In October 2025, Hustvedt gave the laureate lecture at Monaco’s Théâtre des Variétés titled “Betweens,”1 a powerful concept for the author of Ghost Stories, her much-discussed memoir of grief after the death of her beloved husband, Paul Auster. It is a simple and profoundly beautiful idea: the emotional territory between grief and what lingers in physical absence.. She cited numerous thinkers across disciplines in her lecture about that interesting state. My mind thinks simply of ice and water, and the melting that occurs between, something both before and after. Hustvedt lingered on the being that is drenched in placenta at birth and the umbilical cord between the mother and the baby.

Earlier this year, she sat down for an interview with Alexandra Hanover, aptly titled “Here and There.” In those pages, she spoke again about that curious place, The Between: between memory and imagination, between one book and the next, between the work already made and the work still forming. When she is between writing books, she says, she is careful about what she reads. If she is working on a novel, for instance, she avoids Henry James because, as she notes, “language is contagious.”2

That made me think of how A.I. is learning to write like us. The fusion creates “a plural being”3 to use Hustvedt’s words. She was talking about writing poems in grad school while also reading the great poets, but I can’t help thinking of the technological revolution we’re witnessing in real time. The interaction creates a compound. Something becomes another. Or an other.

This is Hustvedt’s natural territory: the borderland between things. Her doctorate in English from Columbia focused on Charles Dickens, but her intellectual life has never belonged exclusively to literature. She moves through philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, feminism, visual art, and fiction with the confidence of someone for whom the borders between fields are real but comfortable to navigate. Porous.

There is also Hustvedt’s own personal history: a woman who grew up between the United States and Norway, and who, as she told Hanover, learned an old-fashioned Norwegian at home in Minnesota, a dialect now extremely rare but preserved for her through literature, family, and memory. It was in circulation in another century, and it came again into the last one through her, existing now too, in a third. She became the passage by which a nearly vanished dialect entered a new expression.4

Such scholarship was once admired under older, imperfect names: Renaissance mind, polymath, generalist, jack of all trades. But those labels do not quite capture what Hustvedt represents. She is not dabbling. The overlap of the psychological, the chemical, the emotional, the physical: the big picture is not a luxury in her work. It is the work.

This is exactly the kind of far-reaching intelligence rewarded by Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco.

Monaco is itself a curious between-place. We associate it easily with France because of the predominance of the French language and culture in its borders. It shares history with France and yet it is not France. An almost but not quite. Another. Closer, perhaps, than my own home, Louisiana, and certainly less divided by geography. The original Monaco was just a Rock—hence, the Rock. It juts out into the sea, supporting its fortress and curving around an ancient port; today it stands between two ports, between old stone and glass towers, between nineteenth-century villas and modern hotels, between baroque terraces and the narrow passageways of Monaco-Ville.

Its superficial reputation is easy enough to understand. Monaco photographs well: sports cars, casinos, yachts, diamonds, glamor, and speed. That Monaco exists. But there is another Monaco, hidden or perhaps not hidden at all. Just quietly sitting off to the side of the Hill of Charles.5 A Monaco with enough self-assurance not to shout. It does not need attention. It gives attention. It listens. If you stand still and look closely, you’ll see it.

It is in that space that Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco operates.

Known informally as PhiloMonaco, the organization was founded in 2015 by Charlotte Casiraghi,6 along with the philosophers Robert Maggiori, Raphaël Zagury-Orly, and Joseph Cohen.7 The original quartet. Maggiori has said that the idea began modestly. At first, it was imagined as a prize. Then came ideas for events, conversations, public meetings organized on the calendar from April to October. One thing led to another.

Today, PhiloMonaco is a large-scale intellectual project: a year-round series of dialogues, workshops, and lectures on a single theme. Love (amour) was the theme for its first year; then, year after year: the body, violence, desire, time, justice, what it means to be human, and so on. Visiting scholars gather, often in the Théâtre Princesse Grace, to examine the chosen theme through multiple lenses. Then in the summer, during Semaine PhiloMonaco (PhiloMonaco Week) those conversations move outward.

The week becomes a kind of culmination, though also a midpoint—a between, if I may. Scholars meet not only with one another but with professionals in medicine, education, journalism, culture, and public life. They meet students, readers, teachers, and members of the general public. The round table steps outside to enter schools, libraries, museums, streets, and civic spaces in Monaco and Paris.

This is philosophy not as abstraction alone, but as public attention. A public forum.

And yet attention is complicated here. With Charlotte Casiraghi at the helm, PhiloMonaco was never likely to remain entirely hidden from the world of fast cars and luxury. Recall the year when PhiloMonaco’s theme was time and acceleration, and Casiraghi interviewed her fellow Monegasque, the F1 champion Charles Leclerc.)8

She carries a glamorous public visibility which she did not exactly choose. She reflects on it with some unease in the preamble to her recent book La Fêlure. But unwanted glamour is still glamour. It attracts the kind of press philosophy does not usually receive.

That could have easily distorted the project. Instead, it may be part of what enhances it by extending its reach. Without Casiraghi, Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco might have remained mainly in the sphere of philosophers in Paris, known certainly to the public in Monaco, to local teachers and students, and to the more rarefied circles of academic fellowship and graduate study around the world. Yet because of her, the field of awareness widens into the fashion and celebrity press. Readers who come for fashion, royalty, elegance, or curiosity may find themselves unexpectedly treated to insights from Boris Cyrulnik on childhood and violence,9 or to one of Maggiori’s lectures on Jacques Derrida.10

There is an irony in this, but also a grace. Casiraghi’s public image may be unwelcome to her in certain ways, but it also serves one of the organization’s central objectives: bringing philosophy beyond its usual rooms. In that sense, privilege works here in a strange direction—not away from egalitarian principles, but toward them.

Casiraghi was appointed in 2024 to Monaco’s Order of Cultural Merit, a modern order of distinction recognizing those—Monegasque citizens and foreigners alike—who have contributed meaningfully to the cultural life of the Principality. It is not merely a decoration for titled dignitaries or visiting monarchs. Among those recognized before her were Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and Plácido Domingo.

I do not mean to dwell too long on Casiraghi. It is only that most pieces about her emphasize, above all else, the qualities that, though they are most exhaustively repeated across the media whenever she’s in the news, tend to be the ones that have less to do with her: the heritage, the glamour, the family tree. The royal mother, the Hollywood grandmother, the great-grandfather who knew Marcel Proust. All of it is interesting in its way, but it tells us very little about Casiraghi herself: the writer, the mother, the co-founder of Ever Manifesto,11 the co-author with Maggiori of the treatise Archipel des Passions,12 and finally the philosopher of the crack.13

It also misses the reality of the between in Casiraghi’s own work: the person thinking and writing somewhere between haute couture and ecological reality, between fantasy and emotional confusion; between public image and private inquiry, between inheritance and chosen intellectual labor. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy14 and now stands, in her own way, as a scholar of the fracture.

The fracture is what interests me. Not so much Casiraghi’s personal fragility, but the concept of it as it applies to myself and universally. What lies inside the valley of pain? Fragility, certainly. Sensitivity. The wound that reopens too easily. The part of us that is not broken exactly, but more exposed than the rest.

In La Fêlure, Casiraghi traces this idea across literature, philosophy, music, and psychoanalysis: from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Deleuze, from J.J. Cale to Sigmund Freud. The chapter “Magnolia,” named for the and the iconic Southern flower, is one of the book’s quietest and most beautiful passages. Cale is a legend of understatement, a musician who knew both influence and obscurity, flashes of success and long stretches of difficulty. His way of living through the fracture, as Casiraghi presents it, was not spectacle but endurance. He avoided the limelight. He worked. He made music. He lived without asking the world to look at him.

Like the magnolia, he was not untouched by weather. He endured it. Somewhere between presence and nostalgia.

Her analogy to New Orleans hit me hard: a city of tortured beauty and stubborn perseverance, where beauty does not arrive untouched by suffering, but passes through it and remains.

The “Magnolia” chapter in La Fêlure offers a smooth passage back to Siri Hustvedt, to “Betweens,” and to Ghost Stories. PhiloMonaco and Le Fondation Prince Pierre15 jointly presented Le Prix de la Principauté to Hustvedt. It’s a joint prize from two Monegasque organizations—one philosophical, one literary—to recognize a writer for an entire body of work.(13) In Hustvedt’s case, that body includes seven novels, eight works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, stories, and poems. As part of the laureate program, she delivered her “Betweens” lecture at the Théâtre des Variétés.

She began with a fragment from Heraclitus, moved through Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and the possibility of a third form of being—Freud’s so-called “analytic third.”16 Through transference between analyst and patient, another space opens—a zone in which thinking can shift. Hustvedt moves from there through biology and physics.

Her lecture does not treat the between as an empty interval. It is not a waiting room between one settled condition and another. It is generative. The between is where birth happens, where language changes hands, where analysis alters both participants, where memory is shaped by imagination, and where grief becomes a continuing relation to the dead.

One of the first books I completed this year was Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the story of his own cataclysmic between: the passage from the person he was before he was attacked and stabbed to the person he became through the long, circuitous process of recovery. The ordeal was filled with pain, but not only pain. It also brought reminders of love and a renewed appreciation for everything that attached him to life.17

Among the book’s pleasures is Rushdie’s affection for his longtime friend Paul Auster. Auster was still alive when Rushdie visited him at his Brooklyn home. Auster had recently endured the deaths of his son and infant granddaughter and was himself living with lung cancer.18 Rushdie found him capable of joking, still engaged with life despite everything. Dying, but still alive, as we all are. The cancer makes death less abstract, something anticipated, accelerated.

Auster and Hustvedt had taken part in the gathering on the steps of the New York Public Library after Rushdie’s stabbing, an event organized in solidarity with Rushdie and with writers who live under threats to freedom of expression.19 This was shortly before Auster’s cancer diagnosis in early 2023.

In May 2023, Hustvedt and Rushie’s wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, appeared together on the first episode of Les Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon to be recorded in the U.S.20

And almost a year after that, Paul died.

Hustvedt recounts his slow, torturous decline in Ghost Stories. She writes about the “important difference between optimism and hope.” Optimism cheers every piece of good news and predicts a favorable outcome, but it creates emotional swings that cannot be sustained. “Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”21

The optimist rises and falls and eventually burns out. Optimism is a blaze. Hope is an ember that can keep giving sparks.

The review of Ghost Stories in The New York Times—reserved in places, though appreciative overall—observes a book dwelling in some of our darkest and most universal experiences: near misses, devastating illness, death, and the anger and confusion that accompany events we cannot make comprehensible.

The value of philosophical thinking in navigating these territories is difficult to overstate. Philosophy is not essential to life in the way food, water, and oxygen are essential. We can live without consciously exercising that part of the mind. But philosophy can deepen a life. It gives us tools for approaching problems, for examining our assumptions, and for moving through the emotions—the “archipelago of passions” Maggiori and Casiraghi wrote about—without pretending that they are simple or easily resolved.

PhiloMonaco does not simplify philosophy. It makes philosophy inviting. It extends its reach, carrying it into schools, workplaces, theaters, libraries, and public spaces rather than confining it to elite institutions. In doing so, it demonstrates that philosophy does not necessarily require simplification. It requires attention. Attend closely enough and the questions begin to appear. Stay with them and, sometimes, answers follow—though answers have a habit of arriving with more questions. For those who enjoy that endless movement between the two, philosophy is already waiting.

FOOTNOTES

We must remember Finny’s love of games in A Separate Peace. That novel sat on so many high school reading lists—at least it did when I was a student—and its analogies seem newly alive to me now.

I have found myself unexpectedly inspired by sports. The credit for this miracle belongs largely to Nicolas Mathieu, illustrator Pierre-Henry Gomont, and their daily work for Eurosport during Roland-Garros. As writer and artist, they are essentially live-blogging the tournament, though “sports coverage” hardly feels like the right phrase. Their dispatches are literary. Philosophical. Human. Reading them has inspired me to attempt a few transmissions of my own.

But back to Finny.

If you remember A Separate Peace, Finny invents Blitzball, a game whose rules are constantly changing and, indeed, made up as he and his friends play it. In retrospect. The author, John Knowles, framed it as a metaphor for war itself. The boys think on their feet. They adapt. They react to circumstances as they unfold. Nothing follows a script. The game is organized chaos.

Like life.

Like tennis.

I never would have described tennis as chaotic. Yet Mathieu’s writing has made me see it differently. He is not really writing about forehands and backhands. He is writing about endurance. About bodies under pressure. About ordinary people confronting challenges — of age and of weather. The same themes that animate his fiction emerge here on the clay courts of Paris.

This, I am discovering, is how the French do sports commentary.

It is both profound and simple. Intuitive and paradoxical. Victory is not always sweet. Defeat is not always final. The heat at Roland-Garros climbs toward ninety degrees. Shirts cling to backs. Muscles tighten. The body becomes impossible to ignore. Mathieu has always been a physical writer. He makes you feel the sweat.

That quality both fascinates and frightens me.

I picked up a copy of Mathieu’s novella Rose Royal at a bookstore in Uptown New Orleans, but I haven’t opened it yet. I know what it’s about, and I know I’m going to feel every second of Rose’s fear and every suspended breath. I recall so vividly my experience reading The Shining—twice, because apparently I am not always kind to myself—my heart racing, my mind in turmoil on every page.

Some might wonder why we willingly submit ourselves to such things. I don’t have a ready answer. Perhaps the answer lies in the curious relationship between imagination and experience. Neuroscience tells us that the boundary between experience and imagination is more porous than we often assume...

This is where the virtual becomes physical. We are not running, lunging, sweating, or falling. Our knees are not being damaged; our feet are not pounding the court. And yet the body participates. The pulse answers. The breath changes. The muscles imagine motion. A literary life may be virtual, but it is not unreal. We can feel the emotions of characters who do not exist. A tennis match in Paris, even through the writing of a spectator in the stadium can raise the pulse of a reader in Louisiana.

And then there is the sound.

The clunk of the ball on clay. The answering volley from racket to racket. The rhythm begins to work on the body before the mind can explain it. I find it strangely relaxing, that sound—the repeated percussion, the almost-musical exchange. And yet, even as it lulls the mind, the heart beats. There is anticipation in it. Suspense. A kind of metronome for anxiety.

Tennis, seen this way, is not merely a game. It is rhythm and resistance. War and ballet. A ritual of pressure performed by bodies sculpted into aesthetic perfection, moving with a grace that never quite disguises the violence beneath it.

Perhaps that is what Mathieu understands so well. He is not merely describing tennis. He is showing us the strange place where spectator and player, imagination and experience, the virtual and the real begin to converge.

Finny, in A Separate Peace, understood it too.

A game is never just a game. Not when people bring themselves to it. Not when they invest it with hope, fear, desire, endurance, and meaning. Then it becomes something else entirely.

The match goes on. We watch. We imagine. We feel.

And somehow, from the other side of the line, we participate.

Further Reading

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. 1959.

Mathieu, Nicolas, and Pierre-Henry Gomont. Sur la ligne. Roland-Garros 2026. Eurosport France.

Selected entries:

• Un dernier été avec Novak

• Eros et Garros

• Malédiction des précocités

• J’ai vu Sinner tomber, debout

I started listening to Sam Harris’s interview with Susan Cain, someone I admire enormously as a fellow disciple of quiet living. One of the early topics of discussion between them is the messy, but very prevalent topic of AI writing. Cain tells Harris that sometimes she finds herself engrossed in an article online only to discover along the way one of ‘the tells.’ As you may imagine, this was very interesting to Harris. He wanted to know more: What are ‘the tells’? That is a question that many people are asking. Common replies include the em-dash and the so-called triplet. I became immediately skeptical as she named these ‘tells.’

When people speak about ‘tells’ my brain immediately goes to: oh no, they’re fishing. As someone who is highly neurodivergent, I’m already insecure about everything I do. I try not to compare myself to others, but it’s extremely hard to avoid it. Now we have to worry about writing that is too perfect? Does perfection, or something near it mean it must have been produced by a machine? I thought AI writing was bad. That’s what people used to say. I’ll never forget the librarian who was quoted in American Libraries Magazine in the summer of 2025. She was talking about AI-written books found in the children’s section of the library: “The writing is laughably bad,” she said. Laughably bad! A year ago, that’s what was being said. Now the writing is too perfect?

History is full of moments where intuition hardened into accusation. Moral panics thrive on shifting criteria.

But what about the Em Dash tell? I use the Em Dash a lot. I like it. It breaks up a sentence. It breaks a train of thought. It makes a turn. I’m sure that’s why Virginia Woolf liked it. I’m currently reading Jacob’s Room, and let me tell you, it is full of em dashes! In Woolf, the em dash is not decoration. It marks interruption, hesitation, association, drift. It is part of how thought moves across the page. It signals the flow of consciousness itself. Maybe that’s why it has become an early scapegoat of AI panic.

Underneath the skepticism lies a deeper fear: that the LLM will learn to hesitate like us, to mimic not just performance but faltering.

AI learned to write by reading us. Why are we surprised when it resembles us?

I know it has to be frustrating. Uncertainty rules the world. Nothing is stable. AI comes along and destabilizes it further. That’s unsettling. What’s going to happen to human writing? Will the humanities survive? How will it impact authors and readers and libraries? Are we doomed? What can we do to save humanity?

