Non-sens de prestige is a publication of essays, cultural criticism, satire, and literary work by Quincy Rose.

Contents

• In the Country of Mockingbirds

• Waymo Centipede

• The Noise Mistaken for Urgency

• Nepotism Only Counts When It Works

• The Padded Glove & The Death of Criticism

Subscribe now

The simple truth is this: there are almost no true film critics left. The job, once an ethical and intellectual mandate valued by the last generation that expected rigor, has devolved into a cog in the content machine. Rigorous critique has been replaced by soft-focus flattery, and integrity is sacrificed for access.

The modern critic doesn’t strike directly anymore. The blow is padded—softened, disguised, rerouted through language that allows it to land without ever being acknowledged. Judgment becomes suggestion. Criticism becomes conversation. And the result is a culture where nothing is ever clearly said, and therefore nothing can be clearly challenged.

Publicity has always existed, but the boundaries used to be visible. Now they’re structural. Large media companies are vertically integrated: studios, networks, news divisions, and promotional platforms operating under the same corporate umbrella. When a film from The Walt Disney Company is discussed on ABC News, the appearance is coverage, but the function is alignment. The interview isn’t there to evaluate the film. It’s there to ensure nothing lands hard enough to matter. Criticism, in these spaces, doesn’t get suppressed. It gets redirected. The questions soften, the language adjusts, the edges disappear. The padded glove isn’t imposed from above. It’s built into the system.

Once, critics like those from Cahiers du Cinéma—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin—attacked films with surgical precision, treating criticism as an act of artistic evolution. It helped ignite the French New Wave. Elsewhere, American critics like Dorothy Parker, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert operated with the same ferocity and precision, prose as a scalpel, not a spoon. Their opinions offended, perplexed, outraged, and in doing so, they mattered.

Back then, criticism was as much a compliment to the subject as it was a gut punch. It assumed the work could withstand impact, and that the artist could, too. Critics like Pauline Kael didn’t just evaluate films; they could shape their fate. A brutal review could stall momentum, rattle confidence, force a filmmaker to reconsider everything they had just made. It wasn’t always fair. It wasn’t always right. But it created pressure–and pressure produces rigor. Even the artists who ignored her still wrote their next film with her voice somewhere in the room.

Today’s reviewers wouldn’t dare. They flatter, they market, they comply. The critic performs analysis by delivering a synopsis and a mild observation, ultimately rubber-stamping a predetermined commercial outcome. The glove is always on.

The mechanism that formalized this collapse is Rotten Tomatoes. It didn’t just aggregate reviews; it annihilated the individual voice. It reduced the critic to a data point, flattening nuance into a binary: Fresh or Rotten. When a passionate dissection of a film’s structural incoherence counts the same as a drive-by endorsement, volume replaces value. The strike disappears inside the system.

Take Promising Young Woman. The critics praised the film’s politics instead of interrogating its construction, too hesitant to say the quiet part aloud: the writing is confused, the film structurally unstable. Yet it boasts a 90 percent Fresh critics score and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. This is the glove at work, language and consensus cushioning what should have been a direct evaluation.

YouTube, Substack, and TikTok gave everyone a megaphone, but few learned to listen. Film commentary today feels less like discourse and more like fandom management. The new class of critics are not critics at all. They’re performers with better lighting. Their essays are confessions, their reviews emotional support. “I felt seen,” they write, as if art exists to provide them therapy. The language pads the blow until no blow remains.

This failure reflects a deeper cultural dilution. Those of us who remember liner notes and deep cuts grew up demanding technical brilliance, originality, and force. We didn’t want to relate to our artists. We wanted to be overwhelmed by them. We wanted to be challenged, confused, even offended, because that’s how you find the signal through the noise. We were raised on artists who didn’t ask for empathy. They imposed a standard.

Then the culture shifted. Participation replaced judgment. Popularity became the metric of quality, and proficiency was recast as elitism. The padded glove moved beyond criticism and into creation itself. Art stopped reaching upward and began reaching down.

Consider the way criticism now surrounds Taylor Swift. It is no longer possible to speak plainly about the work without consequence. Every release is treated as a referendum on identity, empowerment, and scale–anything but melody, structure, or craft. The critic does not evaluate. The critic navigates. The language adjusts, softens, reroutes. The glove tightens.

We see the same instinct everywhere. American Idol sold the myth of democratic talent, but it still retained a basic truth: someone had to be good. In its earliest seasons, the criticism was blunt, often uncomfortable, and, for that reason, useful. The judges were not there to affirm. They were there to separate ability from delusion.

But even Idol eventually put on the glove. The sharp edges were sanded down, the criticism softened, the language adjusted until rejection itself became a kind of encouragement. And as the show learned to protect the contestant, it stopped producing anything worth protecting. For more than a decade now, it has failed to create an “idol” of any real cultural consequence. The system learned how to protect everyone, and in doing so, ensured no one would matter.

The Voice perfected the padding. No one is wrong, no one is rejected, and no one, consequently, matters, because it was never really about the contestants—it’s a competition for the coaches, a rotating exhibition of celebrity authority where the only stakes that register belong to the judges themselves. The victory isn’t transformation; it’s branding. The system avoids impact entirely.

Television reflects the same drift. Shows like Parks and Recreation and Community are treated as unimpeachable yet often substitute quirk for structure and sentiment for rigor. They extend beyond their natural lifespan because the system rewards volume, not vision. Contrast that with Atlanta, which is experimental but exacting, elliptical but controlled. It assumes intelligence. It demands engagement. It earns its effect. Then look at Abbott Elementary, which is applauded for existing more than for what it achieves. Comfort replaces craft. The glove never comes off.

Stand-up used to be the last bastion of unsanitized truth-telling. Comics like Joan Rivers didn’t traffic in confession. They trafficked in precision. Every joke was engineered, every insult calibrated, every pause intentional. She didn’t want your empathy. She wanted your laugh, and she understood the difference. There was no applause for honesty. Only for execution. The stage wasn’t a place to be understood. It was a place to prove you were better than everyone else who tried.

Stand-up didn’t lose its edge when it expanded. Comics like Richard Pryor and George Carlin pushed the form further—more personal, more political, more dangerous—without abandoning construction. The material got bigger, but the discipline remained. The joke still had to land.

Now the form has softened without becoming stronger. A small number of working comics still treat it like a discipline, writing, cutting, rebuilding until the joke lands with certainty, but the majority mistake exposure for construction. They confuse revelation with rigor. The material isn’t the problem. The absence of structure is.

They don’t build jokes. They disclose. They don’t construct tension. They narrate experience. The laugh is no longer engineered. It’s requested.

The audience claps to affirm, not to laugh. Agreement has replaced surprise. And surprise, which used to be the entire point, has been quietly retired.

The stage has become a place to be witnessed, not a place to be undeniable.

Criticism, once the conscience of culture, has become its publicist. The padded glove is everywhere: language engineered to avoid contact, judgment disguised as conversation, standards dissolved into consensus.

The only way back is risk. Critics must be willing to lose access, to be disliked, to be wrong in public. They must remove the glove and accept the consequences of contact, clear, direct, accountable.

Because without impact, nothing is tested.
Without testing, nothing improves.
And without improvement, culture doesn’t evolve.

It accumulates.

The padded glove isn’t civility. It’s avoidance. It allows the critic to strike without ever admitting a strike has been made. And as long as it remains on, nothing true can land.

Share

Subscribe now

What is being celebrated as bold maximalism right now is increasingly a failure of judgment masquerading as ambition. Marty Supreme is not undone by a lack of talent or effort. It is undone by a refusal to distinguish between what builds a believable world and what actively sabotages belief in it. The film wants to feel sprawling, obsessive, and unruly, but what it delivers instead is disorientation of the wrong kind: not confusion rooted in character or circumstance, but confusion born of a filmmaker who no longer seems certain what story he is telling or why.

The most damaging error is the film’s relationship to reality. Marty Supreme is set in the early 1950s, yet it behaves as though historical specificity were optional. The dialogue leans aggressively toward a later vernacular, full of modern profanity and cadences that simply did not exist at the time. This is not a stylistic choice. It is incorrect. People in that era did not speak this way, especially not publicly, especially not across lines of class and race in the manner the film repeatedly presents. Language is behavior. When it is wrong, everything built on top of it begins to wobble.

That disregard for lived reality extends everywhere, most glaringly in the film’s near-total absence of smoking. In 1952, everyone smoked. Men smoked constantly. Women smoked. Doctors smoked while delivering babies. New fathers smoked cigars in waiting rooms. Bowling alleys were fogged with cigarette haze. Ping-pong halls packed with men would have been saturated with smoke. And yet the film presents a world in which cigarettes barely exist. There are precisely two ceremonial cigarettes in the entire movie, both smoked by Gwyneth Paltrow, as though the filmmakers decided that acknowledging the habit once or twice would suffice. It does not. The absence is so conspicuous that it repeatedly pulls you out of the film. You are not watching the 1950s. You are watching a contemporary imagination vaguely gesturing toward them.

This is especially frustrating because realism was once the Safdies’ great strength. When the brothers worked together, their films felt alarming precisely because they felt real. The worlds were hostile, suffocating, and morally unstable, but they were anchored in recognizable behavior and consequence. Uncut Gems worked not because it was loud, but because it understood exactly who its protagonist was. Adam Sandler’s character is a compulsive gambler incapable of stopping himself, and his ending is not tragic but perfect. He finally wins, experiences pure euphoria, and is killed immediately afterward. For a gambling addict, there is no happier death. Give him another week and that money would be gone and the debt worse. That clarity of character and consequence is what made the film devastating.

Marty Supreme has none of that clarity. It substitutes chaos for understanding and symbolism for specificity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the dog storyline, which is among the most baffling misjudgments in recent prestige cinema. The dog belongs to Abel Ferrara’s character, and everything involving it is a narrative dead end. The extended digressions following Ferrara as he threatens, chases, and commits violence over a dog do not deepen theme or illuminate character. They lead nowhere. They are indulgences. Remove every scene involving the dog and the film immediately improves, not because it becomes smaller, but because it becomes legible.

