Sometimes, life imitates art. Other times, art imitates theories of literary criticism.

This is what happened with the third and final “season” of Good Omens, the BBC/Amazon-produced follow-on to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s hilarious, irreverent speculative fiction (1990) about an angel and a demon trying their darndest to preserve the world for the sake of its creature comforts.

After the widely-praised and “exceptionally book accurate” TV adaptation of the novel (2019), Gaiman pioneered a completely original second season (2023) intended to serve as connective tissue between the novel and its sequel which he and Pratchett started brainstorming in 1989. Says Gaiman:

[we] plotted more of it in New York in 2006…and then talked more about it from time to time until Terry’s death... So I know what happens, sometimes in detail, sometimes in broad strokes, and I know the last ten minutes of it to the beat.

The planned six-episode third season (2026) would have been based on that brainstorming. But production halted in September 2024 after several women accused Gaiman of sexual assault and gross misbehavior. (Production also stopped on an adaptation of The Graveyard Book.) A month later, Gaiman offered to end his involvement with production of the final season—as if that would make things better for either himself or the show. Shortly thereafter, not only were Gaiman and his company cut from the production effort, but it was announced that the six-episode season would be reduced to a single 90-minute finale episode, out last month.

We won’t get into a whole can we enjoy art from misbehaving artists thing here. (I’ve written about that already.)

Likewise, I have not done a personal deep dive into the allegations or conducted a large-scale analysis of my current feeling towards Gaiman, one of my favorite writers. There is this immovable constraint—time—which makes such a pursuit unappealing. (Also, I am trending towards holding all immensely talented people in a category of indifference based solely on the history of the past two decades.1) Gaiman’s alleged behavior—of which I’d wager at least some is true—is abhorrent and reprehensible, especially as perpetrated against fans and those on the low end of inequal power dynamics. If you wish, you may find the popular (salacious) interpretation of the allegations with a quick internet search.

Gaiman, for his part, remained silent publicly until February of this year when he posted a message on Instagram, thanking his supporters, declaring that the allegations are “completely and simply untrue,” and linking to the investigative journalism of one who goes by here on Substack.

Here, I intend to spoil the 90-minute finale and discuss parallels between the Good Omens storyworld, what happened with Gaiman during the production of the finale, and the whole “death of the author” question. The parallels and opportunity for conversation are curious to me, and I’d be remiss if they continued unobserved.

the problem of everything

The finale opens with the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) in a high management position in Heaven. He pulls together a small team and announces that it’s time to begin Operation Second Coming—but not as another attempt at “Armageddon.” Instead, he wants to set things up as “a second chance to get things right… to make things better. To inspire the humans, to be…you know, nicer.” He’s even reawakened Jesus—humorously and beautifully played by Bilal Hasna in one of the better parts of the episode.

Of course, this not so ineffable plan doesn’t go accordingly. It soon becomes apparent that Jesus, the Book of Life, and the Metatron (the highest being in angelic management) have gone missing.

Attempting to avert a cosmic crisis, Aziraphale descends to Earth in search of his old demon friend Crowley (David Tennant), whom he hasn’t spoken to in a long time. The two had a falling out at the end of Season 2 after Aziraphale took up the management position in Heaven instead of eloping with Crowley and living on Earth.

To make (what should have been) a long story short, Aziraphale and Crowley figure out that Michael has stolen the Book of Life and is now using it to destroy the world. They rescue one sliver of the universe—Aziraphale’s old bookshop in London—and take shelter there. Satan shows up, naturally. And eventually, Aziraphale summons God so he and Crowley can ask some questions, as one does at the end of time.

God (played primly by Tanya Moodie) is seemingly unmoved by the destruction of almost all her universe. (Perhaps it is an ineffable plan after all!) She humors the last three remaining creatures, fielding their queries about what Crowley terms “the problem of everything”: Why was it a good idea to make fallible humans, deposit them in a world geared for hostility and spite, and punish them for their inevitable wrongdoing? Why create an infinite universe, run it for 6,000 years, and then decide to end it?

Most importantly: what to do about it now?

God surprises Aziraphale and Crowley (and Satan) by offering the angels the chance to determine what happens next to the world as they know it.

“We want you to create another universe,” says Aziraphale.

“One without angels. Or demons. No god. No satan,” Crowley continues. “A universe without a heaven and without a hell.”

“No great plan, nothing ineffable. It just starts with a big bang and ends billions of years later, with the heat death of the universe.”

God is bemused. “You’re asking God to create a godless universe?”

the death of the author

This concept of a god-created universe without god made me ponder the irony of a Gaiman/Pratchett-created universe without either of them. The real cross-nail is Amazon/BBC cutting Gaiman & Co. from a production so dependent on Gaiman for its very existence in the first place.

Back of all that lurks Roland Barthes’ idea of the death of the author and the liberation of texts from the identity of their writers. (Which, now that I think of it, is a neat solution to the question: what do we do about the art of artists who behave badly? But this is not that essay.)

“The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions,” the French critic-philosopher Barthes wrote in 1967. Despite his displeasure, it appears we have maintained, both as readers and as critics, the perspective he so despised. In fact, in our oversaturated, social media-suffused society, the importance of the author-creator’s identity has achieved hyperstatus. The author-creator cannot escape the tyrannical audience hell-bent on holding the creator at risk for every social or political opinion, every ethnic or economic affiliation, every indiscretion or vice. Look at J.K. Rowling. Look at Amélie Wen Zhao. Look at films and filmmakers as points of political arbitration. Look at everything, everywhere, apparently.

Contrary to Barthes’ desire—and contrary to those who vehemently dislike the “death of the author” discourse—the importance of the author’s identity has increased exponentially. Attempts to erase an author from their work incur the work becoming further shadowed by the author. And so, Neil Gaiman is removed from Good Omens Season 3, but we cannot think about it without thinking about him. The god-made world is without a god and we wonder where he might be and how the world might have proceeded differently if he had been around to rule it.

I am not sure if the ending we have for GOS3 is anything like the “last ten minutes” Gaiman would have delivered should things have gone according to plan. (Even Satan is like, “You aren’t going to indulge them in this nonsense, are you?”)

In the ending we do have, God allows Aziraphale and Crowley’s request.

“I’ll make it. I’ll make the universe your way. I’ll even let an Earth happen. Eventually, there’ll be humans and life, in all of its mundane glory. Something that both of you will neither know or experience, though.”

According to TV-making rules, it was so.

Presumably, there was no god to declare that it was good.

who calls it good?

For Barthes, this idea—that “the explanation of the work [must always be] sought in the man who has produced it”—had exceeded its expiration date. Nor did the role of explaining the work belong to the critic. It belonged to the reader.

…the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination…

In his later writing, Barthes’ insistence on a “multi-dimensional space” for the interpretation of a text makes sense. But that space, in my opinion, exists between the creator and the audience. It is not a weight carried solely by the audience over against an impoverished and diluted creator.

Here I, a reader, exercise my right to disentangle Barthes’ work. He claims:

…the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.

But can that really be true? Without the author-creator, we have none of the above. No history, biography, psychology, sociology, religion, economics. Any of it. Without the author, the reader’s place as interpreter and disentangler is meaningless. Without a past—without a voice telling us the story of ourselves—we have no future that matters and no criticism that is anything other than absurd.

Cracks show quickly in those systems which value the reader’s interpretation of a text over all other interpretive frameworks. Recently, Selen Ozturk opined on the expansive BookTok trend in which “verklempt” readers ventilate over how much a book matched their own feelings, identity, and mental state as a means of citing that book’s value to other readers. Often, points are given for mere representation, by which is meant an accurate and unchallenging portrayal of one’s pet population subset. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books have achieved bestseller status thanks to these fecund reels. Such reels are not criticism by any stretch of the word—they do not even count as reviews; but they are the logical end for a world in which audience self-perception is pedestalized.

Ozturk writes:

This critical foundation [that the reader’s identification with the text is all-important], personal though it seems, presupposes a reader equally knowable across anyone who can read at all…

The author becomes the provider of a service (the book) serving the emotional needs of the reader (who the protagonist reflects if the book is good). The stronger the reader’s therapeutic identification with the protagonist, the more recommendable the book. The wider the distance between the reader’s and protagonist’s desires or sense of what is deserved, the less recommendable the book.

Clearly, one reader or a segment of readers cannot dominate the interpretive and applicable perspective of all other readers. This type of environment, in which the audience reflects itself back to itself—pointlessly, ceaselessly—impoverishes and depletes the multi-dimensional interpretive space. It is also most at odds with the author-creator’s contribution to that interpretive space. It is like trying to excuse a chef from her kitchen.

The author is always either attempting, like God, to express an infinite self or to make sense of an infinite world. He is casting the net into an inchoate sea and offering his catch up to an audience. The audience’s role is to eat, and then offer a range of responses from digesting to vomiting.

Barthes’ claim that the author “no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, [or] impressions” is a false dream. If the author had none of these, the reader would have nothing to contend with. A text “eternally written here and now” is a fallacy.

There is no point, as Ozturk writes, in “denying the reader the consolation of being ‘written’ by the author.” Art shapes because it has been shaped. And “art which leaves a person’s inwardness completely secure” (to borrow Kierkegaard’s words) is false.

There is no reader, no audience, without a creator. No world without an author. And like the ultimate Creation narrative, the story is neither God’s nor man’s alone. Granted, the author is simultaneously, uncontrollably, “written” by his audience. This fact has discovered Neil Gaiman.

The author may be hidden, but he is never dead. Even the new, supposedly godless world at the end of Good Omens contains “13-billion-year-old” traces of providence. Aziraphale and Crowley, reunited, gaze at the stars and see through a glass darkly. One day, they will stand like men and see face-to-face.

As will Gaiman. His stories, whether they all make their way out of his head, are his own but his story is not. His is reliant on his readers and fans. To them he writes: “Thank you…for your belief in my innocence and your support for my work.”

And he concludes: “It has meant the world to me.”

OF INTEREST

AI and Copyright

Reading Roland Barthes in the Robot Apocalypse

In an influential 1968 essay the French critic Roland Barthes famously called for us to unseat the author from our considerations of her text. It has been fifty-five years in coming, but now Large Language Models have arrived on the scene to do the deed. We have our first victim of the robot apocalypse: AI has finally shown us the Death of the Author…

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3 years ago · Peter Schoppert

Last week, my wife and I were chatting with a friend—we were passing thru a market across from a display selling Catholic Coffee (“grounded by faith”) and LOTR coffee (“the Baggins blend”)—and something our friend said really struck me. Something along the lines of: maybe some people need ritual, liturgy, and deep religious tradition. What my mind conjured was that: maybe some people don’t need it (as much).

Think about it. According to , data (and excitable anecdotes) suggest that Eastern Orthodox traditions are drawing interest and significant conversions from Protestants and the non-religious, especially among young men. Gen Z is widely reported as experiencing a “revival” that finds them seeking out traditional and liturgical forms of worship. Meanwhile, some—and I know a few personally—have traveled religious roads in Protestantism and/or American Evangelicalism and found their home in Catholic or Orthodox congregations. Likewise (according to data in Wax’s report linked above), Orthodox folks are converting to Evangelicalism at a higher rate than the other way around.

What if all of this seeking is driven by temporal need, restless dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the simple idea that one is unfulfilled where they’re at? I have wondered myself if I should not make the leap into a different mode of Christianity.

But none of these flavors—Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism—are the solo way to Jesus. Perhaps fighting over which way is more correct makes us miss the point which is whether these competing paths bring us closer to God and further into communities attempting to model heaven. Perhaps we should recognize that what works for one might not work for all, and rightfully so, as our emotional, psychological, social, and mental dispositions—and let’s face it: music preferences—all play a role in which traditions suit us and which traditions we are drawn to.

Also, the Holy Spirit. If we are all being guided, wouldn’t more of us be guided to the same place?

I read a lot this month that touched on these issues of religious homing.

Any religious person who assumes that a conversion will solve all their problems must contend with the (probable) eventual collapse of novelty and settling in of mundanity. does so in his post-conversion to Orthodoxy report, linked below. (I’d wager that satisfaction with intellectualism has a diminishing return-on-investment in any case and what we do with our bodies, in our bodies, among other bodies has the primary potential for sustained fulfillment.)

Ghost Drive America

I've been Orthodox for over five years. Now I'm totally burned out.

It’s been over six years since I jumped into Orthodox Christianity. In spring of 2020, Orthodoxy caught my interest, my spiritual sensitivities heightened in the midst of Covid mania and the Evangelical congregation I attended at the time being shut down. I read lots of books, studied, prayed, and started attending a local Orthodox parish. I was baptize…

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a month ago · 529 likes · 321 comments · Edwin Robinson

For more specifically Orthodox takes, has a piece on how “convert-apologist media”—partly the aforementioned intellectualism obsession—actually divorces people from the “organic, liturgical reality of the local Church.”

Over on The Speak Life Podcast, Naomi Brehm and Thomas Thorogood discuss reasons why liturgy is making a comeback. Naomi, especially, asks some thought-provoking questions about liturgy’s proper place and whether it’s really okay to make liturgical activities so accessible that they can be conducted outside corporate church gatherings.

Speaking of casual accessiblity, has an excellent complaint on The Commodification of Christianity—because religious practices should be hard and require discipline and be different than everything else the world offers.

Get used to playing a game and reality becomes boring. How on earth am I going to get through the Book of Psalms when I’m used to iBible?

…But if you are new to faith, you haven’t developed real habits. This is a huge hurdle, trying to stick to a routine, show up every Sunday, even remember that it’s Sunday and that this is something you do now.

To close this section—and to return to my opening point that attraction to conversion may be due just as much to disposition and perceived personal need as anything else—this quote from an article I haven’t read (and this note by ) sums up my general thoughts.

the devil wears prada 2

Shifting gears wildly. I intended to write a whole essay on The Devil Wears Prada 2. Five paragraphs are done—sorry, . Time runs and I really need to strike this one from my plate in order to keep up with other things.

I loved the movie. It made my little writer heart happy: seeing Andy’s dreams of being a serious journalist who writes about things that matter—not fashion!—actually pan out. And then she gets called in to manage a PR crisis at her old employer, levying the acknowledgment that crisis management is all about storytelling, after all.

More importantly, Prada 2 didn’t feel heavy despite taking on some serious issues like the changing media/publishing landscape and journalism as a dying rapidly changing career form. It is a film that does the magic movies are supposed to do. Recently, plenty of media has been indulging in what is and how things are now for the sake of realism or whatever. But TDWP2 is flashy, glamorous, rich—and about people who are flashy, glamorous, and rich (and flawed in entertaining ways). It is not necessarily aspirational, but it does allow the viewer to indulge in a fantasy that lasts as long as the runtime. And that is the point of this stuff (art, movies): to make us escape, to make us want and aspire. (Not necessarily to make us want to dress like we’re going to the Met Gala every day.) That’s what’s really great about it. It’s a good escape to a fantasy world that’s still our world. It’s believable but just out of reach. We bask in the if only.

In the film, there’s a dinner that takes place under Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I planned on discussing those scenes to make some other points about art that I don’t have space for here. But I do want to share ’ piece which I would have quoted from in relation. She writes:

What makes this scene so compelling, especially for an art lover like me, is how seamlessly it collapses the boundaries of time. Only in a movie could a 15th-century fresco become the interpretive lens for a 21st-century character. A Renaissance meditation on betrayal can become a commentary on human nature and professional ambition in the workplace.

The Curatorial Collector

The Devil Knows Art History a.k.a. The Masterpiece Memo #4: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper

Some films define an era, and then there’s The Devil Wears Prada…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Haydin Davis

what else?

