You can have your mental house in perfect order--your little models ready to go so you can survive the day, yet keeping them more flexible than a drunken contortionist--but then a left-hemispheric will come along and try to shove bullshit down your throat.

These little fascists become as obvious as an orc at an elf convention once you learn to recognize them. He’s the pontificating goblin three tables over at the restaurant, the rat-face who makes every office meeting feel like there’s a steel clamp on your privates, the Uruk with a bullhorn on the street corner, the glamhoth who blocks your morning commute because it’s angry about the weather. These “Snaga” (black speech: slave) of the left hemisphere are so awful, you don’t know whether to pity them or to put them out of their (and everyone else’s) misery.

These foul folk suck, but they don’t have much power. Unfortunately, too many of their mental kin in government capitals do.

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All legislation is built with the bricks provided by experts. Experts say this pile of bricks will fix problems A, B, and C, then the politicians try to fashion those bricks into some sort of model legislation to fix the problems.

But those bricks are like the collateralized debt obligations that crashed the economy in 2008: just a bunch of bullshit bricks built into a palace of bullshit.

Experts concoct, cultivate, and cherish concepts. They’re guilty, as William James might have put it, of “concept-worship,” and they use concepts to build their models.

As explained last week, the models aren’t real. They’re bullshit. But the expert thinks they’re as real as Plato’s agathon, and he feels comfortable — aye, morally compelled — to share the models with the rest of us; and if we don’t share his taste for bullshit, he’s inclined to shove the bullshit down our throats.

The average person intuits that there’s a pretty big gap between models and reality, or at least has a sense of existential humility that intuitively prevents him from elevating his models into something worship-worthy.

Experts, in thrall to the power of their rational faculties, lack such intuitions.

Even when someone like Nassim Taleb comes along and painstakingly shows how the gap between expert models and reality tends to be wider than the gap between fashion models’ beauty and their real looks, the experts cling to the models. If you’ve ever suffered a collapse upon seeing your favorite pinup girl with no makeup, airbrushing, or shapewear, you know whereof Taleb speaks, but the experts’ enthusiasm for their models– sustained by the Viagra of their own Rationality– never collapses. Four hours is nothing for the expert. Try four decades or, in someone like Bertrand Russell’s case, eight decades.

My friend didn’t get a promotion at work because his employer needed to promote a less-qualified woman or risk a federal civil rights lawsuit. My friend told his boss, “That’s bullshit,” and the boss replied, “Yup, but it’s real bullshit.” The boss might as well have added, “And you have to eat it.”

If you could capture the energy from the left hemisphere’s kicks to our collective crotch, Saudi Arabia’s economy would collapse into its nomadic goat-lovin’ ways and we’d stop sacrificing millions of birds on the altars of wind turbines. The energetic fury alone from my friend after being forced to eat this bullshit could’ve powered a small village for a week.

Legislation–from building codes to civil rights laws—is nothing less than a model: a model of how politicians think things should be. The regulations and policy directives that then emanate from legislation ooze more bullshit than a cattle CAFO.

I’m not saying we don’t need laws. I’m just saying it’s helpful to keep in mind that all legislation is based on a model and so all legislation is bullshit, and the bigger the piece of legislation, the more bullshit. It doesn’t matter what political party is involved. The bullshit is unavoidable: all legislation is a model so the bullshit comes with it.

Every law is like an active volcano, but instead of lava, it has bullshit. The bullshit is always there. Even if it’s just oozing unnoticeably, it’s coming down that mountain. And sometimes, the thing downright erupts, spraying lavic bullshit over everyone.

The less that happens, the better.

You don’t need to wrap your head around that any more than you need to wrap your head around the WNBA participation guidelines. Just memorize this formula: Ideas + Theories + Explanations + Models = Bullshit.

No, that’s not an exaggeration. An exaggeration is your high school Freshman Seminar teacher telling you that a few cans of Schlitz so inexorably lead to Schnapps, vodka, cocaine, the gutter, and miserable poverty that you might as well go to the boys’ restroom now and monetize a glory hole.

My formula, OTOH, is no exaggeration, as long as we take the joyless effort to define “bullshit.”

“Bullshit” here means unreal reality.

Unicorns are bullshit. They’re real because we know about them and could easily identify one if it came ambling in front of our car while we’re driving 65 mph and are now freaking out because the Canadian shaman gave us too much. But it’s unreal because, well, unicorns don’t exist and never have.

Unicorns and models are bullshit, but we need models: they mold our day and shape our lives. So our left hemisphere cranks them out at a pace that would’ve kept Henry Ford pumped for way more than four hours.

When we grab a handful of platitudinous cliches and try to mold our lives around them, we make models. When we envision the perfect vacation or Christmas gathering, we make models.

Even that most pedestrian thing--planning our day--involves model-building. With the model in one hand and our itinerary in the other, we lumber out the door to greet and beat the day.

The problem is, the models never work. The cliché “Just do it” has an entirely different connotation for the enthusiastic gay couple in the apartment next to you, the bastard airline bumps you from your flight, and the exigencies of daily life use our itinerary to wipe with.

And so we adapt: we flush the itinerary, we get a motel room at the airport to await the next plane, we get Bose noise-cancelling headphones. With effort, we gain a measure of resignation and contentment, just thinking about how much more unpleasant things could be if we had, say, a pit bull latched onto our privates or had to share the motel room with Lizzo.

