete needs and actions, when they talk business, to give their relationship the ring of hard reliability. Adubato helped convince many Italian Americans to vote for Mayor Gibson out of a kind of shrewd self-interest. If we Italians leave Newark, he said, Newark will be all black.…

Second, for five years, Adubato has woven into his political organizing cultural motifs. He has tried to sharpen his people’s awareness of themselves as Italian Americans, with an identity, tradition, needs and re-sources of their own. The morale of young people in the North Ward, he felt, was even worse than that of young blacks; the latter at least had a firm identity as blacks. The Italian Americans did not feel either quite Italian or quite American; they could not ignore the slight silent contempt falling upon their heads from almost every quarter.

Thirdly, Adubato’s work represents the new ethnicity by giving a taste of political effectiveness, by building leadership, by developing new practical strategies, by achieving a firm political base--all this at the most critical point in American society, in neighborhoods where white and black need each other if either is to survive. What concrete institutions must be available to keep a neighborhood stable, attractive, and happy with itself? bakeries? cheese and wine shops? good produce markets? funds for small businesses? churches? cultural organizations? political cadres? schools? banks that invest in the neighborhood, not outside it? realtors who generate confidence rather than fear? a fair break from the media? a legitimate share of the resources of government designated to aid minorities of all sorts?

There is another feature about the new ethnicity, in Newark and elsewhere, that deserves notice. Telly Savalas of Kojak exemplifies it rather brilliantly. (”Kojak” is a lousy name for an actor who is plainly Greek, just as “Bunker” is a misleading name for a man as Irish as Carroll O’Connor. What do the “creative people” of television know about ethnic cues?)…

What happens to these white ethnic leaders-and to others who join them week by week--is the most important social barometer in our northeastern and north central states. Hardly anything is more central to the future of our cities, because what happens to them indicates what will happen to poor and working class populations of all our cultural traditions, white and black together.

• Ethnopolitics vs. Identity Politics in Newark

My grandfather, Steve Adubato Sr., is mentioned in passing toward the close of the book for protecting the North Ward from one of Baraka’s divisive pushes for an all-black housing project in the middle of the mostly Italian neighborhood. But little is said about the fact that he was one of the only Italians who worked tirelessly to convince his co-ethnics to stay put and build coalitions with their black and Puerto Rican neighbors. He also campaigned to win Italian votes for Kenneth Gibson, a black mayoral candidate, in 1970 (without which he would not have been able to win the election).

Steve Sr. (affectionately known as “Big Steve”) was no respecter of white liberal pieties or of black radicalism—namely in the form of excessive government handouts aimed exclusively toward black indi­viduals. “There is no program that the government can ever set up that can duplicate a neighborhood, with its responsibilities, its communication, the feeling of belonging that it imparts. If you put buildings and people together,” he continued, “it’s still not a real neighborhood. It will not be right because there is no common interest or responsibility.”

Nevertheless, he recognized the need for government programs that aimed to uplift businesses and communal organizations. And as much as he advocated for his fellow working-class Italians, he had no interest in the Italian isolationism and supremacism of others like Addonizio and Anthony Imperiale (who is lauded as a hero by Cashill). His main interest when supporting Gibson and going on to found the North Ward Center (a community center and social service organization) and the Robert Treat Academy charter schools, was to uplift all of the neigh­borhood’s communities, teaching them to value their own cultures as well as those of their neighbors as a source of enrichment, empowerment, and existential meaning. All ethnic groups, he believed, “had a vital role to share,” with the potential to enrich and be enriched by others. “A [multiethnic] situation promotes better race relations. A multiracial city is what America is all about.” Thus, Adubato favored universalist approaches in terms of policy, but he also recognized that the ethnic community was the decisive actor in city politics, economics, and daily life—not the atomized individual.

His push to halt the North Ward’s Italians from moving to the suburbs was not driven by moralistic “anti-racist” posturing. “I’m not a white liberal,” he once said. “I’m a practical guy who wants to live in a society that gives people of all kinds, of all backgrounds, a chance to share.” Above all, he feared that the Italians and other ethnic whites would lose their cultural heritage in the suburbs and would miss out on the chance to build a substantial and powerful coalition with working-class people of other races and ethnicities. While he certainly criticized the whites who flocked to the suburbs due to racial animus, he was especially critical of suburban whites who congratulated themselves for supporting liberal policies—which, though seemingly benevolent, were often cynically motivated—rather than “getting their hands dirty” and working side by side with people of color in the old neighborhood.

My grandfather’s mission was inspired by the work of figures like Monsignor Geno Baroni, a Catholic priest of Italian descent who estab­lished a model for building urban multiethnic coalitions. His willingness to walk the nuanced line between conventionally progressive and conservative discourses of race placed him in the line of fire from all sides. He was subjected to harsh criticism from ethnic whites for being too protective of blacks and from blacks for being too hospitable to proponents of ethnic white pride. Despite the vehement backlash, his National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs attracted numerous supporters in favor of multiethnic coalitions, including Senator Barbara Mikulski, Representative Marcy Kaptur, and Professor Arthur J. Naparstek.

• Catholic parish life after the great “White Flight”

Koeth makes the case that mass suburbanization both marred the spirit of neighborliness and collaboration and removed the structural and institutional avenues that once made it possible for people to band together to solve problems. This is not to say that the moral issues that fuel the culture wars are unimportant. Surely, the pro-life movement and efforts to defend the right for religion to exist in the public square have had a concretely positive impact on the lives of many. The problem, however, is when ideological issues take center stage, and when we reduce politicking to culture warring—ignoring the need to address more immediate material issues. The culture warrior, blinded by ideological zeal, forgets to engage in concrete gestures—things like labor organizing, block associations, and even more basic things like talking to one’s literal next-door neighbors—to enact substantial changes in society.

Reality—with whose complex contours one is constantly confronted in cities and the country—forces you to band together to resolve, even with your so-called enemies. Should we fail to use our common sense and get the job done, the consequences are harder to avoid. In suburbia, it’s easier to outsource the job.

My paternal grandfather once warned that “there is no program that the government can ever set up that can duplicate a neighborhood, with its responsibilities, its communication, the feeling of belonging that it imparts.” He was known as the last of a dying breed of New Jersey Italian community organizers; a protégé of Msgr. Geno Baroni, who Koeth cites as one of the few Catholics committed to halting the move to the suburbs in the name of promoting urban multiethnic coalition-building. And he understood that “if you put buildings and people together, it’s still not a real neighborhood. It will not be right because there is no common interest or responsibility.”

Alas, the frictionless, atomized “spirit of suburbia”—which is no longer limited to suburbia—forms people whose point of departure is not the concreteness of reality. This mentality makes it so that reality itself becomes daunting, so much so that it’s better to retreat into our cozy abstractions and leave it to impersonal bureaucratic entities to deal with reality, with all its messiness and unpredictability. There is something sinister—and quite literally “diabolical”—about ideological divisions that become so tribalistic that they block us from building grassroots-style coalitions around addressing immediate material issues.

• The erosion of grassroots politics in Newark under technocratic expansion

  This overemphasis on top-down reform leaves little space for bottom-up changes, and an overemphasis on expertise leaves little room for the wisdom born from proximity to people and problems. That such structures of power seem to operate—as Pier Paolo Pasolini put it—“without a face” serves to further rob the people of avenues to make their voices heard and to have a direct impact on their own community, thus weakening personal agency.

  Papal warnings about over-centralization shed light on the trajectory of the politics of Newark, New Jersey—something which I’ve researched and reported on extensively, in part because of my paternal grandfather’s involvement in it and also because I’ve spent 8 years working (2 of which I spent living) in the city. This essay aims to map out Newark’s shift from a city which balanced “external” interventions with numerous avenues of localized direct action, to one dominated by distant forces and where local agency continues to erode.

• Marcus Garvey against colorblindness

Since the 1960s, numerous other non-Black Christian social justice activists similarly recognized the value of ethnic identity as both a locus of cultural enrichment and political organizing, including Daniel P. Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Father Geno Baroni, and Michael Novak, the latter of whom eloquently wrote that our roots “are our material, our concrete limits, our purchase on a finite, real, earthy earth – our liberation from the land of pure spirits, disembodied presences, and gnostic hoverings…every human being is ‘rooted,’ and that each one’s social history is important. Each of us is born from the womb of a single woman into a particular segment of human experience, at a time, in a place, within a language and a particular set of cultural symbols, beliefs, rites, gestures, emotional patterns, and a not-universal sensibility.”

…

In our rootless, disenchanted age, neither the highly elitist, bureaucratic program of liberal identitarians, nor the bootstrapping rhetoric of colorblind libertarians–both steeped in materialist individualism–provide a way out of our social deadlocks. While Black radicalism may have plenty of pitfalls, it offers us a nuanced vision of the polyvalent elements that make up society–and above all, envisions society as fundamentally rooted in something greater than the atomized individual. If we insist on being “colorblind,” then let us refuse to be cultureblind, because culture is beautiful. As Dostoyevsky famously quipped, “beauty will save the world.” Consequently, a world bereft of substantial aesthetic underpinnings is beyond salvation, let alone “liberation” from oppression.

• Ras Baraka’s pro-black populism in Newark

Newark owes these improvements in public safety to many factors, but these came together under the leadership of the 54-year-old mayor, the son of the late poet Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones), for decades one of the country’s most controversial radical black activists. Having grown up in Newark while his father was heavily involved in city politics, Baraka was well-acquainted with its history and the various factions that hold sway over its public life. After studying at Howard University, he returned to Newark to teach in its public schools, eventually joining the city council and serving as deputy mayor to Sharpe James, with a stint as principal of Central High School. Baraka also made a name for himself in the city’s arts scene for his poetry and rapping, garnering attention for his appearances on albums by Lauryn Hill and the Fugees.

For those who have followed his career, Baraka’s brand of communitarian progressivism is far from surprising. And while deviating from his father’s antagonistic methods, Baraka demonstrates the extent to which he has been schooled by the self-determinist leanings of the black-nationalist tradition, with its emphasis on grassroots solutions and prioritizing the immediate needs of ordinary citizens, rather than by identitarian “anti-racists” who place their hope in diversifying bureaucracies. As cities try to learn from Newark’s example, they would do well to pay close attention to the populist and localist inspiration behind the mayor’s methods.

• The false dichotomy between Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day

What is at risk in these debates over public holidays is the trivialization and potential erasure of the unique sets of traditions, beliefs, and social norms that make up particular cultures. It is this abstracting impulse that ascribes guilt to “white people” for owning slaves, including to “white people” from countries that never owned slaves and were actually enslaved themselves, such as my ancestors in Greece. And it is this abstracting impulse that claims to defend the dignity of “indigenous people” as if they were all an amorphous monolith.

…

Globalist multiculturalism claims to undo the effects of the myth of whiteness, when in reality it perpetuates the erasure of ethnic difference—for both “whites” and “people of color.” Black and Latino Americans are encouraged to be proud of their identities, as the government and major corporations seek to create policies and opportunities that are more inclusive and celebratory of said communities. But these efforts are often quick to gloss over their unique subcultures and traditions, opting instead to sprinkle generic elements of these cultures on top of a globalizing monoculture.

• Are Italians white?

So was Caruso “wrong” for claiming not to be white and for claiming to be Latin? It depends on how you look at it. Surely he can’t be blamed for distinguishing himself from WASPs–whom he differs from both culturally and in terms of “privilege.” And surely we can argue that it is presumptuous of anyone to claim to have the authority to assign him an identity that (a) he doesn’t relate to and (b) erases his cultural heritage.

The cognitive dissonance of those who advocate for the agency of individuals to determine their own gender identity but not their own racial or ethnic identity is astounding. Furthermore, it’s strange that Italian-Americans are ascribed the same guilt as slave owning and colonizing whites, when their ancestors didn’t own slaves in the US nor did they possess any colonies (unless you include their failed attempts in Ethiopia and Libya).

On the other hand is the denial of non-POCs, especially Italians, of their own privileges and the systemic oppression of enslaved and colonized people. Surely Italians faced prejudice from WASPs when they came here. But the fact is that Italians came to the US freely and not as slaves, and had an easier time assimilating and working their way up the socioeconomic hierarchy than Latin@s of color. Italian-Americans (who know what it’s like to struggle and face discrimination) should be standing in solidarity with those less privileged than themselves, rather than priding themselves on their perceived “superiority.”

In a society where nuance is hard to come by, it is of utmost importance that we acknowledge that there are different levels or planes of discourse, and that two things can be true at the same time. We would be naive, however, to ignore that the power-focused discourse of poststructuralist thought currently has a monopoly in the universities, government, and corporate world. Furthermore, most proponents of poststructuralist-flavored social justice activism regard poststructuralism as a totalizing worldview–a religion of sorts–to the point that it recognizes no other facts or truths beyond its narrow, materialistic vision of dialectical power struggles.

announcements

• Cracks in Pomo is co-sponsoring a reception with RealClear, alongside , , , , et al on Thursday 10/1 at 167 E Broadway. RSVP here.

  

• Stephen will be talking about Msgr. Geno Baroni, Steve Adubato Sr. (his grandpa), and ethnopolitics in Newark, NJ at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse on Friday 10/2. RSVP here.

• If you haven’t already heard the tragic news, ineedgodineverymomentofmylife’s IG page got banned. In addition to following their new page, you should also take advantage of their RESURRECTION SALE and buy some of their INCREDIBLE merch (which you have likely seen Stephen wear at pomo events).

  

too reel

Since it went insanely viral, we decided to make a series of reels out of our pod interview with the great Catherine Liu. Check them out on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and IG.

@cracksinpomoCatherine Liu on why those who deeply suffer rarely use trauma scripts for social capital #religion #empathy #sociology #trauma #socialjustice

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@cracksinpomoCatherine Liu on how automation has led to the deskilling of everything from work to flirting #dating #datingapps #sociology #technology #ai

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no pomo update

After it’s first pilot year, we’ve decided to change our format for no pomo. It will now exist as a separate section within the Cracks in Postmodernity main page. no pomo is where Stephen posts his unhinged, unpolished, random takes. If you DO NOT want to receive no pomo email updates, click here, then toggle off the switch for the no pomo section. You will continue to receive email updates from Cracks in Pomo’s main section.

pomo people elsewhere

• Emmett Rensin on why we want AI to kill us all in ARC

• Our friends and invited on the First Things ‘Secret Third Thing’ pod (and shouted out our pod discussion in it).

  As much as there's value in sharp polemics & taking a definitive stand on divisive issues, there's also a time and a place for seeking consensus & building bridges—especially in faith-based spaces.
  Besides, gestures like this are much more "based" than whining about your ideological opponents on social media!

  from the archives

• In honor of having posted Chris Marino’s masterpiece of an essay on Christopher Moltisanti, we thought we’d revisit Stephen’s argument that Tony, despite his less-than-ideal physique, has infinitely greater sex appeal than conventionally “hot” people like Clavicular…as well as my other argument that being fat is not necessarily an obstacle to being “attractive” (but also that being “body positive” doesn’t necessarily make you attractive, either).

• As Stephen has been working on his book Power Without a Face, he’s been referring back to ’s whirlwind of a book We Have Never Been Woke. Check out our pod discussion with him about wokeness, anti-wokeness, virtue signaling, campus protests, elite capture, and grassroots organizing.

When James Baldwin met bohemian artist Beauford Delaney in Greenwich Village in 1940, he was immediately captivated by Delaney’s warmth, charisma and artistic vision. He once reminisced about the time they were walking down the street after a rainstorm and Delaney pointed out a puddle, asking him to “look.” Baldwin claimed to see nothing but water. Then Delaney told him to look again. This time, Baldwin noticed some pools of oil swirling within the water, causing the reflection of the buildings to radiate brightly.

Baldwin’s tense relationship with his stepfather made him long for a mentor to follow. Thus, he saw Delaney as his “long-lost father” who “never gave [him] any lectures” but instead challenged him to see beauty within ugliness, both internally and in the world around him. Baldwin learned to look at reality through Delaney’s gaze, going on to say that “the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.”

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Lately, we’ve been putting out a lot of content about the value of intergenerational interactions…especially for trad zoomer converts [see all of them in this footnote1]. And in our pod discussion with Luke Burgis about his new book The One and the Ninety-Nine, we discussed the need to follow a mentor in order to develop one’s sense of identity and agency.

As I get older, I’m starting to see how beneficial it has been to have older people—people who have acquired more wisdom than me through their life experiences—as points of reference as I walk on my own path. The reality is, you don’t know anything when you’re young. You are dumb. You can’t “see” reality clearly. It’s nearly impossible to advance in life, to grow in maturity—let alone figure out how to function—without someone older than you guiding you, showing you the ropes, pointing you in the right direction. Very few people can DIY or be autodidacts.

Besides, it’s a consolation—it’s emotionally encouraging—to know that when facing a situation in which I have no idea wtf to do, or when I totally fked everything up, I have someone to turn to. I can fall back on the encouragement, the affirmation, the correction, and advice of someone who’s been around the block more times than I have.

The fact that so many young people are binge watching the reels of father-figurish [manosphere] influencers is a sign that they intuit that they have this need for mentorship, to follow someone who is more wise than them. But as Joe Enabnit pointed out, a virtual mentor cannot love you and challenge you. Only an IRL father/mentor can encourage and correct you in concrete ways that speak to the particulars of your personality/lifestyle. Following virtual mentors is an excuse to revert back to living your life in a self-referential manner, to living on your own terms…they aren’t truly objective points of reference. And as he pointed out, most of the influencers just want to take advantage of you anyway.