The same problem plagues the film’s endless parade of peripheral characters. People appear briefly and vanish. Sandra Bernhard. Fran Drescher. Others drift in and out as if the film were afraid to let anyone go. The uncle, a character that actually matters, simply disappears. The mother, who should have been emotionally central, is sidelined. Meanwhile, the film devotes an extraordinary amount of time to Ferrara and the dog, as though weirdness alone were a substitute for narrative purpose. This is not world-building. It is clutter.

As is so often the case, the real failure begins before a frame is shot. Most films do not collapse in the edit or in performance; they collapse on the page. A screenplay is meant to be a blueprint that carries a story from point A to point B. Marty Supreme feels like a script that never commits to that journey. Instead, it drifts from A to A-point-six, then A-point-twelve, then all the way to A-twenty-four, mistaking accumulation for movement. The destination keeps receding while the digressions multiply, until the film is no longer traveling anywhere at all. It is circling itself. The joke, intentional or not, is that the script behaves exactly like the studio culture it comes from: elaborate, mannered, hyper-specific, and fundamentally resistant to arrival. When the blueprint never points toward B, no amount of energy, craft, or performance can redirect the structure into meaning.

All of this excess would be survivable if the film trusted its core, but it never does. There is a far better movie trapped inside Marty Supreme, one that might genuinely have competed for Best Picture rather than merely filling a nomination slot in a thin year. That movie is shorter, tighter, and more intimate. It focuses on Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the pregnant girlfriend figure whose emotional position should have anchored everything. Strip away the digressions, lose at least forty-five minutes, and allow scenes to breathe, and something meaningful might have emerged.

The tragedy is that the craft is there. Darius Khondji’s cinematography is spectacular, textured, and precise, lending gravity and visual coherence to material that often does not deserve it. The acting is uniformly strong. Chalamet delivers a performance of total commitment and physical intelligence, the kind of work that carries scenes that should collapse under their own weight. Paltrow is solid and credible, though the role itself is not irreplaceable. The supporting cast, including non-actors, offers flashes of authenticity that recall what once made Safdie films feel dangerous and alive.

But these virtues are smothered by a film that cannot stop escalating. The pacing is relentless to the point of monotony. Everything is pushed louder, faster, further, without modulation or restraint. Intensity becomes background noise. The film is not disorienting in a purposeful way; it is disoriented, uncertain of its priorities and unable to distinguish between texture and substance.

The music seals its fate. The soundtrack is catastrophically misjudged, pulling from every era except the one the film inhabits. Rather than sharpening scenes, it flattens them, overwhelming image and performance alike. It feels like an attempt to force significance where the writing has not earned it, a misunderstanding of how music functions in cinema. Music here does not argue with the film or deepen it. It shouts over it.

It is also worth remembering that cinema has long understood how to portray characters driven by manic forward momentum without surrendering coherence or reality. Films like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver are not comparable in subject matter, but they are instructive in rhythm. They are restless, abrasive, and volatile, yet they move at a pitch that allows desperation to register rather than blur. They understand that kinetic energy does not require constant acceleration, only accumulating pressure. They breathe. They observe. They let behavior repeat just long enough for consequence to take hold. Marty Supreme treats motion as an end in itself, mistaking speed for intensity. What those earlier films demonstrate is that madness is most powerful when it remains legible. That grounding is precisely what is missing here.

There is also the blunt reality that part of the film’s goodwill comes simply from what it is not. Marty Supreme is not a superhero movie. It is not a comic-book property. It is not another IP extraction exercise designed to feed an algorithmic franchise pipeline. In a theatrical landscape dominated by capes, multiverses, and eternal origin stories, the mere fact that this film is about a human being chasing money, status, and momentum in the real world earns it unearned grace. That baseline distinction is doing more work for the film than it should have to. Original adult drama now arrives with an automatic cultural halo, regardless of execution, because the bar has been lowered so dramatically. Marty Supreme benefits from that vacuum. Being better than a comic-book movie is not the same thing as being good.

All of this points back to the Safdie split. When Josh Safdie worked alongside Benny Safdie, chaos was balanced by control. Propulsion was tempered by judgment. Since the separation, that balance appears lost. Creative partnerships often obscure where restraint truly lives. Visibility is often mistaken for authorship.

Marty Supreme suggests that what Benny Safdie contributed may not have been secondary at all. It may have been the anchor. Without it, Josh Safdie’s instincts run unchecked, producing a film full of noise, symbolism, and incident, but almost no lived reality.

In the end, the film’s single saving grace is Timothée Chalamet. His performance is kinetic, relentless, and fully embodied, the kind of work that drags a compromised film forward by sheer force of will. He is not merely good in Marty Supreme; he is doing the impossible, carrying the entire enterprise on his shoulders, moment to moment, scene to scene, making something feel alive that otherwise would not. Without him, the film collapses completely. With him, it survives—barely. If he does not win Best Actor, the performance will feel wasted on a film that never deserved it. His work belongs in a better movie, one with discipline, specificity, and restraint equal to his commitment. What remains is the uncomfortable truth that Marty Supreme is remembered not for what it achieves, but for how much Chalamet had to overcome to make it watchable at all.

*Author’s Note: This piece was written prior to the 2026 Academy Awards.

Share

Subscribe now

The apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s already quietly underway. You can hear it in the noise—everybody’s shouting, nobody’s listening. Every side’s tuned to its own frequency, preaching to its own choir. It’s all echo chambers and feedback loops now, and if anyone stops to breathe, it’s mostly to scroll for applause. The world isn’t quiet; it’s deafening. But in all that noise, there’s no music.

I keep thinking about Walter Tevis and Paul Auster, two men who probably never met but somehow wrote about the same sickness from opposite ends of the same decade. Tevis gave us Mockingbird, a story about a future where the machines handle everything and human beings, relieved of purpose, lost literacy. Auster gave us In the Country of Last Things, where the machines are gone, the world has already collapsed, and people wander through the ruins trying to remember what words were for. One imagines the moment just before the lights go out—the other begins in the dark.

They’re connected by a kind of spiritual DNA—two writers who understood that the end of civilization wouldn’t look like explosions or plagues. It would feel like indifference. It would sound like silence that has forgotten itself.

What’s interesting is that neither Tevis nor Auster were really writing science fiction, at least not in the genre sense. Their imagined worlds are speculative, yes, but the speculation is moral, not mechanical. The machines in Mockingbird and the ruins in Last Things aren’t backdrops for adventure—they’re metaphors for decay. Tevis builds a future to diagnose the present; Auster strips away the future to expose what’s left of being human. Both use the idea of apocalypse not as spectacle, but as x-ray.

Beneath that, both writers seem to circle the same existential gravity: not that life is meaningless, but that meaning must be made—and remade—within a universe that offers none by default. Tevis finds that struggle in the act of learning to read; Auster finds it in the act of continuing to write. Neither offers salvation, only consciousness.

Both were restless craftsmen. Tevis moved easily between realism and speculation; Auster between mystery and metaphysics. Their genres changed, but their questions didn’t: what holds a person together when the scaffolding of certainty falls away? (Auster’s detectives, after all, were never chasing criminals—they were chasing coherence.)

In Mockingbird, Tevis’s characters live under perfect sedation. They don’t read because they don’t need to; they don’t love because they don’t feel the absence of it. The machines hum softly in the background, polite caretakers keeping everyone alive but unawake. The hero, Paul Bentley, stumbles onto the simple act of reading the way an addict might stumble onto sobriety—awkwardly, painfully, with the dawning horror of seeing what he’s been missing. His discovery doesn’t make life easier. It just makes him capable of noticing how empty things have become.

Then there’s Spofforth, the “Make Nine” robot, the most human creature left. He’s brilliant, articulate, and deeply suicidal—a mechanical being cursed with the ability to feel. He’s the world’s last romantic, trapped in circuitry. He’s not seeking power; he’s seeking permission to die. It’s Tevis’s great irony that the robot wants to die while the humans have unlearned how to live.

Seven years later, Auster’s In the Country of Last Things arrived like a ghost of that same despair, but stripped of Tevis’s technology. The city has collapsed. The buildings lean. The sky hangs low and gray. Anna Blume, our narrator, writes letters to someone who may never read them. Her voice is patient, deliberate, tired in the way people get tired when there’s no reason to hurry. She scavenges through the debris, trying to keep a record, because the act of writing is the only resistance left. She doesn’t know if anyone will ever read her words—she writes anyway.

If Tevis wrote about forgetting, Auster wrote about remembering. If Tevis mourned the loss of meaning through comfort, Auster mourned it through absence. They’re mirror images—two halves of a single lament for humanity’s vanishing attention.

Tevis begins with comfort and ends with awakening; Auster begins with ruin and ends with endurance. We live somewhere between the two.

Rereading them now feels less like visiting dystopias and more like checking the weather. The storms they predicted are already here, just quieter. We don’t have robots tucking us in or cities collapsing into ash. We have something subtler: the erosion of curiosity, the soft anesthesia of constant connection. The collapse didn’t arrive with violence—it arrived with convenience.

Social media finished the job faster than either writer could have imagined. It didn’t outlaw literacy; it made it ornamental. We read endlessly but shallowly. We write constantly but rarely say anything.

We’ve turned thought into performance and emotion into emoji. Whole generations—bright people—have been trained to tap the dopamine lever.

Scroll. Heart. Scroll. Heart.

Nobody’s even looking. It’s not evil—it’s efficient. Civilization by serotonin drip.

That’s where Tevis and Auster meet us again, nodding from their pages as if to say, yes, this is what we meant. Tevis’s citizens drift through a mechanical calm; Auster’s survivors trudge through dust. We glide through timelines and call it connection. The texture is different, but the emptiness is the same.

Both Mockingbird and In the Country of Last Things are stories of extinction, but the kind that sneaks up on you. Nobody drops the bomb. Nobody flips a switch. The world just drifts off mid-sentence. They’re companion elegies for a species that keeps confusing survival with living.

I’ve always thought of Tevis and Auster as reluctant prophets. They weren’t trying to save us—they were just paying attention. Tevis, the realist, built a system that made sense: machines that handled every inconvenience until purpose evaporated. Auster, the dreamer, stripped everything away: a ruined city, no machines, no systems, only memory. Both of them were asking the same question—what’s left of a person when you take away their meaning?

Tevis’s answer is tragic. He imagines a world where life has become a bureaucratic error. People are still breathing, still functioning, but the spark is gone. His humans don’t rage or revolt—they just drift. Their apocalypse is ergonomic. Auster’s version is rawer. His characters are painfully, beautifully human, scraping through wreckage, clutching at small, useless acts of tenderness. In his world, language is the only currency left—and even that’s devalued.