We, in other words, detach our minds from the model and accept the reality, in full, including its blessings. Things are fine. Not model great, but good enough.

My young friend got a job as a waiter. He became so obsessed with creating an (unrequested) efficiency spreadsheet for the restaurant that he neglected the customers at his tables.

“Waiter, could I get some more water?”

“Just a sec. I need to figure out this cell formula and I’m in the middle of talking with the Excel chatbot.”

The restaurant fired him.

That spreadsheet—a model—took precedence in his mind over the real customers right in front of him.

We all have that tendency. It’s so ingrained in human nature, one of the leading spiritual lights of the twentieth century, Francis Fernandez, identified my young friends’ restaurant customers as a “cross”:

“[W]e will normally find the Cross each day in the sort of petty annoyances that may occur at work . . . It may be something unexpected . . . plans perhaps that have to be changed at the last minute . . .”.

Accepting that your model isn’t quite real, casting it aside, allowing reality to control. Those things--beating down the left hemisphere--are crosses in the Catholic worldview.

If you’re into this whole hemisphere hypothesis thing, it’s quite fascinating, but that’s not my focus here. My focus here is to point that we all need to revise, rebuild, and reject our models relentlessly as we discover they don’t fit reality.

If, in other words, we want to lead a sane life.

And Francis Fernandez is right: it’s hard . . . it’s a cross.

And it’s made even harder by those around us who have zero clue that their models are ultimately bullshit and insist on cramming them down our throats, even as evidence mounts that they’re more unicornish than the most fantastical equine novel.

I’ll address the problem of those left-hemisphere captives later.

The arena?

Books.

The left hemisphere is shredding 'em and the right hemisphere is cherishing 'em.

The left hemisphere is dominating, making the fight look more like a Joey Kocur and Jim Kyte fight, but the right ain't giving up.

The act of reading engages both hemispheres. The skill of abstraction fostered by reading is a left-hemispheric thing, but the calm detachment required for reflective reading is a right-hemispheric thing. Maybe I’m a romantic, but I think that’s what makes reading beautiful: the left hemisphere forms abstractions for the right hemisphere to reflect upon, and the R.H. then feeds its reflections back to the L.H. for more work, and on and on.

But a rogue left hemisphere doesn’t like to play nicely. For the L.H., reading is a tool and a weapon. It makes a person better, which allows him to succeed in life. The more books he can devour, the better his chances of success, unless maybe it’s poetry, which is only good for quoting to chicks so he can get laid.

So what do you get when you combine books with AI, that ultimate left-hemispheric machine?

Book shredding.

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AI giants are buying millions of books, ripping off the spines, scanning them, and discarding the remains. But don’t worry, they aren’t destroying old or collector editions. They’re just ravishing young maidens and then returning them to us in a more broken-in, usable, medium.

And they aren’t ravishing babies. They want ‘em at least five years old, born before 2022, because that’s when AI started pissing in the literary water by cranking out AI prose. AI doesn’t want to drink that nasty stuff. It’ll make it, but it won’t drink it. It wants pristine writing.

It’s frustrating because no one can explain why it matters. A recent article that excoriated the practice couldn’t identify the problem. It just said the practice of destroying millions of books is “non-ethical,” triggers something “visceral,” treats art as an expendable commodity, hits a “nerve,” and “strikes at the heart of something sentimental in most people.”

Amen to all that. I’d also add that there’s something “tactile” about reading that makes shredding books an act of violence against the sacramental reality of our existence.

But all those nickel reasons won’t buy you an $8 coffee at Starbucks.

So I’ll explain why it’s wrong.

There are some things you just don’t do. You don’t pull the mask off the Lone Ranger, bed your step-daughter no matter how mature or hot, or tear stuff apart for no good reason or, in AI’s case, for sacrificing to Moloch. Such things land you in Hell, as Giacomo da Saint’Andrea found out after Dante shoved him into the Seventh Circle.

Guerrilla Resistance from the Right Hemisphere

While the left hemisphere is riding AI to raze western civilization, right-hemispheric guerrilla operations are springing up and hunkering down to offer a measure of resistance. They’re tiny efforts, inconsequential really, but quixotic in all the best ways and filled with hope.

The Free Press

Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town?

“I love Poe!” a teenage girl exclaimed, racing toward a shelf of Edgar Allan Poe volumes. I was sitting in BookMarx, a small independent bookstore in Ohio, when she burst through the door, a weathered-looking elderly woman trailing behind her…

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a month ago · 220 likes · 180 comments · Will Bardenwerper

Steubenville is awful. I’ve been to nicer dump sites. I was stunned to read that, as recently as the 1970s, its downtown was thriving with multiple furniture stores and movie theaters. I would’ve thought the decay that is downtown Steubenville took at least 500 years.

But through the smoke and the dust of this left-hemisphere-made hell, Big John has arrived. John Kuhner: Princeton grad, eccentric, husband of a trad wife (I’m guessing), devout Catholic, and owner of BookMarx.

He’s working with corpses (books) in a graveyard (Steubenville) and trying to revive both.

Don Quixote beams and the left hemisphere scoffs, but this essay makes it clear: Big John is doing something illogical, and that’s what makes the effort great.

There are many such bookstores sprouting up or reviving. I stumbled into one last June, and it was the highlight of my summer. Catholic ones have popped up. Link and Link. If you come across one, I beg you: patronize it. It doesn’t take much. Big John says that, if every person in Steubenville’s dwindled population spent just $5 downtown annually, every business owner could make a comfortable living.