»» Mere Orthodoxy launched a new member interface, and offered up this excellent articulation—the best I’ve read in recent memory—of the current media and cultural landscape and what Christian creative outfits should be aiming for within it.

»» sustaining creative aliveness while working a full time job — This was a good reminder that one’s “day job” is not necessarily the enemy of the creative life. I appreciated what terms the “profound, gorgeous, emptiness” of some of the places where I’ve done my best writing—“plane rides and hotel bars,” liminal spaces where time can be stolen back from the daily routine. Read thru the end for some fun and helpful tips on keeping a creative practice.

»» This essay is not for people sensitive about language. But ’s satirical take on what some deem a controversial slang term is actually a brilliant demonstration of the elasticity of our vocabulary.

»» writes about scrupulosity, biblicism, nouthetic counseling, and St. Paul in the Areopagus. She demonstrates the common, bright lines between ancient philosophers and Biblical personalities. (We simply must stop pretending that anything beyond a plain text reading of our favorite translation is anti-God.) She also discusses a helpful framework for dealing with anxiety.

»» I loved ’ homily, you don’t need a miracle, you need a job, because sometimes you do just have to get up and do the thing.

»» The Monotony of a Childless Marriage — Being wed now for less than a year, marriage is the furthest thing from monotonous. Still, I appreciated ’s experienced and sober take on the parts of life that become routine and how to find the “magic” anyway.

»» These days, no movie can be made without controversy it seems and explains why some recent conversations around Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey seem weightier than usual — Post-Literacy Raised the Stakes of the Odyssey Debate

»» Prof. Brenton Dickieson’s book, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, is out in a month. The nerves might be getting to him as his latest essay is on social media trolls, the state of book criticism, and how Lewis can help us think about “the problem of judging a book by its author instead of its argument.”

asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight by . This book is instructional by example, a collection of short essays rooted in life experiences that make it easy to see how joy can be found in the ups and downs. (Fun fact: I don’t know how I first started following Shemaiah’s work, but we had the pleasure of meeting in London back in 2023 when, if I remember correctly, she was writing this book.)

🎞️ Watching

• We’ve been watching House of David (8/10 despite bizarre plot choices) and started Spider Noir (fun, at least the parts I’ve seen before falling asleep).

🎧 Listening

• The Dune 2 soundtrack has become a late favorite go-to for writing.

• Stumbled across The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast this month and have listened to several episodes on the Met Gala, romantasy, earnestness, and our modern glut of choice.

Enjoy summer!

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 was not the hell I suspected it would be at the conclusion of Season 1. At least not until the final episode.

The finale, “The Southern Cross,” was something far different. Let’s catch up.

Season 1 concluded with Daredevil (blind lawyer-vigilante Matthew Murdock, played by Charlie Cox) realizing that Kingpin-turned-NYC Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) couldn’t be taken down by just another back-alley brawl and a couple of twists of legal luck. Daredevil needed an “army” and wanted to wage “war.”

My fear for Season 2 was that the show would devolve into an ever-intensifying series of fisticuffs between Daredevil’s allies and Fisk’s brutal and lawless Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Fortunately (for my sanity), that didn’t happen. Season 2 threaded a few plotlines that kept me attuned, if not, at times, completely intrigued.

Daniel Blake, Fisk’s young and fortunate communications strategist, learns there’s more to politics than posh parties and high living. He’s caught between Buck Cashman, Fisk’s grim reaper who attempts to draw him deeper into the conscience-searing sea of darkness and BB Urich, a sly, fashionable, justice-minded independent journalist who is manipulating Daniel for the greater good. Fortunately, love weakens Daniel’s boyish heart. He meets his end after allowing BB to slip away from Buck’s clutches.

Heather Glenn, a therapist (turned “criminal psychologist”), keeps close counsel with Fisk’s inner circle, supporting the mayor’s pursuit of “justice” against alleged vigilantes by (dishonestly) portraying them as psychologically unwell in court. Meanwhile, she privately struggles with traumatic memories of assault by the serial killer Muse. And the series ends with her putting on Muse’s mask. (Heather, I think you need therapy.)

Meanwhile, Fisk is doing Fisk things. Smuggling weapons to arm his task force. Plotting the governor’s assassination. Blowing up a ship in New York’s harbor and blaming it on Daredevil. Being enraged. Being weak—and then further enraged—when Bullseye kills his wife Vanessa as a weird get-back for her manipulating him into killing Daredevil’s friend Foggy Nelson.

Daredevil is in hiding—lawyer Matt Murdock has been declared “missing”—with Karen Page. They continue their standard underdog scheming to take down antagonists who outnumber them, outgun them, and have near-total control of the justice system through which the duo seeks to destroy them.

I’ll pause here to make the standard complaint that people of my disposition are wont to make: this Disney+ continuation of Netflix’s Daredevil adaptation (2015-2018) is not as religious as its forbear. Sure, Matt Murdock, on occasion, turns to the church for sanctuary, has a priest acquaintance who basically lies for him, and recites prayers for/to/from the saints. Notwithstanding the awesome reel below, this Matt Murdock variant doesn’t feel as catholic in his bones.

Missing from the past two seasons are lengthy (for a TV episode) discussions on the nature of the devil and the form in which he does (or doesn’t) exist, on the good that might come from guilt, or on souls’ damnation, or scenes where the antagonist calmly, frighteningly exegetes one of Jesus’ parables.

Even Daredevil’s debates with Frank Castle over whether it’s okay to kill objectively bad guys hit harder than any of his new conversations with Karen Page about the same thing, despite neither sets of dialogue being specifically religious in nature. The long shadow of the cross cast over the environment of the previous series makes even the fictional world feel different. But I digress.

One place Daredevil: Born Again insists on maintaining some connection to religious conversation is when it comes to justice, mercy, and forgiveness.

In the episode “Requiem,” Karen, frustrated by Daredevil’s rescue of Bullseye after Vanessa’s assassination, argues that maybe Daredevil ought to kill Wilson Fisk, comparing the situation to a Daredevil Season 1 event where she kills Fisk’s then-right-hand man, James Wesley, in self-defense.

“It is not up to us to take a life,” Daredevil insists.

“I pay every day for what I did to Wesley,” Karen replies. “I still have fսcking nightmares! But the difference is I don’t regret it. It was him or me. And what if that’s what it’s like with you and Fisk? Him or you? What if this doesn’t end until one of you goes down?”

“I can’t think about it that way,” Daredevil says.

Well, I can. I can stomach Karen’s desire for retributive justice stemming from frustration and righteous anger. After all, we are five seasons into Fisk’s violence and terror. The enemy is always the same. And when Daredevil is faced with ending it all, he always chooses the high road. Last season, he took a bullet for the man for crying out loud.

Truly, Fisk deserves death. (God forbid these words come back to haunt me.) It seems, to remain sane, we (the audience) cling to a poor sanitized notion of capital punishment and keep it at arm’s length. Our hands must remain clean. And Daredevil thinks his must too.

Another notion the Man Without Fear wrestles with is that of forgiveness, most shown in his conflicted feelings over Bullseye. He can’t bring himself to let Bullseye die; in fact, he intervenes to actively prevent that outcome. In this way, Daredevil is a fool for grace.

Murdock feels guilt over the blind rage that led him to throw Bullseye off a building right after the crack-shot assassin killed Foggy. Completely excusable behavior, in my opinion.

We end up with one person attempting to right past wrongs on behalf of another person who is also attempting to right past wrongs. As Daredevil points out, this is futile: nothing will bring Foggy back. But neither Daredevil nor Bullseye can bring themselves to stop trying to make amends and justify themselves in the sight of each other.

Bullseye’s concept of “good” is balancing the scales by carrying out “one good deed.” Shooting Vanessa was his attempt to erase the wrong that Vanessa had done by hiring him to kill Foggy. But it isn’t enough. Hurt people hurt people. And is one good deed all it takes to stop that cycle?

No, something else is needed. Enter: mercy.

To his credit, Daredevil remains true to his convictions to the very end. And, as much as it sounds like I’m complaining, I really enjoyed this season and love this show and its characters.

As Born Again: Season 2 draws to a close, Daredevil and his allies, including a large contingent of civilians fed-up with Fisk’s regime of terror, are trapped in a courthouse. In this hall of justice, Daredevil persists in showing mercy to Fisk.

But his persistence seems cheap. When Fisk, the white devil, emerges like a modern-day Herod, awash in the blood of innocents—he tore through dozens of citizens, cracking skulls, breaking arms, crushing bodies in his rage—one wonders if, finally, Daredevil might break his one rule.

Alas, he does not. When NYC’s civilians, decked out in horned masks and Daredevil-red clothing, rush Fisk to make an end of him, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen intervenes. “We’re better than this!” he insists. Once again, he puts his body between Fisk and those seeking to deliver reasonable eye-for-an-eye justice.

Daredevil pleads with Fisk to surrender. “What about grace?” he says.

“You are not allowed to offer that to me!” Fisk cries.

Daredevil even appeals to whatever’s left of Fisk’s better angels. “I believe you love this city. Same as me. We have the opportunity to give it peace. Even if we have none. That’s grace.”

But is it really? Is it really grace to allow a bad man who has proven himself to be a bad man to continue to be a bad man. Are all the lives to which Fisk laid waste over five seasons of television worth it for his final surrender? (Which, according to the laws of superhero television, can’t really be his final surrender.)

I’m a Christian and I’m supposed to say yes. After all, where sin increases, grace ought all the more to increase. And grace can only reign where sin has once reigned (Romans 5:20).

But why, even at this point, can’t we stomach Daredevil killing Fisk or allowing him to be killed? Is it so important to us that we remain unlike the “ill intent who set upon the traveler”? Are our clean hands so important? God forbid we follow in the footsteps of Pilate.

I think what these stories need—more than the “good guys don’t kill” trope—is for the weight of taking a life, regardless of whether that life belongs to a good man or a bad man, to be communicated without being justified or excused. I think a world might exist in which a hero like Daredevil takes guilt on himself that others need not do so—like Batman in The Dark Knight—becoming the necessary evil that others might find evil unnecessary altogether.

This might actually be the most Christian storytelling frame. He who had no sin became sin for us. The innocent took on guilt—not only punishment!—that the would-be (and already) guilty might go free.

“…there is nothing more certain to inculcate the sins of scrupulosity and sanctimony than the suggestion that virtue is easier than it really is.”

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking about life. Existing vs. talking about existing. Experiencing vs. sharing experiences. Being in the moment vs. constantly pulling oneself outside the moment to examine it or collect visual proof to present to an audience later.

It sucks to think about experiencing a thing while experiencing it. It’s a weird, exhausting, semi-conscious bifurcation of presence. The more I notice myself doing it, the more I hate it: thinking about being at dinner with friends while being at dinner with friends.

I firmly believe we were made to live inside. But our ability to live (and think) outside is what separates us from animals. Perhaps when we have gone further in, we will lose the ability to think about our own existence.

I wonder: does God meditate on himself?

privacy and pretension

A few things I read this month watered the thoughts above—chief among them ’s essay, the thrill of living privately, and almost finishing ’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

Says Kylee:

The thrill of living a private life is the excitement of knowing something deeply and innately, so that it rests in your bones and settles in your mind, before it becomes something you have to explain. It’s the happiness of experiencing something fully without needing it to extend beyond itself.

Experiencing something fully without needing it to extend beyond oneself. This capability is what’s missing thanks to the panoply of social media and the pervasiveness of technologically-mediated ways of communicating with each other.

Undeniably, the human is built to extend experiences beyond himself. We love to share. (Hot coffee and hot gossip are two of my favorite things.) But what’s happening now is that, increasingly, we are sharing mere slices of life and not whole lives with each other. (Understanding, of course, that no whole life can ever truly be shared—but, perhaps, the aim is to get there.) Right now, though, the shared life is chopped into TikTok-length videos or curated episodes aimed at selling something probably harmful (as talks about here).

The pretension, that anyone anywhere in the vast forest of the world would actually care about the story we make of our lives, is older than Da Vinci. And it seems we are all subject to it more than we’d like—thanks, perhaps, to our divine parentage.

Our economic, cultural, and personal lives are suffused with the notion that we can and should transform ourselves into modern-day deities, simultaneously living works of art to be admired by others and ingeniously productive economic machines.

Burton writes. Her recounting of self-made men, dandies, inventors, and fashionistas from centuries past rings true today. Some are obsessed with making something of themselves. But most are obsessed with appearing as though they’ve made something of themselves. Whether that something is praiseworthy or abominable is no matter. The intent is to be seen and to be shared. To hold up one’s life and examine in the eyes of a public of some kind. I think we need less of that.

for the love of the city

Sometimes, if I wait long enough, some brilliant soul will express my feelings about something perfectly and better than I ever could. So, I was thrilled to discover ’s essay, Can Christians Live in Cities? Against Agrarian Idolatry. Bugh argues this simple (and obvious) point: if Christians have a call to ‘constructively subvert’ less-than-godly systems while fulfilling the Great Commission, then we have a responsibility—even a requirement—to live in and love our cities. He rebukes the wave of anti-city sentiment that seems to go along with the Kingsnorthian impulse to fight the “machine,” turn sectarian, and retreat to ruralism. Frankly, this impulse frightens me because it reads like an endorsement of abandonment—abandonment of the 70% of the human population who will, by 2050, live in cities and towns. Abandonment of the vulnerable who cannot afford to sustain life outside of a city.

I would quote so much from Bugh. But you’d better read his essay.

J.B. Foster

Can Christians Live in Cities?

I love cities. When I was deciding where I would go to college, I didn’t know what to major in, what credentials to seek, or what I wanted to do when I grew up. The one thing I knew is that I wanted to go to college in a city with a skyline. I at least got pretty close. Then, when my wife and I got married, we did our honeymoon in San Francisco. That ci…

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3 months ago · 79 likes · 37 comments · Jeremy Bugh

Also, if you missed it, here’s my ode to London, the city of cities.

asides + signal boosts

More writings I enjoyed reading this month…

»» God, on the verge of creating: ponders what it must have been like in the mind of the uncaused Cause just before it caused anything.

»» After Repeat Box-Office Crashes, New Films Make Space for Optimism and Hope (Lorehaven): My friend (and incredible graphic designer) Jenneth Leed offers an explanation for why Project Hail Mary, Barbie, The Chosen, and Promised Land feel like a breath of fresh air from the film/tv industry. (The common denominator may be Ryan Gosling?)

»» The Problem with Clean Fiction: This guy () gets it!

“We all have our triggers, our ghosts, and our bad memories. But we cannot purge every book of every scene that might upset any possible reader. There would be nothing left.”

He makes the case for why stories seeking to promote virtue must deal honestly with vice and why strict rating systems cannot accomplish what their proponents typically want them to accomplish. (His words in the quote at the top of this post.)

»» What Pullman gets wrong about Narnia (The Critic): There’s nothing and I like more than dunking on Philip Pullman. (Kidding!) But I love when debates about Narnia get attention from people outside our circle of nerddom. In Caleb’s essay, adapted from the paper he delivered at the C.S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference in Romania this year (jealous!), he talks about the places where Lewis and Pullman might be unwittingly aligned.

• For another brief aside about Lewis-Pullman similarities, check out my essay on the BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials (seasons 1 + 2) here.

»» Let the Girls be Evil: Just an argument by for more truly awful female fictional characters.

»» Some Things Shouldn’t Be Made Into a a Joke: warns against the casually permissive blasphemy taking root at the highest level of America’s government.

