James Parker | The Atlantic

The Eighth Deadly Sin

2026-04-14T08:00:00-04:00

Sometimes, staring brainlessly into my laptop in the trough of a weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this ?

Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?

I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones’s Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit—the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God’s grace.

But Jones, a medieval historian, shows us that the High and Later Middle Ages (1100 to 1500, roughly) were every bit as goofy as we are about human nature and behavior, and equally hooked on buzzwords, listicles (Catherine of Siena’s five different types of tears, Thomas Aquinas’s five varieties of gluttony), and junk science. To explain the inexplicable (that is, themselves), the medievals used the 12 signs of the zodiac, the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm—and the seven deadly sins. Jones takes the seven one by one, a chapter for each, arguing that this gnarly old taxonomy represents not only a timeless decoction of human wisdom but something of a moral map for our present wanderings. I think I agree with him, but let’s see.

It turns out that there were eight, at least in the beginning. Evagrius Ponticus was one of the world-abandoning superstar Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt. Influencer-like, he stood in freezing wells and subsisted on bread and oil, and after much torment and cogitation, he drew up a list of what he called “generic thoughts,” or routine invaders of the spirit: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. Subsequent spiritual engineers made their tweaks to Evagrius’s system, but the decisive overhaul was performed 200 years later, by Pope Gregory the Great. He rolled sadness into sloth, vainglory into pride, added envy, and voilà: the seven deadly sins.

[From the November 2024 issue: Hillary Kelly on Oliver Burkeman’s unlikely approach to self-help]

Now the sins were characters. They could be personified, and artists went to town. An illustration for Guillaume de Deguileville’s 14th-century poem “The Pilgrimage of Human Life” depicts avarice as a woman whose arms have been cut off (she retains the stumps) and replaced with allegorical limbs—feathered claws for rapaciousness, hands holding begging bowls and scales for moneylending, and so on. And is her tongue hanging out? Is she drooling with money-lust? It looks like it. Giotto painted envy as a woman—yes, the medievals, like us, were misogynists—a slanderous monster with a snake squirming out of her mouth, turning back, and reentering her head at the eyes. Also, she has huge, swiveling, batlike ears. And her feet are on fire.

Ghastly as they are, these allegorical images don’t really touch us moderns, or not deeply. Much more disturbing and relatable, in Giotto’s case, are the sour-faced onlookers and eavesdroppers who lurk at the edges of his frescoes in the Arena Chapel, in Padua: the servant watching in disaffection as an angel tells Anne that she is going to give birth to the Virgin Mary; the scowling, black-veiled woman overhearing Anne tell her husband, Joachim, that she has conceived. To be one of these characters, Jones writes, is to be a “bitter witness.” We know these people. We are these people. Social media: a cloud of bitter witnesses! This is envy—invidia—as it lives inside us, shriveling our spirits and kindling our meannesses.

Because this is 2026 and everything’s got to be personal, Self-Help From the Middle Ages prefaces each chapter, each sin, with a reminiscence from the author’s time teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia. Hemmed in by the cold, under laboratory conditions as it were, Jones self-examines in the lurid light of the seven deadlies. His transgressions are meek—a bit of ogling at the hot springs (lust), a snippy comment in a faculty meeting (anger). He doesn’t trash the common room in an alcoholic blaze or crucify a colleague’s cat. But this is precisely the point: The sins are quotidian, undramatic, regular human business. You can do all seven without leaving your house. The trick is to recognize the sins, to “name” them (in a modern but very appropriate locution). They offer a kind of diagnostic prism, refracting the black, primordial beam of sin into lesser rays of the identifiably and manageably human. And once you know what you’re dealing with, you can summon its opposite. If pride is getting the better of you, engage humility; if gluttony, moderation; if envy, compassion; and so on.

Otherwise they’ll hold us, they’ll dominate us, these sins. While I was reading the chapter on anger, I experienced a surge in understanding as to the nature of sin itself. Sin is subtle, seductive, addictive, of course: The medical encyclopedia The Property of Things (circa 1240) describes anger very perceptively as a “wave of bliss.” (Oh, the white-hot elation of righteousness, carrying me away!) But it’s also rigid and carceral, a system of control. Jones gives us the 13th-century Catalonian doctor Arnaud de Vilanova, who, after limited success treating anger with the miracle drug theriac (made from viper’s flesh sweetened with honey, a distillation of lilies, and about 40 other ingredients), fell to pondering the character of the malady itself. As Jones writes, “Fury pulls the mind away from reason (ratio), Arnaud reflected, and losing yourself in anger is like letting a puppeteer take control of your brain as well as your limbs.”

A puppeteer controlling your brain? Heavy-metal fans know where this is going—straight to the primary text of compulsion and merciless soul-negation, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”: “Master of puppets, I’m pulling your strings / Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams / Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing / Just call my name ’cause I’ll hear you scream.” This is where the personification of the seven deadlies comes in handy: You, you naughty person, you libertine, rage beast, sybarite, whatever, might think that you’re committing a sin. But it’s the sin, the master of puppets, that is committing you. Unless you can turn, look it in the face, and summon the right ally.

As for the eighth sin, the new one—having Wi-Fi—is there anything to be done about that? Naturally, excessive online-ness has its counter-impulses: the digital detoxes and the dopamine fasts, all in the fine old spirit of medieval asceticism. You can go online right now and learn about how to be offline. But to free ourselves from this one, to even have the beginnings of a program to free ourselves, I think we’re going to have to do the truly and terrifyingly medieval thing. We’re going to have to get on our knees and pray.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Eighth Deadly Sin.”

The Poet Laureate of Madness

2026-02-10T10:00:00-05:00

The appointment of a new medicine man is a dicey moment in the life of a tribe. Get it wrong, pick the wrong guy, and your deepest spiritual diseases will go not only untreated but undetected. Get it right, and there’s at least a chance of an accurate diagnosis. The Victorians, rather surprisingly, got it right. In fact, for all their pomposity and stolidity and leadenness of soul, and for all their windbag religiosity, they nailed it. They chose as their national poet a vagrant and depressed semi-atheist from a family of lunatics. They chose Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson was already famous, largely on the strength of his blockbuster elegy, In Memoriam, when Queen Victoria made him her poet laureate in 1850. But it is with the haunted and chaotic pre-fame poet—the shaggy, craggy, germinal genius wandering in his cloud of tobacco smoke and melancholy, poring over his books about physics and chemistry—that Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep is chiefly concerned. Subtitled Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, it tracks this character’s metabolic absorption of the most disturbing, displacing ideas that contemporary science had to offer; their effect on his personality; and their manifestation in his poetry.

Holmes, the master scholar-biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, is ideally qualified for such a gig. In prose so lucid that you barely notice when it has slipped into a stream of profound interiority, into the hidden life-current of his subject, Holmes gives us what feels like the whole man. His Tennyson is cosmically miserable, while also being—when among friends—very good company: that is, highly appealing to us moderns. He devours works of popular science, the information they contain as intoxicating to him as the poetry of his idols Keats and Shelley. Nervously puffing away on “infinite tobacco” (as his friend Thomas Carlyle described it), he rides the fault line between epochs. Astronomy is deepening space, geology is deepening time, and as the news comes in—one revelation after another—he can feel the answering tremor in human consciousness, and the fearful new understanding it foretells. An empty heaven. A disenchanted world. “I stretch lame hands of faith,” he writes in In Memoriam, “and grope, / And gather dust and chaff.” The new science of psychology, too, absorbs him. Not at all a degraded Romantic (for which he is sometimes mistaken), this Tennyson, in his gleamy-gloomy way, is a looming giant of modernity. Behind him is Keats and “The Eve of St. Agnes”; before him is The Waste Land.

Tennyson was prolific, prodigious. He rumbled with poetry; he recited it endlessly; it poured off him on long walks. Language teemed inside him, especially when he was a young man, producing verse so musical, it sometimes seems on the verge of becoming pure fluid sound, a kind of glittering higher gibberish:

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,
And flam’d upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.

The darker strands of the young Tennyson’s existence—madness, spurned love, ruinous genes, insolvency—would become the themes of a later poem that Holmes regards as pivotal. It appeared in Tennyson’s first book as poet laureate, Maud, and Other Poems, published in 1855. The reviews were not good. In fact, they were violently hostile. Despite containing such patriotic bangers as “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” both previously published (and the latter instantly memorized by half the British empire), the new collection was discredited, in the eyes of its critics, by its long centerpiece, “Maud: A Monodrama,” a poem narrated by a madman.

“Ill considered, crude, tawdry and objectionable” was one reviewer’s judgment of Maud. To the reviewer in the Press, it might have been the output of “a love-sick youth in the measles.” One small constituency, however, rated Maud quite highly: Victorian shrink-types. Clinical accuracy is not something with which poets have traditionally tended to preoccupy themselves, but Tennyson’s account of mental extremity impressed the experts. Maud got a glowing write-up in the October 1855 edition of The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, and a doctor named Robert Mann published an entire pro-Maud pamphlet, Tennyson’s Maud Vindicated: An Explanatory Essay. “Where can this unprofessional psychologist have acquired his accurate insight into the phenomena of insanity?” he asked. (“I seem to have the doctors on my side if no one else,” the laureate growled in a grateful letter to Mann.)

“Maud” was personal. Tennyson called it “my little Hamlet” and then—after the critical kicking it sustained—“poor little Maud,” and it is indeed a strange, stormy, fragmented, wildly lyrical, futuristically subjective freak-out of a poem, part melodrama, part psychotic break. The narrator’s father, destroyed by the failure of “a vast speculation,” commits suicide; the narrator becomes obsessed with Maud, the daughter of the man who bankrupted his father, now living in grandeur on a neighboring estate and flashing her profile at him—“Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, / Dead perfection, no more”—as she rides past in her carriage. Obsessed, obsessed, truly obsessed: obsession like a dead flame licking the walls of life, or a wind singing through the deepest flaw in the universe. Maud and the narrator meet and fall in love—or do they? At one point, he seems to be lying outside her house in the dark—in a trance? stalking her?—hallucinating the sound of her footsteps in the movement of the leaves. Above him are the stars, bleep-bleeping away from the depths of untenanted space. He talks to them, lamenting

the boundless plan
That makes you tyrants in your iron skies,
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.

The cold fires, the nothingness—as Holmes shows us, all of this Tennyson had seen through the high-powered telescope in his garden, and read about in the books that were filling his library. To combine this kind of depth perception with the galactic ache of an unreal love, of an undead infatuation, that was new. That was scary. No wonder reviewers recoiled.

The vision was not just telescopic, but microscopic. In the second—and maddest—section of the poem, the narrator, having fled in panic to France, roams the Breton shoreline. He fixates upon a seashell:

The tiny cell is forlorn,
Void of the little living will
That made it stir on the shore.
Did he stand at the diamond door
Of his house in a rainbow frill?

Buffeted by hallucinations as he is, he zooms in on the long-gone shell-dweller like one of the underwater cameras in David Attenborough’s Blue Planet.

Part of Tennyson lived, was encamped, at the outer reaches of the psyche. Alcoholism, seizures, mood swings, incontinent rage—all ran in his family’s “black blood.” His father was regularly deranged; his brother Edward was a helpless depressive; and his brother Septimus introduced himself to Dante Gabriel Rossetti with the words “I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.” Septimus was under the care of Matthew Allen, a psychiatric pioneer who called his establishment at High Beech, Essex, not an asylum but “a place of seclusion for exhausted minds.” Tennyson befriended Allen and began to spend a lot of time at High Beech: Holmes connects the poet’s observation of the patients there directly to “Maud,” noting, “The gardens at High Beech, the paths and the shrubberies, the wandering figures of the insane, muttering to themselves, recur like a remembered tune fifteen years later.”

A remembered tune, but also a staticky signal from the incoming 20th century, the noise of a voice splintered into different voices, fading in and out of clarity. Modern critics adore “Maud” for precisely the qualities that repelled its original audience—for its weirdness and its brokenness, and its pre-Freudian blast of erotic attachment. Tennyson would never be this exposed again: fame, the laureateship, and a steady marriage all solidified him. But for a long moment, he was beautifully out of sync with his public and ahead of his time, as any healer must be—because where can healing come from if not the future?

This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Madness of Lord Tennyson.”

The Marathon Moby-Dick Reading Is a Radical Act

2026-01-27T11:51:33-05:00

Nearly as old as Ahab (one more birthday and I’ll be 58: his age), I drive south from Boston on a recent Saturday morning. Through a raging drabness of Massachusetts wintertime, I drive and drive: leaky light without a source; seething, decaying snow.

