This past week, we saw how little has changed in the past 30 years. Headlines reported, “AI takes over Cannes as agents privately seek big money deals” and “Pedro Pascal’s ‘The Mandalorian And Grogu’ Bombs At Box Office.” The big follow-up coming out of this weekend will be whether The Mandalorian and Grogu bounced back due to positive word-of-mouth or whether it cratered. I am predicting and praying it will be the former.

Critics are complaining that The Mandalorian and Grogu feels too episodic. There’s no singular villain the entire film builds toward, and there’s no set-up for a bigger conflict in the future. They say Jon Favreau wrote a script for season four of The Mandalorian, and then kinda reworked it to be a movie, but it’s really an abridged TV show.

My reply is, “Thank God.”

The Mandalorian is a show that’s always opted for self-contained episodes over sprawling narratives, and Favreau is staying true to what got them here. It’s refreshing to have a film that isn’t just a set-up for a sequel. You walk out of the theater with a sense of closure instead of a sinking feeling that your $15 ticket is now a sunk cost toward some sequel.

But it’s not just that.

When George Lucas was working on The Phantom Menace, he infamously said, “Jar-Jar is the key to all of this, if we get Jar-Jar working. Cause he’s a funnier character then we’ve ever had in any of the movies before.” And he was correct. Jar-Jar proved to be a lightning rod for critics, exemplifying the overreliance on CGI, tonal imbalances, and bizarre character choices in the film. He did not get Jar-Jar working.

In the case of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Grogu (or “Baby Yoda”) is the key to all of this because we’ve never had a character this cute before. We’ve never had a child this helpless, and that’s shaped the storytelling as well. Favreau has focused more on the Mando-Grogu relationship to propel the story than on the baddies.

There’s plenty of action, but at root, it’s a story about fathers, sons, and family. The key inciting incident for the original series is that Mando is asked to capture Baby Yoda and deliver him to Imperial forces. He fulfills his contract, but stricken by his conscience, he goes back and saves the child—sacrificing his credibility as a bounty hunter but finding an unexpected new life training Grogu and eventually joining The New Republic.

Of course, family stories are not new to Star Wars. George Lucas has called the sprawling story of the Skywalkers a “family soap opera,” but Baby Yoda is something new.

Watching as a father of young kids, I couldn’t help but be reminded of them. There’s the obvious stuff like the way Baby Yoda clings to Mando or crawls up under his arm to sleep. There’s his disobedience flipping switches on the ship or sneaking food. But there’s also the mutual dependence that develops.

At one point in the film, Mando is mortally wounded, but he tells Grogu to save himself and leave the planet. Instead, Grogu risks his life to stay and heal Mando. This is the only time Mando uses one of the show’s most famous lines: “The old protect the young. Then the young protect the old. This is the way.”

I imagine someone who has cared for an elderly parent would relate to that line literally, but I found it spiritually resonant as well. At first your newborn is dependent and you are caring for him. You need to watch out for his safety and explain how the world works. Over time though, you realize he is really the one helping you. He is shaving off your selfish edges, reminding you how amazing lawn mowers and motorcycles and airplanes are, expanding your heart in ways you did not realize were possible. This is the way.

Because The Mandalorian and Grogu leans into these family relationships—including Rotta the Hutt, the son of Jabba the Hutt—the action doesn’t need to carry the whole film. It gets to just be entertainment. And it delivers.

You’ve got Rotta as a muscular Hutt fighting in a gladiator match. Then you’ve got Mando and Rotta facing off against a slew of monsters in a death match. (My friend noted that these are the same monsters from the board game in A New Hope). There was much ado about putting the stunt performers in the title card, but they deserve it. I enjoy watching Mando walk almost as much as I enjoy watching Tom Cruise run.

I recognize that I am the target audience of this flick many times over. It draws on Clone Wars lore, the most popular Star Wars show among Gen Z. I’m a parent of young children. I also am enough of a Star Wars geek to ponder how Boba Fett being a clone of Jango Fett impacts the father-son dynamic of the Fetts vis-à-vis Mando and Baby Yoda.

But I hope it can break out to a larger audience. I don’t want to live in a world where loving children is niche. I don’t want all the summer blockbusters to be meaningless action sequences setting up even bigger mindless crossover action sequences at a later date. I don’t want this to be the last I see of Mando and Grogu. But I know the money will ultimately do the talking.

Let’s see what it says this weekend.

Something shorter this week in case you want to catch the film over the weekend. Leave a comment if you’ve seen it and have opinions. More soon!

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Whatever it is, it’s bad.

The documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere demonstrated how cynical many of these manosphere influencers are about engagement farming (shouting obscenities and slurs solely for clicks) but also how ineffective their “tactics” are in their own lives. As pointed out, Myron Gaines of Fresh & Fit talks a big game about “one-way monogamy” until his girlfriend comes in the room. Then he becomes a deer in the headlights.

On the other end of the spectrum, the performative, “Labubu male” makes a show of how much of an ally and non-threat he is. As The Guardian describes, “You may have spotted him posing with an oat milk matcha pretending to read a copy of The Bell Jar. Or maybe you saw him seeming to listen to Lana Del Rey deep cuts but his earphones weren’t plugged in.”

Both the manosphere and Labubu males are punchlines. As the young men in the poll intuit, modern masculinity seems full of pitfalls no matter which way you turn. Yet there remains a hunger for some vision of masculine excellence.

So I thought I’d get lunch with someone a bit removed from the discourse cycle: . If that name looks familiar, you may be thinking of Hannah’s Children by his wife, Catherine Pakaluk. Or, if you’re a Roman Catholic very involved in the pro-life movement, you may have heard of his late wife, Ruth Pakaluk. The Vatican recently declared that her cause for canonization can proceed.

In preparation for our conversation, I found an article that described Michael as a “legend,” referring to his extensive philosophical and religious scholarship and unique biography. After speaking with him, I would agree that his mind is clearly well-suited to study and his family background is indeed unique. But he is legendary in another sense too. There is something archetypal about Michael Pakaluk.

The man who was once disgusted by parents doting over their baby ended up having 15 children of his own. The man who was once a puritanical husband realized only after the death of his first wife how ungrateful and miserly he had been. And then in the dead of winter, when all hope was lost, a widower of six young kids met a young maiden in the springtime. And as the Earth came back to life, so too did he.

It’s almost too good to be true. Almost.

Michael Pakaluk is not a silly man. He has a simple rule in his house: don’t waste time. That means no video games for the kids, no fiddling on the phone. If you want to learn to be a pilot, prepare to make the PGA tour, or play a board game with a friend, that’s fine. So long as you realize how valuable time is and use it well.

Of course, Michael doesn’t waste time himself. As a young man, his devotion to study was ascetic with bouts of study often lasting twelve hours at a time. After his undergraduate studies at Harvard, he went to the University of Edinburgh on a Marshall Scholarship. He later earned a PhD from Harvard with John Rawls advising his dissertation.