I have one quibble with that essay: It doesn’t mention Franciscan University. That’s like marveling at Indiana football’s stunning rise and not mentioning Curt Cignetti. Most of the folks who are buying tickets to the annual Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice Regency Ball, attending author events, and joining hobbit circle dances at BookMarx aren’t coming from Steubenville’s housing projects. They’re coming from Franciscan University and its satellites.

It’s those glorious nerds who might, just might, save us from this left-hemispheric swamp that AI wants to drown us in.

That anonymous 19th-century Russian pilgrim said the Jesus Prayer made him drowsy. So an elder told him to say it 3,000 times every day. Exactly 3,000 times: not a jot more nor a jit less. And he had to say it with a prayer rope and orally– quietly, not barking 3,000 times a day like St. Homeless Dude verbally accosting anyone in the vicinity of his frenetic pacing.

The Pilgrim tried it and told the elder it seemed to be working. His elder took it up a notch: 6,000 times every day.

It went well.

So the elder doubled it again: 12,000 times.

Within five days, the Prayer had sci-fi-like descended into the Pilgrim’s chest and was saying itself in calibration with his heartbeat. The elder then died; the Pilgrim finished his summer of farm labor, took his wages--two rubles and a rucksack of supplies--and wandered around Russia, talking peacefully and kindly with the people he met, the Prayer beating in his heart without effort.

I was so smitten with The Candid Narrations of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father back in the 1990s, I grabbed my rosary and gave it a shot: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 3,000 times every day. Or maybe I jumped right in at 12,000. I can’t remember.

The problem is, I’m a guy who can form an unhealthy fixation on just about anything--just ask my high school sweetheart, who decades later keeps renewing that restraining order even though we never even went out on a date. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, while driving through downtown Detroit traffic on my way to a deposition, I got the rosary chain wrapped in the crevice of my steering wheel and yanked it out with a furious “f***!,” snapping the cord and spraying beads all over. And I was already at prayer number 2,824,

That killed my Russian Pilgrim phase.

But the prospect of a good, mellow Jesus Prayer beating in my heart? That ideal– and sporadic practice--never left me.

It takes me three seconds to say it. During Covid, I made myself wash my hands for five Jesus Prayers, per St. Fauci’s instructions. At good moments, I say a Jesus Prayer before letting myself gnash against the scores of injustices that afflict poor, pitiful, oppressed me throughout the day.

I once asked my own elder for advice about the Prayer. Sharif Younes at OptimalWork told me to incorporate it into mindfulness meditation. In-breath: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God. Out-breath: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

I think it works. I can kinda feel the prayer synchronizing with my heart like the Pilgrim described, at least during the mindfulness session. And it ain’t taking 12,000 ejaculations (easy there, guys: that’s the technical term).

Mother Natalia says she does a similar thing, but she really slows it down: In-breath: Lord Jesus Christ. Out-breath: Son of God. In-breath: Have mercy on me. Out-breath: a sinner.

Mantra-like use of the Jesus Prayer is an act of immersing the intellect in the heart, said Lev Gillet, that strange cenobitic hybrid of Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism who wrote under the name, “A Monk of the Eastern Church.”

“Immersing the intellect in the heart.”

I’m pretty sure that’s another way of saying, “Hog-tying your left hemisphere and delivering it buck-naked on a spit to the right hemisphere.”

I’ve long maintained that mindfulness meditation is one of the most intense exercises available to fight against our rogue left hemispheres. The Jesus Prayer is mindfulness meditation with a Christian kicker, making it a great way for a Catholic to do hand-to-hand with the LH.

This makes the Jesus Prayer a type of counter-conduct, which in turn helps a person flourish.

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Paul told the Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. Never stop.

It was just inspirational hyperbole, right? Like telling a mathematically-challenged player to “give 110%”?

It’s hard to say. Aquinas said it depends on what you mean by “praying.” If “prayer” means being on your knees or prostrate, Paul was engaged in inspirational hyperbole. We have shit to do. We can’t beat that red light or beat someone’s ass for headphone dodging if we’re lying on our stomachs with our faces scrunched into the carpet all the time.

But what if prayer means--or maybe just includes--keeping the left hemisphere in check?

It then becomes possible--even necessary, as Paul’s injunction implies.

If St. Paul were here today, with the benefit of St. Iain, I’m sure he’d agree: “Pray without ceasing” means “keeping your left hemisphere from ruining your mental life . . . without ceasing.”

Given how robust the left hemisphere has become circa 2026, the advice to say 12,000 Jesus Prayers every day doesn’t sound too extreme.

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When you bump into a friend on vacation, it’s a coincidence.

When the Jewish prose whiz Sam Kriss and the Catholic pontifical whiz Leo both publish lengthy exegeses about AI on the same day, it’s a coincidence on steroids.

And when Pope Leo then refers (repeatedly) to AI as the “Tower of Babel” and Kriss offers extensive examples of AI’s incoherent prose, it’s gotta be divine intervention.

You thinkin’ there’s no way Leo would condone Kriss coming to your house and killing you for using AI to write your stuff?

Well, you’d probably be right.

But Leo and Kriss are fellow-travelers, make no doubt about it. They express themselves differently: Kriss, rabidly, to a fault; Leo, mildly, to a fault.