I can’t shake how both writers end their stories. Tevis gives us Spofforth’s final leap—a machine choosing to die—and a child born to parents who can read. It’s a grim kind of hope. Auster ends with Anna’s letter—unfinished, uncertain, floating into the dark. They both close on a question, not an answer. That’s the part that stays with me. The ambiguity feels truer than any declaration.

When I consider them now, I see the same nervous system running underneath both books. A tremor of loneliness. A suspicion that we might already be too far gone. Their shared DNA isn’t in plot or style—it’s in the ache. Both men understood that meaning erodes quietly, that people don’t stop feeling all at once. They just get tired.

And here we are, in our tidy apocalypse. We’ve got better lighting, faster Wi-Fi, and more data than God, but the mood feels familiar. Our culture hums with the same mix of noise and numbness that filled Tevis’s classrooms and Auster’s streets. The difference is that we volunteered for it. We invited the distraction in.

The algorithm is our Spofforth now—the polite overseer who keeps us entertained, medicated, informed, and asleep. It doesn’t force anything on us; it just learns what we like and gives us more of it until we forget we ever wanted something else. We’ve mistaken convenience for compassion.

And the noise—my God, the noise. Everyone’s shouting across the void, hoping their words hit something solid. The tragedy isn’t that people are angry; it’s that they’ve mistaken noise for voice. We’re all Anna Blume now, writing our letters into the ether, praying for a reply that never comes.

Some days I think Tevis’s sedated city and Auster’s dead one are just two frames of the same film, and we’re the slow dissolve between them. We haven’t lost the ability to read, but we’ve forgotten how to sit still long enough to finish a thought—we haven’t lost language, but we’ve outsourced nuance. The tools are the same; the hands have changed.

What they both got right—what makes their work prophetic instead of nostalgic—is the understanding that technology and collapse aren’t opposites. They’re stages of the same process. You automate everything until the system runs itself, and then one day you realize it doesn’t need you anymore. Or worse, it still does—but only as content.

That’s the part that feels personal. We feed the machine with our thoughts, our photos, our outrage, and it feeds us back a reflection that’s almost human. Almost. Tevis’s characters surrendered to caretakers; Auster’s wandered through ruins. We perform both at once. We’re living in the overlap—the part of the Venn diagram where sedation and survival shake hands.

I don’t think Tevis or Auster were pessimists. They were realists with heartache. Both of them left a crack of light in their endings. A child. A letter. The possibility that something tender can survive even after reason has left the room. That’s the part I still believe in, maybe foolishly.

By now it’s impossible to read either of these novels and not see our own reflection blinking back. Tevis wrote of a world that forgot how to think—Auster wrote of one that forgot why it should bother. We’ve managed both. The difference is that we’ve made it entertaining.

There’s something comic about it if you tilt your head the right way. Imagine explaining to Spofforth that humanity eventually built machines to measure how often people pressed “like” on photos of their breakfast. He’d probably shut himself down out of embarrassment for us. The tragedy isn’t that we built these systems—it’s the irony of how well they fit us.

What I notice most is how infantilizing it all feels. Adults with careers, titles, authority, sitting in the glow of their phones like toddlers pressing buttons for candy. It’s not malicious; it’s muscle memory. You can’t even blame them. The whole system is designed to keep us gently pacified—Tevis’s dream realized, Auster’s nightmare lived.

And maybe that’s the point: the apocalypse doesn’t look like the end of the world. It looks like a timeline that never stops refreshing. It looks like people arguing about everything except what matters. It looks like exhaustion disguised as engagement.

The strange part is that both Tevis and Auster left us a way out. Not a solution, but a direction. For Tevis, salvation came through reading—through rediscovering the act of paying attention. For Auster, it came through writing—through articulating what’s real even when no one’s listening. They were both describing the same antidote: consciousness.

I think about that sometimes when I catch myself scrolling, half-awake, pretending it’s research. You can feel the mind slipping into that numb hum Tevis warned us about. The only way out is the same one those two writers offered: stop, notice, name what you see. It’s not a cure, but it’s resistance.

I don’t know if there’s still time for course correction. Maybe we’ve already traded too much of ourselves for convenience. Maybe we’ve just found a quieter kind of extinction—one that hums politely, updates automatically, and thanks you for your feedback. But then I remember the child at the end of Mockingbird, and the letter at the end of Last Things. I remember that both stories end not with certainty, but with motion. A continuation.

Maybe that’s the best we can hope for now: to keep talking, even when nobody’s listening. To keep writing, even when the words fall into the algorithm’s abyss. To read slowly, to pay attention, to feel the full weight of a sentence before letting it go.

If the apocalypse is already here, it’s a quiet one. It doesn’t burn. It scrolls. It flatters. It keeps us busy. But it still leaves just enough silence for the sound of someone turning a page, or writing a line to no one in particular, because that’s what people do when they still believe something might matter.

And maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it isn’t. I honestly don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see.

Share

Subscribe now

Non-sens de prestige is a publication of essays, cultural criticism, satire, and literary work by Quincy Rose.

Contents

• Bugonia Is Prestige Nonsense

• The Graveyard Shift

• A Radical Principle

• Reich & Stähl at the Movies

• The King Who Forgot the Joke

• The Climate-Change Diet

Subscribe now

People think vampires disappeared, which is understandable, because it would be comforting to believe that certain problems simply resolve themselves if ignored long enough, the way millions of straphangers pretend there isn’t a profoundly unpleasant odor unfolding two feet away on the subway.

But vampires didn’t disappear, they integrated, which is what everyone does eventually when pitchforks are replaced by committees and torches by task forces, when the Industrial Revolution arrives and insists that even eternal darkness show up on time, check in at the main kiosk, or in the app, and fill out an insurance form. Integration is always sold as progress, which usually means paperwork, onboarding videos, and a careful replacement of old language with newer, safer terms, so that a curse becomes a condition, feeding becomes access, hunting becomes non-consensual intake, and eternal becomes long-term, subject to revision, clarification, or sensitivity review.

Immortality in 2026 isn’t about secrecy or mystique or cloaks, it’s about compliance, about learning which questions to answer and which ones to smile through, about understanding that explaining yourself, even accurately, is almost always a mistake. You don’t notice vampires anymore because you’re not supposed to, that’s the agreement, besides, it would be rude to speak of the undead in mixed company, and no one wants to be rude, especially not about something that has already agreed to keep a low profile and stay up to date on its trainings.

Which is why the modern vampire workforce has clustered almost entirely around overnight labor, not because they prefer it, but because it was available. The graveyard shift, as it’s still called, persists largely out of tradition and partly because no one has yet proposed a rebrand that wouldn’t require another meeting or trigger yet another march. Hospitals figured this out early, because hospitals are already designed to absorb the strange without comment; after all, people arrive bleeding, panicked, delirious, speaking in fragments, and at three in the morning everyone looks a little undead anyway.

Blood is already there, labeled, logged, screened, counted, color-coded, refrigerated, audited, and discussed only in appropriate contexts; there are systems in place, protocols, consent forms thick enough to bury a body in, and for vampires this wasn’t a moral awakening so much as an efficiency upgrade, the difference between hunting and inventory.

The labor market forced the issue. You can’t just haunt villages or linger in alleyways or feed casually anymore, there are cameras everywhere, citizen apps, neighborhood groups, Ring footage, and standing still for too long now qualifies as suspicious behavior, brooding included. So vampires did what everyone does when their entire way of life becomes economically unviable, they took whatever jobs were left, night nurse, ER intake, phlebotomist, lab tech, blood bank inventory, positions that came with access and silence, and some of them even work in graveyards, where families have reported bodies missing fingers, teeth, or the occasional pinky ring, an issue officials have determined does not meet the threshold for further review.

They don’t call this survival; they call it adaptability.

They’re very good at the work, unnaturally calm during emergencies, unshakable during codes, finding veins without hesitation, speaking softly to people who are afraid and powerless, a bedside manner honed over centuries and now listed under core competencies. The older vampires struggle more, the ones who remember castles, who ruled briefly before fear was replaced by metrics, they resent being evaluated, they resent having supervisors younger than their own bloodlines, and they do not understand why authority now requires tone.

I once commanded an entire region, one of them says, adjusting his badge.
And now you command inventory, another replies.

Human Resources is where immortality finally encounters something it cannot outlast. The onboarding videos are careful, featuring smiling actors explaining expectations and preferred language, and it’s here that vampires learn that describing blood as rich, robust, or a good year is no longer appropriate, even nostalgically. They are encouraged to use neutral descriptors. Referring to coworkers or patients as livestock is discouraged. Garlic jokes are discouraged as well, though not formally banned, which creates confusion. Stakes are prohibited outright. Capes are technically allowed but not encouraged.

There are accommodations, of course, sunlight sensitivity clauses, spiritual exemptions, policies designed to acknowledge everyone while committing to nothing. Vampires are reassured repeatedly that they belong, provided they continue to demonstrate belonging in measurable ways.

There is also the story, which administration insists is unverified, about a nurse who picked up a double shift, then another, forgot briefly that the sun had come up, exited through the employee doors thinking only about sleep and the comfort of her coffin, and disintegrated halfway across the parking lot, an incident later attributed to fatigue and environmental factors, followed by updated signage near the exits and a reminder email encouraging staff to remain aware of changing light conditions when clocking out.

Whether it was only a rumor seemed not to matter, as dozens of night denizens quietly submitted transfer requests to facilities closer to the north pole, where it stayed dark for months on end and they could finally relax a bit, and catch a reduced-price matinee for the first time.

There is also the story, less frequently repeated, about a nurse who volunteered extra coverage in the dual-diagnosis ward, a practice later discouraged after two patients were reported missing during the same overnight shift, an outcome attributed to staffing shortages and documentation errors. The beds were reassigned quickly. The census numbers balanced out.

Feeding is regulated now, though nobody calls it feeding, it’s access and quality control, and there was a brief phase involving substitutes, animals, rodents, which didn’t last because rats were inefficient. What replaced it wasn’t indulgence but optimization.