I’m on a mission here. A collision with immensity awaits: the 2026 Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Programming, scholarship, and—the event’s steadily droning core—a 25-hour cover-to-cover reading of the great book itself. Hundreds of volunteer readers, in five-minute increments, from noon on Saturday to 1 p.m. on Sunday. A test of my fortitude as a listener, of my ability to keep my behind in a seat.

But I am faint. Succor is required. I pull over at the Bridgewater Service Plaza because sometimes what you need is to quietly conform yourself to the will of God, and sometimes what you need is a cup of stinking black coffee and a Dunkin’ glazed doughnut.

Into snowy New Bedford, into the Whaling Museum, into the room where they keep the Lagoda, the museum’s half-scale model of a whaling bark. A room with a ship in it, in other words. Two stories high (to accommodate the ship’s masts) and stuffed, draped, festooned with humanity: sitters, knitters, nesters, kneelers, sprawlers, leaners, drifters like me, stashed in every alcove and stretched along every railing and baseboard. At noon on the nose, the Massachusetts poet laureate, Regie Gibson, steps up to the lectern: “Call me … Ishmael.” The whoop, the sound of exulting Moby-Dick nuts, goes raggedly around the galleries and hallways of the museum. The tale begins, of course, in New Bedford, where Ishmael arrives “on a Saturday night in December” in search of a whaling voyage. We have embarked.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published in 1851. Let’s consider it. Is there another book at once so good and so bad, so thrilling and so boring, so authentic to the currents of the soul and so hideously contrived, so stunningly patrolled by dreamlike visions and so crushed by its own intellectual baggage?

There’s no denying the power, the pull, of its mighty twin symbols: burning-eyed indeflectible Ahab, captain of the Pequod, emblem of every human obsession, of the violence of the mind; and his quarry, the white whale, the lump of metaphysical mystique known as Moby Dick. Psychic facts, both of them. But what a welter of chaos they must rise through to reach us—what sub–Thomas Carlyle thunderings, what sub–Sir Thomas Browne conceits and curlicues, what sub-Shakespearean rants. Shakespeare especially: a terrible influence on Melville! All the interior monologues in Moby-Dick, and almost anything that comes out of the mouth of Ahab—all those reams of hoarse Elizabethan bluster—you can blame on Melville’s 1849 devouring of a new seven-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays, in large print (he had weak eyes). Enthusiastic American, as he began writing Moby-Dick, he was wildly cranked on the Bard. But wait, hist, soft, listen—now we’re on Chapter 7, and a reader speaks out a perfect line of Shakespearean blank verse: “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs.” Beautiful. I kiss my hand to you, Herman.

Melville would have enjoyed the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Like him, it is given to the grand gesture: whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling, floating above us like hierarchs at a superior level of being; the aforementioned room with a ship in it; and, right by the table where I buy my endless sustaining blueberry muffins and meat pies and cups of tea, a 600-pound life-size model in fiberglass of a blue whale’s heart, its ventricles large enough for a man to crawl into.

The readers: They are everyone. They have every quality. They are stammering, assured, dubious, virtuosic, inaudible, room-shaking, thick-voiced, thin-voiced, professional, innocent, mesmerizing, devoid of presence. It’s an American pageant, purely democratic, intensely moving. Reader by reader, the thread of meaning, the pulse, comes and goes. Some of them seem to seize us by the very roots of our comprehension; others might as well be reading from the Terms and Conditions of Use for Spotify. The prose of Moby-Dick is dense; it can be unwieldy—Melville’s mouthfuls are too large for our 21st-century mandibles. Some words that people have trouble with: idolator, remonstrances, vicissitudes, magnanimity, portentousness. Also (this one surprises me): leviathan.

With merciful swiftness, it is revealed that I cannot, simply cannot, listen to a succession of persons read from Moby-Dick for 25 hours. It’s an impossibility for me. I’m a modern man with all of the modern vices: inattention, solipsism, wooziness, dopamine addiction, twitching legs, low blood sugar, a persistent interest in going to the bathroom. So I phase in and out of the Marathon. I wander the museum; I wander the night streets of New Bedford, with their hostile glints of ice. At 7:02 p.m., I’m in the Pour Farm Tavern on Purchase Street, brooding over a double Jameson. Out of the jukebox, loaded with 1970s baggage but still moving, in 2026, with a slinking, predatory roll, comes Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold.” The maniac Nugent, essential American, once a hard-rock warlock, now a vaunting Trumpist. Listen to the song: “Road I cruise is a bitch nowww, BAY-BEH! / You know you can’t turn me ’round / And if a house gets in my way, BAY-BEH! / You know I’ll burn it do-own.” Wow. How fucking Ahab is that?

Coming and going as I am, nevertheless, in my blue-whale heart, I remain attached to the collective, to the shared journey, the shared imagining, all of us with our copies of the book, all of us enmeshed in the great and groaning text. At 4:15 a.m. in the museum’s main auditorium, there’s a long-haul-flight vibe, people looking pale and rumpled as we steer toward Chapter 87, one of the most limpidly head-expanding chapters of the book: “The Grand Armada.”

Somewhere around Java, the Pequod hunts its way into an entire shoal of sperm whales: Its boats are lowered, and whereas at the edge of the shoal, the harpooneers set about their bloody and ocean-churning business, Ishmael’s boat finds itself in the supernaturally serene center. Peaceable whales approach; “like household dogs they came snuffling round us.” And in the transparent depths, a vision is disclosed: nursing mother whales.

As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.

Incredible prose, somewhere between journalism and science fiction. But a few paragraphs later, Melville falls into his old weakness, his old foible—he starts symbolizing. The violence at the rim of the shoal, the stillness at the center … He can’t help himself. He must go Sir Thomas Browne on our asses: “Even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

Is it a weakness, though? Maybe not. Maybe this nonstop back-and-forth, this spiritual reverb, this throb-throb oscillation between the actual and the symbolic, the objective and the imagined, is the heartbeat of Moby-Dick. Are things ever only themselves, or do they always attach to, refer to, other realities? Must all phenomena have meanings upon meanings? Can a whale ever be just a whale? My mind loops out. It’s 5 a.m. What if existence itself (a line from my notes) is a pun on existence? That’s pretty bloody Melvillean, dude. The man sitting in front of me—rugged, with a fine Rockwell Kent profile—tips forward and begins to emit gentle, bleating snores.

With the dawn—streaky and watery over New Bedford—everything accelerates. Now we’re in the final stretch. Now we’re closing in. At 9:30, in the museum’s research library, a group of Melville scholars holds a packed and slightly giddy informal symposium. A young man, confiding to us that this is his first time reading the book, and apologizing for the basic-ness of his question, asks, “Is Melville using Ishmael to, like, satirize the whole white-male epic of obsession and violence?” Beat. Hanging symposial silence—until one of the scholars, as in the Philip Larkin poem, pronounces an enormous “Yes!” and the room erupts into applause.

The final readings are happening upstairs, in the Harbor View Gallery, with livestreams to all parts of the museum. I’m watching in the auditorium, the doors are open to the main hall, and there’s a slight lag in the streaming between the two spaces. So on every phrase you get an echo: “There she blows!” (There she blows …) Talk about Melvillean reverb. Another line of pure Shakespearean verse drifts up: “Great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang.” (Deep pang …)

And who’s this guy reading the last chapter to us, Reader 277? He’s got to be an actor, a TV guy of some sort: He has an actor’s expressive and sympathetic handsomeness, soap-operatic facial symmetry, no bad angles. His name is Steven Weber (of Wings and Chicago Med, I later discover), he takes a deep breath, and then, my God, he tears the roof off the Moby-Dick Marathon. What a performance. The last battle with the white whale, the destruction (spoiler!) of the Pequod. Weber’s Ahab is all Ahab; his Starbuck is perfectly impassioned. “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” We are agog. Afterward, briefly interviewed by the museum’s president, Amanda McMullen, Weber is almost overcome. “I’m so moved by this,” he manages. “This book, boy …”

According to the reading’s organizers, more than 3,000 people attended this year’s Moby-Dick Marathon. Prediction: Next year, if the Whaling Museum can handle it, it’ll be 5,000. I don’t want to label this event a node of resistance, but … it kind of is. It’s a radical act. An all-analog mass redreaming of a book. And not just any book—a flawed American gospel. With Moby-Dick itself, I may have my little fancy-pants peeves, but let’s face it: Ahab is Donald Trump, and Ahab is me, and I am you, and Ted Nugent is the Pequod, and the whale is the whale, and the voyage is America. These resonances ring out; they ring out from New Bedford and keep going, traveling west until they roll down the hills of California and sink hissing into the sea.

The Savage Empathy of the Mosh Pit

2025-12-16T09:00:00-05:00

“Open it the fuck back up!” the muscular Matt Honeycutt commands, mic gripped in his left fist, mustache prickling with indignation. He is balefully slash lovingly surveying the crowd and finding it a little sluggish and closely packed for his taste. “I need all my primitive, low-IQ motherfuckers!” Behind him, his band, Kublai Khan TX, rears and slumps into its next song. And the crowd lurches; the crowd flexes; the crowd feels its core, which is both a sucking emptiness and a site of repellent energy, like the space cleared by a fistfight.

“Build myself in the dirt!” Honeycutt roars. “Sacred right, sacred curse.”

“I’d hate to be in that pit right now,” someone says behind me.

Hot autumn night has fallen over Worcester, Massachusetts, over the huge, baked asphalt lot behind the Palladium, the ancestral seat of the Northeast’s heavy-metal kingdom. This is the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, 25 bands on three stages, 10 unbroken hours of heavy music, and all day, I’ve been watching the pit—the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I’ve been watching it, and skulking around it journalistically, because I am possessed by an idea: What if the pit, this ritualized maelstrom at the heart of the hardcore-metal crowd, could teach us something about how to live together in 2025—about how to be?

Heavy metal, of all music, knows just how sick we are. Just how pinned down by depression, addiction, insanity, technology, the machine of society and the thumb of God. Metal has been telling us this—gleefully, monstrously—since Ozzy Osbourne first sang, “Back on Earth, the flame of life burns low / Everywhere is misery and woe.” It’s a message that never goes out of style. But right now in America—what with the digital splatteration, the black-hole subjectivity, and the goon squad crouched in a van behind Dunkin’—it has, shall we say, an especial piquancy.

Metalfest, as I like to call it, has been running at the Palladium since 1999, reliably showcasing the best and the brightest, the worst and the darkest, from across the spectrum of metal and hardcore punk. When I say “10 unbroken hours of heavy music,” I’m not kidding. Metalfest is immaculately organized and relentlessly programmed, and the heaviness is continuous.

Inside the Palladium, there’s a small, explosive room for the bands at the jumpier and more hardcore-punk end of the spectrum, bands such as Hard Target, from Central Massachusetts, and New York City’s Madball. Outside in the lot, where the metal hordes are gathered, two large stages face each other across an expanse of a few hundred yards, and when a band (say, Gideon) stops playing at one end, another band (say, Full of Hell) starts up—immediately—at the other end. As one set finishes, in other words—THANK YOU, WOOST-AAAAAH!—its last chord still decaying and its ions still swimming in the afternoon air, you hear behind you a scuttle of drums and a squawk of feedback and an AWRIGHT! LET’S FUCKING GO! All you have to do is turn around.

Perfect. Perfect for this crowd. For this is the deepest and most unassuaged desire of all metalheads: to live in a state of continuous heaviness.

And heaviness is …? I’ll hazard some definitions. It’s a sense of cosmic tragedy, a love of the low end, an affinity for the thicker frequencies of existence, a paradoxically joyful desolation. It’s the compression of Time in a riff. It’s the weight of experience and the curve of space. It’s the caped shadow of Ozzy, his wings spread, crying, “Lost in the wheels of confusion.” It’s the mood conveyed by the slogans on the backs of the various band T-shirts that everyone at Metalfest is wearing: FUCK YOUR LIFE; SORROW WILL PREVAIL; YOU WILL DIE MY ENEMY.