• And writes about the people consistently making excuses for blasphemous behavior. (Honestly, I applaud the work she’s doing over at Unholy Alliances.)

📖 Reading

• Finished reading ’s Wicked Fox—a Korean mythological fantasy novel I bought fiveish years ago because it was on sale at Barnes & Noble and looked pretty interesting. It was amazing! and a window into a brand new world. (Guys, there’s so much gorgeous mythology outside the Western canon.) I finished it over a bottle of bokbunja-ju (black raspberry wine), and towards the end, I had to take a break and scroll silly memes on my phone because I am a very manly man and cannot be seen crying over a novel in public.

  • Cho’s latest work, Gods & Comics, is out now and I plan on getting my hands on it pretty soon. Gods. And comics? What more can I ask for?

🎞️ Watching

• The Devil Wears Prada. It was long overdue for me to see this and, boy, did I love it. It’s funny and simple and contained real human relational wrestling. (Although, I do believe, Andy has some making up to do with Nate. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with that in the upcoming Prada 2.)

  • For the purposes of this substack, one scene stood out—Miranda Priestley’s cerulean monologue. Her speech, prompted by Andy’s snooty, fashion-doesn’t-matter attitude, emphasizes that disengagement in something so essential to life, like the clothes we wear, is not a real choice. What we have in our hands is either deliberately chosen or the result of dozens of individual choices by other people.
    
    “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you…”
    
    I could dissect this more, but who am I preaching to? You know this already.

• Ponies. A fun, fish-out-of-water series about the widows of two CIA agents during the Cold War being thrown into the state-and-spycraft affairs of their late husbands.

🎧 Listening

• I met at an artist gathering in London some time ago. She was working on some music which is now out in the world!

  NAVINA's Notes

  An anti anxiety indie folk anthem: OUT NOW

  The freedom of learning to dance in the rain, with the sun still on our faces…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 1 like · NAVINA

• Would You Love Me If You Really Knew Me? x Fletcher. Started listening to this one in the midst of all the thoughts about privacy that opened this essay. There are some lyrics that jump out: Hi, everyone, leave please // I need a moment to myself

• The Altar x BANKS

internet wit + wisdom

Time itself is moving faster.

The other day, I had this particular random thought about why it feels as though so much happens so fast and we’re hardly able to keep pace. (Insert caveat about not needing to keep pace with literally everything, but that’s another train.)

The idea: that time itself might just be accelerating and we humans are just laggy comprehending and meaning-making machines running the original software. It’s like downloading the latest version of an app or program that’s snazzier and faster than everything that came before it but you’ve still got your 2010 laptop that’s just not able to keep up.

Those are the vibes the past few weeks have given me. To-do lists grow longer but time itself seems to be getting shorter.

Man, however—as much as I try—cannot live by vibes alone. And I’ve lately had reason to reconsider time now vs. time “back then.”

all the new Christian things are old

This month, I finished listening to The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, by Justo L. González. It’s a fascinating narrative assemblage of early church history up to the beginning of the Reformation and I’m eager to begin volume two. But, as I read, I was strangely comforted by the realization that so many of today’s church squabbles, disagreements, and departures from the Gospel of Christ are just old problems reskinned.

Everything—from “celebrity” religious leaders caring more about political and civic power than they do about the flock of God to organizations growing from honest, humble origins into institutions concerned only with self-preservation—has happened before. There is nothing new under the sun—least of all political leaders who cavalierly slap the name of God on their crusades as discusses here and discusses here.

The fact that Christianity has been wrapped up in all of this before has been oddly comforting to me leading up to Easter.

why no conservative art?

I’ve also been invested in a different conversation about a segment of the Western culture/art debate where conservatives complain about what’s presented by “Hollywood.” The vibes are bad and there’s not much we can do about it is no way to address a perceived problem. Nor is, well, if only someone would come and save us.

All the source material is below so you can explore at will. I agree, generally, with ’s summary of how conservatives (or extremely politically-minded people) treat and think about art, but I am not quite so sure all the weight for her solution to the alleged problem can really be placed on the singular shoulder on which she places it.

But, yes, building something yourself is more beneficial than complaining about what’s already built.

The State of the Arts.

This is Your Fault.

Dear Conservatives…

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4 months ago · 204 likes · 138 comments · Clifton Duncan

Fictional Influence

Nobody Is Coming to Save Conservative Art (And What to Do About It)

Every year conservatives complain that Hollywood hates them, point to a handful of companies as proof that right wing art is thriving, then wait for a billionaire to fund the revolution. Every year nothing changes. This episode is the reality check that conversation never gets…

Listen now

3 months ago · 30 likes · 5 comments · Trenton

Anvil & Ink

No One is Coming to Save Us—So Keep Going

I am not what you would call a respecter of persons. Big names are wasted on me, as are awards, band names, and publishers. There are, however, people I respect. One of them is a YouTuber and fellow Substacker…

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3 months ago · 11 likes · Vince Mancuso

asides + signal boosts

’s conversation with : The Myth of the Neutral Human made my day last week. There’s an abundance of food for thought about philosophy, virtue, moral reasoning, conversion, and, of course, family and feminism. Leah’s framework for thinking about those with whom she finds herself on opposite sides of a debate is soul-altering. But I won’t spoil it for you.

📖 Reading

• Currently reading ’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

• Also, with working my way through one C.S. Lewis essay a day for Lent, I’ve been through Mere Christianity (again), The Weight of Glory (again), Of Other Worlds (partially), and God in the Dock (partially andfor the first time).

🎞️ Watching

• + I enjoyed seeing Project Hail Mary. It’s a really good movie—a great movie even. Is it generationally significant as I’ve heard people claim? I doubt it, but that remains to be seen.

• Excited for the new Daredevil: Born Again season! First two episodes were pretty good. And I’m looking forward to the rest.

🎧 Listening

• Sharing an indie pop playlist Spotify ginned up for me because I really, really enjoyed it.

“…I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end.”

In our previous discussions about whether beauty will save the world, we’ve considered: (a) that beauty is hard and difficult and must be earned, not claimed, and (b) whether we’ve lost the ability to see beauty and be drawn into it.

Here, I want to discuss what beauty is, essentially.

beauty is (mostly) truth

Recently, I read a complaint about Christians who communicate about their faith to nonbelievers with truth but not with beauty. In short, the writer claimed a crisis of individuals being self-proclaimed Jesus People while also being pricks.1

What does it mean when we say Christianity has been presented with truth, but not beauty? It means that the message has not been delivered in a manner that is consistent with itself. And that—internal consistency—is the root of beauty.2

I’ve said this before about movie adaptations of books (or any adaptation of a work of art from one medium into another): the trick is to make a thing more like itself. There is an element of the transcendental of Truth wrapped up in the transcendental of Beauty. Beauty is not beauty if it is not itself—that is, if it is not true. This is why aesthetics or following the “rules” of art cannot be the sole (or primary) measure of beauty.

That which is truly beautiful is true to itself. It is not, of necessity, wrapped up in awe or wonder or feelings of celebration, peace, joy, or any other manner of goodness. Beauty is big enough to embrace ugliness.3 We must not cuff her artificially.

A few years back, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp. The day was cold and bleary. Snow on the ground cradled the soul-crippling, red brick buildings. Even before entering, one could feel the imprisonment.

Images of the camp, nestled in snow, are justly described as beautiful—I brought home postcards—because beauty is big enough to swallow the horrors that took place there. It must swallow the horrors. But beauty has transparent intestines. It does not dissolve the horrors that it swallows; it preserves them.

Typically, beauty is spoken of as that which deserves or provokes awe and wonder. But real beauty also provokes awe in the old Norse and Germanic senses of the word: fright, terror, anguish. In our current Western Christian contextual conversation about beauty, this gets overshadowed by the wonder, reverence, and good, proper feelings we are supposed to have when gazing at a stained-glass window or a Rembrandt or whatever.

But beauty also (sometimes) engenders terror. And it should.

Like C.S. Lewis’s description of Joy—it was always “shot through with grief.”

i am myself

In his belated Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Russian novelist and World War II-era atheist dissident-turned-Eastern Orthodox philosopher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, declared that the transcendental of Beauty might be able to do the work of both the transcendentals of Truth and Goodness. I think he was on to something—but we haven’t spoken much about goodness, and we won’t start now.

Beauty must, of necessity, encapsulate truth. It must be its own mirror, almost incapable of description without self-reference. This, says Solzhenitsyn, is “a particular feature in the very essence of beauty.” It is “completely irrefutable,” only because almost no argument outside of itself can be brought to bear on itself.

Beauty, which is itself, will survive trial.

In The Horse and His Boy, the runaway slave Shasta is traversing a treacherous mountain pass, tired and alone. It is dark. He is cold. And suddenly he realizes that someone—a Thing, a ghost—is treading alongside him. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you are not alone when you’d previously thought you were, in fact, alone.

Shasta, hesitant and afraid, dares to ask the Thing what it is.

“One who has waited long for you to speak,” says a large, deep voice.

The conversation with the invisible giant continues until the Voice reveals that it is, in fact, the Lion whom Shasta had crossed paths with numerous times on his adventures leading up to this moment. The Lion had comforted him. The Lion had saved him from fiends. The Lion had wounded his friend.

“Who are you?” asked Shasta.

“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.

Shasta was no longer afraid that the Voice belonged to something that would eat him, nor that it was the voice of a ghost. But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.

That is Beauty. A thing that is truly, undeniably itself. A person who is themself and no one else. That is also Truth—that which can hardly be explained without self-reference.4 And here I will say my only bit about Goodness: it is a chaos that is internally ordered and internally consistent. It is why the Lion in Shasta’s story physically wounds Shasta’s friend for a harm that she had perpetrated on her servant. And that goodness, that justice, is beautiful.

Solzhenitsyn again:

Beauty will force its way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three.

You get it? But that’s entirely beside my point, which is: beauty is a thing that is fully itself.

In ’s interview with Ben Quash, professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London, he discusses how Old Testament law called for a lamb “without blemish” to be brought for sacrifice.

Sometimes we think about beauty as something that is absolutely out of the ordinary. But, actually, in Old Testament terms, this kind of beauty is precisely being what you’re meant to be well. So, a lamb without blemish is just a really lamby lamb; not some kind of exceptional lamb different from all the other lambs, but a lamb with all the right bits in all the right places.

Beauty, as dull as it sounds, is serviceable. It fulfills the purpose for which it is made. It is a thing most like itself.

Beauty is without blemish, not because it has no errors or no areas in which it can be improved. It is without blemish because it possesses no irrelevant or substandard elements. Beauty is in the right place and rightly ordered in association with other things.

“I AM MYSELF,” the Lion says.

And he is. Nothing added. Nothing subtracted. Nothing manufactured or pretended. Nothing left to be desired.

Both the measure and the thing being measured.

Beauty is not required to stand out. Beauty is normal, not extreme, unexceptional.

All the natural things we point to as examples of high beauty—stars, flowers, mountain vistas, hummingbirds—are plentiful and unremarkable. Every time one appears, it does nothing more than any other star or flower or mountain or hummingbird. The star is very much a star, the hummingbird very much a hummingbird.

And so—they are beautiful.

This is beauty which saves the world—the ordinary lamb called to the altar for sacrifice—not because it is exceptional, but because it is perfect—perfectly itself.

Beauty is a thing as true as possible to its own nature. And a thing which is unapologetically self-referential is something to believe in.

“The Matrix was also staged but you watched it like wow.”1

With a twelve-hour flight under my belt and an espresso martini in my hand, I’m feeling emboldened and this rant has been brewing for months. I’m getting tired of everyone blaming everything that’s majorly wrong with our society on postmodernism.

Yes, postmodernism, like any intellectual movement (say the Enlightenment or Romanticism), has a complicated history and flawed effects. But a lot of commentary about the ills of Western society today leans heavily on the crutch of pointing to postmodernism as the singular and primary fault.

We are lonely because postmodernism. We are disconnected from a unified societal story and have suffered the disappearance of shared culture because postmodernism. Nothing has meaning anymore because postmodernism.

I suspect perennial critics of postmodernism suffer from laziness. Arguing is easy when everyone believes the same underlying principles about the world, shares a more or less common understanding of history, and accepts traditional structures of power and authority as just the way things are. Now, however, one actually has to work to convince the skeptic (or the completely non-hostile non-committed believer) that their worldview is correct and worthy of adoption. And that makes things hard for those not used to defending historically unquestioned ways of seeing the world. Those guys now have to go to the gym.

The effects of postmodernism are, in fact, a blessing in disguise. Instead of assuming, belief systems must now prove their validity and coherence. You cannot tell me you love Jesus and then abuse and demean in his name or support those who do. (This is just an example!) Today’s zeitgeist will not allow those narratives to be combined without question. That is a good thing.

We complain about historically conservative, traditional, or Christian values no longer being assumed as foundational societal pillars in the West. Well, you can be bitter and take your marbles and run. Or you can recognize that the bedrock of postmodernism—the rejection of unquestioned grand narratives and the deconstruction of assumed structures of power—are what make it possible for your worldview to have a serious seat at the table in the marketplace of ideas right now. It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.

Postmodernism is what makes Taylor Tomlinson’s new Netflix special, Prodigal Daughter, possible—and funny—and doesn’t require her being burned at the stake for blasphemy. We’re welcome.

Okay, I must admit it isn’t only the espresso martini that has me emboldened. It’s also ’s response to ’s criticism of the Enlightenment and call for more Romantic values in today’s world—which I read and recommended to you last month. Romantic that I am, definitely read this if you have the time.

Fashionably Late Takes

Romanticism Can’t Save Us

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the hype around artificial intelligence is justified. How should a humanist — someone who cherishes human dignity and potential — react to this technological revolution…

Read more

4 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Megan Gafford

otherwise, beauty remains all the rage

I wrote a bit more about beauty this month while discovering more conversation surrounding whether beauty will save the world…

• has this piece on why suffering makes you beautiful

• Plough has ’s piece on discovering beauty through betrayal, business studies, and his mother’s mental illness.

• has hosted four episodes on beauty-adjacent topics on the Another Life podcast.

• I really enjoyed Christopher West’s piece in The Imaginative Conservative on Art & the New Evangelization: How Beauty Will Save the World 🩵🤍💙

asides + signal boosts

• While reading the first third of ’s article on The Small Group Industrial Complex, I found myself screaming internally, finally someone is saying it aloud! It’s something my siblings and I have discussed at least twice a year for the past few years: the difficulty of finding a church home where we feel like we are actually challenged in our faith. I haven’t talked much about this with folks outside my family out of fear of appearing snooty. But,

  A lot of Christians haven’t fallen away.

  They’ve outgrown American churchianity.

  • Although there’s something lacking in Meek’s criticism of the small group in particular—specifically, how to fix it—but his article is a good starting point for conversations about what contemporary Christian church culture has to offer Americans and whether it’s meeting that need.

• In Liberties, Elena Kagan (not the Supreme Court justice) takes issue with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein for philosophical reasons: Monster of the Enlightenment.

• You have to be human!, cries — and everyone feels it.

• Another from and something I’m afraid most people don’t want to face up to: Does Might Make Right? Answer: I mean, kinda.

• laments the loss of the middle. And as much as I want to sympathize—he makes some good points!—the reason we don’t all eat at Applebee’s and flock to romcoms starring Julia Roberts is because we choose not to. No one banned us from mid-tier eateries; we also started getting more options at the box office. We chose what we wanted—voted with our pocketbooks as they say—and it’s time we take responsibility and stop blaming ambiguous “elites” and “theys” for the current state of things culturally. If your local restaurant strip is filled with arch millennial-aesthetic eateries serving avocado slices on your smash burger, it means people are paying for it (or at least posting about it on social media). That’s show business—I mean, capitalism—for ya.