He married Ruth while they were both still undergraduates at Harvard, and they started their family while he was a graduate student. When his first child was born, he realized it’s better to have a counterbalance to study. The most important thing in your life should be something you share with your wife rather than something you do apart from one another. As such, he reduced his study to ten hours a day.

Alasdair MacIntyre famously said we live in an age of emotivism, where our moral judgements are expressions of preference or feeling rather than any objective truth claims. By contrast, Michael, as befits a student of Aristotle, takes careful stock of his beliefs and adheres closely to them in his actions. As he says when we discuss the upbringing of children: “you’re going to be judged on practice, not paper.”

Michael converted from atheism to evangelical Christianity in college and became a leader in InterVarsity fellowship on campus. Friends who knew him at the time saw him as a sort of Cotton Mather figure—a very austere, intellectual like the 18th century Puritan clergyman—dropped in the 21st century. When a pastor came to speak at InterVarsity, he told the students he found trying to pray just five minutes a day to be a helpful, manageable discipline.

Michael was unimpressed. He’d read church history. He knew serious Christians were praying two hours a day, not five minutes.

One day around Christmas time, a student in InterVarsity announced he would be joining the Catholic church that Easter. Michael was troubled. This appeared a failure of his leadership—he felt this was exactly the opposite of what should be happening: “He’s become convinced by Judaizers!”

Over two lunches, Michael tried to talk his friend out of it, but his friend laid two objections before Michael. First, the church up until 1500 remained largely unified in form and doctrine, but since 1500, there was an explosion of denominations and church expressions. That seemed to imply a deviation from some prior unifying principle. Second, if Martin Luther and John Calvin came back to life today, they would feel closest to the Catholic Church and would burn most Protestants at the stake.

Ruth had read plenty of Calvin, and she concurred with his assessment. Eventually, she and Michael both joined the Catholic Church.

While Michael is a serious scholar, he is not without emotion. Once when he was walking down the streets of Edinburgh with Ruth, he saw a couple pushing their baby in a stroller. One was holding the pacifier, the other leaned around to look in. Michael turned to Ruth and said, “That disgusts me. Who are these two adults treating this being like King Tut?”

When I ask how he came around to starting his own family, he says, “Probably following the lead of my wife.”

Over the coming years, Ruth and Michael would welcome seven children (one passed away at seven months in the crib), and then Ruth passed away from breast cancer at age 41 in 1998. Michael admits that these hardships led him to realize how he’d taken so much for granted:

It’s human nature. If you lose something good that you have, then you understand the extent of the loss, and you weren’t registering all the good things when they were there. So I’m completely cured of that. Just shows you how bad I am. The cures needed for my faults have been dying people and multiple, unbelievable amounts of children.

At another point he jokes, “God said this is a very difficult case. We’re going to have to teach him his lesson over a really long period of time.”

Enter the Maiden

After the death of his wife, Michael had no plans to remarry. He was attending a Greek reading group at Harvard when he was connected with a young woman named Catherine Hardy who had recently come to town to start her PhD in economics. They met at Harvard Square, and as a test, Michael asked if she wanted to stop in the local church to pray with him. Catherine went along with it happily, but Michael admits most women would think that he was crazy.

This is how he describes himself and his actions throughout our conversation: a “lunatic,” an “oddball,” “crazy.” He doesn’t seem particularly embarrassed, but he recognizes that his life and actions are strange by modern standards.

As he and Catherine began “courting,” Michael would ask himself a very simple question: Is this a person of fine quality whose company is edifying? While he admits he had that simple criterion in place, he denies that he was truly “evaluating“ Catherine:

You come out of a period of mourning, and it’s like a long winter battered by heavy storms. And you know we courted at the time of spring, and it’s like it’s the same thing. You come out of like a long dark period, and then you meet someone who smiles and who’s beautiful and a great companion and it’s like “wow,” you know? I had written off getting married again. I just wouldn’t even think about it, but I was like, “Wow, this is like being alive again after dying.” To “evaluate” would have been, you know, beyond what I was doing.

Michael admits that his two marriages were quite different. With Ruth, they were both undergraduates doing the same activities and “the more she could act like a man the better.” With Catherine, he was 18 years her senior, and he had come to see the differences between men and women, “and that was good because that then made it more deliberately a matter of courtship recognizing radical differences.”

He and Catherine went on their first date in March and were married that same August.

They got pregnant so fast people teased they didn’t wait till their wedding night. They went on to have eight kids together, and Michael conducted himself differently: more gratitude for all the ways his wife helped him, fewer lectures around the house, less complaining. He had once thought buying his wife nice things was a form of selfishness. After all, the wife’s body is the husband’s (1 Cor. 7:4) so a gift to her is a gift to himself.

But he learned about the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence—what in Aristotle‘s time might’ve meant equipping a trireme or paying for a festival—and he became convinced that the proper passage to apply is that the Church is the bride of Christ. Just as Saint Francis of Assisi had a tunic patched 100 times but spared no expense for the chalice and vestments, Michael made a habit of honoring his wife with gifts.

He bought her fresh flowers regularly, just as Catholics present fresh flowers before the Virgin Mary. He bought her diamond stud earrings and a designer coat from Paris. Cotton Mather would have been outraged, but this new version of Michael set aside an entire budget category for this sort of thing.

Here again, Michael feels archetypal. Not only was he a heartbroken widower who learned to love again, but in that new love, his hard-bitten edge wore away to reveal a caring, magnanimous, and more joyful man.

His intentionality carries over to other parts of their marriage. They have an annual marriage retreat where they talk through all the dimensions of their life: spiritual, professional, physical, financial, and the administration of the household. Then they go through those same dimensions in the lives of their children.

And it’s hard to argue with the results. As Michael explains:

I think without appearing to brag, I can say—I will appear to brag, but without bragging–Catherine and my marriage is so appealing that our kids want to do the same thing. I said to one of my older daughters from my marriage with Ruth, “Where are my priests? I’m a father of a large Catholic family. We have no priests here.” She said, “Dad, it’s your fault. You’ve made marriage look so attractive.”

When I ask Michael if he has any advice for marriage and raising children, his answer is simple: pray. Prayer multiplies and expands your time and while you can’t give your children a prayer life, you can model the importance of prayer. When they are out on their own and realize they’re responsible for their own lives, they will begin to pray in earnest too.

As our meal finishes up, the waitress comes over to get our check. Michael offers to pay, but I protest we can split it. He turns and says to our waitress, “I’ll cover the whole thing. He can pay me back later. He can retaliate. Aristotle calls it retaliation. He can retaliate later, right?” It’s a very Michael Pakaluk moment.

