Caleb Madison | The Atlantic

The Dangers of ‘Mother’ Worship

2024-07-30T11:39:00-04:00

The word mother is strikingly similar in languages all across the world: From Swedish (mamma) to Swahili (mama), Czech (matka) to Chinese (mama), most use some combination of the same two sounds, m and ah, to refer to the female parent. This consistency across space and time makes physiological sense, the pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson explained. One of the easiest sounds for a baby to make is ah. Simple consonant sounds such as m, p, and d soon follow, called bilabials because they require no mouth acrobatics besides pursing the lips. Repeated for emphasis, they create two of our most-likely first words: mama and papa.

But Jakobson found a difference between the two parental terms during early language development. He identified a “transitional period when papa points to the parent present, while mama signals a request for the fulfillment of some need.” Because the m sound evolves from the instinctual nasal hum that babies make while feeding, mama comes to mean something deeper than a literal parent figure. These syllables, which may even be pre-human, express our most basic needs for nourishment, comfort, and survival. From it evolves more and mine and mammal. And of course, perhaps the mother of all words––mother.

The symbolic usage of mother is not new, as anyone who’s been a member of the Catholic Church or a sorority can tell you. But in recent years, the word has blossomed into a term of pop-cultural reverence. “What’s that thing you guys have been saying online?” Taylor Swift asked during some stage banter at a Mother’s Day concert last year. “You’re always just like, ‘Mother is mothering.’” Somewhere between a meme and a mantra, the expression became a half-joking phrase of worship, usually accompanying a depiction of a female celebrity at her most commanding.

This particular pop-culture honorific filtered into American vernacular through the Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom scene, where, according to The New York Times, a “mother” would be designated the figurehead of a group of people in the community. Even before that, the term was used similarly in queer communities as far back as the 1700s: In England, when sodomy was a crime punishable by death, a woman named Margaret Clap ran a coffee house in London that became known for facilitating and protecting gay encounters. Her patrons began calling her Mother.

The metaphorical maternal stretches back even further, into antiquity. To boost morale after a disastrous war, the ancient Roman republic imported the Phrygian goddess Cybele and declared her their protector. Roman citizens took to her with cultic fervor, dubbing her Magna Mater—literally great mother. She was beautiful but childless, because she was the mother of the republic itself. Although versions vary, the gist of her story was: She fell in love with a beautiful young man named Attis; he spurned her, so she drove him mad. Every year, the citizens of Rome held a week-long spring festival to honor their wartime savior, reenacting her story through music, theater, and ritual dance.

More than two millennia later, popular culture crowns a new symbolic mother to comfort our demoralized republic with a festival called the Eras Tour. Revelers gather from far and wide to dance and sing along to tales of love and loss, jealousy and revenge. Again we repeat a variation on that primal childhood syllable—then Magna Mater; now “Mother is mothering”—entreating the feminine divine for sanctuary as things start to get dicey.

But these celebrity mothers aren’t mythical goddesses like Cybele. Nor are they Mother Clap or the mothers of the ballroom scene, risking their neck and providing tangible resources to persecuted people. “Mothers” such as Taylor Swift are wealthy entertainers, elevated to symbolic status by millions of strangers who pledge them their fealty. This sense of the word seems closely connected to Jakobson’s mama of early childhood––the primal expression of a deep unmet need.

But such a need can’t be satisfied by the ecstasy of fandom. The true work of motherhood is carried out every day with no great fanfare. No matter how prolific their output, entertainers and celebrities can’t give us spiritual nourishment in any real or consistent way. Only personal relationships can.

Recently, my grandmother passed away at 92. She was a remarkable and beloved woman, a mother of three, who founded a successful progressive middle school that she ran with a gentle fist and an iron heart until less than a year before her death. Her name was Elaine Schwartz. Most people called her Mrs. Schwartz. Her family called her Ma.

That same syllable of infancy—so comfortable and easy. We all know what it means without thinking about it, and it’s not so different from that first articulation: safety. Sustenance. Love. So be careful whom you call Mother. Save the worship for the ones who can really give you what you need.

Tips and Tricks From a Crossword Prodigy

2024-04-21T08:00:00-04:00

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.