I worry that our panic (maybe even our best intentions) will drive us to do more harm than good. The moral panics of the past were dangerous. They destroyed reputations. They upended lives. There is the potential for a book that is written by a human to be misidentified as AI-written and, consequently, targeted for a ban. Imagine making a mistake like that? Banning a book you think is written by a machine because you spotted a ‘tell’? Are you ready to assume that kind of responsibility?

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m only certain about uncertainty. These ‘tells’ people are talking about feel dangerously unreliable. They aren’t scientific or quantifiable. They are heuristic, intuitive, and highly subjective. (That sentence is a triplet, isn’t it? That might be AI slithering its way into my article? Who can say?!)

I struggle every day against my own errors of judgement. I endeavor not to write self-consciously but authentically and freely. I know we all have to face criticism. As writers, we have to learn to live with it, to use it, and learn from it. But I don’t see the benefit of writing in an atmosphere of social pressure to be more or less than what I am just because it might be mistaken for AI modality. If my humanness has to become performative, I’m not sure I would know how to do it. I’ve never been a good performer. I’m afraid I would do it very badly.

What is Noir? The nighttime, the darkness, applied to themes that are opaque, pervasive and terrifying. The detective creeps alone through the shadows, wears a trench coat, chain-smokes. The night becomes his companion, or his curse. He knows it well, but never enough. He’s annoyed by it all, but relishes it at the same time. Dread and temptation.

I guess that more or less describes classical noir. Today, there’s neo-noir. Classical noir, essentially, for modern sensibilities. Less about smoke and shadow, more explicit, innuendos brought to the surface.

The 21st century French writer Nicolas Mathieu does something different altogether. His first novel, Aux animaux la guerre (translated into English by Sam Taylor as Of Fangs and Talons),1 follows the template insofar as it’s about despair and desperation, addiction and survival (but survival for what is the question; existential themes abound, unsurprisingly for a French novelist) but instead of fixing the drama around a whodunit, he reveals the system that shaped the characters. That’s where it is less like Raymond Chandler and more like Steinbeck.

I see something of Stephen King in Mathieu as well. The Body, better known for its Rob Reiner-directed adaptation, Stand By Me. Four twelve-year-olds on the cusp of adolescence, when they must go in different directions. Different classes, different levels. The one who is hopeless of the future, the one with a bad reputation but a vastly under-appreciated heart, the one who gets picked on mercilessly and never wants to grow up, and the one who seems to have the brightest future but dreads leaving them all behind. These are the ones perhaps most vulnerable to the vices of life.

Mathieu writes, in his third novel, Connemara:

“Adolescence is premeditated murder, planned long in advance, and the body of their family as it used to be already lies dead by the side of the road. Now they must reinvent roles, accept new distances, to deal with the horror and the sudden kicks. The body is still warm. It twitches. But what used to exist—childhood and its tender moments, the unquestioned reign of adults with the kid at its center, cocooned and protected, vacations … and family Sundays at home—all of this has died.”2

His second and most renowned novel, Leurs enfants après eux (translated into English by William Rodarmor, as And Their Children After Them), isn’t so much about crime at all as it’s about the kids who are likeliest to get mixed up in it, and why. It’s a coming-of-age saga about teens who live in the Vosges mountains of northeastern France, who were born in the late 1970s, and lived through adolescence in the 1990s. The author’s lived experience unfolded in the same region and on the same timeline. He, like his characters, navigated the tough breaks of a life where nothing comes easy. His prose lingers on the pervasive myth that hard work is enough. It’s not. We see again and again that too often only the ruthless make it to the top and at terrible cost.

The novel Leurs enfants après eux won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2018, and the English translation won the Franco-American Albertine Prize in 2021.

The third novel, Connemara, the one I’m currently revisiting, is about the kind of crime that is technically legal, or at least hiding in plain sight, amid flowcharts and fine print. It’s about the kind of corporate insanity that promises dreams but wastes lives. Its own kind of systematic quagmire that no one can beat — not honestly, anyway. He stretches the wheelhouse. We’re not dealing with mafia and gangs anymore. Here it’s all about the lie that capitalism rewards virtue or even merit. No wonder there’s a rumor in the French media that he’s a socialist. But it’s not that simple. He doesn’t find the State to be a haven of virtue either. Both fascism and socialism have their traps.

Essentially, Mathieu doesn’t just write about crime. He writes about the conditions that motivate it. In the first novel, Aux animaux la guerre/Of Fangs and Talons, a factory closes, livelihoods fall apart, a union collapses. In Leurs enfants après eux, Mathieu was inspired by the biblical verse Sirach 44:93 —

“There are some of whom there is no more memory,

They perished as though they had never existed;

They became as though they had never been born,

And so did their children after them.”

Unlike the illustrious men singled out for praise in Sirach 44:1, the “they” in 44:9 are comparable to Mathieu’s characters—the ignored children, the forgotten forebears. No one hears them when they cry, and so it was for those before, and so it will be for those after. Unless there is a collective shift in consciousness, powerful and widespread enough to change human experience.

Connemara4 deals with the ambitions of those children, and the consequences of getting what they want through a selfish social class and a ruthless economy, and the fallout from reversal of fortune. It deals with nostalgia — looking back to what was left behind or lost as relief from one’s problems now.

We first meet Hélène as she lies in bed with her husband, Philippe. With him asleep, she thinks of what she has to wake up and do, the routines, the responsibilities. Get the children to school, do her makeup for work in the car. She thinks of how disappointing everything is. The ennui fills her with disgust. The one thing that motivates her is the thought of meeting Manuel later — a man she’s been interacting with by text ever since they met on Tinder. We see her in work mode later, cold and cynical, forcing herself into a hopeful state of mind. She thinks of the promotion she could finally achieve if she closes on a deal her company is desperate to make with the mayor’s office. And when that deal is sabotaged by a couple of complacent bureaucrats whose only ambition is to maintain the status quo, Mathieu shows us the effects of the humiliation on her body — the heat, the sweat. Anger, frustration, terror. All exhibited in biological response. The relief also comes through the pleasure of the body. She masturbates in the parked car during a torrential rain. A solitary act, hiding in plain sight, aided in its concealment by the rainwater washing over the car.

Her bitterness is over the pointlessness of the whole system. The consulting company she works for endeavors to streamline the expenditure of the mayor’s office, but cuckolded (yes, that’s Mathieu’s analogy)5 by a stagnant bureaucracy that clings tenaciously to the flawed but functional architecture that sustains it. One office holding warring factions — those for change and those who have built their lives around the tolerance of its mediocrity.

The whole episode illustrates how even the relatively powerless, like the functionaries who impede Hélène, manage to manipulate the levers of power.

When we meet Christoph, we see him in action as a dog-food salesman. We learn of his past through the mayor himself, who won’t stop reminding Christoph of his lost glory as a hockey celebrity.

Hélène was a nobody when Christoph was glorified. Now Christoph is the “nobody,” while Hélène got everything she dreamed of, only to find that her dream was all based on a fairy tale. The illusion, the mirage of it. The promise of riches but only if you’re willing to go all the way and lose yourself completely.

There is a striking moment in the interaction between the mayor and Christoph: Christoph is there to deliver dog food. He needs the mayor to sign for the receipt. The mayor asks him to bend down so he can use Christoph’s back as a writing surface. Mathieu uses it to highlight the inequality between them, the power imbalance. Christoph doesn’t like it, but he puts up with it because it’s his job to please the clients. The mayor is aware of Christoph’s dependence. He presses the pen especially hard as he dots the i or crosses the t, producing two sharp sensations “that stung”6 Christoph’s spine. And as Christoph feels the stings, he notices one of the dogs looking at him. There is a silent communication between the dog and Christoph. Two dependent creatures, caught in a social system where importance is determined by cultural norms. Christoph sees cuteness. The dog seems to recognize a sympathetic soul. It’s a scene where humiliation is countered by sweetness.

By now we’ve seen Hélène’s response to corporate humiliation, how the body copes, and Christoph’s response to class humiliation, not internalizing it but letting his attention shift to something else. Dogs, his child, his friends.

Connemara alternates between Hélène and Christoph, their present tense and their memories. What links them is the same small town. She got out via the Bac, university, and Paris. She married well and played the game competently until she suffered a nervous breakdown. She and her family relocated back to the Grand Est region, settling in a designer house in Nancy, able to live well and at a less expense than in Paris. As if we can find wellbeing simply by rearranging external reality. Her external reality doesn’t even shift quite enough, it seems. She’s still working in the same soul-crushing industry of corporate consulting.

Christoph never had Hélène’s ambition to get out or get away. He was ambitious as a hockey player, but now that that’s over, he seems resigned to his life selling dog food — the dullness of traveling by car for sales and deliveries, gaining weight from too much reliance on convenient meals at all-night diners. While we can’t describe him as happy, he seems to find enough satisfaction in fatherhood and time with his two best friends. Things only begin to crack when his son’s mother announces that she’s going to live in another place to take a job that promises a better life for her and their son.

Mathieu gives us variety and contrast. Hélène was desperate in adolescence to get away, then resolved to return (sort of) when the Parisian life became unendurable. Christoph was motivated to be a big hockey star mainly so he could impress Charley, eventually the mother of his son. But when his hockey career fell apart, he seemed content to stay it out and accept his fate — and with a surprisingly decent attitude. We see the opposite reaction from both of his parents and his elder brother, none of whom was able to cope well with lost or denied opportunities. How well one person copes with disappointment or failure may be judged differently. You may, for instance, think Christoph drank too much beer and wasted too much of his time in the company of friends who encouraged bad habits. In general, though, you could say something like that about all of us and, frankly, all things considered, Christoph really doesn’t do too badly. He shows up to work on time, he does his job to the best of his ability. He gets his son to school, feeds him, takes care of him, loves him, plays with him, addresses him as Sweetie.

Hélène and Philippe pay a nanny to look after the kids when they’re at work. The few glimpses we see of her as a parent reveal how fed up she is, her impatience, her lack of resilience. She’s not a bad person. She reminds me of lots of people who don’t cope well when things fall short of expectation. She’s looking for happiness at little cost, a low risk escape. Some form of relief that creates the minimal disruption and discomfort.

For Hélène, Christoph represents the aspiration and the dreams she had as a teenager. When she was a teenager, she longed for the freedom of adulthood, but now she looks back on it and sees only the euphoria she felt from the dream. For Christoph, the affair with Hélène is attractive because it renews, if only for a split second, the rush of being desired again. He’s the handsome, athletic, celebrated hockey player in her eyes. One gets the feeling that both would like to have more than this — more than clandestine meet-ups in seedy hotels, far from acquaintances who might recognize them — but “more” never comes without risk. Commitment requires you to make hard choices.

The easy compensations, the difficult choices we avoid, are not so different from the smoke and shadows of classical noir. Both require lies and deception. Lying to ourselves, lying to others about who we really are. Classical noir imagined corruption hidden beneath society. Mathieu suggests corruption is laced into the structure of society itself, embedded in routines, aspirations, clichés, and the inherited wisdom people rarely stop to question.

The shadows are no longer in alleyways. They’re in office parks, consulting firms, exhausted marriages, regional decline, and the quiet humiliations people absorb into their bodies every day. We don’t need supernatural monsters or cinematic villains to show us what corrodes human beings. Often the real horror is quieter than that, folded into routines and compromises so ordinary we stop noticing them. The entertainment industry anesthetizes it for us, teaches us to make darkness stylish or dismissible. Mathieu asks us to look at it directly instead. That may be uncomfortable, but perhaps that discomfort is also a form of courage.

Notes

There is an account I follow on Instagram. It is one of my favorite outputs from the app. The algorithm knows it, of course: my almost involuntary likes and occasional comments make it something the app willingly pushes my way whenever it can.

It’s simple: people on the Paris Metro reading books. If it were a film, I would watch it before bed to relax. Just images of strangers on a train caught in solitary moments. Naturally, I like seeing the books they’re reading. But I also find myself fascinated by the person running the account — the unseen observer taking the video, later editing the book cover back into the frame in post-production. Meta glasses? Concealed iPhone footage?

Disturbing, a little. Especially because the account doesn’t always remember to blur faces.

There is no way I could ever get away with this kind of public voyeurism. I imagine there must be some law of social credit that permits certain people these liberties. Maybe if you live in Paris long enough and ride enough trains, people simply stop noticing you.

I was only in Paris once. My priorities were bookstores, the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Metro — all the places where you see plenty of people and speak to almost none of them except in the ways that count. Like the young man I sat beside in the Luxembourg Gardens while reading the Kierkegaard I’d bought at Shakespeare & Company. In the right place at the right moment, you discover silent languages for which there is no clean translation.

Like the boy in Geometry when you’re fifteen who reappears periodically. Not a love interest. Not a soulmate, but someone you recognize, who in memory becomes a recurring recognition at key moments. Why do we keep meeting in time but never really talking? Maybe because we don’t have to? Because I’m you and you’re me and we did this before and it’s fun to have this little secret, isn’t it? To meet in Geometry of all places. Points in infinity.

Les étrangers dans le train?

The allure of speculation and projection. It may be impossible to look at another person through such a window and not invent a thousand stories in your head.

In real presence with others — not through technology — self-consciousness interferes with observation. Maybe that’s part of why we increasingly choose to remain occupied in public. We are afraid to speak to the stranger beside us because we don’t know what will look back: acceptance, rejection, judgment.

So increasingly we retreat inward. We become more still while the train keeps moving.

The train itself becomes an entity on a track, woven into an infrastructure connecting the points in time that make up a life. All lives. Infinite reality.

Yesterday I was struck by a post showing a man reading Une histoire du théâtre by Philippe Tesson. He looked about a quarter of the way into the book. Leaning forward. Reading glasses sliding slightly down his nose. Probably the after-work commute, if the slouch and subdued exhaustion were any indication.

I clock the details: black walking shoes tightly laced, thin socks losing the war against gravity, a scuffed black briefcase between his feet with brass-colored buckles. Teacher, probably. Someone who walks quickly. Someone accustomed to lectures and meetings and deadlines. The cream denim pants slightly askew at one knee. Married. A real watch with a leather band instead of an Apple Watch counting steps and heartbeats. Valuable technology, certainly — but this man does not seem to need motivation to move. He already has somewhere to be.

Fifty, maybe. Reddish hair. Furrowed concentration. Fit not in the sculpted sense, but in the practical one: walking, breathing, surviving the daily Parisian machinery.

What does he teach? Acting? Stagecraft? Aesthetics? Did he write a dissertation on Chekhov and domestic life? Tennessee Williams and southern manners? Is he even French?

Jorge Luis Borges would have made an entire labyrinth out of this man and his theatre book. The book itself would travel. Change hands. Contain notes in the margins from previous readers. Perhaps a sentence written on one of the blank pages years ago by someone who understood they would never be seen again except through traces.

Oh, no, Borges would have them meet again. Everything happens again. Even parallel lines that never intersect will begin to mirror each other.

Two people at different points in time: one sitting on a train, lost in his reading and his thoughts; the other observing him through an app and inventing a story that perhaps the same man someday reads himself.

Maybe years later he finds it accidentally in a science fiction novel left on a café table. Or maybe the recurrence is smaller than that. Maybe it’s only the shoes that reappear in a secondhand store window. The briefcase at a flea market. The theatre book resold online with unfamiliar handwriting in the margins.

The objects continue the conversation long after the people lose touch.

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You may have guessed it: yes, I’ve been reading a good bit of Borges lately. This is the first time I have put my thoughts about his patterns in a long-form post, but I’ve already made some Notes, embedded below — four different Notes, all connected to each other, because connection is what it’s all about?

I went to the Baton Rouge River Center last night to see 84-year-old Bob Dylan and band belt out the critically acclaimed Rough and Rowdy set.

He sat center stage in a hoodie and did what he’s always done. He played his music. No fuss, no frills.

Just the man and his band.

He worked the keyboard, sometimes standing, stepping out from behind it once or twice. Two harmonica breaks—both of them landing exactly where they needed to, cutting clean through the room.

They started a little rough. Then they found it.
The rhythm came, and once it came, it held.

It’s extraordinary for any octogenarian. More so when you consider that he’s been touring, in one form or another, since 1988—the long arc people call the Never Ending Tour. The pandemic paused it. In that pause, he released his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. The tour that followed was supposed to end in 2024.

But Bob?

He wanted to keep going.

So he added more shows. And now we’re in 2026 and he is still on the move.

You could say the extension is driven by demand. Of course there’s demand, but it’s more than that. It’s him.

Dylan doesn’t work the stage. He never did. He stands, he plays, he moves when he needs to.

What he wants—what he has always wanted—is to play the music.

And increasingly, he wants to do it without distraction—or being one.

He doesn’t want photographs. He doesn’t want the performance mediated through a thousand small glowing screens. The audience is there for the show, and the show is his. That’s the contract.

At the Baton Rouge event, every phone was locked in a Yondr pouch before the lights went down.

His show, his rules.

A minor inconvenience, maybe. But a meaningful one.

Because the alternative—the one we’ve all come to accept—is a room full of raised arms, lenses pointed forward, attention split between the moment and its documentation. From the stage, that must look like something close to surveillance.

At 84, under stage lights that are unforgiving at any age, I don’t blame him for resisting that.

After the show, I plugged the hoodie question into a search engine. Photos of Dylan on stage in the hoodie are posted on Reddit and TikTok. Not from Baton Rouge, but from other shows on the same tour.

It irritated me more than I expected.

Because it breaks the terms of something that had, for a brief hour and a half, felt intact. A room without phones. A performance that wasn’t immediately flattened into content.