Young people need mentors when it comes to their jobs. Only someone who’s already done the job for years can teach you to do it the right way, and with gusto. A university education or certification program can’t teach you how to attend to all the little nuances, to deal with the unexpected situations that will arise, and ultimately to love what you do.

As I wrote in America, it was only by following the veteran teachers who took my under their wing during my sh*t-show of a first year as a teacher that I learned the ropes. These teachers literally saved me when I was drowning—both on a spiritual and practical level: they showed me how to do the job, but also gave me hope that after a horrible day in the classroom, I always knew I had people to turn to for support and guidance.

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The youth also need mentors when it comes to their spiritual lives—especially these little zoomer converts. You can’t teach yourself to grow in intimacy with God. You need to follow something objective—namely a spiritual authority (this is part of my fixation with the “objectivity” of religious orders and lay movements2).

Sure, you can follow a priest, a spiritual director if you’re Catholic or Orthodox, or a sufi master if you’re Muslim. But you also need to follow everyday lay people who are more advanced than you. Not in the form of spiritual direction…just from watching them live their faith in the day to day: seeing the way they treat people, their work, even how they treat inanimate objects with reverence, dignity, and the recognition of how it all has something to do with their relationship with God.

But on top of our career and faith, we need mentors to show us how to live life in general. This doesn’t always come in the form of advice. Sometimes it comes through listening to older people tell stories. In addition to learning from the stories my elders have told me and turning to them as points of reference when I face similar situations, I find them to be entertaining (if they’re told well).

I understand that following (and even finding) IRL mentors is easier said than done for most people. Because I am needy, entitled, and have a passion for learning, it was never hard for me to seek out mentors and ask them for their guidance. It always just came naturally to me. I never felt afraid of being a nag. Also, as a [half-]only child, I had grown up being accustomed to talking to older people. So if this does not come naturally to you, or if you find it to be daunting, I suggest you start by praying that God send you the mentors that you need, and for the receptivity to recognize and follow them.

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When the artist Mark Bradford was young, he spent time in his mom’s beauty parlor, and she would have him make signs for the products and sales. He would write them out, and, you know how it is, he’d run out of room and the letters would get all crunched together at the end, and she’d say, “That’s okay, you’ll get it next time.” She used the signs, though.

And if you think about it, there’s a whole human drama wrapped up in those signs. There’s a boy and his mom, there’s all of the visual figuring that went into the letters, figuring that matured in his later artistic work. There’s the community who gets their hair cut there that he’s a part of, that the signs are a part of. And the beauty of that whole human story and the love between them all is literally singing out of each hesitant line of every one of those homemade signs.

Now, they don’t look as good as the sale signs at the chain stores, with their exact color-matched printing, precise margins, and deliberate font choice. They don’t look “professional.” They don’t even look good, if you know what I mean. And this is the thing I want to pay attention to: these days, a beauty shop owner doesn’t have to use hand-made signs. She can stick a prompt into AI and get signs that look just like the chain store ones, complete with custom branding and color choice. Signs that do look good. Signs that look “professional.” Signs that tell the customer they’re in a legitimate business establishment and not just a shop where their neighbor cuts hair.

Before I start bitching about AI generated religious fliers, I want this distinction to be clear: those hand-lettered signs that didn’t look good may in fact be very good indeed, full of goodness visible right there on the surface. And the signs in the chain store might look good, but not be good at all. They’re well-designed, they convey the information, they reinforce the branding. But they’re not anything anyone can really care about, except insofar as they get the old products off the shelves and money into the register.

So now let’s go to church. It’s Pentecost. You’re genuflecting before entering the pew. And instead of a poorly-aligned, third-generation photocopy of “Ven, Espíritu Santo” sitting on the end of the pew with the words to the tract, this year there’s a glossy postcard: a corona of sunbeams bursts out of a dove with outstretched wings and breaks through golden cumulus clouds, framing text set in a stately font with burgundy drop caps and resolving in a logo on the bottom of the card: a cross cut out of a tongue of flame. It does look good, in a way. It looks like what people expect something religious to look: the dove, the rays of sunlight, the clouds. All of these signifiers veritably shout: THIS IS RELIGIOUS! YOU SHOULD BE FEELING SOMETHING SPIRITUAL WHILE READING THIS!

Here’s another example. Outside a church, an invitation to “Come join us” with the bit about Jesus being present when two or three are gathered in his name, why, it’s not just posted in mismatched letters outlined against the flickering fluorescent lights of a church marquee, but there’s a banner: a racially diverse quartet of fit, symmetrically-featured twenty-somethings smile as pixie dust sparkles over their joined hands—God’s real presence à la Disney—set against one of those sunset skies that only happen after massive storms and in baroque painted ceilings. It looks like an ad campaign for a gym. COME JOIN US AND MEET THESE OLYMPIAN BEAUTIES! CHURCH WILL FULFILL YOUR EVERY DESIRE!

Or worse, instead of hanging some red, white and blue buntings on the church facade for the fourth, in a moment of patriotic good intentions some parish staffer created a banner celebrating America’s 250th birthday, where the fiery sacred heart of a glowing Abercrombie-model Jesus is pasted over an American flag fluttering in a blue sky with cotton-ball clouds. AMERICA HAS GOD ON OUR SIDE!

There’s no doubt that all of these look good, in a certain kind of way. They’re professional. They’re unambiguous in their meaning. And the visual strategies are time-tested to get people to look at them and to feel certain things. That’s why AI is using those visual strategies. They work.

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But think about the difference between the story these fliers tell and the story so palpable in Bradford’s signs, or even in their homelier alternatives: it’s remarkable how little love there is in it. Sure, there’s a parish worker who wanted to have the tract on cards that look good. And there’s goodness in that desire, and that’s real. But that’s where the goodness stops, really. Because what the AI machine does is to take that honest intention and twist it up into something, well, remarkably dishonest.

All of the religious symbolism in the “Ven Espíritu Santo” flier is boiler plate and overwrought, and if it is shouting at you to HAVE A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE while reading it, you’re undoubtedly going to feel let down when you don’t have one. It’s lying to you. Just as much as the “Come join us” flier. There isn’t going to be pixie dust sparkling when you join hands in prayer. There will be clammy hands and awkward grips. And the people won’t be that beautiful. And God won’t feel like a spectacular sunset. He probably won’t feel like anything at all. So it’s a lie, all of it.

Using ChatGPT on Pentecost

And what happens when you paste the average image that signifies the sacred heart of Jesus on top of the average image that signifies the USA? Well, it seems that through some semiotic glitch you end up with a perfect sign for a white-skinned religious nationalism. Ick. Even if that’s the furthest thing from the prompter’s mind. I can’t charitably imagine the intention behind that banner matching up with the visual product, which means that the banner is not only lying, but it must have deceived the person who made it into producing something truly BAD.

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Which makes what these AI creations replaced, what doesn’t look good, feel all the more real. That third-generation photocopy visually tells a story about the tract existing in a book somewhere with all of that implied context, about someone looking it up, and making a copy of it, and sharing it for you to see, and there’s love in that. And the marquee sign that says “Come join us.” With the bible verse. There’s an honesty there that’s disarming in its own right. It’s the same letters, week after week, on that marquee. Probably the same person changing them.

If it strikes you this week, the visual form of it tells you exactly what you’re getting: the same dusty building (just like the same marquee letters), the same earnest people (quoting the same earnest passages), saying something that maybe, today, you’re ready to hear. There aren’t any illusions. And what says God Bless America better than the seventh graders’ hand painted banner? None of these options look good, but there is goodness there, right on the surface, right there for you to see.

I think that one of the greatest lies that AI is telling us is that it’s just doing the work that we don’t have time to do and making the world a better place for that. It’s helping us out. Google “AI church fliers” and lots of companies are jumping up and down to get your attention—Church Canvas, Pixazo, and Pixexact all pop up in a Google search for AI church fliers—and they all promise roughly the same thing: helping church teams save hours each week to focus on what really matters—ministry. (For a fee, of course.)

It sounds good. As good as the images look. What that copy doesn’t tell you, though, is that the scrapped-together flier you draw with a sharpie is almost certainly more meaningful than the crystalline image made for you by a machine. It’s true to the time you have to make it, and true because the person you are comes through every mark you make with the sharpie. And maybe that kind of honesty is part of your ministry, and not just time you spend getting to ministry. And maybe we can learn how to form more honest relationships if we stop lying with the images that bring us together.

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The candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America who recently swept Democratic primaries around the country have stoked fears about a looming wave of communism. Of course, such apocalyptic musings mirror the left’s fears that Trump and other MAGA-affiliated politicians are ushering a new era of fascism. Yet the conventional narrative about the deadlock between communists and fascists, and even between the left and right, serves to obscure the less talked-about—albeit more real—conflict between local agency and over-centralization.

Despite the vastly different framing of their platforms (and personas), writer Leila Mechoui argues that politicians like President Trump and Mayor Mamdani have more in common than we realize. Underneath their theatrics, the inevitable result of their actual policy positions is “a steady expansion of centralized power, which will attempt to manage ever more aspects of social life, and even the inner life of the citizenry.” Indeed, the hysterics and division stoked by the conventional culture war narratives function to benefit technocratic elites: as the common folk are distracted by bickering among their chosen champions, elites continue amassing more and more power into their hands.

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Yet the problem of over-centralization has not been lost on all who have an influence on public discourse. In his recent encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns of the dangers of the excessive power of elites “over the conditions of everyday life.” He points to the principle of subsidiarity, which “requires that such processes not be imposed from above … but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation,” as an alternative model.

The encyclical’s frequent references to Rerum Novarum by his namesake Leo XIII has prompted many to revisit the seminal 1891 encyclical upon which the Catholic Church’s modern social doctrine is built. Though he didn’t explicitly use the term, Pope Leo XIII drew heavily on the principle of subsidiarity, which calls for decisions to be made on the most basic level possible, and for larger bodies to avoid swooping in to do what smaller bodies can do for themselves.1

Technocracy Roundtable

Popes from Leo XIII to Leo XIV have warned of the dangers that come when larger bodies of power absorb local and individual agency. When the locus of power is too distant, too centralized and expansive, it is more prone to corruption. When power gets too big, too God-like, to the point that it begins absorbing the power of smaller entities and individuals, it becomes harder to keep in check.

While few consider it one of the main tenets of his papacy, it was Pope Francis who warned of a new threat to the principle of subsidiarity in our age: the “technocratic paradigm.” In Laudato Si, Francis insists that our age is dominated by structures run by alleged “experts” who create systems that promise us greater freedom and efficiency, while simultaneously severing our agency and roots within a given locale or community.

Evelyn Quartz on Mamdani v Trump

Francis went on to insist that technocratic “expertise” tends too often to measure “human development” more on the basis of “metric-driven” data than on the actual needs of particular people and communities. “By itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development.” Advancements in technology, Francis continues, are frequently made “without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.” While sometimes this is driven by blatant greed and the desire to maximize profits, even those with good intentions end up doing a disservice to people, as their impersonal abstract logic is incapable of recognizing and responding to real needs.

This overemphasis on top-down reform leaves little space for bottom-up changes, and an overemphasis on expertise leaves little room for the wisdom born from proximity to people and problems. That such structures of power seem to operate—as Pier Paolo Pasolini put it—“without a face” serves to further rob the people of avenues to make their voices heard and to have a direct impact on their own community, thus weakening personal agency.

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This is an excerpt from my essay about community development corporations in Newark, New Jersey published in Front Porch Republic. Read the whole thing here.

More to come on this topic in my forthcoming book ‘Power Without a Face’ published by the Image imprint of Penguin Random House.

If The Sopranos has been a success since its first appearance on television, the aspects that have resonated with audiences have changed. During its run on HBO from 1999-2007, The Sopranos was an audacious twist on the mafia genre, a descendent of The Godfather and Goodfellas that put the mob boss in therapy, and showed his struggles to manage both his criminal and domestic families.

As the show became slower-paced and more psychological in later seasons, a divide emerged between those who enjoyed the depth of character achieved with family life, therapy, and dreams, and those who pined for the first season’s cavalcade of wiseguys getting whacked. But the central interest of both camps was always Tony, a fascination provoking anxious discourse about our affinity for this brutal patriarch. Why were we drawn to him, and why did we sometimes find ourselves rooting for him?

With time, however, the centrality of Tony’s character and the question of our sympathy for the devil has abated. We are drawn instead into the show’s rich, novelistic world, which always contains something new to interest us: the desires, fates, and idiosyncrasies of the supporting characters; the snappy, witty, reference-laden, endlessly-quotable dialogue; the location-shot evocation of suburban New Jersey; even the costumes, blending white-ethnic tracksuit with strip-mall department-store business casual. Such richness has allowed the show to escape its genre conventions and live on as something of a period piece.

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It is not as a mob drama that The Sopranos has endured beyond its prestige TV contemporaries, but as a perceptive and resonant depiction of 21st-century American life, registering a sense of anomie and decline at the height of suburban affluence. Among its most prescient elements is its treatment of the younger characters, who largely fail to ascend to adulthood and take the reins from the older generations. And nobody embodies this condition of frustration and thwarted ambition more than Christopher, who to contemporary eyes is the show’s most compelling character.

Christopher Moltisanti is a man defined by his ongoing experience of identity crisis. While his fellow mafiosi are content with the roles and identity conferred by the Family, and shape their ambitions within the rules and rewards of Cosa Nostra, Chrissy is tormented by existential questions, gripped by the desperate need to “be somebody.” “It says in these movie-writing books that every character has an arc,” he tells Paulie. “Where’s my arc?” Paulie lives without such worries: “I grew up, spent a few years in the army, a few more in the can, and here I am, half a wiseguy.” But life doesn’t come so naturally to Chris. He has to struggle to prove himself, and his attempts at self-realization are often stymied. His propulsive, volatile ambition fuels an intimidating charisma: he dresses with flair, walks with swaggering gait, and commands a room with piercing glare and assertive shout.

But other times it incites his self-destructive tendencies, provoking violent outbursts at perceived disrespect and heroin use to numb his pain. We are charmed by his strivings for creative expression, but if his adolescent sensitivity has endowed him with an artistic temperament, it unfortunately hasn’t come with artistic ability. At times we feel he has written his own grisly ending—an impulsive, unreliable heroin addict is not long for a criminal enterprise—but other times he seems a doomed, tragic figure, whose tortured graspings can never change his ultimate fate: an expendable pawn in Tony Soprano’s empire, and a latecomer in a dying world of ethnic enclaves and organized crime.

Chrissy’s insecurity follows from his experience with a largely absent family. His father Dickie died when he was a baby, and his mother Joanne is a distracted alcoholic, whose neglect Chris recalls to a heroin buddy: “My friend Ronnie and I would play on the floor in the kitchen, matchbox cars or whatever. He’d go home and his fuckin’ knees would be filthy, his elbows, she never cleaned my mother. Fuckin’ house was a pigsty. Ronnie’s mother made him stop coming over, it was so dirty.” He has no siblings. He does have cousins, but even these relationships are strained.

A trip upstate with Tony and Tony B to move bodies buried at Uncle Pat’s farm provokes painful memories of being the teased, excluded little cousin. He recounts one such experience to Adriana: “They didn’t take me with them, but when I found them, they said I had to be “initiated” into a special group by being tied to a tree alone in the orchard for an hour. I was on that tree until three o’clock in the fuckin’ morning.” It’s not as if the other mobsters have stable and nurturing families, of course, but Christopher stands out for the weakness of his ties. However tortured Tony is by his mother, or frustrated by his sister Janice, their presences have stamped him psychologically. Chris struggles with the absence of such relationships, a sense of neglect inciting anger, shame, and a deep desire for recognition.

Christopher’s need to “be somebody” is also sociological, a product of his deracinated suburban upbringing. Whereas Tony and his generation—Silvio, Paulie, Pussy, Ralphie—grew up in the Italian-American enclave of Newark’s First Ward, Christopher was born after the Newark riots and grew up in Paramus, “next to the biggest mall in New Jersey.” This Newark ethnic enclave was a small, provincial world, rife with corruption, but living within such limits allowed people to live without questioning who they were: from the neighborhood, Italian-American, Roman Catholic.

The mafia was a lived reality; by your teenage years, you saw peers doing petty crimes for the mob. Tony’s horizons never expanded beyond New Jersey and his father’s line of work, but such restrictions gave him clarity about the life he was supposed to lead, and he made his bones, got married, and started a family as a young man. He struggles with anger and stress, but he never considers an alternative life (except in dreams) or rues a path not taken.

Christopher, by contrast, grows up without the stamp of provincial urban density. A child of the suburbs, he spends less time around other people and more time immersed in media. His early exposure to the mafia comes from the movies rather than the streets. Screens give him a broad distributed awareness of the world, at the expense of rootedness in one embodied socio-cultural milieu. He enjoys wider horizons and lofty ambitions, but he lacks the security of a particular role and culture, and is often beset by doubt and frustration.

the Soprano's helped my family

While Christopher is a suburban individualist, he possesses neither the guidance nor the competence to ascend to the college-educated professional class. In the show we meet several Italian-American professionals, who have traded the tradition and communal life of the immigrant experience for prestigious degrees, fulfilling careers, and polite bourgeois society. Dr. Melfi is the foremost such character, for whom the profession of therapist is a source not only of upper-middle-class income but of meaning and social contact. Tony meets her through his doctor neighbor Bruce Cusamano, a model for the respectable suburban Italian, most at home at the country club and the three-couple dinner party. And of course Meadow is a model student admitted to Columbia and contemplating medical school and law school.