If you’ve ever tussled with our daily mini crossword puzzles, you can most likely blame Paolo Pasco. The good news is that the constructor who stumped you is now the champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the ripe old age of 23. The ACPT is the largest speed-solving tournament in the world, this year welcoming more than 800 competitors. The three finalists solve puzzles on a big whiteboard in front of a crowd; wins come down to literal seconds.

When I first met Paolo, he was 13 and already creating stellar grids as elegant as they were playful. These days, I rely on him as The Atlantic’s main crossword contributor. To put into perspective what a phenomenal speed-solver Paolo is: He solved the latest Inferno (our special magazine puzzle that gets more difficult as you descend into its depths) in one minute and 27 seconds. The average solve time for that puzzle is 16 minutes, 28 seconds. I spoke with Paolo recently about his win, his speed-solving tactics, and, inevitably, the 2024 Marvel masterpiece Madame Web.

Weaving the Web

Caleb Madison: Is this the big winner I’m speaking to?

Paolo Pasco: Well, look who said I would never become the big winner.

Madison: To be honest, that was to motivate you. Because if I hadn’t said that so many times when you were younger, you might not have worked as hard in defiance of me.

Pasco: That is true.

Madison: Okay, I have some serious questions, lest anyone think we’re taking this lightly. When did you start solving crosswords, and how did you transition to speed-solving?

Pasco: I think I’ve been solving puzzles in general for most of my life. I have a pretty early memory of solving Sudoku on the kitchen floor in crayon on a sheet my mom had printed out at work. That turned into those—you know those Dell puzzle magazines they have at airports and grocery stores?

Madison: Yes.

Pasco: I’d do a lot of those, but I would skip the ones that required you to know trivia. Because I was a kid; I didn’t know things. When I was in eighth grade, my family was taking a big road trip up to Stanford for my brother’s graduation, so I downloaded the iPad app of the New York Times crossword, just for something to do. I solved through some of the packs, and I realized: Whoa, these are pretty cool. And you didn’t even need to be a trivia god to make some progress on them. It’s a lot more fun than just a quiz in a box.

Shortly after that, I started getting a lot of those “Will Shortz’s favorite crosswords” kind of books. A lot of puzzles by this one young upstart named Caleb Madison.

Madison: Heard of him.

Pasco: I think it was a combination of the app and those books that made me realize that these puzzles were made by people, and there’s a human sense of fun behind them. At about that same time, I started making crosswords.

The speed-solving began in 2015 or 2016. In the summer of 2016, I was registered by my very kind parents for the indie tournament Lollapuzzoola. And I competed and won the lower division. That was kind of my first sense of, Oh, I can actually solve these on paper, and fast. I remember someone at the tournament said to me, “I remember seeing G. Paolo Pasco on the leaderboards on the website, and based on your times, I would have thought you’re one of those guys who sees the puzzle on someone else’s computer and just copies it.” Everything since then has been to prove to him that I am not one of those guys.

Madison: How did you train? Are there any tactics that you found particularly helpful in getting your time down?

Paolo Pasco during the speed-solving competition (Donald Christensen, courtesy of American Crossword Puzzle Tournament)

Pasco: The standard advice people give, which I think is good, is to print out a lot of puzzles and solve them on paper. It’s a different thing if you’re competing in an online tournament versus on paper, because with online navigation, if your cursor is on 14-Down, you don’t have to do any work to see the clue. So training your eye to move back and forth from clues to grid without losing your place, remembering clues when you can, really helps.

Madison: So when you look at the clues, you’re not only looking at the clue that you’re solving at the moment; you’re trying to get an impression of all the clues around it so that you don’t have to look back.

Pasco: Yeah, I think especially for big puzzles, where you’re navigating your eyes around the grid, that’s a really big time save, because you do it so many times. When I glance down, I try to just remember the next three across clues.

Madison: Oh, that’s interesting.

Pasco: As for less common tricks, downs-only solving was very helpful for intuiting word patterns—thinking, for example, if I have TH, blank, blank, E, then the first one’s probably a vowel, and the second is probably a consonant. If you have a big section where nothing inevitably jumps out as a toehold, there’s value in putting something in to have something in and just seeing if that works. Then if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work—but just to have the idea of something to go off. I think I feel the most comfortable solving one entry, seeing what crosses it, and building out from that, kind of like a web. Have you seen Madame Web?