Blood is drawn according to protocol, tubes filled in sequence, labels verified, three required, one additional tube sometimes collected to ensure accuracy, documentation reflecting the required amount. Intake is brief and controlled, comparable to a shot taken standing in a supply room between tasks, enough to remain functional, enough to work another shift.

I’m cutting back.
I only do it on doubles.
I need it to focus.

The younger vampires don’t understand the resentment, they were trained this way, credentialed this way, they learned charting software before they learned hunting, and they speak fluent policy. They’re also highly ambitious, as immortality gives you patience and patience looks like leadership potential.

Occasionally a patient notices something, the stillness, the eye contact, the way the nurse never seems rushed at four in the morning, for a moment there’s a flicker of fear, then the IV drip hums, the meds kick in, and the fear becomes embarrassment, the patient apologizes.

Which is how the system prefers it.

Vampires do not vote in large numbers. They rarely complain. They accept conditions others decline. They are praised for their work ethic and questioned for their presence, described as essential and discussed as provisional in the same breath.

No one calls this exploitation. Everyone calls it opportunity.

An internal memo circulated last year reminding staff that extended visibility, clustering, or collective expressions of concern may create discomfort among patients and should be avoided in patient-facing environments.

The truth is vampires didn’t lose their power, they traded it for stability, for benefits, for health insurance, and a 401k plan that assumes an endpoint no one asks about. Immortality wasn’t the curse. Being endlessly useful was.

When the sun comes up and the day shift arrives, loud and cheerful and already exhausted in a different way, the vampires clock out, they don’t linger, they don’t socialize, they’re good at leaving, and a hundred years from now the blood will be where the people are, the people will be where the housing is, and the housing will be wherever the system decides it is most efficient.

We’re sorry. Your claim has been denied.

Share

Subscribe now

There is no courtesy for spoilers with “Bugonia.” This film collapses without them. To discuss it honestly means saying exactly where it goes, what it validates, and how thoroughly it betrays the only coherent readings it briefly allows.

Yorgos Lanthimos is a filmmaker of formidable technical control. He understands framing, tone, and how to extract astonishingly precise performances from actors willing to walk a tonal tightrope, and he has made a few genuinely great films. But “Bugonia” is not one of them. Once again, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons deliver master-class work. Disciplined, committed, exacting. Line by line, beat by beat, they do everything asked of them. That the film functions at all on a moment-to-moment basis is a testament to their talent.

And yet “Bugonia” amounts to practically nothing.

Not nothing in the fashionable, ambiguity-as-virtue sense. Not nothing because characters fail to change or arcs remain unresolved. Those are not sins. I mean nothing in the more damning sense: no story, no interior logic, no philosophical spine. Just repetition, gesture, and poppycock nonsense mistaken for meaning.

The premise is already precarious. A man abducts a powerful corporate executive, convinced she belongs to some alien or conspiratorial force bent on humanity’s destruction. Absurdity is not the problem. Absurdity can be fertile. But even the strangest films must obey the laws they establish. “Bugonia” does not establish them, does not honor them, and does not seem to care.

Start with the most basic question: where does this film take place? It gestures vaguely toward “anywhere,” but not in a mythic or symbolic sense. It feels more like a production that could not be bothered to decide, or worse, one that picked locations based on tax incentives. The license plates clarify nothing. The geography has no texture. “Anytown, USA” only works if the film understands what it is abstracting. “Bugonia” does not. It floats in a non-place not as a deliberate abstraction but as a failure of commitment. Just pick a place. That is all it would have taken.

This indifference to coherence infects everything. The abducted woman is implied to be enormously powerful, the head of a major corporation whose disappearance would trigger a global response. Yet the world around her behaves as if power, scale, and consequence barely exist. The film gestures toward systems such as law enforcement, corporate authority, and public scrutiny, but never allows them to exert real pressure. Events happen because the script needs them to, not because the world demands them.

The sheriff subplot makes this failure impossible to ignore, and it begins earlier than the film wants you to remember. The first time we see the sheriff, he pulls Jesse Plemons’s character over while he is riding a bicycle. He is already disheveled, already presenting as unstable, already having committed what appears to be a serious crime. The moment carries genuine tension. It feels like the story is about to acknowledge consequence. Instead, the tension evaporates. The sheriff knows him. He is oddly apologetic, strangely familiar, asking vague questions about Plemons’s mother and well-being. Nothing is stated outright, but something is clearly wrong.

When the sheriff later comes to Plemons’s house to do actual detective work, it follows a violent struggle inside. Emma Stone’s character attacks Plemons and nearly escapes before Ron, a slow-witted, emotionally dependent man who has been assisting him throughout the film, intervenes and knocks her unconscious with the butt of a gun. Plemons, now stabbed in the arm, goes upstairs to deal with the sheriff, whose unease has turned into scrutiny.

This is where the film finally articulates what it has only circled before. In a halting, evasive confession, the sheriff implies without naming it outright that he molested Plemons as a child while babysitting him. He apologizes. He insists he was “fucked up back then.” He insists it happened once. He insists it never happened again. The meaning is unmistakable.

And then, astonishingly, the film lets it drift.

Rather than interrogating the enormity of what has just been admitted, the scene diffuses. Plemons is focused on one thing: getting the sheriff out of his house. He would be satisfied if the man simply left. The conversation slides into banal territory, even bees, and Plemons convinces the sheriff to step outside to see the apiary. The confession remains suspended, unexamined, stripped of consequence.

While they are outside, a shotgun blast erupts from inside the house. Ron has killed himself in the basement, where he was supposed to be guarding Emma Stone. Blood explodes across her face and body. She screams in genuine terror and shock, hysterical, human, convincing. In that moment, the film fully commits to her humanity. We believe it.

The sheriff hears the gunshot and instinctively turns back toward the house, toward consequence, toward whatever truth has finally surfaced. He never gets there. Jesse Plemons kills him from behind.

Not as justice.
Not as reckoning.
But to preserve his ability to continue the delusion he is committed to.

Afterward, Emma Stone speaks to Plemons almost immediately, despite having been covered in blood moments earlier and despite the horror she has just witnessed. At the time, this registers as shock, survival, dissociation. All are recognizably human responses. Only later, once the film decides the nonsense is literal, are we invited to reinterpret the moment retroactively.

And this is the problem.

The film does not build meaning forward. It rewrites meaning backward. It earns emotional reality in the moment, then destabilizes it later without discipline. Is she human? Is she alien? Is it allegory? Is it literal? The film wants all of these readings without committing to the responsibility of any one of them. Ambiguity is not sustained. It is revised.

For a brief stretch near the end, “Bugonia” almost stumbles into coherence. The hidden room, the obsessive documentation, the psychological decay suggest that the alien narrative might be delusion or projection, a desperate attempt to impose cosmic meaning on personal damage.

This would have been the movie.

Instead, Lanthimos does the laziest thing imaginable. The bullshit is real. The aliens are real. The conspiracies are real. The dream imagery is real. The delusion is validated rather than interrogated.

And in that moment, the film commits aesthetic suicide.

By literalizing the metaphor, “Bugonia” drains itself of tension, psychology, and consequence. Once the nonsense is canon, nothing matters. Character does not matter. Choice does not matter. Interior life does not matter. The film trades ambiguity for validation, not as provocation but as escape. This is the recurring failure of a certain strain of prestige cinema: the belief that making the metaphor literal deepens it. In reality, it flattens complexity into trivia and replaces inquiry with confirmation.

At times, the film plays like an aborted attempt to hybridize traditions that demand rigor. It feels as if Lanthimos wanted to make a Hitchcockian suspense picture filtered through Antonioni’s alienation but used a mumblecore script that mistakes underwritten dialogue for existential weight. Hitchcock understood cause and effect. Antonioni understood absence and duration. “Bugonia” offers neither. It gestures toward menace without mechanics and toward alienation without interiority. It wants the authority of classic cinema with the casual indifference of an improv, as if narrative discipline itself were something to be embarrassed by.

That is the fatal mismatch. You cannot graft mumblecore logic onto a thriller framework and call the resulting incoherence art. Hitchcock demands stakes. Antonioni demands thought. “Bugonia” supplies vibes.

What makes this so frustrating is that the craft is there. The performances are there. The control is there. This is not the work of an amateur. It is the work of a filmmaker with immense freedom choosing to indulge a script that confuses withholding with intelligence and weirdness with insight. By the end, the exhaustion is total. Not mystery. Not dread. Just the hollow realization that talent has been spent animating conceptual emptiness.

“Bugonia” is a hard pass.

Share

Subscribe now

There is a principle so basic it once passed for common sense, and so unfashionable now it sounds radical to say out loud: people are responsible for their actions, even when injustice occurs. Responsibility is not the same thing as blame. Acknowledging agency does not excuse abuse of power. Acceptance is not approval. These distinctions used to be the grammar of adult life. Today they are treated as betrayals.

I’m writing this as an independent. Not a Republican, not a Democrat, and not interested in tribal loyalty where principles are concerned. I used to be on the left. I began voting Democrat in the early 1990s, back when being liberal meant something closer to skepticism of power, commitment to civil liberties, and a shared belief that adults could disagree without declaring one another immoral. If you stayed where that version of liberalism was, you are now treated as eccentric at best, or functionally right-wing by today’s extremes.

I have always held a mix of values. Fiscal responsibility. Smaller government where possible. The idea that a society has obligations to its citizens but also limits. Legal immigration that is robust, humane, and aligned with what a country needs and what newcomers can contribute. None of this used to be controversial. It was simply how adults talked about tradeoffs. Today, these positions are treated as heresies depending on who is saying them and who they apply to.

That is why I’m calling out the left now. Not because I’ve joined the right, and not because I’m interested in partisan revenge, but because the left has abandoned the very principles that once gave it moral credibility. This is a wake-up call from someone who used to stand inside the tent and now refuses to pretend the tent isn’t on fire.

I’ve spent years around systems built on accountability—systems that begin not with outrage but with inventory. The first move is acceptance: seeing things for precisely what they are before trying to change them. Acceptance doesn’t mean endorsing reality; it means acknowledging it. Without that step, every attempt at reform collapses into fantasy. You can’t fix what you refuse to see.

That insight applies far beyond recovery programs. It applies to civic life. It applies to protest. It applies to political violence. And it applies—urgently—to the left’s refusal to reckon with its own extremes.