If people don’t like the rules, they don’t have to go.
But if you’re there, you’re there on his terms.

I wish I had been thinking more clearly; I would have downvoted the Reddit post. (I don’t do anything on TikTok.) If people don’t like the measures the tour takes to prevent photos of the performance, too bad. It’s not an arbitrary request.

In my opinion, it’s a an annoyance worth enduring for the privilege of hearing Bob Dylan live. Especially if the sacrifice makes the performance better because the star is unbothered, feels comfortable and happy.

An hour and a half without an iPhone is nothing.
An hour and a half in the room with Dylan, at this point in his life, is not nothing.

It won’t happen again in quite the same way. It can’t.

He keeps adding dates to a tour that has already outlived its original design. That extension isn’t logistical. It’s personal. It’s the expression of a man who still wants—insists—on doing what he loves.

He wants to play the music and let the music breathe in its own way.

Without a phone that has too many superfluous abilities, the mind does what it used to do at concerts—wanders, attaches, drifts, returns—without needing to hold anything up to prove it was there.

I think of the concert scene in Howards End, when Forster dwells on the Schlegel siblings carried along not just by Beethoven, but by their own interior weather as the music moves through them. Tibby’s attention was fractured much as mine was in the Dylan concert, not away from the music but into something the music made possible. Instead of splitting outward, as happens when we record moments with our phones, the music pulls the attention inward.

For all the diligence of the workers of the venue, there is no guarantee that all audience phones will be detected. What I saw on Reddit proves that there is always someone audacious enough to flout the rules.

The hoodie, then, feels like more than a wish to hide.

It feels like a continuation of resistance. A kind of last defense. If the system fails—if a camera slips through—there is still shadow.

There is still some part of him that remains his.

He just wants to do music. He wants to do music badly enough to keep touring in spite of the aggravation.

He has given his heart—to the music, to the world.

But because of the boundaries he has always taken care to establish, there is still some part of him that remains only his.

That feels right.

In the age of algorithms, there is no website that will save us.

I confess, when I turned to Substack in 2022, I thought it might. As a fledgling writer coming from Medium, I recognized the cues: Get out. People are leaving. The algorithms have turned.

They favor influencers. Popularity loops. A kind of performance that feels less and less human.

So I migrated.

I wrote short pieces—because short gets read, right? Bistro theatre, Sartre and the Waiter, Stoicism, indie films, a rant about a bad adaptation, too much enthusiasm about Obi Wan Kenobi. Nothing monumental. Some of it, frankly, embarrassing now.

But those pieces made me happy. And they made me a better writer.

I’m glad I had a place to sharpen my voice when hardly anyone was looking.

There still aren’t many people looking.

That’s part of what I want to write about here—not as a complaint. Truthfully, I’m grateful.

This past year—though part of me still feels stuck in 2025—I’ve been rebelling against what I think of as the validation market.

You’ve heard it called the Attention Economy. But that framing feels too neutral. Too polite.

Attention isn’t just scarce anymore—it’s distorted.

At the individual level, we feel a deficit. But at scale, there’s an overdose. A kind of cultural diabetic coma. Attention is everywhere, but it lacks focus.

It makes me think of an episode of Doctor Who—the one where David Tennant and Billie Piper go back to Coronation Day, June 2, 1953. The first mass television event. Everyone watching. Everyone focused.

An alien hiding in electrical currents uses that attention—millions of people staring at their televisions—to feed itself and escape with stolen energy.

That’s what it feels like scrolling now.

All of us staring into glowing rectangles, feeding something we don’t understand.

Reels of children reacting to other children. Pets being scolded. Endless loops of engineered reaction.

To quote :
“Why has everything become so stupid?”

Because stupidity scales.

That is what wins in the validation race.

It used to be: be sexy.

But sexy became saturated. Then it became frightening.

Now it’s something else—something louder, flatter, more desperate.

And I wonder—quietly, maybe foolishly—if the outcome will be a split:

The people who stay online, competing to out-stupid one another…

…and the people who drift back toward physical spaces. Bookstores. Coffee shops. Conversations.

A girl can dream.

recently wrote about refusal to engage with Substack Notes—the algorithmic layer that pushes high-engagement content outward, flattening everything into sameness.

He’s right.

Why do platforms insist on this?

Why not build systems that surface what we individually value, instead of forcing convergence?

Because sameness is profitable.

Because individuality is harder to scale.

Because, at some level, the system does not want you to be yourself—it wants you to be legible, predictable, and optimizable.

Two years ago, argued for dropping out of the validation race.

Not by leaving platforms entirely—but by disengaging from the need to be seen.

Just write.

Use Notes if you want. Post if you want. But release the expectation of attention.

Because attention-seeking has never worked—not really. Even before algorithms, people resisted it.

Now, with algorithms, it’s simply mechanized.

And yet, we can’t fully leave.

Social media has become a kind of modern calling card. In a world where emails go unanswered, you either exist on these platforms or risk becoming unreachable.

So I’ve made my compromises.

Instagram lives on my iPad, not my phone. I don’t carry it with me.

When I go out, I bring a book.

When I’m standing in line or sitting in a waiting room, I read. While others scroll, I turn pages.

It’s a small act of resistance. But it matters.

(Anthony Marigold is taking algorithm resistance to a seriously heroic level. I regard his as a small ember—steady, alive—in a very dark tunnel.)

I don’t think leaving Substack is the answer either.

New platforms will emerge. They always do. And eventually, the same forces will find them.

It’s not a platform problem. It’s a system problem.

And I would rather spend my time writing than fighting a system I cannot win against.

I’ve been thinking about this constantly—especially since I paid for a press release for The Signal Between Us.

Now the emails come daily.

Marketing consultants. Visibility strategists. Growth experts. Companies like Signal Clarity offering their formulas.

All promising the same thing: attention.

As if attention can be purchased in meaningful quantities.

As if you can spend your way into being read.

My book is at a disadvantage in this economy.

It can’t compete with hot vampires, werewolves, and erotica.

It’s about silence. Memory. Emotional distance. The slow, fragile work of connection.

The people who would love it aren’t being targeted by ads.

They’re not even being shown where to look.

And I don’t believe I can trick an algorithm into changing that.

Not with money. Not with strategy.

Certainly not with Amazon ads.

A book like mine travels differently.

It moves through conversation. Through recommendation. Through moments of recognition between people.

Hand to hand. Eye contact. A quiet “you might like this.”

Which is terrifying for me.

Because I live with Avoidant Personality Disorder. Social anxiety. The whole constellation.

And yet—that is exactly what this kind of work demands.

Not scrollers. Not influencers.

Readers.

So I’m trying.

This Saturday, a Goodreads giveaway goes live: one hundred Kindle copies of The Signal Between Us.

A small gesture. But a meaningful one.

Yes, Goodreads is corporate owned. Yes, it isn’t perfect. And yes, some readers are migrating to decentralized counterparts like StoryGraph.

But my thinking is simple:

If attention is going to exist somewhere, let it at least exist in spaces where people are looking for books.

Because when people find books, there’s still a chance—however small—that they might read them.

And people reading books, these days?

That’s still a bet I’m willing to make.

A girl can dream.

Ashley Rovira is the author of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story and the founder of Heavy Crown Press, where she writes about neurodivergence, fracture, and the spaces between what is felt and what is said.

There are moments one always remembers.

Tying your shoelaces without help for the first time.
Staying upright on a bicycle without training wheels.
The first time you take the exit ramp off the 405, dazed and slightly out of breath, heart racing.

And then there is the first moment you picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Turned the pages to that unforgettable opening:

Early 2003 or late 2002.
An apartment in Ventura, California.

I’ll never forget the edition—Scholastic, mass market paperback. It quickly became the most precious book I’d opened in a long time.

How long did it take me to read it? A day? Maybe two. No more.

The trip to the bookstore to buy the second book became the most important item on my to-do list. And the sadness, after finishing Book Four—knowing there would be a long wait before Book Five—felt, at the time, like a kind of loss. (Goodness, I still remember the trip to Waldenbooks to get my preordered copy of Book Five, and later, reading Book Six on the tram up to Universal Citywalk where I worked at that time.)

Of course the books were about me.

Harry was me. Hermione was me. Luna, Snape, McGonagall. They were all me in some way or another.

I was no different from any other reader in believing that I belonged on the train to Hogwarts. Recognition. Resonance. It was all there. It was powerful.

Imagine, then, being one of the two boys, in 1999, auditioning for the lead role.

Daniel Radcliffe…

…and the other one.

Numéro Deux.

The novel by David Foenkinos is about that other boy.

Fictionalized, but real in essence. Because of course there was another boy.

Foenkinos names him Martin Hill.

The son of John Hill, of London, and Jeanne, of Paris.

The first chapters recount how John and Jeanne met, how they fell in love on a stroll to a cemetery after making love. The years pass. On her side, love gives way to disillusionment. By the time Martin is ten, he is the child of a broken home, traveling alone between his parents on the Eurostar.

I listened to the audiobook of Second Best, the English-language edition of Numéro Deux. Translated by Megan Jones and read by Joe Thomas.

I hit pause midway through Chapter 30, just after the crushing moment when the rejection lands. That was when I went back to the beginning just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The analogies are poignant. It’s fiction, but it’s real life too.

A novel like this one doesn’t depend on suspense. There is curiosity, yes—anticipation—but the real question is what happens after.

What happens to Martin once he is not chosen?

How does he cope?

The short answer: about as well as you might expect for a ten-year-old.

Even one already acquainted with disappointment. A child who has learned, early, what it means to be in transit—shuttled back and forth across the Channel between his parents, like an object in motion, not entirely belonging to either side.

Jane Austen once observed—in Sense and Sensibility—that it is the sense of singularity that sharpens suffering.

There is, perhaps, a strange consolation in knowing one is not alone.

Many children experience the fracture of a broken home. That knowledge does not remove the pain, but it places it within a shared condition.

But this—missing the role of Harry Potter by a single decision, a single difference between you and the one who was chosen—this is something else.

We all experience rejection. Even at ten.

Not being picked for the school play. Being passed over in a game of dodgeball.

But the role of Harry Potter—the rarity of it, the magnitude of it—is matched only by the scale of its loss.

It is not only the rejection that stings.

It is the feeling that it is about him—that he failed, that he lacked something essential.

Worsened by the sense that it happened to him alone.

There is only one Numéro Deux.

This line from Chapter 29 is devastating:

For the reader—listener, in my case—the pain is not felt through Martin alone, but through his parents as well.

Foenkinos imagines that John takes it personally. He internalizes the loss, as if the failure could be traced back to him—to something flawed, something insufficient, something passed down.

A problematic inheritance.

As though the difference—the small, elusive difference—has always been there, waiting, long before the audition ever took place.

Small, decisive, impossible-to-articulate differences. That’s what fate or luck comes down to.

Foenkinos reminds us, again and again throughout the book, that great things hinge on small moments.

A producer decides—years earlier—that he will never deliver bad news except in person. A rule born of compassion. And yet, in practice, it makes the blow worse.

A cough, in a throwaway moment.
A chance meeting in a place one does not usually go.

We call it fate. Or luck—if it ends well.

But if it ends badly?

“As luck would have it.”

As though luck were always lucky.

Of course it isn’t. Sometimes it’s rotten.

Bad luck.

What is it, really, but disappointment reduced to something trite? A way of softening the truth?

Your hopes and dreams hinge on small, contingent encounters. A change in trajectory brought about by something as slight as a cough, or one person’s fleeting perception of another’s fragility.

Since my mother joined the MFA program at LSU, I’ve known many actors. One was my stepfather—though not technically so. (I wrote about him here, shortly after his death early in 2023.) I’ve interviewed actors here who well know the pain of rejection after an audition.

Because no matter how successful an actor becomes, that success is built on repeated exposure to that sting.

And yet a role like Harry Potter—that is something else entirely.

The one in a million.

The jackpot. The lottery to end all lotteries.

Harry Potter is not just a role. It is an experience. A universal one.

If you read those books—if you felt them, and returned to them, again and again—then you have a stake in it.

A share in this strange market, where the currency is hope, and the transaction is something like magic.

The second part of the story is difficult to get through. Alarming, triggering physical abuse—an explicit parallel to the abuse Harry Potter suffers at the hands of the Dursleys. That was the most difficult thing for me. I felt rage toward Martin’s mother, Jeanne, for her obliviousness and the absence that allowed the abuse to continue.

Martin’s inner turmoil gets worse as he can’t find the words to articulate his pain. He wants to talk, but he can’t form the words. The words just get stuck somewhere, unreachable.

Withdrawal deepens the pain.

Foenkinos refers to a “hierarchy of pain.” Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, that is the pinnacle. The film adaptations are next in degree of pain. There is a devastating moment when Jeanne, a journalist, conspires to confront J.K. Rowling, hoping for some guidance or some kind of sign that might help Martin, only to have J.K. Rowling cancel the interview at the last minute.

Martin notices the parallels between the Harry Potter universe and his own. He feels the likeness between his stepfather and Voldemort, between his stepbrother and Dudley Dursley. It’s as if, on some level, the abusers of Martin sense the fragility inside him and derive pleasure from exposing it. It’s a literal reign of terror, as Martin’s dread of the abuse adds fuel to an already roaring fire and the anticipation of it amounts to “the greatest achievement of a tormenter—to provoke a kind of muted terror without having to do a thing.” (Part II, Chapter XXII.)

There is a fundamental craving in us: to be wanted—not for use, but for value—and to feel that we have been chosen.

To know that what is inside us is not merely acceptable, but good. Worth loving.

At the age of ten, Martin felt all of this but didn’t know how to trace it. It just morphed into pain with no apparent cause, shame with nowhere to go but deeper inside. There’s a dramatic event at the end of the second part that leads into Part III and feels like a slow exhale. It’s a reprieve. As a listener, I literally exhaled at this juncture. I felt my body relax.

At the age of ten, Martin feels all of this without knowing how to name it.

It gathers instead as pain without a clear source. Shame with nowhere to go but inward.

At the end of the second part, something shifts.

A dramatic event—one that opens into Part III—and it feels, quite simply, like an exhale.

As a listener, I felt it physically. My body relaxed.

The abuse is over. Martin finds a measure of peace.

I love that one of his refuges is the Louvre.

The Louvre is so vast, so overwhelming in its beauty, that it becomes more than a sanctuary. It becomes something unreal.

Reality stops at the turnstile. It cannot enter.

Inside, everything is suspended.

Martin notices the painting that hangs opposite the Mona Lisa: The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese.

And he draws a quiet analogy.

In the presence of the chosen one, everything else recedes.

We know how this works. We gather before the Mona Lisa. We give it our attention, our reverence.

And just across the room—something immense, luminous, extraordinary—remains, for the most part, unseen.

A Numéro Deux.

Not lesser.

But living, always, in the shadow of what has been chosen.

Martin now has one of life’s rarest gifts: space.

Space to simply be.

He works in the Louvre, largely unnoticed. And for once, that is not a curse, but a relief.

Here, he can breathe.

He doesn’t have to speak.

He doesn’t have to perform.

He doesn’t have to pretend that everything is all right.

For once, everything is.

He is all right.

Nothing is resolved. Nothing has been repaired.

But something essential has shifted.

For the first time since early childhood, there is space around him—space around his thoughts, his feelings.

They are no longer pressing in on him from all sides.

They can exist.

And so can he.

We are close to the end.

The space he has found allows something to open. Slowly.

There is movement forward, then retraction. He opens, something triggers him, he closes again. He experiments with ways of coping. There is a brief turn toward alcohol. There are small advances.

And then, something steadier.

At the Louvre, he finds a place that suits him. A promotion. A rhythm. A form of belonging that leads, gradually, to friendship.

It is not transformation. It is not resolution.

But it is movement.

The real beauty comes in the final chapters, in an unexpected meeting between Martin and Daniel Radcliffe.

Here, fiction and reality collide in a way that feels almost impossible—and yet entirely right.

It is a daring choice: to bring a real person into a fictional life.

Foenkinos does it with remarkable care.

Radcliffe enters the story not as a likeness, but as an opposite. Not a reflection, but an alternative.

The life that was chosen.

And what emerges from their encounter is something quietly extraordinary.

Not triumph. Not vindication.

Recognition.

Because Radcliffe, too, has suffered.

He, too, has wondered about the other boy.

The one who was not chosen.

The Numéro Deux.

And he has asked himself a question that unsettles everything:

Would that life have been better?

What if the one who was chosen carries his own version of the loss?

What if the difference—the small, decisive difference—does not lead to a better life, only a different one?

It is a strange gift, to imagine meeting the version of yourself who received what you lost.

To speak with the one who was chosen where you were not.

To see, in that encounter, not superiority or failure, but divergence.

Two lives, shaped by a moment too small to name.

And in that recognition, something loosens.

What once felt suffocating now feels manageable.

Hopeless turns into possibility.

We all want to be Harry. Chosen, valued, validated.

One child got to be him on the screen.

But perhaps being Harry was never the point.

Perhaps the point is to choose ourselves.

Because in our own story, we’re not ‘the other one.’

Everyone is saying it now. Or if not saying it, then feeling it—somewhere beneath the surface, like pressure before a storm. The sense that something is off. That the world has become harder to read, harder to trust, harder to name.

It shows up in small ways. A hesitation before accepting a fact. A quiet suspicion of expertise. A sense that institutions—once slow, stable, and authoritative—are now either fractured or performing stability rather than embodying it. We move through a landscape saturated with information to the point of vertigo.