Michael Wylie / Avalon / Getty

The pit is an institution, at least 40 years old. Who started it? Where? Was it birthed in the skinhead cauldron of New York’s Lower East Side, or in Southern California, with the punk-rock surfers and skaters of Huntington Beach? The legends abound, but somewhere (or more likely in several places at once), around the beginning of the 1980s, the crowd at U.S. hardcore shows opened up. Where there had been a crush or a scrum, there was suddenly and dramatically a space: for violence, for collision, for expression, for the hardest of the hardcore. The pit. And as the aggression and acceleration of hardcore migrated into metal, and into the roomier, boomier venues of the metal circuit, the pit got bigger.

(And not every hardcore or post-hardcore band was pro-pit. Fugazi, of Washington, D.C., would regularly stop their shows mid-song, the set’s momentum quiveringly arrested, to address thuggish behavior in the space in front of the stage.)

As to who’s in the pit, who’s making the pit happen, let’s take a look. There are big boys throwing their weight around, and there are wild skinnies with flying arms and spinning back-kicks, chopping out their emergency version of personal space. There are cheerful barging amateurs, happy to be bounced about, and there are prowling malevolences, waiting for the moment to blindside someone or chuck an elbow in their face. There is the occasional fearless woman. Like America, the pit is just barely a democracy. But you need youth, and you need strength: It’s no country for old men.

And here’s something interesting. The amount of fights, bloody noses, chest-to-chest confrontations, bouncer interventions I spot at Metalfest: zero. A self-policing environment, to a remarkable degree. Although I do overhear one young woman in post-pit distress—“That was the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen, girl! I am livid! Like, who is this bitch? I’ve never seen her before!”—while her partner murmurs indecipherable sounds of consolation.

Part of being a metal or hardcore front man in 2025 is knowing how to work the pit, appointing yourself a specialist in mob physics. All day at Metalfest, you could hear them calling out the moves: “Make a circle pit!” (a vortex); “Two-step! TWO-STEPPP!” (a dance, a kind of hobbit-y stomp); “Side to fuckin’ side!” (self-explanatory). The crowd will obediently convulse, or it won’t. “Okay, now we’re gonna play a game called Wall of Death,” the singer of Despised Icon announces during their early-evening set. “The game’s pretty simple. I’m gonna count to four—”

“TOO HARD!” one wag bellows in front of us.

The Wall of Death, incidentally, involves splitting the crowd down the middle, creating a channel of space, and then having the two sides charge across it like clashing medieval armies.

Mid-afternoon, battered by metal, away from the melee, I have a chat with the least metal-looking person I can find—Black, nonbinary, softly and secretly smiling, in pants and combat boots but with floating diaphanous layers. “I’m tripping balls,” they tell me, which partly explains their air of conspicuous apartness: They are on a private journey, drifting through Metalfest on luminous drug filaments. They show me their sketchbook, full of tarot-like images of aliens and birds.

“I saw you in the pit,” I say. “How did it feel in there?”

The soft, secret smile. “It’s all hugging; it’s all love. They want the contact.”

You’re wondering about the politics. Metal itself, being essentially a sensation in the brain stem, is apolitical, but metalheads are human, and they have their opinions. And if you want to listen to this elemental, unreconstructed music, you’re going to have to take your dose of illiberalism. In the pit, you’re going to have to deal with the guy whose T-shirt reads I STAND FOR THE FLAG AND KNEEL FOR THE CROSS. The front men are demagogues; the crowd is suggestible, fanatical; and between one downstroked chord and the next, you can hear the eclipse of the Enlightenment.

But love abides. Care abides. “I’ve got 15 seconds ’til I say some real shit,” Mychal Soto, a guitarist for Oklahoma’s PeelingFlesh, shouts, wiping his face mid-set with a towel in the afternoon glare and looking out at the crowd. “This set right here goes out to anybody that’s a minority or a person of color that’s had to battle some real shit,” he continues. “Even though that’s not your problem? Make it your problem—make it your fucking problem. I think it’s time for us as a people to become human again. It’s time to give a shit about the people next to us. We have to stop this madness, because if we don’t, this country is going to be over in our lifetime. This ain’t a cry for either side; this is a cry for love and compassion for human beings. So LET’S DO THIS SHIT.”

Five hours later, Honeycutt doffs his baseball hat to the audience. “This next track,” he declares, “goes out to all the ladies in the house!” But this isn’t some sexist rave-up. This isn’t “Girls, Girls, Girls,” by Mötley Crüe. This one’s about truck-stop sex workers, exploitation, and generational abuse. This is Kublai Khan TX’s “Swan Song”: “To all the ladies working Iowa 80 …” Could it be the most savagely empathetic pro-woman song ever produced by a bunch of big hairy metal dudes? If you’d heard the chorus of women’s voices singing along at Metalfest—“For all the fear, every tear / Slowly burning your sight / For every moment in the light / I fucking see you tonight”—you wouldn’t hesitate to say yes, yes, yes. “Wonderful!” Honeycutt growls contentedly.

There is a set by Cannibal Corpse at one end of the Palladium lot, a set by Lorna Shore at the other end. Then Metalfest wraps up, and we drift off, vibrationally pummeled, numb and gladdened, into the heavy-metal night. Reality will come with the dawn: normal life, the 2025 model, with its warpings of ambient pressure and its weightless panics. For now, we’re held in the sweet penumbra of heaviness. As for my big idea—that we can heal ourselves in the pit—well, let’s just say that it’s the kind of idea only a journalist would have. But I can still see them whirling and colliding, the dancers, and my mind slows it all to half speed, and shafts of beauty beam out, dazzlingly, from the blur of the limbs and the ecstatic, grimacing faces.

It looks like chaos, but there’s no real chaos, is there? Everything’s cause and effect, if you know where to look.

The Great Mystery of Drumming

2025-11-26T10:00:00-05:00

Full disclosure: I play the drums. I play them every chance I get. Although my drumming career has served mainly as a steady education in my own shining mediocrity as a drummer, a reminder that I was put on this Earth for other things, I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you’re like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: You’re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities.

How do you get better as a drummer? Well, you practice: You do the same thing over and over, slowly building muscle fiber while also experiencing, in your brain, the painless, clueless ache of a synapse trying to form. You get better by being in a band, by entering music as part of a volatile, multi-person, multi-addiction organism. And you get better, lastly, via the drummer’s version of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.

John Lingan’s superb Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers is full of such moments. Moments of transmission—often via vinyl, occasionally in performance—when the creative spark zips and snaps across the pre-artistic darkness and some young drummer somewhere realizes that he’s going to have to change his life. Dave Lombardo, pre-Slayer, listening in awe to Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor pummeling through a relentless double-kick-drum pattern on the title track of Motörhead’s Overkill. Jody Stephens, pre–Big Star, in the 17th row at a Led Zeppelin show in Memphis: John Bonham was “like a rocket, everyone else was just holding on.” Tony Thompson, pre-Chic, watching the Mahavishnu Orchestra: “I saw Billy Cobham for the first time—and saw God … It’s still embedded in my soul seeing him play like that.”

The drummer James Osterberg, before he became Iggy Pop, was infatuated with the bluesy playing of Sam Lay. (You can hear Lay’s ghostly snare taps on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster”; you can also hear him, four years later, tearing through the anarchic-ironic shuffle of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”) Osterberg made a young man’s picaresque pilgrimage from Ann Arbor to Lay’s house in Chicago. “His wife was very surprised that I was looking for him,” he tells Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. “She said, ‘Well, he’s not here, but would you like some fried chicken?’ ”

My own little drum crisis/awakening came at the hands (and feet) of Dave Grohl, pre-Nirvana, when I saw him playing with the Washington, D.C., hardcore-punk band Scream. Grohl—skinny, 19 years old—was all attack, all emphasis. He drummed in italics. Simultaneously, there was something subliminal and almost unspeakable about his playing; as devastatingly correct as it was, he also seemed to be pulling information from a rhythmic grid more profound, more capacious, than the mere ticktocking of accurate time.

Because this is the great mystery of drumming: Time. Not just tempo, not just keeping the beat—the guitarist and the bassist can do that—but the drummer’s musical relationship to the flow of Time itself. To the passing of all things, to the universe’s rumble toward infinity. John Bonham’s left foot on the hi-hat pedal—shick-shick-shick—has the cadence of Deep Time. It’s Bonham’s neurological signature: a lilt, an inflection, a swing that microscopically delays or distends the beat while also fulfilling it. Listen to “Whole Lotta Love,” around 1:18, the start of the freak-out section. Listen to that hi-hat going up and down, up and down. Bonham, steady as he is, is not keeping time. He’s releasing it.

John Bonham and Jimmy Page of the New Yardbirds perform in Denmark in September 1968, a month before the group was reborn as Led Zeppelin. (Jorgen Angel / Redferns)

His own rumble toward infinity was brief, fiery, and pocked with shadow. Lingan pairs him with the Who’s Keith Moon: “Their drumming was an accurate reflection of each of their personalities—they were loud, they were destructive, they hurt and endangered people, and they both died young and violently from self-abuse.” Here I think I might respectfully disagree. In both cases, the drumming, the art, transcended the personality.

Grohl and Bonham get a chapter each in Backbeats, as does—to my great delight—Earl Hudson from Bad Brains, a low-key powerhouse whose playing steered the shamanic flights of his brother, the band’s front man, H.R., through the ether. The great session man Hal Blaine is also featured, and Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown’s the J.B.’s, the author of the “Funky Drummer” beat that’s since been looped through a thousand hip-hop tracks.

To nondrummers, many of these figures will be obscure. (One main counterexample is Grohl, who made himself a real rock star as the guitarist-vocalist of Foo Fighters.) This is largely the drummer’s fate: to be felt but not seen. And this is the ambition of Lingan’s book—to tell a story of rock-and-roll evolution from the back, from the bowels, from the under-realm of the creator-drummers. How have drummers responded to the increasing power and complexity of the music? How have they themselves increased that power and complexity? By the time we get to Dave Lombardo and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, we are in a zone of Darwinian mutation, as Lombardo pulls off feats of speed and dexterity unimaginable—and probably terrifying—to his drumming forebears.

The sole female among Lingan’s 15 selected drummers is Moe Tucker, of the Velvet Underground. Self-taught, self-willed—“I consciously, purposely, didn’t learn more about drums because I didn’t want to sound like anybody else”—Tucker fused steely minimalism with raw, repetitive impact. If any rock-and-roll drummer could be said to have made their drums drone, it’s her. No crashing cymbals for Moe Tucker: not for her, the big-top vulgarity of those metallic exclamation points. And sometimes no downbeat—the ferocious shuffle she plays on “Run Run Run” is on the snare alone, its clattering, unmoored momentum working like a propellant on Lou Reed’s storytelling. Ka-chunk-a-CHUNK-a-chunk-a-CHUNK … The addicts are fiending around New York City, looking for a fix, a drag, a taste, anything. Maybe this was Tucker’s special compact with Time—Time as narrative; Time as unfolding drama.

Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, known for fusing steely minimalism with raw impact to produce her signature drone (Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns)

And one last thing about Time: Of all the members of the band, it comes for the drummer first. Guitars get heavier as you get older, high notes harder to hit, but the drummer pays a private tax to mortality. The drummer’s strength goes faster. Exactly how fast depends, to a degree, on the music. Metal drumming is famously punishing, and high-speed punk rock, as Lingan writes, “has always survived on heroic drumming. Someone has to sustain that pulse.” But even the mid-tempo drummer will have their moments of naked endurance. A 2008 study of Blondie’s Clem Burke revealed that, during live sets, he played with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 calories over the course of an 82-minute show. Many bands, when they re-form for their 20th- or 30th-anniversary tours, have a new man, younger and stronger, on drums.

[From the November 2015 issue: James Parker on the twilight of the headbangers]

So what’s a jowly old superannuated drummer to do? How do you stay on that drum stool and keep playing that funky/punky/heavy/wicky-wacky whatever-it-is? Well, you stop thrashing. You move more precisely; you breathe more deeply; you manage your force more shrewdly. You measure the dosage of power in every stroke. You use, in a word, technique. It’s like life.

* Lead-image source: Kevin Nixon / Classic Rock Magazine / Future Publishing / Getty

This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “Respect the Drummer.”

Dear James: When It’s Time to Say Goodbye

2025-11-04T13:00:00-05:00

Dear James,

Why does every online “support group” I’ve joined seem to turn into something worse than the original trauma for which I need support? I’m not a perpetual victim, but over the past 12 years, I’ve felt the need to leave at least four online communities for the sake of my mental health.

