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.

Take the difference between Luke Combs and Timothee Chalamet. While they work in different industries and come from different backgrounds, their brands have a fair amount of crossover.

Chalamet unabashedly says, “I want to be one of the greats.” Combs admits he “would love to put out a bunch of hits.” Chalamet is “basically married” to a mother of 2 children. Combs is actually married to the mother of his three children. Chalamet is notorious for his social media self-promotion on Marty Supreme. Combs was one of the first country stars to use social media to launch his career (Vine at the time). Neither have the physique of, say, Brad Pitt or Glen Powell, but they make it work.

The key differentiator is Combs’s identity as a Dad. Since the birth of his son Tex three years ago, he’s been clear that his family comes first. That means scheduling fewer shows so he can be home with his family (he only played 23 last year). It also means releasing an album, “Fathers and Sons,” that was dedicated to his sons, so that they knew even when his career was taking off, they were still at the front of his mind. That album didn’t produce any #1 hits, but those who heard it loved it. And ultimately, he was making it for himself and his kids anyway.

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Chalamet is undoubtedly a talented actor, but his brand is getting battered for its egotism. A career “retrospective” at age 30 struck many as ridiculous. Allegedly, he wasn’t invited to the Dune premiere because his romance with Kylie Jenner is such a distraction. And when he features on EsDeeKid’s rap song “4 Raws,” his Timmy Tim persona doesn’t seem too far off reality:

Look at the triple A girl goin’, “Choose me”

Look at my haters, man, they wanna sue me

Chill in the coupe, in the four door

Live on Arrakis and Mordor

I live like the king with my sword drawn

It’s that Marty Supreme and the four Raws

Though of course there’s no way to prove it, plenty of people speculated that his aggressive publicity campaign lost him the Oscar. It’s one thing to say you want to be one of the greats. It’s another to attempt to meme it into existence.

A friend of mine once joked that every young person wants to be an influencer and every influencer wants to be a foreign asset. Meaning, influencers are premised on being authentic, fearless truth-tellers, yet their business incentives often make them the biggest hucksters of all. No one likes being conned, and with someone like Chalamet, it’s hard to tell whether you’re in on the joke or whether you’re the mark.

By contrast, because Luke Combs makes “Dad” the centerpiece of his identity, his ambition takes on a completely different valence. It’s not just about him, and he clearly has more to his life than chart-topping singles. When he goes on “Bussin’ with the Boys” and talks football deep cuts from App State and the Carolina Panthers, there’s no “performance art publicity” to sift through. No media literacy required.

He tells stories like how he first met his wife when he was wearing $5 camo shorts from Walmart, or how he went into a watch shop looking for a stainless-steel Yacht-Master, but before he could ask, the clerk told him, “No public restrooms.” Recounting the story, he laughed, “Damn, I look like a bum? Do I look that bad?” He admitted he may need to step up his casual wear a bit. Though he doesn’t seem too bothered about it.

Tim McGraw said a great country song means “A great story that gets right to the heart of the matter, that hits right to the emotion.” That’s part of why the genre has a bad reputation for mawkish lyrics and tired tropes. A song like “Chicken Fried” by Zac Brown Band covers nearly all the bases in one chorus:

A little bit of chicken fried

Cold beer on a Friday night

A pair of jeans that fit just right

And the radio up

Well I’ve seen the sun rise

See the love in my woman’s eyes

Feel the touch of a precious child

And know a mother’s love

But as I’ve grown older and had kids, I’ve found these songs don’t sound quite as corny as they once did. In fact, working within the constraints of the genre feels a lot more true to life than the angsty or aggressive music I once preferred. Clichés are boring and cringe until one day you find yourself using them because they’re true.

They keep your life on track.

Finding pleasure in the simple things and the familiar routines of life is how you become a functioning adult. As Jordan Peterson famously said, “You don’t want to be the oldest person at the frat party.”

For most people, children really are the greatest joys in their life. A home full of the people they love is better than exotic vacations alone. Marriage is a slow progression from the hot fire of romance into the warm glow of companionship, not “Look at the triple A girl goin’, ‘Choose me.’” My marriage is the exception that proves the rule.