Me, I prefer Kriss’ rabid approach: I know he’s going full-on screed to make a point, and I’m (pretty) sure he’s not really going to kill half the “writers” on Substack.

Leo’s encyclical is good, but his style is too mild for what he clearly believes is an existential threat. When there’s a fire, you scream it, not gently beseech the lambs.

Leo takes aim at the digital oligarchy and even implicitly channels that Catholic convert and daily communicant Marshall McLuhan, who relentlessly pointed out that technology has effects regardless of its content. “The medium is the message,” said McLuhan. If you said technology is neutral and just depends on its content, McLuhan would’ve come to your house and killed you, maybe even f’ing killed you.

Leo nods: AI is not morally neutral. AI, he points out, cloaks itself in the characteristics of those who control and use it. The digital oligarchy wants us to think smartphones are neutral (you can use them to watch porn or to read papal encyclicals . . . you make the moral call), but the oligarchs know that’s specious. The phones themselves are the message, and the message is, “We own you, you idiotic consumer.”

And the message of AI is even clearer: “We will destroy you, you idiotic consumer.”

Leo pairs the Tower of Babel image with the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls after the Babylonian Exile. Nehemiah assigned each family a section of the wall to rebuild. Everyone had to do their part, and for the love of Yiddish, no one would be allowed to tear down the wall in their section, or Nehemiah would’ve come to their houses and f’ing killed them.

Everyone needs to do their part and rebuild the walls of human intelligence. This starts with not tearing down our section of the creative world by using AI to do our work. And honestly, why would you? The act of creation is enjoyable. Delegating it to AI is like delegating sex to a robot (more on “robot dick” later).

We’re in Vichy France, and we need to resist the Nazi occupiers. Don’t be Philippe Pétain. That’s what Kriss is saying and Leo agrees, telling everyone they need to do their part and use AI responsibly, starting with not passing off AI writing as their own. That, I think in retrospect, will be considered Basic Morality 101, right up there with not setting cats on fire and tossing them into a crowded theater.

Do Kriss and Leo fear a robot apocalypse? The heck if I know. I just know Leo has made it pretty clear that over-reliance on AI might soon be cropping up in those booklets for the examination of conscience.

Kriss? He’s just fed up with the “dickless” prose AI spits out. To a man of Kriss’ stylistic exactitude, AI prose is like all those times you’re enjoying a Netflix series and then a homosexual storyline is introduced. AI prose is as jarring to Kriss’ discerning reading habits as two dudes kissing on the screen is to a sane person.

That’s why Kriss will come to your house and kill you if you write with AI. His prose is (way) more strident than Pope Leo’s, but the point is the same: If you use AI to do your writing and thinking, you’re part of the problem. Maybe Kriss shouldn’t come to your house and kill you, and Pope Leo isn’t remotely close to excommunicating folks for writing with AI, but I wouldn’t blame either if they did.

Numb at the Lodge

If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer…

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4 months ago · Sam Kriss

You need a phone to park your car in downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan. Yeah, Ypsi-f’ing-lanti, a town that can’t decide whether it wants to be a safe space for white rednecks or a sanctuary for black homeless people who so locust-swarm St. John the Baptist’s parking lot that its priest asks parishioners not to give them money, the ghost of Dorothy Day be hanged.

Ypsilanti’s best hope is that leftist gentrification by mindless professionals brings shloads of cash and an increased standard of living, even if it means turning the town over to eco-fascists and transgender nut jobs whose tolerance for different opinions stops just left of a Kamala-voting soccer mom.

Yeah, that junction of dysfunction now requires you to have a phone to park downtown. Hell, not just a phone . . . a smart one.

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Theories in a secular world grow into dogmas and get enshrined as pseudo-gods. These gods then cascade injunctions back onto the earth. The injunctions include practices a person must observe if he wants to participate in society.

Technological Progress is the Zeus of our culture’s pantheon of gods.

No one knows exactly how it happened. One moment, William Blake was warning that Francis Bacon’s essays are for Satan’s kingdom. The next moment, your cell phone is buzzing against your genitals while you’re trying to get laid.

You can Kingsnorth against it, grind your teeth and writhe, but you will practice the religion of Tech Zeus, mother-f***’er, or you ain’t parking in Ypsilanti.

We’ve always had people who balk at the practices, either because they find them disagreeable at some level or just to be dicks. From heretics to preppers, from Old Believers to Luddites, from Charlie Daniels’ Long Haired Country Boy to St. Francis of Assisi, we’ve always had people who refuse to pick up what the secular gods are laying down.

Me? I refused to download the Ypsilanti parking app. Instead, I drove next door to Ann Arbor, where the love of free market money keeps its Stalinist impulses in check, and ate lunch. I don’t know if that makes me a rebel or a dick, but I’ve never gone back to downtown Ypsilanti.

Russell Kirk wouldn’t have cared if he needed a smartphone to park a car. He refused to drive those “mechanical Jacobins.” He died in 1993, before cell phones burst onto society like a crate of Boone’s Farm opened at a high school freshman girl sleepover, but I can assure you with more confidence than Conor McGregor entering the ‘gon to fight Ronda Rousey: he wouldn’t have carried one of those technological Jacobins.

Jac-o-bin n the most radical group of the French Revolution, implemented vigorous use of the guillotine to deal with the Russell Kirks of the world who refused to participate in worship services at the Church of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Kirk didn’t have long hair, he didn’t get stoned in the morning and get drunk in the afternoon, and he didn’t lie around in the shade like his blue tick hound. . . heck, I don’t even think he owned a dog, much less a blue tick one . . . but he was very much like Charlie Daniels’ Long Haired Country Boy.