The first was a forum for daughters of mothers with narcissistic personality disorder. When its founder converted to a paid model, the restrictions felt like a betrayal, the dynamic became strained, and I lost many valuable connections. Another was a Facebook group for moms who’d experienced life-threatening pregnancy complications. For a time it was nice, but some women became unkind, and it started feeling less like a support group and more like a mean girls’ lunch table. Yet another was a forum for people who, like me, had left a highly controlling religious denomination. At first, it was great, but after I posted one night—expressing concern that theological arguments were getting overly heated—I awoke to a fight in my comments section and a nasty DM. The last straw: I told one person who had called some members “demonic” that they were making the group feel unsafe, and my comment was deleted by the admin.

Then there’s the political chat full of liberals, where I thought it would be a safe space to be a liberal. Instead, I’ve been cyberbullied. I’ve had my spelling and grammar mistakes mocked. When people have misunderstood something I’ve written, I’ve tried using humor to defuse the conflict, but commenters have simply doubled down, gaslighting me and calling me names.

How did we get here? I think of the old saying: “Hurt people hurt people.” Maybe the answer is as simple as that. But there must be something more to this pattern I’ve observed, something rooted in how we process grief or handle triggers. Whatever the case, I’m discouraged: Do I need to stop joining these groups? Should I stop trying to find my people?

Dear Reader,

First thought: You should by no means stop trying to find your people, but you should definitely stop trying to find them online. Second thought: Maybe you should stop trying to find your people.

First thought first. The second law of digital thermodynamics states that every online community, however nurturing and self-aware, however skillfully moderated, will eventually devolve into bluster, acrimony, scapegoating, and chemically imbalanced postings in the small hours. Why should this be? I don’t know. But it is. Humans can be awful, is one answer. And never more awful than when they’re just about to hit “Send.” The liberal chat room turned sour—my God, what a snake pit that must have been. “An intellectual hatred,” as the poet says, “is the worst.”

Second thought. You’ve been seeking your people—people with experiences and opinions similar to your own. What if that’s the problem? Might that not be the larger message of this sequence of online implosions? The safe spaces, the like minds, the emotional-ideological habitats: For me, it’s all part of the great splintering, the fragmentation of consciousness that has left us ripe for authoritarian takeover.

Burn down the book club! Is that what I’m saying? Not quite. Community can be beautiful, of course. But do you know what I’m getting at? It’s time to de-categorize ourselves, un-diagnose ourselves, eject all these discourses from our bodies and embrace that person over there, whoever they are.

My point is: You are not the problem, nor are the other people in your forums. The problem is the infernal force of atomization that is running all over us. And the way for us to resist it—the only way, as far as I know—is to get out there and meet the Other, expansively, overcoming our own fear, again and again, until the Other is not other anymore.

Toppling from my pulpit,

James

Dear Readers,

This will be the last “Dear James.”

I’m conscious, as I say goodbye to this column, of a powerful impulse to be all English and flippant and self-deprecatory, to make jokes about the quality of the “advice” that I’ve been dispensing, ho ho, ha ha. But I’m going to override this impulse and attempt instead to proceed in the fine old register of American sincerity.

Here goes.

Obviously, I couldn’t have done this without you. Your letters have touched me, challenged me, worried me, made me laugh, made me think. I’m extremely grateful for the courage you showed in writing and for the trust you put in me. Your problems became my problems, which is not as bad as it sounds. Actually, I think it might have helped me: Expansion of sympathy is a good thing, especially now. To the readers whose dilemmas I addressed, I hope I was helpful or at least not unhelpful. (“Worse than useless” is a category I particularly try to avoid.) And to those readers I was unable to answer, I apologize—I hope you weren’t left hanging for too long.

In closing, then: Courage, people! Never give up. It’s rough outside, it’s rough inside, and it’s about to get rougher—you don’t need me to tell you that. But if we can stay connected to the miraculous and fleeting fact of being here at all, we’ll have at least a chance of being—eventually—okay. I’ll leave you with a line from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy: “I am still alive then. That may come in useful.”

Signing off, with drunken orchestras playing behind me,

James

Dear James: I’m Tired of Being a Compulsive Liar

2025-10-28T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I grew up in a household full of love and care—but also of elephants in the living room and eggshells I had to walk around so as not to ruffle a single feather. My parents are extremely sensitive and horrible listeners, so you can imagine how I coped: I lied. A lot. I lied to get away with things, but mostly I lied so that I wouldn’t upset anyone or get into trouble.

This has stayed with me my entire life. Even though I don’t lie as much anymore, I often catch myself wanting to so that I don’t have to deal with any aftermath. I’ve hardly ever been caught or reprimanded, which makes it all so easy. Too easy.

I’m writing because I want to stop. I want to tell the truth no matter the consequence—to cease relying on lies to get out of a commitment, or when I feel like I should offer a “better” reason for a choice I have made or might want to make. Any ideas for how to retrain my brain after a lifetime of this habit?

Dear Reader,

The mixing of the metaphors—the elephants and the eggshells—in your first sentence is very good indeed, sort of Seussian or Lewis Carroll–y. Which is how it feels to be in those situations, isn’t it, in those rooms that are carpeted with how-are-they-not-broken eggs, while unmentioned elephants browse in the corners or loom behind the couch: You feel like you’re in a nonsense poem, at the mercy of a meaningless and arbitrary order.

My family wasn’t like that, thank God, but I do know those rooms and those feelings. So I, too, over the course of my 57 years, have been an intermittent yes-man, over-promiser, white liar, soft-soaper, eggshell-walker, aggro-avoider. Viewed from an especially merciless or purgatorial angle, certain strands of my life are little more than histories of lo-fi mendacity. I think that many people are like this.

What to do about it? The training of a lifetime is hard to reverse. To shift the metaphor, you need to take a lot of boxing classes before throwing a clean punch becomes your first reaction and not your 15th. How to be ready, in the moment, to not lapse into the dream, the spell, of the untrue or (worse) the half-true? How to stay alert?

Regular readers will know that I like quoting the Jesuits: Agere contra. Act against. Or, as George Costanza says in an especially useful episode of Seinfeld, “I will do the opposite.” If your instinct, in other words, is to smooth things over with a bland fabrication, try dropping a tiny truth bomb instead. This, too, is an instinct, a deeper one, and it can be developed. You can work on it. See how good the truth feels—how it sharpens the atmosphere, improves the circulation, widens the eyes of the person you’re speaking with.

Simply being present—to the situation, to your own real responses—can fix so much. If you don’t understand something, say so. If something’s bothering you, say so. If you love something, say so. Start small. Experiment with higher levels of honesty in texts and emails. Experiment with saying what you mean. You’ll be amazed at how quickly and gladly the world snaps into focus for you.

Bloating steadily with self-scrutiny,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Dear James: My Stepson’s Biological Dad Is a Terrible Human

2025-10-21T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’m a stepdad who wants nothing more than to be a good father to my stepson. He is 14 years old and many years past the divorce trauma involving his mom and his biological dad. His dad is, from my vantage point, a terrible human being in every way you can imagine. He has rarely paid child support. He is an addict and a drunk, and has exposed his kid to legions of drugs and debaucheries.

Although this biological dad’s older kids avoid him like the plague, the 14-year-old still strives to be his “favorite.” Bio-dad has done everything he can to pull my stepson into his rotten orbit, exposing him to his life and sending him home with retrograde ideas about women.

My question is: Do we tell the 14-year-old what a bad human his biological dad is?

Dear Reader,

One of the ways in which the great psychiatrist and teacher Elvin Semrad communicated with his pupils was via the Zen-like homemade proverb. “The only time people leave their mothers is when they’re ready to go,” he would say. Or: “It’s hard to look at the bottom of a well and see what’s there.”

And then there’s my favorite: “Who can tell anybody anything?” I’ve been pondering that one for years, rolling it around in my brain-orifice like an Everlasting Gobstopper.

What I get from it is this: Everyone has to learn their own lessons. Hints, counsels, warnings, remonstrations, even encouragements are, in the end, of limited value. We’re human, and we have to do it ourselves. “Tell me what to do!” I remember demanding of my first therapist. “Can’t you just tell me what to do?!” He made noises of ethical-clinical demurral. His ginger eyebrows wobbled. Had he zinged me with that Semrad line, I might have calmed down.

You can see where I’m going with this, I’m sure. Your stepson is a teenage boy, the definition of volatility and impressionability. By running down his biological father—even if the guy’s as much of a waste of space as you say he is—you will only be (temporarily) substituting one set of impressions for another. And that’s if your stepson listens to you. The other possible outcome is that you and your stepson get in a fight. His father exists in the world, floundering about and getting high, but the larger and more potent existence that this man has, in your case, is in your stepson’s psyche. In there, he’s a giant. Mess with the father image and you’re asking for trouble.

And here’s another thing, a lesson I learned rather late in the day: Parenting is 2 percent what you say, and 98 percent what you do. How you carry yourself, how you react, how you balance your selfhood against the pressures of reality—this is what a child watches and (God help all parents) learns from. It will take patience and biting-your-tongue forbearance, but you need to be the bigger man here. By modeling love, tolerance, grown-upness, dependability, sobriety—all the non-waste-of-space virtues—you’ll be telling-without-telling your stepson everything he needs to know.

In dadly fellowship,

James

Dear James: My Guy Friends Are Stuck in a Rut

2025-10-14T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

Every Thursday for the past decade, I’ve sat with the same group of guys for a beer after work. I don’t think any of them has changed a bit in 10 years. Nothing. They’ve done nothing to grow themselves or their talents. Each one of them, if they were to die today, would get nearly the same eulogy: Nice man. Worked hard. Loved his children. Nothing wrong with any of that. Or is there?

I love them—and also admit that I’m judging them. I can’t help wondering if they feel any compulsion to better themselves, to help their neighbors, to serve others. What do you think is our obligation to think of people beyond ourselves?

Dear Reader,

Here’s a question for you.

Do you really love these guys? Do you appreciate each one in his radiant singularity, while knowing in your heart that behind and beyond this singularity you share the same immortal, compassionate essence? Can you look at any one of your buddies holding a beer and getting louder (or quieter) as the evening progresses, and recognize his struggle as a child of God in a fallen world?

Probably not, right? Because if you loved them like that, you’d know that plenty has happened in their lives in 10 years, and that they have most certainly changed or been changed. Nature is a Heraclitean fire, as the poet said: Everything’s moving, burning, rushing, altering its state. And we drink beer with our buddies—or I do—partly to slow it all down. To anchor myself woozily in space with dudes I love. Heraclitus told us that you can never step in the same river twice; you can definitely step in the same bar twice.

You don’t have to love everybody, of course. There’ll be people for whom you have only one beer’s worth of love in you, and that’s fine. But these guys, you’ve been with them for a while: You have, as Bodhi says in Point Break, “shared time.”

So, go deeper with your drinking buddies. Drink more, if necessary. Shift gears, drop down, ask the questions, make the confessions. Find out how everyone’s really doing. Crack open Thursday night like a cosmic egg.

After that, you can address your own feeling of frustration: your sense that, day to day, the richer and wilder part of life is going unattended. This is very important. What is your neglected talent? Do you want to grow and serve? This country is full of holes—places where the need is so great that, for a willing and courageous person, it is literally impossible to be superfluous. There’s one in your neighborhood, for sure. Jump in.

Cheering you on,

James

Dear James: I’m Tired of the Religious Platitudes

2025-10-07T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

Am I a bad person for being weary of people talking about God as if everyone else in the conversation believes in their particular deity? I’m thinking of declarations such as “God moves in mysterious ways,” and “God has a plan for all of us,” and the countless other religious platitudes that people trot out.

As an atheist, I certainly don’t assume that everyone I’m speaking with shares my nonbelief. When someone asks why something particular happened to them, for instance, I don’t say, “Everything that happens to us is a consequence of a combination of factors and decisions that are sometimes in our control and sometimes not.” And I don’t do it because I know it would probably be considered rude.

Why don’t religious people make similar allowances for nonbelievers? It really gets to me, and I feel guilty about it—or maybe not guilty, but as if I’m being ungracious or petty.

Dear Reader,

I quite agree: Cloudy talk about plans and mysteries and the winding ways of Providence can be rather irritating. Especially right now, when most of whatever happens next would seem to be determined by arbitrary and despotic centers of earthly power. And in Christianity, as far as I can tell, no one has been able to come up with an answer to the problem of suffering that wasn’t at best kind of a cop-out (“God allows evils to happen,” Thomas Aquinas suggested, “in order to bring a greater good therefrom”) and at worst an insult to the intellect.