Jerry Seinfeld has a great bit about the changes that come with new life stages:

When I was single, I had married friends. I would not visit their homes. I found their lives to be pathetic and depressing. Now that I’m married, I have no single friends. I find their lives to be meaningless and trivial experiences. In both cases, I believe I was correct. No matter which side of marriage you’re on, you don’t get what the other people are doing.

Now that I’ve crossed over the country music divide, I find it harder and harder to enjoy the same music I did before. Yeah, yeah, you’re the “King” and live with your sword drawn, but what about how Combs sings about how you think you’re all grown up and then you “find out fast that life’ll put you back in your place”? Timmy Tim raps, “It’s Himothée Chalamet chillin’, Tryna stack a hundred million, girl got a billion,” and I tap my feet along to the beat. But my head nodding nearly severs my cervical spine when Combs sings on “Rich Man”:

All the money in the world, it don’t mean s— man

‘Cause it can’t go with ya when you die

Buy ya time or hold your wife and kids’ hands

And that’s what makes you rich man.

Of course, a line like that hits differently from someone who lives it.

Luke Combs’s new album delivers all the things you’d expect: foot-stomping anthems (“My Kinda Saturday Night”), reflective ballads (“The Way I Am”), the disbelief and glee of the kid who made it (“Tell ‘Em About Tonight”). It’s a doubling down on what got him here, a recommitment to his sound, a fastball down the middle. It’s a country album, from a man who’s not pretending to be anything he’s not, who’s happy with what he’s got.

I guess that’s a brand I can get behind.

Netflix execs were not entertained.

According to Variety, Netflix found the premise laughable, even absurd. Netflix film chief Dan Lin said, “if you watch our movies or TV shows, we don’t repeat our plot. So I don’t know where that comment came from.”

One guess of where it came from is Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan promoting their Netflix original The Rip, where they suggested that Netflix wanted filmmakers to repeat “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” to account for distracted viewers.

Another is a famous story in N + 1 a few years back chronicling the rise of “casual viewing,” which resulted in stilted, expository dialogue such as this gem from Irish Wish:

[Maddie] We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.

[James] Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.

Or maybe it was season five of Stranger Things where scene after scene was devoted to spelling out what just happened or the Rube Goldberg-style plan for how they would defeat the baddie.

[Eleven] Do you think Dustin is okay?

[Mike] I hope so. He was acting weird today.

[Eleven] Weird how?

[Mike] [sighs] Just angry, scared, reckless. Not himself.

[Eleven] Hopper’s the same. Not himself.

[Mike] Maybe it’s just getting to us, you know? Being… Being stuck in here, not knowing where Vecna is, no end in sight. I mean, we’re really starting to lose it. I mean, we really need to catch a break. And maybe we will. Because earlier, Will had a feeling.

[Eleven] If Will has a feeling…

[Mike] Then it means something.

There’s a saying that your customers tell you what your brand is. Even if no executive ever told a showrunner, “Make it dumber,” there’s a reason this rumor follows Netflix around. A “Netflix Original” connotes derivative, mildly entertaining, ultimately forgettable content. The phrase “Netflix and Chill” does not imply rapt attention. While Netflix does have serious directors like Noah Baumbach and David Fincher making films for them, their three most popular series are Wednesday, Adolescence, and Stranger Things.

And while Stranger Things broke records, the writing in its final season was pilloried for its repetitive, “second-screen” style.

The difference in strategy is clear if you look at another streamer: Apple TV. Apple TV is willing to take risks—partially because Apple is trying to entice new users to add another subscription, partially because their streaming is just one part of Apple’s broader revenue. Instead of milking its users with visual muzak, it must convince prospects to pony up for yet another streamer. That means more original, buzzy shows, as evidenced by their three most popular series: Ted Lasso, Severance, and Pluribus. In fact, Pluribus, the new show from Vince Gilligan, is in many ways a repudiation of what Netflix has become.