In the span of a few seconds, he offers an obscure Aristotelian reference, displays the magnificence he has acquired, and does it all without fear that the waitress will think him a loon. The erudition, the virtue, the confidence that manosphere hucksters present, Michael genuinely possesses.

He finishes his beer and despite the poor service, gives her a generous tip. With a shrug, he says, “It’s Easter.” No performance, no grift. Michael Pakaluk is simply a man among men.

If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to Michael Pakaluk’s Substack here. He is prolific. And if you enjoyed this, feel free to:

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That’s how The Times of London describes the author in an interview about her new book, Girls®.

It’s a clever bit of framing: it sets India up as a victor over her fellow influencers, and the photo to cap the paragraph has India modeling in designer clothes with a caption, “We don’t talk about the constant marketing of yourself. Here’s my face and body; rank and review it like a product.” In the space of three grafs, the reader is made to understand that India is a climber, a hypocrite, and is brazen to boot. She is not a serious person.

I’ve followed India since she began writing on Jonathan Haidt’s Substack about the plight of Gen Z girls. If Haidt offers the statistics about how girls, particularly liberal girls, are struggling, India delivers the firsthand stories. She has a knack for naming the strangeness of life online and the empathy to explain how Gen Z ended up so materially comfortable yet psychologically maladjusted.

Her popular Substack “Girls” has over 50,000 subscribers, and she earns praise from diverse quarters of the commentariat, including , , , and Rusty Reno. For a time, she seemed capable of no wrong.

But that time has passed.

Now that she’s reached a certain level of success, she’s become a target for take-downs from all sides. Leftist critics calls her a “trojan horse” for alt-right conspiracies, a “pick me” desperate for male approval, and a conservative Christian lecturing her secular peers. From the opposite side, she’s called a liberal feminist for “pathologising male heterosexuality” and ignoring the problems facing men today.

I got lunch with her last week and found the person described in the press far different than the one sitting across from me. India is a charming, self-deprecating Brit, and far from an attention-seeking wannabe influencer, she is very cautious to not appear too ambitious. In America, striving to build a public profile is celebrated, but in Britain, people are told to stay in their place.

So despite her success, India remains modest, and Girls® reflects that intellectual restraint.

In the introduction, India clarifies what Girls® is not. It’s not meant to speak for all Gen Z girls. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list. It’s not meant to put girls’ struggles above boys’ struggles. She writes that she focuses on girls because it’s the one topic where “I feel I can speak with what little authority I have. I am not an expert or an academic. I am a woman in her twenties.”

The book makes no policy recommendations and few prescriptions of any kind. Instead, it walks through six chapters on different areas of life where girls are struggling: Filtered (appearance), Diagnosed (mental health), Documented (posting their lives), Disconnected (friendship), Detached (relationships), “Empowered” (career). She gives her thesis right up front: “Modern digital technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt.”

For instance, India admits women have always cared about their appearance and felt self-conscious through puberty. But through social media and body filters like Facetune, they are now acutely aware of the gap between their real body and their idealized body. When they come in for cosmetic surgery, instead of bringing a photo of a celebrity, they bring a printout of their Facetune.

But in her typically gracious way, India doesn’t condemn these women. She just says this sort of commodification is what they were trained to do. Even OnlyFans is really just a continuation of the behavior begun when a 12-year-old posts a sexualized selfie.

If that sounds hysterical or off-base, consider that Shannon Elizabeth of American Pie recently justified joining OnlyFans by saying she wants to be closer to her fans: “OnlyFans gives me the opportunity to offer something more—a behind-the-scenes, unfiltered look at my life and a genuine connection that no other platform allows.” The same logic as Instagram just carried to its extreme.

India felt the story of digital harms had been told by Jonathan Haidt and others, but there was a gap for a firsthand narrative. She tells me, “it was all charts and graphs and I don’t think that’s as compelling as maybe having both, which is the statistics, but also the emotional story.”

Girls® isn’t meant to replace Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. It rounds it out.

India’s approach necessarily opens her up to a certain amount of criticism. She’s not arguing as a brain on a stick but very much as an embodied young woman trying to explain the psychic distress of growing up online. Her age, gender, and biography are inextricably bound up with her writing.

Even so, the scrutiny she receives seems more varied and spirited than you might expect. There are three primary lines of attack.

India as Bimbo

A few weeks back, a popular British writer wrote a 7,000 word Substack article “At War with Freya India,” which included some substantive critiques but was filled with ad hominem and implication. For instance, she points out that one of India’s chapters includes a subheader titled “Consume” and a sentence, “Coming of age with only consumerism as our guide, girls my age had no road map.” From there, she concludes India must have been influenced by the Reddit page r/ConsumeProduct, which was a cesspool of antisemitism and conspiracism. You, wise reader, can connect the dots.

After 6,000 words of that, she writes, “I’d received tipoffs about a managerial boyfriend figure.” (Tipoffs?) She then proceeds to out India’s now-fiancé, castigating him for being a “pro-growth startup guy” who shamelessly reposts India’s articles and speaking engagements. His “preoccupation with Western female fertility” is revealed when he says that women who postpone family life because of single-minded careerism may end up regretting it.

This personal attack is meant to prove that India is a young, attractive, naive woman who is being used by the far right: “The point of Girls® is to gather mainstream consensus for the hard-right’s ideas about working women, birth rates, and civilisational collapse. And its author is a perfect Trojan horse.”

And India’s either too stupid or too fame-hungry to realize what she’s doing.

India as Schoolmarm

The Daily Mail published an excerpt of her book, and the headline restates India’s thesis with one small addition: “and makes men rich.” And just like that, India’s passage about Kim Kardashian and other female influencers sounds tone-deaf and man-hating:

When writing about relationships, India often comes back to the destruction of pornography. If you’ve watched hardcore pornography before you’ve had your first kiss, that will inevitably damage your ability to form healthy, lasting relationships. She struggled to arrive at that position from her secular upbringing.

If a woman merely says, “my boyfriend watching porn makes me feel bad,” she will inevitably be told, “That sounds like a ‘you problem.’” Only after hearing from countless other women did she conclude that her disgust with pornography was not a personal shortcoming.

In her recent interview for the European Conservative, she spoke about this with who wrote:

Many right-wing influencers have taken to arguing online that modern women have unrealistically high standards. The reality is that women and girls struggle to find men that meet one very basic standard: He does not look at pornography online and will not cheat on them by watching porn. Many women accept this. As India points out, a key problem in the dating culture today is that many young women have standards that are too low rather than too high.

When Van Maren posted that excerpt on X, his comments were flooded with outrage that this liberal feminist was “pathologising male sexuality.” To be clear, India tells me her point was that women tend to have low standards on moral character and then unreasonably high standards on height, income, political views, etc. She was merely advocating for high moral standards for both men and women.

But even so, the response Van Maren got—the defense of porn platforms and how “normal” watching porn is—made India think these men (with a few women as well) were responding to the guilt they felt more than anything.