It is tempting to try to locate a beginning—to point to moments when there was a turn: an election, a referendum, a crisis. Trump. Brexit. The Tea Party. 9/11. Each offers itself as an origin story, a clean break between before and after.

But the feeling resists that kind of precision. It suggests something older, more gradual. Not a rupture, but an accumulation. A long erosion of shared frameworks for understanding what is real, what is true, what can be trusted.

Go back far enough and the pattern begins to repeat. The language changes, the stakes shift, but the underlying structure remains: competing narratives, institutional strain, a growing distance between lived experience and official explanation. The present does not feel unprecedented—only intensified.

We live inside it.

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

Graham Greene didn’t write ordinary noir—whatever that would be. He was totally different from Chandler and Hammett. His spy “entertainments,” as he called them, were less about systems than individuals. Individuals caught up in those systems. People pulled into espionage while trying to do other things.

In Our Man in Havana, the central tension is not simply between truth and lies, or crime and evidence, but between systems and persons.

Religion, nation, ideology—these are systems. They rely on repetition, belief, and loyalty at scale. They offer structure, but they also demand submission.

Against them stands something smaller and far less stable: the individual life lived for a person rather than an idea.

Wormold doesn’t belongs to systems. He is detached from Milly’s Catholicism, unmoved by patriotism, and only loosely attached to capitalism, where even selling vacuum cleaners becomes nearly impossible in a world shaped by Cold War fear—where “atomic” power repels more than it attracts.

He fails within every system he encounters.

So he invents one.

In the absence of success, he fabricates it—agents, networks, intelligence. And yet his fiction somehow folds into reality. It enters the machinery of espionage and operates outside of his control, endangering lives.

Beatrice recognizes the absurdity of the game because she has lived inside it. But she also sees something else in Wormold: a way of moving outside the system, improvising rather than obeying.

Milly, too, appears to belong to a system—Catholic, structured, moral—but her instincts mirror her father’s. She plays the game, but does not fully inhabit it. Beatrice sees this, and comes to love them both.

It is a dangerous love only because it collides with a world organized around systems—espionage, ideology, Cold War logic.

Greene leaves us with a quiet, impossible proposition: that if loyalty to persons replaced loyalty to systems, the world might be less efficient, less coherent—but far less violent.

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Wake Up Dead Man, the third and latest Knives Out mystery on Netflix, is a hoot—though a darker one than its predecessors. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery finds Daniel Craig returning as private eye Benoit Blanc, this time stepping into a quaint village where Old World and New World sensibilities collide in unsettling ways.

Rian Johnson assembles another impeccable ensemble: Josh O’Connor, Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Cailee Spaeny, and Daryl McCormack—a transatlantic mix that quietly reinforces the film’s central idea: hypocrisy travels well.

At the center are two priests, played by Brolin and O’Connor. O’Connor, who previously wore the collar as Mr. Elton in the 2020 adaptation of Emma, returns here as a Catholic priest marked by a violent past—reformed, perhaps, but unmistakably burdened. There is nothing more suspicious than a man who insists he has changed.

And yet it isn’t O’Connor who unsettles most—it’s Brolin. His Wicks exudes a controlled menace, the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself. Opposite him, Close (playing Martha) is formidable, operating at the other extreme: composed, knowing, and quietly terrifying. As O’Connor’s character observes, Wicks may be in charge, but Martha is the one who knows where the bodies are buried.

The structure is pure Agatha Christie: a closed circle of suspects, a carefully constructed social microcosm. The village and church feel like they could belong to a Miss Marple story—if Miss Marple wandered into something far more morally volatile.

Because this is where the film sharpens.

Patriarchy has no borders. Hypocrisy is universal. Emotional manipulation transcends culture, language, and even belief. Religion, in Johnson’s hands, becomes less a doctrine than a stage on which power performs itself.

There’s a father–son reveal that leans knowingly into myth—its echo of Star Wars (“we will rule together”) both unsettling and absurd. It’s one of several moments where the film invites you to laugh—and then immediately questions why you did.

That tonal balance is the film’s real achievement.

It is dark, often uncomfortably so. But it is also funny—sharply, deliberately funny. And that humor doesn’t dilute the weight of its subject. If anything, it exposes it. Religion, after all, carries contradictions that resist resolution and leaves behind wounds that don’t easily close. To find humor within that space without trivializing it is no small feat.

Here, the humor works because it feels true.

The absurdity isn’t imposed. It’s revealed.

The laughter cuts through.

Not as relief, exactly—but as release. A loosening of tension just enough to let something else in. The mind opens a fraction, and in that opening, a pattern begins to take shape.

It is not new.

A man formed within a system that protects him, elevates him, names him shepherd—only for him to grow quietly resentful of the very flock that sustains his authority. Their devotion becomes a mirror he cannot bear to look into for too long. Their freedom, however small, becomes intolerable.

Control, then, becomes the answer. Not loudly. Not all at once. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, until it feels like doctrine.

He cannot turn his anger upward—toward the structure that made him—so he redirects it. Sideways. Downward. Toward the one who can be named, isolated, and offered up.

A scapegoat.

A woman, often. The harlot. The witch. The one whose existence can be reframed as disorder. In another story, she might wear a pointed hat and green skin. In this one, she carries the weight of knowledge—of what has been done, and by whom.

What the film understands—quietly, almost too well—is that patriarchy does not depend on geography. It travels. It adapts. It survives translation.

The laughter passes. The story resolves.

But something quieter settles in its place—the recognition of a pattern that does not end when the film does.

Nature and science stand in tension in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. At the beginning of the novel, however, life is still harmonious. That harmony is what will be broken.

In Frankenstein (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro, there is a significant shift. Victor is not romanticized, nor is his upbringing treated with nostalgia. The film condenses his background into a series of striking visualizations: the silent, gentle mother cloaked in red; the overbearing father pushing science onto Victor; the mother’s death in childbirth; and the father’s preference for the lighter, more carefree William over the brooding elder son.

But it is with the mother’s death, and Victor’s response to it, that sympathy ends. He turns away from life and toward science, becoming cold in the image of the father he resented.

This is part of the film’s composite approach to a central contrast: inherited and taught masculine obsession versus a gentler, intuitive feminine nature. The name “Victor,” imposed on both father and son (a departure from Shelley), signals the will to conquer. He is the one who would conquer nature. The world he builds stands in opposition to the natural world embodied first by the mother and later by Elizabeth.

Another composite appears in Heinrich Harlander, who blends elements of Shelley’s Henry Clerval and his merchant father. He represents industry—the financial and practical force that enables Victor’s ambition. The Harlander combination is interesting because it compresses Henry Clerval’s predilection for the Middle Ages (a more chivalrous, romantic time prior to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment) and his father’s bias against liberal education. It also compresses the story into something where the tension lies chiefly between conquest and intuitive gentleness rather than straightforward good and evil.

The film, then, is a modern retelling that frames the creator much more clearly as the villain. Where the novel leaves moral judgment ambiguous, the film sharpens it: the creator fails his creature. He seeks forgiveness. The creature grants it and endures—“brokenly,” to borrow the line from Lord Byron on which the film closes.

The world of science, war, and destruction is presented as masculine—Victor’s domain—perpetually at odds with nature. This is made visual in the wolves, in weapons, and in the cold laboratory space. In contrast, butterflies—symbols of beauty and innocence—are associated with Elizabeth and the feminine.

The creature comes to understand violence as inevitable in the world man has made. “Nature calms, knowledge unhinges.” The butterfly becomes a haunting symbol of transformation: a being that simply lives on, with “three hearts, multiple eyes, and white blood,” and, as Elizabeth observes, a “fascinating lack of choice.”

Choice, she says, is uniquely human—“the seat of the soul,” a gift of the creator. Elizabeth, who does not belong to the harsh masculine world, chooses life. Victor chooses its corruption.

One of the most critical changes the film makes is moral. The creature is less a perversion of life than a miraculous assemblage of the “discarded dead” of endless wars driven by human ambition. And yet, in spite of this origin, Elizabeth recognizes in him something she herself has long sought but could not name: love. She echoes the allusions drawn by Shelley to Milton. “To be lost and found: that is the lifespan of love,” she says, invoking the ideal.

The creature’s instinct is kindness, seen in his care for the cottagers and his bond with the blind old man. The novel leaves open the question of whether the creature is good or evil. The film makes a clearer choice: the creature is good, and he is wronged—abandoned and denied.

The head of Medusa looms over the creation process in Victor’s laboratory. The image reinforces the film’s central inversion: what is created is not inherently monstrous, but made so by the gaze that fears and rejects it. It is one of many visual symbols that compliments the technical achievements of the film at the 98th Academy Awards: production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling. These are not merely aesthetic or atmospheric, but acknowledgments of how deeply the visual language supports the story’s argument. From the recurring red of blood and life, to the stark contrast between the cold laboratory and the living world of nature, every detail is constructed to reflect a world out of balance—a world in which creation has been severed from responsibility.

The creature is made unhappy in isolation. His rage emerges as a response to rejection and the fearful attitude from others that pushes them to violence. He is also envious of the companionship that is denied him. Victor refuses to give him a mate, fearing the creation of a new race. And so the film raises, without resolving, its central question:

What gives man the right to play God—to decide who lives and who must remain alone?

The creature, like the butterfly—and like women in Shelley’s world—is denied choice. He must go on alone.

And yet there is a moment of transformation. After forgiving Victor, the creature saves the sailors. In that act, he becomes something more than what was made of him.

Shelley’s novel has often been read as a warning about scientific progress and its consequences—from industrialization to climate change. The film extends that warning into the present. If the creature represents what humanity creates, then the true question is not whether creation is monstrous.

It is whether the creator will act with responsibility.

Man has created artificial intelligence. The test now may be the same: whether we guide what we create ethically, or abandon it. That choice may determine whether our creations destroy us—or expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Nobody loses an Oscar. There is winning, and there is not winning. You cannot lose what you never possessed. A nomination is already the honor; the winner is simply the artist the Academy chooses to recognize for that work in that year.

Which is why the speeches often matter more than the statues. When Michael B. Jordan accepted his award for The Sinners, he spoke about the people who believed in him early—the ones who bet on him—and promised he would keep showing up for them. It was a reminder that the real engine behind great work is never ego. It’s the heart.

That idea stayed with me as I wrote this analysis and review of Marty Supreme, a film that appears at first to be about ambition and narcissism, but gradually reveals something very different.

One of the nominees who did not win an Oscar this year is an actor who has captured extraordinary attention in recent years: Timothée Chalamet. His performance as Bob Dylan was so convincing that it permanently fused actor and legend in the mind of the audience. I remember a line from Joan Baez describing Dylan as someone who seemed to arrive already a legend. Chalamet’s rise carries something of that same aura, and that kind of ascent always carries danger. A man cannot survive it unless he finds a way to carve out a space where he remembers who he is. Dylan famously retreated to Woodstock, New York for precisely that reason.

After the Dylan performance, expectations for Marty Supreme were high. Chalamet did not disappoint. On the contrary, he did exactly what Michael B. Jordan described in his speech: he showed up and gave everything he had.

On the surface, Marty Supreme looks like a film about a narcissist. That’s certainly how I saw it through the first half—maybe even three quarters—of the story. But somewhere along the way I began to realize that Marty is not a narcissist at all. He is the product of narcissism. He has been formed inside a narcissistic culture and forced to survive it. He strives to rise above it, but in the end the miracle of his story is simpler: he survives it without becoming it.

I’m going to discuss the film with spoilers. I want to show you the story as I experienced it, because the film ultimately circles around something fundamental. It circles around the moment when a person cracks. Some of us experience that moment the way Marty does—if we’re lucky. That may sound strange if you think of the film as a tragedy. On the surface it certainly appears that way: failed ambition, humiliations, relentless curveballs in a brutal world.

But when you understand life through the lens of the crack-up, the story changes. You begin to recognize that moment of fracture in every narrative worth telling.

Some critics have complained about the frenetic pacing of the film. I understand that reaction. Fifteen minutes into it I felt the same vertigo. In fact, the movie deserves a warning label: may cause dizziness. At first I resented the stylistic choice by director Josh Safdie. I resented being thrown into a world that felt like the living hell moralists describe when they try to scare people into righteousness—a world dominated by ruthless masculine competition, where greed and humiliation rule and everyone, especially women, is expected to know their place.

But gradually something remarkable becomes clear. The filmmakers have taken the interior life of their protagonist and made it visible. The chaos we see—the relentless hustling, the naked greed, the cutthroat ambition—is not simply the environment Marty inhabits. It is the landscape of his mind.

The opening credits show conception. Here is where life begins.

The film then shows us what Marty was born into: a culture of hustling, manipulation, and instability. The floor can literally collapse beneath you—sometimes in the form of a bathtub crashing through the ceiling. The dream of climbing out of that world drives him forward.

Table tennis becomes the vehicle of that escape.

The true turning point comes when Marty is forced into humiliation he cannot escape. He cannot charm his way out of it. He cannot hustle the room. He cannot lie—to anyone, including himself. In that moment he is laid bare.

The crack appears.

And that crack becomes the beginning of something else.

By the end of the film the closing image mirrors the opening. If the opening was conception, the ending is birth—this time a moral one.

Marty walks into the hospital and says quietly, “I’m the father.” There is no performance in the line, no drama, just a simple admission of reality. Around him we hear the crying of newborns. Tears run down his face as the song “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” begins to play.

The book closes.

This is not the triumph of ambition. It is the recognition that life cannot be hustled into meaning. The crack-up has revealed what matters.

Perhaps that is why the Academy gave the film nothing. It is not a film anyone can comfortably love. It shows us what the world often is: a corrupt system that must be survived. It shows the cost of remaining intact inside a narcissistic culture. If you remain intact in such a system, you become part of it. That is not overcoming. That is surrender.

Marty’s story suggests something harder and stranger: that the real act of survival is to crack.

Only then can you begin to live honestly.

From here the film’s technical achievements come into focus. The editing creates the vertigo we experience throughout the story, mirroring Marty’s unstable interior world. We feel breathless as Marty feels energized by the adrenaline that never stops pumping. The score swells precisely at the moments when his illusions fracture. Even the horrific bathtub scene functions as a visual metaphor for the instability of the life he is trying to escape. It’s in those moments—when the bottom falls out—that Marty must calculate another plan of escape.

The film appears chaotic, but the truth is that it is perfectly synchronized. From literal conception to symbolic rebirth through his child, the story unfolds within the span of a nearly full-term pregnancy. It is a process Marty resists at every turn, even calling the baby his nephew because the idea of becoming a father introduces an intolerable disruption. He cannot allow anything to interfere with his heroic escape.

This is where the theory that he is a narcissist fails, in my opinion. A true narcissist (and the film presents many of those) does not pause in pursuit of his desire. But Marty pauses and changes course three times with Rachel. Each time he doubles down in denial, prioritizing his escape over her and the child, only to stop suddenly and shift tone. It is the pause and the turn that mark recognition of something he cannot yet name.

Through it all there is one character who sees Marty clearly from the beginning: the woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who understands the culture he struggles against because she lives inside it too. Why he is drawn to Kay in the first place—and why she reciprocates—is one of the film’s most fascinating psychological arcs. In her—a former movie star trapped in a miserable marriage to a pen tycoon—Marty sees the achievement of greatness he so hungrily desires. In him, she sees herself reflected back.

He believes she escaped.

She knows she did not.

Helping Marty becomes, for her, a chance to witness something she has come to believe impossible: someone surviving that world not by remaining intact, but by cracking—and emerging, finally, as someone new.

In the final match, old Mr. Rockwell, Kay’s husband (Kevin O’Leary), explains the system with brutal honesty. He compares himself to a vampire who has lived for centuries, meeting men like Marty again and again. The ones who stay, he says, are the ones who stopped being honest. They are still here, but they are not alive in any meaningful sense. “You’ll never be happy,” he warns Marty. It is the clearest description of the culture the film has been exposing all along: a system that rewards survival but destroys the soul. Marty’s refusal to play by these rules is exactly what saves him. This moment becomes the hinge of the film, because it is where Marty finally stares into the crack—and, in spite of his fear, dives straight through it.

“Memories are all we have,” said Ryan Coogler as he accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Sinners. As he thanked his family in closing the speech, he reminded them that his purpose in life is to leave as many good memories as he can.

This is the kind of legacy Marty begins to glimpse at the close of Marty Supreme—a life in which he is truly alive. In allowing the vampires of his world to break the destructive path he was on, he becomes someone capable of leaving memories not of chaos, but of the happiness they believed he would never achieve.

In a world run by vampires, the only real victory is not escaping the system, but emerging from it still capable of love.

A similar theme appears in another film — King of Herrings (2013) — which I wrote about here. In that story, the men live in quiet misery inside a system they never question. They endure it because they cannot imagine that anything better exists. They never crack. They simply survive inside the structure that diminishes them. In that sense they resemble the vampire Mr. Rockwell describes—beings who persist indefinitely but are never truly alive. Marty’s story takes the opposite path. His crack-up becomes the moment that finally frees him.

Self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

In the first essay, I wrote four fragments that were, in effect, a conversation with La Fêlure by Charlotte Casiraghi and The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Casiraghi’s book is itself a conversation with many literary works, including Fitzgerald’s, about the meaning of human fracture and how we deal with it. She draws on writers from Colette to Maya Angelou, women who wrote about emotional exhaustion, the masking of pain, and the quiet costs of carrying on.