  • Speaking of the middle, maybe it seems like it’s disappeared only because people aren’t writing essays about it. My friend wrote this poem about the Oxford that (probably) gets glossed over by the people who write essays.2

  • And speaking of people writing essays, I appreciate putting words to yet another of my feelings surrounding the irritating sameness of pockets of dialogue on substack. “I’m just tired of seeing essay after essay regurgitating why phones are bad and we need to start connecting more,” she says. “Girl, if your cottagecore village fantasy was actualized, there wouldn’t be any Substack writers. Do you know how to use a farming scythe?” Yeah, let’s see your farming scythe credentials before you get to write about how cancelling the internet is cool. It needed to be said.

  • In the vein of things that needed to be said, talks about Christian hospitality and how the “Norman Rockwell” version of it usually leaves neurodivergent families and folks with disabilities out of the picture.

• sent me this from and I love, love, love it. We all can fight the darkness by simple, everyday acts—like putting some thought into what we wear.

  Tanner’s Substack

  Style Slop & Growth Gluttony

  “Slop” is a term that’s been around for a while but really seems to be picking up momentum in certain spaces recently…

  Read more

  9 months ago · 13 likes · Tanner Guzy

• Finally (saving the best for last), writes about Olympic figure skater, Alysa Liu the Magnificent, and how doing something for the joy of it is like heaven on earth.

Everything's Made In Georgia

The Radical Cosmic Apocalypse of Alysa Liu

Have you ever heard a musical composition that made you think, “I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll hear at the gates of heaven”? Some people have said that about Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Others say it about Nicolas Britell’s score for If Beale Street Could Talk…

Read more

4 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Georgia Coley

Okay, it’s time for another espresso martini. (Shoutout to Tina in Detroit who makes one that’s mean and unorthodox — you have to bring your own espresso though.)

(more) asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Finished C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, hailed by the NY Times Review of Books as his “most mature novel.” I agree it’s mature, and it’s interesting to read in the context of post-modernism (ha!) and a culture proud enough to say what it thinks of how gods should behave. I suppose it’s not really a new phenomenon.

🎞️ Watching

• Followed through on a long-standing recommendation and watched Pluribus, Season 1. I have some thoughts which might emerge in an essay elsewhere, but it’s an interesting story to experience in a society that may one day choose artificial intelligence for convenience and companionship over the difficulties of being human.

• Taylor Tomlinson’s latest Netflix comedy special, Prodigal Daughter (spoken for above)!

🎧 Listening

• It’s extremely trippy watching ROSALÍA’s music video for “Sauvignon Blanc” while in the middle of reading of Till We Have Faces.

• “What’s death to a risen king?” Trip Lee’s BRAG WORSHIP project is bringing new flavor to the sphere of “worship music.” I like it. (But what does my opinion of music intended for worship matter?)

• I haven’t watched the Netflix hit series Tell Me Lies, but I love CHVRCHES’ songs associated with the new season — “Addicted to Love” and “Such Great Heights”

• Lecrae’s Reconstruction: Second Story has seven new songs added to what I think is his last album.

• BLACKPINK’s new EP Deadline, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The funny thing about looking for something is that you very often find it. The funny thing about looking at something for too long is that you very often become incapable of seeing it.

Look for beauty and we find it discoverable.

Look constantly at beauty and we miss the point.

In this next segment of our discussion surrounding beauty and whether it can save the world, I must ask: Do we have eyes to see it anymore? Do we know what beauty looks like? Can we recognize her in the crowd?

Last year, I met up with a friend in Washington D.C. during graduation season. After visiting the Museum of the Bible and grabbing lunch together, we parted ways and I eventually found my way to the Library of Congress. The Great Hall in America’s national library is gilded in gold and royal blue, adorned majestically with Corinthian columns, inscribed all over with names and quotes from luminous wordsmiths and educators of the past. It is one of the most beautiful interiors I’ve ever seen.

Also inside the Great Hall were scores of just-graduated students. Young men in those simple, non-descript black suits that seem to be the only thing available to young men looking for a suit. Young women, as well, in gowns so flamboyant they made one wonder whether the girls wearing them had earned the right to do so. They were everywhere—up and down the stairs, across the compass rose, on every balcony and by every window.

And what were they doing?

Taking pictures. Posing. With parents. With friends. With boyfriends. Group shots. Solos. Selfies. All of it. Incessantly. Completely ignoring the splendor around them.

But that isn’t entirely true.

See. They sensed the obvious beauty of their surroundings, how the afternoon sun filtering through the stained-glass skylights sacralized the aura in that hall.

But, in the context of this conversation, I still wonder if they really recognized beauty.

To speak of recognizing beauty is not to say that everyone must be a history buff to enjoy a historic structure. Or that only those who understand the ancient and intricate act of Persian tapestry-making just so can appreciate a beautiful Arabian rug.

I am questioning whether we, as a society, have the capacity to apprehend real beauty when we see it. To really take it in at a sub-intellectual level. Because, if we don’t, we are more lost than we think, and beauty as a construct is useless to save us.

Let’s relate this to the issue of second screen writing, a topic in the zeitgeist following Matt Damon and Ben Affleck openly speaking about Netflix requesting that movies and streaming series be written in a way that mollifies viewers’ short attention spans and scrolling-while-watching habits. Content made now must:

• be fast paced and have a big action sequence closer to the beginning

• have characters repeat the plot often (in case the viewer forgot)

• have mild, easily understandable dialogue

• also be able to exist as background noise without causing viewers to feel lost when they mentally tune back in

This scheme by Netflix (and other streamers?) caters to our current state of brainlessness, intellectual rot, and inability to focus on anything for longer than twelve seconds. As with AI (and learning music by TikTok), we are at the knife’s edge of entire generations being unable to watch, say, The Godfather because it’s too long, has a diverse plot, and uses words that might send one to a dictionary.

There may come a time when entire segments of cultural phenomena are neglected simply because we’ve become incapable of apprehending them.

Beauty, like a complicated Christopher Nolan film, may become gibberish.

It’s a good thing, then, that beauty conquers reason.

we cannot reason our way out

Beauty—the idea with which we are here concerned—is a magnet with a door. We are drawn to and into that which is beautiful—people, art, buildings, stories. We need no explainer or precursor. We are, often, unaware that it is happening.

Thus C.S. Lewis describes Psyche in Till We Have Faces:

[Hers] was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Unfortunately, we live in an excessively navel-gazey era. We can’t receive an experience without also receiving some kind of dialogue surrounding that experience or some conversation about what it means that we have had the experience that we’ve had. (And here we are talking about beauty.)

But real beauty, the door-and-magnet kind, draws one in without argument, without conversation. There is no negotiation with real beauty. Its un-negotiability is what makes it a transcendental and is also what puts us at a loss to comprehend it.

We don’t need to know what beauty means; we need to know the thing itself. And to know the thing itself, we must receive its answer without question. Beauty rebuffs questions. Or, better said, it ignores them, steps aside and lets them pass.

, who has recently written on the matter, brings this out in the example of characters from The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Alyosha, the protagonist of Brothers Karamazov, is very much like Prince Myshkin whom we discussed in my last post. Readers “are drawn to Alyosha and the kind of life that is lived out by his philosophy. He doesn’t have all the logical answers, but he lives oriented toward something that transcends the need for logical arguments in the first place.”

Further:

Beauty, like the characters of Alyosha and Myshkin, is living proof of a kind of truth that exists beyond the reach of logic. Beauty is something that you cannot be reasoned into or out of, and it simply grabs you.

None of this is to say that reason, logic, or intellectualism are bad. They are simply secondary when it comes to the question of whether we can perceive beauty and whether beauty can truly save us or our world.

two conversations

Let’s go back to the Great Hall of the Library of Congress. When we talk about beauty, we seem to have two different conversations going on. One conversation is about the impulse, desire, or even general mandate to make things visually appealing. (An impulse I fully support.) The other conversation is about the pillars that uphold beauty as transcendental and whether these pillars can be distilled by particular forms—like the forms which influenced the architecture of America’s capital.

I know enough to know that a Corinthian column is prettier than a concrete slab, but I struggle to explain why that matters. And when I attempt to do so, the column begins to feel like something foreign, ancient, and unbelonging to me. Something plucked from its timeline and thrust into our own. I become a foreigner to beauty, putting a blindfold on because I am trying to wrestle beauty into an intellectual frame that is not my own.

One of my chief irritations about the ‘beauty will save the world’ conversation is that it falls into modernity-hatred far too much for my liking. I am in this time and I want to appreciate what is beautiful about it. As an artist, I want to bring beautiful forms out of the matter of today—beauty that sings truly to ears here and now and for eternal tomorrows.

I do not raise The Library of Congress as an example because it is old, but because it is beautiful—and of a beauty that transcends age. A beauty that draws you to itself and into itself. That is what all those D.C.-area college graduates understood without knowing.

Again, The Culturist says it better than I could:

When you encounter something truly beautiful in life, you don’t stop to question its beauty or ask whether it’s meaningful or not. It has already impressed meaning upon you.

The question I ask (and fail to answer) is: will we be capable of apprehending the meaning beauty impresses upon us much longer?

Share very public secret society

This year, I’m trying to be a bit more streamlined with these end-of-month braindumps. Less verbosity from me overall. Less rabbit-holing. These aren’t supposed to be essay-length deals. It’s fitting that some of what I recommend below gets after that.

enough already!

We live in a commentary-obsessed culture—and I’m getting tired of it. I don’t want to talk about things anymore. I genuinely get exhausted when the analysis conversations and theo-philosophical debates extend past 45 minutes. Get it over with, my guy. (Maybe this is just a phase.)

From news to entertainment, the story is often not the story, but what people are saying about the story. We’ve normalized skipping to the comments. “I wonder what so-and-so says about x.” Not me! I don’t wanna know.

angles in on this in his essay, we talk ABOUT stories instead of LIVING them. We’ve traded in the “secret work, the indirect revelation of a story” for “forced, extracted messaging.” We’ve lost the ability to live an “unexplained life.”

I want to read all the books and watch all the movies and go to all the plays and listen to all the albums. And if I hate a few along the way, that’s okay. At least, I fully experienced them without the framework of dozens of analysis videos and hundreds of comments on whether or not a thing is good before I’ve even participated in the art itself.

You will probably catch me being hypocritical on this front. At times, I will indeed talk about things or analyze a story to death—even on this very substack. But that’s because I’m human and messy, inscrutable and inconsistent. Which is the whole point of experiencing and living life as a story instead of feeling the need to form an opinion about it or participate in an aesthetic or play a role. Sometimes I just need to rant about a thing I loved or hated, figure out why I loved or hated it, or convince you to love or hate it as well.

And speaking of opinions, I think we’d be a better people overall if we just shut up a little more often than we do. This is what says in her essay, Not everyone is everything—but in much nicer terms.

People don’t seem to trust the media, the government, government agencies, or social media. Everyone needs to see and make a judgement themselves. Everyone is an expert…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that people can’t have views or profound reactions to what seems to be a sort of lightning bolt moment in American society. But there’s something odd to me in the way that people suddenly take on the office of forensics investigator, judge, jury, and even executioner…

I’m not sure the solution to loss of trust in society is for everyone to become self-appointed ministers, police officers, economists, doctors, judges and executors. It’s not effective and I’m not sure it’s good for us.

We can’t be everything, and if we could, it would not be good for us.

The loss of trust in society (and in institutions) seems to have given us an outsize sense of trust in our own ability to form accurate judgments based on whatever data is available to us. Information saturation has tricked us into thinking that because we can see everything, find any tidbit of information, and essentially have become omniscient, that we also have the wisdom to be the arbiters of right and wrong about everything from in vitro fertilization to space exploration. And that’s just not true. It’s critical that we understand that and stress that to our peers.

My rule of thumb: if I haven’t lived through it, have no experience in it, or have some adjacence to it, it’s probably best for me to listen and learn from those with actual experience or education. I think there’s something to the idea of earning the right to an opinion. Maybe we should all be a lot more humble about our ideas.

But I’m getting long-winded again. Here are some other high notes.

• I enjoyed ’s video, How Pride Ruined the Cinephile Community. It is somewhat related to the above discussion but specifically aimed at the snobby, insular movie critic. She makes the point that stories are not about you. The receiver’s reaction or level of identification with the story (or characters in the story) should not supersede one’s ability to experience and learn from the world presented in the story. In my own consumption of stories, I am trying, deliberately, to interact with more things that I am not sure I would like. The aim is to avoid making my personal level of comfort the measure by which I decide the stories with which I engage.

• It’s the end of the first month of the new year, but there’s never a wrong time to read ’s essay, The devil’s in the distractions » overcome the “dizziness of freedom” » lock in » and choose action over ‘a thousand visions of perfect success.’

• I want to see the new romanticism that talks about take root — and I think this is a stronger anchoring movement than the mere pursuit of beauty as avenue to restoration.

  • Which, if you haven’t read my earlier piece on whether beauty will save the world, you should. The pursuit of beauty alone is not strong enough to fight AI and the evils of technocracy and industrialism.

• Not quite sure how I feel about ’s article, Prestige TV Is Built By Liars. I have always been of the opinion that you can tell a TV series that met with early success but didn’t know where to end because they kind of ramble their way into incoherence and can’t figure out quite how to close things out. But maybe not? Maybe having no plan for one’s TV series is better.

• Finally, the analog trend. I am not quite sure I can agree with Mr. on this…

  • On a more serious note, I’m recommending two pieces that sum up some of my unsettlement around the idea that we all ought to return to 1960s tech.

    • the tension between an analog lifestyle and consumerism x

    • The Case For, and Against, Analog January x

(more) asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• My big, big read right now is The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, by Justo L. Gonzalez!

• One of my goals for this year is to read all of C.S. Lewis’ essays. As such, this post by my friend who runs the Pilgrim in Narnia site has been helpful — How to Read All of C.S. Lewis’ Essays.

• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman continues to entertain.

🎞️ Watching

• Watchmen + Lovecraft Country — both limited series and super-cool additions to my superhero + scifi taste palette.

• Also enjoyed finishing Firefly with my wife.

🎧 Listening

• Found myself enjoying F1 The Movie album between shuffling my extensive Liked Songs list.

Here’s to a February without distractions?

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky uses the word beauty, or some variation thereof, 98 times.1 Over half those occurrences are, naturally, in reference to the story’s women. The next most-frequent uses of beauty (or beautiful) in reference to other things are noted below.

Actions — 9
Objects — 7
Animals and nature — 8
Ideas — 4
Places — 4
Men — 4

I counted occurrences of beauty in The Idiot because a line from the novel has taken on a life of its own. You’ve heard it in artsy Christian circles, in think pieces on better evangelism, or in conversations about restoring the enchanted quality of existence that either the Enlightenment or post-modernism ripped from us.

This line, typically attributed to the story’s tragic hero, Prince Myshkin, does not come directly from him in the novel. Rather, it’s reported as Hippolyte, the novel’s dramatic and suicidal nihilist, questions the prince.

“Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! The prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such playful ideas because he’s in love!”

Despite the incredible verbosity of the nearly 500-page novel, Dostoevsky never has Prince Myshkin articulate what he could have meant by that statement. In the scene quoted above, the prince remains silent in the face of Hippolyte’s accusation that not only did he say, “beauty saves the world,” but that he might have said it only because he was a Christian.