To paraphrase her fellow countryman, the anons doth protest too much, methinks.

India as Conservative Christian

Unlike other popular female writers such as or , India’s book doesn’t give much away with the title. If you pick up The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or even Feminism Against Progress, you have an idea of what you’re getting. India says Girls® is causing “jump scares” in some readers who are expecting an anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy book and are instead finding…something else.

If there is a political influence, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is the one that stuck out to me. When I ask her about it, India tells me she “really enjoyed” that book because it treated where we’d ended up as a culmination of prior trends rather than some deviation from our intended course. Deneen argued that liberalism’s emphasis on emancipation from social obligations combined with its free market economics led to the commodification of our societal breakdown.

But India follows Deneen only as far as Why Liberalism Failed, a book that drew praise from localists, postliberals, and even President Obama. India doesn’t follow Deneen on to Regime Change, telling me, “I don’t really talk about policy because I don’t know much about it or the consequences.” She says she likes the idea of age verification for porn sites for instance, but she also fears a government database of IDs and the potential for surveillance.

Here again, like a good Brit, she stays in her lane.

As far as Christianity, while India spoke with Justin Brierly about how Christianity seems to offer answers for a lost, hopeless generation of young people, she’s not Jesus-maxxing either. She mentions in passing how her friend is an Orthodox Christian who offered her some counsel, but she is not posting her baptism set to worship music.

In fact, India hardly ever posts a photo of herself, a tweet about her life, and she’s never done a direct-to-camera video. That reticence about turning her life into content keeps her relatively private about her religious exploration.

For now, she’ll point to the inadequacies of therapy-speak as a substitute for God, but you won’t catch her endorsing the new Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope. You might take issue with that for being namby-pamby, but it seems to be the same tack Ross Douthat took with his book Believe.

Rather than making an explicit case for Christianity, he made a case for religion to the agnostic and the skeptic. He may not have led the reader through the sinner’s prayer, but he also will attract readers who wouldn’t be caught dead reading The Case for Christ.

Likewise, Girls will “jump scare” some readers expecting a boilerplate anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy book, and that may prove a first step toward a better future for girls all around. India says she’s “hopeful and optimistic about culture actually changing.” She thinks Haidt and others have shifted the Overton window. The children born today have parents much more aware of the relative dangers of life online versus life offline.

Nevertheless, she fears that conversation around the problems facing young girls will be cut off. If India—who I would describe as relatively tame, highly empathetic, and a young woman herself—can be dismissed as too political or demographically disqualified, then who can talk about these issues? Her reception and reputation is a proxy war for the bounds of acceptable discourse.

She may well have to go full Quentin Tarantino before too long.

While her work draws a fair amount of praise and some hostility, it’s not uncommon for India to be met with genuine confusion. How can women be so miserable when they are such professional successes? Aren’t they winning in modern society? To this, she replies:

[Women have] everything that we want and nothing we actually need. And so I don’t think the material successes that women have achieved will make them happy. I would say the same for men, which is that our deep human needs: belonging, to feel like we’re part of something bigger and part of community, and that we can love and accept love from people. All these things that, as you say, they’re matters of the heart, I feel like young women don’t have that and young men don’t have that either.

This is classic India. Instead of reaching for St. Paul (if I have not love, I have nothing) or for Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone saw this coming 25 years ago!), she lets it stay in the moment, in first person, in the pain without reaching for a pat answer.

So you can call her emotional for speaking to the heart and speaking from her own experience. You can call her unfocused for publishing a nonfiction book that’s graph-free, neuroscience-lite, and policy-agnostic. You can call her a pick-me, a trojan horse, a misogynist, a man-hater, a teen messiah or any other slur you like (though that may say more about you than her).

Just don’t call her ambitious. Brits hate that sort of thing.

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That’s how Scott Galloway described rowing crew at UCLA. The moral of the story is that when you think you can’t go any further, you’re at about a third of your capacity. This is all part of his mythos, including his first job at Goldman Sachs where he made a name for himself by working straight through every Tuesday morning to Wednesday night.

Galloway is the heroin of hustle content.

When these stories are about athletes or entrepreneurs, they are praised as examples of American grit. But that praise doesn’t extend to parents pushing themselves.

This came into focus for me listening to Catherine Pakaluk, the author of Hannah’s Children, interview Marcella Burke, who owns her own law practice in Houston and at the time was expecting her fifth. Burke said she was inspired by Justice Antonin Scalia who once quipped, “If you think I’m ambitious, you should meet my wife.” Scalia’s wife raised 9 kids. He just wrote opinions.

Burke was taken with this idea of a “noble ambition,” so she made it a rule: any time she was preparing for a major career advance—clerkship, fellowship, partnership, etc.—she would actively try to have a kid. As a result, she says, “I’ve basically been pregnant for the entire 15 years we’ve been married. And we have four boys now, but I’ve had seven miscarriages.” She also earned equity partnership at a top firm, served in the EPA, and founded her own firm in Houston. As Pakaluk joked, she seems to have lived three lifetimes already.

The idea of being ambitious for children can sound odd. Maybe it conjures up a poorly kept house and an overwhelmed mom. Maybe it seems improper, treating our kids like championship rings we use to taunt our neighbors. It’s one thing to overtrain for crew or overinvest in our business, but you can’t scale back a child. The dangers of too much ambition seem far greater than those of too little.

In practice though, the hesitation is usually for the opposite reason. It’s not that people think parenting is so important that it should only be reserved for perfect conditions. It’s that they don’t think it’s important at all.

In Hannah’s Children, one mom recalls how in medical school, her sacrifice of time and energy was widely respected, yet when she sacrificed her time and energy to have 7 kids, the response was, “Well, you asked for it.” When I interviewed Pakaluk a couple years ago, she spoke to this dynamic:

We don’t think having children is valuable or worthwhile . . . We don’t value medicine and bootcamp and the military—these other all-encompassing professions—we don’t value them because they’re costly or because they’re hard. There’s all kinds of things that are hard to do that we don’t value . . . To say something completely absurd for a minute, try to live a functional life as an alcoholic. It’s actually very difficult. There’s an intense level of willingness to suffer . . . but we don’t value living as an alcoholic. I don’t want to make light of an addiction, but I’m drawing it out.

We have no difficulty separating out costs that people willingly take on to do something foolish . . . from the inherent value of the thing. The question is why we don’t value children and childbearing. They are as hard as medicine and the military and climbing a high mountain, but we don’t see them as worth doing.

Children bring some unavoidable struggles. Newborns don’t sleep through the night. 2-year-olds don’t listen. But if you believe that raising children is worthwhile, then that suffering is the suffering of an athlete or soldier, not the suffering of an alcoholic. And more than that, those moments offer value just like the training session of an athlete.