Chrissy, however, could never hack it as a professional. His brief brush with office work comes when Tony sets him up as a stockbroker overseeing pump-and-dump scams. Tony can’t make things much easier—he even pays someone to take the licensing test for him—but Chris just can’t sit in the office. Disaster ensues when he heads down the shore with Adriana, and his two unsupervised subordinates assault a broker insufficiently pushing the fraudulent tech stock Webistics. Tony is furious at Chris for leaving: “You’re the fuckin’ SEC compliance officer for Christ’s sake! You gotta exercise impulse control!” But Christopher doesn’t have that—or any of the other capabilities needed for professional-class self-regulation: discipline, patience, analytical reasoning, organization.

What he does have, however, is a winning confidence, and the ability to project a commanding image. Chrissy channels his desperate ambition into a style and attitude which both charm and intimidate. He is a man always well-dressed for the occasion. Loafing around with the guys, he loves a colorful polyester tracksuit, the half-open jacket flaunting a wifebeater and St. Christopher medallion: relaxed athleisure with a touch of street class. But like any mobster he enjoys his Italian suits—in sumptuous fabrics, with padded shoulders and wide lapels, always with silk tie and pocket square, lending a sheen of sophistication to a life of intimidation and extortion. He looks “cool” about town in his leather jackets and flat rectangular Ray-Bans. But his signature color is “hot”: a bright fiery scarlet or a dark passionate maroon, on a shirt, track jacket, or suit.

When he’s relaxed, he has a quippy confidence and devil-may-care attitude which are endearing. Arriving late to a meeting with Tony and Sil, he channels Springsteen: “The highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.” “You don’t listen to the president?” he asks an Adriana expressing concern about the Middle East. “We’re gonna mop the floor with the whole fuckin’ world, the whole world’s gonna be under our control, so what are you worked up about?” He moves with a menacing power walk, with forward posture, glaring wide eyes, bouncing long strides, and elastic outswinging arms. You see Chrissy in the pizza parlor, you better come pay your respects.

Did the Soprano's make me more racist?

But even at his most commanding, his inner tumult is palpable: one can sense fear in his wide eyes, anxiety in his erratic, jerking gait. Under stress his need for respect becomes a desire for confrontation. During the first season’s Tony-Junior conflict, after Junior has moved in on his drug territory, Chrissy is ready to go to war. “What are we, politicians?” he asks, incredulous at Tony’s counsel of patience. “Does this look like the Senate to you, T?” Christopher isn’t interested in shrewd strategy; he wants to defend his honor in a blaze of glory. “This ain’t negotiation time, this is Scarface, final scene, fuckin’ bazookas under each arm, say hello to my little friend!”

Even a trip to the pastry shop can become combustible. When the kid working lets a regular cut the line, Christopher pulls his gun on him. “Do I look like a pussy to you?” Chrissy asks. “No? So why the fuck would you give me a hard time and talk to me like I’m nothin’ to worry about?” Just before he pulls the trigger, he demands, “Next time you see my face, show some respect.” The other side of these outbursts is his use of heroin to relieve his anguish. His use intensifies in the fourth season, as he grows frustrated with Tony and disappointed how little getting made changes his mafia career. Without the respect and recognition he’s desperate for, and without knowing how to get it, he feels compelled to numb the pain, nod off, and slowly self-destruct.

If Chrissy’s story is one of emotional volatility, of cycles of desperate self-assertion and turbulent self-destruction, it is also a tragedy of circumstance: he is a man born too late to realize his ambitions, part of a younger generation swallowed up by the ending of a way of life. Chris often feels overlooked and undervalued in the mafia, with promotion and rewards never coming as quickly as he’d like. It is true that his predecessors had smoother and faster trajectories. Tony, for instance, murders the bookie Willie Overall and gets made when he’s just 22, and he becomes a captain at age 27. Christopher doesn’t get made until his early 30s, and because there’s nobody coming up behind him, he remains the little man among the guys.

But his slow ascent follows not from disrespect, but from the mafia’s declining viability as an enterprise. The aggressive deployment of RICO laws beginning in the mid-1980s broke the mafia’s code of silence, threatening arrested associates with decades-long prison sentences unless they cooperated in the prosecution of high-level mob figures.

In the show we see paranoia and mistrust undermining the solidarity of the Family, leaving every man looking out for himself. The mafia’s power base is also eroded by the neoliberal economic transition from main streets to globalized corporations. This shift is humorously dramatized when Patsy fails to shake down a Newark Starbucks for protection money. When the manager explains that every transaction is tracked on the computer, and that corporate wouldn’t care if a brick gets thrown through the window—“They’ve got like 10,000 stores in North America”—Patsy walks out shaking his head: “It’s over for the little guy.”

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Obsessed with the movies, Christopher is desperate to make it in the business. He has big-money blockbuster dreams. “Saw, The Ring, they made millions,” he tells potential investors in his mob-slasher film Cleaver. “And that’s not even including the Godfather angle which we’ve got here!” But he’s primarily driven by a desire for self-expression, his ventures in screenwriting, acting, and producing attempts to realize himself and escape his eternal subordinate status in the mafia. It’s easy to be won over by Christopher in these moments: struggling with his screenplay, vulnerable playing a scene from Rebel Without A Cause in acting class, dealing with feelings of betrayal by making Cleaver. Of course, as obsessed as he is with storytelling, he’s unfortunately a bit of an idiot, and his ideas are terrible.

But in a sense he’s always doomed from the beginning, as a man caught between two worlds. If his sensitivity and existential feeling push him away from his mafia compatriots, in the entertainment world he is merely local color: a goomba source of mob knowledge, dialect, and horror stories, never taken seriously as talent.

When Chris meets director Jon Favreau, Favreau pretends to be interested in Chrissy’s dumb screenplay to get what he really wants: information about mobster Joe Gallo, and then a grisly Crying Game story about a trans woman attacked with acid. His connection to Favreau, the Yale-educated pantsuit-wearing studio vice-president Amy, is attracted to his rawness and dangerousness, but she is interested only in a liaison, not his ideas. A scrappy upstart like Christopher might have made a career in the old Hollywood run by immigrant maverick studio executives, city-journalist screenwriters like Ben Hecht, and vaudeville actors like Charlie Chaplin, but its upper-class professionalized modern iteration has no place for him.

The final tragedy of Christopher is that he sacrifices everything, including the one person who loves him unconditionally in Adriana, to win the approval of a father figure who ends up treating him like a disposable liability and killing him without remorse. Chris is always looking for love in the wrong place: Tony bears the pressure of running a complex criminal enterprise, and he needs Christopher to be a reliable soldier, not a son.

But in the show’s final season, we watch Tony become a cruel, devouring figure, demanding ever-greater sacrifices to gorge his appetites, and undermining others’ attempts to be stable, responsible, and happy. After Christopher goes to rehab at Tony’s behest and works hard to get sober, Tony does his best to sabotage him, punishing him for not hanging around the Bing, and pestering him to “be normal” and have the occasional drink. A stress-induced relapse occasions a horrific death: if the God of Genesis animates man by “breathing into his nostrils the breath of life”, a demonic Tony suffocates Christopher by holding his nostrils shut, and he dies a sacrificial lamb for a fading criminal order.

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announcements

• Save the date: Stephen will be talking about Msgr. Geno Baroni, Steve Adubato Sr. (his grandpa), and ethnopolitics in Newark, NJ at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse on 10/2. RSVP here.

  

• In Wendell Berry’s honor, our friends at Plough Quarterly invite you to plan and carry out some sort of local community-building event with your immediate neighbors in the next few weeks, and then let us know how it went. Write to info@plough.com to share words (and pictures, if you like) of your Berryesque community-building experience!

• New merch drop! Cracks in pomo is now selling CHURCH FANS. In keeping with our anti-AC agenda, you can now cool yourself off the natural way. DM if you’d like to purchase one (or more).

  

latest pod

In honor of our pod discussion with going viral (literally, it got 35 times more listens than our second most-listened-to episode), we are not posting a new episode this week. Instead, we are encouraging you to listen to it in case you did not already (or to listen to it again) because she is so cool! Also, hurry up and pre-order a copy of her book Traumatized (which we’ll be reviewing soon). Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

pomo people elsewhere

• wrote about how his friendships resisted tyranny and despair in Venezuela in Plough Quarterly.

• Emmarae Blum wrote about how her friendship with Ian (one of cracks in pomo’s greatest supporters in Heaven) sparked her conversion as a 20-year-old in Plough Quarterly.

• Santiago Ramos interviewed one of Pope Leo’s besties in (none other than) Plough Quarterly.

• on how Sydney Sweeney is blurring the line between Hollywood and OnlyFans in UnHerd.

• The New Kinship pod did an episode on Stephen’s piece on conversion therapy vs. bisexual responsiveness. While Stephen isn’t fully on board with many of the underlying premises of the conversation, he appreciates their careful and thoughtful engagement with the points he made in the piece.

from the archives

• Well, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was 2 days ago. As you all know, it was a major day for us at cracks in pomo. Here’s a collection of our 9/11 content. And here’s our discussion about Zizek’s book about it with :

• And the 1st anniversary of Charlie Kirk was 1 year ago. Here’s

  • ’ piece on the SEEK conference’s naive glorification of Kirk:

    Certainly Catholics have a responsibility to counter wrongs where they encounter them, but not everyone is called to do that in the same way. And it’s not at all clear that anyone is supposed to go out looking for political dragons to slay. Making Charlie Kirk’s assassination a call to arms against the forces of evil by means of political engagement assumes these young people already know who they are and what they’re about.

  • and Stephen’s piece on the claims that Kirk was a martyr:

    Rather than lionizing local heroes who make a concrete difference in their lives, people lionize figures like Kirk who in the least “do good” and “change their lives” on a purely symbolic level...while the system keeps running just as it was—scheduled programming as usual—and he goes home with a nice paycheck for all of it (which isn’t to say much for his working-class followers).

As we all know, 9/11 is a day that holds great significance for Cracks in PoMo. Among the 9/11 “truthers” we esteem most is the great British documentarian Adam Curtis—whose BBC films are a very pomo-coded combo of Laschian political criticism and Baudrillardian media theory.

This year marks 10 years since the release of his film ‘HyperNormalisation,’ whose commentary on Trump, AI, and Iran has proven to be eerily prophetic. We asked Edmund King (aka Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost on X) to share his thoughts on the film on the occasion of its anniversary.

Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation is ten years old this October. First uploaded onto BBC iPlayer between the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and Donald Trump’s election as US president that November, HyperNormalisation is nonetheless a strangely contemporary seeming document. Indeed, much of what Curtis focuses on—artificial intelligence, online misinformation and its impact on politics, revolutionary Iran’s perpetual standoff with the West, Trump’s ongoing imperviousness to consequences—has only increased in salience since 2016.

We seem to be at a point in history where we no longer face new problems, necessarily, but rather the rapid intensification of problems we know only too well. Everything becomes an intractable quagmire. What seems like a localised storm can easily blow up into a continent-spanning, perpetually spinning hurricane. Rewatching HyperNormalisation with a decade’s worth of hindsight involves experiencing a perspective shift that makes that process of intensification visible. We see in Curtis’s treatment of these issues the first rivulets of floodwater entering the streets before the incoming tsunami of subsequent events swept our whole town out into the bay.

Interviewed for The Economist in 2018, Curtis described HyperNormalisation as his attempt to “explain why we live in this strange world where everything seems very unreal” and at the same time strangely static despite the increasingly obvious need for change:

You fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home … money seems to grow on trees … goods come from China and don’t seem to cost you anything … phones make you feel liberated but … maybe they’re manipulating you but you’re not quite sure. It’s all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.1

The world feels less real than it should because its actual complexities are being progressively edited out from our media-driven perceptions of it, leaving us adrift in a “dream world” of consoling simplifications. Under the Reagan administration’s regime of “perception management,” the American government could conceal the increasingly complex (and unintended) consequences of its foreign policy misadventures behind the screen of narrative control. “The aim was to tell dramatic stories that grabbed the public imagination, not just about the Middle East, but about Central America and the Soviet Union, and it didn’t matter if the stories were true or not” so long as they distracted attention from “the intractable complexities of the real world.”2

Perception management redescribed American foreign policy according to the predictable moral binaries of fairytale and children’s literature. Rendered in these terms, Middle Eastern terrorism could be explained away as the work of a supposed madman—Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the “global supervillain.” The new narrative frame made terrorism legible in storybook terms (an evil terrorist mastermind is attacking us, the children of light) while simultaneously making the actual grievances and motivations informing it illegible, obscured behind the screen of Gaddafi himself and his own easily sensationalised personal eccentricities. Each new attack could be represented as a repetition of what had already occurred—there he goes again—and we (as news-viewers) absolved ourselves of any need to learn more about the conflict because we thought we already knew the story. Reality had disappeared, replaced by a simplified “fake world” that contained only reality effects.

For Curtis, the idea that we had all entered “dream lands” of this sort could explain almost everything. Social media was a fake world where filters and algorithms gave us a thoroughly distorted understanding of what was going on. What we thought was reality was only a mirror constructed out of our past browsing habits. Everything was now invisibly organised around our own desires, our own “user preferences.” Artificial intelligence was the same. We became so beguiled with the prospect of AI that we lost sight of the fact that AI was not independent of us at all, just another mirror of ourselves. And despite their claims of superior insight, academia and the counterculture were just as caught up in these processes as everyone else was. HyperNormalisation offered us a sweeping culture-wide diagnosis. We were all adrift in the dream world. None of us had a firm grip anymore on events, including the expert sense-makers we had hitherto relied on to interpret reality for us.

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The Glamour of “Previously Unseen Footage”

As a documentarian, Adam Curtis operates very much as an unmasker of hidden truths. His films claim a special license to identify confounding delusions (but this was a fantasy), peel away disguises, and reveal what lies beneath. In HyperNormalisation, we see raw footage of Middle Eastern warzones, stripped of the TV broadcast’s usual structure and polish. The camera traces the blood trails where corpses have been dragged out of buildings. A young Gaddafi fastidiously places his officer’s cap just so on the passenger seat of a Peugeot sedan. A gurning Donald Trump gladhands anyone who might be about to lend him money.

The media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz has described our contemporary fixation with what he calls “deep backstage areas,” those parts of the social world where people do not perceive themselves as being publicly visible. It is from glimpses of what goes on in these hidden zones that we see what the world is really like.3 HyperNormalisation’s use of b-roll footage—the visual flanges and off-cuts around the public image—operates in a similar way. Previously unseen images encourage us to believe that what we are seeing is necessarily revelatory and authentic, an expectation that transfers (through a kind of narrative sleight of hand) to the much more debatable interpretations that Curtis imposes on them. The unmasking style, however, has one glaring weakness: it is vulnerable to its own critique. Why should we believe the unmasker’s claims to be laying bare the final level of reality? What makes the unmasker so immune to the powers of illusion? Curtis suggests that our rulers offer us simplified narratives and scaled-down models of reality to avoid acknowledging the world as it really is. This capsule critique could just as easily apply to the film we are watching.

Curtis locates the hypernormal in the schizoid contrast between official messaging that assures people that the system is functioning as normal and people’s daily lived experience of accelerating system failure. In HyperNormalisation, the Soviet Union becomes the ultimate symbol for how this process works. During the final years of Soviet rule, Curtis explains:

everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it “hypernormalisation.” You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

Here we have a concise statement from Curtis about what hypernormalisation means. Hypernormalisation is (1) intimately connected with the last years of the Soviet Union and (2) involves the idea that everything is fake but people are forced to collude in the fantasy that the fakeness is real because there is no viable alternative. This vision has in turn had a remarkable staying power in popular memory in the ten years since HyperNormalisation first screened.

Joining the “Hypernormalisation Club”

In January 2025, after the American comedian Ashey Bez filmed a discombobulated Instagram reel in which she asked her followers, “Can someone please tell me what is going on, like what is happening?”, the digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush posted a response video. “Hi, welcome to the hypernormalisation club, I’m so sorry that you’re here,” Harfoush told Bez:

What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working, that structures are crumbling, that society is going through these massive shifts, and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way it has and we all know that that’s not true.