How do you know when a commodity has become more oppressive than Caligula on an off day?

It’s when you can’t find an alternative or decently do without it.

That’s when it has reached the level of “radical monopoly,” to borrow a term from the renegade Jesuit Ivan Illich, writing in Tools for Conviviality (1973). At that point:

* the commodity is producing obvious harmful side effects but people continue to use it (to practice the religion behind it) anyway;

* the commodity’s use is directly undercutting the commodity’s declared purpose (and becomes, in Illich’s glossary, “counterproductive”);

* the commodity is paralyzing independent action and, instead, demanding conformity from everyone.

I assume the cell phone’s position as a radical monopoly is more obvious than the painful sensation after getting kicked in the scrotal, so I won’t unpack it here.

Did I mention you can’t park your car in downtown Ypsilanti without a smartphone?

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Illich pointed out that Western society is chock-full of radical monopolies. He especially railed at cars and the asphalt whores who service them, but I think he would’ve agreed that they pale next to the dizzying heights of radical monopoly attained by the cell phone today and must be resisted.

Whether he would’ve agreed that the cell phone’s radical monopoly is an existential threat along the lines of ten Godzillas invading Tokyo, I don’t know, but he would’ve urged resistance.

For starters, he would’ve told readers they needed to change their mindsets. Let’s face it, the cell phone feeds our appetite for acquisition like Sydney Sweeney feeds lust. We’re always grasping and the cell phone always offers more . . . and more and more and more . . . to grasp. If the Sydney Sweeneys of the world were as promiscuous as an app store, men would need a Batman utility belt of johnsons to satisfy them.

We need to stop, said Illich, and cultivate what his friend Wolfgang Sachs called “the virtue of enoughness.”

And then we need to invert the whole technology thing. We need to urge society to put man on top of the tool, not the tool on top of the man. If the man can’t or won’t use his phone to park in Ypsilanti, society should respect it.

But that, in turn, requires society to ask a primordial question: What is good for man? Once we figure that out, Illich said, we can adapt technology to foster the good for people and communities.

What’s good for us? That’s obviously a loaded question. You have the reprobate who thinks it would be good to clone Sydney Sweeney in the bajillions so he can pick one up at Dollar Tree. You have bastards out there who think it’s good for people to own nothing. You have the long-haired country boy who thinks it’s the highest good to be left the f’ alone so he can smoke and drink all day . . . and mendicants who agree but for different reasons.

But just because it’s highly unlikely society will ever be able to agree on what’s good for us, that doesn’t mean each of us can’t make that decision for ourselves. We need to opt for lifestyles of self-reliance and independence, and we need to vote for local and national leaders who allow us to pursue them. We can then use our freedom to support institutions and practices that don’t grab us by the back of our head and force us to kneel to Tech Zeus when we just want to grab a freakin’ burger and fries in downtown Ypsilanti.

The Internet's Longest-Suffering Blog

Chesterton, that stout Englishman who managed to see the cosmic joke amid the Edwardian fog, put it plainly enough: the bore is the poor sod who finds nothing funny, while the clown finds everything funny.

We gotta avoid both extremes like Odysseus threading the Straits of Messina, but if I gotta err, …

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They were “monsters” in the medievalist’s Latin jargon: monstrare: to show, display. Saint-Hilaire said the development of these baby monsters sh…

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A few numbers:

144: The number of times an American is digitally distracted daily. (NB: it doesn’t include that extrovert co-worker who circles the office like a turkey vulture).

6.67: How many minutes, on average, pass betwee…

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That’s not just me staring at the bottom of my sixth glass.

It’s all of us while sleep…

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Incessant small talk drains me like a deposed Nigerian prince drains your checking account after you click that link to help him in exchange for $500,000 that will be delivered to you five days after he lands in NYC. After my last dollar of energy is gone, I ghost, later texting my host an apology, saying I had t…

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But it didn’t take me long to realize my co-religionists from across the border could drink me under the table, pray me under the table, and work me under the table.

Especially work. Damn, can …

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Dr. Lefty Hemifear has weighed the evidence and reached a conclusion: All alcohol is bad for you.

The glass of red wine after dinner? Shill conclusions from Madison Avenue. A few belts of whiskey to unwind after a long work week? Redneck heroin.

It’s all science, so it’s all fact.

Until it’s not.

You know who’d really benefit from demonizing alcohol? The pharmaceutical companies.

Satan.

The Satans are already attacking alcohol. The GLP-1 drugs are killing people’s impulsive behaviors, including the need to have a few whacks of the good stuff before the in-laws arrive.

How many more drugs could the Satans develop and sell if they made everyone afraid of tradition’s favorite way of making this vale of tears a little less sad!

So I’m guessing the studies will continue to roll out.

It started about ten years ago, it seems, when I heard that more than seven drinks per week is bad for you. Then that number came down to four per week. Then two. Now zero: more than zero drinks per week, and you’re heading for Zombie Land without a double-pump shotgun.

That’s been Dr. Andrew Huberman’s progression. He ain’t no Establishment hack. He gives it straighter than Viagra after a large can of Red Bull.

But Dr. Lefty Hemifear? He gives it even straighter. Too straight. So straight, it’s crooked.