In his book Enduring Love, Father Josiah Trenham upends the common approach to parenthood:

Contraception is called “protection” as though children are dangerous monsters that husbands and wives need to be protected from. On the contrary, parents don’t need to be saved from children: parents need to be saved by children. The bearing and rearing of children is the narrow path through which those called by God to marriage work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. The real monsters from which the couple needs protection are not their future children, but their egos, self-centeredness, and self-love.

There is a shared discipline between the athlete, the ascetic, and the parent. In fact, St. John Chrysostom exhorts parents to “please God by rearing such athletes for Him, that we and our children may light on the blessings that are promised to them that love Him.”

And as any athlete knows, your best performance always requires others. When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, he had runners alongside him the whole time. For the crucial final lap, one runner stayed behind all race to make sure he paced Bannister down the home stretch. With that accountability, Bannister set a personal and world record.

In the same way, every parent knows the feeling of children pushing us to our limit. There are bestsellers all about it:

And while it’s not good to lose your temper, just like it’s not good to black out during a 2,000 meter race, the idea that you should live in total equanimity doesn’t make sense either. What rower would advise you to never train above 50% of your capacity? Likewise, if your children are part of your path toward humility, then you wouldn’t expect that to mean a smooth ride.

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in Learning to Pray tells a surprising story of how a saint was freed from his anger:

When in our prayers, we ask God to give us strength to do something in His Name, we are not asking Him to do it instead of us because we are too feeble to be willing to do it for ourselves.

The lives of the saints are enlightening in this respect, and in the life of St Philip Neri just such an occasion is described. He was an irascible man who quarreled easily and had violent outbursts of anger and of course endured violent outbursts from his brothers. One day he felt that it could not go on. Whether it was virtue or whether he could no longer endure his brothers his Vita does not tell us. The fact is that he ran to the chapel, fell down before a statue of Christ and begged Him to free him of his anger. He then walked out full of hope. The first person he met was one of the brothers who had never aroused the slightest anger in him, but for the first time in his life this brother was offensive and unpleasant to him. So Philip burst out with anger and went on, full of rage, to meet another of his brothers, who had always been a source of consolation and happiness to him. Yet even this man answered him gruffly. So Philip ran back to the chapel, cast himself before the statue of Christ and said, “O Lord, have I not asked you to free me from this anger?” And the Lord answered, “Yes, Philip, and for this reason I am multiplying the occasions for you to learn.”

The common view of parenthood is that of the utilitarian. Weigh up the negatives (poor sleep, interrupted conversations, screaming on airplanes), weigh up the positives (cute photos, sense of meaning, fulfilling biological imperative), and then see which side comes out ahead.

But if you come to accept that the difficulties are God giving you “occasions to learn” and the good times are blessings, then you can find the whole experience far less pointless and far more meaningful. Just like in the gym you need to push until failure to make strength gains, I like to think of it as Progressive Overload Parenting. You need to push past your perceived limits time after time.

The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, I give you full permission to reframe your life in Scott Galloway’s terms. It can make your life feel as epic and important as it already is. Here are some samples I came up with:

“It’s 2 in the morning, and I remember not being able to feel my legs, wanting to fall back asleep and having to concentrate on not falling back asleep. And the air wafting into my mouth was on fire, tasted like vomit and diarrhea in your throat. And that was at diaper one.”

OR

“It’s 10:15 at church, and I remember being able to feel my blood pressure rising, starting to see red, and having to concentrate on not seeing red. And the breath coming out of my mouth was on fire, tasted like blood and metal coming out of your throat. I was breathing fire like a literal dragon in the middle of this liturgy. And that was 15 minutes after we arrived.”

Feel free to leave your Scott Galloway parenting wins in the comments below. God bless you in all the occasions He gives you to learn.

Beginning with Paranormal Activity (budget: $15,000), he reeled off a series of commercial and creative hits on shoestring budgets, including Insidious (budget: $1.5 million), Sinister (budget: $3 million), The Purge (budget: $3 million), and Get Out (budget: $4.5 million). At that cost, if it doesn’t work, he can recoup his money with streaming, and if it works, then everybody wins. Each of those films grossed over $80 million (Get Out hit $255 million), and the industry has slowly caught on that micro-budget horror can be a great investment.

This strategy isn’t all that different from faith-based filmmakers like the Kendrick brothers of Facing the Giants and Fireproof or Jon Erwin of I Can Only Imagine and The Jesus Revolution. In fact, Erwin said he “talked a lot” with Jason Blum about how studios disdained horror a few decades ago, and faith-based films are in the same situation now. Like Blum, he is seeing these grounded, low-budget films connect with audiences. Because despite the difference in rating and target audience, films like God’s Not Dead and Paranormal Activity share some metaphysical DNA.

For either to be effective, they need to clearly define good and evil.

That’s why it’s no coincidence that many of the best horror filmmakers have Christian roots. Zach Creggar, the writer-director of Weapons, says growing up he went to “youth group a lot. In fact, in my prime when I was in junior high, I would go four times a week to church.” Wes Craven, the director of the first four Scream films, graduated from Wheaton College, the “Harvard of Evangelical Schools,” in 1963. Scott Derrickson, director of Sinister and The Black Phone, is a confessing Christian. Even Stephen King was raised Methodist.

One of the sharpest observers and defenders of horror’s artistic and spiritual merits is Justin Lee, an associate editor of First Things and author of a new short story collection A Prisoner’s Cinema. Lee is an intellectually serious Christian, yet, by his own admission, as a boy he always loved setting a toad on the shoulder of an unsuspecting victim, and with horror writing, he has “found the most loathsome toad imaginable.”

This combination makes for uniquely disturbing reading, especially for someone who’s familiar with the Christian subcultures Lee explores.

It’s one thing to read the story of a pedophile child-murderer slowly descending. It’s another when he frantically flips through his Bible to find a verse to explain his porn addiction: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” It’s one thing to read about a man dedicated to “saving himself for marriage” slowly succumbing to lust. It’s another when the author understands both the psychological toll of purity culture and the spiritual value of chastity.

I’m not a horror fanatic, but I’m familiar with the genre and Lee unsettled me more than almost anything I’ve read or watched. So I gave him a call to try to figure out why.

Justin Lee graduated from Taylor University, a small Christian liberal arts school in Upland, Indiana. It’s the kind of place where you make your own fun. School traditions include “pick-a-date,” where dorm wings schedule giant themed group dates; “Airband,” a competitive lip-synching competition; and “Silent Night,” where dorm wings dress in costumes to attend a basketball game and remain silent until the tenth point is scored.