If I sound a bit vinegary, a bit Hitchens-y, I’m really not. Ever since I realized that I wasn’t actually alone in the universe (it happened at a show by a band of Swiss avant-metalheads in London), I’ve believed in God. Believed, that is, in something that precedes me infinitely and also—most bizarrely—loves me. So I go to church, and I’m at home in the God talk. Do I believe in a divine plan, everything for the best, and so on? Not exactly. My nervous system does not seem to subscribe to that theory. But I do believe in divine trickery, active cosmic irony, and humanity’s bottomless capacity for missing the point completely.

“Everyone has an anthropology,” wrote Walker Percy, meaning that everyone has at some level their own science of man, and of man’s relationship (or not) to God. “There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question.” You have questioned the assumptions. You have thought your anthropology through, and now you find it colliding with the perhaps less thought-through and more implicit anthropologies around you. I recommend generosity: These vague phrasings are just the sound of people trying to get through the moment, trying to make sense of things. Endeavor to not be annoyed. Every idea gets tested in the end, just as everyone comes to their own (eventual) reckoning.

From the back pew,

James

Dear James: I’ve Lost My Writerly Fire

2025-09-30T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

A few years ago (partly inspired by you), I started composing odes to my favorite drinks and dishes in Colorado. After more than a dozen years working on another project, in which I wrote long-form, navel-gazing essays about being a single father, this seemed like a fun and sustainable way to keep my writing chops in fighting trim while sharing my love for Denver’s gems. My goal was to publish one short, impactful, overwrought piece a week.

Although I started strong, I eventually dipped to one a month, and then to—at this point?—only when I think about it. I could blame the vagaries of daily life and a sense that my columns are getting repetitive. But the truth is, I just don’t feel the fire inside like I used to. I was sad when your odes went away, but now I’m wondering if you butted up against something similar: How do we keep rocking rapturous writing when the well starts to run dry?

Dear Reader,

Very important question.

When I was gathering my odes into a book—or rather, piling up my effusions in prose and verse and trying to work out which ones were odes and which weren’t—my friend Carlo gave me a magical concept. He called it “the odeness.” It’s the essential quality, quiddity, floating-in-the-luminous-void uniqueness of whatever you’re trying to write about. It’s what your ode is attempting to first identify and then celebrate. It’s the odeness of your ode.

And I became quite religious about the odeness. I sought it (and found it) everywhere. What is the odeness of a hair dryer, a brake pedal, a ray of winter light, a harsh word in the street? Soon I came to see that the odeness is also an inner state or process, a refinement or tuning up of the writer’s perceptual equipment, a condition of ode-preparedness that seems geared mysteriously toward joy.

And then my book came out, and I lost the odeness completely. “You’re done being happy?” my publisher’s PR chief asked, after I explained to her that I couldn’t possibly do another interview about getting under the skin of reality, the unrevealed glories of the everyday, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, indeed, I was done being happy. I was done being a half-assed evangelist for the odeness. I reread the introduction to my book, which is an enthusiastic primer in odeness theory. I was bemused. Who was this guy? Was he high?

That was a year ago. And today I’m here to tell you that the odeness—gradually, warily, with altered language—comes back. Or one’s ability to be in touch with it comes back. Which is good news, because there’s no question that the general imaginative environment has degraded significantly. Physical reality still works in America, as far as I can tell, but mental reality? Holy moly, we’re in trouble.

I think it’s a question of broadening your range. You ran out of juice exalting Denver’s drinks and dishes, so maybe go a little more abstract: odes to moods, sensations, ideas—weirder, less-immediately-graspable stuff.

Take this story, for example, which I’ve been thinking about lately. It was told to me by my brother. He was at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in a club in London in the late ’80s, and Flea, the Chili Peppers’ genius bassist, was mucking about between songs: making his glutinous, high-speed, punk-funk bass noises; effortlessly doing his runs, pops, twangs, squiggles, doodles, Flea formulae; pluming with pure, incidental invention as he paced the stage in his customary state of near nudity. Flea! “Fucking hell,” spluttered a man standing behind my brother—a man who was clearly a bass player himself, and who now, watching Flea, was caught between revelation and a kind of monstrous affront. “Right—that’s it. From now on, five hours of practice a day. Five hours! Starting tomorrow! Fuck!”

That’s the story. That’s the, uh, experiential nexus. Now, there’s an ode in there for sure—but what is it? What’s the odeness here? Is it an ode to excellence, to artistic transmission, to artistic jealousy, to the bass, to Flea himself? Is it a poem? I don’t know. I haven’t worked it out yet. But the odeness beckons.

Odes don’t need to be rapturous; that’s the other thing. They don’t need to be jolly or even hopeful. They just need to be odes.

Slowly improving,

James

Allen Ginsberg, Great American Poet-Buffoon

2025-09-25T15:37:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Could be the weather, could be the news, could be the state of my digestion, but right now I’m in the mood for a proper American poet-buffoon. A poet-buffoon, that is, on the American scale: a figure of swashbuckling vulnerability, ridiculous and unstoppable, friend to the dispossessed, personal frequenter of the edge of things, orating and chanting and moaning in ecstasy and getting himself arrested. I’m in the mood for an Allen Ginsberg.

So into The Atlantic’s archive I moodily go, hunting for Ginsbergiana.

There are a couple of examples, 20 years apart: a poem from the July 1986 issue titled “I Love Old Whitman So,” and a pro-weed essay from 1966, “The Great Marijuana Hoax.” The essay, according to the Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, “was well conceived, argued, and documented, and its appearance in one of the country’s most highly respected magazines gave it a further sense of credibility among the ‘squares.’” (It still sounds like Ginsberg, though: “I therefore do know the subjective possibilities of marijuana and therein take evidence of my own senses between my own awareness of the mysterious ghastly universe of joy, pain, discovery, birth & death.”)

There’s also some interesting Atlantic coverage of Ginsberg-related phenomena. For readers in 1966 who may have been lingeringly confused as to the precise nature of the Beat Generation (founding member: Allen Ginsberg), Dan Wakefield offers a helpful definition: “The Beat Generation is the name of a young people’s social, literary, and travel club that started up in this country after World War II.” And in 1967, Faye Levine, writing about “The New Calcutta,” zeroes in on Ginsberg’s time in that city, where his fertile, fomenting poet-buffoon presence “bolstered an incipient, antiestablishment literary movement, the Hangries—‘hungry and angry’—who were demanding economic, sexual, and aesthetic freedom from the old order.” The Hangries meant business, Ginsberg-style: “They published works widely condemned as ‘obscene,’ and threatened to hold a nude parade.”

The first piece of Ginsberg verse to appear in The Atlantic, however—“Morning in Spring,” from April 1955—is not by Allen. It’s by Louis Ginsberg, his long-suffering minor-poet father. And it begins like this:

One morning when I went downtown,
I felt such sunlight capsize down
That streets were glutted with more gold
Than all my heart could ever hold.
I thought a glory much like this
Must have been poured from Genesis.

“Capsize”: that’s a great verb. And aren’t they rather moving, these modestly rapturous, small-town-visionary lines? Especially when one considers that at the exact moment that Ginsberg Sr. was being published in The Atlantic, Ginsberg Jr. was in North Beach, San Francisco, writhing through the early drafts of “Howl.” The mighty, shuddering “Howl”: his hymn to the mad ones, the ones who “bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan / angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.” It’s as if the father, with care and quiet formality, has chiseled open this discreet portal to the divine, only to watch his son go rocketing through it with his buttocks on fire.

Poet-to-poet, the two Ginsbergs were always generous with each other. Upon the publication of “Howl” in 1956, Louis wrote to Allen in gentle remonstration: “There is no need for dirty, ugly words.” But Louis also saluted the power of the poem, the gush of the poem, “a hot geyser of emotion suddenly released in wild abandon from subterranean depths of your being.” Fourteen years later, Allen was writing the introduction to Louis’s third book, Morning in Spring. He took the job seriously, according to Schumacher: “To prepare himself for the task, he read and took copious notes on his father’s poetry, treating the individual poems as if they were the works of a contemporary rather than the writings of a relative.” And what he wrote was beautiful.

“I weep at his meekness and his reason, at his wise entrance into his own mortality and his silent recognition of that pitiful Immensity he records of his own life’s Time, his father’s life time, & the same Mercy his art accords my own person his son.”

Dear James: I Fell in Love With My Friend—And Now I’m Confused

2025-09-23T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’m a 22-year-old woman in my first-ever situationship with another woman. We started off as good friends and a few months ago admitted we had feelings for each other. She was seeing someone else casually but then had to leave town for a bit. We stayed in touch while she was away, and at one point I traveled eight hours to visit her and meet her family. During this time I fell head over heels for her, and it was clear she was also interested in me.

Once she returned, however, she revealed that she wanted to be just friends. I felt used and embarrassed. I asked her to give us a chance. At the end of that conversation, we decided to try to make it work in some capacity—the one caveat being that she wanted to see other people. (I didn’t.)

Since then, we’ve had beautiful, romantic moments, although the relationship doesn’t feel as magical as it did before. When we talked recently, she told me that she hadn’t yet seen others—but because of lack of opportunity, not because she doesn’t want to. Meanwhile, I find I’m not being my full self. Typically, I feel secure in relationships. But partly because I’m worried she is seeing others, I’ve developed an anxious attachment to her. I’ve been trying to rely less on her. I don’t want to resent her. This is especially hard because I know what a lovely friendship we once had, and I hope to have a friendship with her if this ends. So I’m really struggling: Is it possible for this to work? Do I need to cut things off completely? Could we be friends with benefits, or should we immediately go back to being just friends?

Dear Reader,

Ah, the anxious attachment. I know all about that. Nothing makes sense, and nothing can be resolved, and nothing can move forward until you get the response you need—and you never get the response you need. So you dangle, you fizz, you drift with wet cheeks through needling clouds of anxiety. It’s a completely existential situation, in my view, because you’re radically in touch with (1) your own incompleteness and (2) the impossibility of ultimate security in this life.

What’s to be done? The original existentialists, all those lovely, gallant, puffing-their-ciggies Parisian men and women, were very happy for everything to be a dilemma. They loved a predicament; they loved a pickle. They loved a situation that had to be lived into and lived through—because that, as torrid and confusing as it might be, is how you know you’re living.

But what if you need an answer? Here, you must consult your impulses. All of the options feel terrible, but I’m pretty certain that one of them, carefully considered, will feel slightly less terrible than the others. And it might have something to do with reclaiming your autonomy, with restoring yourself to a state of, if not wholeness, then at least coherence. A state in which your entire condition of being is not oriented to this other person and what they say or don’t say. Imagine what a relief that would be.

Wondering what to have for lunch,

James

Dear James,

I’m a 19-year-old waiting for life to happen to me. I’ve graduated from high school, and I’m in a holding pattern until my next chapter can begin. In the meantime, I’ve lost all of my friends because they went off to college, and now they have new friends. I have panic attacks daily because I used to be a bright student, and now I feel like everyone is ahead of me and I’ve been left behind. How to find hope? What should I do?

Dear Reader,

All through life we tell ourselves stories about who we are, what we’re doing, and how we’re feeling. The right stories give us strength; the wrong stories take that strength away. It sounds to me like you’ve got yourself stuck in a wrong story. You need to tell yourself a different, better story, and talk to yourself in a new way.

So you’re feeling alone, for the time being. That’s okay. There’s great power in being alone. You can look around with clear eyes; you can make your own decisions.

Fall is coming, the most beautiful season of the year. And although you’re feeling autumnally sad, you can, with just a tweak of the emotional dial, turn that feeling into autumnal joy: a sense of things passing, changing, moving, blazing up into their brightest colors.

Don’t worry about being hopeful. The universe is going to keep on ticking, and it’s going to keep on offering you chances to feel better, whether you’re in a position to recognize these chances or not. You’re young, and you’re strong, and the good stuff is ahead of you. All you have to do is keep getting up in the morning.

Sending you the mega-vibe,

James

Dear James: What to Do With My Post-DOGE Life?

2025-09-16T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I am one of the luckiest people to fall victim to DOGE. I am a military veteran and 20-year federal employee who was able to take advantage of a buyout and early retirement. I have a husband with a military pension who was not pushed out of his federal job. This allowed us to buy our dream retirement home, where I spend my days reading novels and hanging out with my dog.

And yet: I feel lost and pointless. Ungrateful. Some days I can’t get out of pajamas. I’m struggling to navigate the opportunities of my new life while witnessing the horrors unfolding in the United States and the world. How do I get past this ennui, and acknowledge the big while appreciating the small?