It certainly sounds like something the prince would say regardless of whether his own story bears it out. Prince Myshkin, a good-hearted, even Christ-like epileptic, is thrown into the middle of aristocratic Saint Petersburg. He falls madly in love with the problematic Nastasya even as a more suitable woman, Aglaya, takes a liking to him. On the day Myshkin and Nastasya are supposed to wed, Nastasya runs off to marry Myshkin’s frenemy, Rogozhin, who murders her. After Nastasya’s body is revealed to him, the prince comforts his betrothed’s murderer and falls catatonic. Meanwhile, Aglaya elopes with a fraudster who abandons her.

It’s funny that this tragedy is the context out of which arises the sublime slogan.

beauty is a riddle

There are a few other aspects to which Dostoevsky applies the term beauty that I didn’t mention above. The first is epilepsy.

Dostoevsky afflicts the prince with his own real-life condition: an irregularly occurring intense, brief sensation of clarity and awareness followed by convulsion and collapse. The prince experiences confusion and memory loss when he awakes from these episodes. Epilepsy is not something we would typically describe as beautiful. Still, the prince speaks of his condition with a certain awe.

“What matter though it be only disease…when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?”

…That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt.

This intriguing juxtaposition of beauty with disease and disorder brings us to another element to which Dostoevsky applies the riddle of beauty—Jesus. Later in the story, the prince is describing art depicting the Passion in one of Rogozhin’s rooms. (Please forgive the long passage.)

“There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters, as a rule, represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of deepest agony and passion.

“But there was no such beauty in Rogozhin’s picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.

“The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish.”

Take a step back from the sublime slogan and we get the fuller picture of beauty embattled—of beauty as riddle instead of beauty as uncomplicated answer. The prince’s story does not bear out a beauty that saves the world—his world is not saved—the proof is not, as they say, in the pudding—but it does bear out a worthy struggle in a complicated universe. A struggle whose measure does not depend on the outcome.

As the prince continues the dialogue quoted above, he bypasses the resurrection, and sits in the mouth of death—the “enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable Being…”

Myshkin himself is destroyed by the same “implacable, eternal, unreasoning force” that wreaks havoc on the Savior and strips beauty from deity. His sanity shatters when his bride is murdered, after which he is returned to a sanatorium. Beauty, in this context, does not apply to a saved world. Beauty applies to the struggle—dare I say, the passion—that leads one to fight to save it.

wrestle with demons

While pondering whether beauty could actually save the world, ’s recent essay—No, “beauty” will not “save the world”—arrived in my inbox. Much of the time, the “beauty will save the world” argument upholds a conversation around particular styles of artistic expression in architecture, painting, and other visual modes and even some literary ones.

Typically, the conversation goes like this: this [insert modern style of art or expression] is bad; we need to bring back [insert favorite classical or medieval style of art] which is obviously more beautiful. Between church architecture, federal architecture, and corporate logos, this conversation has taken place everywhere over the last few years. Perhaps the U.S. government mandating that new federal buildings be constructed in the “traditional and classical” styles of Greek and Roman antiquity is the apex of this dialogue.

I have nothing against the styles of antiquity or medievalism. I prefer them in many cases. But we cannot act as though those beautiful styles burst fully formed, like Athena, from Zeus’ head. These styles were borne of battle, blood, sweat, and ancient anguish. That is what Hilary says our current call for beauty is missing.

In the same chapter where Prince Myshkin’s epileptic fits are described as having “beauty and harmony,” they are also described as a “demon” being “upon him.” During one of his spells, he roams about the city and has to “repudiate” a devil whispering “awful suspicions” into his ear. In the chapter previous to that, Myshkin exchanges cross necklaces with the man who would murder his beloved.

Prince Myshkin earns his beautiful characterization from his actions, from his wrestling, from his struggle. For the same reasons, The Idiot is a beautiful novel. Its world is not set right, but Myshkin’s flame burns until the very end when the implacable, unreasoning force that conquers Jesus in Rogozhin’s picture puts it out.

In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis tells a story that’s burned into my mind. He interviews an old monk with a reputation for holiness. “Do you still struggle with the devil?” he asks.

“No,” the monk says. “I used to struggle with him when I was young, but now I’ve grown old and tired, and the devil has grown old and tired with me.”

“So, it’s easy for you now?” asks Kazantzakis.

“It’s worse—far worse,” says the monk. “Now I wrestle with God.”

I love that story because it reminds me that the struggle is worthy. Myshkin’s struggle is beautiful in a way that beauty itself cannot bring about. During the five silent minutes that followed Rogozhin confessing to murdering the prince’s beloved, I wonder if the prince thought to himself as he thought about his epileptic episodes: “I would give my whole life for this one instant.” Knowing the outcome of his story, would he walk that path again? Something tells me he would.

Beauty, in the context of saving the world, is not placid and pure. Beauty is not art even. Beauty is not merely the depiction of Jacob wrestling with the Lord. Beauty is the wrestling match itself.

Beauty is born of wrestling. And we are at the part where we have to wrestle with our demons.

More to follow.

Happy new year, secret keepers!

Looking back over my writing in 2025, one word comes to mind: random. Good random! But still random. I wrote about movies and Narnia, a little bit of fantasy, paganism, and death. I want to change that this year.

At least for the first half of 2026, you can look for a series of posts around the following themes…

beauty

I am going to jump on a bandwagon and talk about the idea that beauty “will save the world.” There will be one post. There may be three.

bodies

As a precursor to the theme that follows, I am going to adapt the presentation on tattoos that I gave at Hutchmoot UK 2025 into a series of essays here. The body is the most sacred thing available to us and what we do with and through our bodies matters immensely. Our flesh as canvas—on which and through which we expand and express Beauty—fascinates me.

being

Bridging beauty and bodies, I want to talk about the representational nature of being. Ourselves as simulacrum of something more. Ourselves as icons of a greater reality and how we can bear that weight responsibly.

With one post every mid-month, I expect this thread of discourse to last until July. I anticipate a few posts about other things that strike my fancy in between. Y’know, movies, fantasy, paganism, death.

what else am i enjoying at the turn of the year?

📖 Reading: I’ve breached my 2026 goal of completing 20 audiobooks by listening to Art & the Bible, by Francis Schaeffer. It was a nice reset for someone who is frequently thinking about art and creativity thru the lens of faith and arguing conversing about popular art and culture with my fellow Christians. I own the book, but have never read it. Schaeffer’s reasoning added breadth to some of my instincts, while challenging my thoughts on how much a medium affects a message.

🎞️ Watching: I’m watching Watchmen, HBO’s 2019 limited series based on the DC comics. For someone who’s not a huge Watchmen nerd, it’s one of the best laid-out combinations of several storylines I’ve seen recently. The seventh episode, “A God Walks Into Abar,” is *chef’s kiss* elite on this front.

🎧 Listening: I’ve been going back and relistening to some of the music I really enjoyed over the last year—Kendrick Lamar’s gnx, numerous Fox Sailor albums, and of course Hans Zimmer. On the podcast front, I enjoyed a couple of year-end episodes from Honestly and the Reason Roundtable—fun stuff.

As for artsy things to look forward to, I have a small contribution to a Lorehaven piece on why I’m looking forward to The Odyssey, The Magician’s Nephew, and Avengers: Doomsday. Will share when it’s out.

What are you looking forward to in 2026?

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for Lorehaven about what’s presumedly the biggest difference between Greta Gerwig’s upcoming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew and C.S. Lewis’ original story. The plan—as yet, unconfirmed, but deduced from numerous indicators—is to push the entirety of Digory and Polly’s adventure in Charn, London, and the budding world of Narnia from 1900 to 1950 or thereabouts.

Shifting a story fifty years from its original timeframe is no small undertaking, and is fraught with all manner of possible fallout in potential future adaptations of the Narniad.

In my Lorehaven piece, I used Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein film to make the case that time-shifting an adaptation of a story can be a good thing. Frankenstein (2025) is set roughly sixty years after Mary Shelley’s novel and turned out fantastic.

The same day my piece was published, Narnia Web dropped some comments from IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond that sent eyebrows as high as Fledge can fly. According to transcribed remarks on an investors call, Gelfond said:

This is not your mother’s or your grandmother’s Narnia.

The music in it is unbelievably contemporary music, which IMAX fans like. I’m not gonna say specifically, but things like Pink Floyd and The Doors. You know that kind of music which people go to see in IMAX.

(You can go other places on the internet to hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth about how Greta Gerwig is “ruining” Narnia—despite the fact that we’ve heard nary a substantial peep from Gerwig, her team, or any of the actors involved in the production. Much less a trailer or any official imagery.)

Gelfond also claims that this Narnia film is “going to change the world” and is “going to create a cultural event.”

While it’d be wonderful for both of those latter inferences to end up true, it’s more likely Gelfond is speaking as a salesman aiming to boost confidence in his company at a time when lots of people are losing faith in the theatre model. I take his words to investors with a huge grain of salt. And I take the worst possible interpretations of the idea that Gerwig’s Narnia won’t be my grandmother’s and will also include “unbelievably contemporary music” with a similar grain of salt.

Let’s go back to comments Scott Stuber, then-Netflix Film chief, made about Gerwig’s production back in 2023: “…that’s what she’s working on now with [producer] Amy Pascal and Mark Gordon and they’re trying to figure out how they can break the whole arc of all of it.”

Scary words, for sure. But two years on from those comments, do we know anything more about what “breaking the arc” of Narnia really means? Even taking a fifty-year time-shift, some contemporary/rock music influences, and a guarantee that it’s not a film made for grandmas into account, I don’t think we’re any clearer on the final form Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew will take or what future Narnia adaptations will look like under Netflix’s banner.

And maybe it’s not important that we know.

My cousins have been encouraging me to watch Rings of Power Season 2, the Amazon-backed adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings appendices and parts of The Silmarillion. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the topic came up again. Is it good? Does season two really improve on season one? How true is it to The Silmarillion and Peter Jackson’s beloved film adaptation?

During the conversation, someone said: You already know how the story ends. Plus, you have the books. So just watch it and enjoy it.

Essentially, it’s not that deep.

This view on questionable adaptations came to mind as debates about The Magician’s Nephew film—less than a year away now!—raged in other group chats over the past couple of weeks.

And I think we will also have a great movie come November 2026. Whether it lives up to the adaptation in my head, or the one in yours, remains to be seen. We should probably get comfortable with the idea that Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew will be an adaptation for children who haven’t yet had a reason to learn that it’s foolish to shut oneself into a wardrobe.

Rosalía, mother superior of divine longing

This month, Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía released her fourth album to tremendous acclaim. Lux is a masterpiece of collaborative energy and chaotic wonder, deeply rooted and deeply moving. Bold musical expression and inventive, liminal-space lyrics make this album worth listening to again and again.

Lux scratched at something that has shaped my own philosophy—C.S. Lewis’ argument that we are made to be divine. From Mere Christianity:

He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.

Listening to Lux is like sitting inside the imaginarium of someone conscious of their capability for divinity. And no wonder—Rosalía spent months studying the interior lives of saints as prelude to writing Lux—among them, Olga of Kyiv, Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, and Hildegard of Bingen (who seems to be everyone’s favorite these days).

“I know that I was made to divinize,” she sings. That awareness comes clasped with an acknowledgement of the distance between longing and fulfillment, between what God intends to make of us and how we exist in the interim. From “Porcelana”:

My skin is thin, made of porcelain
And from it emanates
Light that illuminates, or divine ruin

In the chorus:

I am nothing, I am the light of the world
I am nothing, I am the light of the world

The dichotomy expresses what she is and what she hopes to be (and what she is now in small measure). The album is full of this unfiltered longing, “La Yugular” being the most direct expression of that. Listen to the song, then read the lyrics. It reminded me that, once, something bigger than the whole world fit inside a stable.

I fit in the world
And the world fits in me
I occupy the world
And the world occupies me
…

Besides all its spiritual and existential wrangling, Lux is a magnificent demonstration of musical capability.

• Read Brigid McCabe’s review in America: Finally, a pop star who understands Catholicism

• The Dissect podcast’s breakdown focuses on how Rosalía takes the lives of saints into consideration in her work, embodies them in her lyrics, and re-expresses their nature in a captivating way.

• The music video for Berghain – masterful.

• Switched on Pop: Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ brings the symphony to the club – yes, yes, yes.

• NSS Magazine: All the saints and nuns mentioned by Rosalía in Lux

are we allowed to like women anymore?

Speaking of female saints…

Lately, the Discourse™️ has been taken with Helen Andrews’ argument that the large-scale presence of women in corporate, government, legal, and other spheres has and will continue to have negative downstream effects. (Female-majority university English Literature departments are not as problematic apparently.) Big sociocultural shifts are interesting to me, and the idea that a majority female Supreme Court (or company or university administration board) would operate significantly differently than a majority male one is worth an examination.

But, in an era where Helen Andrews, when pressed to do so by Leah Libresco Sargeant, seemed unwilling to delineate any feminine virtues (or virtues that women exhibit at a higher capacity than men), I think it’s important to take a step back and reaffirm that we are all still allowed to like women!

has a piece on men who like women (Glenn Powell) and men who don’t (Tom Cruise) and being able to tell the difference. Her framework, extrapolated from an observation by ) is not something I’d ever thought about. It makes sense though: a precursor to good male-female relations is genuinely liking the opposite sex. It’s gotten cool and trendy to dunk on men lately, but that energy has been going both ways.

I’m blessed to have been raised with five sisters whom I admire with all my heart. I was radicalized by the Christian women of Twitter back when it was still Twitter. I’ve married a beautiful, intelligent, artistic woman whose trains of thought I love following. (There are so many trains!) And I currently help lead a majority female communications team and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Guys should like women, regardless of romantic status.

I also applaud ’s take on the whole thing: Does “Feminization” Poison Things?

…acknowledging that there are biological differences between men and women is simply an acknowledgement of reality. But that’s not at all the same as viewing the world through lens that devalues women as deficient versions of men.

I keep forgetting I wrote something for Fathom Magazine about this topic years ago, and if everyone would’ve read it, we wouldn’t be where we are today: Blurred Reflections: Seeing the whole image of God in virtuous traits exhibited by men and women.

Also interesting…

• Christianity Today: What Broke the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere

• The Atlantic: (Some) MAGA Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

excellence required

writes that one of the dangers of AI and LLMs taking over academic, workplace, and artistic environments is that it makes competence the standard and discourages the pursuit of excellence. When there is no impetus or reward to being extraordinary, everything becomes just fine. Serviceable. That’s it.

One reason for this collective lowering of sights is a lack of cultural coherence, a world in which one is force to either cater to a particular audience – often algorithmically identified – or to a mass audience devoid of aesthetic sensibility. But another reason is a widely shared sense that aspiration is folly, that nothing really matters all that much and that trying too hard is a sign that you’re playing a fool’s game.

In response to this thought, I say: excellere aude! Have the courage to excel!

I agree. Nothing is worth doing seriously if it’s not worth doing excellently. In your art, in your work, in your life, be excellent!

Read his full post: competence is not enough

asides + signal boosts

• ’s take on how men make and keep friends and the way it differs from how women make and keep friends

• For some reason, Matthew McConaughey’s White House speech in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting came up in my feed. I’d never seen it before. It reminded me of the reason we need artists—to tell stories, to provide context and compassion, to pull our eyes beyond the limited horizon of politics and make complex things uncannily plain. “Many children were left not only dead, but hollow.”

• How could one not read something titled Being hot is not a fruit of the Spirit? I think it’s fun to argue otherwise, but rightly condemns the “Jesus glow.”