If Lee were stereotypical, he’d disavow Taylor and its backward ways now that he lives in New York City. Perhaps he’d become a triumphalist Catholic or hand-wringing liberal or else deconstruct altogether. He does none of those. Instead, he tells me his theology is more Catholic and Eastern Orthodox but his ecclesiology remains very Protestant. Meaning he believes in the priesthood of all believers, but he finds Catholicism’s structure and tradition to be expedient in many respects. He thinks Catholics have a sacramental view of reality that is more accurate than much of evangelicalism, but he is not seriously considering conversion.

Keats said a great thinker must be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and Lee seems capable of that as a theologian and as an artist. He is neither dogmatic nor didactic, but he’s not wishy-washy either. When discussing the motivations of “exvangelicals” or the proper theology of evil, he does not mince words. Lee manages to hold productive tensions in his writing and thinking, rather than, as is often the case, claiming “tensions” as cover for intellectual laxity.

Lee is clear-eyed in assessing excesses of Taylor’s spirituality, sexuality, and the relation of the two. He recalls a pair of hyper-Calvinist brothers he knew who would justify their habitual masturbation by saying God had foreordained it. He admits “purity culture” can bring a certain amount of baggage with it, even “trauma.” He just thinks the secular alternative is “catastrophically worse.” A culture that holds out virtuous living as an ideal will necessarily engender some guilt and shame, he says, “And that’s okay.”

In his stories, the psychological toll of sexual sin and temptation is a recurring theme. He says he “sees it in everyone,” especially the exvangelicals who have deconstructed. Here, he’s characteristically blunt, “I don’t know anyone who has accepted that label, who hasn’t done their so-called deconstruction process as a way to get to f—. It’s that simple, it’s that crass. This is especially true of men.”

I ask him how his faith informs his writing, and he admits it helps, just not in the way you might think. He cites Flannery O’Connor who observed that to write good fiction, “you need to be able to get your hands dirty.” Lee’s faith gives him a more accurate map of reality, and for horror to truly terrify, it must understand human nature and the nature of evil. In every story, he says he wants the reader to see a bit of himself in the character even if that identification is shocking or upsetting.

In the case of the title story, that means identifying with a pedophile child molester who’s possessed by a demon. In seeing how this young man named Cal gradually descends into darkness, egged on by a demon he calls “Paul,” Lee hopes people realize how “alien” the self can be. We are not autonomous individuals. We are shaped by relationships and outside forces, demons included. That realization can be a first step toward conversion.

I asked for him to elaborate on this character of Paul. It’s common for modern Christians to be skeptical of demonic activity—“spiritual warfare” can seem lowbrow—yet he treats Paul as real, not a psychological projection. He replied:

The only theologically correct way to conceptualize evil is as privation of the good. Evil is an absence. But it’s an absence that we very much experience as a presence. The way I like to think of it is reality is this beautiful tapestry, or at least it’s a tapestry that should be beautiful if it weren’t for the tears in it, the frayed and missing threads.

Just to clarify, I say that I’ve heard people argue that because evil is an absence of good, to ascribe temptation or torment to demons is incorrect because it attributes too much “activity” to something that is merely an absence. Basically, a privation theory of evil sets the conditions for our fallen nature, but there’s no demon on your shoulder urging you to give in to your passions.

Lee replied, “Yeah, that’s a retarded perspective” and said anyone who thinks the “privatio boni” forecloses demonic activity needs to “exercise better imagination.” Because what are demons but “images in the tapestry of angels where the threads are frayed. Where there are tears?”

Perhaps that’s the clearest indicator that Lee is part of what he calls the “ragtag coalition” of the dissident right: he can use privatio boni and retarded in the same sentence. He admits there are some unsavory types on the Right, but he also sees it as the only place with a genuine avant-garde. Even if it has produced no major works yet, it’s the only place a major work could come from.

A Prisoner’s Cinema offers a glimpse of that future. The book is not some anti-woke screed, but Lee sees it as right-wing in the sense that it “celebrate[s] the order of being, [as] a gift given to us by God.” Lee wants art that is true, not art that is polemical. In the case of A Prisoner’s Cinema, that means portraying evil realistically and unflinchingly but not stopping there.

When characters are at their lowest, the opportunity for redemption still lingers. When the reader finds the self alien, it presents an opportunity to step into the mystery of the infinite. The dread of hell can give way to the ecstasy of heaven.

Horror tends to focus on the former. “Christian” art tends to focus on the latter. Lee is the rare writer that can do both.

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At the same time, breathless media coverage presents Orthodox Church pews “overflowing with converts,” a “surprising rebirth” of belief in God, and Christianity suddenly becoming cool.

So which is it?

As is often the case, C.S. Lewis had the explanation back in 1946:

Plenty of evidence can be produced to show that religion is in its last decline among [today’s youth], or that a revival of interest in religion is one of their most noticeable characteristics. And in fact something that may be called “a decline” and something that may be called “a revival” are both going on. It will be perhaps more useful to attempt to understand both than to try our luck at “spotting the winner.”

The reasons for decline and deconstruction among today’s youth have been discussed ad nauseum, so I’d like to focus on the “revival” side of things today. And rather than quoting statistics and running through my graphs, I’d like to tell the stories of four archetypal young Christians today. Here, I am following the example of Pastor Rick Warren with Saddleback Sam:

Saddleback Sam was the result of hundreds of conversations Warren had with California locals, trying to understand their motivations for going to church. By distilling his target parishioner into a simple image, Warren was able to focus his initial church planting efforts and tailor his outreach.

While I am not trying to create a church growth guide, the characters I have developed — Double-Down Dave, Community Chris, Well-Researched Richard, and Convert Constantine — were, like Warren, inspired by hundreds of conversations I’ve had with peers and their parents over the years.

I don’t pretend to speak for all people in all places, and I am not attempting to be exhaustive. I am merely offering some personal reflections alongside some tasteful infographics. If this jives with your experience or if there’s a character I’ve missed, please leave a comment below.

Without further ado, I give you “The Four Types of Young Christians I Know”

Double-Down Dave:

Like Juni Cortez, Double Down Dave is carrying on the family business. Dave was raised in a Christian household and environment, and while he may have strayed away for a time, he now realizes his parents made one mistake: they didn’t go far enough.

When he compares his childhood to the culture his kids will be growing up in, it’s apparent to Dave that everything has gotten worse. His parents were concerned about Harry Potter and Twilight. Now we have Icebreaker and A Court of Thorns and Roses. His parents hated “American Idiot” by Green Day and “Numb” by Linkin Park. Now we have “WAP” by Cardi B and “Juno” by Sabrina Carpenter. He begged permission to watch The Dark Knight and How I Met Your Mother. Now we have Anora and Euphoria.

He may have chafed at his parent’s strictness, but now he realizes they were directionally accurate, just a bit ahead of the curve. Because the cultural output of Dave’s youth still retained some Christian morality. Bella saving herself for marriage is a key plot point of Twilight. Linkin Park was loud, but their lyrics could be a praise-and-worship song: “I want to heal / I want to feel / like I’m close to something real / I want to find something I’ve wanted all along / Somewhere I belong.” Even How I Met Your Mother, despite its many flaws, is centered around someone trying to find a wife and start a family.