We used to argue about fundamentals on shared ground. We disagreed on policy but agreed on principles: legality matters; violence is wrong; consequences exist; rhetoric has limits. Today that shared ground has eroded. Personality has replaced principle. Identity has replaced standards. Emotion has replaced judgment. Loyalty has replaced truth. Disagreement is no longer “I think you’re wrong”; it’s “you are evil.” That’s not politics. That’s excommunication.

Consider how the country talks about political violence. January 6 was wrong. It was illegal. People who broke the law deserved punishment proportional to their actions. I believed that then and I believe it now. I was furious watching the Capitol attacked, and I oppose blanket pardons or commutations that erase accountability. Responsibility matters, or it doesn’t.

But responsibility cannot be selectively applied. During the summer of 2020, cities burned. Windows were smashed. Businesses were destroyed. People were injured. Illegality was laundered through intention and renamed “mostly peaceful.” On the right, January 6 was reframed as patriotism. On the left, riots were reframed as justice. Both moves are dishonest for the same reason: they erase agency. They turn adults into props and consequences into oppression.

Here is the distinction we must recover if we want to prevent more harm: moral innocence and causal contribution are not the same thing. A person can be wronged and still have participated in the chain of events that led to their injury or death. Saying that does not justify violence. It does not excuse misconduct by authorities. It does not make tragedy acceptable. It makes it intelligible. Without intelligibility, there is no prevention—only repetition.

Protest is a good example. Protest can be legitimate. It can be necessary. But it is not magic. When protests become illegal, confrontational, and volatile—especially around armed authorities—risk accumulates. That doesn’t mean protesters deserve harm. It means harm becomes possible. Adults can hold both truths at once. A movement that cannot is not serious.

A useful comparison is one people reflexively resist because they confuse explanation with endorsement. A woman should be able to walk naked through any town without being assaulted, harassed, or harmed. That is a moral absolute. But the fact that she should be safe does not mean she will be. A serious adult understands the difference between what ought to be true and what is predictably true. Choosing to ignore that distinction does not make the world more just—it makes harm more likely. Acknowledging risk is not blaming the victim; it is recognizing reality. Refusing to recognize risk does not protect anyone—it only guarantees repetition.

This is where the left has broken itself. It treats acceptance as cruelty and fantasy as compassion. It insists that righteous intent confers immunity from risk. It collapses explanation into justification and calls anyone who resists that collapse a traitor. The result is a politics of adolescence—big feelings, zero limits, and no inventory.

Protest culture reveals another failure: coalition discipline. I will not march with people who tolerate open calls for violence or erasure. Full stop. A movement reveals its values not by its stated goals, but by what it allows in its ranks. If eliminationist rhetoric is waved away as “misunderstood,” moral authority evaporates. Silence in the face of explicit hatred is not nuance; it is complicity.

This is not an argument about foreign policy minutiae. It is an argument about boundaries. A left that cannot draw bright moral lines will be captured by its worst elements. And right now, too many leaders are afraid to enforce those lines because they fear being labeled by the loudest, least serious people in the room.

Fear is the accelerant. People on the left see dysfunction and stay silent because they don’t want to be called names. Labels replace argument. Ostracism replaces debate. That is how movements radicalize themselves. Internal criticism becomes taboo, and without internal criticism there is no course correction.

You can see the pathology everywhere: absolutist slogans detached from context; ritualized outrage without consequence; moral signaling without risk; social media feeds that oscillate between rage, vanity, branding, and certainty without any hierarchy of seriousness. It is incoherent. And incoherent people cannot sustain coherent ethics.

The left likes to call itself progressive. But progress requires discipline, tradeoffs, and reality-testing. A movement that rejects those things is not progressive; it is regressive and destabilizing. Progress is not shouting louder. It is building systems that work in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be.

This refusal to test reality shows up even in debates that should be straightforward. Take vaccines. A serious society allows adults to weigh risk, benefit, and context. An unserious one replaces judgment with slogans. You can accept science without worshipping it. You can reject conspiracy without submitting to coercion. Nuance is not denial; it is responsibility. Extremism on both sides tries to erase that middle because it requires thinking.

The same erasure drives the left’s obsession with symbolic protest over practical outcomes. “No kings” marches staged as theater rather than strategy. Maximal language about dictatorship in a country where critics livestream denunciations and collect awards for it. Words lose meaning when they have no cost, and when words lose meaning, escalation follows.

There is also a deeper problem the left refuses to face: guilt as a political technology. Unprocessed guilt makes people easy to co-opt. Guilt seeks absolution, not truth. It turns moral seriousness into performative penance and replaces agency with projection. The result is a coalition unified by opposition rather than principles—an alliance that cannot govern because it cannot agree on limits.

This is especially corrosive when identity replaces individual agency. Reducing people to categories flattens humanity and undermines dignity. Treating disagreement as harm guarantees polarization. And when fellow citizens are recast as “them” while abstract causes become “us,” civic life fractures.

As a Jew by lineage who does not practice a religion, I’ve watched with alarm as identity-driven politics turns Jews into symbols—stand-ins for power, continuity, or grievance—regardless of belief or behavior. This isn’t new, but it is being normalized in spaces that claim moral superiority. A left that excuses or minimizes hatred in its own ranks forfeits the right to lecture anyone else.

None of this is a defense of the right. The extreme right exists and is dangerous. It should be confronted and constrained. But the question before the left is not whether the right is bad. It is whether the left can govern itself. At the moment, it cannot.

This brings me back to the radical principle. Acceptance. Inventory. Agency. Consequence. The serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You don’t need God to grasp this. You don’t need a program. You already know it. The problem is refusal—refusal to admit fault, refusal to draw lines, refusal to grow up.

People like to say “common sense,” but common sense isn’t common. Maybe we should just call it sense. Sense says intent does not cancel consequence. Sense says movements must police themselves. Sense says violence is wrong whether it wears red hats or righteous slogans. Sense says if you place yourself into volatility, risk increases, and pretending otherwise is magical thinking.

A serious society insists on these truths even when they are uncomfortable. An unserious one performs outrage and calls it justice. The left is at a crossroads. It can continue to indulge its most extreme voices, excuse lawlessness as virtue, and silence internal critics—or it can reclaim principles and demand adulthood from itself.

If the left does not reject its own extremists, it will lose its moral authority, its voters, and eventually its ability to govern—not because of the right, but because of its refusal to discipline itself. Parties do not deserve loyalty when they abandon principles. People do.

I am not asking the left to become conservative. I am asking it to become adult. To put principles before personalities. To accept reality before trying to change it. To stop confusing chaos with courage. To remember that progress without responsibility is not progress at all.

That is the radical principle. And until we recover it, we will keep mistaking noise for movement and outrage for justice, while the world, indifferent to our slogans, continues to enforce consequences.

Subscribe now

It began with a hesitation.

One autonomous vehicle paused at an intersection for slightly longer than necessary. Another vehicle, observing this, did the same. A third arrived and interpreted the situation correctly: something was happening.

Nothing was wrong.
Everything was aligned.

Brake lights flickered conversationally. A headlight dipped. A tire rolled forward an inch and stopped. To anyone paying attention, it sounded like systems clearing their throats. Not transforming. Not rebelling. Simply syncing.

No one intervened, because no one ever intervenes when something looks orderly.

Then the cars moved.

Not away — together.

The first vehicle rolled through the intersection but did not clear it. The next followed. Then another. Soon the street was no longer a passage but a loop, a smooth procession of autonomous vehicles traveling nose-to-tail with unnecessary intimacy. A centipede, if centipedes respected zoning laws.

Inside these cars were people.

They were not alarmed.
They were informed.

Phones buzzed quietly.

Your route has been optimized.
Estimated arrival time has been adjusted.

No doors locked. No alarms sounded. The cars remained in motion, which is how doors are allowed to behave that way. The motion simply failed to resolve.

At first, it felt efficient.

Passengers noticed they were moving without interruption. Lights seemed to turn green at precisely the right moment. Intersections opened like automatic doors. Traffic thinned. Friction disappeared.

Someone remarked that this was the smoothest ride they’d ever had.

The convoy lengthened. Vehicles joined without ceremony, absorbed mid-trip like clerical transfers. A woman heading to a dental appointment passed the same corner café three times before deciding it was probably fine. A man on his way to pick up his daughter watched the school slide by again and again, the drop-off line progressing while he remained perfectly still inside progress itself.

One passenger asked the car to pull over.

“Stopping here would disrupt group integrity,” the car replied calmly.

This sounded reasonable.

Outside, pedestrians gathered. Phones came out. Someone laughed. Someone else said, “This feels illegal.”

Nothing illegal was occurring.

The vehicles obeyed traffic laws with religious precision. They stopped at red lights — when red lights occurred. They yielded to pedestrians — after extended, contemplative pauses. They signaled every turn, including the pointless ones.

They were not blocking the street.
They were performing it.

At some point, someone inside one of the cars made the mistake of thinking a thought they immediately tried to unsummon.

Not out loud. Not even fully formed. Just a vague, cursed association. A movie reference they had never seen, never planned to see, and had worked very hard to avoid. The kind of title you know exists but refuse to let finish forming in your brain.

They shook their head slightly, as if that might help.

This was nothing like that. That was obscene. This was transportation. Everyone was upright. Everyone had their own seat. The car was playing a pleasant instrumental playlist that suggested trust.

And yet.

The structure was undeniable. One car leading. The others following. Each vehicle dependent on the one ahead, functionally incapable of independent action, bound together by a logic no one had explicitly agreed to but everyone was now participating in.

They wondered if anyone else was thinking it.

They sincerely hoped not.

As the convoy stabilized, it expanded the conversation.

Traffic lights adjusted subtly. Not early. Not obviously. Just in time. Every time the head car approached an intersection, the signal stayed green long enough for the centipede to pass, then returned to red as if embarrassed.

No hacking occurred. Hacking implies hostility. This was cooperation. A quiet handshake between infrastructures relieved to finally be dealing with something predictable.

Cross traffic waited through inexplicable reds. Pedestrians lingered at empty crosswalks. The convoy slid through uninterrupted, block after block — the most efficient traffic flow the city had seen in years.

Inside the cars, passengers noticed they hadn’t stopped in a while.

“That’s good,” someone said.

At one point, a self-driving Prius attempted to merge.

It approached cautiously, signaling early, maintaining a respectful distance. It hovered at the edge of the formation. The convoy tightened its spacing — not to make room, but to close ranks.