Harfoush’s reel quickly went viral across the platform, racking up several million views within its first 48 hours. It has since received more than 519,000 likes and 5000 comments. Describing the new buzz around the concept in the Guardian, the wellness writer Adrienne Matei defined hypernormalisation as above all an emotional register, a pervasive mood of “apocalyptic gloom,” fear, and unreality that takes hold of people’s modes of perception at all levels. “Confronting systemic collapse can be so disorienting, overwhelming and even humiliating,” Matei wrote, that “many tune it out or find themselves in a state of freeze.” One of her interviewees likened the experience of living under the second Trump administration to a perpetual bout of sleep paralysis: “I’m here, I’m aware, but I’m so scared and I can’t move.” Even something as ordinary as planning a wedding now seemed impossible because, “Will this country exist as we know it next year? It really is crazy.” Matei likened these responses to those of ordinary Germans during the early years of the Nazi regime.4

Hypernormalisation as described here denotes a curiously ineffectual state of helplessness and self-pity. The hypernormalised individual withdraws into self-dramatising poses of paralysis (I’m so scared and I can’t move”) while awaiting validation by the arrow of history, which bends inevitably towards progress. All unhappiness can be attributed to the fact that the political opposition exists, as though they were the only obstacles standing between us and the fulfilment of our desires. Opponents come predefined as “bad” by analogy with the stock of perpetually discredited historical actors. In Matei’s Guardian article, Trump’s America is variously (and simultaneously) an intolerable recurrence of Nazi Germany, the late Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia under Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs (the latter analogy given special credence by a quote from Curtis himself). To view oneself as a dissident from such a system is to set oneself up as the perfect victim, “a poor unfortunate taken to the next level,” a freedom fighter on the right side of history (because freedom fighters are always on the right side of history).5

Life for the hypernormalised subject is experienced as continual information overdose, a state of perpetual (but always helpless) moral witnessing. All temporal and geographical distances collapse onto the narrow confines of the phone screen held in the palm of the periodically mortified information consumer. “The routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of ICE officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families before dinner.”6 For the members of the “hypernormalisation club” profiled by the Guardian, the dissociative states generated by the scrolling session (both hypersensitising and desensitising) represent the essence of the hypernormalised experience. It is a feed-based, algorithmically generated phenomenon, consisting of the piling up of addictive moral outrages alongside the banal and the trivial. Hypernormalisation is “reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”7

While the snippet-sized “horrors” served up by the feed (like the moving images in Curtis’s documentaries) appear to give viewers privileged access to underlying moral realities, their overall effect is strangely de-realising. What they signal most urgently is “wrongness,” or (as Rahaf Harfoush puts it) a “visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right.” Mediatised reality overload segues easily into unreality, the illusion that we are really living in Back to the Future II or season five of Fringe, that some demiurge has shifted us into an alien timeline, and that the only way back is to repeatedly observe how “none of this is normal” until the manager of reality puts time back in its joint for us. The rhetorical force of the “late Soviet” analogy, after all, derives from the fact that the “late Soviet” is by definition doomed. If we allow ourselves to believe that history has a moral direction, then whatever is “fake” must inevitably topple over. In declaring that the world around us is “wrong,” we thereby seek deliverance from it.

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What Does Hypernormalisation Actually Mean?

Even as hypernormalisation has entered contemporary discourse, all is not as it seems with the word. We could almost say that hypernormalisation has been hypernormalised—flattened, that is, into a simplified version of itself. Curtis has always acknowledged that he took the word from the Soviet-born anthropologist Alexei Yurchak and his 2005 book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. But in the preface to the 2026 Princeton Classics reissue of the book, Yurchak goes to some lengths to distance himself from how Curtis chose to represent his concept in HyperNormalisation. Yurchak’s objection is that the film ultimately revives an idea that Yurchak had specifically set out to disprove—that Soviet citizens “publicly feigned belief in the system while privately rejecting it”—thereby reducing socialism to “mere fakery” and daily existence in the Soviet world to a game of pretend.8 This caricatured understanding of Soviet society betrays a certain naïveté about how history and psychology work. Extrapolating backwards from current knowledge, it makes it seem as though everyone in the Soviet Union had known in advance that the system would collapse and lived their lives informed by that knowledge. HyperNormalisation took an anachronistic simplification of Soviet life that Yurchak had explicitly rejected and made it seem like the core takeaway from his book. Yurchak appeared to open his mouth, but really it was Curtis who was speaking.

What Yurchak meant by the term “hypernormalisation” was quite different from how Curtis defined it in the film. Hypernormalisation was originally a model for explaining why people in late Soviet society spoke and wrote in the ways they did. Why did documents, speeches, posters, and slogans repeat the same elements and formulas over and over again?9 Yurchak’s answer was that those who produced these messages had become wholly preoccupied with demonstrating their compliance with ideological principles and the rules of correct discourse. The best way of ensuring one was compliant was to be continually looking over one’s shoulder for models of best practice. Speechwriters and bureaucrats relied on already existing texts as models for “new” compositions, creating highly derivative texts that were “correct” in terms of their formal characteristics, but which had little regard for originality or literal meaning.10 The “truth” of a text ultimately lay in its compliance with an ambient set of norms derived from how previous texts (already, as it were, defined as “correct”) had stated things.

Members of the Komsomol, the youth organisation of the Communist Party, were taught to write by splicing together officially mandated keywords, phrases, and quotes to generate new texts. Speeches were produced using recycled snippets from older scripts in local committee archives, combined with particularly impressive sounding sentences from party newspapers. Deploying “serious and unclear phraseology”—serious in large part because it was unclear—was how one demonstrated one’s compliance with the official ideology.11 To be seen abiding by the complex standards of linguistic correctness was a way of signalling one’s ideological and political correctness also.

Documents under the culture of late Soviet hypernormalisation were judged according to their formal compliance with the norms and expectations of “authoritative discourse,” the one true “official” way of describing things. Hypernormalisation, in other words, was really a form of accelerating hypercorrectness with regard to language norms. However, it was also not some historical quirk specific to the late Soviet Union. Any community can find itself displaying hypernormalisation symptoms if it becomes too fixated on the formal correctness of texts rather than what they actually say. Yurchak’s version of hypernormalisation, perhaps even more than Curtis’s, can give us an insight into our own accelerating obsessions with correctness and formality.

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Making Maximalist Assertions

The basic currency of reputation in the contemporary digital age lies in what the philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call “communicating what is right.”12 Being seen to “say the right thing” is the way to stay in our friends’ and followers’ “good books.” We accordingly issue a steady stream of the sorts of statements that our friends and followers expect to see associated with our names. We keep our profiles in credit by aligning our public statements ever more closely to a particular version of ourselves, optimised for external approval. Moreover, communicating what is right extends beyond simply telling the truth. It involves abiding by the moral, emotional, and political “truths” held by the groups whose esteem we care about. Hypernormalisation in the online realm describes the process by which we grow increasingly stylised (paradoxically, by attempting to sound increasingly like ourselves) through the act of conforming with “correct” beliefs and “correct” communication norms.

The darker competitive drives underpinning life in contemporary institutions—what Mark Fisher called the “priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn,” the “academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake,” and the “hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd”—continually up the stakes involved in “communicating what is right.”13 Non-conformists are excommunicated, leaving ever-increasing levels of ideological homogeneity among those who are left. Language norms accelerate as people compete for membership in the “in-crowd,” inventing new and ever more “correct” forms of compliance that others are then compelled to emulate. The symbols denoting “what is right” must be continually updated as the “academic pedants” point out the hitherto unspotted imperfections in how The Good has until now been described. If one generation of liberal educators added Heart of Darkness and To Kill a Mockingbird to English Literature courses because they seemed like exemplary texts for teaching anti-imperialist and anti-racist values, a later generation of liberal educators now decries those very same texts as irredeemably marked by racism and imperialism in themselves.

Institutions themselves are now increasingly anxious to be seen promoting the cause of “what is right.” In accordance with funding and policy pressures that compel universities to justify their existence by demonstrating their real-world impact, university leaders now task their institutions with an ever-proliferating set of moral missions—rectifying historical injustices, promoting equality, inclusion, sustainability, and social justice, diversifying the faculty, student body, and teaching curriculum, addressing the climate emergency, combatting misinformation, bringing about transformative social change, protecting students from trauma and emotional harm. At the same time, universities have become increasingly hostile environments for anyone looking to have a traditional academic career. The result has been the rise of a new, highly instrumentalist and above all management-focused campus culture. The older academic disciplines have been left to wither on the vine while management appoints ever-expanding bureaucracies to support the new societal impact agendas. Even as the crisis-ridden university sector ceases to function in material terms, management’s functionaries issue ever more hyperbolic claims for the university’s ability to do good in the world.

Life on campus (for both staff and students) has become increasingly ideological, a matter of being seen to publicly assert the “correct” sorts of beliefs. Proving one’s compliance with institutional mission statements becomes—in the same way as demonstrating one’s allegiance to the tenets of historical materialism once was for the functionaries of the late Soviet Union—a matter of form. What results are increasingly unwieldy sets of jargons, shared rituals, and linguistic formulas. Everything is weighed down by the constant accrual of signs and tokens of “correctness,” all of which must be internalised by prospective members of the “in-crowd” as the price of belonging.

Hypernormalised language in the contemporary university14 often takes the form of maximalist assertions that simultaneously declare moral emergencies and demand to be taken on trust. Statements of this sort pose as the absolute truth and brook no counterargument. Even when they come from the managerial centre, they are spoken as though coming from the margins, implying that the act of speaking itself is brave and should confer automatic belief and support. People live in fear of the “most righteous” among them, those who have the fewest scruples about using hyperbolic assertions to whip up moral frenzies against their ideological enemies.

At the heart of “assertion culture” is an almost cult-like overestimation of the power of words to bring about transformative change. Everything is school (or could be school), and properly schooled, the world as a whole could be remade. At the same time as it fetishises the revolutionary power of words, however, the intelligentsia has been busily undermining the basis on which both education and expert language can command authority at all.

Traditionally, members of the intelligentsia derived their authority from their characteristic ways of speaking and arguing, defined by Alvin Gouldner as the “culture of critical discourse.” This meant having to justify any assertions made through reasoned argument (according to the principles of neutrality and objectivity) and without deferring to authority—moral, religious, political, hereditary, or otherwise. Lately, however, nearly every part of this formula has come under suspicion. In 2021, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (the leading American professional organisation in rhetoric and composition studies) declared that “neutrality, objectivity, and apoliticality,” as well as “clarity, order, and control,” were simply the oppressive “habits of white language” and on that basis must be resisted and discarded.15

There has been, as the philosopher Mark G. E. Kelly observes, a subjectification of the objective and an objectification of the subjective. The old universal norms (striving for neutrality, avoiding political bias, maintaining objectivity, shying away from emotional appeals) are now rejected as outdated, provincial (“white” or “western”), and straightforwardly oppressive. Quasi-feudal, mystical, and outright aristocratic modes of authority and charisma have made a covert return. The identity of the speaker is now deemed relevant to whether a particular statement should be amplified and given credence (or simply ignored). At the same time, the realm of the subjective (what we report our feelings or lived experience to be) has been given a new value in the contemporary university.16 Despite Michel Foucault’s grand predictions of the author’s imminent demise in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?”, it has lately come to matter a very great deal “who is speaking.”17 Under this new regime, we have become accustomed to issuing a stream of eye-catching language in order to maximise our engagement metrics and profiles. We learn very quickly that asserting the centrality of our wounded identities and lived experience can be effective ways of deterring others from challenging what we say. Dialogue disappears, replaced by the mic drop—the argument that declares itself the winner in advance. We have inverted the expert “culture of critical discourse” while still somehow expecting to receive the respect for our expertise that it once conferred.

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AI: the Ultimate Expression of Hypernormalisation

With the wider context of hypernormalisation in view, the most seemingly disruptive phenomenon of our current period—generative artificial intelligence—may not represent a revolutionary break with the past but rather the intensification of a set of hypernormalising dynamics that were already well in train.

Chatbots have access to a vast corpus of texts in a way that no human being could ever replicate, but at the same time they have been, as Sam Kriss has observed, programmed above all to “write well.” The result is a “hypercorrect,” somewhat uncanny textual output optimised for plausibility and surface-level coherence and “impressiveness.” AI produces prose that resembles human writing while simultaneously being something one cannot imagine any actual human being having written. In other ways, however, gen-AI’s formulaic quality is little different from the “authoritative discourse” produced in contemporary hypernormalised institutions. AI is now automating modes of knowledge work that had been tending ever more closely towards “automated thought” well before the advent of the chatbot.

Writing in 1976, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard observed that the logic of modern society seems to be increasingly that of question and answer. “All content,” he wrote, “is neutralised by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations … the question induces the answer, it is designated in advance.”18 The various rituals that impose question and answer logic on people—the test, the questionnaire, the opinion poll—involve an expectation of “total circularity.” “Those questioned always behave as the questioner imagines they will and solicits them to.”19 This is the mirror fallacy—the idea that answers of this sort represent independent truths and not the terms of the questions themselves reflected back—and it is the baseline problem at the heart of simulation.

Generative-AI represents the culmination of Baudrillard’s question-and-answer logic. Even those who pose as critical onlookers are still bound up in the system, subject to question-and-answer logics of their own. Substack posters who triumphantly brandish screenshots of Pangram analyses to accuse others of using AI have been told exactly what they wanted to hear (in appealingly shareable infographic form). These analyses not only represent the mirrored responses to leading questions (please delegitimise this piece of text for me) but also end up deferring to AI itself as the ultimate arbiter of correctness.

The “hypercorrectness” of contemporary hypernormalisation can be seen everywhere. Any teacher or academic knows that the more accomplished and authoritative student writing sounds now, the less trustworthy it seems. A certain hyper-compliance with formal rules has come to read (paradoxically) as potential misconduct. The AI-generated essay is composed of nothing but an array of interlocking reflective surfaces, mirroring back the authoritative discourse in ways that seem simultaneously “correct” and perfectly fake and wrong. More than simple laziness or cynicism, the temptation to turn to the “homework machine” for answers may reflect a misconception that the point of education is to conform to the assumed values of the question-setter exactly. As in a mirror, the “compliant” student seeks to become a kind of information clone, to behave as they imagine the questioner wants them to, to be seen alighting upon the one right answer.

Where to from here?

Instagram has lately reduced hypernormalisation to a simple caption: “TFW the world is collapsing around you and only you seem to care.” It has become a snippeted summary, a mood board, a stylised emotion to be performed to camera. It might be tempting at this point to shrug our shoulders and leave Curtis to the influencers. But hypernormalisation is such a useful concept for describing our contemporary moment that we cannot discard it completely.

Hypernormalisation describes the processes according to which our reality becomes more and more intense, increasingly attuned to a “perfect” and “fully realised” version of itself (because it is modelled on its own image). Under the regime of hypernormalisation in the social sphere, we find ourselves constantly pressured to imitate our peers, overly responsive to new models of social and linguistic “best practice,” perpetually converging on (but never quite achieving) the ever-updating norms we are expected to comply with.

But perhaps the most destructive hypernormalising tendency is the movement away from truth towards formal “correctness” as the ultimate arbiter of reality. The “simplified truths” of moralising and technical jargon, ideological alignment, and emotional synchronisation (“if we all feel the same, then it must be true”) beguile us into unjustified certainties of their own. This kind of fake “reality consensus” can take hold of “resistant” unmaskers just as much as it can establishment “elites.” Resisting the demands of hypernormalisation (no matter how “correct” they may appear to be) might be the most important thing we can do.

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Editor’s note: Though we typically publish in US English, we decided to make an exception and retain the author’s original UK spellings in this case.

So I’m not a universalist. I believe Jesus when he said there is a hell. And I’m pretty sure some people will go there…and that we all technically deserve to be there. But I do dare to hope it will be empty…and that no one will go there (at least not for all of eternity).

Of course, the afterlife is a very mysterious thing, as is the state of a person’s soul. So my opinion can only be a vague approximation of what’s actually gonna go down. I just wanted to flesh out why I dare to hope that some people—including non-believers, as well as very sinful people—will go to heaven (one day).

My conviction emerged while working on several exhibits for the New York Encounter. Each year, there are about 5 exhibits presented, and at least one focuses on the life of a particular person in history whose legacy in some way touches on the Encounter’s theme that year. Oftentimes, the people featured are not Catholic or even Christian…or even theists!

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Wendell Berry, the Southern agrarian writer, farmer, and poet, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the age of 92. He was a towering intellectual figure of bioregionalism, and an outspoken critic of technology and war. The fact that I am mourning him from 700 miles away, on a computer, in an apartment is ironic considering he left New York to write in a place where he could actually make a difference — that could not be here.

Berry’s model for a good life rests on a simple axiom: put down roots and stay there. His life and writing are characterized by the following themes, expressed most succinctly in his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” the poem that first introduced me to the mad farmer himself: “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. “Love the Lord./ Love the world. Work for nothing./ Take all that you have and be poor/ Love someone who does not deserve it.” For Berry, a persistent care for what cannot demand care for itself is our duty — and that’s the art of husbandry.

Unlike his Southern Agrarians predecessors in I’ll Take My Stand, who mostly wanted the old slave plantation economy back, Berry did not call for a return. He asks for responsibility: for a life spent tending to unwieldy things — the land and the people that land makes you depend upon. This he calls the home economy, set against the national economy for which everything and everyone is an interchangeable part. His worries about the rural reflect urban realities, in “Renewing Husbandry” he wrote: “Soon the majority of the world’s people will be living in cities,” and would be “demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge.” While much of his writing predicted the disappearance of the family farm, his real apprehension was of people like me — the New Yorker.

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It is so hard to live like Wendell Berry that many of us cosmopolitan pseudo-intellectual types find contentment in the mere regurgitation of his language. We perform rootedness, obligation, and stewardship with our sourdough starters and book clubs but drop such things when they become inconvenient. These great things have practically no significance in a place like New York City. That’s roughly how I felt at the end of college here. While college might be the most self-centered time in a young person’s life, we’re hardly supposed to stay that way, and yet, rage as I may against the machine, staying in New York feels like a continuation of that self-regard. We make plans with three people in one night and cancel on two of them. Yes, community is an uphill battle sometimes, for the New Yorker, it is in fact best described as a social climb.

Besides feeling like a country bumpkin in college because I am from a Pennsylvania suburb off the mainline, I felt out of place among my peers because of my resistance to the city’s transactional logic. I would give my money to homeless people on the street only to be told by my New Yorker relatives that I was being unwise, that that is New York, and to keep your guard up. I cried about it because what about caritas, the virtue of Christian love?

In his 1987 Harper’s Magazine essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry credited his wife and typist, Tanya Berry, with editing his handwritten manuscripts. A small pint in an essay about something else entirely. In a reading group in college, this small detail became the focus of the whole discussion. A friend of mine argued that model was exploitative — that Tanya was performing unpaid labor and many others agreed. The Marxists, predictably, missed the point entirely: that the mutual dependence of husband and wife was a higher good than anything a computer could produce, nor in productivity, the logic of its invention.