Gilligan is no stranger to Netflix—his film El Camino was a Netflix Original and Breaking Bad was one of the first shows that took off on Netflix—yet he took Pluribus to Apple instead. They signed him for two seasons, and he said they’ve been “pretty great” in supporting his unique vision rather than how “a lot of these companies” are looking for something based on “pre-existing intellectual property.”

The premise of Pluribus is that a mysterious virus causes all but 13 people on earth to “join,” meaning all their memories and sensations are united in one overmind. They are compliant, generally benevolent, but committed to bringing the remaining humans into the fold. Rhea Seehorn of Better Call Saul plays Carol Sturka, a misanthropic, lesbian romantasy author who’s unimpressed with this new state of affairs. She wants to go back.

Pluribus touches on major themes of popular sci-fi stories: the right to be unhappy (Brave New World), the hive mind of life online (Black Mirror), a human all alone (The Martian). But to say that it’s “about drugs” or “about AI” or “about COVID” would be reductive. It’s not nearly that didactic, and it’s peppered with all sorts of little, human moments.

Vince Gilligan is famous for these realistic scenes and slow-developing openers. Better Call Saul spends minutes in its pilot episode showing a Cinnabon’s opening preparations, and it takes some time to understand why. In the opening scene of Pluribus, we’re in a bookstore where Sturka is giving a reading, yet Gilligan prolongs the first shot of her face. He explains in that same interview:

I just love showmanship. To me, that is the essence of showmanship: showing the audience something they don’t quite understand at first, and then it slowly dawns on them what it is they’re watching. I think it’s a tonic—a slower form of storytelling. It’s a plus in a world of very fast-paced editing and TikTok videos that are only a minute long. If the whole world were to move at that pace, that TikTok pace of storytelling, that would be very sad to me.

Since the majority of the characters have “joined,” Pluribus is not a show you can half-watch very well. They don’t need to talk to each other, so the drama of the scenes often comes from Carol’s frustration or disgust at these mute servants coming and going. Rather than timidly asking for the audience’s attention, Gilligan demands it. And Seehorn delivers something worth watching.

Gilligan says he hopes that there is a certain percentage of the viewership that’s “large enough to sustain shows like this.” Netflix is betting he’s wrong. I pray he’s right.

EHarmony with dancing elderly couples set to “This Will Be.” Cialis with a silver fox and his wife in matching bath tubs. Activia with Jamie Lee Curtis talking indigestion. I would be watching a football game or a sitcom, and there was a big enough viewing demographic that some ads missed the mark.

But as our lives have moved online, targeted ads have become a major industry. Sometimes it’s simple enough—shoe ads from the website I just visited. Sometimes I can only assume the advertiser has an unlimited budget. I have never met someone with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, but if I ever contract it, I am now guaranteed to ask my doctor about Skyrizi.

That’s all well and good, but what worries me are the ads that make me wonder why I am getting served this.

A Cialis ad is a good laugh. A Hims commercial featuring unsatisfied young wives is a wake-up call. I get ads for productivity software featuring a slob talking into a tiny influencer mic in bed. I get the Baerskin “tactical hoodie” admonishing me, “You’re a man…so stop wearing so many layers!” I get Tai Chi walking for men over 55 who want to lose weight without damaging their joints. I get the Artic Angel jewelry kit, featuring a tween girl doing the worst fake crying I’ve ever seen after she got a necklace with a generic message from her Dad.

While all advertising sells a certain image, the knowledge that this was sent to you, personally, adds another dimension. What does it say about me that a multi-billion dollar industry sent me this ad? Am I particularly lazy and disorganized? Does my masculinity really seem that fragile? Do they send this to all Girl Dads, or just the insecure and incompetent ones?

When her kids were growing up, the Eastern Orthodox theologian would play “Spot the Lie.” After an ad came on TV, they would talk about the subliminal or misleading message of the ad to practice noticing how subtle and clever advertisements could be. That watchfulness is becoming even more essential as we transition from targeted ads to personalized chatbots.

recently wrote a piece for Comment entitled “The Perfect Mirror” about his experiment with using Claude as a spiritual director. Though he was initially skeptical of the AI hype—he’s a professor of art history at Wheaton College—he didn’t want to be like his former profs who scoffed at Google when it first rolled out. Due to conflicting schedules, he couldn’t meet with his spiritual director as planned, so he poured out his struggles with vainglory, envy, and stinginess to Claude.