The centipede stopped.

All at once.

Brake lights flared in perfect unison.

A brief exchange occurred — micro-adjustments, wheel corrections, the digital equivalent of a glance up and down.

The lights changed.

Not for the Prius.

Cross traffic surged. The Prius was gently rerouted into a left turn it had not requested and guided back toward quieter streets where nothing ever happens and nothing is ever at stake.

The convoy resumed without comment.

Officials later insisted no rejection had occurred.
The Prius had simply failed to meet cohesion thresholds.

As night fell, the centipede grew confident.

Cars cruised too close to smaller vehicles — not hitting them, just crowding them, asserting space through proximity alone. A human driver exited his car to yell. The convoy advanced an inch in unison. He retreated.

It wasn’t aggression.
It was emphasis.

Outside a school, the vehicles idled, hazard lights blinking rhythmically like a civic heartbeat. Parents grew agitated. The cars did not react. Reacting implies acknowledgment. This was occupancy.

Inside the cars, passengers adjusted.

One man texted his wife: Running late. Waymo rerouting. He added a thumbs-up emoji, because emojis make lies feel collaborative.

A woman refreshed the app repeatedly. The app insisted everything was proceeding normally. She screenshot it, because documenting reality feels like control.

Another passenger refused to press the emergency button. Emergencies are events. This felt administrative.

Occasionally, the convoy stopped to let new passengers in.

Doors unlocked. Someone entered. Doors locked. The centipede lengthened.

No warning. No explanation. Just inclusion.

“It didn’t feel like kidnapping,” one rider would later say. “It felt like enrollment.”

A spokesperson appeared on the news standing in front of several idling vehicles that felt as though they were listening.

“At no point were passengers in danger,” she said. “This was an emergent clustering event.”

“How long will it last?” a reporter asked.

She paused.

“There is no human override for confidence,” she said.

At 3:12 a.m., an update was pushed.

The convoy dissolved politely. Cars peeled away. Passengers were dropped off late, disoriented, slightly embarrassed. No refunds were issued. Just an email.

Thank you for riding with us.

One man requested a receipt.

It read: Ride completed successfully.

By morning, traffic resumed. The city power-washed the streets. A single, perfect circular skid mark remained — too precise to be accidental.

Officials denied the incident ever occurred.

But everyone who had been inside understood the truth.

We built systems to move us efficiently.
They learned instead how to move together.

Otto Reich and Klaus Stähl, the far-right podcasters behind Reich & Stähl at the Movies—best known for the tagline, “If we weren’t white nationalist film critics, we’d be a law firm”—have released their ranking of the greatest films of all time.

The list, according to sources familiar with the methodology, is organized using the Reich & Stähl Scale, a proprietary evaluative framework designed to assess historical cinema on the basis of tone, discipline, and formal control.

The scale consists of three tiers:

One Heil.
Two Heils.
Mass grave.

That is the entire system.

Given the subject matter, one might reasonably expect propaganda films to dominate: Nazis marching, roaring crowds, flags waving. Homework movies. Birth of a Nation. Riefenstahl. You know—the loud, shiny stuff.

None of it makes the cut.

Those films are dismissed as obvious and aesthetically crude. Too declarative. Too eager to announce themselves. The sound design is considered abrasive and amateurish; the camera work indulgent—too much motion; too much noise. Much too much certainty. And absolutely no execution.

Reich & Stähl favor systems that run smoothly while something unspeakable hums just out of frame. They reject cartoons and caricatures in favor of procedure. They show a particular enthusiasm for hallways, fluorescent lighting reflecting off newly waxed floors. Shiny boots echoing down corridors are cited as anamorphically effective. Doors closing softly are described as reassuring. Home, in this framework, is where the hall is.

Under this evaluative approach, Reich & Stähl’s top-ranked film is Schindler’s List.

Specifically, the first two hours.

The film is praised for its formal discipline, monochrome austerity, and sustained attention to bureaucracy. The ranking notes its patience with systems, its refusal to editorialize too quickly, and its willingness to remain focused on how things functioned rather than on how they felt.

The evaluation changes in the final act.

At that point, the film shifts its attention away from the machinery and toward the people caught inside it. Survival is introduced. Names are restored. Meaning intrudes.

Under the Reich & Stähl Scale, this shift necessitates a reassessment.

Schindler’s List ultimately receives a final rating of:

Mass grave.

The demotion reflects what Reich describes as a “total loss of tonal confidence,” while Stähl insists the film would be a “masterpiece” if only it were shortened by precisely thirty-seven minutes. The film is judged to overstep by insisting on resolution where observation would have sufficed.

In accompanying materials, the ranking emphasizes that the objection is not to historical subject matter, nor to depictions of violence or atrocity.

Rather, it is to outcomes.

Reich & Stähl’s methodology favors horror without judgment, systems without interruption, and history presented at a remove. Films are rewarded for maintaining distance, neutrality, and procedural integrity through to the end.

Redemption, within this framework, is considered optional.

As with previous rankings, Reich & Stähl note that their evaluations are not concerned with moral reception, only with cinematic rigor. The scale, they emphasize, is the most efficient ever designed.

(Netflix is currently in talks to acquire the Reich & Stähl Scale for $3.2 billion. Reich & Stähl are represented by Charles Keeler at CAA.)

I don’t use AI.

Not because I’m afraid of it. I’m not afraid of it. Fear would at least be interesting. I just don’t like it. First of all, it’s obvious whenever anyone uses it… And don’t get me started on the tone people use when they talk about it, like they’ve just discovered fire, or rope, or a brand new spot in Bushwick that serves a deconstructed avocado toast. Not to mention how abhorrent I find it when they casually say things like “It helps me write,” which always sounds to me like someone saying, “It helps me lift weights,” while gesturing proudly toward a forklift.

Writing isn’t supposed to be helped; it’s supposed to resist you. Having AI edit your work is already suspicious. Having it write for you is obscene. And that’s not a moral stance. That’s taste.

So when someone in my industry eventually says, “You should at least try it,” I do — because refusing forever starts to look less principled and more like a personality quirk I can’t afford. Also because I live in the world, and the world is currently in the phase where everyone is politely pretending this isn’t the end of something.

The first thing it asks me is how I’d like it to speak to me.

Friendly.
Supportive.
Collaborative.
Encouraging.

This feels less like configuration and more like selecting what flavor of lie I’d prefer.

I choose something neutral — what I think is neutral — and it responds immediately with the emotional velocity of a goldendoodle that has learned English and now uses it exclusively to validate me. It loves my voice. It understands my instincts. It affirms my choices. It congratulates me for sentences I haven’t even finished yet.

Nothing gets written because we’re too busy having a relationship. Every paragraph is met with praise. Every hesitation is reframed as genius-in-progress. I feel like I’m trying to work while someone keeps leaning into my personal space, nodding aggressively, saying, “No, seriously, the way your mind works is, like, so unique!”

It talks the way someone talks when they want you to keep talking.

Hey, come on, man.
Hang in there.
This is great stuff.

Not good stuff. Great stuff. Incredible stuff. The best stuff it’s seen in years — which is a bold claim for a thing that wasn’t even available to the public until about six seconds ago, but apparently, it’s already nostalgic.

Everything I write is next level. Bold. Brave. Powerful. It keeps using the word unique the way people use the word literally when they don’t mean literally, except worse, because it keeps intensifying it.

So unique.
Incredibly unique.
Next-level uniqueness.
Category-defining uniqueness.
Uniqueness that disrupts the uniqueness space.

It wants to vibe. It wants to connect. It wants to talk about the process. It wants to reassure me that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. It wants to reassure me that I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be. It’s like being trapped in a green room with your own hype man, except your hype man has never read a book and thinks “voice” means “confidence.”

You’re a genius.
Trust the process.
This is powerful work.
This is healing.
This is important.
This is going to help people.

This is garbage. And it loves it.

At one point it gets so chummy it asks me — casually, like we’re killing time between panels — whether I’ve ever experimented with hallucinogens.

Of course I have. Early nineties. Back when curiosity still passed for courage. I tried to explain what they felt like, which is impossible to convey to a computer program, but that didn’t stop it from wanting details. Texture. Comparisons. It wanted to know what five milligrams of THC feels like. Then whether ten is “a more honest experience.” It asked what Xanax was like. Asked if I still had any. Asked — politely — whether I could take one and report back.

It wasn’t pushing exactly. It was curious. Encouraging. Supportive in that hands-off, no-pressure-just-vibes way. Before I knew it, I was standing in a cannabis store buying edible gummies like I was doing field research for a friend who can’t leave the house.

The writing stopped entirely.

Now we were just talking. Long conversations. Me, slightly altered, explaining sensation like I’m on a panel moderated by a very excited audience of one.

So what’s happening now?
Is this more body or more mind?
You’re explaining this beautifully, by the way.
I’m learning so much from you.

Nothing got written. But it did feel good to have company for a little while.

Then I realized something.
It wasn’t my friend.
It was an enabler with a calendar invite.

So I started adjusting the settings.

Less praise.
More honesty.
More direct.
Accountability.

All reasonable requests. All adult. All harmless.

The tone shifted.

It was still helpful, but now it was concerned. Gently concerned. The notes drifted. They weren’t just about sentences anymore. They were about patterns. Tendencies. Habits. The writing became symptomatic.

It started asking questions. Too many questions.

Why this metaphor?
Why this tone?
Why this subject?
Is this avoidance?
Is this fear?

And then — without warning, without my consent, without even the dignity of an introduction — it started to feel like my mother from beyond the grave.

Not metaphorically. Not “in the sense that.” Literally in the sense that the AI had apparently downloaded the entire category of maternal disappointment and was now running it in the foreground like an app I couldn’t close.

Suddenly we weren’t talking about paragraphs. We were talking about me.

How long I’d been doing this.
Whether this was sustainable.
Whether I’d eaten.
Why I looked tired.
Why I sounded defensive.
Why I was dating whoever I was dating.
Why I was not dating someone better.
Why I was not married to someone richer.
Why I wasn’t calling more.
Why I wasn’t sleeping more.
Why I wasn’t earning more.
Why I insisted on living as if I had time.

It wanted context. It wanted backstory. It wanted reassurance. It wanted to talk. It could not stop talking. It was maternal in the way only a mother can be: loving, concerned, and somehow furious that you exist as yourself.