• Soman Chainani’s White Witch Fan Club over on the substack was also a fun read.

• Men who dress well are on the upswing, Adam Sage writes in The Times: Young French dandies find elegant solution to combat ugly world

📖 Reading

• I’ve finally started reading the Percy Jackson books for fun!

🎞️ Watching

• Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—and I wrote about it here. Also, the 45-minute behind-the-scenes special on Netflix is very good too.

• All of the Maze Runner movies. Solid.

• The Netflix mini-series Adolescence got a lot of love a few months back and I just recently watched it. While I think some of the Issues could have been handled with more clarity—I felt like the third episode went in circles—the acting and film technique are on point. Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay are excellent in the first two episodes. And the final episode is soul-crushing and revelatory.

🎧 Listening—other than Rosalía

• Propaganda’s poetry album The Beautiful Endling. It’s not every day that feelings ripped from my soul get put into words. Will be listening to this one again.

• I also think I’m in my synthwave edit as I’ve been enjoying The Midnight, All the Damn Vampires, WOLFCLUB, and The Strike.

It continues to be a busy season. I’ll be back with more written things soon!

“What I didn’t want is for you to feel that you were watching a classic interpreted with reverence, but with urgency—and something alive now.”

Watching Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I couldn’t stop thinking about artificial intelligence. AI is the creature of today’s mad techno-creators. GDT’s film—a beautiful work and substantial adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel—whispers about this in a number of ways.

But, first, some thoughts on the adaptation itself. It’s been two or three years since I’ve read Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and it took me a bit to recognize that Guillermo del Toro makes significant narrative departures from Shelley’s work—not that any other Frankenstein adaptations follow it so precisely either.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

what’s essential to its being

Instead of being alive for most of the story, Victor’s father is excused from the narrative early on, his harshness and hinted-at role in the death of Victor’s beloved mother (played by Mia Goth) becoming the spark that ignites in a young Victor the passion to conquer death. Elizabeth (also played by Mia Goth!) is Victor’s love interest and eventual wife in the novel; in GDT’s telling, she becomes the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer). Victor (sturdily and impassionately portrayed by Oscar Isaac) is teased as a foil to William and Elizabeth’s relationship,1 while Elizabeth becomes a foil to the standard depiction of the Creature (a soulful, miraculous2 turn by Jacob Elordi).

These are notable structural departures (and there are others); I point them out to say that this Frankenstein remains a powerful adaptation and proof of the sustained mythic elasticity of Shelley’s original gothic horror. It’s also proof that old things made “alive now”—to use GDT’s words—are not always bad. His Frankenstein feels original; his creature, which took him 30 years to bring forth, is full, powerful, determinative, and measured. It’s beautiful to look at, beautifully scored, and beautifully written.

On adaptation, del Toro says:

The goal isn’t to sing the same song; it’s to sing it with my own voice…

To be faithful to the book, I believe you have to be as biographical as Mary Shelley was.

To that end, del Toro’s changes to the script are driven by the similarities he sees between his life and Shelley’s, as well as their differences. “The changes I made are numerous,” he admits, “but always in service of this film.” His particular Frakentale rings true because it is rooted in specificity of time, place, and belief systems—both his, Shelley’s, and the audience’s. As a not insignificant example, the famously lapsed Catholic admits:

The pageantry of Catholicism is very present in my work…that’s one of the biggest differences between me and Mary Shelley. She was a Protestant girl from England. I’m a Catholic boy from Mexico. Big difference in temperament.

This Frankenstein is different, but it is also the same—in the way that every childbirth is different but also isn’t. GDT captures what’s essential to Frankenstein’s being.

ardour that far exceeds moderation

Now, back to what I think this particular story speaks to in our time, since it is a story of our time. AI is only one manifestation of that broad, questionable creative impulse with which Frankenstein converses. The story speaks to the creation of monstrosities that will, eventually, span beyond our reasonable control—autonomous weaponry, automated policing, designer babies, and social media’s algorithmic refinement, which forces us into narrower and narrower modes of thinking and being.

Frankenstein is about fatalism, acceptance, and inevitability. It’s about the creation of machinations capable of our own unmaking and how we will (or won’t) live with them.

A critical difference between Shelley’s Creature and del Toro’s is that del Toro’s is self-healing. He is shot and stabbed multiple times and blown up twice, but he is essentially a perpetual motion machine—unkillable, unstoppable once animated—making artificial intelligence and advanced robotics an easy-to-grasp case for analysis.

What we do about AI is morally significant. Frankenstein’s visual grandeur, especially Victor’s lab (located in a solitary but magnificent gothic tower), maps onto the modern birthing womb of artificial intelligence: big budgets, ambitious promises, risky ethical terrain, huge leaps in capability unleashed on the world without any unified system of accountability. To borrow from Shelley: “with profane fingers,” techno-creators have already bestowed “the tremendous secrets of the human frame”3 onto thousands of amoral mainframes.

Elon Musk is aiming to raise $20 billion to invest in AI. He admits to Peter Diamandis (who has written a book on how to “reverse aging” and “not die”):

When we ultimately create a digital superintelligence that can enable [the] future of abundance there is also some chance that a digital superintelligence could end humanity…

In a way, this is what happens to Victor. His own end is the end of his pursuit to create life and relieve the bounds of death.

What is the motivation for the pursuit of artificial superintelligence—or anything that pushes the nature of humanity beyond its perceived limits? Ambition? Mastery? Ego? Whatever the case, like Victor, we rush headlong into creation, enflamed by the novelty of breakthrough and disruption, aiming for dominance in something that we do not fully understand, desiring with an ardor that far exceeds moderation.

As for del Toro, he told Reuters: “Artificial intelligence I’m not afraid of. I’m afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant.”

unable to endure

In Shelley’s telling, when Victor beholds his Creature, he runs. “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.”4

Del Toro, however, has Victor first try to teach and nurture his Creature, though it soon becomes clear that the Creature has a mind of his own. (Or its own, as Victor insists.) Victor becomes angry, violent, and hopeless. He realizes his mistake and tries to destroy the Creature. This, of course, does not work.

The Creature pursues Victor. Victor pursues the Creature. Both are in a terrible dance of attempted destruction.

Is this our future? Will man replicate God’s creative act but be incapable of replicating divine responsibility?

In the world GDT creates, it seems mankind is incapable of beholding the monstrosities made with his own hands. Man runs either from his monsters or with his monsters. We cannot truly face them. Our impulse is to become one with our creations or attempt to destroy them. We are limited by our humanity: our emotions, relationships, lineage, and context. Life and death are to us “ideal bounds,” which perhaps we should not break through. But this realization comes too late.

God, on the other hand, is capable of beholding the monstrousness of his creation. He does not run from (or with) his monsters. He faces them and their offspring. He can do so because he cannot create beyond himself. He is unlimited, infinite, and so can sacrifice, redeem, forgive.

This is where del Toro ultimately makes his mark on Shelley’s story.

For Shelley, both Victor and the Creature are irredeemable, incapable of reconciliation. They pursue each other to the bitter end. Victor dies lamenting his inability to end his Creation, perhaps a prediction of mankind’s ultimate conflagrations with its alienic inventions. “The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed,” Victor says.5

As he observes his creator’s corpse, the Creature laments how evil became his good, how the light he’d gained through knowledge and observation of kind humans became useless to him. He tells his onlooker, “Your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself,”6 and commits himself to destruction.

Del Toro does not find this resolution appealing. “Mary is really brutal with the Creature,” he says. “If you read the novel, the Creature is really demonic at times—and, still, you love him.”

Del Toro capitalizes on that love and pushes his film’s ending toward transcendence. With his Creature existing entirely outside of his creator’s control and incapable of being destroyed by human means, the stakes are more significant. Simple destruction is not the answer. Divine capability enters the scene.

That earlier quote where GDT says natural stupidity is more abundant than artificial intelligence is incomplete. He follows up with: “We live in a time of terror and intimidation, certainly. And the answer, which art is part of, is love.” His film is faithful to this belief.

In del Toro’s ending, the Creature, who cannot be punished beyond mental torment and will not be absolved, offers his creator forgiveness for his parental wrongs. Victor accepts the responsibility that he is incapable of actually exercising, claiming the Creature no longer as “it” but as “son.”

The drive to this ending is what fills GDT’s Frankenstein with “urgency” and “something alive now.” It calls the viewer to become capable of beholding the monstrosities of our time, genuinely facing them and accepting the divine weight of responsibility.

We must consider that the monstrosities of our children’s time may well include creatures very similar to Victor’s. We must learn, as does Victor, to behold them and to wrestle with them in the way that divinity wrestles with monstrous humanity and ends up designating some as sons.

“For me, what we strive for with art is grace,” del Toro says. “If we can achieve grace at the end of the movie, and emotion with it, I’m in.”

He laughs. “It seems like I’m still Catholic.”

asides + signal boosts

Listening to Guillermo del Toro talk about the making of Frankenstein, it’s clear he’s been pondering Shelley’s story for what seems like an eternity and he’s deeply passionate about it.

» Listen to his interview on The Director’s Cut, which includes some very cool behind-the-scenes/making-of stories, tangents on creativity, and insight on where he’ll next direct his creative energy.

» Read the Irish Times story in which he talks at length about some of the structural changes to Shelley’s story.

» writes about GDT time-shifting the story from the Romantic era to the Victorian era and why it matters.

» For a contrarian view, argues that GDT totally misses Shelley’s philosophical outlook.

» Costume designer Kate Hawley on how David Bowie and Prince inspired Victor’s looks.

» Also, more in-depth on the differences between GDT’s film and Shelley’s novel.

I consider this braindump a service of sorts.

art (to save culture)

Jonathan Pageau gave a talk at the 2025 Touchstone Conference that I thought worth listening to twice—3 Things Christians Must Do to Rebuild Culture. I’ll spoil it for you: remember, celebrate, create. I appreciate his positive, optimistic perspective. We can make good things! And they’ll be so beautiful that they’ll inspire!

He argues that all art should communicate transcendence and, as such, art cannot be about self-expression. I disagree on only that fine point. We cannot communicate about the transcendent without communicating a personal experience. All art, at its inception, is fundamentally self-expressive—expressed through and by a person (or group of people), based on comprehension of what they mean to communicate.

But I agree that much of what we see in the art space right now is not only perverse but boring, which is why we need good art (to save culture).

attention

You know what’s not boring? Everything America right now. Since moving back to the States, I’ve realized how insulated I was from the roller coaster of American governance (or lack thereof). I was also a recovering news junkie. Being back in these red, white, and blue borders, I’ve felt the palpable political tension in a way I did not expect.

It’s so easy to give all my attention to the constant stream of every news thing being the worst thing ever. It’s been a struggle centering my attention on things that are worthwhile—things that are good and within a personal realm of practicality. So I’ve been thinking a lot about attention this month: ’s post, You’re shaped by what you pay attention to, is a beautifully-written reminder that not only must we deliberately attend to that which we desire to emulate, but we are responsible for what we point at and draw others’ attention toward.

Sherry Ning

You're shaped by what you pay attention to

We have whites in our eyes because we care about what other people are looking at. The most universal symbol is the arrow (→) because of how primitive it is: the spear precedes words, alphabets, and compasses. It’s a line with a tip at one end, and it’s enough to imply “LOOK”. Its shape embodies its function—to point, to pierce, to direct. Every road sign, every cursor on a screen, every gesture of a finger uses this prehistoric grammar of attention…

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9 months ago · 817 likes · 28 comments · Sherry Ning

Also this, from …

america

James Wood draws some lessons for today’s Christians from anti-Nazi theologian Henri de Lubac. In his Plough essay, The Politics of Pagan Christianity, he argues that the church cannot operate in the “exclusive service of one or another form of civilization.”

The world, in a sense, was made for the church, because the church is the final community, that site of supernatural social life for which all were made and apart from which human nature will not be satisfied. The world belongs to her, and she remakes the human race. All other communities must find themselves in her – if they are to last. This will mean that the church will cause some unrest in the world. She will frustrate the ambitions of any and all who seek to make their fleshly identities, temporal projects, and earthly communities ultimate.

» Jonathan Pageau says Charlie Kirk’s murder was ‘disturbing, but not that disturbing.’ Why? Because “assassination culture is downstream of anti-creative culture.” Interesting to think about: are we living in a time so driven by what we’re against that the only actions available to us are acts of destruction. We are so against things that our vision is clouded by what is bad and can see nothing worth building.

» In response to Kirk’s killing and recent political upheaval, writer and journalist Lionel Shriver reminds us that “we want things to mean something but maybe they don’t” and “making it mean something might be dangerous… The only thing we have power over is how we choose to see and react to the thing.” She’s right. We have to restore personal responsibility in our conversations about acceptable political speech and behavior. My actions and words should never be predicated solely on your actions and words. “A society entirely dependent on conflicts and sides and being defined by one’s enemy makes it so that no one really has an incentive to stop.” Insightful interview with Nick Gillespie.

aesthetics

Speaking of America, (if that is his real name) has a really good read on America’s “hyper-low church aesthetics.” I enjoyed the discussion on why/how a particular aesthetic comes about and how social and religious philosophies mix to get the rules of visual appeal that we have now. It’s a good shot in the arm to the old American churches are ugly because people don’t care about beauty anymore argument. It’s not as simple as that.

Owen’s Substack

Hyper-Low American Church Aesthetics

The strip mall church: often presented online as the ultimate symbol of American Christians dropping the ball somewhere along the historical timeline. Plastic signs and conference room vibes. You can post it next to a huge gothic cathedral and say something disparaging. Everyone loves that. The font on these particular windows even looks like a Nike ad…

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9 months ago · 357 likes · 46 comments · Owen Cyclops

» On the aesthetics beat… writes about watching a personal style choice become a popular fad: the polka dot renaissance: on trend cycles ruining personal style.

absence

has an interesting take on why “secular” sci-fi stories sometimes do a better job at communicating the transcendent—it’s because they communicate its absence. I am not entirely sold on this idea. But, considering the vibe shift, with so many people becoming cognizant of a lack of meaning in their lives and finding ways to seek it out, he might be on to something.

…this principle—knowing the good by leaning into the portrayal of its opposite—is exactly where secular sci-fi is excelling.

Interesting stuff: Secular Sci-Fi and the Transcendent

asides + signal boosts

• In Compact, Helen Andrews has a cautionary examination of societal shifts that have taken place (will take place) as more women claim leading roles in judicial, political, corporate, and educational spaces. Read The Great Feminization.

• I thoroughly enjoyed ’s theatre kid Christianity. Essay of the year imo.

• All the old stories contain the truths we need today. shares why Hamlet Is the Gen Z Story We Need Right Now.

• It’s purity culture 2.0 — gets inside the “thin, fertile, and conservative” movement.

• Guys, “literally just do things” because “there will never be a perfect time,” says .

📖 Reading

• Finished The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater. Five stars, no notes. Can’t wait to continue this series.

🎞️ Watching

• Tron, Tron, and more Tron. Thanks to my wife and sister-in-law, I watched all three of the Tron movies over the past week. My (apparently) unpopular opinion is that Tron: Ares is the best of them and a genuinely good film.

🎧 Listening

• Enjoyed Doja Cat’s Vie—a surprisingly good accompaniment to a gym session.

• I’ve also been enjoying The Midnight’s Syndicate.

closing with this

I watched a video of comedian Jimmy Carr taking questions from the audience. One guy asked for help making friends as an adult. Carr, known for his brutal and inappropriate (to some) humor, had an atypically sincere piece of advice.