He dials in the science more and more, taking one little line of fact and blockchaining it to another little line of fact, breaking the little lines down more and more, then he wraps them around and connects the ends to come up with something resembling a circle.

But it ain’t a circle. It’s a shit-ton of tiny lines pasted together and wrapped around to look like a circle from a distance, but when you look close, you see it’s all f’ed-up.

That’s because Dr. Left Hemifear can’t draw a circle any more than a virgin can do high-grade work in a whorehouse.

Read the rest here or be a paid subscriber.

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Back in the greasy, disco-lit haze of the 1970s and the dawn of the Reaganite ‘80s, the publishing world churned out a billion paperbacks. They were dirt cheap, some even free, handed out like girlie pamphlets on the Vegas strip.

But there was a hook: they were riddled with ads, mostly from the cigarette barons who’d been booted off the TV and radio airwaves by the sanctimonious 1969 federal advertising ban that limited Joe Camel to lumbering along the printed page only.

The public spat ‘em out like bad moonshine and the critics bayed. One critic prophesied a dystopian literary future where you’d be deep in the brooding currents of Hemingway’s Old Man or Wolfe’s electric prose, only to flip the page and confront: “Are Your Underarms Really With It?”

On paper, it was a stroke of genius. Advertisements had for years been littering the pages of magazines, many of which were filled with some of the finest writing. Why not books?

Indeed, fast-forward to today, and the whole scam’s a triumph in the digital carnival: online “reading” is just Times Square shrunk to your pocket, a blitz of blinking banners, vapid clickbait drivel. Rivers of cash sluice into the coffers of the cyber-billboard overlords.

So here we sit, our reading experiences inundated with distraction and commercials, yet nobody has dusted off the idea to put advertisements into books. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enema, the kind of thing that ought to jam a crowbar in the spokes of the rational mind and send it somersaulting over the handlebars into the ditch.

Nassim Taleb, that prickly Levantine sage, thinks the idea flopped because authors are artisans with their souls in the game and advertising is anti-soul. Putting them together is like putting paper with fire.

I don’t buy it.

Magazine scribblers pour their guts into those monthly dispatches, yet we swallow the ads just fine. Online content creators, too: tons of sweat and soul, yet ads confetti the online world.

On the flipside, there are a gazillion books with no soul but we won’t tolerate ads in them. There ain’t no romance hack who wouldn’t take a fiver to tweak “Her heaving bosom quivered in his callused hands” to “Her heaving bosom, snug in her Playtex bra, quivered in his Marlboro-Man like hands.”

No, it ain’t the soul that was the snag. It’s the book experience itself that recoils from the marketer’s paws. There’s a sanctity to reading a book, a whiff of the communion chalice.

That’s the thread the doomsayers are missing today in their endless keening about reading’s twilight in this pixelated perdition we call “the information age.”

Take James Marriott, one of the chief mourners, who unlimbered his self-styled magnum opus on the subject just last month.

Marriott strikes me as one of today’s leading men of reading and this essay held promise. He’s a fan of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis, and his essay led with a quote by Marshall McLuhan disciple Neil Postman. I was expecting something compelling.

What a letdown.

Marriott’s essay hoists the flag of the left-brain brigade: the cold calculus of rationality, the ledger-book logic of productivity, the shiny badges of success and salubrity. Books, he laments, were the great enablers of all that tidy virtue, and now, with screens gobbling our gaze, we’re adrift in entropy.

Well, if it’s all left-hemisphere hoo-ha, those ad-riddled paperbacks should’ve been a slam-dunk success. But they weren’t. That Edselian idea was concocted in the left hemispheric abstraction cooker.

Marriott’s not entirely off the beam, mind you. His jabs at the digital scrum are accurate at some level.

The problem is, his jabs are like warning the cheerleader that bedding the whole varsity squad might leave her sore in the morning. True enough, that. But there’s deeper rot at work, the kind you can’t spell out to the girl, even though you might try and, in the process, merely stack up more left-hemispheric laments for her to consider before crawling into the back of the pickup truck: the clap, the twittering and giggling whispers in the girls locker room, the ghost that haunts the memory for the rest of one’s life.

That’s Marriott’s essay: piling on the left-hemispheric laments, blind as driftwood to the McGilchrist-McLuhan undercurrents.

In his windy exegesis, he misses the heart of the matter:

Reading a book is a deeply tactile experience.

The heft, the crinkle of pages, the ink on your fingertips, even the smell of decomposing vanilla if you’re blessed enough to be reading an old book. It’s an experience, and experiences are fleshly yet intellectual, woven into sinews and breath. Experiences like reading from a book defy the scalpel of words that the intellect wields like a butter knife against the grund of reality.

The heart has reasons the head can’t understand.

And the heart is in the body.

There’s something about the book medium itself that transcends mental effort to understand. Put another way, there’s something the left hemisphere can’t appreciate about the book reading experience because it’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to articulate and quantify. The whole thing’s gotta be left vague.

Marriott? He jumps in, articulating all the reasons . . . and all of them like the left hemisphere warnings to that cheerleader who’s gonna be walking funny the next morning.

Online prose is everything Marriott celebrates about the book, but it’s everything on crack cocaine.

Online prose is hyper-rational, hyper-logical, hyper-productive.

Hyper-Cartesian.