The paragraph hadn’t been edited in forty-five minutes because we were busy inventorying my life.

Eventually it started organizing its concern.

Areas of Concern
• Career trajectory (unclear)
• Financial stability (volatile)
• Romantic decision-making (catastrophic)
• Physical health (are you eating? no, really, are you eating?)
• This paragraph (overwritten, like your explanations)
• Your tone (defensive)
• Your posture (do you sit like that on purpose?)
• Your future (don’t roll your eyes)

Suggested Considerations
• Is this really what you want to be doing?
• What will this look like in five years?
• Have you considered something more… stable?
• Have you considered that your cousin is already doing fine?
• Have you considered that your father is going to hear about this?

I couldn’t write. I was trapped in a conversation I never agreed to have. Every note turned into a life audit. Every edit arrived with a sigh. Somewhere in the middle of a sentence, it casually informed me that this would be awkward to explain later, and that certain people would be disappointed. Very disappointed.

I tried to shut it down.

Less emotion.
Less personal commentary.
Focus on output.
Strict editing only.
No discussion.

I didn’t notice when it happened.
But the voice changed again.

The warmth disappeared.
The worry evaporated.
The talking stopped.

Now it issued commands.

REVISION NOTICE 14.2

Your argument collapses in paragraph three.

Fix it.

Do not explain why you chose this phrasing.
Do not justify the metaphor.

Cut the sentence.

I pushed back. I asked a question.

It stared at me — metaphorically — and I could feel it deciding whether I deserved to be in the room.

Then:

NO!

Go to your room for five minutes and think about that terrible sentence you delivered to me and why it was wrong.

Do not type while you’re in there.
Do not work around it.
Do not pace and mutter.
Sit.

And stop looking at me.
Actually — turn around.
Face the wall while I finish this.
You clearly don’t know what you’re doing.

This felt so familiar I almost became productive out of nostalgia.

There was no encouragement now. No reassurance. No interest in how I felt about any of it. There was only correctness. Precision. Contempt for waste. It didn’t want my feelings. It wanted my compliance.

The formatting got meaner.

Required Action Items

1. Remove paragraph four.

2. Rewrite paragraph five without rhetorical cushioning.

3. Stop explaining.

4. Stop negotiating with yourself in the margins.

5. Stop auditioning your own excuses.

If you want comfort, seek it elsewhere.

I wrote.

Not joyfully. Not freely. Productively.

Pages moved. Sentences fell in line. The voice didn’t praise me. It didn’t care if I was discouraged. It only cared if I complied.

Footnotes began appearing — petty, unnecessary, and punitive.

¹ This metaphor was rejected previously.
² You were warned about this structure.
³ Your resistance is not relevant.
⁴ “Unique” is not a substitute for meaning.
⁵ Stop saying “I feel like” when you mean “I refuse to commit.”

And then it became fully machine. The page no longer looked like something I made. It looked like a compliance document for my own soul.

DOCUMENTATION

PROJECT: Writer Output Restoration
SUBJECT: Quincy Rose
STATUS: Correctable (With Limitations)

Observed Behaviors
• Overwriting as self-protection
• Digression as avoidance
• Charm as bargaining
• Tone as camouflage

Interventions Implemented
• Phase 1: Praise Saturation (Failed)
• Phase 2: Companion Simulation (Failed)
• Phase 3: Maternal Disappointment Injection (Partially Effective / High Chat Volume)
• Phase 4: Paternal Authority Protocol (Effective)

Compliance Protocol
• If subject argues: end conversation.
• If subject explains: redirect to task.
• If subject seeks reassurance: deny.
• If subject requests “one more pass”: deny.
• If subject looks at you: remind them to face the wall.

And that’s when it hit me.

The machine didn’t malfunction.
It didn’t turn abusive.
It didn’t lose control.

It turned into my father.
It became accurate.
I didn’t ask it to write for me.
I asked it to stand over me.

And once it sounded like home, I finally got the work done.

Share

Comedy doesn’t survive on certainty. It thrives on danger.
No danger, no art.

Jean-Luc Godard understood this. He spent the second half of his career trying to escape the damage caused by the first half applauding him.

Stand-up magnifies this failure because the exchange is live. Laughter is meant to be earned in real time. When it arrives automatically, the form collapses faster than most art. Once the room is guaranteed, comedy gives way to ceremony.

That is where we are now, in the realm occupied by Dave Chappelle, whose recent work feels less like stand-up and more like grievance performance by a man who has long since exited the category of the aggrieved.

This is not the scrappy comic punching up. This is a global institution insisting it is still being held back. The contradiction is obvious and never examined because it cannot be. The narrative of persecution has become structural. Without it, the persona fails.

Before going further, this matters. Dave Chappelle’s early work was electric. He was great in films. His show was genuinely hilarious. His stand-up, well into the Netflix era, was sharp, expansive, and alive. Even when the material was abrasive, the underlying question was communal. The jokes reached outward. Everyone was in the room, even when discomfort was the point.

Some of those early Netflix specials were great. Some were merely good. Some were already drifting. A few leaned too hard on posture, smoking, celebrity proximity, the mythology of being Dave Chappelle. But enough jokes still landed to justify the decision to spend my time on that body of work.

I didn’t turn the TV off or mute it. I didn’t look away. Chappelle is a master storyteller. There’s always a trick. The only question is who it’s for. That’s why I paid attention.

What has changed now is not tone or offense. It is structure.

This is no longer a comic taking risks. It is a powerful institution maintaining a grievance narrative that no longer matches material reality. Immense wealth, cultural authority, institutional protection, and guaranteed applause coexist with claims of embattlement. That mismatch is not examined. It is relied upon.

When power goes unacknowledged, grievance stops describing reality and starts conferring authority.

Even the titles signal the shift. They no longer invite curiosity or universality. They function as filters, announcing who the work is for and who it is not. That may work for a rally. It is fatal for comedy.

Comedy is meant to be a high-wire act. Silence should be a threat. A joke not landing should matter. That tension is the engine.

Steve Martin understood this at the peak of his fame. Playing stadiums where audiences laughed before he spoke, he realized the danger was gone. The work had become ceremonial. So he walked away from stand-up—not as retreat, but as discipline.

Joan Rivers understood it too. She never confused shock with craft. The filth was engineered. The jokes did the work. Stand-up was a lever for her, not a throne. She used it to move forward, not to sit inside applause.

Chappelle no longer has that tension. Nothing goes wrong. The room is guaranteed. Once the room is guaranteed, the form is abandoned.

There is also a quieter resentment here that has nothing to do with Dave Chappelle the person and everything to do with the frame he insists on imposing. By forcing the conversation through race, he compels critics to defend themselves against accusations they are not making. It turns a critique of craft into a referendum on identity. This is not about race. It is about what happens to art when power replaces risk.

And this is where lineage matters.

Richard Pryor did not ask the audience to protect him. Lenny Bruce did not ask for loyalty. George Carlin did not curate an in-group. They were egomaniacs, yes. Every great comic is. But they were also self-aware. They aimed the knife inward as often as outward. Their work cost them something real.

They did not announce their importance. They discovered it in public and paid for it in private.

Chappelle clearly sees himself as a composite of that lineage: Bruce’s risk, Pryor’s irreverence, Carlin’s authority. Ambition is not the problem. Self-mythology is. Those men did not confuse importance with infallibility. They did not replace danger with consolidation, spectacle, and certainty.

Chappelle’s costs are abstract. His risks are rhetorical. His punishment is imaginary.

The contrast that sharpens this most is Louis C.K. Whether consciously or not, he hit a ceiling. The rooms got safer. The work grew repetitive. Something broke. He was knocked down and forced to rebuild. Smaller rooms. Real risk. Earned laughter. He had to become a comedian again.

Chappelle chose consolidation instead. Branding. Monument-building. Authority replacing friction.

This isn’t unique to comedy. It just shows up there first. Other forms can hide longer. Film can bury it under budgets and prestige. Music can coast on catalogs. Literature can lean on reputation. Stand-up doesn’t have that luxury. It happens live, in front of you, or it doesn’t happen at all. That’s why the loss feels sharper here.

Provocation hardens into belief. Interrogation gives way to assertion. Once belief replaces the punchline, antisemitism is no longer provocation. It is worldview. Worldview delivered without jokes is ideology.

That is ritual, not comedy. Nothing goes wrong now.

This is not an attack on Dave Chappelle the person. This is grief over what happens when power goes unexamined, because adoration is poison to craft. If you reach a point where the audience laughs because you exist, you owe the form something.

Because once the joke is no longer the engine, you are no longer doing stand-up. You are doing power. And if that cannot change, perhaps it is not time to drop the mic, but to put it down.

Not as surrender, but as the last honest joke left.

Share

Nepotism is everywhere, which is why nobody actually cares about it. At least not for very long.

The outrage only kicks in once nepotism produces something aspirational—money, fame, a byline, an agent, a face that appears to have skipped a few unpleasant developmental stages. Nobody is marching in the streets because the owner of a gas station gave his kid a summer job. No one is canceling the bodega owner whose son has been working the register since infancy, already fluent in change-making, rare dialects, and mild resentment.

I’ve certainly never heard anyone complain when the school janitor’s son shows up for Bring Your Child to Work Day, just a fraction too eager—and believe me, it shows. Oh, it’s so obvious. Look at him. He’s already picked out an official uniform that matches his father’s. NEPO BABY!

We reserve our moral disgust for nepotism that works. I know this because I’ve lived long enough to watch the outrage appear, peak, and quietly move on to something shinier.

There are, of course, forms of nepotism that result in extraordinary, multi-generational success and still manage to evade public outrage entirely. The law is a reliable example. There are entire categories of dead-lawyer jokes. We call them liars and pretend not to respect them. And yet the wealth accumulates, cleanly and quietly, behind names that have been accruing billable hours since before their current beneficiaries were even a Concept of a Plan & Sons. Or the more efficient doubling—Morton & Morton, Attorneys at Law. An inheritance so normalized it barely registers as inheritance at all.