And this, I came to believe, was the reason no New Yorker could be a true Berryite. Berry had, in fact, addressed the feminist objections to his essay at length decades earlier, defining marriage as a state of “mutual help” and the household as an economy — neither of which a disorder to be cured by modernization. This is what he means by husbandry: “the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.” The refusal to let any relation become efficient, whether that is between husband and wife or on a farm, it requires the same discipline. Berry speaks to the deliberate choice for the harder thing when faced with the logic of the computer, the logic of expediency, and for me, the logic of New York City.

I gravitate towards Berry, knowing my life looks markedly different from his. I want to be helpful in a self-emptying kind of way because, as Berry recognizes, that’s what fills you up with love. I appreciate the opportunity to make a genuine sacrifice for another, but the conditions of that act require knowledge of the other and trade-offs for the effort spent, both obstacles for the cosmopolitan whose access to (semi-) cheap expediencies that make sacrifice feel unnecessary. Why drive someone to the airport when you can call them an Uber? Why cook a meal for church when you can order and pick up large quantities of food on the way, or better yet, have it delivered? Why bring medicine to a sick friend when CVS delivers and you could instead send a text with a heart emoji? These are questions I’ve asked myself since living in the city.

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New York doesn’t just make husbandry hard, it precludes it, by definition. There is no soil here to answer to, not really. There is no calf to tend to through the night. What the city sells instead is the aesthetic of rootedness, the doorman who knows your name and who, in turn, you give money to around the holidays. It is dense enough to feel like a village with none of the costs that truly define one. Call it a rootedness LARP, call it belonging to a community, but just know, those for whom you depend on might leave when their lease is up.

So, perhaps you’re wondering, why pretend to have the dirt-under-the-nails, agrarian mindset when that isn’t available here? Why pretend? Why not move? Because the LARP itself is a piece of husbandry that survives the logic of Manhattan. It is the conscious choice, and the willingness, to be used up by people who do not make your life more efficient; to get off the app; to have relationships that run on debt, on either side, neither expecting to be repaid. Staying put rejects optimization, in a sense, a kind of adherence to the Berryite philosophy.

And so, it was exactly the moment I felt myself becoming a New Yorker — no longer a temporary resident here as a college student, but a real legal resident — that I felt the urgency of Berry’s voice among the many. I’ve always been a LARPing Luddite, a faux trad, if you will — I love Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Kingsnorth and his intellectual forebears — Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, and Marshall McLuhan. I found no such practical manifesto nor anthology of a life aligned with those values closer to hand than in the essays and novels of Wendell Berry.

The second I feel too comfortable, too at home in New York, I feel the deeper sense of unease because I know that I’ve embraced a logic at odds with flourishing. This is the lesson of Wendell Berry and the reason I return to his words in a city so at odds with his teaching. I can’t start a farm, one tilled by horse as Berry’s was. I can’t help birth a calf. I am not going to give up my MacBook Air or autocorrect or my Instagram. I’m basically a failure — and yet, maybe that awareness counts for something.

I’m reminded by the night I spent in a hospital chair instead of sleeping before a presentation I had prepared for all day, tending to a friend, because she shouldn’t have to wake up alone. No one could stand in for me — not a text message, nor a transaction on Venmo. Freezing from the air conditioning blasting above me, no repayment could make up for the bad coffee and what five hours of fitfull naps in a plastic chair did to my back. But isn’t that the point, that it doesn’t have to?

So, my advice is simple: read Wendell Berry out loud with friends in shoebox apartments. Read his poetry on the subway. When it doesn’t feel guttural, you’re doing it wrong. If his passing is the first you’ve heard of this hero to so many — from Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher to bell hooks and Barack Obama — then I urge you to give him a read. Start with the “Manifesto.”

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As much as I’m embarrassed to admit it, I can’t deny my obsession with MTV’s most-watched reality series Jersey Shore. Known for the wild partying and other debaucherous antics of its cast members, the series lasted for six seasons and spawned numerous spinoffs including Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, whose eighth and final season ended just this week.

I’ll always remember spending Friday mornings in AP Calculus as a high school senior back in 2009 rehashing what went down on the last episode of Jersey Shore the night before. To us, the cast members were deific figures. Sure, they may have been glorifying activities and ideals that were far from godly—diabolical even, but we couldn’t help but feel that they were somehow larger-than-life…at least larger than our very humdrum, cookie-cutter, rootless suburban lives.

And while the rest of our classmates attended the customary trip to Seaside Heights (where the series is filmed) after graduation—a bacchanal involving renting a cheap, dirty house, drinking and doing drugs, “smooshing,” and then making a run for it when the cops show up—I hosted an alternative, classier graduation trip to the shore. I invited a select group of friends to stay at my family’s shore house, a mere Vodka bottle’s-throw from Seaside, and took them for a Jersey Shore tour: from the MTV house, to Karma, to the Shore Store, to the bar where Snooki got punched in the face.

Even to this day, I have been known to drag my friends on “pilgrimages” to the house in Seaside, forcing them to take selfies with me “fist-pumping” in front of the Italian flag painted onto the garage. I’ve also been known to offer dance tutorials for the “Jersey Fistpump” at parties and to randomly reference memorable lines from the show like “come at me, bro!”, “party’s here!!”, and “shut your mouth, you dirty little hamster!!!”

The series is the dictionary-definition of a guilty pleasure. Yet I’ve found while watching—and re-watching—it over the last seventeen years since its release that it has an underappreciated depth. Sure, it promotes reckless hedonism and perpetuates stereotypes about “trashy” Italian-Americans, but the series reveals something fascinating, perhaps even beautiful, about the characters and the culture they come from.

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A snapshot of the Italian diaspora

Among the major objections to the series was its perpetuation of negative stereotypes about Italian-Americans and Jerseyites. Of course, this is nothing new: other TV series and films that featured the morally-questionable antics of Italian-Americans like The Sopranos, Real Housewives of New Jersey, Mob Wives, The Godfather, and Goodfellas have been the objects of such criticism. Others pointed out that on top of the representation being negative, it was also inaccurate—not all of the cast members were Italian, or from New Jersey. Several were only half Italian, Italian by adoption, or not Italian at all, and only Mike, Sammi, and Deena were from New Jersey.

But the fact that not all of the cast members are fully Italian or from Jersey opens up an important discussion about the nature of the Italian diaspora in the US.1 The fact that Ronnie is half-Italian half-Puerto Rican, JWoww is mostly Irish (and not Italian at all), and Snooki was born in Chile but mainly identifies with her adoptive-parents’ Italian heritage speaks volumes about the nature of Italian identity in the American Northeast.

Despite having had tensions with Irish and Puerto Ricans in the past, Italians largely embrace them as “one of us” nowadays, to the point that there is a great deal of intermarriage between Italians and Irish (especially in suburbs, to which Italians and Irish flocked after “making it” out of their urban ethnic enclaves, where the tension between the two was more pronounced), and between Italians and Puerto Ricans (especially in the Bronx—where Ron is from, Brooklyn, and Newark).

And I’ve met countless Latinos adopted—and fully embraced—by Italian families, like Snooki. Besides, the porousness of Italian identity is bolstered by the fact that most non-Anglo ethnics will—out of a desire to avoid completely assimilating—attempt to emulate either black or Italian cultural stereotypes.

Also, Snooki is cracks in pomo’s main contender for an alternative to Columbus Day (right next to Cabrini…forget about the globohomo co-opting of “Indigenous People”).

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Wildean trash looking up at the stars

But what of the claim that the Jersey Shore cast members—with their mixed heritage, hailing from Italian diasporic communities—are perpetuating negative stereotypes? The unavoidable fact is that yes, they are severely, painfully, scandalously trashy. They represent the excesses of the American Dream, the nihilism of neoliberalism, the dead end of consumerism and the death trap that is bourgeois individualism. Their hideous, hedonistic lifestyles, their grossly artificial fashion sense, their taste for instant gratification is emblematic of what this nation and its ideals does to the dignity of the roots, legacy, and tradition that immigrants bring along with them—which is to process them through a meat-grinder, desiccating and destroying them beyond recognition, all in the name of affording their posterity to someday have the freedom of getting to live their “best lives”: a life devoid of friction, discomfort, and external constraints…but also devoid of dignity, meaning, and hope.

And yet, as trashy, nihilistic, and undignified as the Jersey Shore cast members may be, they are also much more than this. They are Wildean2 trash stuck in the gutters of the American Dream, looking up at the stars—that is, who maintain some tension of sorts with the beauty, the dignity, the glory of their Italian roots. The meat-grinder may have distorted their heritage, turning it into something quite distinct—and less dignified—than that of their ancestors (as evidenced by their trip back to the motherland), but it did not succeed in obliterating their roots completely. The process of assimilation started to run its course, but they managed to bring it to a halt midway. It did not totally annihilate the spirit of the particular. The roots remain, albeit in a bastardized form. They successfully steered clear from being morphed into non-descript, flavorless “white” people—in either the bourgeois suburbanite or white trash iterations.

They fought against the suffocating spirit of the suburbs and emerged alive, if not triumphant—with muscles, poofy hair, spray tans, hot temper, zest for life, and accents intact. They still respect the sacredness of the Sunday dinner and start it off with grace (even if they drop f-bombs in the middle of it). They attempt to learn Italian while visiting the motherland (even though they could barely pronounce anything).

Even GTL is a remnant of sorts of the Italian cult of beauty; their attention to aesthetics faintly echoing the art of fare bella figura. The swamp of Anglo-American hedonism, individualism, and careerism did not totally swallow the spirit of tradition and southern Italian cult of family in them, as evidenced by the fact that nearly all of them got married and had children fairly young…not to mention their maintenance of distinct gender norms (take Snooki, who in the first episode proudly proclaims that she wants a big, muscly, tanned “juicehead,” which is to say, she has no interest in a neutered, wimpy soyboy).

I belong, therefore I am

For a half-Italian boy like me stranded in the deracinated suburbs, this bastardized representation of my people was better than no representation at all. My town was full of assimilated Italians, Irish, and Jews, with only a small smattering of blacks and Latinos. The only identifiably ethnic elements in our school was when the Irish girls danced for us on St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone would circle around the black kids to watch them dance with great skill to Ciara or Lil Jon songs at the school dances and Sweet 16s, and when the Jewish kids hosted lavish Bar/t Mitzvahs.

For the rest of us, there was no way to publicly claim or share our roots, our belonging to a people greater than ourselves. Thus, Jersey Shore represented the chance to say in front of everyone, “these are my people…this is what I belong to.” No, I was not a juiced-up guido with a hot temper and heavy accent. But they were my people nevertheless.

They represented the lineage I came from: the pipeline from Italy, to an ethnic enclave in an American city, to a nondescript suburb. While everyone also looked down upon them for representing negative stereotypes of Italian-Americans, I applauded them for representing a recognizable stereotype of Italian-Americans.

As Jersey Italian TV shows proliferated, they fanned the flame of my pride not only in being Italian-American, but also in being from Jersey. This only served to strengthen my hope that maybe I was not a rootless, atomized individual with no story, with nothing to belong to, after all. The stifling air that was the promise of being “whoever you want to be” with no ties to anything particular—which translated to the curse of being nothing and no one in particular—that I was forced to breathe in was alleviated by my being able to identify with the stars of these shows.

It became a point of pride to say I saw Melissa Gorga at a gift shop in Lavallette, that my step-mother hung out with friends of Teresa Giudice back in the day, that your friend goes to same bar as Caroline Manzo’s sons in Hoboken, that I was going to Christmas dinner at Lunello’s and sat at a table in the same room where Teresa flipped the table. And don’t even get me started about boasting about all the Soprano’s sites I’ve been to.

Further, there’s a simpler reason I can’t help but keep watching Jersey Shore: I have fallen in love with the cast members. Sure, I know reality TV is all scripted. That the characters we see are artificially cooked-up and meticulously managed by the elites working in Viacom’s corporate boardrooms. I know it’s all a simulation, and that even an AI-written essay or a BBL is more real than what goes down in each episode. Yet, I can’t help but feel—or hope—that something of their real personalities have indeed emerged through the artificial matrix of the reality TV industrial complex in which they are trapped.

There is something severely endearing about each character, to the point that they feel like family. Maybe I’m just a sucker…I’ve been successfully duped by MTV’s expert, metrics-driven script writers. But how can you not love Snooki, a little meatball packed full of alcohol, a little bit of Latinx spice, and loads of fun; Pauly D, with his Sonic The Hedgehog hair and tension-breaking humor; JWoww’s ride-or-die spirit, who in one moment has got your back in a fight and in the next will “chop your fucking head off”; Mike’s redemption arc from asshole, to addict, to dude humbled by his recovery; Sam and her toxic attachment to Ron…and Ron’s toxicity; Angelina for keeping up the persona of the villain the whole series-through; Deena for her bicurious, benevolent energy; and of course, Vinny, perhaps the most fascinating, most real cast members…with his complex personality (is he secretly actually very smart? Also a little gay?), his proximity to his Italian roots thanks to his mom (with whom he is enmeshed in a classical Italo-Freudian Oedipal Complex), whose post-series career actually has a semblance of substance, and the only one who has yet to get plastic surgery.

They are indeed trash, but they are also stars. They are my stars, whom I will never stop loving, and praying for. I am sad that the series is now officially ending—even if it’s been dragged on for way too long. But the grandeur of their memory—and of binge-watching YouTube compilations—will live on into eternity.

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Being a writer in the same generation as Matthew Gasda is an awful thing. Consider how few writers in their thirties can compete with his cultural footprint: a dozen well-received plays and novels, two poetry collections, a bohemian life in New York City running a theatre company while also co-founding and editing a literary journal dedicated to Romanticism, plus publishing a popular Substack newsletter and writing essays for multiple magazines. Add onto this his formidable talent, and it’s easy to understand why I have twice subscribed and unsubscribed to his ‘Writer’s Diary’ of epigrammatic fragments. It’s no fun to be seething with envy every time you open your emails, knowing that there is a man of your generation who is living a lifestyle you believed was gone for good, and having insightful thoughts about it to boot.

Envy is not a state I wish to remain in, and when I take a deep breath, I do not actually begrudge Gasda his success, given how seriously he takes his craft. If anyone is to take on the mantle of being our generation’s bohemian romantic, I’d rather it be one of the few writers who is capable of grappling with the tension between tradition and modernity, between mysticism and technology, between morals and aesthetics.

And so I’ve resubscribed to his ‘Writer’s Diary’ and have been reading through past entries which are filled with fragments which challenge and inspire and occasionally provoke me. This mode of writing, of arranging a series of short philosophical sentences distilled down to purest observation and truth, is something Gasda excels at. And this mode forms the backbone of his latest novel Stranger Beauty, in which Gasda projects himself into the depressing future of NYC in 2038.

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In this realistic futureworld, AI is fully incorporated into households via agents named ‘Kairos,’ all cars are driverless, food is lab-grown and delivered by drones, many people’s brains are chipped in order to be hyperintelligent, and there are pills which help you live longer via nanobots rejuvenating your body and keeping you artificially young.

Despite its futurism, there’s a timelessness to the way Gasda writes, a timelessness in his settings and characters and preoccupations. Much of Stranger Beauty could easily be set in 1938, aside from a few stray anachronisms. It made me wonder if there are really any new questions to grapple with in the age of artificial intelligence. We are still left with the problems of faith, of how to love others, of the futility of glory, of the value of our legacies.

In Gasda’s imagined future, M has a complicated marriage with an actress, S, a complicated relationship with his institutionalized brother, Christopher, and an uncomplicated relationship with his seven-year-old daughter, Ruby. The novel is immediately immersive in terms of giving you the sense of a dystopian future, and M is well-textured as a character, even if he is an obvious projection of the author. The scenes we get in 2038—Ruby playing the piano while M reads and ruminates, a winter walk and conversation between M and S about their strained marriage, a confrontation about faith and pride between M and Christopher at the facility Christopher permanently resides at—demonstrate Gasda’s playwright instincts of dialogue and blocking. We can hear the characters and their sparking conversations, we can imagine them on stage together. Whether we can believe they exist in a wider world filled with other men and women is another question, as the novel is extremely narrow in its focus on M and how he thinks and feels.

A huge portion of Stranger Beauty is given over to fragments from diaries written by ‘M’, Gasda’s stand-in and the protagonist, before the widespread use of artificial intelligence. M has kept these diaries and a screenplay locked away from Kairos’ prying eyes, determined that they remain pure and unsullied by the cannibalizing instincts of LLMs. The focality of this plot point, and the way M’s wishes are ultimately betrayed, makes one wonder if someone in Gasda’s life has ever uploaded his writing to an LLM without his permission, and whether this would be a sin he couldn’t easily forgive.

If you like Gasda’s Substack, then you will enjoy the fragmented diary portions of Stranger Beauty sprinkled throughout, for as M writes, “The addiction to the fragment is an addiction to the barest and truest parts of speech, the earliest hope of speech, which knows that its dissipation will come through context, explication, iteration.” The magic trick Gasda manages to pull off again and again is the distillation of truth or paradox into a few words. In our age of over-explanation and noise for the sake of noise, this is a welcome countermeasure, and it does work as a method of immersing us into M’s character.