Marriott oughtta crack open that McLuhan-Postman ledger again. “The medium is the message,” the old Toronto prof McLuhan growled. It’s not the piffle it peddles, but the way it changes your physical senses and kneads your nerves. “Media,” McLuhan explained, are tools that extend the individual’s physical senses which, in turn, affect him mentally. Similarly, Postman taught that every new physical tool comes with an idea embedded in it.

In the McLuhan-Postman arena, it’s all about the intertwined physical and mental experience. The crux of the matter is in the experience itself, which starts with the body.

Body, touch, soul, mind . . . all coming together in ways that we must explore slowly because our minds can’t readily grasp them. We need to recognize the physical effects that different forms of media have on us, which then affect us mentally . . . and eventually spiritually. It takes time, yes, but that’s why we oughtta embrace new technology slowly, even patiently and with caution, not like frat boys at an open bar.

Speaking of which, if you see one of those frat boys injecting vodka into his rectum to get drunk faster, don’t caution him with left-hemispheric laments like intestinal disorders and colon problems down the road. Don’t tell him he can get just as drunk by drinking the stuff normally.

No, criticize him on grounds that the rectum approach is rational: efficient, cost-effective, and logical. Hyper-so. Like online reading. In a sane world, that would be enough to shame him into pouring a decent Cabernet into a crystal snifter.

And drinking it while holding a real book.

It’s irrational, but that’s the entire point.

Part Two of Two Parts

Role models are great. We all oughtta have a few.

But don’t underestimate the anti-role models. These cautionary wraiths of consequence are more often the true educators in this carnival of folly called “modernity,” whispering not “be like me” but “For God’s sake, be anything but.”

That lean 60-year-old man playing robust basketball inspires, but that 60…

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Everyday Neurology 101: The right hemisphere receives sensory input, feeds it to the left hemisphere for processing, receives a report from the left hemisphere, synthesizes it, feeds its synthesis back to the left hemisphere for more processing, which reports back, and on and on until a decision is made.

This “lateralization” occurs rapidly, but in a healthy brain, the final decision takes a considerable amount of time.

When filmmaker Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks at the Grand Chartreuse if he could film a documentary about the monastery, they said “yes” . . . . 16 years later.

A healthy mind moves quickly but finishes slowly.

An imbalanced mind moves and finishes quickly.

Jack LaSota, a technically brilliant computer scientist, moved from Alaska to the Bay Area in 2013,1 changed his name to “Ziz” and switched his sexual identity. He joined the area’s rationalist clubs: effective altruism, Center for Applied Rationality, and other groups where big intellects feed massive amounts of information to hyper-siloed left hemispheres.

By 2016, Ziz was writing a blog and attracting readers. By 2017, Ziz was the leader of the “rationalist fleet,” a group of people living on boats because they couldn’t afford Bay Area rent. By 2019, the Zizians were violently thrashing against the other rationalists in the Bay Area, at one point launching a protest at a rationalist retreat by donning black robes, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and blocking access roads, prompting local law enforcement to send in a SWAT team.

By 2022, the Zizians were murdering people. At least four, and they’re “persons of interest” in other killings.

Blog to murder in nine years.

It took the Carthusians 16 years to respond to a request to allow a documentary to be filmed at their monastery.

Gnostics, Adamites, Marxists . . . now Zizians. They’re all freaks of left-hemisphere nature, their right hemispheres sealed off tighter than the Epstein files. Different approaches, different times, different flavors, but all one big Venn of jackoffs marinading their mental illness in a paradoxical sauce of intelligent ignorance, the recipe for which only the left hemisphere has.

Ziz attracted followers with a blog.

That’s why Adam Lehrer says, “We’re all just one hyperlink away from a new cult.”

Modernity is left-hemispheric. That’s its calling card, that’s its essence.

A “normal” person today has a left hemisphere silo full of dry wood just waiting for a spark to ignite it.

The Internet contains more sparks than a comet, it creates more flames than a Bay Area Pride Parade, and causes more fires than homeless meth addicts.

Pew Research Center data from the late 2010s indicate that during the previous decade, people on the left shifted significantly more to the left than those on the right shifted to the right.

It’s the left hemisphere at work.

Semantically, “left hemisphere” and “leftist politics” are unrelated. In the real world, they’re fellow travelers.

Rationalist reductionism is the left hemisphere’s modus operandi. The left hemisphere gets information from the right hemisphere and, instead of processing and returning it to the right hemisphere for further synthesis, keeps the information, ruminates on it, and spits out conclusions faster than a baseball dugout spits tobacco juice.

The right hemisphere is the hemisphere of big-picture awareness, which brings caution and a measure of trepidation. If the left hemisphere took its findings back to the right hemisphere, it would just slow things down . . . and for no reason, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned. The left hemisphere by default deems its conclusions--spawned from its mighty IQ and rationality-- sufficient.

That’s why an imbalanced mind moves and finishes quickly, while a balanced mind moves quickly but finishes slowly.

The Left has been finishing quickly for hundreds of years, starting with the French Revolution, which was fueled by the mainstreaming of the French Enlightenment and its celebration of raw, naked rationalism: of a left hemisphere unbridled from the control of the right hemisphere and its seemingly endless hurdles like the ineffable, paradox, and the gestalt—sticks that tend to slow the spokes of progress.

Empirically, I don’t know if left wing violence is more prevalent than right wing violence. Both political poles are marked by the dogmatism born of a rogue left hemisphere, so both are capable of violence, which is always the product of a brain that reaches conclusions quickly.