By contrast, Dave thinks today’s cultural output revels in its ugliness and perversity. There is no redemptive message lurking below the surface. It is aesthetically and morally nihilistic. To make sense of it all, Dave remembers a quote from Alfred in The Dark Knight: “some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Dave understands that this post-Christian culture is crumbling, and he has accepted that barring a national revival, he and his family will be part of the remnant.

Community Chris:

In our anti-social century, we have left behind “bowling alone” in favor of “bed rotting.” Loneliness is now an epidemic. Young people in particular are seeing friends less, having sex less, and are just generally depressed.

If you ask Community Chris about it though, he might give you a puzzled look. He’s in a community group, a men’s group, and a small group. His friend group is a tangle of love triangles and unrequited affection. His calendar is overbooked.

Chris might admit that the substance of his church service is not great (just like Troy from HSM wouldn’t say he loves high school because of chemistry class). But Chris loves his church because he loves the people. He would rather go to a subpar service with his friends than the perfect service without them.

When Chris goes to church, he feels comfortable. These people dress well, they vote for the right candidate, and they have decent, if not impressive, jobs. Chris doesn’t need to cordon off his “church friends” from the majority of his life. His church friends are his life, and he feels comfortable talking about his work, the news, and his weekend plans with them.

He is aware of various critiques of the faith — academic and otherwise — but he doesn’t give them much thought. Not because he’s examined and dispatched them but because they just don’t seem relevant to his life. His friends are all on the same page, so why bother with what some egghead says?

Chris is generally optimistic about his future. He’s got girls, he’s got friends, and he’s got a good job. Alright, alright, alright.

Well-Researched Richard:

When I interviewed Ross Douthat for Believe, he offered a theory for the secularization that accompanied the rise of the internet: apologetic naivete. Suddenly a kid in Naperville was hearing for the first time that the Pentateuch wasn’t written by Moses, that Isaiah wasn’t written by “Isaiah,” and that the gospels are internally inconsistent. This wasn’t new to the Christian intelligentsia, but for a generation of bright-eyed youths, it was devastating.

Thus, the rise of New Atheism wasn’t merely a function of techo-optimism and the impending triumph of science. It was a story of information dissemination made possible by the internet. Even as New Atheism has waned in influence, many young people still retain a vague sense that Christianity has been disproven and that its only contribution to history was war and superstition.

In the face of this ambient disdain, some abandoned the faith, some retreated to platitudes, but some — like Well-Researched Richard — stepped up to the plate.

Richard’s favorite verse is 1 Peter 3:15, “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you,” and whether it is an online argument, a family dinner, or a co-worker’s innocent question, Richard is always champing at the bit to explain how he has finally found the Truth.

Richard watches theological debates in his free time as blood sport. It is apparent to him that all other religions and Christian sects are illogical, and thus he can only conclude that these people are either unaware or unconcerned that their house is built on sand. At every opportunity, he tries to turn them from their folly.

He is skeptical of squishes and a keyboard apologist with a hair trigger. Like Gandalf, he feels he is plagued by foolish companions that he must counsel. His “church leadership” is always at risk of compromising their theological rigor and integrity. No matter what church Richard attends, he must maintain a critical distance, always monitoring whether he agrees with what’s being taught. If he doesn’t, they’ll be hearing about it.

Aesthetically, Richard may smoke a pipe or enjoy a fine bourbon, or he may do neither, but he will always seek to comport himself in a way that is slightly more refined, old-fashioned, and well-considered than the hoi polloi.

Convert Constantine:

Though the name “Constantine” might imply a Roman Catholic, Convert Constantine could be any young person who is deeply, perhaps unreasonably, proud of their tradition. David Bentley Hart told a story from when his brother went on a tour in Constantinople. As they were riding on the bus, a recent Orthodox convert burst out in a deep Southern drawl, “these Latins simply cannot understand what the sack of Constantinople in 1204 still means to us.”

While this sort of Catholic-on-Orthodox fighting will occur occasionally, Constantine’s most telling trait is his four word motto: Always Dunk On Protestants. This can take many forms. The unrelenting soft pressure campaign: “You’re going to convert. It’s just a matter of time.” The not-so-subtle dig, “Wouldn’t you say Protestantism’s ‘deep history and tradition’ is a bit of a stretch?” The pwn with facts and logic: “If sola scriptura is true, then why couldn’t the Reformers agree on the meaning of communion?”

It’s worth noting that this zeal for tradition is not the same as zeal for church hierarchy. Constantine would see no contradiction between praising the Catholic Church one moment and bashing Pope Leo the next. In fact, criticizing Leo can signal his exceptional piety. But he likes having something to push back against. In an ever-shifting and increasingly virtual world, the stability, physicality, and mysticism of liturgical worship appeal to Constantine.

As he looks around, Constantine feels he is in good company. The best and brightest converts are leaving secularism in favor of the liturgical. (Anglican), Shia LaBeouf (Catholic), (Anglican), (Anglican), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Anglican), (Eastern Orthodox), (Anglican), (Anglican), (Catholic), Tammy Peterson (Catholic), (Eastern Orthodox), and (Eastern Orthodox).

Now Constantine just has to get the apostates and the Chreasters out of his church à la Friar Tuck, and he should be all set.

In the same essay where Lewis observed a simultaneous decline and revival, he mused on the future of Christianity for Britain. While he admitted that a certain public, cultural Christianity would be lost, he didn’t believe confessional Christianity would necessarily suffer. The secularizing forces would merely force a decision: “When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone.”

The middle things are gone, the lukewarm Christians have drifted away, and now the church has an opportunity to be a compelling, countercultural witness to the world. All we have to do is deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

Shouldn’t be too tough…

Every day I spawn in. Emerge wriggling out my skibidi bolus of slime. Whence and where? Lol. Idk. Vibes here be mad shady fr…Here’s a normal day in the life of a mf with zero inner monologue and zero ability to speak. From 6 to 7 am I bedrot, or I would if I had a bed. Instead I simply rot. Goblincore. Mushroomcore. Livid colonies of fungus going feral around my wounds fr. From 7 to 8 am I bedrot. From 8 to 9 am I bedrot. From 9 to 10 am I flail my arms around while making strangled hacking noises. No cap this is such a dope part of my morning routine. From 10 am until lunch I enter grind mode, by which I mean wandering in loose circles over the ruins.

After this goes on for awhile, Kriss moves to third person to offer analysis:

If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.

In an age of overwhelming content, the hipster initially helped sort through it all by being a tastemaker themselves. Then that role was handed over to programmers who created algorithms that would sort and deliver to you the best cultural tidbits. Now, people are consuming the algorithms directly.