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Gasda is working here in the tradition of Novalis, that German mystic philosopher poet who inspired much of the late 16th Century’s experiments in Early Romanticism. Novalis viewed the fragment as more ‘alive’ than a ‘dead’ book of completed and complex arguments, stating in his seminal work Pollen, “Fragments of this kind are literary seeds.” To Novalis, a fragment was like a poem, more alive because it required the reader’s own imagination to grow and complete it.

Gasda is a master of the form, and like Novalis, he fluctuates from cutting observations on the mundane realities of life, to commenting on modern politics and economics, to deeper questions of faith and reason. Some of my favorite fragments from Stranger Beauty’s fictionalized diary entries include:

“A single good day on earth is good enough. It’s as good as eternity. I think from the premise ‘I don’t want to die,’ we can’t draw the conclusion ‘I should want to live forever’.”

“I am mangled by the digital machinery that I both use and am used by.”

“Some part of me never really accepted that the world outside would not love me as much as the house I grew up in…”

Gasda’s theory seems to be that fragmentary writing, as opposed to over-explained AI sycophancy, forces even those readers with severely damaged attention spans to stop and puzzle out what he’s saying. His fragments are often blunt statements, with little room for nuance. But forcing the reader to consider each fragment is exactly what Gasda is trying to achieve: to arrest us from our smooth glide through a frictionless world, to halt us in our seemingly inevitable downward spiral toward a dystopian future.

Gasda on his flip phone

Gasda is particularly interested in Catholicism as an inescapable inheritance, as something genetic and unshakeable, and yet terrifying and overwhelming. That’s why certain sections of this book reminded me most of Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel Stella Maris, down to the sense of watching a two-person play unfold within an asylum. But Gasda is less elliptical than McCarthy, much more quotable, which is why I often found myself highlighting many of Gasda’s pithy epigrams on aspects of faith and family:

“If I’m a sinner, then I have hope: I can be redeemed. If I’m merely bad, then I’m hopeless: pathological.”

“On one hand there’s the body, which is an engine running down. And then on the other hand, there’s the living world, which is unfolding toward increasing order and complexity. We are dying in other worlds, and the world is living and living and living and living. We’re islands of disorder in a sea of order.”

“The summit of sexual fulfilment is a home with children, like a flare in the distance. But I choose to remain at the base of Mount Purgatory while others climb toward the light; to go forever in a carnival mood and a mood of reproach. Tired of my own lust and overstimulation.”

“All I want is children, a child. I’m afraid to say it. The unconditional love one gives and receives from a child. That all-healing love. This is part of just preparing to get married and looking ahead in a new way; not looking back toward youth anymore or not clinging to it, not quite the same way I used to.”

The particular focus on children and fatherhood are beautiful in the diary fragments, but also reveal the weaker elements of Stranger Beauty’s more plot-based scenes. While the characters of M and Christopher are finely drawn portraits, almost twin brothers who act as mirrors, the character of Ruby (M and S’s daughter) felt thinly sketched; a caricature of a child with M as a caricature of a father. M doesn’t seem to have any strong sense of identity invested in Ruby, despite his purported desires to be a father. He isn’t portrayed as having that heart-tugging investment in the little girl who is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

If I hadn’t recently had a son I may not have noticed this, but fatherhood really is a foreign country and it’s hard to truly project yourself there, to that place where you willfully subordinate yourself to the life of your son or daughter. Although Gasda is a talented writer, it is somewhat limiting that he feels most comfortable writing as M, a futuristic version of himself, rather than attempting to write fragmented diaries in the voice of someone totally different. Even the character of S becomes less interesting in the later portions of the book when she is no longer directly interacting with M. In his absence, she is rendered an inert and cardboard version of herself.

The ending of the novel will be challenging to many readers, a stream-of-consciousness experiment with AI-styled writing that discombobulates and blurs the plot first into an imagined film and then into a word salad, quite unlike the obsequies and chatty LLMs we know today. This final portion is most reminiscent of Ayad Akhtar’s 2024 play McNeal, in which the main character, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., descends into a drug and alcohol induced spiral, increasingly dependent on AI to write a book regurgitating his and his deceased wife’s writing while passing it off as his own, and then ultimately giving the audience an LLM-generated speech to close out the show.

Gasda seems to be purposefully inverting this dynamic. Instead of the fraudulent genius relying on AI to do his work for him, Gasda’s M distrusts the machine so completely that only another can subject his work to its algorithm, and the reader is left trying to puzzle out the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of this decision and its result. Personally, I was left convinced that nothing was gained and much lost by the sacrifice of M’s writings to the false god of Kairos.

review of Gasda's 'Sleepers'

Gasda may be our greatest young writer working today, and certainly one with the keenest aesthetic sense of what the 21st Century is and might be and ought not to be. Stranger Beauty manages to capture an element of that in a short and constrained book, shedding light on the possible futures immediately before us and laying choices at each of our feet. Or maybe I’m wrong to say that the novel sheds light; perhaps it’s better to say it captures it—light which is mostly generated by Gasda’s keen insight but also generated by the reader, in the act of reading and teasing out his or her reaction to the book and its fragments. As one of M’s diary entries reads:

“Art does not illuminate, it is illuminated, the way a cathedral receives light. A work of art is a cathedral. A structure that can be inhabited.”

Stranger Beauty cements Gasda as an aesthetic auteur, spearheading a generation of writers who are invested in slicing open the ailing body of postmodernity and looking at its many cancerous tumors directly. That Gasda manages to do this kind of surgery delicately, inviting the reader to dance through diaries and fragments and small scenes of domestic discomfort, as well as through screenplays and AI conversations, is no small feat. And it makes me look very much forward to future novels from Gasda where he puts his formidable talents to work painting a larger and more varied landscape.

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The Greeks, with their diverse lands, from the southern slopes of grey crags, to the fertile plains of the north, to the blue infinity of the islands, so too vary in local traditions, especially in their musical lineages. In the tavernas you’ll hear bright bouzouki melodies plucked until the light blue hour of dawn. In Thrace, the pounding of drums, wheezings of bagpipes. In the islands of the Aegean Sea, which in my mother tongue means, The White Sea, are the sounds of bellowing lyres, heavy strumming of lutes, galloping rhythms beating on hand drums, and sensual voices resounding over the islands, carrying their memories, their eternal spirit.

Earlier this summer, Konstantinos Argiros—Greece’s most popular music-star—announced the release of his new album, an homage to the island music of the Aegean. Kabanes, bells, is Argiros’ cover album of Greek classics, most of which were previously recorded by Yiannis Parios, on his albums Ta Nisiotika (1982) and Ta Nisiotika 2 (1992). Parios popularized native island songs, which spawned several versions from Greece’s most influential artists such as Glykeria and Eleni Legaki.1

This tradition, which Argiros has taken up with his latest album, exemplifies my point that—in general—“Western pop has become a cult of decadence whereas Eastern pop preserves cultural spiritual and political memory.”2 Much like Arabic, Balkan, and Turkish popular music, Greek pop melds traditional melodies with newer trends in global pop music. While one can easily recognize hints of house or dembow rhythms on many top-charting Greek songs, they can also detect distinctly Greek elements within the mix. The fact that Argiros has opted to drop an album covering straight-up traditional folk songs is a bold statement that—despite the expansion of global monoculture that erodes local roots—Greece’s musical heritage isn’t going anywhere, and will continue to remain a mainstay in its commercial musical repertoire.

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The lead single “Kabanes,” the album’s title track and its only original song, is a marriage proposal, brilliantly rendered in the song’s music video. A young boy scales the walls of a bell tower of a milk-white island church, tugs the ropes of the bell, releases their clang. The din of metal modulates to the plucking of a laouto, and Argiros sings:

Tell me yes, koritsi3//and I’ll land ashore.

Your eyes the sea—//completely wreck me.

The video depicts an Orthodox wedding ceremony and an ecstatic reception of song and dance. As any ethnic Balkan Orthodox can attest, we have the best weddings. Celebration, even as it borders worldly pleasure of food and drink, is part of our Christianity, whereas historically, Western churches have been suspicious of revelry.4 We drink, dance, and eat to celebrate life.

But the video is not trad-Orthodox by any means. In place of a suit or traditional village wedding garb, Argiros dons a wife-beater and black slacks (what we call Balkancore). The priest’s officiation is barely audible, and cut off, as Argiros swipes the mic away from the priest and initiates the wedding festivities. There’s even some Queer-coded dancers hitting the dance floor with zesty moves!

And then there’s the song itself, composed with instruments common in nisiotika. The melodies are narrow, melodic, and repetitive. I had to listen to the song’s rhythms very carefully to detect the presence of any electronic sounds. Indeed, they are there, but very subtle. The bass line and beat are clearly synthetic, especially towards the end of the track as the song speeds up. Regardless, upon first listen, I was struck. There is not a single moment in Greek music history, and across the Balkan Peninsula, in which a popstar has transitioned effortlessly into a folk aesthetic.5

“Kabanes” is some of the best poetry in Argiros’ oeuvre.

Let the bells ring,//sing for you,//until dawn’s rising,//sung with violins and handkerchiefs.6

Tell me yes, my love,//and I’ll drop my anchor.//I’ll give you//your desires, your searchings.7

Tell me yes, my soul,//and we’ll go to the plain.//I will be in your harbor,//I will shine as your beacon.

Interestingly, Argiros and the actress playing the bride, never embrace. In fact, the wedding is nothing. A mere aesthetic choice, arbitrary, bric-a-brac. The song itself, tender and soulful, celebrated through dance and cheer, is the vessel of joy.

Bring Back Multigenerational Merriment

Early August in Indiana. A cousin has been married. Naturally, there must be a party the day after the wedding.8 Sometime in early evening, as the sun sunk slowly under the horizon, a Greek family-friend, long a part of our lives, joined in. We asked the band to play a Greek song. With enough wine in us to slightly elevate our ecstasy, we twirled and danced a horos, sang lyrics that we didn’t understand.

“Dari Dari,” maybe the most iconic nisiotika, is about yearning. Another famous song from Parios, Argiros’ version is slightly more percussive than the original, yet he performs perfect poetic justice. The speaker of the song wanders around, likely on an island, and seeks his past. Everything reminds him of it—the gulls circling above the shore, the glow of morning on the neighborhood. The chorus uses an interesting lyrical device.

Dari dari, dari dari,//the seagulls fly to the shore//the seagulls fly to the shore,//if only we could play with them.

“Dari” is not real word, but a sung rhythm for dancers to follow, very common in Balkan folk songs. In that August evening, we twirled and stepped, circled, just as the seagulls circle the shores, to “Dari Dari,” thousands of miles away from where it was written. We always find each other. Balkans always find each other. Nostalgic for their ancestral home.

“Dari Dari” ends with an iteration of the chorus, but the last line has changed—“the seagulls fly to the shore / they’ve caught up to us.” We wish we could soar higher than we can, but like the seagulls, we too circle life, landing now and then.

Stephen in the Greek islands

“Ta Nisiotika Paidia” is a cover from singer and bouzouki player Vangelis Perpiniadis. The song tells of a group of boys in their late teens who spend their island lives joyfully partying, drinking, listening to the bouzouki in the taverna. Their “hearts of gold” have no room for sorrow. Even when it comes to love, they break not the hearts of the island girls. Argiros’ cover breaks from the bright sound of Perpiniadis’ original, which represents the laiko style popular in the mainland tavernas, in favor of the island aesthetic (the use of violin, santouri, and toubeleki).

“Gianda”9 is a Cretan song. The music of Crete is dark, bellowing, thanks to the lyra, a bowed string instrument at the heart of Cretan culture. Here lovesickness takes hold. The speaker of the song sings of his love for a woman—“Why won’t you want my love forever? / I fade away for my love / what will I become?” The verb for “fade” here is “svino,” meaning the fading or extinguishing of a candle, in which I cannot help but recall the sad and erotic poems of Constantine Cavafy.

Argiros’ versions of “Sala Sala” and “Chorepsete Chorepsete” (both originally recorded by Parios) are ecstatic, and may be the best versions to date. “Chorepsete Chorepsete” is spiritually the last song on the album, but Argiros decided to cover his own song “Eleftheros” in a more traditional style, omitting the electronic elements. It feels more like a coda, something extra, than a finality. “Eleftheros” was the opening track to Argiros’ previous album 22, his best work. It marked a shift in his aesthetics from commercial Greek Pop, to a fusion of traditional Greek and global sounds.

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Kabanes is a perfect album to complete his aesthetic modulation, and the world seems to agree. It is the first Greek language album to debut on Billboard, and Argiros is embarking on a world tour. He’s already sold out stadiums in the States, and he’ll likely do so elsewhere. In the past year, young Greek artists like New Jersey’s Evangelina, and Megara’s Anastasia, have blended global pop and Greek folk sounds in surprising and new ways. Marina Satti, originally from Athens and educated at Berklee College of Music, is even more radical, with her 2024 album P.O.P. often being described as the European Brat (we should call it the Balkan Brat of course).

Greece has always had a strong music industry, with Serbia and Bosnia trailing close by. What I hope is that more artists in the Balkans seek to fuse a new sound, or redefine the classics of their country. This goes for Argiros, too. Can he make an album of original songs, purely acoustic with traditional Greek instruments? God willing.

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latest pod

Catherine Liu joins the pod to talk about trauma scripts, AOC and other fragile millennials, Laschian narcissism, the identitarian co-opting of the Left, and how to get over yourself. And make sure to pick up a copy of her forthcoming book Traumatized (which we’ll be reviewing soon). Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

pomo people elsewhere

• Stephen

  • wrote about how the real “battle” is not between DSA “communists” or MAGA “fascists,” but between overly-centralized technocratic power and local agency, and how this is playing out on the ground in Newark, New Jersey in Front Porch Republic (which is a lil preview of what’s coming up in his book).

  • appeared in a semi-viral reel on America Magazine’s IG, commenting on the backlash to his article about those people who insist on kneeling/receiving communion on the tongue when everyone else is receiving it in the hand…only to receive even more backlash! Oh well, all publicity is good publicity!

from the archives

So as we all know by now, Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported. It really is a shame that he’s allowed himself to turn into a mere rage-baiting psyop…when he could’ve been the next Oscar Wilde, or at least the male Paglia. As a tribute to our downed-diva, here’s Stephen’s piece from The Critic about how he ruined his own career.

In our discussion with Catherine Liu, I mentioned that the excesses of woke identitarianism has (thankfully) generated a renewed interested in Laschian leftism, with its focus on both class and Freudian psychology. One of our favorite people in this cohort is the great Eli Zaretski, who came on the pod a little over a year ago.

I often write about the themes of virginity/vowed celibacy and thought it would be helpful to delve a little more deeply into what that looked like for two particularly “passionate” saints: Teresa of Avila and Augustine of Hippo. In the spirit of Camille Paglia’s magnum opus Sexual Personae, I’ll explain how they embody two different archetypes of sexual sublimation [a word you can interchange with transformation or offering].

Both Teresa and Augustine were hot-blooded Mediterraneans from well-to-do families and with lively temperaments. It was often the case that their vivacity manifested in intense erotic longing. They also were disposed to thoroughly (some might say neurotically so) examining their thoughts and experiences, which is part of what enabled them to produce such intimate accounts of their spiritual lives (in Teresa’s Vitae and Augustine’s Confessions).

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Yet the two figures diverge in two important ways.

Augustine grew up in the Roman province of Hippo (modern-day Algeria), which at the time was largely pagan, with growing factions of Manichaeans and (Catholic) Christians. His father was pagan and his mother Christian. Thanks to their high social ranking, Augustine was able to obtain a solid education. Though he succeeded in his studies, he had a proclivity for getting into trouble with his group of bandit friends. His exploits ranged from rabble-rousing and stealing to attending lewd performances and fornicating.

His experience of sexual desire was intense and all-consuming:

Bodily desire, like a morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust. Love and lust together seethed within me. In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin…For I had been deafened by the clank of my chains, the fetters of the death which was my due to punish the pride in my soul…I was tossed and spilled, floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication. Confessions Book II Chapter II

He eventually fathered a child out of wedlock. After a dramatic and definitive conversion experience (akin to those who claim to have been “born again”), he left behind his life of debauchery and committed himself to God, the spiritual life, and the companionship of the Church. He eventually was called into the higher rankings of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and shepherded joyfully over the flock entrusted to him. His life panned out to be fairly stable and consistent after his conversion, as he had gotten his erratic, passion-filled tendencies “out of his system” before that point.

Teresa of Avila’s life, on the other hand, was one marked by repression, hysteria, and a continuous tension between extreme poles. Teresa grew up in Catholic Spain during times of conflict with the Moors, the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation, and the Spanish Inquisition. Her family was both aristocratic and deeply Catholic (said to be conversos from Judaism). Her life of comfort and privilege nurtured in her a taste for bourgeois “vices” from wanting to be known “on the scene” and engaging in gossip, to being overly concerned about fashion, reading extravagant romance novels, and fantasizing about finding the ideal lover. She was, for lack of a better term, a party girl, with a richly decadent imagination.

At the same time, she was heavily drawn to spirituality and religious devotion, at one point during her youth escaping from home with her brother in order to get martyred by the Moors. Eventually, she gave up her luxurious life to enter the convent, and—driven in part by her passionate temperament—went on to initiate the reform of the Carmelite order and to found numerous convents around Spain.

Unlike Augustine, there was never a definitive “breaking point” for Teresa. She spent her entire life oscillating between the extremes of decadence and worldly passion on the one hand, and religious devotion and penitential asceticism on the other. This constant back-and-forth made it difficult for her to remain “grounded” in reality, as her obsessive navel-gazing brought her from the depths of shame and scrupulosity to the heights of missionary industriousness and even spiritual ecstasy.