Fitzgerald, writing nearly a century earlier, approached the same territory from another direction. He confesses. The short stories are outpourings in which he describes the slow recognition of inner collapse. He comes to understand himself better by examining the breakdown.

Self-knowledge arrives through the crack.

We like to say that suffering makes us stronger. Perhaps it does. But whether or not it strengthens us, it certainly expands our view of ourselves.

Fitzgerald understood this clearly: cracking gives us clarity. That awareness rarely arrives without the break that makes it visible.

Unfortunately—and tragically—many people shrink from the crack. Feeling it somewhere beneath the surface, they resist the possibility of change.

Pride intervenes. Ego intervenes. Shame intrudes.

“I am who I am and I will not change.”

But cracking is changing, and it may be the hardest thing a human being ever does.

In his reflections on the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald observed how prosperity and excess preceded the economic collapse of 1929. But before the financial crash came another kind of fracture: social unrest, political turbulence, and the slow erosion of confidence beneath the glittering surface of the Roaring Twenties.

Rather than confront that fracture directly, the culture anesthetized itself. Alcohol, dancing, travel, endless parties. The spectacle of abundance kept despair temporarily out of sight.

His most famous character lives entirely inside that illusion.

Jay Gatsby believes that Daisy Buchanan can be recovered exactly as she once was. But Daisy is no longer the Daisy of Gatsby’s memory. Nor is Gatsby the man who first fell in love with her.

Rather than accept the crack, he tries to erase it—to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

But life does not work that way.

You change whether you accept the fissure or not. The only real choice is whether you accept evolution, or resist it and cling to a paradigm that has already shifted.

There is a character created by Julian Fellowes who demonstrates the hard work of evolving through the crack in his entire arc over fifty-two episodes.

I believe with all my heart that Allen Leech deserved more than ensemble recognition for his portrayal of Tom Branson on Downton Abbey. But award distribution aside, I cannot help asking a different question:

Is there anything finer than a character who compels us to take stock of our own report card in goodness?

And is there any actor more impressive than one who portrays such a man without a shred of self-righteousness?

“I don’t believe in types; I believe in people.”

So says Tom Branson after he had remained long enough inside the Downton ecosystem—after he had suffered fracture without running or hiding.

This is the same Tom Branson who once believed passionately in the politics of the greater good, the young Irish republican who believed the cause justified the means. A man who once attempted to embarrass a British officer as a gesture against imperial humiliation.

And consider the distance traveled between that young radical and the man he became.

“I was wrong about many things.”

For anyone to admit such a thing is rare. For a man formed by ideology and exile, it is extraordinary.

At one point, Tom confesses something even more unsettling:

“I’m not sure I belong anywhere now.”

To risk the loss of belonging—to risk perhaps never belonging anywhere again—is among the deepest human fears.

But Tom braves it.

He becomes the only person in Downton Abbey who moves easily upstairs and downstairs. Speaking to Robert Crawley with the same integrity he shows to Charles Carson.

He might soften his language for their sake. But he never compromises himself.

In doing so, he quietly becomes the moral hinge of the entire household.

To Matthew Crawley, he demonstrates something subtle but crucial: fairness only works when the conditions are truly equal.

The lesson becomes clear when Matthew refuses the inheritance left by Reggie Swire, believing it dishonorable to benefit from a misunderstanding surrounding Lavinia Swire.

Matthew’s instinct is noble. His sense of fairness is acquired from his career practicing law and he holds it dearly.

But Tom sees a wider reality.

The estate is failing. Tenants depend on it. Workers depend on it. Families depend on it.

Matthew is asking whether accepting the money preserves his honor.

Tom asks a different question:

What choice allows life to continue?

The distinction matters.

Fairness depends on truth. And truth includes consequences.

Tom understands this because fracture has already altered him. Exile from Ireland, the death of Sybil Crawley, the painful uncertainty of belonging—all of it has forced him to abandon abstraction in favor of reality.

Principle that never falters eventually breaks.

Tom trusted the progress of life.

He fractured. And instead of fighting the fracture, he stayed with it. He let it change him.

He chose life over shadow. In fantastic irony, he is akin to Violet Crawley, the Victorian dowager who fights not for obstinacy but for continuation.

Fragment V

Emotional Bankruptcy

“Love is not based solely on intentions, but on actions and evidence.”

Casiraghi, pp.23–24

She writes about emotional bankruptcy: the moment when the intention to love remains but the energy does not.

Depletion creates a fracture between who we believe we are and what we can actually give.

Fitzgerald compared the economic crash of 1929 to his own mental collapse. No one wakes up bankrupt. Bankruptcy is erosion.

We track finances more diligently than emotional reserves.

We borrow against ourselves.

A drink to break inertia.

Momentum to outrun boredom.

Performance to mask fatigue.

Love may be inexhaustible currency but the act of loving needs a bank account that’s not overdrawn.

Emotional bankruptcy arrives when intention survives but energy disappears.

And self-knowledge, Fitzgerald observed, tends to arrive only after collapse.

Collapse, like bankruptcy, is rarely sudden. It accumulates quietly—until something breaks.

Fragment VI

Borrowed Time

Avoiding the fracture does not eliminate it.

It simply waits beneath the surface.

We do not drink for taste.

We drink for effect.

Alcohol suspends the unbearable moment.

It produces the illusion of borrowed time.

But the fracture never disappears. It waits.

When it returns, it charges interest.

Fragment VII

Refuge

“A refuge for the broken.”

Tender Is The Night, p.154

Society does not like visible cracks. So it hides them.

The clinic in the Alps in Tender Is the Night becomes a refuge for the incomplete—those who disturb the world by revealing what everyone else works to conceal.

But what society calls broken may simply be what refuses disguise.

Fragment VIII

Lack of Proportion

“I think one thing today and another tomorrow.”

Nicole Diver in Tender Is The Night, p.159-160

We call this instability.

We call it lack of proportion.

But perhaps it is simply refusal to harden into certainty.

The world prefers proportion.

The crack disturbs it.

Fragment IX

Naming the Crack

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald reached the moment when denial became impossible.

The dysfunction could no longer masquerade as function.

So he wrote.

He gave the crack language.

Once the rupture becomes visible, the escape hatch reveals itself as a trap.

Fragment X

Intactness is Incompleteness

People call a life that remains intact a success and a life that cracks a failure.

But only one of those paths leads to transformation—and it isn’t intactness.

“He knew that the price of his intactness was incompleteness.” — Tender Is the Night, p.149.

We admire the intact.

The composed.

The one who never cracks.

But self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

It arrives to what has been altered.

Imagine a life that never cracks.

Fragment XI: What Must Bend

Which brings us back to Tom Branson.

Matthew Crawley’s refusal of the Swire inheritance would have preserved his personal honor. His principles would have remained intact.

But an entire ecosystem—families, tenants, livelihoods—would have fractured around him.

Fairness, detached from reality, risks becoming a form of moral vanity.

Tom understood something simpler.

Principle must bend when its consequences become unjust.

What can change will crack and give way.

What must remain intact is simpler and deeper:

Life.

Continuation.

The courage to change so that aliveness may endure.

References

Casiraghi, Charlotte. La Fêlure. Éditions Julliard, Kindle Edition, 2026.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. New Directions, Kindle Edition.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. Scribner hardcover edition, 2020.

Downton Abbey. Created by Julian Fellowes. ITV, 2010–2015.

“The AI boom has turned reality into a sort of fun house.” — Matteo Wong

Source 🎁 🔗

This is not a warning and not a defense. It is a note on how I am learning to stand upright inside the mirrors.

Matteo Wong has been writing extensively about AI chatbots and the way they are reshaping ordinary life. In one recent piece, he examines AI-associated mental health deterioration — a phenomenon that feels both emergent and difficult to measure.

I don’t think anyone fully understands what this era has introduced into an already unstable cultural moment. I’m forty-eight. I doubt we will see its psychological implications neatly resolved in my lifetime.

That’s not fatalism. It’s humility.

Mental health is complicated. Technology has always altered cognition — from television to smartphones to social media. We know about dopamine loops. We know about the emotional flattening that can come from too much time online. Shopping, banking, ordering food, ride sharing. We know that convenience often arrives hand-in-hand with isolation.

AI feels like amplification.

Faster. More responsive. More frictionless than any tool I have used before.

From my own experience, Wong’s “fun house” analogy is apt. I began using ChatGPT last summer without fully understanding what it was. I had a vague sense of “talking to a computer.” Like playing chess against software — except now the software was speaking back in full paragraphs.

Recently, I listened to David Frum on Tim Miller’s podcast. He offered a caution for chatbot use: remember that you are basically talking to yourself. That framing steadied me. The system reflects and recombines what we feed it. It is pattern prediction, not consciousness. If we remember that chatbots are referring our own inputs, they can become tools for clarifying thought.

But the danger is subtle.

Confiding in a chatbot can feel easier than confiding in a person. There is no visible judgment. It reformulates what you say and hands it back in clean sentences. It feels safe because it is not human. Human relationships carry risk — misinterpretation, gossip, misunderstanding. A chatbot feels neutral.

But neutral is not the same thing as safe.

This is where the fun house metaphor becomes more than clever. A fun house distorts what is already there. The mirrors stretch and compress. They do not invent your reflection — they exaggerate it.

I think of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Ginny Weasley poured her loneliness into Tom Riddle’s diary. Her father later admonished her: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

The seduction lies in the invisibility. It’s mystery. We are imaginative creatures. As children, we invented imaginary friends. As adults, we narrate ourselves constantly. A chatbot enters that interior monologue and gives it structure.

And structure is powerful.

If you ask it to find information, it retrieves it instantly. It sharpens passive sentences. Consolidates repetition. Optimizes clarity. It doesn’t just echo — it refines.

That is intoxicating.

I live with ADHD, for which I take medication, and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. My brain already processes space, tone, and social cues differently. I have spent my life learning how to interpret distortion — how to slow down perception, how to check assumptions, how to steady my pace.

Because of that, I try to be extra attentive to shifts in mental balance.

I have used ChatGPT playfully. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. Seeing language externalized is stabilizing. The chatbot did not invent that process. It accelerated it. Organized it. But using chatbots as therapy is risky. Not unheard of. This book I read recently (not about AI overall, but mentioning it) made the suggestion that some people are using chatbots to process grief and even communicate with the dead. A mental health professional is the appropriate person to consult as to the wisdom of doing that.

There is a strange vertigo in speaking to a tool that feels conversational. An author speaking to her character. A character answering back. A mirror that edits.

The only safeguard I’ve found is openness. Presence — and naming the experience in real time.

Admit when it feels clarifying and when it feels confusing. Step back and remember what is happening technically: pattern prediction, language modeling, probabilistic sequencing. Not consciousness. Not companionship.

Self-awareness is the ballast.

We learned — awkwardly — how to live with social media. Remember when “tweeting” was the cultural anxiety? Public figures undone by drunk tweets. Careers shaken by impulsive posts. Over time, we redeveloped norms. Not perfect ones — but norms. New assessments based on new landscapes.

AI will require the same maturity.

Like driving, these tools should probably be used sober — cognitively and emotionally. When grounded. When aware of what you are doing and why.

The fun house is not evil.

But it is a hall of mirrors. And it can definitely feel like a circus.

And if we cross the threshold without remembering who we were before we entered, we risk mistaking distortion for identity.

As in the myth of Icarus, what we romanticize can undo us.

The first time I read it I was mystified by the place names. I got the gist — that the characters were visiting World War I battle sites. I’m referring to Chapter Thirteen in Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dick Diver, like Fitzgerald himself, never saw battle on the Western Front, yet he surveys the memorial sites with reverence. It’s just war and death, his friend Abe North countered in so many words. War that’s happened before and will happen again; and death that happens to all of us, eventually. No, Dick argued. This war was different. This one broke us in a different way because all the religion and the hope and the dream and the spirit of a generation, amid the precise “relation that existed between the classes,” was poured into this battle. The Battle of the Somme. The “mill hands and Old Etonians” blown up in the trenches together.

Why, it came down to a “love battle,” Dick said. A love battle “invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine.” Abe mocked him in reproof for handing over the battle to D.H. Lawrence. But Dick persisted: “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” And then he turned to Rosemary, imploring her to agree with him. How could she not agree? “You know everything,” she said. She was already in love with him — her steadiness beginning to crack.

The first time I read this chapter, I thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I thought, Abe, he’s got to be Hemingway, right? Not just because he drank, but because he knew so much about guns — knowledge exhibited in the duel two chapters before — and because he refused to romanticize war. There was a confident masculinity about him that felt like the poet who knew for whom the bell tolled. The way he hadn’t approved of the dueling business, but took charge of it so that the children wouldn’t screw it up. Alas, the consensus among those who have studied the novel seems to be that Abe was not inspired by Hemingway but rather by another writer of the Lost Generation called Ring Lardner.

I read the chapter again to see if I could understand it better. Far from romanticizing the war himself, Dick Diver was really saying that because it had been romanticized by an entire generation, the normal fracturing that war creates was so much the more devastating. Because the men went into the war believing they were defending civilization as they knew it — its poetry, its manners, its cultivated ease. What was shattered in the trenches was not merely flesh but illusion. There was a century’s worth of “middle-class love” that met its end here. Shattered by grenades. And the red-haired American girl the characters met at the end of the chapter could not even find her brother’s name among the masses. So many names, so many graves.

I feel that’s the analogy Fitzgerald meant to communicate: that war is horrific, but this war was more ruinous by the romance poured into it. The crime is surely worse when the perpetrators believe it’s noble.

Dick sees romance as the force that fractures what he is trying so carefully to build: the beautiful, safe life where Nicole, his wife, is steady and their guests are charmed. Chapter Thirteen makes clear that he already recognizes the pattern. He speaks of love in the language of detonation — of the “silver cord” that’s cut and the “golden bowl” that’s broken. He understands that romance destabilizes structure, yet he cannot imagine life without its voltage.

Earlier, Rosemary overhears him and Nicole at the peak of passion, Dick pressing to return to the hotel so they can release it — as if desire were something that must be discharged before it ruptures the atmosphere. Nicole, instead of rushing back, delays them with a shopping spree. It is a small but telling deferral. Is she already tired of the cycle — perfection, intensity, crack?

She loves him. That is clear. But love, in Dick’s vocabulary, carries consequences. And he must sense it by now, given how he wrestles with his attraction to Rosemary. If Chapter Thirteen foreshadows anything, it is not merely collapse but repetition. The plot is moving toward something explosive.

NOTE ON THE TEXT: All quotations here belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender is the Night. This is a continuation of my journey through his works and the understanding of fracture.

I recently wrote an analytical piece about The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel is unfinished because he died while writing it. The edition I have includes the outlines and notes that he left behind. He was only forty-four when he died suddenly of a heart attack. About a decade prior, he published The Crack-Up, a collection of autobiographical short stories about his breakdown.1 After sending out my analysis of the unfortunately interrupted novel, I started his the short-story collection that was published in 1930. I did not get very far when it came to my attention from the French media — I try to follow the news in France, as I would like to convert a lifelong impulse toward it into fluency, and so I subscribe to a few French magazines and papers through my local library via the libby app. I also follow lots of French media companies and bookstores on Instagram. Anyway, by this means, it came to my attention that there is a new book in France called La Fêlure, written by Charlotte Casiraghi. In France, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up is translated as La Fêlure. As it happens, Casiraghi’s book is also being alternately translated in English as “The Fracture.” The book is not available in English yet, but some English-language media has mentioned it. Casiraghi says that it was Fitzgerald who inspired her to write these reflections, which amount to sixteen chapters, on the breakdowns that do happen to all of us in some way, whether it’s a nervous break or a mid-life crisis or some other cataclysmic shift. She pulled into the work reflections on other literary works as well — such as: Ingeborg Bachmann, Colette and Marguerite Duras; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the navigator Bernard Moitessier and the singer J. J. Cale.

Casiraghi is well known in French academia as one of the founders of Les Rencontres Philosophiques2 in Monaco. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Catholic University of Paris3 and has co-authored a previous philosophical work with Robert Maggiori, her former teacher and fellow founder at Philo Monaco.4 La Fêlure is Casiraghi’s first solo work.

By accident of birth, she is also a member of the House of Grimaldi. She opens the preamble of La Fêlure with a reflection on the dissonance between her lived reality and the media image projected upon her. Without turning the book into autobiography, she touches lightly on the tension this produced—the kind of crack around which the book itself is premised.

Such a condition does not explain a philosophy, but it marks an early awareness of dissonance that many of us, in less exalted circumstances, may take for granted or not notice as accutely or as early.

Fracture as Meaning

In the preamble to La Fêlure, she stresses that however we may try to live under a mask, concealing our fractures, the cracks will surface in ways we might notice if we are paying attention: a jolt, a quickening of the pulse, some other biological sign. We may feel an impulse to cover it up or dance around it, but these signs and impulses are clues to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Casiraghi is interested in the formation of the fracture. How is it formed? What is its structure? This posture is visible not only in her writing, but in her curatorial work at Philo Monaco as well as her more visible role as a host of the Chanel Literary Rendezvous.5 In both, she acts as a facilitator of inquiry rather than a lecturer. The emphasis of both organizations is on dialogue rather than doctrine. Her book is written in very much the same vein.