Madison: I was going to say, that sounds kind of like some of the webs that Madame Web was dealing with in the film.

Pasco: Yeah. So eventually, I would want that web to connect them all.

Madison: Describe that last moment where you’re up there and you finish the puzzle. Do you check your grid really, really quickly?

Pasco: Oh gosh, I think I made a policy while I was solving it that when I was done with a section, I’d just check every clue in that section to make sure it makes sense.

Madison: So you’re checking as you go along?

Pasco: Yeah. I think that was a conscious decision, because I knew that the two people I was up against, Will Nediger and David Plotkin, are both very fast. So if I was spending a lot of time checking at the end, then that might be time for someone else to sneak in. Last year was kind of that scenario for me. One letter left, hesitated on it for too long, and Dan Feyer snuck one past the goalie.

Madison: Last year, you came in second place?

Pasco: I came in second place by a margin of one and a half seconds.

Madison: Wow.

Pasco: And if I had just gone with my gut and put in the letter I was guessing, I would have won. But I hesitated, and Dan pulled out a well-deserved win.

Madison: Have people started to treat you differently now that you’re the champion?

Pasco: I mean, I hope they don’t. I feel like it’s a very “big name in a small room” kind of thing.

Madison: Have you said it at any New York restaurants? Maybe you could get a better reservation, or free appetizers.

Pasco: I do want to pull out “Do you know who I am?” at least once.

Madison: Do you have anything else you want to say to the good people at home about your big win?

Pasco: I feel very fortunate. I truly did not expect for it to happen. Oh, I also want to say thank you so much to my family for everything. For being so gracious when their kid had one of the weirdest hobbies you could have, and not only encouraging it but also enrolling them in a crossword tournament to spend the whole day doing this weird hobby. I hope it paid off.

Madison: I think it did. I mean, it’s pretty exciting to be the best in the world at something. Not many people get to do that.

Pasco: The current best in the world. Until David Plotkin or Tyler Hinman or Dan Feyer or Andy Kravis compete again next year.

Madison: You get a year of being the best. Most people don’t even get an hour.

Pasco: True.

Madison: A hearty congrats. It’s very exciting. And you should be very proud. You deserve it.

Pasco: Thank you.

Related:

Why AI Doesn’t Get Slang

2023-10-28T07:00:00-04:00

Slang is born in the margins. In its early form, the word itself, slang, referred to a narrow strip of land between larger properties. During England’s transition from the rigid castes of feudalism to the competitive free market of capitalism, across the 14th to 17th centuries, the privatization of open farmland displaced countless people without inherited connection to the landed elite. This shift pushed people into small corridors between the recently bounded properties.

Confined to the literal fringes of society, they needed to get creative to survive. Some became performers and hucksters, craftspeople and con artists, drifters and thieves. They lived in makeshift homes, often roaming in groups along their slim municipal strip. This was the slang: the land on the outskirts of early English ownership and, by association, its counterculture. The slang had its own rules, its own politics, its own dialect. Roving bands needed a way to speak surreptitiously in the presence of law enforcement, a rival group, or a mark. So over time they developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant.

Across languages and throughout time, the term slang has evolved to mean a subversive lexicon, purposefully unintelligible to whoever’s in charge, perpetually shape-shifting against the mainstream. Organically encrypted through shared experience, slang is difficult for anyone outside the given speaking community to reproduce.

That doesn’t mean people won’t try. Coveting its vitality and upset by their exclusion, modern-day lords and ladies catch wind of a phrase—perhaps by commanding a commoner to explain it to them—and start using it in the castle, ruining it for everyone. Tostitos posts “slay.” Shawn Mendes says “It’s giving …” The essential, defiant purpose of the vocabulary is undermined; at this point, the term stops being slang. But what happens when machines attempt such an appropriation? Large language models—also known as LLMs—like ChatGPT train on an expanding supply of practice text to be able to converse in real time, mimicking speech as closely as possible. Slang’s magnetic repulsion to mainstream appropriation, though, makes it a particular challenge for computers. And the failure of these algorithms to speak in vernacular illuminates the essential differences between human and nonhuman intelligence.

[Read: Learn a foreign language before it’s too late]

Through brute processing power, AI can now, for the most part, functionally speak English—and most other languages. But none of them is its native tongue. The natural language of the computer is a more basic alphabet with only two characters: 1 and 0. Yes and no. Billions of these little electronic decision points branch into a fractal tree of countless possibilities, forming a method of communication in its simplest form: binary code.