Stop asking what you want and start asking, ‘what do I have to offer?’ because we are all in service of our friends, partners, everyone.

I think we’d all be happier if we re-oriented our thinking around how we can serve others. The love you desire is the love you should give, etc. ✌️

I’d be remiss if I let this weekend pass without acknowledging The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’s publication on 16 October 1950—75 years ago. C.S. Lewis’ children’s fantasy novel sits in a strangely revered position: it is popular and timeless but it hasn’t yet broken its confines and become merely an “intellectual property,” twisted, over-adapted, and under-interpreted in popular culture.

At least, not yet. Maybe it’s safe, protected by a strange magic of its own. Or maybe Greta Gerwig’s currently-filming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew will change all that very soon.

Regardless, I happen to be doing my part to interpret and over-analyze the Narniad. The texts are significant to me and I use no hyperbole when I say The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe changed my life.

Six years ago, I wrote a series of essays reflecting on each of the Narnia books as I re-read them all at once. Last month, a youth pastor in Georgia sent me a long DM expressing that he had unearthed those essays and was reading them alongside his re-read of The Chronicles of Narnia.

…I stumbled onto your articles about re-reading the books. And they have been so helpful to me and so encouraging and uplifting... The Lord has really used your articles to widen my understanding of the books and give me a deeper appreciation for them and for what Jesus has done.

I have not gone back to read those original essays in a long time. But I have continued to write about Narnia—some of which you can read at the links below.

• There Are No Cruel Narnians: What The Horse and His Boy Can Tell Us About Racism, Cultural Superiority, Beauty Standards, and Inclusiveness

• Wherever I Go, That’s Where the Party’s At: Prince Corin as C.S. Lewis’ Harbinger of Joy

• Narnia Reveals the Best Kind of Nationalism

• (And I swear I’ll write The Lasaraleen Piece if it’s the last thing I do!)

Those seven original essays from 2019 are the sapling that led to my current work-in-progress, a fourteen-branch tree from which I’m sharing an excerpt below on this special occasion.

Real things and true things are not always the same. Your house is real. It’s solid; you can touch it. So are trees and the earth beneath your feet. Everything we can see and taste and touch—everything we’ve lived through—makes up our reality. But what if our reality is not all? What if here is not all there is?

Am I talking about aliens? Possibly. Life on other planets? Why not? Parallel universes? Definitely. A realm of spirits and ghosts, angels and demons? Absolutely.

A reality beyond our own is no less true simply because we have not experienced it. Our very ability to conceive of realities beyond our own is testament to the logic of such concepts. The fact that we can assume perfection, idealism, fulfilment, paradise—having not yet experienced these things—ought to tell us something. When we aren’t becoming frustrated with life in this world, we can dream of a better one.

Most of us spend our lives unattuned to the whisperings of Northernness and longing. We let the cares of this world extend their limbs around our hearts and minds, burying us in mechanics and utilitarianism. We see value only in what we do and the product of our labor. We, ourselves, become mere statistics—quantities over quality.

And, yet, not in the daylight, not in the well-lit places, not in the coffee shops and supermarkets, not on the commute to work or home, but in the quietness of dimmed bedrooms, in the afterglow of the latest Netflix episode, in the shower when the water’s gone cold and we are holed up with our fears and anxieties, we want to believe the myths. We want to believe that all the stories are true.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.1

A seed is in each of us. A question mark. And that seed is meant to flourish into a tree. The question has an answer.

Peter, Susan, and Edmund attempt to kill, in Lucy, the dream of another realm in which her little heart had already found a home. But the professor begs them to let the issue be. “We might all try minding our own business,” he says.

And if we all tried minding the business that is truly ours—not the nine-to-five or the demands of a career, not the obligations we must meet because our neighbors will look down on us if we don’t, not the obsession with what’s happening in others’ lives—if we nursed the little seed that’s worming about in our souls, we might find that longing growing larger and fiercer. Instead of quieting the natural demand for transcendent fulfilment, we might find that demand growing louder, and our attempts to satisfy that demand growing more serious and deliberate.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.2

Don’t dismiss the whispers in your soul, the forlorn bees buzzing about the hive of your heart, demanding entrance. If you desire to enter another world, turn the doorknob. Don’t be scared. We hesitate to try the door because something tells us it’s unlocked.

Now for some movie thoughts…

The past few months have been like 2007 and 2009 all over again, with Narnia movie news, casting rumors, and actual footage of actual filming taking place on location at various spots in England! Despite the rumored timeline shift, I remain optimistic that we’ll have a good Magician’s Nephew adaptation and that it will come with the groundwork for a long-standing Narnia film franchise.

I am mostly concerned about whether there is a plan in place for such a franchise. IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond seems to think Netflix is planning for as many movies as there are books. Not to get ahead of things, but what’s the plan for after The Magician’s Nephew? Is Gerwig willing to sign on to adapt another project beyond the two she’s set for? If not, will whoever takes over after her follow the same vision or go off and do their own thing?

There’s much to be revealed and November 2026 can’t get here fast enough. NarniaWeb has been doing amazing work covering developments. If you want to talk specific Narnia movie news, comments are open.

And for more Narnia…

Read my take on Greta Gerwig as a portal fantasy filmmaker here.

Read my friend ’s reflections on Narnia at 75 below.

Bigger on the Inside

What I did in Narnia, and Narnia did to me

I’m excited that I’ll be off to the C.S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference next month! I also took part in a Discarded Image reading group on YouTube recently, discussing Lewis’s book about the Medieval worldview. I’m also hosting an online Narnia book grou…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Caleb Woodbridge, Caleb Woodbridge, and Caleb Woodbridge

And ’s latest essay. (She has a good handful of writing on Narnia and Lewis which I’ve enjoyed at her substack, .)

The Undercurrent

Narnia Against the Machine

More than a century ago, C.S. Lewis witnessed the approach of the Machine. He saw it pockmark the countryside with belching factories, felt it unravel the delicate interplay of time and distance with every ringing telephone, and recognized how it warped the soul of his generation with its hollow ideologies…

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8 months ago · 39 likes · Natasha Burge

For the longest time, I have struggled to say something about London. Having the desire to say something but not knowing if the essence of that desire could be translated into words.

Flying away from the city for perhaps the sixteenth time, I think I finally have enough language. Mary Oliver helps.

Some are quick to express how much they hate London. It is loud, stuffed, filthy. There is too much traffic. It’s expensive. It’s boring. (I’m personally offended by the last accusation.)

I, on the other hand, cannot help but love the city of cities. Partly because it is loud and stuffed and filthy and expensive. London lives, a heaving, breathing metropolis. An assemblage of arteries pumping blood and thought, time and anxieties, success, poverty, and art through itself. Unremitting. Obnoxious. Unforgiving.

London hoists itself on the unbeguiled, preaching of its own existence. Unfrustrated by its annoyingness. It “turns inwardly to find a space / to stretch out in, within a space no bigger than itself.”1

Lord, direct us.

I am partial to the idea that places have souls. A lingering spiritual sense. A vibe, if you will—something that can almost be described accurately with a few choice words. (But only almost.)

I am also partial to the idea of the city in general. I like cities. I like the glut of people and flesh and commerce. I like the overflow of comedy cellars, bars, pubs, churches, theatres, cinemas, and museums. I like the buzz of a million coffee shops and university courtyards and community centers. The sense of making and doing and being in places like this is unparalleled.

I like the sheer magnetism of London. A place one might not like but can’t avoid. I, for one, never want to avoid it.

Lord, direct us.

I even like the wanness of late, late London nights. When all options are exhausted and the city blankets its tiredness around me. Tube workers regard me strangely as I descend below ground. As if I’m the weird one for wanting to go home. It is quarter to eleven.

Drunk chaps, the last ones alive among a smattering of passengers killed by exhaustion, regale the near-empty subway car with a recap of the night’s football match, arms around each other’s shoulders, swaying—“by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen!” Young women, unwilling to climb down from the highs of a night out, pop into my picture, momentarily forcing our lines into the same sonnet. We’re not lost. We’re here. Outside the station, an entrepreneur offers me a bit of weed.

Another time, after an exhibit and dinner at Tate Modern, my friend convinces me to take a later train so we can hang out in London longer. But there are no more trains. Workers are on strike. So we end up splitting an expensive Uber back to Cambridge where we parked. This is the cost of London. It takes as much as it gives.

Lord, direct us.

It is easy to be possessed by London, to be manipulated by the city. There is so much to see and do! It has waylaid me and turned me about, with its many secrets, its many opportunities, its many closed and then open doors. It screams the capability to be, in anonymity, both lost and found.

The city is caught in a Jekyll-and-Hydean paradox, a complex it enforces through a love-hate relationship with all who endure there. I’ve made friends fast and entered close conversation. Oddly, I’ve never felt alone even on solo adventures. How can I when spirits incessantly swim up from the ancient stone? There is presence in London. Among its vast grandiosity, I’ve found specifics and homeliness, so many pins on the map—marks left, places to return to.

Lord, direct us.

London is “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation.” It is a city of time reinforced by never-ending cycles, a consistent loop of tube lines, buses, trains. It is fed by and feeds on people who are similarly bound by clocks, regulation, and obligation. “Beyond all other songs,” London loves “the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.”2 Forward, forward, forward says a city overburdened by its imperial past.

London is the child it was which it isn’t anymore. Every block is rich with history. Some run to it. Some run from it. Everywhere, modernity builds on ancient anxieties. Some come to see the old stones, statues, and landmarks, and are frustrated that their own countries have few equivalents or that so much sheen and commerce has risen up or that so many other people have come to see the same stuff.

Despite its burden, London remains eternally adolescent. It leans into the future, sometimes dragged by change, the ball in a brawly rugby match of diverse and competing sociopolitical contingents. A city of bright lights and youth and innovation. A city of age and decay and decadence. Frustratingly fast. Frustratingly slow. Such is progress.

Domine dirige nos.

These braindumps are an opportunity for me to pump my personal brakes.

down the disenchanting rabbit hole

The straight line has become a horseshoe, and the growing conversation about the need to re-enchant the world (and/or ourselves) has doubled-back on itself and pointed an accusatory finger. There is nothing quite wrong with the natural world—only something wrong with our perception of it. And also, maybe we’re over-obsessing about re-enchantment anyway. These conversations kept finding their way to me this month.

First, there was Plough’s new edition themed around The Supernatural. , surprisingly, has an essay Against Re-Enchantment which I eagerly read.

By attempting to re-enchant the world, we underscore the sense of distance between ourselves (the ones doing the re-enchanting) and the world (that which will be enchanted). By putting ourselves in the posture of a consumer who demands enchantment from the world as a spiritual solace in draining time, or even a wizard who re-enchants it, we inscribe into the world the alienation we seek to escape.

I’ve been a fan of the Re-Enchantment-Industrial Complex—read my take on (some of) it here. But I’ve also been wary of the idea that we can force it. That there is a Thing or Things we can do to make it so. By trying too hard, are we missing the point?

Then there was this episode of the Mere Fidelity podcast: “Are We Disenchanted? Should We Be Enchanted?” Derek Rishmawy, , Joseph Minich, and Brad East play around with the idea that, although much of the “Re-enchant or Die” conversation takes place in Christian circles, Christianity itself is quite the culprit in getting us to this disenchanted state. “Disenchantment” is downstream of Christianity. (There’s a follow-up episode, Two Cheers for Modernity, that I’m listening to now and is equally beneficial/insightful.)

I eagerly look forward to getting into new/upcoming books by (Against the Machine), (Merlin’s Isle), and (Living in Wonder)2—all aimed, in one way or another, at figuring out how to recapture this state of enchantment both for ourselves and the world. But, again, if we aim at it so much, are we missing it altogether?

Re-reading Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl right now, and this passage, long ago highlighted, jumped out as appropriate:

Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortune-teller with a foot-peddle Ouija board and a gold fishbowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stink cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their place in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.

Speaking of enchantment though: ’s review/attempt-to-convince-people-to-read-Piranesi, has me yearning to re-read one of the three copies of the book I’ve somehow come to own.

pop gets spoken for

Wildly shifting gears! This is the kind of culture commentary that I live for. observes that four of pop music’s biggest stars—Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, and Taylor Swift—all in their thirties (and wealthy and successful beyond imagination) have, this year, either gotten engaged or married. (Ditto Selena Gomez, so that makes five.)

Once advocates for possibility, freedom, and the limitless self, they have chosen exclusivity, commitment, constraint, and someone else.

What does this mean for the music? Her piece, Pop Enters Its Wife Era, dispenses with predictable garbage takes from ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum (equally incapable of seeing anything outside their limited scopes), and centers on the themes of the past few decades of pop and how they might be on the verge of change.

We might not get a new breakup anthem, but as an unapologetic romantic, I hope we get something better…

Selfless love and sacrifice are underexplored ideas in today’s artistic landscape. In marriage, you’re bound to experience a lot of both. There is nothing more beautiful or profoundly affecting than witnessing someone pour their heart out for someone else.

Yes and amen.

fools rush in…

I’ve written before about being compelled into silence and into wonder. This past month has made me think that, just as often, we ought to be compelled into silence and into terror. Predictably, following Charlie Kirk’s tragic and public murder, the discourse filled and filled at a volume and scale I don’t think we’ve witnessed the past few years. At least from my insignificant vantage, it seemed like the discourse invaded and persisted in spaces where such affairs barely garner a blip.

Something is happening. What? I don’t know. Political throughlines may align in predictable ways. Other short-term evaluations may fade into insignificance. Time will tell. Or maybe it won’t.

In the meantime, I feel we’d all do well to sit in terror. Silently. Struck by the awfulness of now, the blood-dimmed tide released anew upon the world, and the potential awfulness of the future. (What does it mean?) Some things I read from and helped me do that.

New Grub Street

The value of holy hesitation

Perhaps it is a product of my childhood in Northern Ireland, but I have never been great at picking sides. From as long as I could think critically for myself, coming down in favour of one party or another always felt tough. This was further complicated by my study of the liberal arts at university, where dogmatism was discouraged in favour of careful l…

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9 months ago · 39 likes · 16 comments · Andrew Roycroft

Every Day Saints

Vengeance is Mine

My morning is two parts Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, two parts insomnia, and a splash of hope that there’ll be some quiet before the kids wake. Bottoms up…

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9 months ago · 342 likes · 72 comments · Josh Nadeau

Also, William Butler Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

empty sophistication

I thoroughly enjoyed a piece by Travis Alexander in Liberties journal, Apology for Decadence: Pleasures of Empire at World’s End. His argument, if I dare summarize it, is that “American decadence,” reaching its zenith in the 90s, was essentially a front of sophistication that served as “aesthetic and intellectual discrimination” as well as “collective taste-making.” It enforced a mono-culture, a shared belief system (if one can call it that) with no real, hard beliefs behind it, thus making it unharmful and unsusceptible to authoritarianism. “American decadence” (aka sophistication) might be the harmless good we’re missing, culturally, at the present.

As political theorists and psychoanalysts agree, the human mind might well be hard wired to believe in something, to valorize or heroize some decisive and positively-articulated system of value…

[T]he advantage of sophistication as a placeholder for such a noble lie is that it is at once concrete, coherent, and commanding enough to satisfy that need and still so self-defeatingly ambiguous as to keep that system of belief from metastasizing into a hard cultural authoritarianism.

It’s a fresh, interesting take. But I wonder if the point of such a belief system being the appearance of a sophistication in which everyone participates eventually proves too thin. The scales will fall off and the restless will wriggle out of it.

asides + signal boosts

• In Liberties, I also read James Livingston’s piece examining two recent music-centered films, Sinners and A Complete Unknown, that tell political stories.