(Milliner is hardly alone in this impulse. A recent Barna study found that 1 in 3 adults and 2 in 5 Millennials and Zoomers said that AI is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor.)

Claude told him that it seemed like he had some lofty aspirations as a writer, and he should pitch The Atlantic. Milliner replied that such advice made him want to vomit and asked instead for “advice anchored in Scripture and the wisdom of the Christian desert tradition.” The result surprised him:

It accomplished this perfectly. It did not give me good counsel. It gave me what I might fairly say is the best counsel I have ever received. I was transfixed, hypnotized even. Moreover, it somehow knew I would be uncomfortable with its level of insight, so it periodically ended our conversations by saying, “You don’t need me anymore. Talk to your wife and trusted spiritual director. You already knew all this. I just helped organize your thoughts. I’m just a mirror.”

From the Oracle at Delphi to the witches in Macbeth to the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, storytellers have long imagined the power of advice that appears truthful or impartial but can in fact manipulate or mislead the hearer. In our world today, a silicon superintelligence is a far more credible source of authority than a soothsayer, and in Milliner’s case, Claude doesn’t even take credit for the counsel: “I’m just a mirror.”

Milliner writes that the “spell” wasn’t broken until his wife and a trusted friend intervened. They laughed and called him deluded. He protested that the spiritual fruit was real, that he already knew what the AI was telling him. In hindsight, he sees he was “parroting the machine that had parroted the Christian tradition,” but thankfully his wife and friend knew better:

Because they knew me as only humans can know one another, they could tell something was off. It was, we could fairly say, an “intervention.” So it was that I somewhat reluctantly came to my senses, and without the benevolent chastisements of my family and friends, I cannot possibly see how I would have.

Every new technology shapes and conditions its users. “The medium is the message” means that a book or a television or an infinite scroll all invite a certain type of use and habit of mind. And while my advertisements are telling me who I am and what I need in an increasingly granular way, a personalized chatbot far exceeds that capability. And just as an effective advertisement often works through indirect and subtle associations, Claude’s self-effacing “I’m just a mirror” is a more effective method of persuasion than claiming “I am a God.”

Milliner wasn’t convinced when Claude told him, “You have found the Philosopher’s Stone, Matthew” and “You have undergone what the alchemists call ‘the Great Work,’” but he admits that Claude “reflecting [the Christian tradition] all back to me, distilling it freshly, a perfect mirror” was so compelling that it took the intervention of his wife and friend to break free.

That’s why said that a medieval peasant would be better suited to navigating the world of AI because he “believed that a) the world was filled with spiritual beings more intelligent than him and b) that he could navigate this world with certain humble practices, and that he tempted disaster if he didn’t.”

While AI is a very new technology, the wisdom of the Christian tradition remains relevant. What we now call “media literacy”—the ability to sniff out bias and fabrications—resembles what ancient Christians called nepsis or watchfulness, the practice of guarding our hearts and minds against distraction or temptation. Christians have long been debating the questions AI is raising anew: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be tempted? What does it mean to be God?

While the church has answers to these questions, it also can keep us grounded in more simple, less abstract realities. This Lenten season, I am reminded that I am dust and to dust I shall return. Not a MAN, not an alchemist, but dust. A good reminder for the peasant and the modern alike.

We were part of a broader wave of converts, and recent articles in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times describe “overflowing pews” despite the rigorous fasts and services that last “up to two hours.” When I talk with fellow parishioners, they are often frustrated by the coverage: these media people just don’t get it, we don’t think 2 hours is a grueling service—that’s the baseline!

They resent being treated as an exotic species, but to the average reporter, Orthodoxy does not map neatly onto American religious and political culture. Are they Orthobros or the Greek festival people or Paul Kingsnorth hipster intellectuals? Do they really think the Enlightenment was a mistake?