Language models, in the most basic sense, represent our 26-letter alphabet in strings of numbers. Those digits might efficiently condense large amounts of information. But that efficiency comes at the price of subtlety, richness, and detail—the ability to reflect the complexities of human experience, and to resist the prescriptions of formal society. Artificial intelligence, in contrast, is disconnected from the kind of social context that makes slang legible. And the sterile nature of code is exactly what slang—a language that lives in the thin threshold between integers—was designed to elude.

Even ChatGPT agrees. “Can we talk in slang?” I prompted it recently.

“Sure thing! We can chat in slang if that’s what you’re into. Just let me know what kind of slang you want to use.”

I responded that I wanted to use “modern slang” and confessed my suspicion that LLMs might have difficulty dealing with vernacular.

Thus spake the algorithm: “Slang can be hella tricky for LLMs like me, but I'm here to vibe and learn with you … We can stay low-key or go all out—it’s your call! 💯😎” The words and their meanings were all technically correct—but something was definitely off. The usage didn’t ring true to any consistent place or time. The result was an awkward monstrosity of tone and rhythm that could make the corniest dad cringe.

No matter how much I iterated, ChatGPT couldn’t seem to reach slang fluency. But to be honest, neither could I. In my own messages to the LLM, I found myself fumbling to speak Gen Z, botching terms such as hits different and bet. Trying to keep up a conversation in relatively new slang at the ripe age of 30, I felt like just as much of a fraud as my synthetic interlocutor, clumsily appropriating a language I could only imitate, never access. Like verbal quicksilver, slang cannot be co-opted or calculated. I hope it continues to evade the machines—and evolve beyond my own grasp—as long as we’re both around.

A Slow Descent Into Devilish Difficulty

2023-07-03T11:04:00-04:00

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.

The ancient Greeks called it katabasis: a test of heroism by descent into the underworld. The deeper you go, the more difficult the journey becomes. But if you can withstand the heat as you approach eternal damnation, you return to Earth’s surface with the wisdom to transcend mortal fear. This mythic quest has long captured the cultural imagination, from Orpheus to Barbarian. It has the power to bestow superhuman glory on those who survive. And it’s also the concept behind my new crossword, appearing on the back page of each new print issue of The Atlantic.

The back page of a print magazine is consecrated space for a puzzle: one final flourish, like the cherry on a sundae or the outro of a power ballad. Even in our age of ephemerality, the essential experience of the crossword, to me, remains sitting around the breakfast table with loved ones and the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shouting answers, arguing, passing the puzzle around, pooling knowledge to forge ahead and collectively rise to the intellectual challenge.

To do justice to this tradition for The Atlantic’s elegant and historic print editions, I knew I needed to make something diabolically special. I wanted to give the classic print crossword a fresh narrative spin without changing the tried-and-true mechanics that have kept readers turning to the back page Sunday after Sunday for so many years. The Atlantic mini, which we publish every weekday and Sundays, gets larger and more difficult as the week progresses. This structure offers a gentle introduction to novice players, and it gives experienced solvers a yardstick they can measure themselves against week after week. It’s the cruciverbal journey that first hooked me: an ongoing test of acuity, contextualizing personal progress across a week, a month, a year. What if that same journey could be re-created over the course of one puzzle?

At first glance, Inferno might seem like your average, run-of-the-mill crossword puzzle. List of numbered clues? Check. Empty grid with corresponding numbers? Double check. You, the inveterate solver, using one to fill in the other? Duh. But look again: The grid you’ve come to know as perfectly square has been transmogrified into a tall, thin pillar, like a skyscraper. And once you start solving, you’ll see that the puzzle begins easy as pie, and gets tougher and tougher as you solve downward, until, I hope, you reach the bottom stumped and sweating. The puzzle is a slow descent into devilish difficulty, simple enough to slip into but nearly impossible to complete. That’s why it’s called an Inferno: Like Dante’s katabasis into hell, the deeper you go, the more severe the punishment.