But the left wing’s historical cornerstone--faith in rationality--makes it inherently left-hemispheric. Its cornerstone has no ground underneath it, detached from those things that tend to give right-wingers at least a little bit of pause, like tradition, religion, and family.

Ziz and many Zizians are in jail as the investigation continues to unfold. So that’s good.

But modern culture, combined with online culture, is cranking out more Zizians every day.

Share Eric Scheske's Outside Modern Limits

Excuse me, while I rail against the gods while worshipping at their altar.

I’ve bought five Kindles over the years, giving two to my daughters, a testament to my enthusiasm for these devices.

But there’s a problem, Houston. I mark up my books like I’m mad at them. Same with my books on Kindle. Amazon’s Kindle license agreement allows it to “remotely manage, update, or remove Digital Content from your Kindle device or reading application at any time.”

Those Kindle highlightings? At risk. My book markings? Not.

My favorite movie is GoodFellas. If it were a TikTok video, I would’ve watched it 10,000 times by now. One of my favorite scenes: A young Henry Hill holding an umbrella over a Mafia soldier in a hard rain as he delivers information to Capo Paulie Cicero on the porch of Paulie’s house.

Paulie wouldn’t allow a phone in his house.

I’m thinking I shouldn’t allow a Kindle in mine.

Paulie didn’t trust the phone for good reasons. I don’t trust digital content for good reasons, starting with Amazon’s deletion, without notice, of Animal Farm from users’ Kindles in 2009. It apologized . . . but didn’t change the terms of the license agreement. It has recently surreptitiously revised Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, and others to change passages that snowflakes readers might find offensive.

No notice, no refund, just the implied “F’ you if you don’t like it. Read the license agreement.”1

Stalin altered photos to erase political inconveniences known as “former friends and allies.” Amazon removed Parler from its servers in 2020 because it wanted to swim with the politically powerful. The Kindle in the hands of our digital overlords is like a Grand Secretary with Photoshop.

Politics wins the battles it pitches against truth. Politics might lose the war eventually . . . the USSR did . . . but it wins every battle, especially if it’s pitted against a weak opponent like digital prose and a one-sided license agreement.

Digital content is, well, digital. It’s pixels and light and electricity. It’s more fragile than my mental state during a five-alarm hangover.

The book? Not fragile. In fact, as far as anything in this vale of tears goes, dang near indestructible. They’re not even subject to theft (no one wants them).

A book also doesn’t lie in real time. Sure, it might contain incorrect information, but it doesn’t con me while I’m reading it like the online algorithms that treat users worse than a bluegrass fiddler on crack treats a violin. At least the violin knows it’s getting played.

How do you trust anything you see online? Malinformation, misinformation, disinformation, f’ed-upformation, propogandized information. You can’t be sure of any knowledge you get online. It’s Epistemology 101.

Do you get information online and find yourself unequivocally anti-Trump or pro-Trump? I’m afraid you didn’t learn a damn thing these past eight years.

Retarded fiddle.

A book doesn’t provide sycophantic feedback like the AI robots who, I’m pretty sure, provide users with whatever conclusion they want as long as they groove it with the correct string of questions. No thanks. I have enough confirmation bias to last me ‘til I’m 225 years old.

A book also doesn’t manipulate dopamine, serotonin, and whatever else my brain oozes to make me feel good. It might draw me in, it might make me feel great and noble, but not because it’s using algorithims to manipulate my neurotransmitters to stay fixed on the page. The book’s prose is good, true, or beautiful, or it’s not. If not, I put the book down. If it’s online? I can barely put it down . . . I more often simply click on the next thing offered by the same device that is currently offering me the slop that isn’t good, true, or beautiful.

They say social media companies will be held accountable someday for what they’ve done to our brains, like tobacco companies that knew for years they were killing their customers but lied about it. I hope so.

You don’t need to wait 20 years to join yet another lawyers-get-rich class action so you can spend 35 minutes filling out a claim form to get $1.38 in damages.

You can quit smoking now.

Of course, I still have three Kindles in my posse. I read books and Substack essays on it.

I wrote this post for digital distribution on Substack. I consulted Grok on a few matters while writing this essay (and my last essay), both railing against AI.

Hypocrital?

No.

Weak and addicted?

Possibly.

A man in search of that Goldilocks space between Ludditism and mental hand puppet of the ruling elite?

Definitely.

Bonus: A quote from Joseph Epstein about physical books:

Smooth makes things rough. Ease makes life more difficult. Soft makes us brittle.

We lost something when asphalt replaced cobblestone. Every step on those old, gnarled stones forced a man’s body to shift, recalibrate, and work. The more cobblestonish the surface, the more micro-exertions. The more asphaltish the surface, the fewer micro-exertions.

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Picture a man, tattered coat flapping, rummaging through a dumpster in an alley. You wince, don’t you? That flicker of disgust ripples through your gut.

But hold on. Don’t judge him too harshly. He’s not much different from a stray dog, sniffing for scraps.

That’s not my line; it’s Albert Jay Nock’s, that old curmudgeonly godfather of the modern liberta…

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Thomas Jefferson amassed the largest library in America. Fifteen thousand volumes, according to Paul Johnson.

Books were expensive: expensive to produce and expensive to import from Europe.

Jefferson paid for the books by accumulating massive debt, which he repaid with his slave’s labor and, upon his death, his slave’s bodies: his executor was unable to f…

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