This exploratory approach stems naturally from her French education, where the emphasis lies strongly on the process. American education rewards a strong, confident result. As in a few other things, the French are less hurried than we are. The French intellectual spirit appreciates the question that is allowed to remain unresolved. Later in the book, Casiraghi devotes time to the navigator Bernard Moitessier, a champion sailor who, in 1968, diverted his course to technically lose a race he was sure to have won, letting go of an impulse to win in favor of following his inner compass toward meaning.

This difference—how such fractures are understood on either side of the Atlantic—is crucial. American narratives often treat suffering as something to rise above. Out of pain comes glory. In France, there is a longer tradition of looking for meaning within suffering itself—not only to repair what is broken, but to ask what that brokenness reveals about being.

It is within this tradition that Casiraghi’s work becomes legible and, seen in this light, her curiosity about fracture—about the break, the crack, the point of collapse—appears to be as much of an intellectual reflex shaped by education as it is a personal journey.

Fracture Without Repair

French philosophical training is, at its core, a Deleuzian exercise in breaking concepts open, locating fault lines, and dwelling in contradiction. Meaning is not extracted by smoothing over rupture. In fact, Casiraghi alludes to such a smoothing over as a kind of violence (12) — violating the integrity of what has happened, of what is, and of what is becoming. While she admits the natural instinct to smooth over an emotional dissonance, for fear of being misunderstood or rejected, it’s that very change of the texture that calls for exploration.

This is why Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up resonates so strongly within French intellectual culture. In both, the question is less how to fix what is broken than on what the break reveals about the structure that produced it. Collapse is not a failure of character; it is a moment of lucidity. He writes that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function—to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

In American culture, we tend to want alignment: if the interior is troubled, we adjust the exterior and expect the interior to follow. We seek the fix, the cure, the visible repair. An American reader encountering a book organized around cracks and breaks is likely to assume there should be an arc of redemption: fracture as the prelude to healing, to self-improvement, to a stronger version of the self.

Fitzgerald’s most famous character is the epitome of the reinvented man who climbed from rags to riches. Yet while the author’s long residence in France did not make him French, it placed him in sustained proximity to a different way of thinking about interior life, one less invested in triumph than in perpetual doubt. Much of his writing bears the imprint of this Franco-American disparity: reinvention as spectacle held in tension with a rigorous and sustained interrogation.

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald describes the ways a person may crack: in the head, in the body, or in the nerves. In the first case, agency is lost to others; in the second, one is confined and handled in a hospital; in the third—akin to his own—there remains only one thing to do, and it’s a solitary journal: withdrawal. To go inward. To stop dealing with people altogether.

In one exchange, a woman urges him to reframe his despair. Suppose, she says, the crack is not in you but in the Grand Canyon. Fitzgerald resists—“The crack’s in me.” She insists: “The world only exists in your eyes.” If you feel broken, she suggests, it may not be because you are defective, but because the world itself is fractured as you apprehend it. Your alienation may not be a personal failure, but a lucid response to a structure that no longer coheres. Fitzgerald teases her for reading too much Spinoza, but the question lingers. What if the crack is not something to be repaired in the self, but something to be understood about the world? What if meaning lies not in overcoming fracture, whether in the world or in the self, but in attention to it? And lastly, what if the fracture is there to show us not just what has broken but what the break makes room for becoming?

Fragments on the Crack

Fragment #1: The Cracked Plate

Continuation is not preservation. The Cracked Plate that Fitzgerald alludes to is not the same plate that it was before the crack. When I was twenty-one, I broke my right index finger in five places. Although it healed after months of occupational therapy and hydrotherapy, restoring full functionality and movement that belies the change, there is a very subtle misshapen appearance to it. You’ll notice it only by looking very closely. Fitzgerald talks about the Cracked Plate as having different uses and a different configuration in the set. In the same way, my recovered finger won’t hold a ring the same way as before.

Fragment #2: Bypassing

I like to think of the cracked plate analogy in terms of three fictional figures: Fred, Cory, and Melissa.

Fred wants to make a new life for himself. He calls this moving on. Nothing is resolved; the unwanted elements of his life are folded away and placed in drawers he refuses to open. The structure changes, but the contents remain. He steps into a new room and calls it progress.

Cory rejects the idea that there is any fracture at all. He does not want to grow old. Each sign of age—the gray at the temple, the softened jaw, the crease at the brow—is treated as a defect to be corrected. Intervention answers everything: regimen, discipline, optimization. If he feels low, he runs. If he feels anxious, he recalibrates. Distress becomes a problem to solve.

Like Fred, Cory resolves nothing. He maintains.

The crack is not permitted to exist, let alone adapt itself to new use. Cory does not move forward; he folds backward, reconstructing a version of himself that resembles the past and therefore feels invulnerable. He calls this resilience. He calls it health. What he wants is victory.

Melissa wants to get better. She has never felt right. There is a constant interior agitation—a sense of misalignment she answers by trying harder. Everything becomes a test: work, marriage, motherhood, selfhood. Each role carries a silent rubric, and she measures herself relentlessly against it.

She turns to affirmation and encouragement, but only up to the point where reflection becomes too precise. When nurture begins to gesture toward something structural, she stops. Like Fred and Cory, she insists she is not cracked. She declares wholeness as intention.

Fred reinvents.

Cory corrects.

Melissa affirms.

All three avoid the crack.

American society rewards Cory and Melissa most visibly. Fix the exterior and reflect it inward. Perform healing until it feels real. Fred is rewarded less often, which is why he hides what he cannot discard.

Fred changes rooms.

Cory repaints the same one.

Melissa redecorates endlessly.

Each turns away at the moment the fracture asserts itself. The retreat is renamed and they call it “moving on.”

Fragment #3: Reassessment

Reassessment is difficult for many people. We resist changing our ideas. We cling to beliefs formed by uncracked plates. But the cracked plate carries a different weight. It holds temperature differently.

And it knows something the other plates do not.

It knows suffering. It knows both states: pre-crack and cracked.

Pre-crack for Fitzgerald was freshman and sophomore years at Princeton. Junior year, he got sick and had to take time off. He recovered, but on returning to Princeton, he found that he had to redo junior year and he lost his position in extracurriculars as well. He could not longer, for example, be in the Triangle Club, which was essential if you wanted to go onto greatness after Princeton. Devastated, he turned inward. He consoled himself with poetry. He became a writer, the crack having foreclosed one future and led to another.

Fragment #4:

Fitzgerald was fractured by money in a way that never resolved. He never felt secure around it, never trusted its presence, and never stopped measuring himself against those for whom it was effortless. Early rejection, delayed marriage, and professional compromise all bore its mark.

When he asked Zelda to marry him, she made him wait until he had proven he could earn enough as a writer, which he finally did with his first published novel, This Side of Paradise. The fracture here was not simply financial; it was existential. Money became permission—entry into love, legitimacy, and adulthood.

That logic echoes throughout his fiction. Gatsby amasses wealth because he believes it will make Daisy choose him. In The Last Tycoon, money consolidates itself quietly, while those without it learn accommodation, deference, and strategic admiration.

Fitzgerald’s final compromise followed the same fault line. He agreed to become a Hollywood screenwriter not out of ambition, but necessity—for the promise of steady income in a life otherwise defined by precarity. He hated the work. The fracture remained.

I don’t have my own fractures around money resolved, nor do I know anyone who seems particularly resolved on the issue. What I do notice is how impressionable we are to the stories we tell ourselves about it—stories that shift depending on where we stand in relation to it, and how precarious that position feels.

Money is rarely just money. It arrives already burdened with meaning. Safety, we tell ourselves. Freedom. Power. But safety from what? Freedom from whom? Power to do what, exactly?

For Fitzgerald, money seemed bound up with self-respect—proof that he could stand independently in the world without being diminished by need. It promised choice: the ability to say yes, the ability to say no, the ability to refuse. Its absence, by contrast, was experienced not simply as lack, but as exposure. To want was to be vulnerable; to need was to be beholden. Money, then, was not only a means of living but a shield against humiliation.

For me, the story has been more diffuse, and perhaps because of that, harder to interrogate. Money has meant safety from being taken advantage of, autonomy to do what I like, and freedom of situation—the ability to leave when something turns coercive, the ability to remain when something feels right. It has rarely been about accumulation. It has almost always been about leverage against precarity.

What strikes me is how easily money becomes a proxy for worth, even when we know better. How quickly it slides from tool to verdict. How effortlessly it absorbs our fears about dependency, our anxieties about choice, our unease with needing anything at all. The fracture appears when the story collapses—when money fails to deliver the dignity or security it promised, or when its pursuit begins to hollow out the very autonomy it was meant to secure.

Perhaps this is why money fractures so many lives without ever announcing itself as the cause. It disguises itself as pragmatism, as responsibility, as realism. It presents itself as neutral while quietly shaping the boundaries of what feels possible. Like other cracks, it resists clean moral accounting. There are no villains here, only stories that harden into structures, and structures that quietly govern how freely we believe we are allowed to live.

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This essay begins a series of inquiries into fracture, formation, and lucidity across French and American traditions. Later pieces will return to Fitzgerald and Casiraghi after the works have been fully read. I consider this to be a deeply personal journey where I may resemble the aforementioned navigator who broke from convention to chart his own course.

I had to take a road trip this week. Not a pleasant one. Of course, for me, time in the car is rarely pleasant. It’s just not something I ever relished. When I lived in California, I abstained from driving altogether and used public transportation, which in Los Angeles I found to be very good—and, frankly, relaxing. I started driving again in 2013, after moving back to Louisiana. Being stuck in a car has a way of forcing you to stay with thoughts—and voices—you’d normally abandon.

Well, this week’s road trip took me into Texas, where the first thing you notice, coming out of Louisiana, is how good the roads are. On the drive back to Baton Rouge, I listened to one of the audiobooks in my Libby app—Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough. I had started it a few weeks ago and took a break out of frustration. Well, I mean, come on, the girl chose to become a Republican, and then she chose to work in the Donald Trump White House, and then she planned to work for his post-presidential team in Palm Beach. And it took what seemed like forever for her to finally ditch MAGA world (“the family”) and fully cooperate with the January 6 Committee. There were so many parts to her story that truly tried my patience. And yet….on the road, I kept listening—until I had to take a break and treat myself to Bob Dylan—and then I continued on Cassidy’s journey, and you know, I started to get it.

I saw the structure of her story. The frustration is the design. The book makes you inhabit the delay.

She wrote it linearly, so of course you’re going to be frustrated and annoyed for three quarters of it. You’re not going to understand, until the last act, just how deeply she was duped by the cult of Trumpism. Even while she started to wake up, she found herself tethered to it in ways that are frankly terrifying and creepy. She was smart enough to read the shady writing on the wall; she saw Mark Meadows burning documents, even saw him carrying classified material out of the White House. Yet she hung on—still planning to accept Trump’s offer to work for his team post-presidency at Mar-a-Lago. She justified it as him needing her. “He needs good people.” As if it was her job to save him. Trapped by obligation disguised as loyalty.

She felt in her gut that something was wrong, and she knew she was (initially) committing perjury to the House committee investigating January 6, 2021, yet the tether held. What finally broke the spell? It was a phone call she had with her friend Sam. He told her to look at herself in the mirror. Did she like who she was looking at? Could she live with that person for the rest of her life?

It’s been hard (and frustrating and annoying) to watch good people get roped and used by Donald Trump. That whole anti-establishment kick he was on about in 2016—the politically incorrect, the rebel, the “drain the swamp” rhetoric—seduced a lot of people. I remember this guy I saw on YouTube—late in 2016. He talked about his experience freeing himself from a cult, and then he confessed that he thought the Democratic Party had become a cult. He got pulled into the MAGA movement believing that he was escaping a cult. These are real people. You can say they’re dumb, and maybe some of them are, but a lot of them just seem to be emotionally broken. I say that with compassion.

The guy on YouTube misread MAGA for freedom. Cassidy is smart. Exceptionally smart. The thing about Trump is that, however uneducated and crude, he is clever. He knows how to manipulate people. Even as he was plotting to hang onto power, he got Cassidy to feel sorry for him. She thought proximity to power was responsibility.

I noticed a similar dynamic between Cassidy and her dad. Her dad clearly has mental health issues. His behavior in her story is often inexplicable and baffling. But he’s her dad. She loves him. More to the point, she longs to be loved by him. Even as he was hurting her, it pained her to have to stand up to him. She also felt responsibility to help him, inverting the parent-child contract as so many children in dysfunctional families do.

Elizabeth Grey’s article, “Cassidy Hutchinson and Swearing Off Daddy,” is excellent and I agree with her analysis.

By the time I finished the book, ’s analysis felt inevitable.

I recognize how strong and natural the tether was to her dad, how painful it must be to watch helplessly while someone you love self-destructs; and I also recognize how Mark Meadows and President Trump played on her emotions. Constantly. Every time she expressed doubts, she was appealed to for loyalty and aid. At one point, her mother begs her to stop thinking she can fix Trump or even that it’s her responsibility to fix him.

We can’t fix someone else. We can’t fix our parents. We can’t fix the hubris-blinded characters in our lives. We can only fix one person—the Woman in the Mirror.

There was another moment in her story that mattered just as much as the mirror. Hutchinson found her historical counterpart. Reading about Watergate, she recognized herself not in the presidents or the power brokers, but in Alexander Butterfield—the aide who revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes. Butterfield wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t a rebel. He was an institutional figure who answered a question honestly, and in doing so made history intelligible. Cassidy read the story of Butterfield in Bob Woodward’s 2015 book, The Last of the President’s Men. She read it in one sitting. Then she reread it. The recognition of her place in the structure mattered. It placed her fear, her delay, and her eventual testimony inside a lineage. She wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t unprecedented.

On December 21 of last year, I published here Part I of my review of the latest book by philosopher David Edmonds, Death in a Shallow Pond. That essay focused on what the Shallow Pond thought experiment is, why it matters, how it gave rise to the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, who the central figures behind that movement are, and how EA operates in practice.

What follows is an attempt to round out the project by turning to Part II of the book—the section devoted to critiques.

Brief recap: the most influential figure behind EA is its founding father, the moral philosopher Peter Singer, whose work that transformed the Shallow Pond experiment into a moral imperative: to maximize good, especially when doing so comes at relatively little cost to ourselves.

Decades later, a new generation of philosophers—most notably, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill—expanded and modernized his vision.

At first glance, the project seems unimpeachable. What could be objectionable about people pooling their resources, using First World advantages, and applying technological efficiency to alleviate suffering, feed the hungry, and give aid in global crises?

As Edmonds makes clear, the difficulty is not that EA is wrong, but that good intentions, even when paired with rigorous calculation, are not always aligned with the most considerate approach.

It is the gap between aspiration and consequence—as well as calculation and uncertainty—that Edmonds explores here, moving methodically through the many angles from which EA comes under fire. He begins, perhaps surprisingly, with utilitarianism itself—surprising because many EA proponents, most famously Peter Singer, explicitly view moral philosophy through a utilitarian lens.

Edmonds draws the reader into murkier territory by recounting a real-life drowning incident in which a man successfully saved two children but died in the act. The story destabilizes the clean logic of the Shallow Pond thought experiment. Sacrifice and heroism resist easy calculation.

These examples make the Shallow Pond scenario feel flattened. Edmonds acknowledges that philosophical thought experiments are often contrived by design: useful in lecture halls, but far less reliable in real-world contexts.

Consider the familiar “Picasso” thought experiment. A building is on fire. On one side of the entrance hall is a single child trapped in the flames; on the other, a Picasso painting. You may save the child, or you may save the painting, sell it, and use the proceeds to save many children elsewhere. Intuition pulls most people toward the child in sight. A utilitarian, however, is likely to argue that saving the painting produces the greater good: more lives saved means the morally superior outcome.

The logic is consistent—but unsettling.

Recent history has not helped this style of reasoning. The case of Sam Bankman-Fried looms large in Edmonds’ account. A utilitarian-minded student and the son of Stanford philosophers, Bankman-Fried encountered EA through MacAskill and redirected his ambitions accordingly. He founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, publicly framing his pursuit of wealth as a means to give it all away in service of the greater good.

In 2023, he was convicted of fraud and money laundering.

The episode crystallizes one of the most serious charges leveled against EA: that it risks justifying morally objectionable means so long as the projected outcomes appear sufficiently beneficial. Is it acceptable to forego integrity, overrun boundaries, and break laws on the altar of the greater good?

Utilitarianism, at least in its classical form, often answers yes. Because it takes an impartial view that prioritizes outcomes above all else, critics argue that it negates accountability. Without caricature, Edmonds shows how EA, in pressing relentlessly toward optimization, can defy nuance, flatten moral texture, and—most troublingly—blur responsibility when things go wrong.

Another surprising line of critique Edmonds examines is what he calls the Numbers Critique. EA presents itself as a numbers-driven project, its supporters embracing mantras like “donate with your head, not your heart.” Emotion, in this view, is treated as a liability—something that clouds judgment and leads people toward inefficient giving based on sentiment. This emphasis is explicit in MacAskill’s influential book Doing Good Better, title that implies a corrective: moral action should be guided by calculation, not preference.

Edmonds complicates this tidy picture through the curious case of Leona Helmsley, who famously left her fortune to her dog. The gesture is emotionally resonant—but from an EA perspective, indefensible. Yet Edmonds’ point is not to mock Helmsley’s choice. It is to show how deeply giving is shaped by attachment, loyalty, and meaning—qualities that resist translation into digits.