Inferno taps into what I love about print puzzles. You solve as much as you can. Then you get stuck and stow the magazine somewhere safe while the frustrating blockade of clues burbles in your subconscious. A few days later, you pick the puzzle back up to find the knot of knowledge untied by some unseen cognitive force inside you. Your momentum returns, and you cruise along victoriously … until you hit the next impenetrable barricade. Lather, rinse, and repeat; before you know it, you’ve conquered the unconquerable, and another magazine with another unconquerable challenge arrives in the mail.

Can you plumb the very bottom of this puzzle’s infernal depths before the next issue hits the newsstands? Can you at least get a little closer each time? My advice, as with every crossword, is to be patient and build from what you know. A long “spine” answer will run down the center of the puzzle, traversing each tier of difficulty, which should help you gain a toehold in even the toughest tangles. Test your prowess starting in the July/August 2023 issue of The Atlantic. The puzzle will also be available to play online, and the answer key will be posted at www.theatlantic.com/inferno.

We’re All Capable of Going ‘Goblin Mode’

2022-12-10T07:00:00-05:00

The people have spoken about what the people have spoken: The 2022 Oxford Word of the Year, chosen for the first time ever by public vote, went to goblin mode by a 93 percent majority. Oxford defines goblin mode as “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” It’s a gloriously evocative phrase—and it tells a concise story about how many of us are doing these days.

The first record of goblin mode occurred in 2009, when someone tweeted: “m was in full hyperactive goblin mode last night. it was as if she ate a bag of sugar-coated candy, then washed it down with a few red bulls.” Not much is known about m or the specifics of her behavior on that fateful night, but the description is vivid: Her primal side had been unleashed. Although the post received a lukewarm 22 likes, going goblin mode described a condition that, more than a decade later, has become all too familiar.

People have gone other modes before: We started to go beast mode, for example, in 2007, with savage mode and sicko mode following later. The metaphor originates in video games, where navigating a hidden challenge might activate another “mode”: a special style of gameplay where you might move 10 times faster or appear as a zombie. To “go X mode” is to summon the spirit of X for a stretch—going Caleb mode, for example, might mean overanalyzing internet slang.

Goblin mode returned with a vengeance in February 2022, in a tweet expressing mock disbelief at a Photoshopped headline: “Julia Fox opened up about her ‘difficult’ relationship with Kanye West,” it read. “‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode.’” Fox, the actor/model who had just ended a high-profile fling with the artist now known as Ye, never actually used the phrase—but something about it resonated with the discourse of the moment. Fox’s eccentric style might seem goblinesque compared with the pristine InstaBeauty of the Kardashian empire from which Ye had been so recently banished. Goblin mode represented a full aesthetic rebound from immaculate self-presentation—perfect for a time when people were returning chaotically to public life from the madding bowels of pandemic isolation. “The term then rose in popularity over the months following,” Oxford University Press said, “as Covid lockdown restrictions eased in many countries and people ventured out of their homes more regularly.”

[Read: The year without germs changed kids]

Western mythology is littered with all sorts of goblins: shape-shifting animals; demonic, fairylike creatures; rude and hairy humanoids. What typically separates them from other supernatural forces is not their physical appearance but their passion for shelter. Goblins tend to lurk in cozy spaces. Most early accounts place goblins in caves; eventually, during the ascent of urban European life in the 15th and 16th centuries, stories described them as dwelling in houses.

Goblins represent the impish un-self-consciousness of our private lives. They’re ugly little monsters who love making mischief around the home. They have more fun than trolls because, instead of waiting under a bridge to hurt someone, they’re just chilling at the crib, looking nasty and getting up to no good. Maybe they haven’t showered in a few days, but they’re not evil. They just want to stay in and play. Sound like anyone you know?

In the early days of the pandemic, many of us unlocked a new mode in the video game of life: demonically uninhibited domesticity. Through countless quarantines, we all became “m”: pent-up balls of energy bouncing off the same four walls, maniacally scrounging up fun in confinement. Unable to party elsewhere, we transformed our home by necessity into a stage for chaos and revelry. I myself would not be writing complete sentences today had my housemates and I not developed a weekly ritual of getting blisteringly wine-drunk and screaming obscenities at the movie Cats.