Dear Reader,

Stay in your pajamas.

In fact, stay in bed. Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. And get that dog up there with you. Feel that lovely dog weight, dog density, as your dog settles and downshifts, grows heavy with unconsciousness, and makes the profound noises, the groans of contentment and secret multi-voweled suspirations, of a dog entering its sleep world. Let the dog be your teacher; let the dog be your guide. Deep-breathing animal equanimity, that’s the ticket.

I think you might be suffering from some version of survivor’s guilt. No doubt many of your colleagues had their jobs indiscriminately minced by the same whizzing DOGE machine that gifted you this painless early retirement. Meanwhile, the country you have served so well, for so long, is apparently separating into coagulated lumps of volcanic matter. And here you are in your nice house with your novels and your unscripted afternoons.

All the more reason, in my view, for you to let yourself off the hook. You don’t sound ungrateful to me—quite the opposite—and you are certainly not pointless. The shape of your new life is not going to reveal itself unless you give it some space, which is going to require from you a degree of gentleness, both with yourself and with your circumstances. There are, as you know, a hundred things you can do, a hundred places where you are needed, a hundred places indeed where it would be impossible for you to be superfluous. But you’ll get to that.

Right now I think you should deepen your relationship with idleness—which has a political value, let’s not forget. A state of honoring your whims; smelling the roses; reading books; not being driven, harried, jabbed, guilted, digitally overwhelmed: At this phase in the culture, that’s not self-care; that’s revolution.

Collectively, we’re heading into a sticky time, aren’t we? The harbingers are everywhere. I was walking to the liquor store with my son the other day, crossing a large, downward-sloping expanse of a parking lot, when a hectic jogger veered into our path, flailed past us, and almost collided with the brick wall of a T.J. Maxx before self-correcting and zigzagging away. “Reality’s breaking down, Dad,” my son observed. “That guy was like an NPC with a glitch.” (He had to explain to me what an NPC is: a nonplayer character in a video game—in other words, a character generated and controlled by the game itself.)

What I’m saying is: In the now-imminent uproar, we’re going to need all the elements. We’re going to need sane ones, and we’re going to need mad ones, and leaders and loose cannons and daredevils and bureaucrats and the driven and the opportunistic, but we’re also going to need some people who know how to savor the textures of existence. We’re going to need you, in your pajamas, with a book in your hand and your dog by your side.

Making a thoughtful cup of tea,

James

For Those About to Mock

2025-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

On July 5, a couple of days after I saw Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Black Sabbath played its final show, at Villa Park, in Birmingham, England. Not only are these two phenomena related; they seem to have been impishly synchronized: Just when the troupe behind Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that satirically exploded the genre of heavy metal, reunited after four decades for a sequel, the band that invented heavy metal called it quits.

And then, two weeks later, Ozzy died: Ozzy Osbourne, Sabbath’s front man, who at Villa Park had sung sitting down, enthroned on what looked like a satanic office chair, heroically managing a host of ailments (including Parkinson’s disease). No one was more metal than Ozzy. At the same time, no one in metal was funnier, more in touch with his own bathos, more post–Spinal Tap, in a sense, than Ozzy, especially in his shambling-paterfamilias incarnation on MTV’s reality show The Osbournes. At Villa Park, his frailty was epic, defiant, even as his bandmates labored drastically to summon the power of 50 years earlier. Still, Sabbath sounded amazing, the band’s distinctive vibe of limitless cosmic encumbrance, of Man squirming under the thumb of Fate, God, madness—the essential heavy-metal vision—somehow magnified by the venerable wobbliness of its playing.

[Read: Ozzy Osbourne’s wild, normal life]

Spinal Tap II (which arrives in theaters on September 12) also concerns itself with last things. As the movie (again directed by Reiner) begins, Spinal Tap the band—ultra-English, ultra-deluded as to its own quality and status, basically a slavish amalgam of every trend in hard rock since 1966—is no more, its members long dispersed and out of touch with one another. Lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel is the proprietor of a guitar-and-cheese shop; guitarist-vocalist David St. Hubbins makes on-hold Muzak and soundtracks for true-crime podcasts; bassist Derek Smalls runs the New Museum of Glue. But upon the death of Ian Faith, Tap’s posh-sounding, cricket-bat-wielding manager, his daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman), inherits from him a contract for one last Spinal Tap show. Initially underwhelmed by this concept, Hope happens to catch a clip of Garth Brooks sound-checking with a Spinal Tap song. The clip has gone viral; people love it; Tap has accidentally re-impinged on pop consciousness. There’s money to be made. She must get the band together again for a final outing, for a grand farewell fling. She books the Lakefront Arena, in New Orleans.

This Is Spinal Tap was an almost-clinical study in anticlimax, in rock-and-roll humiliation. Again and again, the band falls (petulantly, peevishly, with English accents and English swear words) into the gap between its bombastic self-image and the facts on the ground, the dwindling ticket sales and tiny sandwiches and spontaneously combusting drummers. The world is against the members of Spinal Tap: Everything undercuts them; everything ironizes them. Their way to rock-and-roll sublimity, to headbanging apotheosis, is comprehensively barred.

And as dead-on comedies will sometimes do, the movie claimed a piece of reality. After This Is Spinal Tap, any band, in any genre, could have a Spinal Tap moment: taking a wrong turn on the way to the stage, being caught out by malfunctioning gear, suffering through an in-store appearance. For musicians, and metal musicians in particular, it was a new and liberating form of self-awareness.

[From the May 2011 issue: James Parker on how heavy metal is keeping us sane]

Does the world need another Spinal Tap movie? Obviously not, no more than—inside the movie—the world needs another Spinal Tap concert. But the redundancy, the extraneousness, is exactly the point here. Prior to their reanimation by Hope and her magic contract, the Tappers are in a state of almost-hysterical obsolescence. The cheese, the Muzak, the glue museum—they’re all doing, with complete conviction, completely useless things. They are post-rock, post-culture, post-history in a sense. An inferno of triviality. A cameo by Elton John, along with glancing appearances from Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, contributes to the sense of the movie as an End Times in-joke. And we’re all in on it.

I don’t want to argue that rock and roll is over, its teleology exhausted, its glorious arc attenuated and made vague by Spotify and nostalgia and stylistic recyclings and concert tickets that cost $400 and blah blah blah—I’d die if I really believed that. But it certainly feels over. (For the definitive account of this feeling, and the reasons for it, read Simon Reynolds’s Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.)

[From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

Next question: Is Spinal Tap II funny? I’ll give you a qualified yes. The sensation of a new comic universe popping into being is absent, because you can do that only once, but the original elements are still vital: the luminous deadpan stupidity of Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), the wheedling vanity of David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), the spacey sentimentality of Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). These are great comedians, working up their scenes, as before, from hours of improv. There’s some lovely in-studio bickering as Tufnel and St. Hubbins lock horns over a complex new musical arrangement. (St. Hubbins: “Why is it so hard for you to grasp?” Tufnel: “I’m grasping it! And my fingers are saying … don’t.”) Also, as before, the occasional shamelessly scripted gag. St. Hubbins, in his solo career, is working on the soundtrack for “a horror movie that takes place in a retirement community. It’s called Night of the Assisted-Living Dead.” We learn of a new addition to the dark lineage of deceased Spinal Tap drummers—Skippy Scuffleton; cause of death: sneezing fit—and we watch the band rustically keening its way through a folk song: “I loved me a lass whose hair was long / And brown as the finest stew.”

In Spinal Tap II, guitarist-vocalist David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) reunite for an absurd final show. (Kyle Kaplan / Bleecker Street)

Speaking of drummers, Valerie Franco—hired in the movie for that final gig at the Lakefront Arena—is almost too good. Driven by her smooth and emphatic playing, Spinal Tap comes close to losing its special lumpy Tap groove, its farcical Deep Purple mega-thump, and begins to sound disconcertingly like a proper band. But it’s okay, because here comes the cameo of cameos: Paul McCartney! He wanders into the rehearsal studio with his long Liverpudlian face and ironic O-mouth, takes Tufnel’s side in the aforementioned musical dispute, and then sits down with the band for—yes!—a full-length version of “Cups and Cakes”: “Cups and cakes, cups and cakes / Oh what good things Mother makes.” It’s a number from Tap’s psychedelic infancy, and—in its pastiche-y, chamber-musicky way—wonderfully McCartney-appropriate: It’s like “Martha My Dear” written by … Spinal Tap.

Last question: Will Spinal Tap II put a dent in actuality, refine the consciousness of musicians, in the same way as its predecessor? Time will tell. With my own eyes, I have seen the uncanny afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap. I have witnessed the movie creating, as it were, new scenes for itself, new great lines. In 2006, for example, I saw Iron Maiden, perhaps the most potently theatrical (and ultra-English) heavy-metal act ever, at an arena in Boston. At one point in the set, during a characteristically epic, multipart number, the music turned moody and the stage blacked out. From up in the rafters, a single spotlight coldly blazed. Its unfortunate operator, however, couldn’t seem to find his target. His beam wavered on a patch of blankness, or the corner of an amp, and then began to roam the stage in desperation, scanning here and scanning there—until, from the darkness, the voice of Bruce Dickinson, Iron Maiden’s singer, was heard. “I’m over here,” he said dryly. “On top of the speaker. Twat.”

*Lead-image sources: Bleecker Street; Album / Alamy; United Archives GmbH / Alamy; rapid eye / Getty

This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “This Was Spinal Tap.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Dear James: The Men I’m Dating Keep Leaving Me Numb

2025-09-09T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’m worried I may no longer be capable of feeling. Melodramatic, I know—but hear me out.

I am 26 and have been single for seven years, after two short-lived, emotionally tumultuous college flings. And my single life has been great! I’ve improved relationships with my family and friends, built a career I’m proud of, traveled, tried new hobbies. Over the past three years, I’ve been dating super intentionally; I’ve been looking for a relationship that’ll add to my life. I do want to marry, and I want a relationship where we’re both invested in exploring long-term potential—no situationships. My hope is to find someone kind, respectful, and confident (a fairly inclusive set of criteria), which has allowed me to keep an open mind in meeting different kinds of men and not sticking to a “type.”

Some guys have been immediate nos. Others have been nice—our conversations are okay, and we seem aligned on priorities—so I’ll go on a couple of dates to see if a spark develops. But the spark simply isn’t developing. I know not to expect fireworks right away. But after a few dates, I’m not excited to see them anymore. If I sense someone is feeling a connection but I’m not, I’ll usually end it so as to not lead them on.

I have felt sparks and attraction before. I know I’m capable of wanting romance. But I’m so confused, and I can’t help wondering if my expectations are unrealistic. Am I waiting for something that’ll never come? Is “When you know, you know” a fallacy? Or am I missing some feelings that are usually present in these situations?

Dear Reader,

I’m picking up a lot of front-brain activity here, a lot of planning and problem-solving, a lot of executive function—which has its place, of course, but I don’t believe that the core of our existence, the great mysteries of love and spirit, are accessible by thinking. In the areas that really matter, the intellect has limited range.

Certainly, in my case: I can see now that the major decisions in my life, however they might have appeared at the time, were made not in the well-lit boardrooms of my frontal lobes but down in the darkness of my raging, whining, babbling, and despotically sensitive amygdala. (This brain stuff is all metaphors, by the way. In terms of actual brain function, how it works, I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

And then there’s Eros, also known as Cupid, who flies away with his little buttocks clenched at the least hint of a rational process. Dating consciously and intentionally, with a checklist of desirable qualities and a determination not to hurt anyone’s feelings—what a great way to keep him out of your business. It sounds to me like you got rather scorched by those early romances, and since then you’ve been doing a very good job of regulating your love life. In the past seven years, no one’s run off with your heart, blown your mind, challenged your identity, or trampled your self-respect. On the other hand, no one’s been very interesting, either.

I don’t want to be a cheerleader for the forces of irrationality—we’ve got quite enough of that going on these days. But I wonder if you could make yourself a little more available to the unlikely, the unpredictable, the downright unsuitable. Take your aversion to situationships: I mean, they’re all situationships, aren’t they? From the randomest hookup to the most heavily layered entanglement. Put two people together, in any context, and you’ve got a situation.

Am I an expert in dating? By no means. But it seems to me that you’re in a great position. You’ve looked after yourself, which is no small thing, and you’ve been steadily exploring. Now you’re feeling the flickerings of an as-yet-obscure romantic destiny. Let it happen!