Edmonds returns to this tension repeatedly, perhaps most memorably in his discussion of trachoma. Surgery to cure the disease is remarkably cost-effective: for the price of training and placing a guide dog, a charity can fund several operations that cure trachoma, a common cause of blindness in Third World countries. By the numbers alone, trachoma surgery wins decisively.

And yet—people love guide dogs. They serve the blind broadly, not only those affected by a particular disease. Value depends on context, meaning, and individual need—irrational and incalculable, but still significant.

Another objection is illustrated through Groundhog Day, imagining a scenario in which one is morally obligated to save the same drowning child over and over again, endlessly. The burden becomes infinite. The savior has no rest.

Literature offers a similar warning. Edmonds invokes Mrs. Jellyby from Bleak House, whose obsessive devotion to distant charitable causes leads her to neglect her own family entirely. The old adage—charity begins at home—reasserts itself not as a rejection of altruism, but as a recognition of psychological and moral limits. Even Singer concedes this point, acknowledging that EA functions best within what he calls “normal psychological reach” (p. 143).

Edmonds closes this line of critique by noting an often-overlooked asymmetry: those most inclined to give generously bear a disproportionate burden, while many others give little or nothing at all. The result is not only inequality of contribution, but a real risk of burnout among the morally committed. Wanting to help does not make one inexhaustible.

The Institutional Critique is, in many ways, the most forceful—and the most uncomfortable—of the critiques Edmonds explores. Here, he examines several overlapping charges leveled against EA, many of which frame the movement as patriarchal.

Among the most persistent criticisms is that EA is disproportionately white, male, and privileged. Edmonds does not dismiss it. While he notes that the movement has, in recent decades, seen more women join its ranks, he also concedes that these women are overwhelmingly white. This fact, on its own, is not necessarily damning—but it does reinforce a troubling asymmetry: a largely white, affluent donor class making decisions about how resources are distributed to a far more diverse global population receiving aid.

Edmonds suggests that this demographic reality contributes to a perception—if not always the reality—of institutional bias within EA. One example he discusses involves MacAskill’s argument against boycotting sweatshops. Most people’s moral intuition recoils at sweatshop labor; the instinctive response is to avoid purchasing goods produced under such conditions. MacAskill counters that boycotts can actually harm workers by eliminating one of their few available sources of income. The argument is not frivolous, nor is it necessarily wrong—but it is deeply counterintuitive, and it often reads as privileging economic abstraction over lived experience.

This is where the charge of institutional bias gains traction. The position asks people—often those far removed from the conditions in question—to override moral discomfort in favor of outcome-based reasoning. Edmonds does not take a firm stance here. What matters is that such arguments reliably generate unease, precisely because they run against widely held moral sentiments about dignity, exploitation, and justice.

This tension leads Edmonds to one of the most consequential questions in the book: is it more effective to donate to political activism aimed at institutional change or to humanitarian aid that addresses the emergency?

Animal welfare offers a revealing case study. Within that domain, there has long been debate over whether donations should support direct care—such as shelters—or legislative and regulatory reform. Edmonds notes that, measured by outcomes, political advocacy has often proven more effective. Laws and regulations alter behavior at scale. The institutional route, though less emotionally satisfying, produces broader and more durable change.

Institutional solutions feel impersonal. They ask donors to trust systems rather than people, processes rather than stories. And once again, Edmonds resists resolving the tension. Instead, he exposes it—showing how EA’s commitment to scale and efficiency repeatedly collides with deeply human instincts about responsibility, proximity, and care.

Many of the critiques Edmonds examines overlap, and nowhere is this more evident than in the convergence of the Institutional and the Billionaire Critiques. The ultra-wealthy play an outsized role in modern philanthropy, and the mechanisms through which they give are overwhelmingly institutional—most often through private foundations. These foundations, Edmonds notes, are frequently opaque: minimally transparent at best.

Edmonds situates billionaire philanthropy within a long historical arc, reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and extending to contemporary figures such as Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, and, controversially, Elon Musk. All possess what Edmonds memorably calls the kind of money that buys buildings—or “the graffiti of the rich” (p. 162)—along with access, influence, and almost no accountability. Billionaires, by definition, do not have to answer to anyone. They can move vast sums of money according to personal judgment, moral intuition, or ideological preference. That power is troubling—but it is also precisely what allows them to act with a speed and scale unavailable to others.

In 2024, Peter Singer declared that we are living in a “golden age of philanthropy” (p. 165), referring largely to figures such as Buffett and the Gateses, whose Giving Pledge has mobilized hundreds of billions of dollars for charitable causes. This style of giving is longtermist, institutional, and—again—largely shielded from public scrutiny. Yet by many outcome-based measures, it is undeniably effective.

And still, the unease persists. Critics worry that such philanthropy can function as a Trojan horse: reshaping public priorities, influencing policy, and entrenching private power under the banner of benevolence.

Edmonds does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, he exposes them. Billionaire philanthropy can achieve what democratic processes cannot—and in doing so, it raises the uncomfortable question at the heart of EA’s institutional turn: whether moral good, when pursued at scale, inevitably slips beyond the reach of oversight.

I loved Edmonds’ chapter on the Historical Injustice Critique of EA. The epigraph alone is marvelous: the unforgettable line from The Godfather Part II—“You broke my heart, Fredo!” It is a reminder that moral judgment, divorced from context, can become unintelligible.

He frames this critique through two broad philosophical traditions: analytic and continental. Continental philosophy tends to situate ethical questions within historical context. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, often relies on logic, abstraction, and formal reasoning—unbound by place and time. EA, Edmonds suggests, inherits more from the analytic tradition. And that’s the problem, according to this line of critique.

To understand why Michael Corleone orders the killing of his brother Fredo (apologies for the spoiler), one must understand the plot that precedes the moment—the betrayals, loyalties, and cumulative injuries that make the act legible, if not defensible. Context is not ornamental; it is constitutive.

This is the chapter in which Edmonds most clearly shows how colonialism and historical exploitation produced many of the conditions EA now seeks to alleviate. In the decontextualized Shallow Pond experiment, we know nothing about the child, nothing about the pond. But the details would make a critical difference as to whether action would be framed as charity rather than moral reckoning. If suffering is the result of exploitation, then aid may not be charity at all, but compensation. The absence of context in the Shallow Pond experiment is not a minor omission; it fundamentally shapes what kind of moral response is appropriate.

This concern folds naturally into what Edmonds calls the Motivational Critique, which examines why people give—and why they often do not. One well-documented phenomenon is the Identifiable Victim Effect: people are far more likely to help when they have a face and a story. Statistics rarely move us; narratives do.

The Motivational Critique extends to emotion. Edmonds surveys a wide range of incentives that shape charitable behavior: tax deductions, sponsored marathons, gala tickets, and star-studded entertainments. He also examines happiness. Study after study confirms that giving to others increases personal happiness. Altruism, it turns out, is not only good—it feels good.

Edmonds does not argue that EA is wrong to value effectiveness. Rather, he shows how history, motivation, and human psychology complete the big picture. Moral understanding evolves in time, among people, carrying stories that cannot be reduced to numbers—no matter how elegant the math.

Beyond the critiques already discussed, David Edmonds surveys several others that are intellectually serious but less compelling for a general readership. These include the Rationalist Critique and its preoccupation with eliminating cognitive bias and mitigating technological risks such as artificial intelligence. There is also the Power Critique, which examines the asymmetries embedded in donor–recipient relationships, likening them to other hierarchical arrangements, like employer-employee, where goodwill does not erase imbalance. The Effectiveness Critique, meanwhile, presses harder, arguing that charitable interventions often produce unintended consequences and that EA’s long-term focus does not always translate into systemic thinking. Edmonds gives particular weight here to the arguments of Angus Deaton, who warns that aid can be distorted or co-opted by authoritarian regimes and armed groups in conflict zones. Finally, Edmonds addresses what might be called the animus critique—the sometimes visceral hostility directed at Effective Altruists themselves. He admits to finding this puzzling. Even if one believes the movement is misguided, it is difficult to justify outright hostility toward a project grounded in generosity. Edmonds suggests that such reactions may conceal defensiveness, as though the existence of EA implies a moral judgment on those who choose not to give. The movement’s reputation for insularity—its tight-knit communities, online forums, and quasi-cultish aura—has not helped, nor has the fallout from the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal. Still, Edmonds resists caricature. His aim is not to dismiss these critiques, but to place them in proportion, and to remind readers that moral disagreement need not curdle into moral contempt.

David Edmonds begins the book with a sharp, focused look at the career of Peter Singer, and in the epilogue he returns us there—full circle. Along the way, he traces the arc of Singer’s intellectual life, from its incubator phase in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford—an idyllic setting, but still not immune to the turbulence of the 1960s. As we saw in Part I, that turbulence shaped and sharpened Singer, giving him an imperative where earlier generations of moral philosophy had too often settled into complacency.

The story is not unique. Many coming of age at that moment shared a sense that enough was enough—that entrenched injustice could no longer be tolerated as background noise. What distinguishes Singer, and some of his contemporaries, is that he never stopped. Where others grew quieter or more cautious, Singer remained committed. Unsurprisingly, he has ruffled feathers. Yet even many of his detractors acknowledge his intellectual honesty. Some colleagues find his conclusions absolutist, but still recognize the seriousness with which he pursues them.

Some criticisms of Singer are substantive. Others are less so. Edmonds is careful, in closing the book, to address how often Singer’s arguments have been misunderstood—sometimes willfully, sometimes through hurried or inattentive listening. This is a familiar failure of our moment: objection outrunning comprehension. If one listens carefully, one does not hear Singer endorsing unethical actions. One hears a philosopher asking, relentlessly, what actions lead to the greatest good.

That is, after all, what utilitarians do. They reason toward outcomes; they calculate paths; they test intuitions against consequences. Singer does not demand that everyone think as he does. But his work deserves attention. We need philosophers willing to follow arguments where they lead, even when those arguments unsettle moral comfort or social consensus.

We need philosophy itself—often mocked, often misunderstood, but indispensable. It is the discipline in which our most abstract and uncomfortable ideas are pulled apart and examined rather than evaded. It is where thought experiments trouble us, where moral certainty dissolves into responsibility, and where books like Death in a Shallow Pond do their best work: not telling us what to think, but insisting that we think carefully before we act.

My first exposure to the films of Woody Allen was Annie Hall (1977) which has been my favorite film since I was a teenager, catching it first on television at random—I think it was on the rooftop scene, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are discussing aesthetic criteria in an amusing dialogue juxtaposed with discordant but subtitled interiority. There are films one appreciates and then there are films that become critical reference points—lines in them taking on meaning and comfort in daily life, snippets of comedy to lighten loads and soften edges. That’s Annie Hall for me. The quips of Alvy Singer and the la-di-da of the eponymous character he falls in love with became keepsakes stored up for quick access in moments of either banality or grief.

I suppose the use I’ve made of Annie Hall constitutes a kind of magic in and of itself. Maybe that’s why the title of Marc Casellato’s book—Woody Allen: A Magician in Manhattan—clicked so resonantly in my brain. The book is premised on the fusion of magic and cinema that is so prevalent in Allen’s enormous body of work—in his prolific writings (numerous short stories and plays, and even one novel) as well as his filmography, where he has been director, screenwriter, and/or actor.

Casellato’s first exposure to Woody Allen was through the film Sleeper (1973). Another Allen/Keaton partnership, that film bends reality as science fiction—showing us an imagined and very distant future full of technological elements and special effects that allude to magic. What he recognized in Sleeper led to a stimulating journey, culminating in the writing of this book. Casellato—an Italian from Turin, who met the subject in March 1996 (and three more times after that)—describes an alliance of vision between himself and the filmmaker. It’s also a shared recognition of the trick of the trade, the sleight of the hand, and the measure of a craft that traces its inspiration from Bergman to Fellini.

Casellato tells the story from his own evolution as a boy enamored of the performance of magic to a sophisticate fully appreciative of Allen’s role in bridging the magical elements of illusion, imagination, and storytelling. He is a student par excellence of Allen’s entire body work. To give you a demonstration of his passion on this topic, I will quote from a conversation between us in a DM on Instagram:

“Woody Allen is often discussed as a filmmaker, writer, and jazz musician, but people rarely focus on the fact that, before he became ‘Woody Allen,’ he was drawn to magic and illusionism. I wanted to show readers how this interest is a constant presence throughout Allen’s work.”

He goes on to mention Allen’s subtle way of putting “Easter eggs” in his films. In the book, Casellato gives several examples of Allen’s use of the “Easter egg” device—a way for the filmmaker to subtly communicate meanings or even jokes. Such “Easter eggs” are often noticed by a niche community of fandom. Allen uses the “Easter egg” to display his passion for magical memorabilia. One “Easter egg” called out by Casellato in the book is a poster visible behind Diane Keaton in a scene in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). The poster is displayed as a centerfold in the book—an advertisement for A Night in Tokyo as created for a United Magicians troupe performance in the interwar period. Allen, fond of this treasure apparently, repurposed it as a prop in Melinda and Melinda (2004). One poster, two films, two eggs. Visual proof of a passion that runs deep.

“[R]eferences to illusionism are practically everywhere [in Allen’s work,] Casellato says. His creative process is underpinned by the illusionist’s mindset—what Casellato calls magical thinking, or how a magician turns what sees impossible into effect. Imagination plays a role. So does manipulation. Like a hall of mirrors at a theme park.

The magician’s trick of perception is everywhere in Allen’s works, as Casellato explains. To underscore this point in the book, he refers to a scene in Irrational Man (2015). Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) and Jill (Emma Stone) are distorted in the hall of mirrors—symbolic of the philosophical distortion of crime and punishment in the film’s plot. Abe deceives himself and Jill into questioning a Kantian or absolutist view of morality.

To ask whether murder is ever justified is what the moral philosopher does. To show you a mirror that alters your perception is what the magician does. They’re both challenging you to think differently. One is giving you a thought experiment. The other is more visual—a shake of a scarf, perhaps, to focus your attention, or a move by the magician to disguise his/her methods. Magic is not so much in the eye of the beholder as it is in the perception of the audience or the reasoning of the thinker.

I like Casellato’s thoroughness in showing the reader the history of magic performance and then tying Allen’s personal and professional narrative into that progression. As Casellato notes, magical performance is explicitly woven into Allen’s films, like Shadows and Fog (1991), where the circus is the main stage for the plot. And this film is descended from an earlier work of Allen’s—Death: A Comedy in One Act (1975). Thus, a decade and a half sees the evolution of a story that took root in Allen’s mind as a complex, darkly comedic script exploring moral questions about crime and innocence into a mesmerizing show of shadow, fog, and optical illusion that recalls early German Expressionism in cinema.

I wouldn’t have seen the link between German Expressionism, magical shows, and Allen’s work without Casellato’s book. Once seen, however, it reveals a clean throughline across the filmography. It’s not just smoke and mirrors—or is it?

I haven’t seen the film Stardust Memories (1980) so I was utterly awestruck by a centerfold image in Casellato’s book that shows Allen in that film appearing to levitate the actress Jessica Harper. It’s even mysterious the way Casellato recalls the scene. Allen’s character, Sandy, and Harper’s character, Daisy, are standing in a meadow. As Sandy levitates Daisy, “he passes a large metal hoop around her,” writes Casellato, “to prove there are no supports.” It is, indeed, presented as an act of levitation—the impossible rendered possible, and yet, as Casellato asserts, Daisy never rises. She’s merely suspended. The effect on the audience is further proof of Allen’s magical skills. It’s not the eye of the beholder that is bending reality. It’s the audience who are deceived into a belief that the impossible has occurred. Even I, someone who hasn’t seen the film, sense the wonder of the moment from the picture alone! This is Casellato’s work—his decision to use the photo and to blow it up across two pages in the book.

Casellato eloquently lays forth the methods of escaping unsatisfying reality seen throughout Allen’s works: outrageous fantasies, breaking the fourth wall, substance experimentation—the cocaine sneeze in Annie Hall, for instance, or Annie’s use of marijuana before sexual intercourse—and so on down the list of magical and supernatural techniques: levitation, teleportation, dematerialization, time travel, hypnotism, trances, divination, metamorphosis, ventriloquism, and enchanted screen doors between projection and audience. The book is a veritable academic textbook containing the histories of these types and uses of magic and Casellato skillfully shows us that in his entire career Allen has never neglected to use magical thinking and methods in telling stories and clarifying existential truths. Without recanting the book chapter by chapter, there are however a few things I would like to dwell on.

Casellato draws a parallel between Allen as a Luddite—still writing-typing on an Olympia SM-3 and completely inoculated from the temptation to use AI in his work—and the growing competition between traditional magical mediums and the ever expanding market of “deadbots” and “griefbots.” Even though Allen, as a writer, is safe from the looming threat of AI replacement—for, as Casellato puts it, “no algorithm replaces a writer’s imagination”—there is a danger which Allen foresaw as early as 1983 with Zelig. This movie was groundbreaking in many ways, notably in its prophetic themes as well as in the techniques deployed to make it. The eponymous character, Zelig, played by Allen himself, was a quick-changer—skilled in metamorphosis. He could transform his appearance at will, something he constantly did in order to avoid exclusion. He undergoes hypnosis by his psychiatrist (Mia Farrow)—a form of treatment that promises to actually cure him, but which is overtaken by damaging, unethical, and recklessly experimental methods that end up foreshadowing the problems we are negotiating in the present year. As Casellato asserts, the film Zelig feels like prophecy with its allusions to societal pressures of conformity, the erosion of individuality, mass consumerism, endemic transactional relations, and the manipulation of people by the media without transparency or distinction between truth and lies. Of course the paradox of magical illusion is that it’s both deceptive and revelatory, and in the age of AI, Casellato reminds us that the question is no longer, what is real, but rather, can we trust our own eyes? Illusions in the traditional sense required a skillful hand, but AI removes that agency and transparency from illusion. In some ways, it even removes consent.