[Read: Just embrace the madness of Cats]

The ability to go goblin mode was a necessary evolution, forged in trauma. But it now remains with us as a superpower. As we emerge from our caves after that long hibernation, our goblin-selves lurk somewhere deep inside us, beckoning us back home to vibe out. I don’t see going goblin mode as “self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy” at all. It’s refreshingly authentic and deeply cathartic. In goblin mode, we can become our true wild selves, unkempt and offstage, triumphantly invisible to the public eye.

I might define goblin mode as “unbridled domestic liberation” or “a complete shedding of the mask of public life” or, my personal favorite, “staying home and getting weird.” Whatever you call it, I’m grateful for my newfound ability to go goblin mode. Now get out of my house so I can act unhinged.

Meta Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

2022-06-06T13:07:00-04:00

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.

Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than meta. I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. On a basic level, meta meant recursive or self-referential—like a warning sign warning you about warning signs or a coffee-table book about coffee tables. But in the 2010s, it also came to signify coolness. To be meta was to flex your self-awareness for social currency, to demonstrate proficiency in the language of smirky dissociative irony that was the trendy cultural refuge from the massive information shitstorm (think: “Thrift Shop” and Deadpool). The word became ever more ingrained in the national consciousness until, in what felt like a culmination of its journey, the primary social-media company responsible for stirring up said shitstorm announced that it was rebranding itself with the word.

To the ancient Greeks, μετα- simply meant “after.” So when some first-century B.C. editor (maybe Andronicus of Rhodes) was compiling the teachings of a philosopher named Aristotle, and he got to the period right after The Physics, he didn’t put too much thought into calling it Metaphysics. He was basically calling it Physics: The Sequel. But Aristotle’s work in that period was arguably his most intense. Whereas The Physics summoned concepts like matter, nature, substance, and motion to describe the inner workings of the visible world, Metaphysics attempted to go beyond the visible—zooming out as much as possible to address questions like “What does it mean to exist?” and “How can we prove anything?” and “What in the Underworld is going on with all of us right now?” Because of the deep and abstract subject matter, many translators erroneously interpreted the prefix meta- as meaning “beyond” or “transcending.”

A whole new branch of philosophy was born, and this misinterpretation of the prefix meta- proliferated in the critical-theory jargon of the 20th century. As academia ran out of rationally explainable things to study, it began to study itself. Fields of study emerged, like metalinguistics, metahistory, and metanarrative, that attempted to go “beyond” the traditional areas of study to discover fundamental rules underlying all history, all language, all narrative. The rise of the Information Age stoked the promise that, through quantitative data and cold computational analysis, certain fundamental truths could emerge that might allow us to transcend our subjectively limited human perspective.

[Read:] H ow ‘I’m Dead’ became a good thing

In his emotionally barren 1979 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction behemoth about self-referentiality, Gödel, Escher, Bach, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter uses 25 different words with the meta- prefix, many of them coinages. This was noted in a 1988 article by Noam Cohen, who argued that the prefix reflects a concerning instinct toward semantic self-annihilation, whether used in academia, comedy, or politics. Cohen worried that, faced with the limitations of our own perception, instead of creating anything new, we were beginning to eat our own tails.

The concept of a “metaverse” like the one currently being peddled by Facebook was first hypothesized in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 breakthrough science-fiction novel, Snow Crash. In Stephenson’s future America, an impotent federal government has ceded societal control to corporations and entrepreneurs. Massive hyperinflation due to overprinting physical currency means that even quadrillion-dollar bills (called gippers) are practically worthless, and most transactions are made online using electronic currency. A goggle-based interactive virtual reality resembling a massive first-person multiplayer online game called “the Metaverse” is the successor to the internet we currently know and love. Sound familiar? Stephenson claims to have had no communication with “Zuck,” but either Neal is a true prophet or Mark is a true fan. Regardless, 20 years later, this garbled ancient-Greek prefix stands next to a symbol of infinite recursion (a favorite image of meta maven Hofstadter) as Facebook hard-pivots into an uncertain future.

Whatever you make of Zuckerberg’s vision for Meta, the word still resonates with its ancient Aristotelian questions and contradictions. Like Aristotle, Zuck forces us to ask ourselves: Is there really something beyond the physical? Can we know it? Or is it a limitation somehow baked into the human experience? We seem to still be stuck on the ancient misunderstanding that gave us meta—a confusion of the spiritual “beyond” with the chronological “after,” mistaking abstraction for transcendence as we come up against the limits of our perceptual abilities. Put more simply: Is Meta “the future” or is it just “the sequel”?