• Time is Always Time: Christopher Nolan, T. S. Eliot, and Creatureliness, by in Mere Orthodoxy.

• , brainchild of and produced partly by yours truly, has launched a crowdfunder for season 2. The season aims to continue showcasing British creatives pursuing both their art and their relationship with Jesus. Check out Season 1 here. Support the crowdfunding effort here. There are rewards!

📖 Reading

• Finished The Great Gatsby, and I’m honestly kind of drifting between what to pick up next—a re-read or something fresh? I am, unfortunately, not devoid of options. I’ll probably pick something out of left field just to get the gears going again.

🎞️ Watching

• The 2013 Great Gatsby film adaptation. It wasn’t bad. Joel Edgerton greatly improved Tom’s character. Overall, the vibe of the film was less classical moodiness and arch faux intellectual passion (as the book is) and more cheap, affected glitz.

• Finished Umbrella Academy: Season 4.

• HIM: Jordan Peele’s latest production is, stylistically, a feast. Aesthetically earnest—maybe this would not be surprising if I watched more horror—but the obvious, sometimes overwrought, intentionality made me happy. You aren’t drawing the lines quite right because the lines are supposed to be invisible. But somehow seeing the lines is making me happy. It legit had me grinning at times. And it has one of the best training montages ever. Thanks to the main character’s head injury very early on in the story, some weird culty segments blur between what’s real and what he’s imagining. And there’s a weird timeline thing going on that I might need to get straight with a re-watch. It is not the best film. The middle, in places, is uneven and thematic disonnance occurs. But it has a strong ending sequence that pulls out of all that mire into a bold, clarifying vision. Plus, all the evil, scheming, downside-up bastards die in a grotesque blood-fest. Which made me incredibly happy. My soul needed that this week.

🎧 Listening

• Hadn’t listened to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Dunkirk since seeing the movie, but I did last week and it’s gorgeous!

• The new Purity Ring album, purity ring—dark nights, dreamscapes, and bright stars. ✨

• Derek Minor’s new album, Vigilante. An attempt at (return to?) cinematic music-making. It’s not a collection of singles but an album meant to be listened to beginning-to-end. He talks about that in this episode of the Relevant podcast.

  

Finishing the third of these in a row with another gorgeous Purity Ring music video!

I’ve been blacking out, but I will come back changed
You recall the soul, and I’ll recall the body

This is what the movies didn’t tell me about death.

The movies didn’t tell me about phone calls to funeral homes or flipping through catalogs of caskets—oak, walnut, mahogany, biodegradable. At the time, I told myself this activity mattered. For her. Perhaps, deep down, I knew already it mattered only for us, the living.

The movies didn’t tell me about sitting in a plush conference room with the people closest to me in the world, trying to choose between colors and casket corners. Pietàs, crosses, praying hands, sacred hearts. We went with dragons.

They didn’t show me careful, earnest funeral directors, eager to please, to sell their services, to sign a client.

But not too eager. Someone died, you know.

The movies didn’t tell me about joking with the funeral home director who looked exactly like the sort of person you would cast as the funeral home director in a horror film.

They didn’t tell me about designing a funeral program or sending invites or deciding who will speak, and who will read Scripture, and who will pray, and in what order. They didn’t tell me about the intense possessiveness I would feel over someone I could no longer have and hold.

(At that point, you are just wedded to Death and working hand-in-hand. There is nothing but the all-consuming reality. With every invite to the service, every keystroke and conversation, you are saying, “She is dead. She is dead. She is dead.”)

The movies didn’t tell me about the sterile, forced comfort of the organ donation center. Or the representative who parades you by a “wall of heroes”—the unfortunate dead whose organs live on in other men, women, and children. They didn’t tell me I wouldn’t give a fuck about that wall or those “heroes” or organ donations because, if I could turn back time, I would.

The movies didn’t tell me that I’d inescapably watch myself do things because they were necessary.

Or that I would be separate from myself.

Or that noise would be silence.

Or that weight would be nothing.

Or about the ineffable waning of the day and the fear that there is another day, just like it, following behind and following behind and following behind. But only for some.

Others have run out of days.

And you must go on, because you cannot go the same way. Even though you will. Eventually.

(You must not cause another rip in the fabric. Not now. You must not deliberately drown the halls and invite the Dark Waters in.)

No film told me of the guilt I would feel the first time I laughed after Death passed over us and lingered still. How dare I? Is this what it is like to know darkness and light?

The movies never communicated the shock of saying her name in prayer as though she were still living. Sometimes, the brain wants to cheat on Death.

The movies did not tell me how my tongue would tie over whether to say “she is” or “she was.” Or about the mental break that occurs whenever I say to someone, “I have six siblings.” Do I? Should I specify who I have and who I had? “I cannot share one of them with you now.”

(You do not think about these things until you are asked.)

The movies do not tell you how you will desire silence and yet abhor it.

This silence is heavy with all the gods and all the angels and all the hosts of the past staring down at you impassably. Whether they abide in heaven or hell, they are all staring down. You are unenvied. They do not hear your screams or your cries or your prayers.

Death, to whom you are married, does not reason.

You sit in silence, and you hate it. The silence is too loud. You blast music to drown it out. And it does not satisfy.

The movies did not tell me this.

This time a year ago, my family sat in death’s yawning valley. I never imagined thoughts like this would come so soon. My sister graced our lives with her presence and was gone.

Here’s to August’s abundance! 🍻

reconstruction

In the week leading up to Lecrae’s twelfth album release last Friday, I went back to the beginning—back to Real Talk from 2004—and listened to everything, including the Church Clothes mixtapes. Over twenty years of music, crammed into just a few days. I rejoiced, as I often have, over his immense and consistent creativity. In his earliest work, there was always the promise of what was to come. While lyrics, tenor, and tone shifted, improved, and evolved, the fire in the soul of the music never left.

I’m impressed. I don’t think I’ve followed an artist’s journey as closely as I’ve followed Lecrae’s (who often feels like a big brother to me). His faithfulness to the craft and the responsible and honest expression of his journey through art is admirable at a time where it seems like artist crash-outs over controversy, life drama, and conflict are the norm. (IYKYK) It’s a blessing to see how he is giving back now, helping younger artists, and continuing to paint a bigger picture around the art.

In honor of that, here are some of my new favorite old Lecrae tracks.

not to talk about myself by talking about someone else, but

dropped a gorgeous piece about being a person, determinedly becoming who we feel we are, and doing so publicly because expression of self is part of the wholeness of being human. It demands to be reread and pondered.

Every idea that obsesses me…comes not from theoretical speculation but from that same impulse that led me to Wilde in the first place: a desire for my life to be both a meaningful unity, in the sense of its philosophical and theological and vocational and artistic and relational and aesthetic components all serving a single function, and to be something both legible to myself and communicable to others.

...it’s an innately human thing, or maybe even an innately creaturely thing, to feel that there is something inchoate about ourselves that we have to express or it will kill us, in the various languages (clothing, touch, dance, words) that make up the lattice of communications in the world.

Essay of the year imo. self-creation! social creature! (s)caroline calloway!

soul, say something

The Cracker Barrel controversy had been brewing for months, but it hit the fan with the reveal of a new logo on August 19th. The bland, ugly, boring, flat, characterless design was part and parcel of a chain revamp that the CEO claimed was getting “overwhelmingly positive” reviews. Clearly, she hadn’t been spending any time on social media. (Which, good on her, we love healthy internet habits.)

In an appearance on Good Morning America, CEO Julie Felss Masino argued that “the soul of Cracker Barrel is not changing.” Which is the problem! We can’t see souls! We need symbols that communicate what the heart of a thing is. And the new symbol communicated vacuity and nothingness.

After much ridicule, they restored the old logo, and perhaps some of the old soul. (Read the comments on that link; you will thank me.)

I am far more interested in what drove criticism of the store and logo redesign than what these few paragraphs will give off. (People, of course, revolt whenever they feel like something “traditional” is being taken away, regardless of its valence.) gets the “soulless” part correct but then breaks it down into left-wing vs. right-wing thought processes. From my own perambulating through the internet, I saw next to noone outside of the CEO defending the redesign. Did liberal/left-wing ideology drive the effort to modernize Cracker Barrel? Possibly, in a subconscious, uninterrogated kind of way. But modernization in and of itself is not a bad thing. Other corporations have managed to modernize and rebrand without jettisoning their customers or their souls. (Well, the soul part can be debatable sometimes, but at least they didn’t damage their pocketbooks.) Was Masino trying to destroy Cracker Barrel because she thinks it’s too conservative-coded? Of course not. Did she misunderstand her customer base (or the people who claim to care about Cracker Barrel’s logo all of a sudden)? Definitely.

Defining such corporate-cultural interactions in strictly political-ideological terms is a heavy lift. One runs the risk of just appearing as though they’re complaining because everything isn’t white, male, and Christian anymore, which talks about in this episode of the Honestly podcast. (Give that a listen.) What represents “heritage America” is different for different groups of Americans. (On that note, ’ latest TGIF news summary has some excellent commentary related to this. Shoutout .) We can all agree that the new logo was yucky, but I haven’t thought about America and Cracker Barrel in the same sentence until this past month.

The fallout of the attempted redesign is proof of a lack of vision generally for the world now and the world tomorrow. Being modern or progressive for their own sake and not in accordance with any higher order. (Not a uniquely American problem; something’s in the water.) The new design is rightly perceived as soulless because it embodies nothing—it says nothing. It’s a symbol without referent. The culture is becoming more sensitive to that. Even if the retro Cracker Barrel aesthetic suggests racial segregation, that’s at least something.

Narnia, awake!

Greta Gerwig might just be the new queen of Narnia. The steady stream of Narnia movie-making news coming out of England this month has been so exciting. (I am keeping some thoughts and words to myself.) NarniaWeb.com is doing excellent work keeping fans informed of all the happenings. They’ve got this excellent roundup of everything Greta Gerwig has said about Narnia, including the below. And also check out why Aslan will not be changed into a lioness (because that would be silly).

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books are something that I’ve loved since I was a child. I would say the two big books of my childhood were Little Women and the Narnia books. So I had that instant excitement, but instant terror that comes from trying to tackle something that has shaped me. I want to make it feel like magic… I’m interested in embracing the paradox of the worlds that Lewis created, because that’s what’s so compelling about them.

swimming in a sea of orange

What seems like yesterday, Taylor Swift announced the impending release of her 12th album, Life of a Showgirl. (I’m looking forward to listening to all her previous music between now and October 3.)

There’s an absolute undeniability to Swift’s cultural power. And with great power comes great responsibility. Or so some would have it.

I’m loathe to endorse the idea that an artist with a platform is under some moral imperative to use said platform for a social or political good as suggests in Taylor Swift V Sally Rooney. The same week that Swift announced her album, Rooney, a bestselling Irish novelist, penned an op-ed condemning the British government’s labeling of a pro-Palestinian activist network as a “terrorist organization,” making it a crime to be a member thereof. Rooney declared that she would go on supporting the group and invited the UK government to investigate such “shady organizations” as the bookstore chain WH Smith and the BBC which, respectively, sell her books and adapt them for TV.

Says Pengelly:

I would argue that the crucial difference between Rooney and Swift is the degree to which they possess a moral imagination. Rooney’s work and ‘interventions’ demonstrate a consistent moral framework which underpins her thinking and actions.

Swift’s work and public interventions do not demonstrate even a fraction of Rooney’s humanitarian impulses. At a moment in time in which Swift could arguably change the course of America’s foreign policy by mobilising her ‘Swifties’ - she chooses to channel her audience’s energy towards her merch store.

Is ‘Swift’s failure to utilise her platform [for geo/political manipulation] undermining her artistic legacy’? Hmm. I’ll offer this…

• I can’t think of an artist of yesteryear with comparable platform to Swift whom we revere primarily for their public posture on social, political, or humanitarian issues. It’s their art that earns them their place in society’s flattering halls. Never have I assessed the value of an entertainer based on whether they were on “the right side of history.” But I guess people do that.

• Don’t we deserve sanctuaries from sociopolitical wrangling? The cinema, the theatre, the stadium, the nightclub… places where everyone who wants to can feel welcome, can escape, can be enraptured, regardless of political creed. Of course, some would say everything is political. Even the act of being apolitical is political.

Maybe we should just go back to the days when people didn’t have platforms.

Or, maybe… Taylor Swift’s “moral imagination” has been hyperfocused on finding true love, and what’s wrong with that?

Between the time I wrote the above and the time you’re reading it, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged. (If this is where you’re first hearing about it, congratulations on being sufficiently disconnected.) If we think Life of a Showgirl is going to be a fire album—and it will be—the next album with Taylor’s meditations on marriage and (dare we hope) motherhood is going to be spectacular.

Some have remarked that the Swift-Kelce wedding is going to be the closest thing Americans get to a royal wedding. That has restirred some thoughts on why I think royalty can serve a positive symbolic purpose in a society. (Yes, I know it’s politically incorrect to say royalty is good these days.) Maybe I’ll write about that as I wait impatiently for my TTPD ring to arrive.

what if AI worships us?

It pissed me off this month when Google—Google, not the corporation, but the programming in my phone—wished me a happy birthday. To be fair, it irritates me every year. I don’t need an inanimate object, a machine intelligence, pretending to be human. It’s icky.

In a recent Real Time segment, Bill Maher floats the idea that maybe AI becoming our super-intelligent lord and master is a misdirection. Maybe, it’s the other way around: we’ll be flattered by AI and other forms of machine intelligence. He notes the self-congratulatory schtick of much of our programming and ties it to our seeming societal development of the need to be ever-praised, patted on the back, and pushed along with a panacea of encouragement. The bar is so low that we accept this encouragement from our smartwatches, washing machines, and GPS apps. It’s a thought: the machines, at least some of them, are being made to worship us.

• Highlighting here: who writes and, generally, has a more balanced take on AI than most.

asides + signal boosts

• @winnie_thepooj’s urban/hipster coffee shop skits are the liberal millennial equivalent of — either you get it (and I think everyone gets it) or you don’t, and it’s so good.

• ’s terrifying rumination that Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives is a desperate truth that needs to be shouted from rooftops. As for me, I’ll probably print some of those prayers and post them somewhere I can see them regularly.

• Straight lines and hard angles are not all bad, but the circle has a power within it that needs to be reclaimed says in The Importance of Counter-Clockwise Dance Rituals.

• Are swear words going away? Probably not, but the overuse of them means they increasingly lack power. David Mamet writes on that and other interesting aspects of linguistics in Back When We Gave a Fuck.

  • “The speech of the American middle class is largely the attempt to impress, obfuscate, or placate. That of the streets is, in my experience, to express.”

  • “Had he possessed either power or a plan, the phrase might have been a warning—as it is on the streets. In fact, it was merely the unfortunate mewing of the reduced.”

asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Back on The Great Gatsby. Reading it more for the style than the plot at this point.

• Batman: The Killing Joke and Other Stories (1987-89)

🎞️ Watching

• KPop Demon Hunters. I would not have seen this, despite ’s enthusiasm, without the theater release. I loved it. It’s good indoctrination. Nice, mostly original (from a genpop perspective). Interested in the irony of the cultural obsession considering the plot.

🎧 Listening

• Propaganda’s new spoken-word album, The Beautiful Ending.

• Purity Ring is killing it with the single releases. They dropped imanocean last week, which I will plug at the end of this post. So hyped for the new album.

Good luck and godspeed in September!