From a sleeping bag in the hippocampus,

James

Dear James: I’m Stuck Caring for a Husband I No Longer Love

2025-09-02T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’ve been married to my husband for 35 years. He is 88 and I’m 79. I was in love with him during our courtship. He showed interest in me, appeared to enjoy doing things with me, and was affectionate, kind, and communicative. But in the first year or two of our marriage, most of that dropped away.

When I told him that I didn’t feel loved, he didn’t seem to care. He apparently believed that once the courtship and honeymoon were over, he could start behaving like an entitled jerk (my words, not his). I’ve made attempts to leave, none of which panned out. During my third attempt, about 10 years ago, it became clear to me that my husband was in cognitive decline. I had suspected it for some time, but his behavior as we went over logistics confirmed that he no longer understood what was happening. Now, here I am—the sole caretaker for a husband with full-blown dementia.

It’s been awful. He rarely speaks to me. When I walk into the room, he doesn’t look up. I’m expected to listen to his news and conundrums, but he doesn’t have time for mine. I do the laundry and cooking and shopping, and he hasn’t said “thank you” in years. Sex is at zero. We have no family nearby. We’re living on our government pensions and can’t afford caretakers. My husband isn’t far enough along to qualify for long-term care—which we probably couldn’t afford anyway. Our mutual social contacts have drifted away. I have made some new women friends, and I still go out for a coffee now and then, but I can’t be gone for more than a few hours before my husband’s anxiety maxes out.

I’m not unkind enough to leave him now, but I am not kind enough to treat him with the love and concern he deserves in his confused state. How do I reconcile this? I want to go. I want him to go. That’s not likely to happen until one of us dies. Is there a way I can curate my feelings and attitude, so I don’t cringe when I read books about dementia care, and they keep using the term your loved one—which he has not been to me, nor I to him, for decades?

Dear Reader,

This one goes out to the carers—to the unpaid, at-home carers; the carers for husbands; the carers for wives; the carers for parents; the carers for disabled children or siblings, who on good days and bad, with hearts overflowing or through gritted teeth, get the job done. Who renew the routine, repeat the steps, climb back onto the spiral, whether it feels like a joyous practice or a scene from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, or both.

I find myself reaching for religious language when I think about what you’re doing: You are consecrating yourself to the well-being of another—in some cases, or at some moments, a difficult, intractable, and unable-to-be-grateful other. You are making a liturgy out of the everyday.

In your case, is it possible for you to separate the husband who made you so miserable from the man who now relies on your care? I wonder. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the symptoms of his cognitive decline are inextricable from what seemed to you to be his general self-absorption and thoughtlessness. But the situation is different now: He’s sick, and he needs you. And you have stepped up with strength and generosity, even if you can’t manufacture feelings that aren’t there. About those feelings, by the way, you should be experiencing no guilt whatsoever. These books about dementia care that you’ve been reading—every time you come across the words your loved one, try substituting your huge pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, is there anything you can do to take care of yourself? To lighten the burden? Think hard about this—think about those pockets of the day when you can get a break, and about how to make the most of that break. Maybe you sit in a diner and read a book (one definition of bliss, for me). Maybe you start playing Grand Theft Auto. Whatever irrigates the imagination and allows the soul to exhale. You’re the expert here. You know exactly how the system of caring for your husband runs, and you know what you need. And if you allow yourself a minute or two of unharried consideration, I guarantee that you’ll come up with some angles.

In admiration,

James

Dear James: I’ve Got a Bad Case of Unrequited Love

2025-08-26T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’m 19, and as childish as it sounds, I’ve fallen deeply for someone who will never love me back.

He’s my co-worker. We both belong to a small group working in theoretical math, and we see each other almost every week for meetings. He’s several years older than me, and I guess when I look at him, I see a guy who’s incredibly smart and seems to have his life figured out. Every time he explains a problem, I find myself getting lost, just watching his face.

I know he won’t ever look at me the same way as I look at him. But I try to make myself smarter, funnier, prettier, more interesting. I laugh at his dumb jokes (even when I consciously tell myself not to). I remember the smallest details he shares. And every time I stop myself from texting him something funny, sending him a cat picture, or asking him to hang out, I hate myself just a little more for not simply telling him the truth: “I really like you.”

Somehow, I’ve convinced myself that if I just get thinner, or smarter, or somehow better, I’ll finally have permission to feel this way—maybe even to tell him. What do I do? How am I supposed to feel?

Dear Reader,

As I say to my son when I’m trying to give him advice: “I’m not cleverer than you; I’ve just been around longer—which means that sometimes I know what happens next.”

What you’re going through is extremely painful and not childish at all.

People have been going through it forever, of course. In Ted Hughes’s retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the nymph Echo has an almighty crush on Narcissus, and “like a cat in winter at a fire / She could not edge close enough / To what singed her, and would burn her.” Sound familiar?

So this is an age-old human difficulty. But no question that it’s worse today, more acute, more invasive of our imaginations, because of [Sound of middle-aged columnist clambering breathlessly onto hobbyhorse.] our goddamn phones. The bastardized telepathy of texting, the endless pseudo-proximity of everybody to everybody else—any kind of preoccupation or passionate interest gets horribly magnified and distorted.

You’re in a difficult spot, is what I’m saying. I can guarantee you two things.

One: This person, as good as he might be at math, and as gazeable-upon as his face no doubt is, does not have his life figured out, because nobody does. He’s precisely as messed up / un–messed up as you are.

Two: You do not need to be thinner, smarter, or better. I don’t mean to be glib about the effects of generations of patriarchal damage and the ongoing psychic catastrophe of consumerism, but—you’ve got to get that stuff out of your head. It’s poison. It’s also quite wrong. You yourself, right now, just as you are, are enough and more than enough.

Am I being helpful at all? Probably not. That’s the worst thing about this condition: It’s pretty much immune to counsel, immune to rationality, immune to quotations from Ted Hughes. You just have to hang in there until it wears off. As a practical matter, please make sure you’re taking care of yourself in other areas of your life—seeing friends, getting around, having fun, playing the banjo, riding buses, talking to dogs. Don’t stay up too late. Get the protein in. Avoid the company of mopers or blowhards. Eventually, eventually, all of this will guide you back to feeling all right.

Sending you profound stamina vibes,

James

Dear James,

I work for a small-business lending company, in the credit department, reviewing and moving files as quickly as possible. We get pressure from above to move faster and from below from our customers. I have been a team lead for a year, yet every day, I feel like an impostor—because I do not have a background in accounting or lending. I also get really anxious if things start to fall apart, which they do often. (We just completely changed our workflow, and the growing pains are mounting up.) I try to do my best, but mostly I watch the clock, waiting for eight hours to pass as soon as possible.

I have at least one moment each day when all I want to do is quit. I have another job bartending, so I can do that for a while, and I have savings to get through six months. But I stay because I need the health insurance. (I started therapy again because of my job, and I’m seeing an ophthalmologist tomorrow.)

I get scared to quit because of the economy, but I’m exhausted. It takes all my energy to maintain a professional demeanor. I stare at my phone, go to bed, wake up, repeat. I know everything is temporary, but I really think this is going to ruin me. Any thoughts?

Dear Reader,

Quit! Screw this job! Life is for living!

Feel better? I do.

Seriously, though: Quit. Screw this job. Life is for living. You are in a spiral here, and you need to pull out of it. “Maintaining a professional demeanor” can blow your mind more thoroughly than the most violent psychedelic.

There remains the small matter of the future. Even my dog can tell that I have zero expertise in financial planning—but it doesn’t sound like you’re being irresponsible; you’ve got money saved, and you’ve got your bartending gig. What happens next is what happens next, but one thing’s for sure: In two weeks, you will feel so much better.

Byronically, on a mountaintop,

James

Dear James: Do I Need to Be Nice to My Aging Stepfather?

2025-08-19T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

My late mother’s second husband was pretty mean and made no bones about disliking me in his heyday. But now he’s in his 90s, he has no other family, and I feel guilty about how I actively ignore him. (Just avoiding him isn’t an option because he lives next door to my sister.) I’m generally a caring person, but he was the source of so much agitation during his time with my mother that I’ve told myself I don’t owe him anything.

Am I right to ignore him? Or should I rise above my petty grievances to check on him and take him casseroles?

Dear Reader,

Petty grievances: That’s the stuff. Juicy animosities, reared mushroomlike in the darkness.

This might be a good moment to explain that, although I have evangelized for the values of niceness and positivity in this column, I am neither an especially nice nor an especially positive person. Day to day, I’m as grumpy and jaundiced as the next man. Not yet as far gone as Evelyn Waugh’s Gilbert Pinfold (“The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.”) but getting there. Definitely getting there.

However, I happen to know—with the same bland certainty that I know my own name—that loving your neighbor and looking on the bright side are the way to go. They just are.

So I’m going to say: Yes, you should check up on this grisly old boy, this diminished antagonist. You should be kind to him. The universe has placed him squarely in your path, right next to your sister’s house, so the fact of his continuing existence must be reckoned with.

Actively ignoring somebody is stressful. Better to go in generously, wearing the mighty breastplate of total undefendedness. He’s not actual family, this guy, so even if he’s snippy or insulting, or rejects your overtures, he can’t reach in and pluck those deep bass strings of neurosis. He can only irritate. Plus he’s older, and drained of his former power, like a washed-up supervillain. You can handle him!

Look at it, if it’s helpful, as a rebalancing of the scales. Revenge is not a dish best served cold. Revenge is a piping-hot casserole, graciously presented to a lonely ex-tormentor.

In touch with my lower self, and possibly yours,

James

Dear James: Do I Need to Shut Up at Work?

2025-08-12T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I can’t seem to shut up at work, and I keep putting my foot in my mouth.

I am a naturally brusque person—a get-to-the-point kinda gal—but I am not a complete boor. Over the years I have learned to temper my directness with watercooler niceties and “please” and “thank you” in my emails.

But, sometimes, when faced with inadequate meeting agendas, disorganized communication, and paper-pushing bureaucracy, I can’t help but speak up about our team-wide inadequacies. (My other colleagues are much more reserved.) I oscillate between wanting to shut up and act my wage, yet also wishing we would hold ourselves to higher standards. By God, can’t we do better here?

This is not a new feeling in the office for me, and I am starting to question whether I’m the common denominator. Is it time to throw in the towel? Or should I do more to restrain my critical instincts?

Dear Reader,

I think your questions answer themselves. In the workplace, you should never restrain your critical instincts, and, yup, it’s always a good time to throw in the towel. (When it comes to family, interestingly, the opposite is true.)

It does sound as if you are the common denominator, carting your high standards and your limited tolerance for banality and ineptitude from office to office. Then again, aren’t we all the common denominators in our own lives? It’s always us, in the middle of some situation, doing what we always seem to do, arriving at more or less the same outcomes, which for some reason bewilder us completely.

Not you, though: You’re un-bewildered. You know what you’re doing.

I’ve had only a couple of office jobs in my life. I’m a lucky bastard: I sit in coffee shops and type and fiddle around with my playlists on Apple Music. But I do know that watercooler niceties (to take a phrase from your letter) will kill you in the end, and that team-wide inadequacies (to take another one) are a condition of office life. And if you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough.

Continually firing myself,

James

Dear James,

After more than 40 years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I thought I’d overcome my childhood demons. But, like my parents before me, I still became an alcoholic. Now I’m 66, and I’m torn: Should I give up on the world? (The state of affairs is grim.) Or should I strive to live without alcohol?

Dear Reader,

I deeply appreciate this letter. So many of us right now are contemplating, approaching, or have already passed the moment of abdication you present so clearly. The moment of: You know what? Fuck it.

I hope you won’t think I’m being flippant if I respond to your question with a couple of staves of soul doggerel. Here they are:

TO A READER
ON THE VERGE

When the demons are upon you
and the world is on its ass,
why not sink in resignation
to the bottom of a glass?

I’ll tell you why: You’re here to try,
and while you have volition,
to quote my friend Jay Babcock:
Don’t be bummed into submission.

Heroically,

James

Dear James: I Worry Too Much About What Other People Think

2025-08-05T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I have spent so much of my life thinking about other people and viewing my own worth in relation to them. Growing up, I was the “golden kid” in my family, focused on making the adults happy. Years later, I still often try to say what people want to hear. Ironically, I believe my intense fear of being disliked makes me unlikable: clingy, distant, cold, and needy. I’ve never had long-lasting friendships or relationships because of it. How do I escape this self-fulfilling prophecy?