The effects of rapture are great: one is that the mighty power of our Lord is manifested; and as we are not strong enough, when His Majesty wills it, to control either soul or body, so neither have we any power over it; but, whether we like it or not, we see that there is one mightier than we are, that these graces are His gifts, and that of ourselves we can do nothing whatever; and humility is deeply imprinted in us. And further, I confess that it threw me into great fear, very great indeed at first; for when I saw my body thus lifted up from the earth, how could I help it? Though the spirit draws it upwards after itself, and that with great sweetness, if unresisted, the senses are not lost; at least, I was so much myself as to be able to see that I was being lifted up. The majesty of Him who can effect this so manifests itself, that the hairs of my head stand upright, and a great fear comes upon me of offending God, who is so mighty. This fear is bound up in exceedingly great love, which is acquired anew, and directed to Him, who, we see, bears so great a love to a worm so vile, and who seems not to be satisfied with attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way, but who will have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so foul, such as it is through our sins, which are so great. The Book of Her Life Chapter XX paragraph IX

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I don’t mean to indicate in juxtaposing the two that one is morally superior to the other. While Augustine’s path was more stable, the instability of Teresa’s was partially what enabled her to have miraculous out-of-body experiences. More than anything, it’s to highlight two different temperaments of people with both passionate and mystical proclivities, and the creativity of God who uses the raw material that we offer him according to his wisdom and mercy.

I’d also like to point out how those who fall into either of these archetypes have a hard time fitting into the “neutral,” middle-of-the-road bourgeois ideal which upholds moderation as its ideal and avoids any (public) expressions of passion. These two archetypes would rather go to Church or to a disco, listen to Lady Gaga or Gregorian chant, pray the rosary or go to a lavish restaurant, read The Secret History or Brideshead Revisited, watch Elite or Silence…than fill their time with tame or “respectable” affairs. Driven by the Dionysian spirit, they have little interest in more Apollonian pursuits.

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For more on Teresian spirituality, check out:

The Sacramental Love Songs of Bachata’s Romeo Santos

Notes on Duende

Were some saints mentally ill, holy, or both?

And for more on virginity, check out:

Love, Sex, and Dorothy Day

St. Agatha and the subversiveness of Roman virgin martyrs

photo taken in Rome by Jacob Anthony Amaro.

Day 1

Arrive in Malpensa airport. Six hours til my bus to the outskirts of Milan arrives. Navigate a quick roundtrip train ride to the center of the city to kill some time. Made my way to the train terminal only to find out trains were not running due to a strike. Pause to celebrate Europe’s esteem for the cause of labor…and to lament the fact that this also enables them to be lazy and for their public works to be inefficient and unreliable.

Lunched on subpar airport pizza and peach EstaThe. Checked the label, fearing the globalization of America’s use of artificial ingredients had reached Italy: sucralose (sigh), but no high fructose corn syrup or artificial peach flavoring (relief). Airport full of hijabis and their husbands and numerous children. Bus to small town.

Lodging at 17th century Franciscan friary complete with courtyard, cloister garden, halls lined with baroque-ish original paintings, high-ceiling bedroom devoid of air conditioning (alhamdulillah) with antique prie-dieu and sketch of the crucifixion.

Dinner at caffe bar staffed by Peruvians while a mix of recent reggaeton hits (Rauw Alejandro, Mike Towers, Bad Bunny) plays in the background. I guffaw at the fact that they only charge 4 euro for a glass of red. Followed by vegan gelato.

This globalization of consumer culture, of libertinism and tolerance—and the subsequent idolatry of “development” or progress for its own sake—engendered a new monoculture whose control was totalizing. It absorbs not only political ideologies but also the particularity of cultural differences, making them, as Pasolini put it, “perfectly homogenized and acculturated.” Its alleged tolerance and freedom “conceal a decision to reconfigure everything so ruthlessly as to be without historical precedent,” and thus “represents no one.” Its “imposition of hedonism and joie de vivre” is “a deadly form of fascism.” Unlike the old forms of fascism which blatantly made known their ideals and goals, the new fascism is deceptive: It “has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical in a human way, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganization and homogenization of the world.”

Day 2

Morning in Porta Garibaldi neighborhood of Milan. Say a prayer in the Cimitero Monumentale and roam around the streets. Pop into a church after telling gypsy at the door I don’t have any money. It’s ok, she tells me. I can give her the money on my way out. Streets full of Arabs, Africans, and Latinx…much more than I saw last time I was here back in 2024. Very few indigenous Italians.

I find myself uneasy at having such a knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of migrants in my motherland. My inner millennial SJW is disgusted at myself for thinking thoughts that far-right populists and ethnonationalists think. But then I remind myself that it’s ok—being disturbed by mass migration in Europe is more justifiable than feeling so in the US, where a steady flow of migrants has always been a key element of the foundation, of the cultural fabric of the national identity. In Europe, on the other hand, cultural homogeneity—the passing on of a distinct cultural legacy through the ages—is more of a thing. Thus waves of migrants pose a real challenge to Europe’s stability—for cultural and metaphysical as well as political and economic reasons.

I compensate for my “problematic” train of thought by insisting to myself that ethnonationalism and right-populism are—on top of being morally depraved—politically impotent. They are mere reactions that pose no real challenge to the expansion of globalization. They posture themselves as the antidote to globohomo, while in reality functioning as a mere reactionary performance, a simulation of “tradition” and pride in the particular. As Trump has proven, right populists have little to no real commitment to protecting local agency and cultural patrimony, and thus act in collusion with the very evils they set themselves in opposition to.

Besides, I reassure myself, it’s not the immigrants’ fault. It’s globohomo’s fault. It’s neoliberalism’s fault. Colonialism’s fault. I think of Pope Leo XIV’s insistence during his Apostolic visit to Spain that while people have the right to migrate, they also have to right to stay put in their home country…and more should be done to aid the nations from which natives feel compelled to flee.

Then I remember that had Europe not given up it’s Christian heritage, they wouldn’t be caught in this deadlock between globalist, diversity-coded neoliberalism and xenophonic ethnopopulism. Had they maintained their roots, they would’ve had a host culture to welcome and integrate immigrants into. Europe’s rejection of its roots renders them vulnerable to waves of migrants. I think of Pasolini, who understood the value of local cultures…of Simone Weil who understood the need for roots, of Fr. Arizmendiarrieta who understood that the Church’s vision for society stood apart from capitalist liberalism, nationalist fascism, and socialism.

Years before modern globalism emerged, nationalism was already eroding local cultures and institutions. You could even say that the nationalism that Vance praises—embodied by figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Otto Van Bismarck—paved the way for the internationalist outlook he so openly disdains. By undermining the power of local community, nationalism weakened the most natural and deeply rooted ties individuals posses. After such ties have been cut, the ethical argument propounded by numerous religions and philosophies—that all humans are one community regardless of place—was able to exert its influence without substantive opposition.

Champions of rural America must reject reactionary nationalist attempts to rewind the clock back to the 1950s. They need a totally new solution to rural malaise—one that combines the localism of the past with the values of the open society that will likely dominate the coming century. This is not an easy task; it asks us to combine two things that have not historically gone well together. Yet it is the only real hope for rural America.

-Jeffrey Tyler Syck

Days 3-7

Off to the Alps for a retreat. [top secret]

For the record, I hate nature. I despise being removed from civilization. When I travel, all I want to do is pop into every single church I pass, eat, smoke, dance, and engage in cultural anthropology (observing the culcha and then writing/[shit]posting about it). Sure, you can see the hand of God in the natural world, but I see perceive his handiwork more keenly when watching humans—the apex of his creation—and the stuff they do/have created. In nature’s defense, it’s not as bad as suburbia…where there’s nothing sacred at all, and where there’s nothing to do at all.

Day 8

Arrive at Venizelos Airport, Athens. Impossible to get a taxi. I’m immediately forced to reconsider all my clamoring against the toxicity of America’s cult of efficiency and utilitarianism. My shockingly cheap hotel, which is in walking distance from basically everywhere I planned to go in the city, also happens to be in the neighborhood where Athenians go to buy drugs. The neighborhood’s Bangladeshi restaurants and businesses are interspersed with dilapidated abandoned buildings and lots.

My feelings about cultural cohesion and mass migration are confirmed. I think back to the time my friend in college showed me a Vice News video about the Golden Dawn, a neo-nazi-adjacent, ultra-xenophobic movement in Greece that would go around terrorizing immigrants. At the time, I dismissed them as lunatics. But now I understand the very real problem they are trying to address, albeit with hatred and, ultimately, with stupidity: on top of being morally concerning, ethnonationalism is a hollow solution to the erosion of national identity…only capable of constructing an artificial, simulated version of it, rather than tradition in its dynamic, “living” form—which is capable of both maintaining a strong, cohesive culture as well as receiving foreigners into it.

Once again, back to square one: where has Greece’s Christian heritage gone? I saw a poll on IG reporting that Greece is the 4th most religious country in Europe. 59% of Greek believe in God. 55% say religion is an important part of their lives. 38% go to church at least once a month and 29% pray daily. But much like Luigi Giussani observed about Italy in the 1950s, Christianity is viewed more as a cultural institution or a “natural” religion—treated like a source of morals, magic, and superstitions—rather than an actual “proposal” that ontologically shapes the way you view and live within reality. I came across a handful of deeply pious people (mostly old ladies, the who made up the majority when I attended church services) and a couple of atheistic rebels, but the vast majority view faith as nice background music—which is to say it is a welcomed presence, but not deemed an integral part of how one lives their life.

Surely, this has to do something with the deeply mystical and relatively static nature of Eastern spirituality and Orthodox ecclesiastical governance, with its basis in monasticism rather than in social, political, educational, or missionary/charitable endeavors.

-Geronda, we’ve heard that they are thinking of replacing the Greek alphabet with Latin characters.

-Forget it! That will not work! It will not work. We are lucky that God always makes good out of what is crooked and evil. Otherwise, we would all be lost. Our Tradition and language were not lost back then when everything was recorded in hand-written manuscripts and there were no photocopy machines or other ways to preserve them. Nor will they be lost now that we have so many means of preserving them. Have you noticed how Pontian refugees from Russia have kept their customs? It helped that they spoke Pontian Greek and were able in this way to keep their Tradition alive. And even though they were given a little freedom, they still chose to leave Russia in order to be truly free. With only the little freedoms they were given, they were like birds taken out of the cage and left to fly freely in a room. Wouldn’t they feel sorrow there, too? How could they have been happy with this kind of freedom? Imagine how hard their lives must have been!

Some individuals are trying to wipe out this Orthodox nation. Do you know what this means? An Orthodox Christian nation today is a matter of great importance. In the old days, we had philosophy. Saint Catherine used philosophy to silence the philosophers of her time. The ancient philosophers paved the way for Christianity.

The Gospel was written in Greek and spread around the world. The Greeks then enlightened the Slavs. There are those who stand to lose if Greece continues to exist. “She is doing us harm,” they say; “We must destroy her.”

[…]

I will urge individuals that I know in higher education to establish a few more universities in Greece, so that our children will not have to go abroad to study. They should study here. In this way, no children will remain abroad; nor will their parents have to spend a lot of money, and the country will save on currency.

I always say to young people who are going abroad to study, “Go if you want to, but be careful not to lose your faith; take only their expertise. And most important-ly, don’t forget to come home, to our Homeland. Greece is waiting for you. You owe her your help. Stay close to the Greek people. Help all those poor souls who would otherwise have to go overseas to find a doctor or a specialist. Be very careful not to let your hearts grow cold The Europeans are cold people. And the United States is only for becoming wealthy in material goods and becoming spiritually bankrupt.”

-Elder Paisios, With pain and love for contemporary man

Day 9

We roamed around the streets, passing fliers in Bengali, numerous malnourished cats, graffiti of various political persuasions [Antifa, pro-Palestine, “death to America,” pro-LGBT, Christian], and more dilapidated buildings…which I must admit brought back memories from my time in the West Bank. I am reminded of the time that King George II referred to Greeks as “orientals.” Despite being the “cradle of Western Civilization” and belonging to the EU, the lack of order and rationality—thanks in part to its Byzantine and Ottoman patrimony—reminds us of Greece’s “exotic” eastern flair that so allured the likes of Byron.

After dodging tourist trap restaurants and asking locals for where we can find traditional fare, and breathing a nicotine-laced sigh of relief upon being permitted—even encouraged, by the ashtray awaiting me on the table—to smoke while eating (33% of Greeks still smoke, making it #9 in all of Europe), we made our way to Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. Mass was said in modern Greek by a Greek-born priest of Syrian ancestry, with a choir of Filipino children, and a congregation mostly consisting of tourists, Filipinos, and a few east Asians, Latinx, and Africans. Behind me sat a Basilian (Byzantine Rite) monk from Lebanon who, after introducing myself, told me he’d pray for me for my feast day.

This stark example of globohomo didn’t hit me with the same sensation of horror as I felt while roaming the streets…perhaps because this parish provided an ethos of cultural—and metaphysical—cohesiveness. There was a spiritual—and perhaps also—cultural proposal to participate in and belong to, something generative, capable of uniting these people of different backgrounds and fostering harmony rather than chaos. An oasis of hope in a swamp of globohomo-induced nihilism.

Day 10

Taxi to Piraeus to take the 7:15 am Blue Star ferry to Ikaria. I anxiously await the dude with the giant belly and booming voice who sells halva and loukoumi (Turkish delight) to board once we dock at Paros.

I roam the deck, where the groups of Balkan-maxxing young men decked in cut-off Ts, mid fades, Oakley-adjacent sunglasses, jean shorts, with fannypack across their chests are sitting with their frappes and iQos cigarettes in hand, some playing backgammon with each other.

I indulge my craving for kefalograviera cheese, Amita “Motion” fruit punch, and Lay’s Oregano potato chips…only to find out they started adding MSG to the latter. Globohomo strikes again.

I disembark from the ferry hoping to find a taxi, only to find out they are all booked. I begin my 25 minutes walk to the Airbnb carrying 3 bags under the noonday sun, texting the host that I’ll be getting there late since I have to walk. As I sweat profusely, I relish the aroma of figs and symphony of cicadas chirping in the air. Halfway there, the host beckons us into the car and graciously drives us the rest of the way. I plop myself onto the bed, overjoyed to find a ceiling fan and blackout shades. Heaven.

We walk over to a secluded little beach where a woman clad in only a bikini bottom is tanning while her dog takes a dip in the Aegean. A mountain goat watches from the ledge of a cliff hanging over the water. I make my way over to the cafe to get a freddo cappuccino and ask the barista where he recommends we go to dinner. The best place is about a 45 minute walk. Knowing there are no taxis, we resolve to do the grueling walk. It will be ok because we’ll work up an appetite, we tell ourselves.

The waiter is the epitome of European customer service—or the lack thereof. Extremely kind, in a genuine way…because he actually enjoys being nice and not because he’s working for a tip. But also extremely inefficient. We have to remind him 3 times to bring us more water. And serves us the wrong kind of salad. But all with a smile. We ask him if he knows of any taxi drivers who can bring us back. He says no, but offers to drive us on the back of his vespa. Apparently his boss has no problem with him taking 20 minutes to drive customers to their Airbnb and back…but then again it’s common for waiters to take 20 minute cigarette breaks. It is despite, or perhaps because of, their inefficiency, that European waiters can be so genuinely kind.

The loss of (spontaneous, reciprocal, symbolic) human relations is the fundamental fact of our societies. It is on this basis that we are seeing the systematic reinjection of human relations -- in the form of signs -- into the social circuit, and are seeing the consumption of those relations and of that human warmth in signified form. The receptionist, the social worker, the public relations consultant, the advertising pin-up girl, all these apostles of the social machine have as their secular mission the gratification, the lubrication of social relations with the institutional smile.

Everywhere we see advertising aping intimate, intimist, personal styles of communication. It attempts to speak to the housewife in the language of the housewife next door, to speak to the executive or the secretary as a boss or a colleague, to speak to each of us as our friend or our superego or as an inner voice in the confessional mode. It thus produces intimacy where there is none -- either among people or between people and products -- by a veritable process of simulation. And it is this, among other things (though perhaps this above all), which is consumed in advertising.

-Baudrillard, The Consumer Society

Day 11

After a full day on the island, one begins to understand why Ikaria is a Blue Zone. People are both extremely self-reliant and extremely interdependent. They know how to DIY, but have no problem asking a perfect stranger for help. People build and fix things themselves. But they have no qualms with hitching a ride with a perfect stranger. (It also helps that there’s no crime on the island…like, at all.) To a New Yorker, this is bizarre…ridiculous. But for Ikarians, this is common-sensical. This random guy needs a ride, needs help with cutting a tree, with fixing his car…why wouldn’t I help him? Wouldn’t I want him to help me if I were in his shoes?

They cook their own food from locally sourced ingredients. A tomato tastes like a tomato. Cheese tastes like a slice of heaven. They walk everywhere. They nap and dance and have sex frequently. Kids have a healthy balance of work and play, of peer and intergenerational interactions. The 9 year old son of the bakery owner takes my order and rings me up, asking mom for a price check on my bread. While parents eat dinner at a restaurant, kids play with each other in the streets. No helicopter parenting, nor babysitting the kids with iPads.

Even the teenagers seem stress-free. They work non-bullshit jobs—at a restaurant, at a store, in a mechanic shop—part of the day, and hang out at restaurants and parties with their peers while surrounded by babies and octageneraians the rest of the day. They take pride in their appearance without obsessing over it, without making “a thing” out of it. They have social media, but seem unconcerned about the likes and comments. They drink, but not for the sake of getting drunk.