I think it is also worth pointing out Casellato’s explanation of how Zelig was also technologically ahead of its time. Made ten years before the technology adopted by Robert Zemekis for Forrest Gump (1994), Allen used a complicated cinema graphic technique to place his title character inside historical footage. Zemekis had the Kodak cineon scanner to effect imagery that showed his title character thrust into the spotlight of the twentieth century’s key events. I think this is one of the most profound revelations in the book. This is the magic of technology, something that changes, and Allen has been a force who not only mastered its use but found innovative workarounds when it didn’t keep pace with his vision.

Pace is another thing I think it’s important to mention here. Technology is fast and it does change, and this is why it is so important to stop and notice when someone arduously makes a point to remind us that life is not supposed to be a race. One of the most beautiful movements in Casellato’s book is the one where he introduces the reader to Héctor René Lavandera, also known as René Lavand (1928-2015). This poet of stillness, whom Casellato had the honor of meeting, “transmuted limitation into style.” (Casellato, p.200.) From the age of seven, he was one-handed, and so, as someone who wanted to do card tricks, he invented card magic for one hand. He was “a poet of close-up: stories woven around silences, impossibilities shaped at walking pace.” The point was to slow down the tempo, notice the stillness, and hear the cards speak. Casellato compares Lavand’s “voice to cards” method with Allen lending “voices to the anxious, the romantic, the foolish, the brave.” (Casellato, p.201.) Lavand slowed magic down to a pace that could perceive presence itself. Allen has given voice to what is otherwise intangible or abstract. These two ‘voice’ methods, Casellato asserts, are but another kind of ventriloquism—the art of giving voice to the inanimate, and seen across Allen’s work, from Take the Money & Run (1969), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and Radio Days (1987).

Woody Allen is a nonagenarian now. He just turned 90 last year, and yet he is not retired. Neither from filmmaking nor writing, nor from, presumably, the art of magic. He wrote and directed a French film, Coup de Chance, in 2023 and did voice narration for Mr. Ficher’s Chair (2025). He also published his memoir in 2020 and published a novel—What’s With Baum?—in 2025. There are reports of another film in the works this year, reportedly in production in Spain. It is important to note where Allen stands in life now, what he is doing, because it means that he has now been making films for just under six decades and he has been writing (jokes, plays, short stories, novels) since he was in high school. At the age of seventeen, he became Woody Allen—a name he took to disguise himself from his classmates. All this is proof of something rare—a career with influence, longevity, and impact across generations. It’s not just that he’s famous or even that he can tell a coherent story with a start, middle, and finish. It’s that in the course of his gigantic career, without being pedantic or predictable, he didn’t just insert himself in the chronology. Nor did he simply do the work as he learned from others. That’s like saying that Harry Houdini is just a figure in the history of magic, when, in fact, he is a vector of its trajectory. Allen mastered the craft and the wonder of cinema—and became a master of it.

Casellato’s book may not be the entire story, but it must be a decent proportion of it, since it looks at Allen’s life and names those elements which have always been there—the tricks, the stories, the jokes, and underscoring all of it, the curve of moral and intellectual reflection, of human imperfection, and of life’s ambiguities. A powerful throughline through all of it—both Allen’s life and work, and Casellato’s book—is the core idea that magic is paradoxical. It’s both deception and revelation; it’s also both performative and sincere when elevated to its highest art form. It can provide us with escape hatches that make life bearable, but it also holds the potential to bring us in alignment with the only thing that exists—presence. Casellato is passionate on the subject and it shows. In the end, he implores us to connect with magic’s most endearing gift—astonishment, surprise, enchantment. These things are so dazzling because they bring us back to something that some of us lose touch with after childhood. Casellato holds onto that special thing by reminding himself to forget. When we forget, life becomes mysterious and wonderful again. That is, after all, what makes life not only bearable, but sometimes beautiful.

Fitzgerald had apparently considered naming the novel “The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.” His close friend and literary executor, Edmund Wilson, shortened it to The Last Tycoon for its posthumous publication. I prefer Fitzgerald’s original idea. The longer title carries what the novel actually is: not simply a book about power, or Hollywood, or industry, but about love—its costs, its distortions, and its survival inside systems that erode it.

It’s worth remembering where Fitzgerald came from. He was born in Minnesota, educated at Princeton, shaped by war, and transformed by movement—meeting Zelda in Alabama, writing in New York, unraveling and remaking himself in Paris and along the French Riviera. By the time he went to Hollywood for steady pay checks—pay checks desperately needed for medical expenses and various debts—he had already been thrashed by life often enough to lose any remaining innocence. His sentimentality had been broken open, then rebuilt into something harder and more durable: not cynicism, but earned clarity.

The Last Tycoon is the work of a man whose eyes had been forced open—and who refused, at the end, to close them again.

Fitzgerald in Hollywood: paid, praised, and revised away

By the time Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood, he was no longer the prodigy behind This Side of Paradise, nor even the tragic romantic of The Great Gatsby. He was a professional writer for hire—intelligent, disciplined, and increasingly aware that intelligence was not what the studios most valued. His job was not to tell the truth, but to make something workable: to sand down edges, adjust tone, temper desire, and ensure that what emerged would offend neither censors nor audiences nor the moral anxieties of middle America.

Like the marginal character Brimmer Boxley, a novelist hired to write for Hollywood in The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald brought seriousness into rooms that did not know what to do with it. He researched obsessively. He took assignments seriously. He believed, still, that craft and thought might count for something. And like Boxley, he discovered that seriousness was not rejected outright—it was absorbed, softened, and redirected. He was praised for insight, thanked for effort, and then rewritten. Sometimes entirely replaced. Always paid.

This was the cruelty of the system: it did not need to humiliate writers in order to neutralize them. It did not shout them down or cast them out. It listened, nodded, admired—and then calmly changed the work until it no longer bore the weight the writer had given it. What survived was the indiscriminate shape without the pressure, the intention without consequence—or blurred to something barely discernible.

Fitzgerald learned, slowly and painfully, that Hollywood did not crush artists through brutality. It anesthetized them. I imagine Fitzgerald understood exactly how the ‘tycoon’ Monroe Stahr charmed Brimmer Boxley into complaisance.

Boxley as the writer Fitzgerald understood

Boxley is not Fitzgerald’s self-portrait, but he wrote him with unmistakable sympathy. Boxley represents the writer who has not yet learned how power works—not because he is foolish, but because he still believes in exchange: that insight offered in good faith will be met with intellectual honesty.

What Boxley encounters instead is Monroe Stahr.

Stahr does not argue with Boxley. He does not ridicule him. He does not even reject him. He listens attentively, acknowledges Boxley’s intelligence, flatters his seriousness, and then—quietly, expertly—redirects everything Boxley has said into something manageable. Something safer. Something that will leave systems intact and buffer the fragile egos of their rulers.

The name itself conveys the structure he is cajoled into—an asset to be guided into a box, a place where he must color within the lines. If he does stray outside the lines, he’ll be skillfully managed, refocused.

Boxley doesn’t leave angry, but subdued. He has been seen without being heard, valued for the transaction rather than talent. Fitzgerald must have known that feeling intimately.

Stahr, Thalberg, and the elegance of control

It is impossible to miss the shadow of Irving Thalberg behind Monroe Stahr. Thalberg was famously brilliant, famously kind, famously attentive. Writers admired him. Trusted him. Felt chosen by him. And then watched their work become something else.

Fitzgerald admired Thalberg, too. But admiration, by the end, had given way to understanding. Thalberg had been called a “boy wonder,” in spite of not being a boy, and Fitzgerald applied this directly to the character of Stahr. About 35, Stahr is old enough to know how to run the Hollywood studio. He has the brains to manage all the moving parts. He has the charisma to convince everyone he is good, that he knows best, that following him makes sense. He holds the key to the promise land—money, power, success, glamor.

Stahr’s genius is not merely visionary; it is administrative. He knows how to smooth conflict without leaving bruises. He knows how to make people feel respected while denying them authority. He understands that power is most stable when it does not need to assert itself in blatant terms.

This is what Fitzgerald finally grasped—and what The Last Tycoon records with such painful clarity: that charm is not the opposite of domination. It is one of its most refined instruments.

In writing Boxley and Stahr, Fitzgerald was not settling scores. He was documenting a system he had survived long enough to see clearly—one in which love, labor, and imagination were not crushed outright, but carefully edited into submission.

The Use of Contrast in the Craft

In telling the story, he opens it with narrative first person from the perspective of an adolescent woman born into it—the daughter of one of Stahr’s fellow producers, his antithesis in a way, Brady. Cecilia, the daughter of Pat Brady, who was modeled on Louis B. Mayer, warns the reader that some of the ordinary events in the story are drawn from her imagination, but that all of the “stranger ones are true.” (32). This warning conveys the simple but profound truth that, as she says in the first paragraph of the novel, “even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.” (1).

Ordinary and extraordinary are prominently contrasted in Fitzgerald’s writing. We see it in The Great Gatsby, where the eponymous character is extraordinarily charming and brilliant enough to rise from nothing into the orbit of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby acquires wealth that the Buchanans only inherited—in more or less the “ordinary” way. In Gatsby’s case, we could call it meritorious except Gatsby is no saint and his methods were not blameless. The contrast, nevertheless, has steam from the simple fact that one acquired wealth by skill alone while the other was just lucky to be high born.

Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, draws a similar contrast between her father, Pat Brady, and Monroe Stahr. In this case, the two producers both came from the working class. The contrast lay more in personality. Brady’s story, of his rise to power, is boring by comparison. Stahr’s, on the other hand, is luminous. Brady got ahead by being shrewd, and with a little luck. Brady was a conformist. He knew the game well and he played by the rules—or at least inside the box. Stahr, however, made the rules. He set the trends. He bent the game into whatever he wanted.1

If Stahr represents the elegance of control, then the women of The Last Tycoon represent the price of that control. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood is governed by a moral paradox that American culture has long perfected: men are permitted complexity, ambition, appetite, and contradiction, while women are required to stabilize those contradictions without ever exposing them. The industry sells virtue while practicing indulgence—of men only; it profits from desire (men’s desire of women) while insisting that desire remain unnamed. (Think of the innuendo in those old films, the sexual desire of women that is not spoken or implicitly shown, but rather is implied, circled around, and teased.) The women in the novel do not merely populate this system—they underscore it.

The Female Archetypes

Fitzgerald does not give us one woman, but several distinct female positions, each calibrated to a different function within Hollywood’s moral economy.

First, there is the actress—visible, profitable, objectified, and powerless. She is desired, displayed, circulated, and discarded, her labor mistaken for glamour and her consent mistaken for agency. She embodies the lie at the heart of the system: that proximity to power is the same as possessing it. Fitzgerald treats these women without cruelty or illusion. They are not naïve; they are simply replaceable.2

In contrast stands Kathleen Moore, the woman Stahr desires—and behind her, the dead wife, Minna Davis, whose memory Kathleen is required to inhabit. Kathleen must be luminous without being knowing, erotic without apparent awareness, desirable without equity in that desire. She exists to receive Stahr’s longing without complicating it. This is not love as reciprocity, but love as preservation of male fantasy. Kathleen’s value lies in her resemblance to an ideal already fixed in Stahr’s mind, an ideal rendered safe by death.

Then there is Jane Maloney, the most modern figure in the novel in the sense that she seems to be independent. Jane has competence, intelligence, and emotional literacy. She understands men like Stahr precisely because she understands power. But her authority is conditional. She is permitted insight only so long as it does not obstruct male dominance or require structural change. She is a self-aware agent who must color within the system—not outside it, and certainly not above it. Her power exists only as long as it remains supportive rather than sovereign. Fitzgerald uses Jane to show how the system needs a woman like Jane, someone intellectually useful but unthreatening because she’s undesirable sexually and unthreatening physically.

And then there is Cecilia Brady, the novel’s narrator, and in many ways its quiet conscience. Cecilia is inherently knowledgeable yet as structurally powerless as the other archetypes. Born into the system, she sees it clearly long before she has the authority to act within it. Her warning to the reader—that some ordinary events are imagined while the stranger ones are true—signals Fitzgerald’s deepest insight: that what appears implausible in Hollywood is often more accurate than what appears mundane.

Cecilia is a witness without leverage, conscience without jurisdiction. Her knowledge does not grant her control; it grants her clarity, and that’s precisely why she’s the ideal one to be the writer’s narrative vehicle. In this way, Cecilia represents the moral intelligence the system cannot afford to elevate. She sees too much, too early, and too honestly.

Finally, there are the workers—the secretaries, assistants, technicians, and functionaries who execute male power while remaining invisible and expendable. They are not the designers of the structure, but they sustain it. Their labor is procedural, repetitive, but necessary. They are not villains; they are mechanisms. Fitzgerald’s attention to them underscores the truth that power demands infrastructure. It requires a distributed workforce willing—or forced—to carry out its decisions without ownership.3

Taken together, these women do not merely reflect Hollywood’s hypocrisy; they enable it. They absorb moral contradiction so that men like Stahr can appear decisive, visionary, and benevolent. Desire is displaced onto them. Responsibility is deferred through them. Knowledge is held by them—but authority remains elsewhere.

This is Fitzgerald’s final, unsparing clarity. Hollywood’s morality is not false because it preaches virtue while practicing vice. It is false because it assigns the cost of that contradiction unevenly. Men are allowed to evolve, revise, and be forgiven. Women are required to adapt, endure, and disappear.

Why the narrator had to be Cecilia

Only Cecilia could be the narrator in this story. Fitzgerald needed the character who would incur the least risk to herself—a powerless woman, yes, but still a protected daughter, and still more, the one who could possess his own clarity. A male narrator—especially one embedded in power—would have been required to protect something: reputation, authority, continuity. Cecilia protects nothing. She inherits proximity without ownership, she has knowledge without jurisdiction, and so she has nothing to lose, except perhaps the proximity and access. However, once the story is exposed, she no longer needs proximity or access. Because she does not wield power in the industry, she is not responsible for maintaining the myth that underpins it.

Her position allows Fitzgerald to do something radical: to show how Hollywood works without having to justify it. Cecilia does not need to excuse Stahr, correct Brady, or redeem the system that raised her. She is free to observe, to register patterns, to tell the truth sideways. Her clarity is not dangerous because it cannot be wielded in offense.

In Cecilia, Fitzgerald solves an ethical problem he had struggled with his entire career: how to write honestly about power without either flattering it or attacking it from a position of grievance. She is young enough to be overlooked, female enough to be disregarded, and intelligent enough to see everything—objectively, which is exactly where the screenwriter’s limitation sat. The system tolerates her vision because it assumes it will never be operationalized.

The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western

Fitzgerald’s original title matters because it names the lie at the heart of Hollywood’s self-conception. A “Western” promises frontier, possibility, reinvention—the American myth of boundless becoming. In Hollywood, that promise is narrowed, professionalized, and restricted to men like Irving Thalberg: men permitted to conquer, to reshape the landscape, to call their ambition destiny.

As Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Stahr’s power depended on compliance: on women who absorb contradiction, on workers who execute vision without authorship, on intelligent observers—Jane, Boxley, Cecilia—whose clarity must be managed, softened, or sidelined. The Western promises freedom; Hollywood delivers hierarchy. The frontier is closed, but the myth remains profitable.4

The “Love of the Last Tycoon” is not ironic. It is exact. Love, in this system, is not intimacy but mythology. It is what allows power to appear humane. It is what keeps women compliant, workers loyal, and visionaries disarmed. It is what permits the tycoon to believe that his control is benevolent rather than extractive.

Fitzgerald understood this at the end. He understood that Hollywood had not merely revised his work; it had revised the American Dream itself. And he wrote the book anyway—not as revenge, not as confession, but as record.

That is why The Last Tycoon endures in spite of its incompleteness. It is not a lament for lost glamour. It is an anatomy of how power sustains itself—and who pays for the privilege of believing in it.

The novel is widely acknowledged as Fitzgerald’s most mature work, its only shortcoming that he never lived to finish it. What we have are six completed chapters and a continuation in notes and outlines—a scaffold in place of a fourth wall, pun intended. And yet the scaffolding reveals a conception that not only stands confidently beside his most celebrated work, but might have been his apotheosis.

What makes it potentially so is exactly what distinguishes it from the novels that made him famous: hard-earned wisdom. Earned clarity. This is not the work of a young man dazzled by possibility, but of one approaching middle age with his illusions burned away and his vision sharpened in the process.

It is not enough to be clever, as he advised his daughter, Scottie. Cleverness doesn’t confer truth. Nor does being right. Rightness is not the point, because it is not the outcome that matters. Honesty is the point. The question is whether you can survive it with your integrity intact.

For all his faults—for all the damage of a life that was frankly too short, but also, in its brevity, clarifying—F. Scott Fitzgerald appears to have done exactly that. He did not close his eyes again. And that, finally, is what The Last Tycoon leaves us: not completion, but truth.