Dear James,

A confluence of life events—processing the imminent loss of a family member to cancer, dealing with some new-to-me mental illness, and leaving the high-demand religion of my youth—has prompted me to realize that I’ve lived most of my life on autopilot, trying to meet other people’s expectations. Now I’m left wondering who I really am and what is actually important to me. Do you have any sage advice for finding myself?

Dear Readers,

Pleasing people: That’s a bad thing, right? Do it, and you invite the scorn of the jargon-mongers. To be a people pleaser—yuck.

But speaking as a person, I like to be pleased. I like to have my feelings tenderly considered. Sure, it’s good to be confronted now and again, or given a little jolt, but fundamentally, I have to say, I prefer to be at ease. My great-grandfather used to say that if he had to be trapped on a desert island with another person, and could choose between someone interesting and someone with good manners, he would without hesitation choose the latter.

One can be too accommodating, of course. As a well-trained English person, I have in my life apologized to chairs, lampposts, and low branches for bumping into them. (That’s over, by the way. In middle age, my relationship with inanimate objects has grown vicious and profane: At every turn, they obstruct me and confound me, and I curse them.) There’s a quality of self-abnegation in excessive politeness. I think of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Toots in Dombey and Son, rendered almost brainless by gentility: He sits there blushing and chuckling and saying, “It’s of no consequence at all.” And yes, you can try too hard to please people—so hard that it becomes a strange form of aggression. Thinking of others: It’s complicated.

Then again, what’s the alternative? If you stomp around speaking your mind and having it your way, are you a reality dispenser, a model of authenticity? Or are you just an asshole?

But I’m rambling, and I may be evading the question behind both of your letters. Which is (as I hear it) this: How do I separate myself from the needs and opinions of others?

Strip it down, is my answer. Back to basics. Go into the sensorium, into your body, into your own God-given perceptual equipment: what you see, what you smell, the thoughts that flash across your viewfinder. This is you, nothing and no one but you, in your essential nonstop dialogue with the universe. Attend to this dialogue. Refine it. Trust the information it’s giving you. In this place, at this depth (which is really the glittering surface), no one else can tell you who you are.

Wondering what’s for lunch,

James

Dear James: Am I Wrong Not to Dwell on the Past?

2025-07-29T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I rarely ever think about past events unless explicitly reminded, and I wonder if I’m missing out on some core human experience. It’s not that I can’t or won’t reminisce; I have a pretty good memory, and I’m happy to relive old scenes when my partner or family prompt me. I don’t dwell much on past failures and embarrassments, but I’m also not living entirely in the present—indeed, I tend to obsessively worry about the future. So what am I missing? Should I be making an effort to look backwards more often?

Dear Reader,

I want some of what you’re on.

Me, I’m a nurser of ancient grievances. I believe in forgiveness, but then again—do I? If you pushed me around in 1982, ripped me off in 1997, failed to be sufficiently fascinated by me in 2013, I haven’t forgotten, and vengeance will be mine. Not to mention the grievances against myself: For them I get revenge every day, and rather painfully too.

Oh, to leave the past behind! To dump it, toss it overboard, and tread blithely as a lamb into the eternal welcome of the present moment! But I dunno, something in the wiring (mine, anyway) won’t allow it. Is it evolutionary? Are we meant to drag all our mistakes around with us—plus the bruises to our nature, plus the dilapidated hulk of our crappy memories—so as to avoid them next time? As Kingsley Amis wrote to a friend after his second divorce: “Well, it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”

So what’s my advice? Only this: If you find yourself able to stay clear of the shadow of what’s already happened, I’d say that’s something of a superpower. You might consider using it out there in the world, this mutant gift of yours. Use it for good. Seek out people who offended you, or who worry they may have wronged you at some point, and tell them it doesn’t matter. Seek out anybody—why not?—who’s guilty or ashamed or bogged down with regret, and tell them they’re free.

Hauling my deluxe, personalized baggage,

James

Dear James: How to Be a Better Loser?

2025-07-22T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’ve been a lifelong participant in various recreational sports. Candidly, I’m not a great athlete, but I’ve always been enthusiastic. Now, in my late 50s, I’ve gotten especially serious about tennis. Sometimes, I play five times a week. I’ve committed to improving and have taken group and individual lessons. I play in competitive United States Tennis Association leagues specific to my age and ability, and play pickup games whenever I can.

But I realize that when I play competitively, I have a negative, lingering, outsize reaction to losing. When I lose, I try to reframe it less as a defeat and more as What did I learn today? Yet my mind leads me back to despair and rumination on my mistakes.

Logically, I know that if I were to win these competitions, I would most likely be bumped up to the next level. And at that point, I would probably be the weakest player in a higher level of competition—leading right back, with even more frequency, to despair. Some athletes joyfully stick with their sports for a lifetime and don’t seem to be derailed by losing. What am I missing? How can I develop a healthier relationship to defeat?

Dear Reader,

I don’t think you’re missing anything. We all lose in the end—that’s the second law of thermodynamics. And every intervening loss, be it in business, love, or tennis, simply reminds us of this elemental fact. Is it even possible to have a healthy relationship with losing? I’m not sure it is, any more than it’s possible to have a healthy relationship with food poisoning. Certain human experiences simply resist philosophy.

My grandfather, who had an ego like a piece of Roman statuary, enjoyed a game of chess. Especially in his final years: late-night, booze-fueled and booze-fuddled, with the occasional, accidental knocking-over of pieces. He enjoyed it—if he won. If he didn’t win, he would take it as a melancholy comment on his old age, as evidence that his mind was going at last. And then he would slump, and brood loudly upon his failing faculties. So, as his opponent, you had to lose. But you couldn’t lose too easily or obviously; fuzzy as he was, he would pick up on that. You had to lose while looking as if you were trying to win. (It often fell to my brother, a teenager at the time and—luckily for my grandfather—an excellent chess player, to perform this complex operation.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think my point is that losing is never just losing. In your case, losing at tennis connects to what? An ever-present and not particularly welcome sense of your limitations as a player? A whisper of advancing decrepitude? Some other, deeper, darker thing? When I lose, I feel like the cosmos is against me. And I’m right.

So forget about being a good loser. Work on the comeback: That’s my advice. Doomed as we may be to entropy, we humans also possess nearly idiotic capacities for self-renewal. We bounce back! Soak up the gall of losing, absorb the horrible information, feel it to the full, go there—and then rebound, with superb elasticity. Save your energy for that.

Anticipating a National Magazine Award for this column,

James

Dear James: My Ex and I Were Horrible to Each Other

2025-07-15T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

Two years ago, desperately lonely, I became involved in the first serious relationship of my life. It began when the woman I was into pressured me into sexting her. I was sexually inexperienced and uncomfortable with the idea, and when I told her this, she accused me of “sex shaming” and bombarded me with a bunch of angry texts. Eventually, I gave in, mostly because I thought this was my only chance to be with someone.

Things got worse from there. I was struggling with mental-health issues; she was an alcoholic. She was also dating and living with another guy and saw me only in secret. She promised me the moon, however, and swore that I was the love of her life. After years of intense loneliness and self-loathing, I felt validated in ways I’d never felt before.

We soon went through a cycle in which she would get upset and begin attacking my character. I would try to break up with her, she would call me crazy and harass me with texts, and I would eventually call her names in hopes that it would make her stop. It didn’t work, and eventually I would give in, trying to reconcile until the cycle repeated.

Then she got pregnant. But she kept drinking and seeing her other boyfriend. I said this was unacceptable. We planned to terminate the pregnancy and had one last horrible fight, where she called me evil and pathetic and made it clear that other than paying the bill, she didn’t want me involved in the abortion. I didn’t hear from her after that.

Months later, I still didn’t know whether she’d gone through with the abortion, so I got in touch to find out. I learned that she had ended the pregnancy and was getting serious with someone new. She didn’t apologize for anything. I couldn’t handle this, and to my great shame and guilt, I began sending her unwanted texts (with more name-calling). She accused me of harassment. I apologized and vowed to leave her alone.

We’ve now gone two years without contact. I’m in a relationship with a kind, healthy woman, and I haven’t repeated any of the bad behaviors that I engaged in with my ex. I’ve had therapy, but I struggle to sit with the complexity and guilt of having participated in a pattern of mutual verbal abuse. Everyone I confide in tells me that I’m not defined by this relationship, and that I need to forgive myself. But the guilt remains unbearable. I never thought I could be so cruel, and I don’t know how to put this behind me, or even whether I should. Any advice?

Dear Reader,

The philosopher Georges Bataille, not a man whose body of work I’d necessarily recommend to souls in jeopardy, nevertheless gifted us one very helpful phrase: unemployed negativity. What he meant by it, I’m not sure. But I know exactly what I mean by it.

Guilt, remorse, mortification, scrupulosity—pull out your thesaurus and we can binge on words for shame, each with its own flavor, its own particular sting. Self-obloquy: How about that? We do things in this life, we do things to other people, and some of them are terrible. The spasms of our conscience, promptly or not so promptly, alert us to the terrible things. We show contrition for them, we endeavor to understand them (so as not to repeat them), and we do our best to fix them. And that’s it. That’s all we can do. Whatever darkness or pain is left over from this process, whatever tormenting residue remains, whatever carries on messing with us—that’s what I call unemployed negativity. In other words, it’s no good; it serves nobody; it is literally without utility. All it does is ruin us.

In your situation, it sounds like the good part of shame—the accountability, the desire to improve one’s behavior—has been naturally consumed or burned off in its alchemical reaction with your heart. What you’re left with now, even though your heart has been altered, is a quantity of tar, of bitumen, of the inkiest and stickiest stuff. It doesn’t want to let go of you. So you must let go of it.

No doubt your ex-girlfriend has her own version of events. No doubt it diverges significantly from yours. But you took responsibility for your actions, you apologized to her, you got yourself some therapy, and you’ve kept your promise to leave her alone. Whether she has done or will ever do any of this doesn’t matter; that’s her business. Your business is to carry the weight of who you are and how you behaved, and—from where I’m sitting—you’ve done it.

Now it’s time to climb out of all this. Shrug off the familiar shadow, the well-known specter, and show up fully for the person you’re with today. Show up for reality. Get out of the “nest of salt” that Kurt Cobain sang about. It’s a challenge, a proper one. You risk learning even more about yourself, perhaps (most strangely and terrifyingly) some good stuff. Are you big enough for it?

Betting that you are,

James

Dear James: I’m 19 and Afraid of Dying Alone

2025-07-08T13:00:00-04:00

Dear James,

I’m only 19 years old, and I’m afraid of dying alone. Any advice?

Dear Reader,

First of all, you are not “only” 19 years old. Nineteen is a perfectly respectable age at which to be experiencing the terror of the human condition. Especially these days. My own encounter with dizzying finitude didn’t happen until I was 25—but this was pre-internet, pre–authoritarian disruption. Your generation, I think, has aged at warp speed: By the time you’re 16, you’re all anxiety ninjas and grand masters of depression.

From your question, I can’t tell if it’s the eventual snuffing-out of your subjectivity that so appalls you or the idea of having no one there when it happens. Probably some combination of the two, right? We go through this life sealed up in our skull, squinting out through our jaundiced little eyeholes, and we’re lucky if we feel the consoling touch of another—if we get shaken all night long, as AC/DC has it—before our switch gets randomly flicked to the “Off” position. Dying alone: That’s what it comes down to.

Or does it? Because the older I get, and the weirder I get, the more convinced I become that, far from being a bunch of brains spinning in cosmic isolation (which was very much my sense of things when I was a younger man), we are wildly and unstoppably connected—to one another, to the world, to everything. We’re not in exile; we live here. Our bodies are crucibles of sensation; our minds go out to greet reality. And other people, whether we like it or not, are all over us, just as we are all over them. Even you and I, right now, are in a particular kind of rarefied relationship. You may feel alone—you may even want to be alone—but you’re not.

You are, however, in charge. Your life, and its decisions, are your own. You’re the boss. This is the flip side of isolation: autonomy. So claim it. Get out there. Revel in experience. Do things you’ll be proud of. Make the leap, and people will show up for you, I promise. Are we floating in a universal sea of Love? I think we sort of are, especially when it doesn’t feel like it. As a friend in London once said, when he saw me despairing: “Be strong, mate. Be happy.”

Amazed at my own advice,

James