They don’t have identity crises because they know exactly who they are: They know, enjoy, and take pride in their cultural heritage. They know what village they come from, what family they come from. Their identity is founded in something solid, something meaningful and generative. They conceive of themselves as being in relationship with reality, with “the world beyond their head,” rather than in opposition to it. Their point of reference when thinking of themselves are not abstractions, the machinations of their own minds (or the minds of corporate execs). Rather, their point of reference is the concrete limits, contours, and surprises of reality itself. Their identity is molded by the interplay of tension and harmony with the real, with society, with their relationships, rather than by their own schemes and efforts.

I’m awestruck by being in the presence of kids who are genuinely happy, who are not perpetually anxious, fighting against something, who are not desperate for approval or trying to construct their “best life” or sense of self artificially, but for whom identity emerges organically from their relationship with the real. They are not plagued by the infinity of options presented to them by the liquid-like limits of “The Market.” Reality doesn’t make them anxious or restless. They are at ease with the world around them as it is.

Day 12

Run into Airbnb owner in the morning. “Off to work?” “Hmmm…maybe I’ll go to work today. First I have to go to the beach for a swim.” Thank God Greece was allowed into the EU! Who knows where it’s already crumbling economy would be with that work ethic.

Lunch at the other place the barista recommended. Waiter is extremely friendly, and inattentive to the point that it’s almost amusing. Across from us, there’s a group of young men in Balkan-maxxing attire.

The homosocial culture in Greece is striking. Men go around in packs, exuding a strikingly natural, effortless brand of masculinity: neither hypermasculine/performatively macho nor wimpy/effeminate. They take pride in their appearance, but not in a guë way. They are virile and clearly take pleasure in the hot girls passing by, but not in a lecherous way. And they enjoy being in each other’s company…they enjoy the bond that they can only share with fellow men.

Homosociality among women is less pronounced, more subtle. But they similarly exude an effortless femininity. Utterly gorgeous, done up—hair, makeup and outfit to the nines—more out of a desire to take pride in their appearance than to gain the approval of others. In part out of a desire to attract male attention, but not in a desperate way. Indeed, they are sexy, but without being slutty—emanating a natural rather than forced, anxious kind of beauty.

I begin to wonder where the actual homosexuals are. I notice a couple of butchy women here and there. The only effeminate man I noticed in Greece was the flight attend on the way here. Despite all the leftist graffiti, I’m surprised by the lack of a prominent LGBTQIA++ subculture. Then again, Greece remains an “oriental” culture…it retains its antiquated eastern aversion to “western” innovations like the normalization of homosexuality. Even the communists—who literally run the island [it’s where all the leftists were exiled during the civil war]—voted against gay marriage, for fear of turning children into a commodity.

I text a Greek friend asking what’s up with the Greek gays. She tells me that most of them are on the DL, dating women while snooping around on Grindr. But even the DL gays will tell you they’re straight. They retain the old school dictum—it’s only gay if you bottom. Surely, there’s nothing commendable about homophobia. Yet there’s something somewhat relieving about their holding onto the old school model of gay. Keep heterosexuality as the norm, and keep your naughty (gay) business in the underground…and never turn it into an “identity” marker. Don’t present as femme in public either (unless you become an Ottoman court eunuch). And only pursue gay sex for the sake of sex alone. Don’t pursue a romantic partnership—romance if for hetero pairings, homosexuality is strictly sexual, transactional. Romance between men constitutes a friendship, not a “romance” in the conventional sense. Besides, the secrecy keeps things spicier, on top of maintaining social order.

Day 13

Feast of the Transfiguration. The priest begins the liturgy while simultaneously trying to fix the air conditioner in the sweltering little chapel that overlooks the port. The old ladies with little kids file in, most of the men wander out for a cigarette break, pausing to show reverence to the priest as he incenses outside the doors of the chapel. I love how they segregate the pious from the nominal believers—so natural, so accommodating. The chanter’s 6 and 11 year old sons join him at the paslterion to help him out. At the end, one of the old ladies begins cutting up and distributing the artoklasia—blessed bread—which is still warm from when she took it out of the oven that morning.

Church in the US feels so “processed,” so “developed” as Pasolini would say, compared to this. It’s a production, a consumer commodity—designed to please the customer so they leave a good Yelp review. Some parishes might be nice, but they leave you feeling empty in the end…like after going on a shopping spree or drinking soda with high fructose corn syrup or aspartame. The put-on nature of it doesn’t fill your soul the way reverence shrouded in informality and spontaneity can.

We walk over to a shop that makes fresh spanakopita. The man before us orders a sandwich. The owner tells him she’s out of bread, so she’ll just run over to the baker to get some to make his sandwich. She jumps on her Vespa…while we impatiently wait in line to order.

Quick swim, then back to the Airbnb to get ready for the panigiri—the village feast in honor of the Transfiguration. Panigiria are truly the culmination of everything I’ve ever yearned for: run by the villagers, these festivals—which date back to antiquity—feature fresh homemade food and wine, concentric circles of people—from 3 year olds to 90 year olds—dancing from sunset to sunrise to folk songs that have been passed down through the centuries played by a live band.

We are handed a flier for a communist festival hosted by the youth division of KKE as we walk in, and are barraged with cigarette smoke and the sound of the Ikariotiko being played on the violin. At least 50 tables surround the church, whose doors are wide open for when people want to take a break from dancing, eating, drinking, and smoking to light a candle.

I immediately join the dancers, doing the Ikariotiko, then the kalamatiano, then the balos, until I sweat through my shirt…then taking a break to dry off while puffing on a Greek Lucky Strike. I hop back into the circle…people squeeze in, and the circle gets too big as people start to bump up against the tables. I take the initiative to break off and begin the inner spiral. After 5 minutes I get tired of leading and try to get the Balkan-maxxing dudes next to me to take over, but to no avail. I wave over a middle-aged butch, and she gladly takes the lead. [I even made it into YouTube cut…in the back coming in from the right]

My heart surged with a burst of revelry and pride. I feel myself to have roots, a foundation, a heart, balls—to be fully a man, fully a human being, in this moment. I’m participating in a tradition, a form of culture, of joy, that has been passed on through millennia…knowing that I belong to so great a people as the Greeks. A pride that those living in homogenized, deracinated monocultures—however much “diverse”—will never know…yet that neither will the reactionary ethnonationalists, with all their clamoring about “tradition” and “national identity.”

Indeed, this is the kind of tradition, of cultural institution, that no one can invent artificially. It is too beautiful, too dynamic, too lively to be “constructed,” but can only be passed down through the ages, shared out of gratitude and joy. Indeed, it is this kind of “living” cultural pride that is capable of receiving outsiders, of offering something of substance to participate in and become part of.

I think of how much Pasolini would’ve loved this, this pride in the particular. In a people who smell and taste like something distinct, with flavor, with chutzpah—who are not bland “like a piece of toast.” I think of my grandparents, filled with gratitude for all that they passed down to me. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to care for them on their deathbed, even with all the sacrifices that entailed. I’m grateful to my mom for forcing me to go to Greek school against my will, where I learned the language, history, culture, religion, dance, music, literature of my people—which gave me dignity, which gave me hope in the deracinated hellscape I called home.

People from the motherland wonder why their brethren in America are so proud, why we wave our flags and constantly remind people of our heritage. They wouldn’t understand…when your grow up in the cradle of global homogenization, without roots, without a clear identity…you hold onto to whatever remnant of roots, of substance, that you can (it’s the same reason Americans are prone to inventing identity categories like non-binary, neurodivergent, and Republican).

One of the main characteristics of this equality of lived expression, besides the fossilization of verbal language (students speak like printed books, street kids have lost all colloquial inventiveness), is sadness: joy is always exaggerated, ostentatious, offensive. The physical sadness of which I speak is profoundly neurotic. It is based on social frustration. Now that the social model to be attained is no longer that of one’s own class, but the one imposed by power, many people are no longer in any position to attain it. And this is horribly humiliating.

Allow me to offer a very modest example. At one time the baker’s assistant, or cascherino, as he is still called in Rome, was always, constantly cheerful: it was a real joy, which sparkled in his eyes. He used to walk down the street whistling and cracking jokes. His vitality was irresistible. He was dressed much more poorly than his contemporary counterpart: his trousers were patched, and even in good times his shirt was often hardly more than a tattered rag. But all of this formed part of a model that, in his village, had a value, and a meaning, and he was proud of it.

And, in short, what counts is that this person, this man, was cheerful. Isn’t happiness what really matters? Is it not for happiness that one fights for the revolution? The peasant or sub-proletarian condition was once able to express, in those persons who lived it, a certain “real” happiness.

Today, this happiness—with the coming of Development—has been lost. This means that Development is by no means revolutionary, not even when it is brings reform. It only generates anxiety. Today there are adults my age who are so aberrant as to think that the (almost tragic) seriousness with which our contemporary bakers hand us their package wrapped in plastic, with their long hair and moustaches, is better than the “silly” joy of the past. They think that to prefer seriousness to laughter is a virile way to face life. In fact, they are happy vampires, happy to see their innocent victims transformed into vampires, too.

Seriousness and a dignified demeanor are horrendous duties that are imposed on the petty bourgeoisie; and the petty bourgeoisie are therefore happy to see the poor people become “serious and dignified”, too. It never even occurs to them that this is real degradation: that the poor people are sad because they have become aware of their own social inferiority, since their values and their cultural models have been destroyed.

-Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere Lutterane

Day 14

Last day. Airbnb owner catches us having mountain tea outside and asks us how we enjoyed the panigiri. “Omg so much fun…we stayed til like 2 am!” That’s nice, he tells us. He stayed til 5 am, took a quick nap, then went for his morning swim and then off to work.

We hang around on the beach, behaving like obnoxious Americans: talking loudly, drinking, dancing, making a scene…and taking pride in it all. We are the center of the world, and we know it. The Ikarians are eating up our brazen American superiority complex. The young man collecting the fee for umbrellas lights up when we tell him we’re from New York. He always dreamed of going there. He tells us about life on the island, how he rides dirt bikes, and asks to follow us on IG. We make nice with the bartender—Stavros, which means “cross.” My friend asks him if he’s religious, he tells us he goes to church regularly, and that he’s a boxer. Strikes me as much more genuinely chadded than any of the American Orthobros who post about their OCA church and BJJ gyms on X.

I overheard a Greek-American family next to us—the son, about 12 years old, proclaims that the panigiri last night was “the best night of his life,” as he “never had so much fun before.”

At our last supper, I see more people who were at the panigiri, including the lovely butch with whom I danced, and then overhear two women with heavy Noo Yawk accents. I lean over and ask if they’re from Astoria or Bay Ridge. Bayside, they tell me. Close enough. The brief whiff of Noo Yawk makes me nostalgic for home.

Day 15

Back to NY/NJ. I start thinking how much I’ll miss the island life, the people, the food, the music…but then I remember I live in the center of the world. Where I can go down the block to one of the numerous Greek restaurants or markets to get authentic Greek food…or Italian, or Palestinian, or Korean, or Dominican. And I can drive up to Astoria to hear real Greek music, and down the shore to see the sea.

New York truly is the perfect combo of eveything: globalization and ethnic rootedness, corporate power and local communities, efficiency and messiness, tradition and progress, sacred and profane.

I’m glad to be home.

If there is one aspect of Millennial culture I hope that our generational successors jettison, it is the concept of “introverting.” Along with profane tea towels and self-help books, Harry Potter, and Cards Against Humanity, it belongs on the ash heap of history.

Psychology Today explains that an introvert is someone who prefers “the inner life of the mind over the outer world of other people.” “Introverting,” then, is a neologism usually deployed to mean an unapologetic retreat from public or social life. I’m an introvert myself; I tend to prefer time alone to read, exercise, watch a movie, or do housework. But I don’t like the adoption of “introvert” as an identity that requires societal carveouts.

I’ll explain what I mean. “Introvert” is a personality type. It isn’t good or bad, it’s just that you get your energy from being alone or in small groups, rather than from large groups. It isn’t a diagnosis. And yet people who self-identify as introverts sometimes seem to feel like their introversion gives them social license to be misanthropic.

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Take this Instagram slideshow I found. It is entitled, “15 Images every introvert relates to.” The first image is an unkempt cartoon person scowling, wrapped in a blanket with the phrase “current mood” written overhead (why?). Later, a waving cartoon puppy: “I suck at keeping in touch, but I like you,” the caption reads (that’s just inconsiderate?). Still later, a pie chart entitled “Why I am on Instagram,” where the two categories are “To make friends and socialize,” and “To see memes.” Guess which one is a tiny sliver (who is so introverted that they can’t even be sociable online?).

Then there’s another reel explaining introvert life.” “We’re introverts, we want to be invited to the party, even though we probably won’t go,” a woman says with a chipper smile. “We’re introverts. The thought of making small talk makes our armpits sweat, so we’re probably going to ask you really deep, intrusive, inappropriate questions to get to know you better.” It’s funny, and I’ll acknowledge that I find the underlying sentiment relatable.

But whatever this is, I’m not sure that’s actually introversion. Maybe some kind of social anxiety? A touch of autism? Seasonal depression? Anyway, even if the above phenomena were universally true to the introvert experience, in this type of for-us-by-us content, there’s very little sense that anything about it might be wrong in some way. People should just understand.

Maggie on Charlie Kirk

And look, introvert here! I get that it’s often exhausting to do things with other people and it is nice to be left alone sometimes. But I’d also argue that it’s necessary to repress our introvert tendencies more than we give into them, in order to be a contributing member of our communities.

Making “introvert” a key personal identity marker carries an underlying threat. Often, it is accompanied by an evident sense of superiority to the kind of sheeple who go to large parties or make small talk.

the woes of slight autism

It’s what I call “Liz Lemon Syndrome.” In an episode of the TV show 30 Rock, TV sketch comedy writer Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey) remembers her high school experience as a bullied nerd. But at her high school reunion, we learn that she was a quirky loner, yes, but she was actually fairly cutting and judgmental toward the popular kids.

I suspect these kinds of nerdy introverts populate a lot of TV and movie writers’ rooms. At least since I was a kid, popular media tends to portray the kids who roll their eyes at the popular kids, who don’t go to parties, who are allergic to superficiality, as actually the most special, the sensitive misunderstood intellectuals. “Be yourself! Don’t follow the crowd!” is a popular message in kids’ entertainment. That’s fine advice if the crowd in question is pressuring you into risky sexual behavior at a young age or going all-in on National Socialism. But groups of people in public aren’t bad in and of themselves, and you aren’t actually the secret Princess of Genovia just because you don’t care for them.

Stephen on therapy speak

Anyway, I certainly absorbed this message. In my imagining growing up, I was Belle in the opening number of Beauty and the Beast, “never part of any crowd/’Cause her head’s up on some cloud,” meant for better things than the provincial life of my myopic extroverted classmates. But in reality, most of the time, if you stand off to the side critically evaluating or frequently opting out of things that everyone likes–including something as basic as being together in a group–you’re kind of the problem. It took me until I was in my late thirties to realize that aversion to small talk actually isn’t a virtue. In fact, surface-level pleasantries are an important part of getting to know people and your community.

Although I’m not really a joiner, I make myself do a lot of things with groups and organizations. It’s not a natural fit for me, to be honest. And I do find it really draining sometimes at the end of a long day. But the benefit is belonging to a community and being a part of something bigger than myself. As human beings, this ultimately is what we’re made for.

most of you need therapy

If you want society to recognize your introversion as a trait that requires special consideration, the flip side of that is understanding that justice is giving others what is due to them. We owe those around us the best of ourselves. And if we’re being honest, our best self is not always the same thing as our authentic self.

I’ve learned a lot from John Machnee, the host of the Christianity on the Spectrum podcast. He is frequently on X adjuring his fellow ASD1 folks to learn to “mask” (essentially to fake neurotypical behavior), at least just a little bit, if they want to make friends or date.

Making introversion a key component of your personality risks a kind of entitled safetyism. Where is it written that we should never be tired or uncomfortable if we can help it? Who owes us that? Reality has a bias, and it favors extroverts. And thank God for that, because that’s the whole reason we were able to develop market economies and governments and culture. What do you gain by opting out? A few more hours alone?

Take an invitation to a house party for instance. Someone who has undertaken the logistical, emotional, and financial burden to host a gathering is owed the courtesy of the introvert’s time and attention. Showing up tells that person that you value them: you made the effort, you put in the time. If you as the introvert are a little more tired than usual on the other end, that’s simply the price you pay to be a part of something human.

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Frankly, not liking to go out doesn’t make you special. Moreover, staying home or standing on the margins when you could otherwise put yourself out there isn’t justice. But you can strike a balance. A therapist once explained to me the value of “putting in an appearance.” Essentially, she explained to me that habitually declining (or worse, ignoring) invitations is actually really rude. But if you’re an introvert, you’re also not obligated to stay the entire time or to be the life of the party. Show up, drop off a bottle of wine, make yourself known to the host and exchange a few pleasantries with other guests, and you’re home in your socks watching Widows Bay again before you know it.

To quote George Costanza, “We’re living in a society.” I’d encourage my fellow introverts to act accordingly. The urge to protect the authentic introverted self from feeling emotionally depleted is as deleterious to the introvert as it is to their community. So fake it till you make it. Accept the next invitation whether you want to go or not. Don’t flake. Show up and join in some small talk (without judgment). Then, go home at the earliest possible opportunity, and go to sleep.

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