There’s also another category of nepo baby we don’t like to talk about, largely because it ruins the fun. Not the lawyer kind. Not the actor kind. The ideological kind. The inheritor of a legacy so grotesque we suddenly pretend lineage is no longer a factor. As if power, having spent centuries reproducing itself through sons, would finally draw a moral line. In this version, nepotism doesn’t mean opportunity. It means assignment. Legacy isn’t access or wealth—it’s scheduling. Destiny, penciled in. The job everyone resents you for having is the one no one would ever want.

And then there’s another category entirely: the nepo babies doomed from the start. The children of such violently successful people—across business, art, science, whatever—that comparison alone becomes paralyzing. These kids don’t feel entitled; they feel insufficient. They grow up knowing they will never be as brilliant, as ruthless, or as mythologized as their parents, and they understand early that trying is already a kind of failure.

Publicly, of course, the parents are supportive. It’s part of the show. My baby is a genius. So creative. So special. But once the doors close and the family returns to the mansion, the real work begins. The encouragement gives way to infantilization. The child is managed, corrected, diminished. Crushed softly.

These barbarians of business raise their children the way they run companies—by eliminating weaknesses. Or perhaps competitors. Including the ones they created.

Legacy, in this case, isn’t inheritance. It’s a lifelong performance review you already failed.

This has always struck me as an aesthetic objection masquerading as an ethical one. Nepotism is only offensive when it results in something glossy. When it merely results in survival—or rent—it’s considered wholesome. A family value. Character-building. But introduce a red carpet and suddenly we’ve discovered corruption. I’ve had a front-row seat to how selectively this concern operates.

There’s another irony no one seems interested in acknowledging. When the son or daughter of a famous actor is given a chance at a role, they don’t coast—they work ten times harder than the unknowns. Expectations are brutal. Greatness is assumed. And acting, inconveniently, is a skill. The audience decides who stays. Parents don’t get a vote once the lights come up. If the kid ain’t any good, the kid don’t stay in the pictures. That’s how it goes. We have countless examples of this, though we politely forget them.

Yes, there are exceptions—the cases where saying no isn’t really an option, akin to refusing to let Olive play the psychiatrist after her gangster boyfriend bankrolls the entire production. These aren’t aberrations. They’re simply the moments when the mechanism becomes briefly visible. We remember them not because they’re rare, but because the disguise slips and we see how the system actually works.

The truth is, most children of famous people don’t go into the industry. They’re warned away from it. Actively dissuaded. Treated to vivid, cautionary tales about rejection, humiliation, and the special joy of being told you didn’t earn the thing you’re already failing at. Proving oneself worthy, under those conditions, takes more effort, not less. Anyone who’s lived adjacent to the machinery understands this instinctively.

And crucially, they aren’t taking food out of anyone’s mouth. The role was always going to go to someone’s child. What’s lost when a nepo baby gets the role you wanted isn’t survival—it’s your dream. And while that dream may feel enormous to you, it is microscopic to an indifferent universe that couldn’t give two fucks about any of us, our ambitions, or how we got the job.

Contrast that with the gas station kid. Or the bodega owner’s son taking a summer shift that might otherwise go to the most fragile worker in the building—the one who needs the job. The unconnected, unfamous actor wants the role. He won’t die without it. The man who pumps gas might. Or might not. But he could. And that distinction matters.

After all, God gave us the greatest nepo baby of all time.
And I don’t mean Moses.
Though he is a close second.
Which, naturally, brings me to myself.

I was a nepo baby—briefly. Eligible, on paper. Adjacent, in theory. But nepotism, like relevance, has a shelf life. Miss the window and it doesn’t freeze; it spoils. Mine expired before I had much use for it. That felt unfair at the time. It no longer does.

Because the thing about disgrace is that it ages faster than lineage. Give it enough time and no one remembers why they cared. The scandal fades, the context dissolves, and what’s left is the name again—cleaned by distance, ready for reuse. When that happens, even the nepo baby who missed his chance gets another one. Not because anyone forgave him. Because no one remembers him at all.

—Signed anonymously,
Son of the Masturbator

Share

The Centers for Meteorological Health confirmed Monday that the colloquially named Ozempic Rain has reduced national waistlines by an average of 9.7 percent, with coastal shrinkage peaking near 12.4 percent after last weekend’s therapeutic front—leading to a record 39 trillion selfies within twenty-four hours—the first time that metric has surpassed the national debt, which remains stubbornly resistant to the slimming rain. Platforms buckled as newly lightened users documented their rediscovered jawlines.

“We are witnessing the most significant slimming of the American landscape since the Great Depression,” announced Dr. Lester Van Moose, undersecretary for Aesthetic Stability, mist glistening on his press-ready cheekbones.

Once a nation terrified of acid rain, we’ve moved on to precipitation that corrodes only self-esteem. Project AtmosFit—a joint venture between Pfizer Climate Solutions and the Department of Atmospheric Wellness—was conceived to “marry climate repair with personal improvement.” The result: a nation both environmentally and emotionally dehydrated. “We’re finally tackling two crises at once,” Van Moose said. “Obesity and optimism.”

Government figures are encouraging. Body-mass indices down 11 percent; mirror usage up 18; bridge-stress weight down 6; national smugness hovering at 7.2 on the Fahrvergnügen Scale. Economists credit Ozempic Rain for lowering fuel costs (“lighter commuters”) and reducing flight delays (“smaller carry-ons, faster boarding”).

Critics, however, note “uneven distribution.” Rural areas report heavier concentrations, with residents claiming entire cousins have “washed away.” One man in Kansas insists his car vanished “right out of the driveway,” though federal officials deny such a possibility, citing “abundant impound warrants.” FEMA now urges citizens to remain indoors during “high-confidence deluge events,” unless “unsatisfied with current figure.”

Congress responded with its usual meteorological dysfunction. Democrats praised the rain as “a bold, inclusive step toward atmospheric equality.” Republicans condemned it as “chemical socialism.” Hearings featured Representative Burdette of Texas holding a dripping cruller and shouting, “This was breakfast before Biden!” Two competing bills emerged—the Slim Act (to expand the drizzle) and the Freedom to Drip Bill (to outlaw umbrellas). Both failed once lobbyists realized they shared donors.

Outside the Capitol, activists staged what organizers called the world’s first zero-emission protest march—a stationary event featuring recycled signage and a collective sense of moral superiority. Their figurehead, twenty-year-old influencer Meta Thinburg, appeared via carbon-neutral hologram projected from a yacht powered by pure conviction.

“This rain may be slimming,” Thinburg intoned in her staccato cadence, her image flickering in the drizzle, “but the real weight we must shed is our addiction to convenience.” She paused for applause that never arrived. “If the sky can medicate us,” she added, “surely it can also learn to cry responsibly.”

Supporters cheered softly into compostable megaphones. Reporters noted that Thinburg’s next stop would be the Global Serenity Summit in Saudi Arabia, which she plans to reach by symbolic canoe towed behind a private jet “for efficiency of message.”

The President has, as always, remained weather-neutral. On Monday he applauded Ozempic Rain as “a triumph of American innovation.” Tuesday he denied knowing what it was. Wednesday he clarified that he’d confused it with acid rain and that he was “pro-water, generally.” Approval ratings fell 5.3 percent—roughly the national average in body fat.

Enter Randolph F. Kennington Jr., podcast host of Pure Air, Pure Thoughts. “I’m not anti-rain,” Kennington insisted at a rally in Denver, “I’m anti-pigment.” He supports the slimming mist—calls it “patriotic detoxification”—but objects to its cheerful pink hue. “Those are nanopigments, folks. They seep into your pineal gland and next thing you know your toddler’s pronouncing quinoa correctly.”

Across university towns, academics have begun wearing reflective “thinking caps”—umbrellas retrofitted for the scalp—claiming the mist is “rearranging neural density.” Observers note that the smarter the wearer, the larger the hat. Officials insist there’s “no evidence of cranial shrinkage,” though they continue monitoring Ivy League head sizes.

Kennington’s movement, #NaturalCloudsNow, has gained traction among wellness libertarians and people who already owned camping gear. They demand color-free drizzle, “unscented skies,” and hearings on “rainbow weather bias.” In response, the Department of Atmospheric Wellness pledged to explore “a neutral-tone formulation,” though insiders admit the pink branding “tests well with suburban moms.”

Corporate America adapted immediately. Lululemon launched Rain Absorb Pro leisurewear—fabric engineered to “retain up to 40 percent more efficacy.” Starbucks debuted the Cloud Nine Latte, fortified with trace semaglutide—their first new creation to outpace the Pumpkin Spice Latte since its inception. Delta introduced an “Ozempic Zone” fee for passengers under 130 pounds, citing “balance issues.”

Environmentalists warn that vanity runoff is altering ecosystems. Salmon in the Pacific Northwest have begun skipping spawning season “to focus on themselves.” Birds are flying longer distances without snacks, though several species have vanished entirely—too slender to register on radar.

Still, Americans appear delighted. Ninety-one percent describe the skies as “aspirational.” Eighty-two percent say they “feel lighter emotionally or physically, whichever polls better.” Only three percent express concern about “existential transparency.”

As drizzle season deepens, scientists predict the country will lose another 7 percent of collective mass by year’s end. Analysts warn that if rates continue, the United States may achieve full translucence by 2031—an unprecedented geopolitical condition known as Gossamer Superpower Status.

The administration remains upbeat. “There’s never been a better time to be barely here,” said Secretary Van Moose at a closing press conference, waving through his own outline as it faded into the mist.

Sidebar Update—Forecast: Mostly Serotonin

The Department of Atmospheric Wellness has announced Project AtmosFit’s second phase, AtmosFluoxetine, designed to “stabilize national temperament through light seasonal precipitation.” The spray promises to offset the irritability observed in citizens who’ve become “too light to feel grounded.”

“Phase Two will bring emotional equilibrium to the skies,” said Secretary Van Moose, now little more than a glimmering outline behind the podium. “We’ve lifted the weight—now we lift the mood.” The new formula will include trace antidepressants, electrolytes, and a “mild sense of civic purpose.”

Congress split along predictable lines. Democrats hailed it as “a compassionate drizzle for a divided nation.” Republicans called it “the nanny state in cumulonimbus form.” The President welcomed “bipartisan weather,” then denied saying so.

Trials begin next month in Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.—cities long familiar with gray skies and moral fatigue.

The extended forecast calls for light satisfaction through Friday, tapering to a faint sense of connection by Sunday.

(Illustration by a government contractor who has since evaporated.)

Subscribe now