To me, the whole endeavor still stinks of the superficial pubescent ooze that Facebook crawled from, the image-conscious irony of hipsterdom that first taught me how to be meta. Hence my Monday clue: “Smugly self-referential.”

How ‘I’m Dead’ Became a Good Thing

2022-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.

On a literal level, it should be impossible to make sense of someone saying “I’m dead” unless you’re attending a successful séance. Yet here we are in 2022, not only proclaiming our own expiration but reveling in it. Far from speech beyond the grave, “I’m dead” has come to communicate one of the highest pleasures of life: the giddy throes of uncontrollable laughter. When someone says “I’m dead” or even just “dead” in 2022, they’re telling you that they couldn’t be more tickled by what just happened. So how did being dead become a good thing?

Death and laughter have been strange bedfellows since ancient Greece, where, legend has it, the fifth-century-B.C. painter Zeuxis died from laughing at the portrait he was painting of a supposedly ugly old woman—a hilarious anecdote later immortalized in an equally hilarious painting by the Dutch master Arent De Gelder. And Zeuxis’s isn’t the only classically depicted death by laughter. The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, by several accounts, kicked the bucket because he couldn’t stop laughing after witnessing a donkey eating his figs. Bizarrely, King Martin I of Aragon is said to have died laughing at a joke also concerning an animal eating figs. Legends of giggly demises litter history; as recently as 1989, a Danish audiologist is said to have passed away guffawing during a screening of A Fish Called Wanda. Apparently, the best medicine is also sometimes the sweetest poison. Although I admit it would be a great way to go, I myself will be avoiding all zoo-adjacent fig farms in the near future out of an abundance of caution.

[Read:] Trolling’s surprising origins in fishing

The connection between death and laughter was consummated in English by—who else?—Shakespeare. In his comedy The Taming of the Shrew, after the exit of the vivacious and eccentric couple Petruchio and Katharine, Petruchio’s servant, Grumio, says, “Went they not quickly, I should die with laughing.” From then on, the phrase to die laughing was part of the language as a hyperbolic idiom—we all know it’s an exaggeration, but something within the fiction rings true to our relationship with laughter and death. The fatal violence of hilarity proliferated in English over the following centuries. From the 1930s slang to bust a gut to the idea of being “in stitches” to the ironic Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield–ism “That killed me,” there’s something about the experience of uncontrollable laughing that seems to put us into close contact with our inevitable nonexistence.

And it makes sense. Intense laughter expresses itself in violent convulsions and temporary loss of bodily control. Who among us hasn’t been part of a tickle-fest that verged on sadomasochistic brutality? Times when I laugh so hard that I cry can feel like an out-of-body experience—a sublime mania that temporarily relieves me of the burden of consciousness. Perhaps we say “I’m dead” because we’ve intuited that deep and frenzied laughter gives us a taste of the eternal unknown toward which we’re all always hurdling. This sense of comatose comicality yielded our Friday-level clue “That's so funny I can't even function."

Trolling’s Surprising Origins in Fishing

2022-05-09T07:00:00-04:00

Caleb Madison | The Atlantic

The Dangers of ‘Mother’ Worship

Tips and Tricks From a Crossword Prodigy

Why AI Doesn’t Get Slang

A Slow Descent Into Devilish Difficulty

We’re All Capable of Going ‘Goblin Mode’

Meta Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

How ‘I’m Dead’ Became a Good Thing

Trolling’s Surprising Origins in Fishing

Why People Can’t Stop Adding lol to Texts

Why We’re Calling Everything a ‘Hellscape’

Are You Using Gaslight Correctly?

What Makes Someone ‘A Lot’?

The True Meaning of Happiness

The Two Most Dismissive Words on the Internet

The Crucial Difference Between Cheesy and Corny

The Rap Catchphrase With Metaphysical Roots

Why We’re All in a Shmood

What Love Meant in 4500 B.C.

How Canceled Reached Peak Semantic Power

Why Everything Online Is Suddenly Cringe

How a Crossword Editor Plays Wordle

Why We’re All Shooketh

Where Marx Meets Migos

Doing Grown-Up Tasks, in Millennial Slang

Normcore: Just Your Average, Everyday Paradox