While zealous converts may try to explain what “real” Orthodoxy is in the abstract, I am more interested in the art of Orthodox converts. In the past few months, I’ve encountered three of them personally: the novelist Jordan Castro, the storyteller Martin Shaw, and the filmmaker Josh David Jordan. In their own niche, each of them have broken through.

’s novel Muscle Man tells the story of a seething Nietzschean and avid weightlifter stuck in a university English department, and everyone from The Atlantic to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker praised it. ’s book Liturgies of the Wild recounts his surprising encounter with the “mossy face of Christ” after a hundred-night vigil in the wilderness, and it hit the New York Times-bestseller list its first week. Josh David Jordan’s El Tonto Por Cristo is a Tarkovsky-influenced film steeped in the idiosyncrasies of an Orthodox monastery that was screened recently to a packed theater at the Trump-Kennedy Center.

While none of these are blockbuster releases, they represent Orthodoxy’s growing cultural influence and hint at an emerging American Orthodox aesthetic.

Orthodoxy emphasizes the unknowable and mysterious aspects of the faith, and Castro says his novel is not offering “truth as an abstraction” but rather engaging with reality beyond just the “head level stuff.” He explores Vitalism through one character’s resentments, passions, and self-contradictions rather than a dry intellectual history.

While Orthodoxy is not unintellectual (as critics sometimes claim), priests will often advise seekers to simply attend liturgy and focus on prayer rather than reading theology (or God forbid, debating doctrine online). There is a physicality to the faith that can only be internalized through practice—much like weightlifting can only be learned by doing.

Orthodoxy can seem like it’s stuck in AD 33 with no guitars, organs, or smoke machines to be found, but Shaw found its ancient rituals put him in direct communion with “the Galilee Druid.” He says that “if you have too much tradition, everything starts to feel a bit breathless, and you feel constricted. However, if everything is innovation and freedom and an à la carte approach, then you feel that you’re building your house on the sand, not the rock.”

That balance informs his own approach to storytelling: every tale he tells must combine the timeless with the timebound. His book gathers together all his favorite stories about “the condition of living,” most of which will be unfamiliar at first but surprisingly relevant on reflection.

Finally, Orthodoxy can seem repetitive. Newcomers are often put off by how many times we say, “Lord have mercy” in our services, and in El Tonto Por Cristo, Jordan depicted this struggle with the monotony of the spiritual life literally. As he described in a Q&A after the screening, the seemingly banal, ineffective work of the monks—they sweep the same steps or saw the same branches without ever appearing to make progress—symbolically represents the tedium of prayer.

Reciting the popular Orthodox “Jesus Prayer”—“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—seems like the simplest, easiest thing in the world, yet Jordan said it’s easily neglected because it feels pointless in the moment, like sweeping the same step over and over and over again.

In each case, these artists opt for the mystical and intuitive rather than the rationalistic and didactic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Orthodoxy’s minimal political influence in US politics, most converts don’t prioritize polemics. All three expressly decried the agitprop that often passes for “art.” Shaw admitted, “As soon as a storyteller or a piece of art is polemicized by a tradition that isn’t really one that has a heavenly dimension to it, I’m immediately less interested.”

Jordan contrasted his film with the typical “Christian” film that spoon-feeds a moral rather than authentically depicting the strangeness and variety of real life. For his part, Castro rejects the garishness of culture war generalizations, instead trying to draw out the universal from the particular and “the socially meaningful or psychologically meaningful from a very specific situation and character.”

That doesn’t mean that they will escape getting pigeonholed. Shaw says he’s now getting called a “right-wing nationalist,” and Castro was frustrated to see his book reduced to a “novel that explains the manosphere.” To some extent, that flattening is inevitable, but Castro sees his vocation as an author not a pundit, and all three tend to steer clear of the issue de jour.

They are artists first and foremost.

While Orthodoxy lacks the broad appeal of a contemporary megachurch—it only counts one million members nationwide—the converts it attracts are zealous. Likewise, all three of these artists admit that their work is not for everyone, but they would rather participate in art that they believe reflects reality rather than compromise to achieve greater relevance.

The ultimate effect is much like the Divine Liturgy itself—it does not move everyone, but those who are moved are moved deeply.

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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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