He gives the example of the stereotypical TikTok doomscroller. If you watch someone in the throes of it, they aren’t actually watching the videos. They are instead glancing at and then flicking through the vast majority of them. It’s not that their parents were watching 2-hour films, and they now watch 30 second clips. The scrolling is now the point of it. The algorithm is the entertainment.

Kriss believes Twitch, the popular streaming platform, is the fullest expression of this phenomenon. Streams go for hours, sometimes including while the streamer is sleeping, and rarely rise above commentary like, “This dual hammer meta is absolutely disgusting and I really hope they patch them immediately and make them share global cooldown.”

Nevertheless, Twitch is the platform of the future and the incubator for the next generation of micro-celebrities (and slang). The dialect is less about referencing a specific cultural artifact — e.g. “Assistant to the Regional Manager” — and more about glorying in your familiarity with the platform’s jargon. In other words, buckle up for a lot more of this:

“Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of “like” has spread through the idiom of the young…the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables” - Christopher Hitchens

Valerie Fridland argues in her 2023 book Like, Literally, Dude that people who claim spoken English is deteriorating are hypocritical curmudgeons. They are hypocritical because language always changes. You don’t speak the English of Beowulf, do you?

More than that, she believes “there is no right way to speak English” is a moral stance. Holding up any norms would allow the continued marginalization of immigrants, women, minorities, etc.

As an etymological history, her book is full of interesting notes. For instance, while um and uh can seem like dead space, she argues they have all sorts of valuable uses. If you want to hold the floor while you remember what you wanted to say, you can just toss out an ummmm (which generally implies more cognitive processing required than a mere uh).

What’s more, young women, who tend to be linguistic innovators — they started using going to instead of will, have to instead of must, and really instead of very — have now turned um into a sarcastic sentence opener:

As a linguistic polemic, I find Fridland’s book less convincing. It’s one thing to say that Southern accents shouldn’t be stigmatized. I also acknowledge that saying, “It took, like, twenty minutes,” or “I was like…,” or “And when I heard that, like, my heart dropped” all have a different effect than saying, “It took twenty minutes,” or “I told him…” or “And when I heard that my heart dropped.” Like is a versatile, playful word whose enduring popularity — despite attacks from Christopher Hitchens and others — signals a certain value to its users.

Nevertheless, Fridland wrongly elides differences in usage (a Southern accent versus a Northern one) with differences in effort (littering your speech with like, um, and profanity).

In her disdain for linguistic prescriptivists, she becomes a sort of linguistic populist, appealing to the natural instinct of ordinary speakers over any kind of historic norm. Quite literally, vox populi, vox dei. And while that seems compassionate and righteous at first glance, linguistic populism carries the same risks as political populism. It is easier to tear down than build up.

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“Important art forms will survive only because of a frank elitism, an insistence on distinction, a contempt for mediocrity.” - Ross Douthat

The internet is a vulgar place.

Of course, there’s the violence, the sexuality, and the obscenity, but at root, vulgarity means something like philistinism — a lack of sophistication. It comes from the Latin vulgus meaning “common people.” Vulgarity in its fullest sense is something that is both popular and in poor taste. (Sometimes, things are “in poor taste” merely because they are popular).

That’s why Henry Higgins, the phonetics professor in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, is not merely concerned with changing Eliza Doolittle’s vowel sounds. Higgins admits that most upper class ladies are dreadfully boring and Eliza could fit in with a little vocal work so long as she stuck to pleasantries.

But to become a lady, truly, is another matter. As Higgins tells her, “Oh, it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real: it’s warm: it’s violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art.”

To Higgins, the work of rhetoric, of speaking well and clearly, is not incidental to the refinement of a proper lady. Instead, he sees discipline of speech as connected to the discipline it takes to appreciate art, literature, and music. While Fridland argues that the enduring popularity of like signals its utility and rightful place in our language, Higgins might argue that its ease and thoughtlessness disqualify it from the vocabulary of a gentlemen or lady.

It is as vulgar a word as any of the other four-letter ones.

Of course, that sentiment, just like the Douthat quote above, comes off as rather harsh. It sounds retrograde and condescending. And any norm necessarily carries the risk of being weaponized.

But the historic understanding of rhetoric and the liberal arts was that it benefitted the student first and foremost. That to become a fully formed person and citizen, you needed to train yourself. The great books were not a way to exclude but a way to elevate.

If virtue is the midpoint between two vices, you always need to consider which vice you are closer to. For most modern people, our speech is too bloated and profane rather than too spare and stiff. Our leisure time is too passive and self-indulgent rather than too rigorous and edifying. Our greater danger is not that we would become robots but that we would become beasts.

“We must labor to be beautiful” - W.B. Yeats

A few years ago, Martin Scorsese expressed the controversial opinion that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, they are more like an amusement park ride. 5 years later, Netflix is explicitly telling filmmakers to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

Podcasts were once praised as a new opportunity for in-depth conversations, a chance to go deeper than a 5 minute radio spot. They have become a new form of talk radio offering hours of entertaining background noise.

Social media gave people a chance to exercise their creativity, and an iPhone put a production studio in your pocket. This has culminated in Twitch, a streaming platform that excels at running in the background.

All these different forms have converged on slop.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Platforms moving toward ad-supported content have incentives to maximize total engagement rather than the quality of that engagement. Cultural aspiration is now viewed with scorn. Awards shows praise irrelevant, self-congratulatory works of art.

The million dollar question is whether you can convince people that this is as good as it gets.

wrote about a study that tested whether you could trick people into liking bad art. A sample of 12,000 people were given access to a private music service. Half saw the actual rankings of the most popular songs while the other half saw some songs artificially inflated in their popularity.

In other words, the test was whether you’d trust your own judgment or the system’s promotion of inferior music. Gioia explained:

There were three lessons learned from this study—and I believe that they are extremely important:

1. Yes, the system could manipulate people into downloading and listening to inferior songs—simply by lying about their popularity.

2. But this only worked in the short run. Over time, listeners would return to the better songs no matter what the fake rankings said.

3. The scariest part of the story is that fans who were lied to—given crappy songs and told that they were great—eventually lost interest in all the songs. They listened to less music. They cared about it less.

That last point rings true to me.

At first, Marvel trounces “cinema,” but then no one ends up going to the movies. At first, book candy replaces the classics, but then kids stop reading altogether. At first, Moral Therapeutic Deism replaces Christianity, but then that’s replaced by the Void.

So here we are at a pivot point. Some will continue barreling down the path we’re on, tearing down what little there is left.

Others will rebuild.

They will clean up their speech, they will pick up their books, and they will go back to church. They will dispense with ironic detachment. They will commit themselves to their families and communities, knowing that these offer the greatest joys in life, as well as the greatest risks. They will not bedrot. They will not brainrot.

St. Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

So rather than zombies, let us live life, and live it to the full.

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